a new analogy
while on the way to a diagram and explanation, which i still mean to offer, i happened on an analogy which might simply convey the distinction i’m considering. it goes like this:
the Great Mass of People subsist on The American Diet. the diet amounts to a set of definitions of what food is and what health is. the diet produces a host of illnesses which are accepted as normal and addressed medically. some people have what we might call extreme allergic reactions to this diet which prove chronic and medically unmanageable. for these people, the only way to health is a new diet, amounting to a redefinition of food and health.
it is this redefinition of ‘food’ and ‘health’ (or in Phildickian terms, ‘real’ and ‘human’) that i’m calling ‘radical difference’ between ‘normal’ and ’shamanic’ empathy. the fundamental terms (hence ‘radical) have been redefined. the chronically ill person isn’t seeking a return to the normal diet with its definition of food and health. in terms of our discussion: the normal person dining on the Great American Diet isn’t seeking universal empathy, even if they define their diet as such.
that definition of the norm as the universal is a myth (is, in fact, what Campbell referred to as the Great Bronze Age Myth of social norms as forms orienting toward the transcendent Absolute). the clearest example of this conflation of the normal for the absolute, to my mind, is Jefferson’s statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. An absolute value, though in actual fact, in Jefferson’s world, not all men were men.
this radical change in diet (that is, in the fundamental ideas of ‘food’ and ‘health’, or ‘real’ and ‘human’) can be seen in the phenomenon of religious revivals (and also political revolutions). the revivalist (or shaman) seeks to make conventional values real. even though the revivalist and the conventional congregationalist point toward the same ideals (the Gospel stories, for example), the revivalist attempts to embody those values in an immediate way that the conventional congregationalist does not.
to return to the diet metaphor, both the society of the Great American Diet and the Health Food Nut agree on the importance of proper nutrition and health, their definitions of these are radically different. So that is sum is what i’ve been trying to point out: the depth of empathy you’re aiming at is not the norm, even if both are described as ‘empathy.’
i have some faith that i’ll continue to improve at articulating this distinction, so if it still hasn’t come across, it might at some point in the future.
May 9th, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Jones: It sounds to me like you’re saying that: (1) the shaman/recovering-emotionally-dissociated-individual is aiming for comprehensive empathy, while (2) people who were never emotionally disconnected, while perhaps capable of much empathy, probably accept whatever blind spots exist in the comprehensiveness of their empathy without feeling they need to be addressed, or more probably may not even realize those blind spots exist. Further, (3) those untended blind spots provide a hiding place for unhealthy elements of the national psyche.
Is that a correct restatement of the distinction you’re drawing?
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May 10th, 2010 at 1:54 am
that’s the gist of it, yes. your thoughts?
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May 10th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Sure, I’d agree with that.
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May 10th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
My picture of the shamanic function in society is:
0. Everything is working pretty much okay. No one has time to think about God and the Soul and stuff all day because they all have day jobs. But everyone is fairly happy and things are working okay, so it’s still workable even though people have some empathy gaps, generally toward outsiders or people who question the benevolent authority of their perfect system.
1. Something bad happens.
2. Because of this something bad, the tribe is disturbed. Maybe there’s a war, or a drought. Let’s say there’s a drought, so many of the crops die, so there’s not enough food, so people are at each other’s throats.
3. Some parents will die. Some parents will get drunk and impotently take their frustration out on their kids. Those kids will be traumatized.
4. Most of the traumatized kids will grow up disfunctional. Some will commit suicide. Some won’t know to take sufficient precautions, and they’ll be picked off by predators.
5. A few of the traumatized kids might figure out how to repair their psyche. Maybe they’ll be lucky and have an older shaman to model how it works.
6. The most successful self-repair-ers will tend to twine their path of self-repair with the ’something bad’ issue that hurt the tribe in the first place. Like for instance if things got bad when the drought caused the taro crop to die out, the apprentice shaman might grow a single taro plant, taking great care to bring it back to health, as a physical act that maps to their own psychic self-repair.
