I would really like your thoughts on this:

[sathor]

http://themindunleashed.org/2014/08/shaman-sees-mental-hospital.html

Would like to know your opinion on this Elenbarathi.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Oh wow - I have a lot of thoughts on this, and will definitely come back to share them, but I also have a lot of houseguests (who are just now starting to wake up) so will have to wait till they leave.

*hugs* Hope your day's going well!

Reply part 1

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Okay, back again! and hopefully with a couple of hours before my house-party returns to the house.

So, my thoughts on this article are manifold. The first is that the author of this piece apparently takes it for granted that people of "indigenous cultures" (viz. cultures not contaminated by Western concepts of science and rationality) are correct in thinking that 'the spirit realm' exists outside of the human mind.

"Another way to say this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that we in the West are not trained in how to deal or even taught to acknowledge the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. In fact, psychic abilities are denigrated. When energies from the spiritual world emerge in a Western psyche, that individual is completely unequipped to integrate them or even recognize what is happening. "

This author is apparently unaware of the existence of the Western esoteric traditions, of which the 'New Age' is the youngest and fluffiest. Plenty of us here in the West ARE trained in how to deal with psychic phenomena, and many believe implicitly in psychic abilities, the spirit world, etcetera. The difference is that we of the West also have the scientific method, with which to examine our beliefs and see what they're actually based on. "Reality is that which remains when you stop believing in it."

My shaman, Mikhail Duvan (AKA Grandfather Mischa) only spoke Ulchi, so to ask him a question, it had to be translated first into Russian, then into Ulchi by his student Nadyezhda... then, if he thought it worth answering, from Ulchi to Russian to English. One time, somebody tried to ask him a Jungian-type question about whether spirit-experiences came out of the collective unconscious, or what. Grandfather's answer was essentially that the Ulchi belief/language didn't have any such concept as 'the unconscious', nor make any distinction between varieties of experience. What people experience in dreams or in trance is considered just as 'real' as what they experience awake. Consider the implications of that!

I learned a lot from Grandfather and Nadyezhda, and one of the most important things was that in order to walk the Ulchi path, one has to be born to the Ulchi tribe. Nadyezhda was born to it, but being an ethnologist as well as a shamanka, she had to find a balance between her indigenous culture and her Western education, and I doubt that was easy for her.

Tribal cultures - including the Israelites and the ancient Greeks - are full of beliefs and traditions about the spirit-realm: ghosts, ghouls, angels, demons, succubi, trolls, fairies, dryads, devas, satyrs, werewolves, vampires, dybbuks, djinni... helpful, hostile or indifferent to humans, but believed to exist as beings in their own right, not just as projections of the human mind. The ancient Greek philosophers were the first people on record to question this belief, and to try to figure out ways to test it. As you'll recall, one of the main accusations against Socrates was that he said the Gods were not.

What I think is that the Gods are within us, and so are the fairies, demons, etcetera - that there is no 'spirit realm' outside of the human skull. We're predisposed to interpret our perceptions as externally-caused, and even knowing about cognitive biases won't make a person entirely free of them, so when unusual things happen, it's natural to think that something or someone made them happen, on purpose for a reason.

Continued...

Reply part 2

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Humans have weird cognitive/perceptual shit happening all the time. Our rational minds are the newest function of our cognitive/perceptual array, and the interface still has a lot of 'bugs' in it, even under relatively peaceful, stable circumstances (like life in a small tribal village.) New Agers like to glorify the spirit-healers of Africa while ignoring the ugly reality of exorcism which comes directly out of their belief-system.

"it is very recent in history that mad people were deemed mentally ill. Historically, people who acted crazy were thought to be possessed, either by evil spirits or by the gods. In the seventeenth century Europeans began to feel unsafe with the crazy people in their midst, who wandered the streets – not unlike the homeless people who wander around our cities – and began to confine them as a means of protection. Not surprisingly, such confinement made them even crazier and their jailors began chaining them to the walls of the Lunatic Asylums they put them in. They soon developed diseases, which only escalated their problems further until the French physician, Philippe Pinel, attended to their specifically medical conditions and observed that the way they were being treated was inhuman. Pinel argued they should instead be treated as sick people, in order to humanize their treatment. It was then, according to Foucault, that mad people were first deemed mentally ill."
Source

I don't think it's of any benefit to tell someone struggling with scary thoughts or out-of-control feelings that invisible beings are causing their thoughts or feelings - regardless of whether the beings are supposed to be healing spirits or demons intent on possession. (Note that a whole lot of spirit-believing Christians would say that Dr. Somé is an agent of Satan, and that what he calls 'healing spirits' ARE actually demons.)

On the other hand, people who already believe that spirits are doing things to them aren't going to just stop believing it because someone says so. Such people will believe that an authoritative person - a healer, a shaman - can make the bad spirits go away, and/or find out what the good spirits want. It doesn't matter whether the healer believes the spirits live inside or outside of peoples' brains, because the Sacred Rigamarole will be just as efficacious (or not) in either case.

Continued again...

Reply part 3

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"As part of the ritual to merge the mountain and human energy, those who are receiving the “mountain energy” are sent to a mountain area of their choice, where they pick up a stone that calls to them. They bring that stone back for the rest of the ritual and then keep it as a companion; some even carry it around with them."

... this cracked me up, because the very first Sacred Rigamarole I ever saw deployed was just such a stone-hunt, only (being in the city) the person in question was instructed to look for the special stone in the parking area of her apartment. It worked, too; the person had been freaking out, spinning herself up into superstitious hysteria, and stone-hunting calmed her right down, because it focused her attention on a simple task. That was in 1977, before I'd met my High Priestess, and I believed in All the Woo, but even so, I thought at the time that "go look for a rock" was just a polite way of saying "bitch, please, stop calling me with this craziness!" Which it almost certainly was, in truth, but nevertheless it did do the trick.

