So, part six of the unpacking of this idea of Chaos Shamanism. You get Chaos Magic. I had someone explain it to me once, who’d been doing it for many years. What she said is that the way it works is that you create a ceremony for a particular reason, and it's unique, but the way they create those ceremonies is by drawing on other magical traditions. A diligent practitioner of Chaos Magic will spend a fair bit of time researching other magical traditions from all around the world and using that as a kind of databank. So you can kind of see the Chaos element, in that there's no set tradition; rather, you're allowing the form to create itself, rather than having a preset form in which you put your prayers - it's the other way round. It's quite sort of postmodern, you could say.
Maybe you could for the same reason call Chaos Shamanism, post-modern Shamanism. But it’s a bit different to Chaos Magic, because it’s not like our raison d’etre is to create ceremonies for purposes of magical outcomes. When you're doing magic, you're doing it for a reason, and we do magic in Shamanism as well. What is magic? Magic is prayer, and prayer is asking Spirit for an outcome.
You can't predetermine exactly what the outcome’s going to be, it'll often take you by surprise, but outcome there will be if the prayers are heartfelt. How could it not be, because when something is heartfelt, you're connected to the whole universe and the universe responds, the universe cares for us, is benign. In a way that's what magic is, it's an inner thing, it's the secret teaching. The secret teaching is the inner teaching. It’s the intention behind the forms, not the forms or spells themselves, whatever other impression you might have got from Harry Potter!
So we do magic, but it's in the form of prayer, beginning with the expression of gratitude for all those things in our life that work, and then asking where we need help, or where others need help.
So there's one comparison point. The other comparison point with Chaos Shamanism that I want to make has to do with my early Buddhist background.
What's our modern context for Shamanism? Here we are, high and dry in a society that in many ways has lost its roots in that indigenous connection to the natural world, that connection to the elements, that soulful connection to the natural world, and everything that comes out of that. And we're trying to recreate it. We're in a great position because we've got the whole world to draw on, we've got indigenous traditions from all around the world to draw on and to use and to be inspired by. And that for me parallels the Buddhism I was involved with in my 20s and 30s, my misspent youth - that's a joke.
The teacher’s approach was to take the essence of Buddhism - he had spent 20 years or so in the East practicing various traditional forms - and re-express it in a form that's relevant to modern society. So not committed to any one school, but drawing on all of them.
It's a great idea, but his trouble was that he started it far too early, he hadn't really done his own inner work. He was one of these people who had a genuine insight at a very young age, but then identified with that, and kind of remained the same. So his understanding of the essence of Buddhism – which is an inner thing – remained partial, and in some ways quite cold, quite intellectual.
He did have something, but the inner work hadn’t been done, that demolition that happens to you, that underworld journey where you are honest about your demons, you learn to bear them and make friends with them, and allow them to change you - that revolutionizes you and changes the way you see everything. It's like well, that was how I saw things 10 years ago, now I'm saying this and this is how I see the world now, I have grasped something essential that I did not see before. It's that kind of demolition out of which we're initiated, out of which something new is reborn, and it's that, that is of the essence of spirituality, that is the essence of Shamanism. It's an inner thing, and that's what Chaos Shamanism is about. It's about an alignment to that inner thing, and doing whatever practices will support that.
So this other aspect of Chaos Shamanism is the kind of same idea as my Buddhist teacher had. But it is me in my 60s saying it, not him in his 40s! I’ve had more time – and, I think, willingness – to sit at my own coal-face, and in a way develop more humility and a broader self-knowledge. I mean, when I teach I like to begin by talking about the things I find difficult, the things that make me anxious, how I have to make sure I don't drink too much because I do like it, it is a get-out from my creativity, the things that can make me angry sometimes, the things that can make me lose self-possession, the self-doubt I go through, at least in the early stages, with just about everything I do. I like to talk about all those things, because it keeps me on the same level as you, because we are all the same yeah, I haven't got a special experience that puts me above other people. I've just stayed with myself. Live closely to yourself, that's all we're here to do.
So when I am open in that kind of way, then other people feel emboldened to do that, they feel it's okay, that their faults aren't terrible and unique, it's like no you’re the same as the rest of us. We don't need to judge the demons and the tribulations, we just need to come into a relationship with them. It's all you have to do, it's easy and difficult. So it's that process which attunes us to the spirit, to the heart of anything.
Okay, that's my preamble, and that's taken most of this one. I wanted to talk about the Medicine Wheel. Maybe I'll do so in the next one, I might just begin it with this one. What I’ve been doing is asking how do we connect this idea of Chaos Shamanism, of going back to the essence of Shamanism, that essence of what it is to be a natural human being, how do we connect that with one of these traditional practices like the sweatlodge or like the pipe ceremony or like the medicine wheel or the journeying, all of these things I like to do.
And I’m essentially coming at it from the point of view of what they're getting at, why we're doing them. That's what Chaos Shamanism or just Shamanism, the essence of Shamanism is. It’s the secret teaching! In Buddhism you get the secret teachings, the transmissions. I think something can be transmitted from person to person, from Spirit to Spirit. It's not in words, it's not in forms, it's more like being around that person and being open. I went to an online shamanic initiation, it was a three-part course, and the initiation was into was into some sort of feminine goddess. I lasted the first session, but he was recounting the traditional ways they work, which is great but it's not for us, it didn’t mean anything to me. But I felt I got it after the first session, I felt I picked up something out of him, something around him was now around me, even online! (And why not? These things are outside the usual rules of time and space.) So that's the transmission, you just need to be open to it, and this other kind of thing happens.
In traditional shamanic cultures you get spirits being passed down families, from father to son, grandmother to granddaughter and so on, and I think it's got something of that nature. There's a special feeling, do you know how you get that with people who've got that Shamanic connection, from the point of view of that kind of inner energy Spirit work, which some people try and make the whole of shamanism, but it's not. I mean even academics are divided on that, some use it in a that narrower way, some use it in the broader way to mean the whole indigenous inheritance and that's how I use it.
But anyway, particularly that inner energy work, people who work in that sort of way, you can feel it, for me it’s a connection. I also feel that more broadly with Native American stuff, it somehow seems to come my way, I'm not going to big it up, but somehow there's a spirit connection there. So there's that kind of energetic connection there as well, and that's very much the plane that I'm talking about. All these other practices are a support to that inner kind of knowing, that inner connection, it's quite special, it's very alive, it's got a fantastic taste to it, it's like ambrosia, it's like honey and it's always a mystery, but we can't resist it. We know we're meant to be around it, it has that deeper kind of thing in it. I think Tibetan Buddhism can have that, and Shamanism has that, any of these things that have held on to the inner tradition – and it's easy to lose the inner tradition in the outward forms. Chaos Shamanism stands for that impulse to reclaim the inner traditions from their tendency to ossify in forms and hierarchies and books and so on.
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