BRAIN: STACKED, LOOPED & EXPERIENCE READY

As it turned out, Michael Winkelman’s book called “Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing,” (always pay attention to the long phrase after the colon in the titles of scholarly books) is as much about brains as about glamorous ethnic ceremonies that require one to drink nasty stuff in a jungle somewhere. It was exactly what I needed but I had to read it slowly with the radio turned off and a couple of dictionaries at hand. The writing is exact, packed with composite words, and sometimes uses invented words and phrases to describe phenomena we’ve only recently understood to exist.

Most of us know that the brain has evolved along with the rest of the body, so that the knob at the top of the spine is attached to the reptile brain, which still does all the things it used to do in reptiles, and then there is the mammal brain which adds a lot of things that a cat or dog would need to think about, and on top of that is the paleohuman brain which has developed a lot of little bells and whistles with strange names like amygdala and hippocampus. Then behind the forehead is the frontal lobe, which is the location of the social brain, all the little understandings that makes you (but not necessarily everyone) cooperative and reliable.

That uses up all the space inside your skull, so since then evolution has been about complexification and internal communication, messages and collaborations among all the parts. These loops are identified and we even know what some of them do -- mostly. Some are molecular reciprocities, like serotonin v. dopamine, and some are actual fibers, like the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. Taken together, a lot of this is called the limbic system, which is of crucial importance, especially if you are a shaman, since a lot of it is about managing the consciousness it produces and the busy brain and body-wide sensory equpment you are rarely conscious of, if ever.

The looping, sensory, and memory information is organized into modules which might be called algorithms or convictions or habitual practices. I take them to be skill sets like recognizing faces or knowing where you are in space. Real basics. This is called “evolutionary psychology” and is still arguable, though I’m pretty much persuaded that it exists in an “if then” sort of way. Between Google and Wikipedia, a person who cares can explore vast realms of research.

The main idea for what I’m doing is that modules developed in the brain throughout evolution and that the hunter-gatherer skills and assumptions are still dominant and used in our modern society, whether defined as the ag-based last ten thousand years or as the city-defined civilizations that have developed in the last few thousand years.

The theory in “Shamanism” is that it is a form of leadership and healing -- reassurance and courage, really -- that formed during hunter-gatherer times to keep the group together and surviving. Winkelman does not say, but I will propose, that modern life with electronic communication is more like hunter-gatherer society than like grain-based settlements. In fact, I would reflect that I’m a hunter-gatherer living in a agricultural community and that this leads to awareness of difference. Like, where’s my tribe? Online?

The next element that is often overlooked is brain development that is “experience ready,” that is, finished outside the womb by the social “womb” of the family home. The first three years are so basic that if things go seriously wrong with the brain’s learning, death can ensue. This is when babies learn intimacy, trust, and mirroring. In the next years, which we might describe as the primary years, it is motor skills, space exploration, and social outreach that shape the brain. Then in the elementary years the brain is still physically growing and shaping even such things as sexuality (tissue response to stimulation) and language skills like narration. The secondary school years involve abstractions, history, moral concepts, and irony. Physical maturation of brains continues into the twenties of grad school students and, of course, mental and emotional growth never stops. Brain cells replicate in response to use.

People can be seriously deformed by physical trauma as in the head injuries of the football game our country loves so much. We are only recently beginning to understand that. Then there is mental and emotional trauma. Clearly, until now, we have not even admitted that such a thing as shower room encounters can warp a growing brain. Just horseplay, we say.

I have in my possession a set of videos sent to me by an artist who wanted to tell the world, as part of his healing, what his history was. Born to a prostitute who was the daughter of her madam, he had been sold for sexual uses from infancy onward. In adolescence he ran away to remake himself as a cowboy. War and a head injury remade him again. Art communities, and particularly the Manhattan abstract-expressionist world, were tolerant of personalities like Jackson Pollock, who was a kind of archetype who allowed for maladjustment and fury. So my friend did well and became well-known, though he could never maintain a marriage.

What seems to have saved him was the underlying vitality of his “original equipment” and the skills he learned as a whore which included incredibly seductive sensitivity to other people. He’s dead now. I never knew him very well. Someday someone else who received those videotapes will release them but it won’t be me. Our prudish and clumsy culture would condemn the man and gut the value of his work, all the while being eager to attend movies about just such a story.

