MEANINGFUL BUT NOT NECESSARILY TRUE: GNOSIS AND DISCERNMENT

 I have made two blog entries here describing and unpacking Shamanic journeys and the insights that can come from them. Now I want to talk about what to do with those insights. This is really for absolute beginners.

 

Firstly, I believe I am working with real spirits. I have longstanding friendships with compassionate and transcendent spirits who are wiser than I am. They are more-than-human or once-were-human persons whom I meet in the Upper or Lower Worlds. They advise me and help me, and sometimes heal me.

 

Not all spirits are safe or wise, and some care only about their own people, land or affairs. They can’t see the big picture any more than I can. Relationships with these spirits are more like dealing with human people. Some of these non-human people are friendly and helpful and others are just plain sketchy. I need to use discernment in my dealings with them.

 

It helps to be clear about my own core values. If I meet a spirit in Non Ordinary Reality and they tell me to do something that goes completely against my best values, I am likely to be suspicious no matter how they gloss it. Anyone who wants to sell me something or bargain or offer me power beyond my wildest dreams or whatever is the NOR equivalent of your local meth dealer. Walk on by. Compassionate and transcendent spirits want what is best for me, and for all beings including the planet. A spirit who appears powerful and wise but wants me to be an asshole is probably an asshole themselves. I used to work with people who were psychotic and they would sometimes tell me how they were enlightened, or burdened with glorious destiny or whatever. There is a test for this sort of thing and it is well described in the mystical writings of the great religions. If it makes you into an ass hole you are probably not enlightened. If you are doing things that are inhumane or cruel, you are probably not enlightened. If all this is making you arrogant and grandiose and oh so special, you are probably not enlightened.  

 

This is not to say the spirits you work with can’t knock you sideways at times or tell you off or test you, because they sometimes do. You can experience some very powerful and life changing things. However, it is good to think about how these experiences might play out in Ordinary Reality. Helping spirits may speak in metaphors or symbols, and sometimes they are simply unsure of what it is like to live in bodies. Interpret wisely.

 

Whenever you are in doubt about where you are, or if you are venturing somewhere that is not the Lower or Upper Worlds, take a Power Animal with you. They will protect you.

 

Gnosis is the direct experience of divine wisdom or knowing, often a secret or esoteric knowledge. It is a word used within today’s magical communities to mean any direct revelation from a deity or a higher power, including your own higher self. Sometimes it is described as a ‘download’, which sounds trite, but it can be experienced like that, as a sudden rush of insight and inspiration that seems much greater than whatever came before it. You might feel beyond yourself, truly expanded, part of something universal, as you experience these things.

 

Such experiences are meaningful, but not necessarily true, at least not true in an intersubjective way. They are true for you, but not immutable and not infallible. Among magicians this gnosis is called Unverified Personal Gnosis or UPG. UPG is fine. Whatever is happening to you is quite possibly exactly what you need. Where it all goes wrong is when people decide their gnosis applies to others. Then we have fuckery. When charismatic and worldly people decide their gnosis applies to others, and that this application is compulsory, we have cult fuckery. Don’t do fuckery. These experiences are exquisite. They are fragile, like a first idea, like a new bud easily windblown. They are in the first instance just for you. They can bring you on or protect you or inspire you with the actual breath of the divine.

 

In a previous post I described my experience of an endless pulse of light, that is light upon light. I am intrigued by light and find Ordinary Reality a lot more sparkly and iridescent and colourful as a result. But I don’t expect anyone else to read my words and feel like that. I don’t expect anyone else to have the same experience that I had. They will have their own experiences, informed by their own prior knowledge and culture and guided by their own helping spirits. I seldom talk about where I have been. These experiences are as subjective as dreams, and you know how it is when you try to explain a dream to someone.

 

It is worth getting curious afterwards. Ask questions of your experiences of gnosis. Do they accord with your core values? Do they have some kind of coherence? Do they ennoble you? Have others you respect experienced similar things? Is there a canonical check you can make, like from scripture or wisdom texts?

