Shamanism: Synchronization with the World (Maelinhon)

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
(с) Lao Tzu

Many years ago, when I was stupid and young, I met a female shaman. A real, authentic one. She didn’t have any ribbons, flowers, animal skins or shaman’s drums on her. She just stood at the station and smoked, waiting for her bus. We got into chatting.
A some point, the shamaness suddenly winced, looked up at the nearest tree, and muttered:
Oh, jackdaws. So Igor will come today, i have to buy a cake then… And not one but two birds. So he will be with friends!
She stomped the cigarette butt and left my reality, leaving me completely perplexed. Jackdaws… Igor? What?
And now, almost 20 years after that episode, I occasionally catch myself muttering – Oh, a balloon flew by. Perhaps, I’ll stay home tomorrow! 😀
Now I am just as stupid, but not so young anymore, and can call that incident a real eye-opener, which was revealed to me much later. Who shaman is, how shaman thinks, how he sees, what he feels, what he works with… This information is nowhere to be found, because people persistently take ethnography for shamanism and costumed actors for shamans.
Shamanism – isn’t about drums, ribbons and other museum crap. What is it about then? Have you ever wondered what this technique is and why it belongs to a certain separate species? Stupid humor section – all those “ individual” names, by the way. Magician, witch, herbalist… Or here it’s not a witch, but sorceress. And this one – is a fairy. Shaman, witch, sorceress, magician. You open Google and drown in the mess of meaningless terms, those rational people use to describe irrational things. Humans in the same way look for who are shamans, how to become one, shamanism for dummies, shamanic drums, shamanic disease, but in response they get ethnography at best, schizoterics – at worst.

Shamanism – is not about drums

Who is a shaman and how to become one? 🙂 Is it required to go to Yakutia and learn throat singing? I’m telling you – it’s not necessary. What you need to do is to think about how you affect the world in general and what you are to it.

People have an interesting stereotype that there is the world, there are some people in it, and there is Me. I.e., me – a certain separate, completely atomized thing, that only occasionally comes into contact with others. And then runs back into its hole and from there, sits, watching “the world”. Many people write to me, saying ‘I do not feel myself a part of the world, of society, I am always apart’! And when something bad happens or changes occur, 95% of people start to howl with feathery voices ‘What did I do? Why i deserve to be punished?! Why are you bothering me? Can’t you just leave me alone?!’ And this phrases about ‘bothering’ and ‘leave me alone’ are an ideal indicator of the complete desynchronization with the world and huge problems with perception for most people.. There is the world, and there is me, and the world is disturbing me, violating my boundaries. This is a state opposite to the life of a shaman. It is also a state of a kind of anti-Dao.
You see, the world, the universe – is a combination of elements and its dynamics. And if you move away from the contemplating your life, even by 10 centimeters and do not look point-blank, you will clearly see the whole world is one and the same structure. Objects in it have a WILL, but there are no BOUNDARIES between them. There are no walls between nature, people, animals, sky, seas; from a metaphysical point of view, it is all one big ball filled with a mixture of 12 components. That is, you (or me, or the cat in the yard) are like a thin plastic bag with water, which is loosely tied and floating in the thickness of the same water. There is water around and water inside, it is poured inside and overflows from inside, mixes with the water of other bags, but the bag is piously sure that there is the World, and here is Him, the bag. And he’s fed up with worlds’ nonsense, which doesn’t allow him live peacefully!

But he himself can rob, kill, scam and cheat, shit on the world, and he will not be punished for it! He’s a well-thought-out bag, he’s thought of everything, his walls’re strong. The world can’t get into his little baggy essence and do something in return. But not. You spat into the water and the next wave poured that spit back into your fragile boundaries.

It is quite funny to watch, because from the outside you can clearly see how a person with all his limbs is trying to move away and abstract from what he is made of. That’s why he perceives all events with surprise. And he considers other bags with water to be completely detached from him, not connected to him in any way, and so, why are they ‘getting on my way’? But both of you a cut from the same cloth. It flows from the river to people, from people to air, from air to animals, and in a circles, and constantly. The Elements are ONE structure, it’s a puree soup. Everything that distinguishes people from trees – are consciousness and reflexivity, and even that, is not inherent by all of them.
Can you imagine this? If you look closely, you will clearly see that every action you take, creates a resonance that hits you back. Therefore, if you hurt someone, the whole world is ALSO hurt by it, including you. Dirty water is in each bag now.