Much of brain theory -- to say nothing of our understanding of shamanism -- shades off into philosophy or even mathematics. But we can all grasp the idea that a society that punishes and excludes the atypical person is more, shall we say, “stream-lined,” but takes a huge loss in richness and awareness. Winkelman’s ideas go towards the humanities. The innate “modules” of rhythm -- like percussion or dance -- are the first bridge between the animal world of pre-humans and the modern city-dwelling person with class advantages. The skills of the hunter-gatherer don’t lead us to math and hard science so much as they do the painter, poet, and orchestra, exactly the skills we are dumping out of our schools. This needs to be rethought.

In the meantime, every individual with an “experience-ready” brain needs human intimacy and support. And yet we continue to find unwanted children abused and starved, war-damaged men half-conscious on park benches, hidden dead women. We have no “module” in our culture -- not even religion -- that effectively accepts and guides them. The cultures of the planet need a shamanic intervention. I need to buy a copy of this book so I can read it over and over.

"ELEMENTS OF SHAMANISM" by Nevill Drury

The fox I am chasing is the design of experiences (called liturgies) that will allow people to confirm or challenge deeply held premises about the world. This is a matter of consciousness and so we come to the stinking holes where the shamans live. It is not the shamans themselves who stink -- it is the debris decaying around the mouth of their caves, much of it brought to the shaman in homage as well as bribery for their own purposes.

I’m going to devote this post to a book review: “The Elements of Shamanism,” 1989, by Nevill Drury, an Australian writer and self-publisher. It’s a true “pocket” book, 5” by 7.5”, 102 pages of text, with everything in the “resources” section at American addresses. It’s a quick inventory of the experts, the assumptions, and the names of identified shamans. It’s meant to produce profit. Exploiting shamanism is an old game.

Drury’s first assumption is that there ARE gods and that shamans believe they are relating to them, perhaps with the help of animal spirits. Then, making a quick tour of early cultures that have defined shamans, he collects typical tropes and methods: the tree, the mountain, the blood, the bones, flight, curing of the sick, bringing back the dead, crystals. and drumming. He is much influenced by Michael Harner, who uses drums and gourd rattles. http://www.shamanism.org/index.php If you’re into the paraphernalia, he’s your man.

Of course, once shamanism got mixed into New Age ideas, mind-altering substances became essential, so there is a discussion mostly based on identifying on some of the substances. He doesn’t spend time on the possible medical action of these enzymes in the brain, etc., because he is concentrating on primary ethnic contexts. He mentions the use of disciplines (starvation, thirst, cold, extreme exertion, pain) but doesn’t elaborate.

In the late Nineties, when I was first on the internet (to let you know how long ago that was, my computer was a LISA), I participated in a Native American “bulletin board” which was often preoccupied with discrediting “plastic shamans.” Some of the most notorious are listed in this little book. Black Elk is generally not attacked, though scholars will note that he seems to have absorbed quite a lot of Christianity. (They say the same thing about Percy Bull Child, who is not mentioned, and probably it is true.) Brooke Medicine Eagle, Sun Bear, and Lynn Andrews were regularly berated as fakes. Carlos Castenada and Luisa Tiesh are in this book but didn’t much enter the online discussion.

Echoing the notorious wars over writers who were or were not Native American, people got locked into jealous rages over the fakery, representing themselves -- the speakers -- as Ones Who Really Know and therefore the more legitimate objects of the adulation and prosperity. The most angry were often the ones of least blood quantum. (Which is a “red herring” anyway, since tribal affiliation is based on parentage, not the genome which was not known when tribes were defined.) Since it never really went anywhere, most of them have left the issue by now. This book is outdated.

The study of shamanism continues and I consider it both worthy and valuable. The ways of people who are still hunter/gatherers have a lot to teach us. In my experience, those who are considered shamans by their own people are rarely contacted by outsiders. Why would the People want a lot of tourists wading around in their sacred waters? Many scurrying little wannabes and outright charlatans end up killing people in plastic-tarped sweat lodges. There are people on this reservation, though death keeps weeding them out, who charge enormous amounts of money for outsiders to participate in half-invented ceremonies for people seeking magic rather than real inner change. That’s simply not what interests me.

What I want to think about is the management of consciousness. Shamans come into it as “technicians of the sacred” who in themselves experience something that belongs to a category called “dissociation” by psychologists. It is a brain state that includes out-of-body experiences, hypnotism, visions and hallucinations, schizophrenia, seizures, moments of high emotion or danger. Some people can control dissociation and others cannot.

