EAT PRAY LOVE as shamanismLITE

I read recently how Bataille, having written INNER EXPERIENCE then recoils in horror: not once, but  twice.

The first is that it is misunderstood by philosophers.  I did something philosophers never do (he said) and wrote in a way that lacked rigour.   

The second is that muddle-headed people, whom he considered superficial to the extreme, hailed him as a new mystic.

He states:  I wrote in a way that just let go of everything, like I was slipping off to sleep.   (Bataille's shamanism involves what he calls as a loss of consciousness.)   As a result, the sleepy-minded and the mystics embraced me as one of them.   I'm not like them at all, but I inadvertently opened myself to that identification.

EAT, PRAY, LOVE is the book that the glib mystics of Bataille's time thought that he had written.   Just slip off your rock wherever you happen to be perched and the universe will take care of you :

http://youtu.be/mjay5vgIwt4?t=2m3s "If you could clear out all that space in your mind, you have a doorway.  And you know what the universe will do?  RUSH IN!!"

Well, that is the initiatory experience expressed in terms that will appeal to naive people.  Fall from the summit, lose your attachments to the things that bind, and the universe itself with patch you up, bestow you with its blessings and send you on your merry way.

At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for "balancing." " Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

A similar story of feminine ascapeeism is SHIRLEY VALENTINE (1989).  This narrative doesn't have a mystical aura but also addresses the crisis of femininity in women who have never taken up the practise of having serious thoughts.

Shirley's a middle-aged Liverpool housewife, who finds herself talking to the wall while she prepares her husband's chip'n'egg, wondering what happened to her life. She compares scenes in her current life with what she used to be like and feels she's stagnated and in a rut. But when her best friend wins an all-expenses-paid vacation to Greece for two, Shirley begins to see the world, and herself, in a different light.

Upper class bichon frise  meet your lower-middle class spaniel counterpart!

But it's not just their class status that sets them apart.  Nor is it even that one is a Yank and the other a Brit.   Rather, in the first instance, the Yankee engages in ShamanismLite.

Ideal for women who don't want to break into a sweat whilst partaking of their rite of passage, ShamanismLite everything and more than Chris Lilley singing LEARNING TO BE ME.




But let us return to the matter of Bataille and his superior writing.  There is rigor and depth there, but not in the use of philosophical or literary conventions and certain nothing like what people have made of initiatory rites in the approaches shown above. When they desire or expect an easy journey, that is all they'll see.

The question remains as to how to cope with the consequences of all of the inevitable misreadings that more complex shamanic writers always seem to attract.  The most delusional notion of mystics is their idea that the universe has any natural or reciprocal relationship to you.   It doesn't.