Shamanistic flows of life

I now understand that the problem I wanted to solve through writing my autobiographical thoughts was solved through shamanistic methods and strategies of recapitulating the past. It was not enough to write the thoughts down, but I had to eventually reach the point where I would be able to see myself objectively -- that is, to see myself from the outside. Up until this point, the memoir wasn't completed, at least not in my mind.

I had, for a while, a wish that others would complete it for me. My expectation was based on my social and cultural conditioning, which had been extremely idealistic, in the sense of believing that knowledge and power and goodness were absolute, and that I had only to keep struggling to be rewarded with the jackpot.

Looking back, I had anticipated that others generally knew more than I. For instance, I presumed I had only to mention a theory or a concept to any lecturer at university, and they would immediately be able to become a fountain of knowledge, filling me in on the aspects of meaning I had missed. I assumed, in short, that I was missing strategic bits of knowledge that others probably had.

This wasn't an issue of self-esteem, since I also knew that I had a great deal of knowledge in specific subject areas, which gratified me a great deal. Nonetheless, it vexed me that I seemed to be missing some parts of emotional and historical knowledge. It perplexed me even more that I couldn't figure out what these were.

This something essential being missing made my paragraphs seem awkward as I had to somehow cover over the elisions with words I thought probably approximated my intentions. Most of what I said I was entirely certain about, but there remained nonetheless some missing bits of knowledge -- aspects of meaning, and a sense of the likely impact of my words, of which I was uncertain.

Having to take a hit or miss approach to meaning unraveled me. I had to recover knowledge about what I didn't know -- but above all, I had to find out specifically what is was I didn't know.

I finally found out that a particular paradigm resonated with me deeply. There were others who had a similar goal and purpose in life, and were pursuing it in ways that made a lot of sense to me. Peculiarly enough, I also found that those who couldn't understand the meaning and value of this project intuitively could not understand it at all.

Misinterpretations of Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera are common -- for instance, in the idea that they were simply acting up. I perceived that they were in search of their emotions to recover them. I was doing the same. The fact that I had missing bits of awareness deeply bothered me. I had to work my way deeply into the reality I had come from to learn what these pieces were. This process was constituted by writing and researching my PhD.

My PhD research finally brought me to an understanding of a paradigm that would facilitate my task. Descent into the past to recover one's identity is what I came to term "intellectual shamanism". The concept of Eternal Recurrence that is at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy is also concerned with recovery of one's self from one's historical accidents.

I also understood what defines and separates writers like Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera from other sorts of writers is that they are writers who have some early trauma. In the case of Nietzsche, it seems to relate to his father's early death. Bataille's father used to beat him. Marechera was born into a war zone, and I entered one, psychologically, when my family emigrated from a war zone. The logic of intellectual shamanism is in the recovery of the parts of oneself lost to trauma. For those who do not have to face this task, this shamanistic paradigm will make little intuitive sense. The ability to restore one's sense of one's life into a whole, that one approves of, is the basis for Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence:  until one can effectively manage this, one keeps reliving the original trauma.

The effect of trauma is the numbing of emotions -- hence the loss of aspects of oneself to the historical past. To feel one's emotions again, whilst recreating the historical context in which they had become numbed, is to restore one's full sense of self, so that nothing is missing. The emotional and intellectual knowledge I'd been lacking due to episodes of numbing were restored substantially.

Still, I had not seen myself from the outside yet, which meant I retained a feeling of vulnerability in terms of overall self-knowledge. In the back of my mind I feared that there was something strange about me -- a feeling confirmed by the fact that many others could not understand my sense of the issues Marechera, Bataille and Nietzsche were trying to address through their philosophies. All three of these writers have come under intense fire by moralists who thought they were engaged in nasty practices. The bourgeois moralists considered Marechera simply and straightforwardly undisciplined, Bataille as having a meaningless, but not redemptive attraction to violence, and Nietzsche as being simply ideologically fascist. In my experience, these writers were my salvation, instructing me how to repair damage to my psyche.

Just a few days ago, I finally saw myself from a detached point of view as a result of continuing to pursue self-knowledge. Thankfully, there is nothing wrong with me -- except one thing: I do have a tendency to psychological numbing. I'm not always entirely present, although never out of control. At the moment of reliving an earlier trauma, I am intellectually and emotionally absent. This tendency is deeply ingrained, conditioned from childhood. The consequences of this early conditioned form of emotional self-defense is that I lose details from the present, very easily, if under stress. When my emotions temporarily switch off, I am no longer present. This in turn leads to another problem in that I'm not sure what the proper emotions or observations would be in relation to a particular situation, since although I was there, I didn't really experience the situation fully.

Intellectual shamanism helps me to overcome this tendency to emotionally switch off. One has to face "death" in accepting the fact that all is finite. By means of fearlessly "confronting death", one encounters reality in all of its unmediated immediacy. Shamanistic techniques thus manage to reawaken socially traumatized people's connections with reality -- which are then experienced as spontaneous flows of life.