A theory is that children who are extremely abused, both in terms of beatings and sexual invasion, can enter this state as a form of self-protection. Though “Sybil,” the girl with multiple personalities, has just now been discredited as making up her experiences, I suspect that there was a kernel of truth. There ARE instances of multiple personalities. Also of interest are people whose brains have been separated down the middle or who have had one half removed, usually in an attempt to stop disabling seizures.

It’s clear that something real happens in the brain that “presents” as a form of dissociation. The people who experience this may report they are in a different place -- truly and actually -- which they may or may not interpret in a religious way. Maybe because it was the first descriptions of shamanism that I knew (Campbell's and Eliade’s) I find the idea of bodily death, replacement of the bones with quartz stones, and a long flight on a horse over an abyss, the most gripping interpretations of the experience.

Much depends on what the shaman does with the experience. He may just hide it. He may try to take others to the same place. He may understand it as being chosen or as being damned. He may use art to explore and express it. Some try to make an institution and a dogma out of it, because they interpret the experience as religious and that’s what they understand religion to be. There might be money in it.

What interests me comes from the Sixties, when Bob Scriver and I sat with the Bundle Keeper circle of the Blackfeet in the Sixties. There was nothing “churchy” about it. It was more like a family reunion where traditions have been established. This is not to say it was trivial. What struck me most was the relationship to the ecology, the land and its inhabitants. This “Bundle Opening” was a ritual that tried to put everything into “right relationship” just as the season of the great thunderstorms began, for the sake of protection from lightning and floods. The materials were animal and bird skins, the songs were about the creatures, and the dances were imitations of them. Each man who danced, took the creature into his hands and rose to the circle with that sensory memory prompting him. In other words, if this were not your family and if you didn’t live out on the grass among the other creatures, you couldn’t really “get” the ritual. How could you feel it? It was an evoked heightened consciousness of each other and the great ecology in which they lived, based on experience. No amount of reading about it in books would really help you understand in the sense of shifting consciousness.

A BIRTHDAY DECLARATION

One thing folds out of another, thus all the “post” philosophers: post-structuralism, post-colonial, post-what-have-you-got? that have dominated a lot of thought. Here’s what the wikipedia volunteer authority (unnamed) has to say: “a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Rather, it holds realities to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the interested parties are and what their interests consist of. It upholds the belief that there is no absolute truth and the way in which different people perceive the world is subjective.”

These guys wear those sweatshirts that say on the front, “Question authority!” Some looked at the back (“Listen carefully to the answers.” Note plural.) Some authorities (!) said that it wasn’t a rebellion against what came before so much as it was an extension of the thinking of some people who came before, and about all you can do is name the people mostly in France (Derrida, Foucault, et al) but also in Italy and even a few elsewhere. In 1982 when I left seminary, they were just beginning to hit their peak.

I wasn’t ready for the shift, unless you count Thomas Kuhn, who defined paradigm shift (the point when the evidence against the standing order has accumulated so convincingly that everyone goes to a new understanding -- like the shift from theism to science, which is not quite finished). I was forty, my reality was challenged, but I loved both structuralism and narrativity. Now, thirty years later, I’ve found Deleuze and Guattari who turn out to be an excellent entry point for me.

For instance, Nick Lane’s understanding of what he calls “Ascending Life.” I’ll go finish the book as soon as I finish this post. I have two chapters left. Notice that he converts the noun in the “Ascent of Man” to “Ascending” and is not anthropocentric. In fact, his account of evolution is largely about the invention of life itself and most of the evolving is done at the single cell level, where things reverse, hop sideways, fuse, gobble each other in an orgy of change that continues on without much attention from us until now. He describes an entity that has 28,000 “sexes” -- meaning they can copulate in various combinations to create entirely new creatures with unique genetic scripts -- at which point he suggests maybe we need a new word for the category. Humans are limited to maybe a double-dozen variations, including people with XY chromosomes, XX chromosomes, YY chromosomes (they die), XXY, YYX, upside-down versions, partial versions, etc. Post-binary but not unlimited because if the plan gets too far away from the norm, it’s erased. That erasure is as important to evolution as is war or competition for resources, but only with instruments can we see it. It’s all based on electrons and we still aren’t sure exactly how to describe them except by their behavior.