7. Ideally, at least one of the apprentice shaman will graduate to shaman, by attaining psychic self-repair in a way linked to the tribal wound. So let’s say our apprentice shaman with the single taro plant figures out that the taro farming problem is all about lack of irrigation, so they invent a new irrigation system that functions even in a drought. They could liken water to positive emotional attention, so at the same time they’re figuring out how to heal the tribal wound of recurring drought and food shortage, they’re finding a way to get the emotional connection they need with other people by reciprocating with the same attention their friends need.
8. So nature addresses large social problems by creating potential shaman who can only graduate to full shaman when they figure out how to twine their personal psychic wounds to the tribal wounds, and repair both.
9. Once the new irrigation system is working, the shamanic function is fulfilled. With no more taro shortages, the irritant that traumatized those children is removed. The shaman is like a white blood cell, generated to repair a wound. It’s not fair to all the traumatized children who aren’t lucky enough to stumble into finding an older shaman to model for them. It’s not fair to the shaman, who still has to carry a heavier burden of trauma than most of her tribe-mates. But once a child’s psyche is so badly torn, I suspect their *only* choice is to follow the shaman’s path.
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May 10th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
The shaman is a white blood cell created to think outside the box of current tribal assumptions, which are demonstrably inadequate to address the trauma-inflicting bad thing.
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May 10th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
interesting. i’m in general agreement with that, though i think the way in which the boundary of the tribe is determined is of great importance. that is: as i see history, a big part of the ‘bad thing’ that has happened to local culture is their subsumation into imperial systems. the culture that would become imperial Rome, for instance, was created by the near constant warring of the Roman city-state, which had the effect of destroying the agricultural lifestyle of the Roman people. as the farmers were called away again and again to serve in the army, their farms failed and were subsequently gobbled up by the rich and powerful senators who were starting the wars to begin with. the cost of the growth of the imperial power structure was functioning local culture. this loss inflicted a deep psychic wound on people. the same thing is still happening around the few margins left to the global empire. for example, the inhabitants of the island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, were recently forcibly displaced so that their home could become an airbase for wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.
my point being that the realization of the shamanic function requires more than the merging of the personal psychic wound with the tribal, as the ‘tribe’ in effect no longer exists. the level of mass tribe that we are relentlessly encouraged to live at is, i suggest, too great. it seems to me that the shamanic function requires a recreation of tribal context in order to properly succeed. or as the Preacher at Arrakeen said: The Fremen must return to their genius at forming human communities.
seems to me that trying to play the shamanic (or artist, singer, etc) role to the mass culture is not only extremely perilous, but unnecessarily restrictive. small scale human communities allow for the realization of this function throughout the whole tribe, really; whereas mass culture creates a mass audience living vicariously through the few shamanic stars; which has the effect of disempowering the great many and over-empowering the select few.
this plugs back into the discussion we’ve been having, but i’m going to leave it there for now. let me know what you think.
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May 10th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
I take your point about ‘the tribe’ today necessarily means the national or global tribe. I agree that enforced slavery/serfdom/wage-slavery is a communal wound.
It sounds to me like you’re saying that the global tribe is too vast for an individual shaman to deal with, so the ideal solution is for people to reconnect to smaller communities (like in ye olden days, when you knew literally everyone in your community), in which the shaman can fuction properly.
- Maybe you’re right
- I’m worried that if you’re right, we’re screwed, because we’re unlikely to convince people to do that.
- If that’s the best path, and we (or a League of Extraordinary Shaman) manage to convince people to live more harmoniously, isn’t that still the shamanic function working on a global scale? (I agree that the way people live more and more, connected maybe to internet tribes but not knowing their neighbor’s name, seems an unhealthy trend.)
- I do think there are plenty of roles for shaman to do good on the local community level, like psychotherapists and priests and other healers, without society needing to be restructured.
So I’d ask:
1. Is global culture necessarily less desirable than local culture? Would you encourage people to throw away their albums by Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and Coldplay and go in search of local bands instead? Isn’t it desirable for people to have access to the most potent shamanic work in the world, even when it’s not local?
2. Is it really necessary to change the way people live for shaman to function in the local community? What about therapists or non-molesty priests, or popular local artists?
3. Is becoming a famous singer/author/director the only way to shamanically address the global psychic trauma? What about all the little wikipedia edits, for instance, that add up to hold the line of fact against the onslaught of bullshit?
