I think we tend to err, as a society, and indeed in the humanities, when we view the fundamental relationships of life as being inter-personal. It’s just a wrong paradigm.
The fundamental relationship in life, that has to be right above all, is the intra-personal one.
Think about what a paradigm that centralizes the inter-personal demands. You have to calibrate yourself with others. But the only way to do this is either to be in a mode of complete acquiescence with others (a mode of complete conformity) or to keep changing one’s calibration, from one situation to the next (which is to continue to foot the bill, in every instance, for one’s differences). The inter-personal paradigm, therefore favors conformity as the least energy consuming adaptation. If you do not learn it early, eventually you will be worn down to the point of accepting conformity as the way to reduce ongoing expenditure over time.
By contrast there is the model of the intra-personal. The assumption that this is a retreat or an easy resort can be only made by those who have not tried it. It is actually the most difficult option in the sense of calibrating oneself to oneself. Naïve people would suggest this relation is a mode of narcissism, but that is because they haven’t tried it. They don’t know that there is a doing self and an observing self and that the observing self is often harshly critical of the doing self. So it is very difficult to be alone with oneself and listen to the antagonism or the reprimands. It does take a lot of energy and will and a determination to reach a calibration.
Actually, I think that is what shamanic initiation is about – getting the right calibration with oneself, so that no matter what might happen on the outside, or to the world in general, this fundamental calibration is right.
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