Shamanic self-knowledge

Shamanic journeying -- especially in the way that Marechera invites us to do it in Black Sunlight -- is conducive to gaining ontological self-knowledge. What did I mean by that?

There are so metaphysical mystifications. Derrida's entire schema of philosophical thought is directed towards softening the effects of the mystifications, by compelling us to go their intellectual origins: to see metaphysics as being constructed of binaries that logically entail each other, and not as values that spring from the divine elbow of a god (or some other mystifying formulation).

Shamanism goes further by enabling us to travel to the very root these metaphysical thoughts. There we go to a point that precedes thoughts about gender -- that there are two metaphysical binary-partners, male and female. We encounter a way of experiencing the world that precedes the categories of race, as well as the way of thinking that produces morality in black and white.

I am suggesting that this deep kind of shamanic journeying equates us with the ontological forms of existence that go towards making up our identities. The primary form is that of the primeval mother -- Nature -- in her two-sided nurturing and engulfing qualities. So it is that one of the fundamental lessons that shamanistic journeying can teach us is about our real relationship to Nature, as something apart from our culturally conditioned notions. Nature has a dual and contradictory ontological quality for humans. As part of cultural knowledge, we cannot help but define ourselves in relation to Nature. In shamanic terms, however, we side neither with Rousseau (and his romanticization of Nature) nor with Hobbes (and his intense reservations about it). Rather, one has the ontological self-knowledge that one is both a part of Nature (and fundamentally dependent upon being nurtured by others), and necessarily a thing apart from it (and needing to strive towards our own individuality.)

It is hardly surprising that shamanic journeying leads to genuine insights about how the psyche can become better grounded. We are to understand, shamanistically, that one is in danger of losing very much by valorising one side of nature -- that is the nurturing side. One risks everything because one overlooks the engulfing side of Nature; the loss of self:

Ye crowd around your neighbour, and have fine words for it. But I say unto you: your neighbour-love is your bad love of yourselves.
Ye flee unto your neighbour from yourselves, and would fain make a virtue thereof: but I fathom your "unselfishness."
The THOU is older than the I; the THOU hath been consecrated, but not yet the I: so man presseth nigh unto his neighbour.
Do I advise you to neighbour-love? Rather do I advise you to neighbour- flight and to furthest love!

Neighbour-love involves the actions we do on the basis of a faith in the nurturing side of Nature. But with only this faith, and without further insight, we overlook the fact that we are being engulfed by the other aspect of Nature -- the side that annihilates individuality, Culture and Civilisation -- due to the plain and simple trust in the idea that Nature has only one dimension. To succumb in this way indicates "bad love" for one's individualistic powers.

Herd morality is the problem being here defined. It is valorisation of neighbour-love at the cost of attending to one's own inwardly defined potential. But to take up an absolute embrace of the alternative perspective, (offered by the metaphysical binary of Nature-good or Nature-evil), is to deprive oneself of half of one's ontological nature. One may then attempt to be a strong and solitary "individual". But there is no way that one will be nurtured in this attempt. One has cut oneself off from one's roots, to the point that there is no more capacity for change or self-transformation. To persist with this one-sided embrace of reality for too long will make one very rigid. One may even start to hate the things that represent the nurturing side of Nature, to one's metaphysically intoxicated mind. One would likely become a dyed in the wool misogynist, then -- and this is anything but shamanistic!

Experiencing Nature as being necessarily a two-sided force can save us from one-sided interpretations of the world, and their catastrophic effects, whereby we end up denying one entire half of our what makes up our very state of being. Shamanistic self-knowledge,about one's dual nature, is the only basis by means of which the negative hold of herd morality can be broken cleanly. Other attempts to free oneself from its control must necessarily fail, due to their reliance on metaphysics, for one cannot eschew one side of Nature, whilst attempting exclusively to latch on to the other side of its ontology. We as humans are already both sides, and need ongoing nurturing from others if we are to be able to work towards a real individualism, and not just an individualism of the tormented, very psychologically fraught and intellectually rigid sort.