4. What strategies can you think of to convince people to dramatically change the way they live into more localized communities?
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May 10th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
1. if you mean global culture without local culture, then i’d say yes, it is less desirable. or, in astrological terms, such mass culture is a feature of the passing age, whereas networked local culture is a feature of the coming age. so it’s not so much less or more desirable, but less or more appropriate to the time. if that’s the case, then there’s no need to convince people of this need. the idea is ‘in the air.’ it’ll be arrived at independently in many place by many people. i think that’s simply the case. at least that’s the movement i resonate with and so observe.
as to you final question, i think work is most potent when it’s participatory, or inspires participation. when it enforces the split between author and audience i think the real potency (as a shamanic or vivifying act) is necessarily diminished. certainly the mass culture serves, oceanically, to spread influences around. thing is: for those influences to really develop, to fulfill their vivifying potency, they must be taken as influences and not just as entertainment.
2. i’d say such functioning occurs, but is less than optimal. better to have that than nothing. better to have functioning local community than that.
3. well, i’d see some value in those things though i don’t think they really qualify as shamanic. it’s a tricky thing to really draw lines around.
4. i don’t think it’s a matter of convincing people. i think the idea is already arriving. the issue, as i see it, is becoming a facilitator of the idea. that’s what i view SONG (the church of the human endeavor) as. and again, i don’t see that as a way of convincing anyone they need to behave similarly, but rather satisfying a need (within myself and locally) and thereby providing a model for other people (elsewhere) who experience a similar need.
thanks for asking.
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May 10th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
I hear that you place value on small local communities, and your current focus is on the shamanic work to be done on that level. I hear you intuit that mass culture is on the wane, to be replaced by networked local culture.
I agree there is great value in person-to-person, participatory shaman’s work. I agree it’s possible for the harder division between some creators and their audiences to lessen the creator’s potency. I know it can be frustrating that only a fraction of a percent of shaman can ever reach a mass audience, especially when society basically presents that as the only valid measure of shamanic success. However, I am also a great fan of stuff written essentially by one guy with no audience participation: the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Dune, Evangelion, Godel, Escher, Bach, the Glass Bead Game, The Planiverse — I guess most of my faves. Ergo, it would be pretty hard to convince me that ivory tower shaman are de facto less potent. I guess you could say, as Tolkien came to believe, that the humanity in his work came from his non-ivory-tower, participatory interactions with his students, family and neighbors. Anyway I’ve been working on an epic 5-book series for 11 years now (based on all this stuff about empathy and myth), and my fantasies are definitely along the lines of J.K. Rowling. So I’ve kind of bet the farm on the Ivory Tower path. I enjoy the more-participatory interaction of playing live music, but I don’t think I’ll ever be more than competent at that. I want to give my life to something at which I have the potential to excel.
You write: “for those influences to really develop, to fulfill their vivifying potency, they must be taken as influences and not just as entertainment.” I have wondered about that point myself. It seems to me that people generally take stories & ritual for catharsis and entertainment. But when people have the need and willingness and skill to draw patterns from story to weave into the pattern of their own psyche, they turn to the same great stories that best fulfill those other needs. That seems to be the shamanic function, that psychic reweaving from the raw material of story (or nature). How do we teach “normal” people how to perform that basic shamanic transaction themselves? I kind of see that as my vocation.
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May 10th, 2010 at 8:50 pm
i’m not saying the ‘ivory tower shaman’ are less potent, but that the potency of any medicine is ultimately a function of the body responding to it. it’s not that the shaman is less potent, but that the unengaged audience is.
i need to think more on that last question.
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May 10th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Sure, I’d agree with that. So the kids find a numinous groove in Tolkien, he’s doing his job. Okay, thanks for clarifying.
Thinking further on the last question, it’s kind of ‘How do you teach people to learn?” Or more precisely, ‘How do you teach people to grok?’
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May 11th, 2010 at 10:06 am
first step, i guess, is to afflict them with some need. as you describe above, a condition of need is the precursor to the whole process. as one old saying puts it: need facilitates fulfillment. i have a post about this from not too long ago… one of the few cross-posted at Hamlet’s Nation.
second step, i’m guessing, is to encourage them to release what they already know… the whole empty cup thing.
in sum, i imagine an alternating process of emptying and filling, breaking down and reforming. in essence, alchemy. this is the formula (problem-reaction-solution) that lots of conspiracy theorists regard the shadowy elites as using to guide the world to their desired end.
