THE ALIEN
THE PROBLEMATICS OF UNDERSTANDING SHAMANISM

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DEATH AS THE THOUGHT OF THE ALIEN

In order to understand the meaning that death has in shamanism, it is necessary to understand the concept of the alien. Death is not the alien but is the crawling space, the passage to the alien. In order to understand this we also need to understand the radical separation between the logocentric and egocentric perspectives of the west and the thought structure, or rather mood structure, of Shamanism.

The alien is that which is initiated by dread and death. It is nothing less than the opening up of reality; it is nothingness and the void. The alien is not some thing which we can grasp in its entirety, but it is rather the artistic production of death. The alien intrudes into the mundane as death and reveals itself in this dimension. The initiation and the transformation of the Shaman is realized through his encounter with death. What follows is a short discussion of the problematic of encountering the alien while still bound within the western dualistic mode of experience.

Configurations of thought

In order to understand the meaning of death in a non-dualistic sense, we have to engage with a mode of thought different to our normal perceptions. This does not merely refer to cultural shifts in meaning within a continuum of shared ethnocentric perceptions, but to shifts in meaning that take us out of our world of referential understanding itself. Any understanding of the Shamanic world requires an entrance into an alien configuration of thought. If we, however well intentioned, presume that other modes of thought are linked as extensions of our own mode of thought, we are bound either to misunderstand these other modes of thought or to reduce them to the parameters that conform to our perceptions of reality

The Alien.

The difference between ordinary, rational thought and Shamanic altered states of consciousness, is reflected in the following:

"We have said that the Shaman lives in a psychic universe in which he, in addition to his ratio-analytical level of consciousness, has access to a trance-like and holistic form of awareness. Anyone who tries to understand the Shamanic experience of the world by the use of causal categories of space and time, is doomed to failure."

(p. 242/3 Kalweit: 1988 )

In this sense Shamanism cannot be approached through the conventional apparatus of rationalistic analysis. However, the limitations of rational analysis have long been realised by, among others, Heidegger and Hillman in the west and for centuries by Eastern modes of thought like Zen. To different degrees of penetration these theories enlarge upon an area of thought which lies at the fringes of Shamanism.
There is a strange congruence between the situation of Western mental discourse and the ancient techniques of Shamanism. The emergence of a deconstructive analysis of Western thought has not only brought Western Metaphysics into question and unveiled it as inadequate to cope with the perception of reality, but, at the same time, opened up pathways to new attitudes towards consciousness. Martin Heidegger and others have made this inadequacy very clear and this has been verified in the work of quantum and microphysics as well as in areas of psychology. In other words, the positioning of Shamanism, emerging in an era of cultural openness and the realisation of the marginalisation of so-called "primitive cultures", presents the Shamanic experience in a peculiarly and problematic contemporary light. The path that has to be followed therefore must take the findings and experiences of Western thought into account, but, only as the very most tentative advances towards a way of thought and experience which is as futuristic as it is ancient. Where these theories end other more adventurous paths must be constructed that allow the thinking that has begun to merge into a fruition that enters Shamanism.

A brief insertion as to what is meant by the disparity between Western modes of thought and Shamanism will suggest the fault lines that lie within Western thought. The crucial difference between Shamanism and Western rational modes of thought are illustrated directly by Kalweit. Here the description is of the Western mode of consciousness attempting to understand the Shamanic world:

" He will construct a picture of the Shaman which is more a mirror image of himself. He is like someone who tries to record the "tones" of a painting on a tape recorder-all he captures on tape is the background noise of the recorder itself. What we are trying to say is that just as an audio recorder is not suitable for recording pictures, so the mechanistic and objectivistic methodology of Shamanic research cannot lead to a correct understanding of the nature of a sorcerer. When it comes to studying Shamans, our findings are no more than what we have fed into the research itself, namely our own concepts and philosophies, our contemporary projections. Hundreds of theses on Shamanism have been written, but their methodology has only explored the cultural skin of the Shaman-his external appearance. The essence of altered states of consciousness and the inner world of the Shaman are not touched upon.

(Pg. 242. Kalweit, H.,. 1988)

Kalweit continues to suggest that conventional interpretations of Shamanic thought are only meaningful in that they reveal more about ourselves and are self-reflexive.

"The greater part of Shamanic research so far is meaningful only in that it tells us something about our own world view and about our entanglement in our cultural values. A critical assessment of the literature on Shamanism can help us analyse our own projections and ritualised expectations toward other cultures and develop a morphology of Western man's introspection. The attempts of most researchers to understand inner experience are confined either to recording physiological changes that occur during an altered state of consciousness or to reproducing the narratives of people who have experienced such states. Apart from the fact that Shamans have up to now not shown a great spirit of co-operation when it comes to taking physiological measurements or recording their psychic experiences, it must besaid that such methods are, in any case, incapable of recreating the cathartic atmosphere of a ceremony or the feeling of sacredness that pervades an altered state of consciousness-which are the essential characteristics of healing or initiation."

