A Life of Learning:
Shamanic Training and Discipline
The greatest of all wonders is not the conqueror
of the world but the subduer of himself.
—William Durant 77
The extent to which the human mind and body can be developed is extraordinary. Master Game players develop them exquisitely, but for this a discipline is essential.
This discipline includes toughening the body, cultivating the mind, conquering cravings, facing fears, and cultivating capacities such as concentration and endurance. Not surprisingly, this is a lengthy process, where success is measured in months and years, and patience is not only a virtue but a necessity. The goal is to hone body and mind so as to first awaken to spirit and then become an effective instrument of it. The process was pithily summarized by Chuang Tzu, one of the greatest Taoist sages.
First gain control of the body and all its organs.
Then control the mind.
Attain one-pointedness.
Then the harmony of heaven will come down and dwell in you.
You will be radiant with Life.
You will rest in Tao.236
This is obviously no simple task, and some 2,000 years ago the Stoic philosopher Epictetus warned, “If you aim to live by such principles, remember that it won’t be easy.”87
Instructions come from both inner and outer worlds. In the outer world, they come via apprenticeship to a master. The apprentice shaman must learn both theory and practice: the myths and cosmology, rituals and techniques of the culture. With their aid, the apprentice’s experiences are evoked and made meaningful within the tribal traditions.
In the inner world, the apprentice learns to cultivate and work with dreams, visions, and spirits. Ideally, both inner and outer worlds align. Together, they mold the novice into a mature shaman who can mediate effectively between these worlds, between sacred and profane, spiritual and mundane.
The apprenticeship may take months or years. The novice’s first task may be a ritual purification and confession of breaches of taboo.299 After this, actual instruction by the teacher—aided, of course, by the teacher’s spirits—begins.
Much must be learned. On the theoretical side, the apprentice must become a mythologist and cosmologist. To become an effective “cosmic traveler,” he must learn the terrain of the multilayered, interconnected universe in which he will quest for power and knowledge.
This cosmology is no dry mapping of inanimate worlds, but a guide to a living, conscious, willful universe, and the would-be shaman must become familiar with its spiritual inhabitants. He must learn their names, habitats, powers, likes and dislikes, how they can be called, and how they can be controlled. For it is these spirits who will help or hinder, battle or befriend him as he does his work. It is they who embody the power at work in the cosmos, and it is his relationship with them that will determine his success.
Much of this cosmic terrain and advice for relating to it are contained in the culture’s myths. Throughout human history, myths have provided guidelines for the conduct of life. Only in our own time have so many cultures lacked a coherent myth—a grand, unifying story of the cosmos. Indeed, this lack of meaningful myth may underlie much of the fragmentation and alienation that haunts our lives, and our future may well depend on our ability to create a new, life-affirming myth that gives coherence and common meaning to our modern world.
Joseph Campbell45 suggested that myths serve four major functions: developmental, social, cosmological, and religious. Their developmental function is to guide individuals through life’s stages. Their social function is to support the social structure and offer a shared understanding of life and relationships. Their cosmological and religious roles are to provide an image and understanding of the cosmos and of humankind’s role and responsibility in it.
Myths serve the shaman in all four ways. This is not surprising since some myths may have originated in shamanic journeys and reflect the terrain discovered there.83 They guide the shaman’s development, suggest his place in society and the cosmos, and indicate how he is to relate to them. In addition, myths provide the belief system he and his patients will share. This may be crucial since research suggests that a shared belief system or “healing myth” is vital to effective therapeutic relationships.
But there is much more to learn than myths. The would-be shaman must also develop therapeutic skills, master altered states and journeys, and acquire his own helping spirits. We will explore these arts in subsequent chapters.
Helping spirits constitute the shaman’s inner teachers. Consequently, considerable training involves learning how to cultivate the circumstances and states of consciousness—such as dreams, journeys, or visions—that will coax the spirits to reveal themselves and their messages. The most dramatic of these circumstances include ascetic disciplines.
ASCETIC DISCIPLINES
Ascetic practices are the atom bombs of religious discipline. These powerful tools can strengthen and purify by forcing practitioners to confront their limits, fears, and self-deceptions. But they are tools of high risk and high gain, for though they can be beneficial, they can also be misused.
Traditionally, ascetic practices are said to strengthen and purify.187 They can strengthen warrior qualities such as courage and endurance, strip away physical and mental impurities, and foster clarity and concentration.25 The sum total of these benefits is power; not power over others, but far more important, power over oneself. This is the power to control one’s faculties, overcome obstacles, master spirits, and benefit others.
