Shamanism(s) in a Changing World
Indigenous peoples have rich storehouses of information about nature, man and the balanced relationship of the two. From their beliefs about the spiritual world to their traditional knowledge of rain forests, healing and agriculture, these societies provide the opportunity for new interpretations about the world and our selves. Many of these populations face severe discrimination, denial of human rights, loss of cultural and religious freedoms, or in the worst cases, cultural or physical destruction….If current trends in many parts of the world continue the cultural, social and linguistic diversity of humankind will be radically and irrevocably diminished….immense undocumented repositories of ecological, biological and pharmacological knowledge will be lost, as well as an immeasurable wealth of cultural, social, religious, and artistic expression.
—International Cultural Survival Act of 1988, United States Congress
GLOBALIZATION
Globalization—the meeting, mixing, and conflict of cultures—is all about us, and the world will never be the same again. The meeting of religions is most loudly discussed as the “clash of civilizations,” as Islamic and Christian worlds collide. But all religions are affected, and shamanism is no exception. What will be the future and fate of this ancient tradition?
Traditional Shamanism
In its native homelands there seems to be four main possibilities. The first is that it may simply disappear. Elsewhere, among the rare peoples relatively untouched by the industrialized world, it may remain as a major religious, medical, and cultural resource. In newly industrialized countries, it may survive or even flourish alongside Western medicine and religion.283 Indeed, in countries such as Korea and Nepal, some wily shamans carefully cull their clientele, retaining likely successes and referring more difficult illnesses to physicians.282 Other shamans may work in partnership with physicians or even treat clients that physicians have deemed incurable.
A final possibility is revival, and this could occur in several ways. One is the emergence of new forms inspired by spontaneous experiences. Examples of such major movements with shamanic elements include the nineteenth-century North American Indian religious revival, the Ghost Dance, and three twentieth-century Brazilian churches that center on the sacramental use of ayahuasca.240
Another possibility for revival is the recreation of practices that languished or were outlawed under cultural repression. This is now occurring in several parts of the world.153 For example, the Northwest American Salish Indians have successfully revived the shamanically related winter spirit dance, and participants are less susceptible to prevalent problems such as depression and alcoholism.180
A third revival possibility is the reintroduction of practices by people outside the culture. The American-based Foundation for Shamanic Studies has been doing this upon request and has had success among the Tuvans of Central Asia, the Caribou Inuit of Canada, and the Buriat of Siberia.153
Shamanism in the Western World
How much of the current lively interest in shamanism will endure remains to be seen. Part is doubtless mere curiosity and fad. But some reflects deep and durable spiritual seeking and an interest in native traditions. There is also a desire to honor the earth351 and respond to the alienation from nature that is so much a part of modern life and that is producing “nature-deficit disorder”218 in individuals and ecological disaster for our planet.
How will its migration to the West affect both shamanism and the West? Perhaps other religious traditions can offer clues. For 2,500 years, Buddhism has slowly migrated around the world from its Indian birthplace. Each new culture it entered has both transformed it and been transformed by it. Time after time it has incorporated and adapted to indigenous ideas and customs in whatever ways best serve its supreme ethic of the awakening and welfare of all beings. In our own time it is evolving once again as it enters the West and confronts the postmodern world.
Already dramatic shifts are evident. Organizational changes include democratization, feminization, and an emphasis on lay as opposed to monastic life. Other shifts include adoption of Western psychological concepts, openness to investigation by scientists, combination with psychotherapy, and social applications such as “engaged Buddhism.”
Similar transformations are already apparent in shamanism. New forms and practices are much in evidence, especially “core” and “neo” shamanism. Core shamanism was founded by Michael Harner on the assumption that a common, crucial core of practices underlies diverse cultural variants. Neoshamanism refers to a more amorphous family of practices. According to anthropologist Joan Townsend, “It is an invented tradition of practices and beliefs based on a constructed metaphorical, romanticized ideal shaman concept which often differs considerably from traditional shamans.”370 How Western forms of shamanism will continue to evolve and what their impact on the West will be remain some of the intriguing cultural questions of our time. However, the British anthropologist Piers Vitebsky makes a powerful point about today’s marketplace of ideas and practices:
Overall, I suggest that shamanism cannot avoid sharing the fate of any other kind of indigenous knowledge in the industrial world: its full implications are too challenging even for radicals to accommodate….This is not a true marketplace, but a rigged one in which your product will sell only if you pretend that it is something else, far less distinctive and valuable, but also far less trouble to come to terms with, than what it really is.383
There is also an important research question. For example, shamanic healing methods are increasingly used for physical and psychological disorders. Careful studies of shamanic healing are essential. For if any shamanic techniques are to take their place alongside Western therapies, they must at some stage be tested experimentally. The capacity for self-deception of both healer and patient is endless, and if believed in by both doctor and patient, the most useless or even harmful technique can seem, at least for a time, nothing short of miraculous. Such is the power of the placebo effect. Therefore, it is not enough that shamanic techniques seem to work. The only way to be certain is to test them experimentally using carefully controlled studies.
