Emotional and intellectual vitality can be radically increased through shamanistic practices. To achieve this, you must face the void of the soul, in the absence of any culturally determined meaningfulness. By an existential threat to ego, one can often see those aspects of the real self that one's conformity to others' expectations has rendered invisible to you. Shamanism works on you at the level of this existential threat, forcing a deeper investigation of one's inner resources.
There are degrees and kinds of shamanism. Nietzsche's intellectual shamanism is relatively deep, just as his experience of an existential "abyss" is central to his work. All the same, if had experienced an even deeper sense of the void, he may not have been so keen to reinforce radical gender polarities along the lines he did. He would have seen the aspects of "femininity" that he condemned in women as being part and part of his own psyche.
Bataille, it seems, had much more of an intuitive sense of going further, by means of "excess" which would break the existing boundaries of bourgeois consciousness.
The problem with any contemporary "New Age" shamanism is that it seeks to increase vitality on the basis of a prior acceptance of bourgeois norms of identity. The need to make shamanism commercially viable, according to capitalist and consumerist mores, leads to the kind of attitude that is all too reassuring -- the idea that with just a very tiny bit tweaking, the system we live in can be overhauled.
An enemy of shamanistic knowledge is the pervasive bourgeois ideology that we cannot change our essential characteristics, especially the fundamentals of our relationship to freedom, but can only work to refine and improve what we already have. This bourgeois pessimism is very pronounced, for instance, in the work of Lacan. His work proclaims, perhaps truthfully, that all are in, one way or another, pathological under the force of Civilization. His approach also effectively closes the door against any non-civilized means for recovering one's sense of wholeness. There is no void in which one may discover one's identity, within psychoanalysis. Rather, there remains the muted authoritarianism of an analyst's couch.
Strong bourgeois cynicism may also found in Freud. He views the state of discontent with civilization as such, as pathological. Nietzsche effectively reversed this valuation by holding that civilization was itself an illness caused by the human propensity to suffer too much from consciousness, at the price of losing touch with instinct.
There are degrees and kinds of shamanism. Nietzsche's intellectual shamanism is relatively deep, just as his experience of an existential "abyss" is central to his work. All the same, if had experienced an even deeper sense of the void, he may not have been so keen to reinforce radical gender polarities along the lines he did. He would have seen the aspects of "femininity" that he condemned in women as being part and part of his own psyche.
Bataille, it seems, had much more of an intuitive sense of going further, by means of "excess" which would break the existing boundaries of bourgeois consciousness.
The problem with any contemporary "New Age" shamanism is that it seeks to increase vitality on the basis of a prior acceptance of bourgeois norms of identity. The need to make shamanism commercially viable, according to capitalist and consumerist mores, leads to the kind of attitude that is all too reassuring -- the idea that with just a very tiny bit tweaking, the system we live in can be overhauled.
An enemy of shamanistic knowledge is the pervasive bourgeois ideology that we cannot change our essential characteristics, especially the fundamentals of our relationship to freedom, but can only work to refine and improve what we already have. This bourgeois pessimism is very pronounced, for instance, in the work of Lacan. His work proclaims, perhaps truthfully, that all are in, one way or another, pathological under the force of Civilization. His approach also effectively closes the door against any non-civilized means for recovering one's sense of wholeness. There is no void in which one may discover one's identity, within psychoanalysis. Rather, there remains the muted authoritarianism of an analyst's couch.
Strong bourgeois cynicism may also found in Freud. He views the state of discontent with civilization as such, as pathological. Nietzsche effectively reversed this valuation by holding that civilization was itself an illness caused by the human propensity to suffer too much from consciousness, at the price of losing touch with instinct.
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