Dreaming the World

A cool, grey day with a promise of sun and warmth to come along later. We are now quickly transitioning from spring to summer, with each day bringing more uniformity to the greens sprawling across the landscape. The birds are busy raising their young, the sparrows in our nest box already on their second brood. The osprey on the nest at the beach appear to be feeding young but it may just be the male feeding the female. A couple of days ago both were out of the nest briefly, spiralling and playing together over the bay, their flight seemly more about together time than fishing.

I’ve been mulling over, for some reason, Jesus’ insistence that only those who are without guilt throw stones. It seems to me that this teaching, together with the Sermon on the Mount, are the core of his doctrine. They are also immensely difficult for us humans to accept and practice; life is, after all, a morally complex experience.

Earlier this the week I was speaking with a shaman friend about the necessity of acknowledging the psychological challenges of cognitive and moral development when working with clients. We were thinking about the truism that one cannot force any form of psychological growth, especially growth that leads to more complex more reasoning. Indeed, it appears to be the case that moral reasoning, much like other forms of cognition, may be shaped as much by genetics as by life experience, as moral reasoning appears to follows a bell curve with the majority of us falling somewhere in the middle of possible outcomes.

Fortunately, for most of us the emotional, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions of life become richer and more nuanced over our life span. A large part of that growth may arise from one’s capacity to consider and generalize from one’s life experiences. Hopefully we learn from our successes and mistakes, and in doing so, become more tolerant of ourselves and others.

Psychology repeatedly rediscovers that there are limits to our capacity for growth and that, for the most part, our level of development is not a moral failure. Rather, our awareness and growth appear to be shaped and limited by the interaction of life experience, education, and genetics. While most of us fall somewhere in the middle of the curve of what’s possible, others find themselves outliers, for good or ill. It is those persons whose cognitive, emotional, and moral development are on the “high” end of the spectrum to who we tend to look for moral guidance, even though their teachings may demand levels of care and compassion that seem unreachable in a world where we are also urged to stop evil’s harms.

Shamans are people and shamanism is an innately human activity, so shamans as a group follow the human bell curve, as do our clients. I have had teachers whose moral reasoning arose entirely out of amoral self interest (although invaluable teachers, they are probably best avoided) and teachers who literally gave their lives in support of their communities.

In some New Age circles shamanism is seen as mostly, or entirely, a psycho-spiritual program. Certainly one’s emotional, cognitive, and spiritual understanding of the world seems to shape what is possible as both shaman and client, but to reduce shamanism to a form of psychotherapy is to effectively erase our larger relationships with the natural and spirit world, and our bodies, and to rob life of mystery and magic.

I believe that shamanism offers us an opportunity to be alive and aware at the joyous intersection of All That Is. As we aspire towards rich and vibrant lives, it is, I imagine, best to keep in mind that we are all doing our best, and to to the extent we are able, to avoid throwing those proverbial stones.