The placebo effect is an amazing phenomenon, and one might as well call it 'magick', because nobody knows how it actually works. As for mental illness, people frequently recover from it on their own without any treatment, especially if people are kind to them and they can spend a lot of time out in Nature. The mental hospitals of 1980 were pretty horrific, with their drugs and restraints and cold, clinical artificiality: that was the height of the 'Biopsychiatry' era, which swept away all that kinder, gentler, hippie-therapy stuff of the 60's. (Check out R.D. Laing & Anti-Psychopathology: The Myth of Mental Illness Redux for a non-drug view of the treatment of schizophrenia - fascinating comments, too.)

From what I have seen, I would say most forms of 'mental illness' have this in common: the perception that nobody understands, nobody cares, nobody can help. Thus, as Laing said, it's for the healer to listen attentively, to genuinely care, and to be confident in his/her intention to help. I think the assumptions behind both psychiatric medications and ancestor rituals are erroneous, and I don't believe either of them actually do any good beyond the placebo effect: "Doctor said this would help me." Further, I think that both do harm, in that they take agency away from the patient by framing the source of the trouble as something completely out of the patient's control: either 'chemical imbalance' or spooks.

Re: Reply part 3

[sathor.livejournal.com]

It all comes back to the whole thing about patient relationship with therapist/confidant, doesn't it? The drugs aren't all that effective...we both know that. Skimming your link seems to echo a similar way of looking at it, and I'm actually surprised that Freud seemed to have held the same kind of "anti-psychiatry" position.

I agree with you. At first I was a bit moderate on my opinion of the Shaman article - I mean, I am still a spiritualist to a degree - but the extent to which "magickal mental illness" is taken is a bit ridiculous, I feel. Ghost, spirits, psychic imbalance, mental/emotional symptoms of trauma...they're all about as intangible as one-another, and claiming beings from the other world are trying to communicate with us is about as scientifically meaningful as claiming that there's a chemical imbalance, but then adding that we can't actually measure what the average is (or what your levels are), so we're just going to experiment with some mind-altering drugs until we see an observable effect (and if we don't, we'll just keep upping the dose until we do, or you get horrifically ill.)

I never had a Sacred Rigamarole, I guess. Attempted self-initiations before, did plenty of ceremonial magick and meditation, but I'm not sure where it got me. Which reminds me, I must imagine that your opinion of magick and the occult at this point is 100% scientific, in that (since I'm pretty sure you do believe in magick) you see magick and ritual as a way of altering or affecting our nervous system or mental/emotional states...is that accurate?

Second reply

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Well... about 80% accurate, I'd say. "Any sufficiently advanced magick is indistinguishable from science", but what means sufficiently? The hallmark of the scientific method is reproduciblity: same procedure==>same results. But where we're dealing with human thought, emotion and impulse, reproducibility is strikingly low even where actual science is being practiced.

I'm not a scientist, I'm a witch. I'm very aware that "the plural of anecdote is not data", but I'm not that interested in data; in my Tradition, knowledge is passed through tales of personal experience. Modern medicine is still as much art as science - as you say, much of it depends on the doctor/patient relationship - and traditional healing is almost entirely art. I work hard to get more science into the mix, but what I'm actually practicing is magick, "the art of causing change to occur in accordance with Will."

I have no way of knowing what exactly is altered by certain practices. I can definitely think of some experiments I'd like to see the scientists try, but they'd be complicated, unprofitable, and probably inconclusive. I see magick as, first of all, a taking-on of personal responsibility: I am an agent of change in the world; "I am the Master of my fate, I am the Captain of my soul"; my Will has potency, thus it is for me to learn to use it correctly, in order to cause the change I desire. In other words, to change the world by my Will, I must first use my Will to change myself.

Ritual is a tool-set for facilitating such change. The Will may be directed by the rational mind, but the rational mind is not the only part of the mind/brain/body. Color, scent, music, dance, chanting, symbolic gestures, dramatic emotion-laden spectacle, all carry a lot more weight with the non-rational-mind parts of us.

Unfortunately, the non-rational parts of us tend to be superstitious barbarian children much prone to glomming on to Beliefs through inability to tell metaphor from literal fact. This is why indigenous cultures and magickal traditions tend to have useful ritual practices attached to illogical belief systems.

Did you read that story I posted the other day, Swept And Garnished? Poor Tella; if she'd come to me, I'd have given her a Sacred Rigamarole of epic proportions, to fill up her street with bright warrior angels and dancing faeries: magic crystals, special teas, sacred oils and candles, songs and chants and blessings; prayers of praise and thanksgiving, dances of joy.

The thing about the Sacred Rigamarole is that it actually does work, but not for the reasons the seeker supposes. Consider: if supernatural beings were objectively real, it would matter which one a person invoked, right? One couldn't just go with Lugh or Ra or the Archangel Michael, whichever best fit the seeker's existing belief-system. Aleister Crowley's Liber Astarte is intended as a reproducible magickal experiment to test the hypothesis that it doesn't matter which Deity one invokes, because any of them will answer.

Ritual doesn't have to be Sacred Rigamarole, of course. One can do the same personal rites with full understanding that they are symbolic, metaphoric, and only 'sacred' to one's own self - that the Gods won't be angry, nor the faeries offended, by anything one does or doesn't do. I do my Wheel of the Year rites because they're beautiful, useful and meaningful to me, not because I think the Moon is *really* the Goddess Arianhrod. She is still my Lady, and the Horned One is still my Lord, regardless of how symbolic and metaphorical my rational mind knows Them to be.