I HAIL THE IMAGINAL - AND TRY TO ANSWER THE QUESTION OF WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH NON ORDINARY REALITY

 

 I was asked recently, why bother at all with Non Ordinary Reality? Ordinary Reality is wonderful. It is all we need. And it needs our help. 

I have muddled around with an answer. It is a good question, because it bypasses the obvious. The people I do Shamanic things with, understand about Non Ordinary Reality, but their understanding is not automatic. Many of us don't share it. Many of us are empiricists. They would state that is not just that NOR is not to be bothered with, but that it doesn't exist. 

Yes, OR is wonderful, or to be more explicit, the Middle World is wonderful. It includes all the things we think we know, all the deep lessons of science, all that we perceive with our senses. It is beautiful and terrible and subjective and real. And it does need our help; climate change catastrophe is upon us and to do anything at all about it we need a shared understanding and a will to act and that all has to be grounded in OR to mean anything. It is clearly not enough to float around in alternative realities grooving to the spacey vibes of the cosmos right now. 

So here are my arguments, and I admit their philosophical weaknesses. Shamanism, as a way of exploring NOR, is experiential and experimental rather than theoretical, so the theory is weak in comparison. Or maybe not weak so much as diverse, culturally informed, and personal. 

My first argument is from history. Of course arguments from history tend to have problems with the logic, but I think I can get away with this because there is so much history. I reiterate, for ninety percent of our human history we were animists. We saw the world as alive, people with non-human entities, and we were more naturally able to access this aliveness by experiencing NOR. I have written before about how animism has been normative, and how this aliveness gradually receded from our consciousness over the last thousand years or so, yet has remained just under the surface. 

For ninety percent of our history, we thought that NOR was real. 

I know that for some people the acknowledgement of empiricism has been liberating, but mostly what they mean by that is atheism. They have found it personally liberating to not have to believe in God any more, with all the baggage that entails. They are free from the psychological gymnastics they have to undertake to believe in things that they just can't, and from the guilt and fear and so on. These are important experiences, but they have nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of NOR. 

I have asked in groups, has anyone here ever experienced Non Ordinary Reality? A few tentative hands would go up. I would ask, really? Have you ever had a dream? Have you ever had a daydream? Have you ever taken alcohol or other drugs? Have you ever  had a mystical experience? Have you ever had a premonition or a Near Death Experience or seen a ghost or had any experience of the numinous? Almost all hands go up, and people nod and smile. NOR is not that hard to find. We all of us have the background for an exploration of NOR. Some of us wander around in it all the time, but without awareness or will or purpose.

The question then becomes, but is it real, or is it your imagination. Well, yes. See the paragraph above. Sigh. 

Holy the imagination. Holy the impulses of the brain. Holy the cave of the skull and the light that fills it. Holy the silky tide of spinal fluid, and the rainbow of chemicals, and the fire of electricity. Holy the physical heft of it - the surge of oxytocin, the hairs on the back of the neck rising, the hands uplifted. I cast my eyes to the hills, the real hills, and all of this happens in that holy cave of the my skull. Holy all of it. No less holy than angels is our experience of them. You may even say we make them holy. We sanctify the world and it sanctifies us right back. There may be nothing else. 

Having said all that, there is however an aspect of will when it comes to navigating in NOR. I think I can make a distinction between willed imagination and unbidden experience that is bigger than the usual state of consciousness. You will know the shift. You lie there thinking about journeying, propelling yourself around in your mind, asking yourself questions, willing 'something to happen'. Or you dance and dance and shake the rattle and drink a heap of vodka and you think you see something out of the corner of your eye, but in the end it is nothing, you are just making it up. Often it is like, I thought I experienced something, but I didn't. I was just making it up. Then you feel the shift, or something like taking off and leaving your will behind. Once you have left your will behind, the opportunity is there for helping spirits to come in and guide you. You are now tapped into power beyond yourself. You still have some will, in that you can make choices and ask questions and so on. But the more you are in there, the deeper the trance, the less will is possible. Working with will is a useful skill.

Henry Corbin, Islamic scholar, uses the word imaginal. Poet Gerard Manly Hopkins uses the word inscape. These are attempts to describe a state of enfolding realities within the human brain. I want to find a term that is not metaphor but not equivalence. I don't actually mind the resulting lacuna. No words work here, and yet we have written millions.

Now I need to address the other part of the question - that Ordinary Reality, by which I mean here the material world, needs our help. Help needs to be grounded in OR. 