Because so many people in my family have had head injuries (you can include Bob Scriver) and because I’m old enough to see the consequences play out, I’m aware that the identity of people is dependent on their frontal lobes. Disease or stroke can do the same kind of damage as a blow or a fall. Yet sometimes only the people closest to the damaged person can really “see” the change unless it’s major. Now I’m reading Michael Gazzaniga and

thinking about Leda Cosmides’s work, trying to understand exactly how it is that identity arises from not just the brain but the whole body. Long ago I converted to the idea that identity is not from a “soul” residing in the brain, which is mostly what we can get to through introspection, and that identity changes all the time, which leads to problems with relationships -- or does it solve them?

My trusty guides are largely at edge.com, the same folks I loved in young adulthood. I still protect my worn “Whole Earth Catalogue.” It’s remarkable that people my age and much younger still continue the back-to-the-land communal practices of those times, except that now many of them are on-line. They have gone from being "social fossils" (which they never were anyway) to self-confident networks, rhizomatous, as DeleuzeGuattarian thought would have it. They preserve the boundary between the hunter/gatherers and the ten-thousand-year-old experiment with agriculture and cities that sometimes burdens us. In the beginning much of civilization depended upon the expanding and protecting of population because of granaries and walls: a lot of people with time and safe space for thinking. Now the biggest "cities" are “virtual.” The online “cities” are bigger than any resource-bound city can ever be and more assorted as well, which means richer, deeper, more complex thought explorations. I have better access to more brilliant people now than I had on the campus of the University of Chicago.

So now I can return to the task I set myself there, which is something like “the re-enchantment of the world.” That is, the most basic level of reconciliation and rejoicing between the planet and the human body/brain. I’ll close with this quote from Art Durkee, which he posted as a comment to yesterday’s blog.

“Shamanism is the single most rhizomatic spiritual technology, or set of practices for dealing with the spirit world. It's an utterly pragmatic, local system. Yet it turns up in literally every culture, in every era, in some form or another. Often it takes on the local language and cosmology without really changing its essence.

“That's partly because it's rooted in earth, in sky, in the land, in the people. The organized religions are smart when they adopt the local practice and try to subsume it into their own systems. That works better in some places than others. In native North America, the Jesuit presence among the early explorers was a political policy, part of the policy of conquering a new land for Europe. It's interesting to note how some native groups, who nominally converted to Catholicism, still practice their old ways anyway. Rhizomes, growing up and spreading invisibly below-ground.”

I do not want to be a shaman. I do not want to join any organization. I do not want to convert people. I want to read books and write about them. On to Michael Winklelman. But first I’ve got to get tarps on the roofs of the bunkhouse and garage. After I finish reading Lane’s book and copying his bibliography. Busy day. Every day is a birth-day.

THE SHAMAN'S PATH OF THE HORSE

This list is taken from the website of RAVEN KALDERA.  If you are interested, you can find a LOT of stuff there.  http://www.ravenkaldera.org/  This is his list of the 8-fold path of Shamans.  He speaks of classic Northern modes.

The first path is the Path of Meditation. This is also sometimes called the Path of Breath, because altering consciousness through specific forms of breathing is one of the classic techniques of meditation.

The second path is the Path of Ritual. Creating sacred space and doing deliberate (and often repetitive), mindful activities that are heavily laden with meaning in that space can create an altered state by itself. 

The third path is the Path of Rhythm. This includes drumming, dancing, or any repetitive rhythmic motions.

The fourth path is the Ascetic's Path. This includes fasting, sensory deprivation, and purification ordeals, all of which have various precedents in the North. 

The fifth path is the Path of Sacred Plants. From Thor's henbane beer to the infamous Little Red Man mushroom, hallucinogenic plants have been used with surprising frequency in the ancient North. 

The sixth path is the Path of the Flesh. This path involves using sexual energy as a way of opening one's self to the spirits.

The seventh path is the Ordeal Path. This path revolves around intentional and careful use of pain in order to put the body into an altered state. 

All of the above have crossed my research more than once in surprising ways and have shown up in real life -- I run across persons who actually practice one or more of these paths with no reference to shamans.  Sometimes the experience was imposed on them, unasked for.  

But the eighth path is not one that I know at all, unless Raven is talking about shape-shifting, in which case the path should be the “Path of the Creature,” since sometimes we’re talking seals or big birds or bison.  