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May 11th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
If only we could trigger some kind of worldwide banking crisis.
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May 11th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
ha. you know, the worldwide banking crisis was part of my semi-written undead founding father force, started back in 04. the tea party movement, too. feeling kind of dumb for not trusting that inspiration. belief without action isn’t belief.
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May 11th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
It’s still a great idea. I like the hints of your mythology that peek through your blog and your original jones website: the founding fathers, UFOs, the death and rebirth of the alien Horus. I hope you do something with all that stuff someday. I don’t feel at all like the moment has passed; rather it’s still ramping up… the tea party movement is still waiting for someone to give them a mythological underpinning, and explain to them who they are. Maybe it’s time to mix some action into that belief stew.
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jones reply on May 11th, 2010 3:21 pm:
thanks for saying so. maybe so. it definitely has gained in clarity and depth over the years. another thing: you and bill have figured into the story, though like myself in fictionalized form. this conversation we’ve had lately has added an amusing (to my mind) twist to that.
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Anonymouse reply on May 11th, 2010 4:07 pm:
Clearly I’m Nutt, goddess of the sky.
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jones reply on May 12th, 2010 12:33 am:
nope. you’re in large part yourself, as seen through the lens of my mythology.
May 11th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
You released a music CD recently and said something about selling enough CDs at shows that maybe you won’t have to work a day job anymore. Where are your musical ambitions these days?
I long fantasized about becoming a professional musician and getting songs on the radio and for people to treasure my albums like Beatles albums, but like I said, (1) that’s just not what I excel at, and there are so many fantastically talented people competing for the same prize, and (2) the music industry seems to be overly dominated by corporate interests at the moment, so a good-looking teenager has a better chance of getting on the radio than a brilliant-but-grizzled songwriter. Many of the established artists I like say they could never get a contract today.
I still play guitar like a slap-bass, taking my musical cues from Ani Difranco and Michael Hedges (and Kaki King and Preston Reed). The guitar is more and more a percussion instrument. I still lean towards sus2, sus4 and open9 chords a la the Police. I’m less harmonically complicated and more funkish, dropping 16ths here and there till it’s danceable. I’d love to play out with a drummer and maybe bass someday, and will definitely release a CD someday, but at this point it’s for sure a hobby only.
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jones reply on May 12th, 2010 12:50 am:
did i say that? ha. well, no, still working freelance. i sold maybe 50 discs, though i never pushed them. the musical endeavor got really tangled up in my relationship. i did have two songs downloaded about 100,000 times each by people in China. no idea how that started or why, but it was neat to find one of my songs included in some chinese engineer’s list of his 100 favorite songs at the moment. all of those downloads were free.
i think there’s lots of potential room on the radio today… or rather, lots of room on the various streams of media. i don’t, at this point, feel motivated to try to craft some persona. i really enjoy facilitating groups, rather than performing. it has most all the aspects of performance plus a tremendous return of energy; and i feel inspired and instructed observing other people opening. whereas, on the other hand, it feels kind of weird to me to emote in front of a bunch of people sitting their looking at me. one of the primary reasons i live here in eugene is because people here play music at parties. a friend of mine hosts a music night twice a week, usually, and it’s in those situations (and similar) that i find the most fulfillment. accordingly, i experience peaks in my own playing.
the only downside is that i still feel a great deal of anxiety, for no good reason. it’s like i need a half hour of yoga beforehand and a hot tub after. i came across this passage in the introduction to Thomas Cleary’s taoist i ching translation. it’s from an ancient Chinese book called the Book of Balance and Harmony. i experience music in these terms, though i only very imperfectly fulfill them:
“To successfully comprehend and deal with changes, it is best to know the times; to know the times, it is best to understand principles; to understand principles, it is best to be open and tranquil.”
so, i really need to work on the ‘open and tranquil’ part.
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May 12th, 2010 at 11:21 am
I hear you. Congrats on your popularity in China.
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