Why we journey is traditionally to help in OR. Shamans journeyed to heal people, find scarce resources, and guide communities. I return to the example of Black Elk of the Lakota. Black Elk had a mysterious illness as a child and he lingered in a coma for many days. In that coma, he experienced a vision. Much later, when the Lakota were under existential threat from the white invaders, he spoke of his vision. It was a highly elaborate vision, and the people enacted it faithfully over several days, a whole community event. I can't imagine that happening in my society. For a start, nobody would trust a vision, or the person who had the vision, that much, and it they did it would be a worry because that person would probably be running a cult. There is little space for true community NOR vision in this world of cynicism and grift. But think of the possibility for genuine consultation and change. I can imagine it. Black Elk had proven himself in battle and daily life before he was able to tell his vision. His vision nearly cost him his life. He had to be worthy even to talk about it. His shamanic abilities needed to be tested and publicly acknowledged, and they were by no means infallible or beyond debate. I don't want to overstate this, but I can see the shamanic vision as a tool for community decision making and whole community involvement in rituals which then enhance the experiences of NOR for everyone. As I have said before, it is the job of the Shaman to turn into the crab or the bear or the ancestor, and it is our job to see the crab or the bear or the ancestor. NOR is for everyone.

In neo-Shamanism of various sorts, or Core Shamanism, journeying in NOR is used primarily for personal spiritual development. I have my serious doubts about the endless search for personal growth, or the endless growth, or the endless bloody endlessness of it all which can result in as much guilt and powerlessness as traditional religion. However, wise guidance from helping spirits you trust in the Upper or Lower Worlds is a good thing. It is a way of getting information and advice you would not otherwise have access to. It can also be healing and soothing and fun. The helping spirits I work with have very rudimentary senses of humour, for example. I am refreshed by their silliness. 

Working in NOR with an animistic framework can impart a respect and love for the natural world. You realize you are not just part of it, but entangled in it, in and out of different realities. Here is where the boundaries between realities become porous for us. The mountain is holy in all realities. It is holy because it has always been so. It is holy because it is beautiful and treacherous and clearly a person. It is holy because it is a keeper of secret wisdom. And so on. The shamanic view starts and ends with this world, the natural world, the real ordinary world, wherever it may go during the journey. 

None of this obliges us to do the right thing for the planet or be better people. We are still subject to ideology and cultural bias and our own psychological strengths and problems. I suppose I could give thanks to my Power Animals in a nature ritual and then go home and eat a huge steak packaged in a hundred years of plastic. I could doom myself to thoughts and prayers. Experiences in NOR need to feed back into OR. They are likely to sensitize us to the natural world, our actual world, and give us context and a bigger picture. Balanced with activism and a healthy ethical system good moral judgment, that is. 

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The photo is of  the entrance to Te Puna o Riuwaka, also known as the Riwaka Resurgence.

 

THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR: I HAIL THE WOOD PILE!

The Wood arrived yesterday. Wood Day is the best day of the year and I am always excited beyond reason. Here it is in its raw form, before being stacked and the ritual made for it. The Wood comes each year to warm us and light us. I love the Wood very much. It smells of boreal forests, of ancestry. Stacking it makes the holy Wood Pile. We approach the Wood Pile with offerings of Wood, giving itself to itself. Each Wood has made so many journeys just to get to the Pile. When I handle the Wood, I trace it back from tree to seed to water. It is all there in my hands, so that stacking is an act of reverence and memorial.

The arrival of the Wood is an early hint that Summer will be over soon. Along with bottling and preserving and Winter planting. Thus the world turns, and sometimes even we notice.

It is also a chance to consider the concept of enough. Having enough for Winter was surely a preoccupation for many of my ancestors. Enough warmth, enough food, enough company. All the Winter festivals are doubly precious because they affirm that there is enough. Now our preoccupation with enough-ness is way out of whack. There is never enough for the world in this stage of terminal capitalism. Planning for scarcity, real scarcity, is something we may have to learn again.

 Here is the Wood Pile half stacked. Gentle sparks of light filter through the tarp, its dappled irregularities a complex wonder. Holy the light! Holy as it speaks of its source! Holy as it enters the cave of my skull! All is holy today. 

Here is the ritual to welcome the Wood into the Wood Pile. And to bless the Wood Pile. This is a Cernunnos ritual of sorts, for himself is of the northern forest and also is for prosperity.I hail and thank Cernunnos. I hail the Wood Pile, its mites and wights, and the Clan of Pholcidae who are welcome to come and live in it. I ask the Wood Pile to last all Winter and keep us warm and bright. The little drum, not the big one I use for journeying, sounds flat like step step step step step. There are grains and fruits and consecrated water. All is poured over the Pile and I leave. Salve!

This kind of ritual is close to prayer. Because I am asking the Wood Pile to do what it is going to do anyway, what it is there to do. We pray to God, if we pray to God,  to do what God is bound to do by God's nature. God is bound in this way to God's attributes in a way that we are not. I think there is some theology around this, and perhaps someone with some theological sophistication can tell me more. If there is some sort of Aristotelian grain, of right meaning or the right way to be, the Wood Pile knows it. It is the sentient guardian of our Winter, and it settles nicely into its destiny.