So: a Shaman is a person who has synchronized with the world and stopped isolating himself from it.
The Shaman has overcome this imaginary barrier in his head and realized that he is as much a part of the world as any other segment of it. That there is no boundary between him and his neighbor or the forest, because all are filled with the same things and live in the same environment that flows over everyone’s insides. The shaman is part of the world and consists of the elements, the deer in the forest are part of the world, other humans and non-humans are also part of it.
We – are all one. This is the basic core of shamanism. As Lao Tzu said: «Man follows Earth, Earth follows Sky, Sky follows Tao, and Tao follows nature». Any of your actions return to you, therefore, everything that happens to you is the result of your actions or non-actions. The world simply responded to your requests or steps, because you are a part of it. And the one, whose actions are greater, tips the scale in his favor.
Therefore, when a shaman does something, he doesn’t come out of the mink ‘to perform a shamanistic ritual and run home’, he influences the world through himself. He creates a wave, oscillations, vibration if you like, which goes from his body further into the world, through all other structures. And changes something there.
The main thing about the shaman is that he works with his body, through it. Not with rituals, drums, jaw harps, herbs, oracle cards and other crutches for the ezo-surdo-tiflo audience. He may be able to do all that, but strictly not necessarily. A real shaman can tap something on the table with the palm of his hand or sing into a glass of water and it will work, because all drums, candles and other paraphernalia are just tools, not the essence. Yes, the culture of working with shamanic drums is a cool thing, interesting, bright. But to take shamanic drums or costumes as a basis for the work of this practice is like taking a pencil as a key basis for the work of an artist. Like, you can not do it without a pencil! While an artist can draw with a pen, charcoal, Photoshop, and generally make installations out of grass and paper. The essence of an artist are knowledge and practice, he KNOWS how to do it, but you still fuss around with a pencil….

Shamanism in practice

I hate the word ‘vibration’, it’s discredited by schizoterics a little more than fully (low vibration, high vibration – all of this is only good for vibrators), but I’ll have to use it today.

How does the shaman work? There’s the water inside the shaman. And the wood. And there’s the air. And a bunch of other things he feels in himself and sees around him. Imagine that you need to deliver your thought or message to a person who is very far away. For example, you want to help him to heal or send him strength.
What does the shaman do? He goes to the river and starts, in fact, creating vibrations that go through the water. How – it’s up to him. Will he sing with his voice, play the drums or play a song on a speaker… The water in front of him gets saturated with his message, because it interacts with the water inside the shaman. The river carries away this resonance, mixes with other water (for example, from the rain), and this message quickly migrates around the world, because water is everywhere. A day later, a person, at the other side of Terra, will open a tap, pour water into a glass and drink the resonance sent to him, letting it into his inner water.

It’s a bit exaggerated for better understanding, but that’s how shamanism works. A master can knock it on wood, sing it into the air, breathe it into a dream, draw it with runes… Any way he prefers. As long as the right resonance hits the right section of the elements and floats into the Big World to the addressee or addressees. A shaman is the one who can create and send such resonance, not a man in skin of animals, with horns on his hat. Those are ethnography and folklore, don’t get confused.
There’s nothing to talk about with schizoterics. I’ve heard wonderful verdicts along the lines: ‘because he has Mercury in the sign of the m*ron, he is destined to be a shaman!’. Or that man was born in Tyva or Colombia, THEREFORE he is predisposed to shamanism. The shamanism – is the self-evolution and self-discovery, deep awareness in relation to yourself and the world, not some embedded data that can be peeked at. Harry can become a shaman, George can become a herbalist, and Maria can not become anyone, because that is how I see it. It all lies inside a person, it is his self-painstaking work. How clearly can he hear the world, and himself in it?

Shaman’s Walk

The icing on the cake of today’s topic 🙂
Here we’ve looked how the shaman sends messages to the world, influencing it. But as well, the shaman catches “ the vibes” from the world in his direction. This is quite logical. If the world – is one structure, then the answers to your requests will also be given by parts of the world. Crows, branches, clouds, random phrases of passers-by, inscriptions, dreams… Anything. Whatever was closest to you, that’s what the world beaconed. As it was said in the old joke, ‘if you left home, and saw writing on the wall, saying, “you’re an idiot”, then it was definitely intended for you’. Anything that is ‘not meant for you’ will not be noticed by you at all, and if you notice and light it up, without doubt, it is for you 🙂The principle ‘if you got an illusion about something, may be is not only illusion’ works here at its maximum, 200%, because that’s how the world communicates with its plastic bags. It has no other ways.
And here we come to the question of self-trust and irrational part belief, because at this point most of those who could join shamanism and mystical practices, fall off, in general. They see a green car, e.g.. Boom, flare, flashback: they got an omen to go for a walk now and if they ‘follow the white rabbit’, they will find something interesting there. But they take an axe and start chopping this current reality branch with rational counterarguments. What if it’s not a sign, but my imagination? And anyway, I was going to do the laundry, why should I go for a walk… And your imagination, my dear friend, what is it then? Isn’t it also a part of the world? There’s the world as a structure, but your imagination is a separate unit and does not connect to it?
It’s like to turn on the handbrake and step on the gas. You set an irrational process in motion and in the same way, you’re trying to investigate it rationally (write it down, study, explore, analyze it), selfsame other people’ve done before.