THE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS PROJECT
Two great mapping projects are underway, both of which could radically affect our future. One is well known and well funded, the other virtually unknown and unfunded. The first is the human genome project to map the genetic code. The other is the human consciousness project to map the varieties of consciousness. This project aims to map the range of states and stages of consciousness, its developmental pathways and potentials, the varieties of practices to heal and enhance it, its biological underpinnings, and its social-cultural correlates. We already have initial maps of states and stages, pathologies and therapies,413 as well as the central practices found among diverse spiritual traditions.392 Shamanic studies have crucial contributions to make, without which the project cannot be complete.
Perhaps the most crucial finding of the human consciousness project is the recognition of the overlapping claims in diverse spiritual traditions about the unrecognized limitations of our usual waking state. According to contemplative traditions of both East and West, our usual waking state is distorted, constricted, and deluded, so that we live in what the East calls avidya, maya, or illusion. In the West this has been called a shared dream, a consensus trance, or a collective psychosis.355
Within our collective illusion we act blindly and all too often destructively, as might be expected of someone whose awareness is distorted and constricted. Our behavior is said to be driven by greed and fear in ways destructive to ourselves, our fellow beings, and our planet.
But a few have awoken from this illusion, recognized their true nature, and then returned to point the way for the remainder of us. These are the spiritual heroes, the master game players, the great saints and sages, and those who escape from and then voluntarily return to Plato’s cave. These are the people who have created and refreshed the world’s spiritual traditions.
The essence of their message is “Wake up!” Awaken to your true nature, awaken to the fact you are not separate from anyone or anything, awaken to the fact that, as the Confucians say, “Heaven, earth and the ten thousand things form one body.” Awaken to the recognition that, as one Zen master put it, “You are more than this puny body or limited mind. Stated negatively, it is the realization that the universe is not external to you. Positively, it is experiencing the universe as yourself.”191
The person who awakens to this recognition is said to realize that “the I, one’s real, most intimate self, pervades the universe and all other beings.”144 These, of course, are expressions of the unio mystica so revered by contemplatives of all kinds.
But such descriptions are not the exclusive province of mystics. They have been echoed by philosophers, psychologists, and physicists. “Out of my experience….one final conclusion dogmatically emerges,” said William James. “There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness against which our individuality builds but accidental forces, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea.”249 Albert Einstein made the point as beautifully and poetically as only a genius could:
A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.120
The practical implication of this realization is that when we realize that we are not separate from anyone or anything, we naturally want to treat them, quite literally, as our self. Hence, the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor as thy self,” to which Gandhi added, “and every living being is thy neighbor.” In the words of the Buddha:
See yourself in others.
Then whom can you hurt?
What harm can you do?42
An ethic such as this, aimed at the welfare and awakening of all, may be crucial to the survival of our species and our planet.
OUR GLOBAL CRISIS
Clearly, our species and planet are at an “evolutionary bottleneck,” as Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson calls it, in which our natural resources and human ingenuity will be tested to the limits. The next few decades will doubtless determine our collective fate, as Jared Diamond concluded from a study of failed societies in his book Collapse:
Because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.71
Big-picture thinkers, such as Duane Elgin, situate our current crises within an evolutionary view and see us at a developmental crossroads.81 We may well consume, pollute, and war our way into social collapse or even species oblivion. Alternatively, we may be able to find our way through our current global crises via a forced collective maturation. To achieve this, however, will require development of our inner world as much as our outer one.
For what is remarkable about this era is not only the awesome scope and urgency of our problems. It is that for the first time in millions of years of evolution, all our major threats are caused by humans. Problems such as overpopulation, pollution, poverty, and nuclear weapons stem directly from our own behavior, and from the fears and fantasies, desires and delusions that power this behavior. The state of the world, in other words, reflects the state of our minds. The conflicts outside us reflect the conflicts inside us, and the insanity without mirrors the insanity within.389
What this means is that current threats to human survival and well-being are actually symptoms, symptoms of our individual and collective state of mind. If we are to understand and correct the state of the world, we must understand the source of both our problems and their solutions: ourselves. As Senator William Fulbright said: “Only on the basis of an understanding of our behavior can we hope to control it in such a way as to ensure the survival of the human race.”107
The challenge is to optimize our individual and collective maturation. How best to do so is no longer an academic question but an evolutionary imperative. We are in a race between consciousness and catastrophe, the outcome remains unsure, and we are all called to contribute. How spiritual practices in general, and shamanic practices and studies in particular, can best contribute is a crucial question of our time.
CONCLUSION
No one approach or perspective can fully encompass shamanism’s many facets and dimensions. Yet in this book our psychological explorations have provided insights and understandings that other approaches overlook. Clearly we have much to learn from much that shamans do—the myths they live by, the training they undergo, the techniques they use, the crises they confront, the capacities they develop, the states of consciousness they enter, the understandings they gain, the visions they see, and the cosmic travels they take.
The more we explore shamanism, the more it points to unrecognized potentials of the human body, mind, and spirit. For untold thousands of years the world of shamanism has helped, healed, and taught humankind, and it has still more to offer us.