I guess this checking can seem a bit clinical, especially if you have had your universe expanded. And in the end, the experience was unique to you and just as precious as you are. But a bit of curiosity can help you integrate. If you find similar imagery or motifs or lessons elsewhere, it can solidify your own experience, especially if you doubt yourself or worry that you’re weird. Pick up ideas, turn them over, make art, change things. And be thankful.

 

We are to live in all the worlds, including Ordinary Reality. We need to function here, working and caring and learning and getting through our days. We need self-discipline and grounding to manage all this powerful stuff, and to be bounced around in the Brownian motion of society.

 

In summary, be brave, use the underrated virtue of discernment, and be balanced in your Shamanic explorations. And thank the spirits.

 

 

 

NECROMANCY: INSIGHTS FROM SHAMANIC JOURNEYING

 The Shaman of Bad Durrenburg was buried about 9000 years ago in what is now Germany. She was in her mid twenties and an infant was buried with her. She was dressed in her shamanic garb, wearing an elaborate head-dress comprising parts of many animals, and packed in red ochre which indicated her high status. She was well nourished, but probably died of a severe dental infection.

This was not the most remarkable thing about her. A malformation of her cervical vertebrae meant that she would have experienced unusual physical sensations and maybe hallucinations. Some experts have considered that by turning her head in a particular way, she could have induced a trance state. 

I was fascinated by her. I try to look back to my own ancestry rather than take from other cultures, and I feel I am finding a rich history. I was also intrigued by her method of entering trance, if this was true. Because all this discovery does is find the method; it by no means invalidates her power or her experience. 

So I thought I would try a bit of necromancy, sort of. I made a ritual and asked for help from my helping spirits, including a deep ancestor of mine. I found as many things as I could to be her/my grave goods. When I laid it all out it looked a bit pitiful, but it seemed to work. Then I made a kind of grave out of my bed and 'buried' myself in the same sitting position in which she was found. 

Here is a picture of some of it:

In the jar is Jagermeister (yeah I know I am all class, but it reminds me of European forests) and red river ochre. The knife is old, my original ritual knife, sharpened with a Japanese whetstone; you could shave with it. 

There is a wonderful Muslim meditation where you think of a silence and darkness so complete it is as if you are dead, and your funeral has finished, and everyone has gone home. So I blew out the candle and sank into that. And here we are:

GRAVE GOODS – FOR THE SHAMAN OF BAD DURRENBERG

 

These are your grave goods:

A needle, naked,

And thread to clothe it with.

A knife for ritual –

Or for slaughter.

Bones of deer, sheep, tahr, turtle and whale, for company.

The God rune, so you know who you’re speaking to.

Red ochre, so the Gods know they’re speaking to you.

Waters of moon and forest, grains ergot-tainted

And abalone for beauty.

 

You don’t have to tell me your name.

Oh you told me –

And here is your baby boy, and his name too.

So now we are friends, what was it like?

 

You were the weapon of your people

And the tool of the spirits.

They would stand you up on the front line,

Hunched and twitching as the power crazed your skin,

And your eyes rolling back.

You would bring the spirits down and the enemy would flee.

By the end of it all, no enemies came.

 

No wonder you drank.

 

But afterwards the spirits came unbidden.

They showed you lights, and more lights, and a great house of lights in the sky.

They comforted you.

 

Now you show me the great house in the sky.

You tell me, joyful now, this is not any reward of yours,

But the need of your soul.

We don’t get rewarded,

We get our soul’s need.

