PRINCIPLES OF INTELLECTUAL SHAMANISM
1. Intellectual shamanism is the experiment of acting and thinking as if essentializing categories of identity -- such as those delineating race and gender characteristics -- are inherently arbitrary. Indeed, without the artifice of the form of logic we often mistake for "common sense", much of human experience would appear in a state of flux. We overestimate humanly constructed realities, often largely as a result of individual and group psychological projections, which serve to solidify flux into seemingly reliable, moral facts.
Group psychological projections can do both good and harm, since we ascribe positive or negative meanings to otherwise ambiguous actions depending on our prior dispositions which are historically generated and therefore more arbitrary than human neurology finds it comfortable to accept. Shamanism is also a means to get below normal neurological patterns of thought, which is why those whose normal human consciousness has been "wrecked", either by traumatic experience or shamanistic drugs, can often resurface from their descent into the underworld of the mind with remarkable insights into humanity.
2.a Shamanism does not so much "transcend" reality. It immerses the subject more deeply in reality to the point that authoritarian gestures start to appear superficial and even meaningless. It's like drinking more deeply from the stream. You no longer desire the socially contained droplets of meaning, given by those "high above". Intellectual shamanism is radical subjectivity.
b. Shamanism's insights typically originate in near death experiences, which teach the value of life by enabling one to see how one has sacrificed vitality out of fear of transgression. One sees oneself from a distance and typically doesn't like what one sees. This capacity to take stock of one's life from a distance is what I have termed shamanistic doubling.
3. a. What intellectual shamanism isn't.
-- b. How it differs from its intellectual cousin, Postmodernism
-- c. Shamanism, Eliade and Nietzsche
4. The idea that one must constantly renew oneself or risk living a rigid, inauthentic life -- always return to nature -- this is shamanistic, but also Nietzschean. Dionysian revelries and war as such, were in his view a return to nature and hence heralded cultural renewal.
5. Power is our natural medium; the one we move in. We can't renounce relating to others in terms of power even if we want to, but we can observe how power functions and step back from that. That is like stepping out of time and out of reality temporarily. One observes reality better from this position of detachment and it buys one time to think before acting. Shamanism is not asceticism, in any way. It renounces nothing. In this it differs very much from Christianity, which would posture as if to forsake an interest in power in order to appear more "spiritual".
6. How intellectual shamanism differs from conventional psychoanalysis
7. When some or many in the community become ill, shamans traditionally take control by re-framing the old mythologies and thus rejuvenating the community. They throw out whatever in the old mythologies had been causing unwarranted distress or inhibiting growth. The cultural mythologies themselves were put under scrutiny so as to be analysed for their capacity to create sickness or engender health. Nietzsche, for example, performs this myth rejuvenating function with regard to the decline of the myth of Christianity: he puts, in the dead God's place, a stimulating new myth: Overman.
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From Nietzsche: But someday, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, He must yet come to us, the redeeming man, of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, He may bring home the redemption of this reality; it's redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning [ascetic] ideal has laid upon it.
From Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the restoration of previously lost aspects of oneself):
I am a wanderer and mountain climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seems I cannot long sit still. And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience - a wandering will be therein, and a mountain climbing: in the end one experiences only oneself. The time is now past when accidents could befall me; and what COULD now fall to my lot which would not already be my own! It returns only, it comes home to me at last - my own Self, and such of it as has been long abroad, and scattered among things and accidents. [emphasis added]
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The conclusions I have drawn about the reptilian brain have been my own. In effect I have made my conclusions as a by-product of writing my PhD. If you want to find out more about how the reptilian brain functions, you could do worse than look at some of the psychoanalytic writings dealing with the early stages of childhood development. If there is a sense in which 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' it is evident in the way that children move away from operating from a 'desire oriented ego' to a 'reality oriented ego'.
The former seems to be related to the earlier stages of our evolutionary development, and has quite a different orientation on the world than that of our more complex thinking processes. It is oriented towards the world on the basis of need (including need for nurturing and a need for a sense of control) and desire for pleasure.The early childhood ego may mentally distort reality in order to give it a sense of satisfaction when the material elements it seeks to satisfy itself are missing. This is how it defends itself against fear, or the sense of abandonment. By distorting reality. So distorting reality is a 'primitive' ego defence.
Adults continue to use the primitive part of brain to deal with power relations and issues of dominance and submission -- especially in moments of anxiety and extreme fear. Anything that threatens one's survival, even symbolically, will tend to evoke this mechanism, which enables one to adjust to power relationships as they exist at the expense of rational thinking.
Melanie Klein is the founding investigator concerning this level of consciousness.
A shaman symbolically faces his own 'death' and survives it. On that basis, he is able to conquer R-complex, which works in the subconscious mind to force compliance to existing power systems. Having faced his own 'death', he is an exception to the rule of normal human behaviour (which is ruled, subconsciously, by R-complex).
As an exception to humanity, he or she becomes very aware of how influential primitive thinking is, in the overall society.
