So he had access to the shamanism proper (in the sense of a correct orientation towards Nature) as compared to many of the new age papers on shamanism that I moved swiftly through today.
Once again, let me offer a caution to "Nietzscheans" -- just because the true nature of Nature doesn't mean you have to submit to it. Even worse, if you try to force others to do so!
The new age view on Nature, however, is that it is really nurturing and benign.
It is considered "healing" to submit to Nature on the basis of a supposition that this is so.
Yet shamanic healing does not come about through submitting to something which has intrinsic properties of being healing -- rather as one might submit to a hot bath at the end of a long day.
That is why the destructive elements of shamanic initiation need to be emphasized more within the Western context -- not to give people the basis for macho posturing, but to warn them of the reality.
Shamanic healing comes through an encounter with oneself as intricately related to raw Nature. It is not -- (another common misunderstanding) -- a way to grasp an epistemology that is unaffected by social content or cultural ideas. It is not neo-platonism. Rather it is a way to encounter a part of one's nature of which one had previously been unaware.
2 comments:
Nature is both brutal and beautiful. Its brutality stems from it's efficiency. Nothing is wasted, not even you or me. The benign aspect of nature is often through motherhood or parenthood. Clinging too much to this state, and ignoring all the rest is a sign of arrested development. The desire to never grow up, and this prevents a person from grasping and guiding their own power and their own lives.
New Agers are terrible when it comes to taking responsibility for their own actions and look to some higher power to correct them or shelter them always---like a parent shelters a child. And when that doesn't happen, they imagine it and move on.
When you are internally, independently powerful, you are potentially part of that efficient brutality. How scary would that be?
Others take that in the opposite direction and see it as permission to be brutal--but permission is still a means of avoiding ownership.
Excellent summary. I am less familiar with anything new age, except through books, so I don't have a measurement of the new age character structure, although I dislike it when anything is made out to be too facile. Life isn't.
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