Shamanism, language and the limits of therapy

The difficulty of relating to others about what I have called "shamanic experiences"  (more specifically those described by modernist intellectuals)  is that these involve changes that are not necessarily able to be related through language.   When we are children, we have a certain arrangement of experiences, including those that are common and/or significant for us, and we end up associating these with certain words.Thus language expresses emotional values and meanings for us.   That is why it is difficult to try to resolve some kinds of emotional issues with the assistance of therapists.  If the therapist does not attach the same emotional meanings to words as you do, you will end up effectively speaking a different language.  You will become tied up in language, as generally happens to me when I try to get into any depth about emotional topics with most Western people.

Cultural differences are extremely significant.  There have been women who have tried to get help from Western authorities, such as the police, because they saw that they would become victims of a culturally driven "honor killing".  The police may not necessarily believe the future victim, as she does not use the words that are emotionally loaded, in Western cultural terms, to imply genuine and significant danger.   The future victim is dismissed as being merely "manipulative" and ends up in a suitcase, dead.

Emotional meanings and the way these are associated with language are different in every culture.  Thus, language can obscure, rather than reveal meanings, when one relates in a cross-cultural situation.

Shamanism, however, is the means by which one exits language.  One resolves one's emotional issues independently of language -- and then, the issues having been resolved, one re-enters language.

The difference in the initiate has to do with the degree to which one can now experience oneself as a whole, rather than as fractured parts.  These are differences concerned with inner experience and have to do with the capacity to speak more confidently about one's inner experience. That this difference is not easy to relate in language is to do with the nature of language itself.  As Nietzsche says:

Ultimately, what does it mean to be ignoble?—Words are sound signals for ideas, but ideas are more or less firm image signs for sensations which return frequently and occur together, for groups of sensations. To understand each other, it is not yet sufficient that people use the same words; they must use the same words also for the same form of inner experiences; ultimately they must hold their experience in common with each other. That’s why human beings belonging to a single people understand each other better among themselves than associations of different peoples, even when they themselves use the same language; or rather, when human beings have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (climate, soil, danger, needs, work), then something arises out of that which “understands itself,” a people. In all souls, a similar number of frequently repeating experiences have won the upper hand over those which come more rarely; people understand each other on the basis of the former, quickly and with ever-increasing speed—the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation. On the basis of this rapid understanding, people bind with one another, closely and with ever-increasing closeness. The greater the danger, the greater the need quickly and easily to come to agreement over what needs to be done; not to misunderstand each other when in danger is what people simply cannot do without in their interactions. With every friendship or love affair people still make this test: nothing of that sort lasts as soon as people reach the point where, with the same words, one of the two feels, means, senses, wishes, or fears something different from the other one. (The fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”: that is the benevolent genius which so often prevents people of different sexes from over-hasty unions, to which their senses and hearts urge them—and not some Schopenhauerish “genius of the species”!—). Which groups of sensations within the soul wake up most rapidly, seize the word, give the order—that decides about the whole rank ordering of its values, that finally determines its tables of goods. The assessments of value in a man reveal something about the structure of his soul and where it looks for its conditions of life, its essential needs. Now, assume that need has always brought together only such people as could indicate with similar signs similar needs, similar experiences, then it would generally turn out that the easy ability to communicate need, that is, in the last analysis, familiarity with only average and common experiences, must have been the most powerful of all the forces which have so far determined things among human beings. People who are more similar and more ordinary were and always have been at an advantage; the more exceptional, more refined, rarer, and more difficult to understand easily remain isolated; in their isolation they are subject to accidents and rarely propagate themselves. People have to summon up huge counter-forces to cross this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile [advance into similarity], the further training of human beings into what’s similar, ordinary, average, herd-like—into what’s common.

Whereas therapists tend to try to bring you in line with what is experienced by the rest of the herd, shamanism invites you to experience your subjectivity in non-linguistic ways.   This doesn't mean you lose your capacity to speak -- only that problems are resolved far away from the purview of the crowd.