The use of psychoactive drugs enables a shaman to discover a cosmology that would make us all connected to each other, in particular via a sense of unity with organic nature, as the prime source and origin of life. The insights gained through exploring this cosmology are useful. The sources of malaise can be ascertained, observed and come to terms with.
The range of possibilities for life may be greater and more widely varied than those observable in everyday existence. Thus, a shamanic journey can lead not only to healing, but to creative solutions to life’s difficulties.
Shamanic experience could also free one from idées fixes through a baptism into new experiences.
This is of course against the grain of Nietzsche, who feared, as Luce Irigaray pointed out, the element of water, including oceanic experiences.
Have no fear that water is "feminine", as it is only so according to essentialist notions of identity. Patriarchal religion would urge us to see it in this way, but there is no need to trust patriarchal versions of anything, given that the patriarchal priest is invested in maintaining specific power relations. We should rather distrust anything essentializing -- at least until we can test it for ourselves and work out what its value might be.
1 comment:
Not all forms of shamanism rely on psychoactive drugs to reach altered states. Some use drumming, starvation, isolation, etc. Shamanism is so fast that it is really hard to classify in a single definition.
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