I’ve been doing a lot of thinking – again – about how science and materiality have utterly trumped mystery.
Well, it’s a sore spot and no mistake. I’ve been reading a book by David Abram called Becoming Animal, and he devoted quite a bit of ink to this idea as well. (I’m hugely enjoying Abram’s book, and I recommend it highly.)
Abram talks about how when Copernicus started messing about with lenses in tubes that let him actually see the planets sort of up close and personal like, and was able to start calculating cosmic distances, the whole fabric of the sky was torn into shreds. Humans used to believe that we were wrapped up in this little ball of safety, and the stars were … ancestors or angels or something, and then oopsie daisy, they’re so not … and the fear and confusion and utter lostness set in. People weren’t okay with being teeny and insignificant. The Earth wasn’t the center of this homey little velvet-wrapped mini-verse anymore. Suddenly, the sky zoomed out to terrifying proportions, and we haven’t quite recovered yet.
But experientially … well, have you ever laid on the ground under a dark sky and looked up and felt like the whole universe was close enough to touch? If you send your love out it is. Absolutely. Copernicus wasn’t wrong, but neither were our ancient ancestors. Sky Camp is a real place, and we can half-close our eyes and feel ourselves there.
We don’t have to choose. Or we can. Or we can accept one as materialist fact and embrace the other as mystical, mythical, spiritual, sacred truth.
We can look around and see the results of rejecting the mystic in favor of the material every day – pollution, concrete over everything, the destruction of pristine forests and natural glories, sacrificed on the altar of greed and land-lust. We know the price of ignoring the sacred truths, we live with the outcomes. And we also know the dysfunction caused by rejecting the facts of the material in favor of trying to be in the world but not of it, sacrificing the body on the altar of the soul – a slightly less poisonous trade-off for sure, and at least one that usually harms far fewer people in the long run – with some recent notable exceptions. But both extremes are destructive, obsessive, and unhealthy.
There is a way to weave both ways together. The material is the warp, the sacred is the weft. The Structure is the grounding and stabilizing Real, and the Spirit is the uplifting and sacralizing More Than Real. Both are essential for the fabric of our own survival.
Shamanic drumming is one way to access the More Than Real, which has the advantage of being safe, legal, and completely in the control of the journeyer. Entheogenic substances, in ceremonial, ritual, or therapeutic situations, can also open the doors to altered perception and alternative reality, and powerfully so, albeit with the disadvantage that the journeyer often lacks a certain amount of agency over the experience. The chemicals are gonna do what they are gonna do, and sometimes you are just along for the ride, no matter what you intended to accomplish.
But however you choose to kick the doors of perception open, I highly recommend it. The more we cultivate the mystic the more mystic the world gets. Want magic? Gotta make your own these days, but Gaia wants to bring us back home to the soul and center of our ancestral inheritance. Magic will be afoot again just as soon as we drop its other shoe.
Want to experience Shamanic Journeying for yourself? If you’re in the Iowa City area on the third Saturdays of the month, you can! Click here to learn more and get your ticket!