Calling the Shamans

An urgent task for our time: Imagining “Earthdream Mystery Schools” to guide us in recovering our lost intimacy with physical and psycho-spiritual Gaian landscapes.

The day of reckoning has come. In this disintegrating phase of our industrial society, we now see ourselves not as the splendor of creation, but as the most pernicious mode of earthly being. We are the termination, not the fulfillment of the earth process. If there were a parliament of creatures, its first decision might well be to vote the humans out of the community, too deadly a presence to tolerate any further. We are the affliction of the world, its demonic presence. We are the violation of the Earth’s most sacred aspects.

--Thomas Berry, “The Dream of the Earth,” 1988*

Despite his severe condemnation of humanity’s role on Earth, eco-philosopher Thomas Berry continued to have hope that the environmental and social crises of our time could be turned around, principally because, he said, we are not alone in our efforts to bring humanity and the Earth back into balance:

“In moments of confusion such as the present, we are not left simply to our own rational contrivances. We are supported by the ultimate powers of the universe as they make themselves present to us through the spontaneities within our own beings. We need to become sensitized to these spontaneities, not with a naïve simplicity, but with critical appreciation. This intimacy with our genetic endowment, and through this endowment with the larger cosmic process, is not primarily the role of the philosopher, priest, prophet or professor. It is the role of the shamanic personality, a type that is emerging once again in our society.”

Each of us, Berry says, needs to cultivate “the shamanic dimension of the psyche itself,” which emerges in all moments of “significant cultural creativity.”

What does Berry mean by evoking this shamanic aspect of the psyche? What does he mean by “the spontaneities of our own beings,” which are part of our “genetic endowment”?

All members of the Earth community are born with a “genetic coding,” Berry says, a survival instinct emerging from “that numinous source from which all things receive their being, their energy, and their inherent grandeur.”

Humans, unlike other species, also have a “cultural coding,” a set of cultural values and ways of thinking and doing that are taught to us from earliest childhood. We are genetically coded to use language; we are culturally coded to speak English or French or Indonesian. We are genetically coded to collaborate with other humans; we may be culturally coded to participate in certain in-groups and see others as antagonists.

What has happened in modern times, Berry says, is that “Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted.” We are living within what Berry called a “pathological” culture, which is suicidally destroying the very basis of our existence.

All culture is built on the deeper “spontaneities” that we access through both waking and sleeping dreams, Berry says. The industrial extractivist consumerist society that dominates the planet now is based on a “dangerous dream,” in which “our cultural coding has set itself deliberately against our genetic coding and the instinctive tendencies of our genetic endowment are systematically negated…. Our secular, rational, industrial society, with its amazing scientific insight and technological skills, has…broken the primary law of the universe…the law that every component member of the universe should be integral with every other member of the universe…. This is a bitter moment, not simply for the human, but for the Earth itself,” Berry concludes.

But it’s also a moment of possibility, as we humans are being pushed, by the necessities of sheer survival, to reimagine our relationship with each other and with our planet.

To do this, Berry says, we must “invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources….What is needed is not transcendence but ‘inscendence,’ not the brain but the gene.”

Whenever it’s necessary to coin a new word, we know that we are on some kind of cutting edge of thought. Berry’s neologism, “inscendence,” still doesn’t have a place in the dictionary, but it harkens back to the ancient shamanic and mystical practice of going within the psyche to explore the vast inner landscapes that open up there.

Dreaming is part of our “genetic coding.” We do it instinctively, the way we breathe—it does not have to be taught to us by culture. Shamans and mystics, however, learn to dream in more intentional, lucid ways, and to bring back messages and wisdom from those mysterious nonphysical realms that are, quantum science now teaches us, both within and outside of us—the universe and all its components being, as Berry knew, fundamentally integrated.

“The new cultural coding that we need must “emerge from the source of all such codings, from revelatory vision that comes to us in those special psychic moments, or conditions, that we describe as “’dream,’” he says, referring not just to nighttime dreams, but to the “intuitive, nonrational process that occurs when we awaken to the numinous powers ever present in the phenomenal world about us, powers that possess us in our high creative moments. Poets and artists continually invoke these spirit powers, which function less through words than through symbolic forms.”

In invoking “the shamanic dimension of our psyches,” Berry calls on each of us to reawaken our innate power to shift our culture so that it is in alignment with the naturally harmonious “dream of the Earth.”

Can we imagine a form of education that might help in this crucial shift from a destructive to a harmonious culture?

For many generations, education has been a handmaiden to the destructive dream of industrial and colonial “progress.” Shifting entrenched institutional frameworks is never easy, and many today foresee societal collapse as the only way that humanity will be wrenched away from the dominance of pathological Western culture.

I continue to imagine that if enough individuals awaken from the destructive dream of Western industrial science and begin to follow the melodies of integral harmony that are always sounding on the edges of our psyches, we may be able to shift our culture in a less violent way.

We could begin to move in this direction by…

·      Encouraging children’s natural curiosity about the natural world around them and cultivating their innate ability to commune with all aspects of the Earth community, from animals and plants to rocks, water and light;

·      Cheering children’s innate ability to “make believe,” and reawakening dormant faculties of imagination in people of all ages;

·      Understanding the imaginative forays of artists and writers as forms of shamanic inscendence, explorations into the psycho-spiritual inner landscapes that can provide unexpected guidance, especially in times when our cultural frameworks cannot be trusted;

·      Valuing day dreams that give us stirring, sunny visions for a thriving future, and night dreams that give us uncanny, starry explorations of deeper dimensions beyond time and space;

·      Reconceiving education as a process of initiation into a balanced human relationship with the Earth community and the greater cosmos of which we are an integral part.

In my memoir, What I Forgot…And Why I Remembered, I described how my own long education demanded that I submit to the dominant “cultural coding” of my society. It took me many years to extricate myself from that indoctrination and find my way back to “the spontaneities of my being” that I knew so intimately as a child: my innate ability to lose myself in communion with the natural world and my own imagination.

At the end of the memoir, I invoked the famous line by Rilke, as translated by Joanna Macy: “If the drink be bitter, turn yourself to wine.” For me, this mysterious process of transmutation happens when we tap, individually and collectively, into the deep creative dimensions of the psyche as it opens to Spirit, “each of us working alchemically to make her life an offering to the great collective artwork that is our human gift to Gaia.”

Education can facilitate this process, rather than hinder it. In future posts, I will look at some of the first sprouts of an emerging new form of education, which we might whimsically call “Earthdream Mystery Schools.”

I can hear Thomas Berry cheering us on, across the vast inner landscapes of time and space. Do you hear him too?

*All quotes from Thomas Berry are from “The Dream of the Earth: Our Way into the Future,” in The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, 1988; 194-215.

All photos by J. Browdy