The epigraph’ve started with a quote of Lao but another amusing chinese, Zhuang Zhou, also wrote about this process very beautifully: ‘Go with the flow of things, and you will find yourself at one with the mysterious unity of the Universe’. Water, following its path, always reaches the ocean without fighting obstacles. Don’t look for a path. Follow what opens up in front of your eyes. A very common ‘shamanic’ message in Chinese philosophy implies next ideas: do not make efforts, do not try to think intensively about the goal, do not analyze reality… It’s about to relax and trust the space: naturalness does not need intense brainstorm.
A shamanic walk – is when you feel a message from space, put on shoes and run for the Chiron star 🙂. You don’t think about where to go or what you need to do, you just walk. Turning your brain off. On the way you pick up, e.g. an oak leaf and a beautiful stone, and keep on walking. After 1.5 kilometers you see a ‘backlit’ pillar in the middle of nowhere and leave the rock and the leaf there. Then you find a bag of money or something else behind it.

These ‘spatial quests’, following your intuition and ‘illuminated’ objects without thinking, – are basic shamanic practice. If you remember, that a leaf is a part of the world, then, by moving it a kilometer away, you change SOMETHING in the world. It may to seem intangible and very subtle, but you do change things.

It is not necessary to call all of this a shamanism. For example, in some slavic languages, an etymological origin of the word ‘witch’ means ‘to know’, ‘someone who knows’. Witch, sorcerer. Woman/man, from nowhere KNOWS where to go, what to sing, and what herbs to tie in a knot to make it rain. From the outside, it looks like some kind of knowledge, although it is pure intuition and turning off rationality. The world itself told them what to do.

In my favorite book, ‘Kafka on the Shore’ by Murakami, the second storyline and the entire ending is based on this concept. Where half-mad but kind old man Nakata goes on a shamanic trip in real time to help reunite separated lovers. He just goes along the way, doing all sorts of weird things, turning over rocks, talking to cats and summoning odd rainstorms, while in another part of the country, tumultuous events happen as reactions to his activity. And because Nakata is in sync with the world, along the way everything makes way for him, obstacles disappear, right people amerege to help him, etc.
This is – a true shamanism.
What kind of magic ( influence the world) can we talk about if the majority of people hear neither themselves nor the world? When a person (or a non-person) is goal-oriented and also open to the world, reality itself starts to help him and tell him where to go and what to do. People with money and opportunities appear right out of the air, roads open, doors fall and reality itself starts to get involved in this game. It’s an awesome feeling that it’s as if someone has heard you and is responding to your questions, that you’re not alone anymore.

Shamanic Disease

Shamanic disease is a separate segment of searches and scary stories on the Internet 🙂. How ‘fake shamans’ die in agony, how they are tested by some spirits (why?), etc. By the way, in the mentioned book ‘Kafka on the Shore’, Nakata also got permanently and strangely ill as a child; after he became different (although it’s served in the book under a slightly different sauce).
Everything is much easier, in fact. In order to synchronize with the world and start feeling a part of it, you need to overcome a lot of natural patterns and settings inside yourself. Especially the ones, which were set down by parents. To break your psyche in a such way, which will allow you to have root-rights of your brain, emotions and sensations.
And when a person takes this path, his physical body turns on alarm ‘Code Red’, because the future shaman, in fact, gets into the basic settings of the body. He starts to turn off the templates, activate the tumblers and options he needs in order to stop separating himself from the Universe with imaginary walls. The body reacts with the fiercest psychosomatics, to make the fool immediately stop interfering with the control panel and continue decomposing in his hole. The body temperature rises, body aches, vomiting begins, glitches starts… Simply put, psychosomatic Nightmare level and from all systems of the body and at the same time. Not everyone can take it.
We experience something similar, but gently and not everything at once, when we going through the cycle of planetary upayas in the Jyotish system. Because working through the elements in the body and switching them to normal work is the same thing a shaman does, but from a slightly different angle and gradually. So, if you want to work with this sphere, then preliminary upayas remove the shamanic disease completely.

Are there any ‘ancestral spirits’ involved in this process of beating babies? I doubt very much these spirits exist in reality at all; especially since the mechanism of this disease is quite clear and well studied. But spirits of ancestors – sounds beautiful and mysterious, so tourists are thrilled with it and continue to believe such thing exist.🙂 🙂

Mylene Maelinhon (c) Material from the Marginal Metaphysics Project.

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