 

LESSONS IN ANIMISM: LOVING YOUR VACUUM CLEANER AND OTHER HOUSEHOLD GODS

 

When my father moved from the small town where he was raised, to Wellington in the early 1950’s, he boarded with a Roman Catholic family. Catholicism is somewhat marginalized here in Aotearoa. My father found this first encounter to be one of many peculiarities of big city life. It was for him a hotbed of superstition and idolatry, very different from the watery suburban Protestantism of his upbringing. Here in this household were saints and angels and statues and bleeding hearts. He was most astounded when the vacuum cleaner stopped working, and the woman of the house sprinkled it with holy water. Roman Catholicism is older than many forms of Christianity and it carries a warning: Contains Traces Of Animism.

 

Animism, the ancient experience that everything is alive, is the substratum of all spiritual belief. We were animists for maybe ninety percent of human history. Joshua Schrei in his podcast The Emerald points this out. Animism is normative consciousness. The fact of not being animists now is still an uncomfortable one. While there is no evidence for animism in what we are taught, and how we are acculturated, it is in our spiritual bones.

 

The world is alive, with spirit and with spirits. These spirits are not imaginary, not archetypes, not metaphors, and not narrative devices. They are real and we used to experience them directly, with our senses, in our bodies, because we lived in ways where we more often entered the trance states that open us up to Non Ordinary Reality. Now we think those spirits are invisible, because we don’t see them. We no longer see them. But once, nymphs really did bathe in streams, stones contained local earth goddesses, and taniwha, the guardians of the waters here in Aotearoa, protected those humans who were in their care.

 

The great spirits we used to live alongside gradually became deities. In the Indo -European traditions, the sky/daylight spirit Dyews Phiter became a sky father god. Trace the lineage of the name through the development of languages: Tyr, Tiwaz, Deus, Zeus, Jupiter. We stopped visiting them and speaking to them, and began to worship them. The great Axial Age religions made them into abstracts, transcendent ideas, and the old deities became demons, or figures from folklore. Folklore lasts longer than religion, and we still have vestiges of both the old gods and the even older spirits right up until the early modern period in Europe.

 

We can still imagine nature spirits, or an alive nature. We know about fairies and talking trees. It is a bit harder to imagine made things being alive or being/having spirits. Dr Michael Harner, anthropologist and founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, lived among the Shuar people. He had expected to hear about the spirits of plants and animals, but was surprised to hear about the outboard motor spirit. Yet we sometimes think of the things around us as animate. When I was a child the family car always had a name. You can journey shamanically to a made thing I the same way you can journey to a nature spirit or power animal. It is not such a stretch, after all, when you swear at your laptop for deliberately glitching at you!

 

So anointing your vacuum cleaner makes perfect sense to me, because it is a powerful being in your house. Your vacuum cleaner knows what is under your bed. Your vacuum cleaner has been behind your couch. It has watched you argue with your kids and heard you sing out loud to Cardi B. Do not mess with your vacuum cleaner.

 

I clean houses for part of a living, for people with disabilities. It is pure service. You can tell a lot about a house when you clean it. You can sense the sorrow in the old photo, and the soft sinking into memory of all those ornaments. A house is a container for spirits as well as being a spirit itself. Once in a ritual, unbidden, my house showed me that. I saw what I thought of as the grain of the house, slipping backwards in time, the wood and concrete becoming undone, the trees filling in their clearings, and older trees, and racing backwards all the way to the hiss and bubble of the swamp. Next time you want to do something with your house, ask it first.

 

In pre-Christian Roman religion, the lares and penates were the spirits of the house. Both were protective spirits but they were slightly different, the lares being associated with crossroads and neighbourhoods.  Each morning, the human inhabitants spoke to the lares and asked it for prosperity and luck for the day. Roman religion also featured the genius loci, meaning the spirit of a place. Genii were often represented as people, holding objects of prosperity. The term has survived, meaning the atmosphere of a place, or how you would imagine a place if it was a person. I think the vacuum cleaner is the genius loci of a household. Look after the vacuum cleaner, and you look after the house.

