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I woke up this morning after dreaming heavily. Whilst in the borderlands between wakefulness and sleepiness, I suddenly caught sight of what seems to be the most elusive issue, but the central one relating to shamanism.  It is also the most difficult to express, since language, being a static self-contained philosophy in its own right, doesn’t really address it.  Also the ideologies of humanism and other systematizations of theory cannot bring it directly befoire our mind’s eye.

The issue is the nature of being.  Being is the faculty by which we interface with the sacred.   So long as being is passive — which is its normal state — being cannot be sensed, smelled or felt.     What can be detected whilst being is passive are expressions of knowledge and insight.  But these are not being.  They are almost the opposite of being, since they can deflect attention away from being, making the core of life seem to be about how much knowlege one had obtained, or whether one had developed insight into anything.

But shamanism is not about knowledge and insight.  These are just the epiphenomena of being.  Shamanism is about discovering being, which is elusive.

Here’s what Bataille discovered about being.  It can’t be discovered whilst one is sitting still.   It has to be shaken up.   Being only comes to light when it is volatile.   In its resting state, in its apathetic or complacent state, it seems like nonbeing.

So Bataille and Nietzsche — the core of the philosophies — is to make being volatile.   That way it can be known.   Awareness of being for the first time is shamanic awakening.

Language, of course, betrays this sense of things, because it is too facile.   Some people will say, “Well, of course, we know we have being, because it’s mentioned right there in the text.   In fact they will say this, but next minute they will imply that they are trying to develop their knowledge and insight about fixed things in a fixed world.  This is proof positive that they do not in fact understand about being.   At best, they must have  lost sight of it.

Static being erases itself.   All that one sees is the shell of knowledge it has left behind.   To be self-satisfied with one’s being, or to confuse being with one of its outer shells — social identity, personality or knowledge — is to lose sight of being.   Those things are either static or slow moving and do not encapsulate being.

The great philosophers of being — Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera — do not fit well into frameworks that maintain a static view of things:  academia is one of these.   I have often wondered what made me so uneasy about the ways that critics took Marechera apart with such facile motions.   It seems they erred in not understanding the core issue of his writing, which was to make being more apparent.   To cause being to appear in his writings, he had to stir it up and make it volatile.   But people took this volatility as a threat or a sign of pathology, rather than seeing that through allowing being to be tormented, a relationship with the sacred is established.

But no matter — the critics focused on the external form, the shell, whilst debating whether his writing had social or political utility.   Of course, postmodernists also do the same to Nietzsche, which is moronic.  The degree to which they don’t know anything about being can be measured precisely in the lengths they will go to preach morality to others.   Morality spells the closing off of being.   When the circle of experience becomes closed and one is cocksure about one’s knowledge and one’s place in the world, one begins moralizing.   Some people never stop moralizing after this point.   They’ve lost access to the sacred – maintained through the volatility of being — and this is their revenge on others.    To be static in one’s overcertainty about things is spiritual death.

But no matter.   A prematurely closed circle around one’s being means no more torment of one’s being.   One is what one is what one is.  The sacrilege only appears in a demand that others simply be “what they are” — which means they are obliged by me to remain just how they appear to me.   This is childish vengeance against the sacred — but it is not uncommon among academics.   They want things to be fixed by their piercing eyes.

You can tell they don’t know anything, because one’s obligation to the sacred is not to remain fixed, but to stay in a volatile state, so that one may communicate with it.   A really good shaman — which I am not — will also be able to impart in words some of the ecstasy of his interaction with the sacred to others.

The cost of being a good shaman is that one must allow one’s wound in one’s being to constantly be reopened.   One does not communicate with the sacred otherwise.   This sort of relationship with reality is what Bataille terms not “torment” but “torture”.   If one allows oneself to be tortured,  the relationship between being and the sacred becomes salient.   Ancient shamanism does not mince words about what shamanic initiation implies — the initiate’s organs are taken out, boiled and counted and then replaced.   This is a depiction of torture followed by spiritual rebirth.

A shamanic initiate is therefore not one who ought to be summarily dismissed with remarks about so-called pathological states, or by remarking on a lack of social utility or a failure of originality.    All of these issues could hardly be more beside the point.    Indeed, experiencing pathological states, not having any social function and falling short of all measure of originality may be the cost a shaman has to pay in order to gain access to the sacred.    To pay the cost no matter what one loses in the process is an act of courage that goes way beyond my present capabilities.   Marechera could do it.  But me, I am at the bottom of the ocean floor, happy for now if others mistake me for a shell.   When I do eventually move, I know it will feel like torture, so I wish to delay that process of regaining volatility.

I hope I’ve explained about the nature of shamanic being and the encounter with the sacred.   Passive beings can’t do it as they lose sight of the sacred in a non-volatile state, but the volatility of being is nothing short of torture and shamanic initiation is ritual torture or extreme violence that suddenly befalls someone, that cannot be fully resolved.  Those who don’t understand this tend to miscategorize shamanic writing to make it something they can more easily relate to.   They say very weird things in this vein, for example laying the charge that Bataille’s writing is “left fascism”.

They demand more political and social utility from the writing.   They moralize, or seem to be observing states that they take to be self-evidently pathological.   In most cases, they stay on the surface of being, unable to see down to the level of the sacred.  To understand being, they would have to risk their own beings, but they won’t allow themselves to experience any amount of torture, so they stay where they are, which allows them to grasp much less than what the writers have expressed.   They remain static and their very language betrays a resistance to knowledge of the sacred.   The fact of shamanic experience upsets them, just as being pierced through or watching as this happens to others is a horrifying prospect.  It’s easier to choose not to see what has just occurred.