How do ascetic practices achieve these benefits? In several ways. First, those who face challenges successfully develop “self-efficacy”: a sense of confidence and effectiveness.19 Ascetics who master extreme challenges may therefore develop an exceptional sense of personal power and freedom from fear.
The secret to overcoming fear is to confront it—face your fear and it will disappear—and ascetic practices are superbly designed to force an unrelenting confrontation with fear and self-doubt. As Abraham Maslow put it, “The person who hasn’t conquered, withstood and overcome continues to feel doubtful that he could. This is true not only for external dangers; it holds also for the ability to control and delay one’s own impulses, and therefore to be unafraid of them.”225 This confrontation with fear, whether through cold, hunger, isolation, or psychedelics, has long been central to shamanic training The early initiates who crawled far underground through the pitch black labyrinths of caves, such as Les Trois Frères millennia ago,316 left behind not only stunning Paleolithic art, but probably also their fear.
By holding fast to their spiritual goals, despite the pull of conflicting egocentric cravings—such as the classic temptations of money, sex, and status—ascetics undermine these cravings. Unreinforced motives diminish, and this weakening of conflicting drives, which is a goal of most religions, is a crucial part of “purification.”
Only by winnowing away distracting drives can shamans and other Master Game players direct all their energies to spiritual pursuits. So important is this winnowing and the nonattachment it produces that Meister Eckhart, one of the greatest of all Christian contemplatives, wrote: “I have inquired, carefully and most industriously, to find which is the greatest and best virtue…” and concluded that “I find no other virtue better than a pure detachment from all things...”79
Asceticism can also assuage that tricky and painful emotion: guilt. If practitioners believe they are evil or contaminated and must pay for their sins, then asceticism can seem a logical way to do so. But though this can work to some extent, it can also be tricky. Self-punishment may assuage guilt temporarily, but can also strengthen belief in the appropriateness of both guilt and punishment.
Any spiritual practice has its traps. Asceticism is no exception. It can arouse feelings of righteousness or a puritanical denial of the beauty and joy of life. Asceticism can also be carried to dubious and dangerous extremes, even to the point of self-torture, mutilation, and death. Because of such dangers, the Buddha, who at one stage practiced asceticism so fiercely that he almost killed himself, finally advocated a “middle way” between sensuality and asceticism.
Japanese Ascetics
Ascetic practices occur around the world and reach extreme forms in parts of India and Japan. Many Japanese ascetics have been described as shamans.25 If we look closely, however, relatively few of them seem to meet our definition of shamanism. No distinction is made between shamans and mediums; beyond that, contemporary shamanism in Japan seems to have degenerated significantly from former times. Few contemporary Japanese shamans enter altered states and actually journey. It appears that most simply act out the classic trance in symbolic rituals.
Today this trance occurs only rarely. The capacity for this kind of dissociation, and for the visionary journey which goes with it, seems to have diminished in recent centuries, and today the journey is most commonly accomplished by symbolic action in fully waking consciousness.25
This is an example of what we might call the “ritualization of religion”: a process in which transcendence-inducing practices degenerate into ineffective rituals, direct experience gives way to mere symbols of experience, and understanding and mastery of effective altered states are lost.
Whatever its current limitations, Japanese shamanism has historically been highly ascetic. Some of these practices offer graphic examples of the extremes that asceticism can reach. Three major types include dietary restriction, cold, and solitude, often accompanied by sleep deprivation.
Mild dietary restriction involves avoiding certain foods, such as meat, or any foods believed to inhibit the acquisition of power. Extreme forms of dietary restriction involve fasting, even to the point of death, such as in the mind-boggling discipline of “tree eating.” Though “tree eaters” were not really shamans, the discipline is instructive in demonstrating the ascetic extremes to which some seekers go in their quest for salvation. Practitioners would begin by vowing to follow the discipline for one, two, or even three thousand days.
During the first part of the discipline their diet consisted of nuts, bark, fruit, berries, grass and sometimes soy in fair abundance. The quantity of these things was then reduced, until by the end of their allotted period they had undergone a total fast of many days. Ideally, if the discipline were properly calculated, the man should die from starvation, upright in the lotus posture, on the last day of his avowed fast. His body should have been reduced to skin and bone.25
Such a practice was obviously not for the faint of heart.
A second major austerity is exposure to cold. Common in arctic areas and Japan, this technique is considered highly effective in developing power. Once again the severity of the practices can reach almost incomprehensible extremes.