 

I will discuss animism and its practical applications further. For now, the picture above is of a container for holy water, depicting the BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary). It comes from Belgium, probably from the shrine of Our Lady of the Poor, at Banneaux. People buy holy water in these containers and then just throw them out. Also in the picture are two forms of holy water, both used for rituals. In the clear bottle is full moon water.  

 

HOW TO EXPERIENCE THE BIG BANG: INSIGHTS FROM SHAMANIC JOURNEYING

 

Let’s start with the light from your screen. Let’s start with the light that comes out of the light socket. Let’s start with the glint of the sun on water, the arc and umbra of the moon, the weave and play of gold and brown as shadow works its way across my wooden dresser in the late afternoon.

 There are lights upon lights. The light we see is only our small fractalized bounce in the great pulse of light. If it has an end, it is in the beginning. Trace it back, from when you flick the switch, and turn on your own little light bringer, all the way to the source of all light, where all lights vanish, where light dies in light. All things at source became lit, en-lightened. There is nothing in the universe that has not been lit.* If it is now occulted, yet in the distant past it was lit. It is thus known. There is nothing that has not at one stage been known.

 I am here trying to describe something that is more than metaphor but not quite an equivalence. By ‘known’ I mean illuminated or revealed. I am talking about the original revelation. There is nothing that is not known from the source of it all, from what the Kabbalists call Ein Sof, the one that made the light burst out of the singularity.

 

This is exposing. And the realization of it exposes me. The deepest earth has been lit. My inner organs, unless breached by injury, have never been outside of me, but they have been lit. The dark side of the moon has been lit. There is no true darkness here, only things that have been occulted for aeons, or a lifetime. Seen on that scale, darkness is just like putting one hand over another. Seen on another scale, there is nothing about me (or any being) that has not been seen, known, loved....and forgiven.

 

Some of us have asked what is outside of that causal reality of light. The darkness was there first after all. It is called the void, Kore in Maori, Ginunngagap in Norse cosmogony, the singularity. You could argue that there is a lot more darkness than light. In the words of Terry Pratchett: ‘Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.’ So I have held my diabolical nerve on the Darkside of spirituality. I searched for an action so pure it was free of causation, a place untouched, a totality. This is where all things can be defined only by what they are not. This is where the divine can only be defined by what it is not. In this place, the abyss looks back, and it is you it fears.

 I am now simply amazed by the onrushing flood of light in which I perpetually find myself. I bow my head to light. I bathe in it. It washes me and I am astonished.

 This is what I have experienced so far, and it does not by itself make me a better person. What insha’allah does make me better, is the knowledge that we are all in this light, that there is no one who is so bad (or so special) that they have not been lit. We are one with dancing motes of dust, and stars.

 In the search for the pure and the acausal, as I mentioned, I was beguiled by the passing of time. I found I could slice time more and more thinly, until I was seemingly in the moment. This moment – no, this one, this one, this one….it was like catching a fish in a waterfall. Fleetingly, I really could ‘be here now’.

 Now I know this. The light from Ein Sof as it has spread throughout the universe is not steady state. There is a pulse. Think of how a sound is a sine wave, and then turn it in your mind so it faces towards you. It then becomes a pulse. It is as brief as binary code, briefer. It is as long as the slow sail of galaxies. It is thus not a measurement of time. It is not to be measured but sensed. If we can sense it we can ride it. Like this: There is an outburst, like the very first outburst of light. This is breathing in, moving, spending, waking, expanding. Then there is rest, a pause, something akin to darkness. This is breathing out, resting, conserving, contracting. My hunch is that if we understand this well, we can use it for singing, for planting, for working, for grieving, and for an understanding of the great happenings of which we are a part.  

 These are Shamanic insights. They may be universal, but they have arrived in the cave of my skull by Shamanic means. There is no substitute for this type of learning. I recommend it. Go hang out with some people who can journey in this way; you can watch the Big Bang together.

 

*I am aware of the slang meanings of ‘lit’ and I mean that sort of lit as well.