Trumpeter (1994)
ISSN: 0832-6193
Deontology, Ecology and Core Shamanism
About the Author: David Sparenberg is the author of numerous articles and several books of poetry. He is the editor of the literary journal Orphic Lute. Some of his essays, poetry and stories have appeared in earlier issues of The Trumpeter.
Desacralization and radical isolation, better known as secularization — what Ludwig Binswanger has called the individuality that exploits "the possibility of a nonspiritual manner of being human".1. — has long since led to the exteriorization of signifi-cant processes of change. Under the rubric of progress, socio-economic innovation, the actual cult of novelty; as it directs such arenas as morality, nutrition, fashion, habitation and imagination; is a disconcerting, if not strenuous, constant. On the other hand, rites of passage, which may be both natural and necessary for the equilibrium and maturation of individuals and communities, are outside the everyday field of recognition and organization, except as contentless exteriorizations, utilized for the indefinite advancement of technocracy and the status quo of a militarized world-market economy. This extravagance, in turn, amounts to the exile and interment, literally, the burying in an unfamiliar, disempowering place, of the laws of inner evolution. And, of course, this is the reversal of traditional patterns of human association, in what we might refer to as the grand nexus in the primal configurations of all ecological culture cores.
The attrition on the ancient syndrome of transformations — formerly encompassing existential and mythopoeic processes on physical, intellective, emotive and spiritual/instinctive levels — has consequenced the shrinkage and shallowing of the atomized, often fragmented, self; the junktifying of identity in prolific associations of false dependencies; and the denial of interior (pneumatic) experience as having value and worth equal to or beyond that of marketable goods and services.
At the root of this misevaluation is our socially cultivated inhibition contra the pathetic network, or symbiotic interlacements, of all diversely inhabited environmental time and space as also the trifold pathology of fear, pain and denial. Specifically, I intend the overblown fear of natural transformations (which are shared by all earth processes and which include the transformations or transitions of aging and death), the unacknowledged suffering of urban, hyper- existentiated forlornness, anguish and displacement, and the mainstream, systematic denial of human actions in a foreground of deep meaning and metaphor, conditioned by a background of deep purpose and analogue. In short, we are reviewing an ideologically ingrained fear of Nature, the suppression of conditional suffering (and the profound dialogue of suffering; the dialogue between spiritually invested material and disembodied spirit, or between incarnate consciousness and its ideal) and the denial of the soul as a perceptive interiorization (sensus interior) and continuation informing physical reality as the ultimate, immanent ground for individual and community experiential authentication. And without authentication which may indeed be reliant on the genuine reemergence of our archaic mythological and ecological identities, we are in danger of being numbed to silence in the throes of atrocities to planet, species, memory and culture, at such a moment when our most primal and soul-deep articulations are required.
Against the atrophy of this eschatological domination of history, core shamanism, with its primitive immediacy of seeing, hearing, feeling and responding to impresses of otherness with rhythmic (mirroring) movements and with rhythmic (mirroring) speech, not only opens for us a multi-cultural line of collective memory, extending at least as far as paleolithic migrations and the subsequent eons of ecological interdependencies, but as importantly opens once more the vitalizations of soul, cosmology and sojourn.
In such openings might we not eventually see a democratization of other terms and levels of experience valuation? And in such transvaluations, might we not see other terms and levels of personal, communal and ecological healing, whereby it is not our primitive sanities that are denied but the technologies and ideologies of impending omnicide?
Here permit me an exemplary reply to my foregoing questions. The traditional bio-regionalism of the Plain's Cheyenne, replete with an explicitly sacred stewardship, as summarized in the quotation below from Karl Schlesier, has behind it a cosmology of finite resources, transformation potencies and recycling (or energy transfers), and indelible spiritual forms, along with an active anticipation and engagement of extrasensory rapport, which we might call mutuality or numinous tropos. "The original order of the universe as created by Maheo requires ethnic entities that occupy life zones — even as animal species do — that they are charged to protect.".2. And in such groundings are there not formulated holistic antidotes to the deontology (the science of not being or dissolution of the fabric of reality) that originated in dogmas of radical and unnatural oppositions, and has extended to planetary engulfment through the ideologies of imperialistic theology, anthropology and necro-technologies. In this inquiring context, a core shamanic interiorization can become an important station on the way to horizontal, as well as vertical, exterior reclamations. Assuredly, there is tremendous ground to be gained against the experienced fragmentation due to the pathologies of extravagance, from the trustworthy explorations of an ambience of warmth and guidance (a mythosphere reconditioning the appreciation of time and space), and in the encouragement of depthful communications out of dream, vision and numinous tropos.
Significantly, it is only now that we begin to truthfully judge the negative consequences of continental conquest, not merely as another historical trauma, even with its full accompaniment of unmendable atrocities, but as a global disaster that has interrupted a way of life and wisdom that might have developed an empowering democratization to stand against the destructiveness of what we, the heirs of conquest, have become and are rapidly imposing on the earth.
* Indebted to the profundity of others (Eliade, Grim, Walsh, Halifax, etc.), I should like to define core shamanism as a complex made up from four essential components: (a) altered states of consciousness directed toward the subtle theatres of nonmaterial reality, known as the world of the creative imagination, (b) an isomorphic, or at least pathetic, but multi-dimensional worldview, (c) the value-validation of dialogical events between accessible states of altered consciousness and accessible personalizations or personifications of nonmaterial dynamics, and (d) capacities and techniques intrinsic to the human condition, making such dialogical events as possible as the extensions and limitations of awareness and continuity.
Notes
1. "Dream and Existence" from Being-in-the-World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger, translated by Jacob Needelman (Souvenir Press, 1975).
2. The Wolves of Heaven: Cheyenne Shamanism, Ceremonies and Prehistorical Origins by Karl H. Schlesier (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).
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