To stand under a waterfall, preferably between the hours of two and three in the morning and preferably during the period of the great cold in midwinter, is believed to be an infallible method of gaining power. Indeed, one female ascetic reported that such a practice “no longer felt in the least cold to her. It rather promoted an unrivalled concentration of mind…which formed the very basis of her ascetic power.”25
A third major ascetic practice is solitude. This common practice marked the lives of several religious founders, such as Jesus’s forty days of fasting in the wilderness, Buddha’s solitary meditation, and Mohammad’s isolation in a cave. For centuries, prolonged solitude has been part of the training of shamans, Hindu and Taoist yogis, Buddhist monks, and Christian contemplatives. “So, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything,” urged the Christian Desert Fathers.237
Solitude frees attention from the distractions and seductions of the world and redirects it toward the spiritual. This spiritual realm is ultimately found to reside within the seeker—e.g., “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” or “Look within, you are the Buddha”—but to find it usually requires intense contemplation and introspection. One must concentrate and still the mind, quiet the clamor of competing desires, and birth a new sensitivity to one’s inner world.
“Know thyself” is the motto of these practices. However, the cacophonous demands and distractions of society usually hinder deep inner searching and self-knowledge. Consequently, periodic withdrawal and solitude may be essential, since as Wordsworth explained so poetically:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away.
Shamans were the first spiritual seekers to appreciate that, to use their own words, “The power of solitude is great and beyond understanding.”299
The many trials faced by those who confront themselves in isolation have inspired countless spiritual biographies. The Eskimo shaman Aua, whose parents’ rituals and taboos were outlined earlier, described his time of solitude as follows:
Then I sought solitude, and here I soon became very melancholy. I would sometimes fall to weeping, and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then for no reason, all would suddenly be changed, and I felt a great, inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break into song, a mighty song, with only room for one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of my voice. And then in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different way.299
These extreme mood swings and lack of control are common initial reactions to solitude. After my own first retreat, I wrote of experiencing “sudden apparently unprecipitated wide mood swings to completely polar emotions. Shorn of all my props and distractions there was just no way to pretend that I had more than the faintest inkling of self-control over either thoughts or feelings.”387
Those who face themselves in solitude quickly appreciate just how restless and out of control the untrained mind is. They soon come to understand claims such as Sigmund Freud’s that “man is not even master in his own house…in his own mind”106 and why “all scriptures without any exception proclaim that for attaining salvation mind should be subdued.”296 Solitude is a time-honored method for subduing the mind.
Not content with the rigors of solitude alone, shamans sometimes combined it with fasting and cold, as in the following account by an Eskimo shaman, Igjugarjuk. While still young he received his call to adventure in the form of mysterious dreams.
Strange unknown beings came and spoke to him, and when he awoke, he saw all the visions of his dream so distinctly that he could tell his fellows all about them. Soon it became evident to all that he was destined to become an angakoq [a shaman] and an old man named Perqanaoq was appointed his instructor. In the depth of winter, when the cold was most severe, Igjugarjuk was placed on a small sled just large enough for him to sit on, and carried far away from his home to the other side of Hikoligjuaq. On reaching the appointed spot, he remained seated on the sled while his instructor built a tiny snow hut, with barely room for him to sit cross-legged. He was not allowed to set foot on the snow, but was lifted from the sled and carried into the hut where a piece of skin just large enough for him to sit on served as a carpet. No food or drink was given him; he was exhorted to think only of the Great Spirit and of the helping spirit that should presently appear—and so he was left to himself and his meditation.
After five days had elapsed, the instructor brought him a drink of lukewarm water, and with similar exhortations, left him as before. He fasted now for fifteen days, when he was given another drink of water and a very small piece of meat, which had to last him a further ten days. At the end of this period, his instructor came for him and fetched him home. Igjugarjuk declared that the strain of those thirty days of cold and fasting was so severe that he “sometimes died a little.” During all that time he thought only of the Great Spirit, and endeavored to keep his mind free from all memory of human beings and everyday things. Toward the end of the thirty days there came to him a helping spirit in the shape of a woman. She came while he was asleep and seemed to hover in the air above him. After that he dreamed no more of her, but she became his helping spirit. For five months following this period of trial, he was kept on the strictest diet, and required to abstain from all intercourse with women. The fasting was then repeated; for such fasts at frequent intervals are the best means to attaining to knowledge of hidden things.298
This is a beautiful account of not only solitude and asceticism, but also of the practice of attempting to fix one’s mind unwaveringly on the Divine.
Igjugarjuk’s conclusion from all this was that “the only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.”271 Igjugarjuk would therefore probably have agreed with the French existentialist Albert Camus that “when a man has learned—and not on paper—how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn.”423
Practices such as solitude and fasting enhance access to the inner world and its visions, dreams, and spirits. For successful candidates these climax in culmination experiences, which indicate that a degree of shamanic mastery has been attained. Two of the most frequent shamanic culminations are of being immersed in light and of death and rebirth.