There are certain domestic animals which will “bond” with a human being and become attuned to his or her mind and goals -- horses and dogs do this so well and so thoroughly that the relationship becomes more one of extension than of partnership.  There’s a little sexual fusion to it, mind-reading, picking up signals so subtle that one is not conscious of them.  But that’s not what Raven is talking about.  This what he says:

The eighth path is the Path of the Horse, which involves direct spirit-possession, bringing the Gods or wights into the body for a short period of time. 

First, let me disclaimer right off that the word "horse" is borrowed from the Afro-Caribbean religious traditions. In those religions (Voudoun, Santeria, Candomble, Umbanda, Palo Mayombe), the person whose body is borrowed by a God or a spirit is referred to as a "horse", and the act of being spirit-possessed is referred to as being "ridden". While we who do these things in a modern northern-tradition context do unashamedly borrow this term, it seems oddly appropriate in spite of its origins. One is reminded of the runes Ehwaz and Raido, the Horse and the Ride, which are also Movement and the Path.

He’s talking about possession, some mind-force coming into a human being and taking him or her over for its own purposes.  This is much darker and scarier than the appreciation of a willing horse.  We know one metaphor for sex is riding or being ridden (“ridden hard and put away wet”).  The play “Equus” bitterly recounts the merging of sexuality with equitation, but even that is innocent when compared with the notion of invasion by a completely different consciousness that is anthropomorphic but not human.  

Maybe there’s “channeling” as when a spirit personality talks “through” someone.  Or “speaking in tongues” or maybe there’s what might be called psychosis or a “split personality.”  Those who like to think of such phenomena as being explainable by science will look for descriptions of changed consciousnesses and identities, maybe arguing for a kind of brain-reorganization, extreme playacting to the point of losing the boundary with reality.  At least some pre-existing reality.  Where’s that fMRI machine?

On the other hand there will always be people who accept a magical, other-worldly explanation.  I don’t see a problem so long as one is able, in that U of Chicago Div School way, to state one’s method.  Don’t mix science with superstition.  But one who is clear, and at least in control of their own thoughts, could go back and forth from one method to another:  observe someone who seems to be possessed; let the scary feelings run up and down the spine; then step over to questioning about what forces are scientifically operating on this person.  Maybe ask about trauma or hormone levels.

So it turns out that the Path of the Horse is not even about equines.  Shucks.  There is so much that is magical about a horse even if you’re not riding it. Sitting up on a horse makes the world a different place, as the plains Indians quickly figured out.  Even walking across grass with a horse willingly traveling beside you, keeping its head by your shoulder, seems so companionable, so natural.  Horses are curious and -- once they know you -- trusting, so that you can put your hands all over them, sliding palms over their slick warm quivering and flinching ribs and flexing round rears; blow your breath up their noses; put your fingers in their mouths.   But if you get out of tune, de-synchronized, you’re liable to be bitten hard and even kicked.  A rearing, striking horse is deadly.

My niece’s ranch was bought by a man who was raising wild horses, the original mustangs, except that it all went wrong and collapsed.  Maybe something made a “horse” of him, though his name was Black Bear.  Anyway, my niece and her son and grandson, a toddler, wanted to visit them so we went out into the field in the foothills of the Rockies where the horses that Spring had run off a couple of gregarious young moose.  Now it was mid-July and the grass was tall but still green.  These horses are gray, dun, buckskin, mouse-colored, sometimes with that ancient stripe down their back and vague stripes across the backs of their rear legs, as though they’d been switched by something soft but dirty.  They were very curious about the baby, who was wearing only a diaper.  They came to peer, with their manes in their eyes like bashful girls, 

The baby’s father put his crying, fussing, boy down in the grass to rub sunscreen on him, blue goop that made me think of the Picts. The baby calmed and the horses -- a band of mares with colts -- came even closer to see what was happening and try to interpret it.  But when my niece and I reached out to touch the horses, they struck the ground with their front hooves and blew snot at us, backing off.

The shaman’s idea of the Path of the Horse is one of a big something possessing a little something, but a rider is a little something on a big something, so this Horse Path is one of Reversal.  But what we felt that summer afternoon in the grass was an enveloping fusion, light streaked with shadow, no need for any sort of possessing.  

But shouldn’t an aspiring Dionysian welcome being possessed?  Perhaps I am this blog’s “horse.”