1. Intellectual shamanism is the experiment of acting and thinking as if essentializing categories of identity -- such as those delineating race and gender characteristics -- are inherently arbitrary. Indeed, without the artifice of the form of logic we often mistake for "common sense", much of human experience would appear in a state of flux. We overestimate humanly constructed realities, often largely as a result of individual and group psychological projections, which serve to solidify flux into seemingly reliable, moral facts.
Group psychological projections can do both good and harm, since we ascribe positive or negative meanings to otherwise ambiguous actions depending on our prior dispositions which are historically generated and therefore more arbitrary than human neurology finds it comfortable to accept. Shamanism is also a means to get below normal neurological patterns of thought, which is why those whose normal human consciousness has been "wrecked", either by traumatic experience or shamanistic drugs, can often resurface from their descent into the underworld of the mind with remarkable insights into humanity.
2.a Shamanism does not so much "transcend" reality. It immerses the subject more deeply in reality to the point that authoritarian gestures start to appear superficial and even meaningless. It's like drinking more deeply from the stream. You no longer desire the socially contained droplets of meaning, given by those "high above". Intellectual shamanism is radical subjectivity.
b. Shamanism's insights typically originate in near death experiences, which teach the value of life by enabling one to see how one has sacrificed vitality out of fear of transgression. One sees oneself from a distance and typically doesn't like what one sees. This capacity to take stock of one's life from a distance is what I have termed shamanistic doubling.
3. a. What intellectual shamanism isn't.
-- b. How it differs from its intellectual cousin, Postmodernism
-- c. Shamanism, Eliade and Nietzsche
4. The idea that one must constantly renew oneself or risk living a rigid, inauthentic life -- always return to nature -- this is shamanistic, but also Nietzschean. Dionysian revelries and war as such, were in his view a return to nature and hence heralded cultural renewal.
5. Power is our natural medium; the one we move in. We can't renounce relating to others in terms of power even if we want to, but we can observe how power functions and step back from that. That is like stepping out of time and out of reality temporarily. One observes reality better from this position of detachment and it buys one time to think before acting. Shamanism is not asceticism, in any way. It renounces nothing. In this it differs very much from Christianity, which would posture as if to forsake an interest in power in order to appear more "spiritual".
6. How intellectual shamanism differs from conventional psychoanalysis
7. When some or many in the community become ill, shamans traditionally take control by re-framing the old mythologies and thus rejuvenating the community. They throw out whatever in the old mythologies had been causing unwarranted distress or inhibiting growth. The cultural mythologies themselves were put under scrutiny so as to be analysed for their capacity to create sickness or engender health. Nietzsche, for example, performs this myth rejuvenating function with regard to the decline of the myth of Christianity: he puts, in the dead God's place, a stimulating new myth: Overman.
-----------------
From Nietzsche: But someday, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, He must yet come to us, the redeeming man, of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, He may bring home the redemption of this reality; it's redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning [ascetic] ideal has laid upon it.
[emphasis added]
-----------------From Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the restoration of previously lost aspects of oneself):
I am a wanderer and mountain climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seems I cannot long sit still. And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience - a wandering will be therein, and a mountain climbing: in the end one experiences only oneself. The time is now past when accidents could befall me; and what COULD now fall to my lot which would not already be my own! It returns only, it comes home to me at last - my own Self, and such of it as has been long abroad, and scattered among things and accidents. [emphasis added]
------------------
The conclusions I have drawn about the reptilian brain have been my own. In effect I have made my conclusions as a by-product of writing my PhD. If you want to find out more about how the reptilian brain functions, you could do worse than look at some of the psychoanalytic writings dealing with the early stages of childhood development. If there is a sense in which 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' it is evident in the way that children move away from operating from a 'desire oriented ego' to a 'reality oriented ego'.
The former seems to be related to the earlier stages of our evolutionary development, and has quite a different orientation on the world than that of our more complex thinking processes. It is oriented towards the world on the basis of need (including need for nurturing and a need for a sense of control) and desire for pleasure.The early childhood ego may mentally distort reality in order to give it a sense of satisfaction when the material elements it seeks to satisfy itself are missing. This is how it defends itself against fear, or the sense of abandonment. By distorting reality. So distorting reality is a 'primitive' ego defence.
Adults continue to use the primitive part of brain to deal with power relations and issues of dominance and submission -- especially in moments of anxiety and extreme fear. Anything that threatens one's survival, even symbolically, will tend to evoke this mechanism, which enables one to adjust to power relationships as they exist at the expense of rational thinking.
Melanie Klein is the founding investigator concerning this level of consciousness.
A shaman symbolically faces his own 'death' and survives it. On that basis, he is able to conquer R-complex, which works in the subconscious mind to force compliance to existing power systems. Having faced his own 'death', he is an exception to the rule of normal human behaviour (which is ruled, subconsciously, by R-complex).
As an exception to humanity, he or she becomes very aware of how influential primitive thinking is, in the overall society.