(Ibid.)

The above also points towards a central area of concern within the working of the Western consciousness: this is the ego-centric or the humanistic approach within the West which interprets all to fit the subjective-ego range of understanding. This is the central criticism that Martin Heidegger has of Western discourse and it is this " releasement" from the entrapment of the ego-centric world which the East and Zen Buddhism holds at its core of understanding. The question of humanism and the subjective bias of Metaphysics is the central aspect which forms a connective bridge between understanding the inability of the Western mode of thought to enter in Shamanism. This is in fact the very aspect that makes Shamanism alien. It is alien because of the habitual insistence within Western discourse to centre everything within the myopia of the subjective polarity as a reflection of the human centre. This of course is Heidegger's central concern in his attack on Western Metaphysics.

"What irritates Heidegger, however, is the emphasis on man: it is man who always demands reasons; the ground must be given to man. Leibniz, by making man the measure of all things, extols human subjectivity. Heidegger then shows that seeking for grounds results in an "infinite regress" and concludes that every beginning, every first principle involves some kind of faith or arbitrary decision which in the end forces us to enter a "dangerous region, a "twilight zone"-the groundless. "This region is known to many thinkers although they rightly say very little about it. Moreover, the demand to give grounds has the effect of robbing us of our rootedness in soil upon which we have always stood, for the more we pursue grounds the more we lose our footing."

(P. 74/ 75 Avens, r. 1984. )

What is of extreme significance for this interrogation of the meaning of death is the reference to a 'dangerous region', a 'twilight zone' of the groundless. It is this region which, for Heidegger, evokes the mood of ' dread" at the exposure to nothingness that finds its concomitant in the Zen 'no-mind' and void. This is the erasure point of all opposites and thinking in terms of the values of certainty and linearity. It is this area that is central to the initiation and the experience of Shamanism and can be seen as the central site of Shamanism. This is also the entrance to a discovery of death. And the entrance into dread, the precursor of death lies in a devastating loss of all points of security and sureness on the new map of reality. The experience is one that is inadequately described as nothingness, but which holds a very different experience of reality.

"Only because Nothing is revealed in the very basis of our Da-sein is it possible for the utter strangeness of what-is to dawn on us. Only when the strangeness of what-is forces itself upon us does it awaken and invite our wonder. Only because of wonder, that is to say, the revelation of nothing, does the ‘why?’ spring to our lips. Only because this ‘why?’ is possible as such can we seek reasons and proofs in a definite way. Only because we can ask and prove are we fated to become enquirers in this life."

(P. 379. M.Heidegger:1949)

The essential difference between the Shamanic experience and the world view of scientific consciousness is stressed in the reduction of Shamanic terminology and values to mere denotations of fantasy. The words that we use to describe the Shamanic experience have in effect lost their ability to convey any of the alien quality and resonance of Shamanism. This is not a reflection of Shamanism, but rather of the inability of logocentric terminology to understand the Shamanic view.

" Our scientific methods remain dissociated from actual life, whereas the Shaman seizes life by its roots and experiences blazing reality. Words like "sacred" or "magical" ultimately can tell us nothing about other realms of consciousness. They are empty and without substance-mere shadows of a dimension closed to us. Religion is experience, a transformation of waking consciousness which can never be conveyed by words. The map is not the terrain. A painting is not real life, and our obsessively literate culture all too often forgets that rationality and language do not reflect life as it is lived."

(p.243. Kalweit, H.,:1988)

LANGUAGE

The area of language is central to this the discussion of Shamanic death. The question of language is complex and both Zen master Dogen and Heidegger see language as a non-humanistic phenomenon which can in fact speak to man if man listens and " hearkens" to that which is being "spoken". But the idea of a altered state of consciousness suggests the need for a new language, a mode of expression which will not be for communicative purposes but will act as a means of expressing and allowing the new form of consciousness to take shape Again Kalweit expresses the possibility for a " new language, "

" Our linguistic repertoire is geared to a one-sided interpretation of Time, Space, and Causality and thus contains no terms to describe the paradox and acausal nature of the inner world. Even the findings of modern physics can barely be expressed in words because of the mechanistic/materialistic structure of our language. We may therefore ask with some justification whether we do not need a supplementary vocabulary that allows fresh associations and makes it possible to formulate and describe paradoxical thoughts and feelings. What we really need is a multivalent logic, multidimensional figures of speech, and ambiguous concepts capable of giving us a better idea of ambivalences. However, in attempting to realise such an undertaking we would be like creatures of a two-dimensional world dreaming of a three- dimensional universe."

(Ibid. p 244 .)

The expression of essential difference in the above echoes the central concern with alienness and Shamanism.

The understanding of the meaning of death and its construction in both western, eastern and Shamanic domains is closely tied to the fundamental question and ontology of language.

Heidegger sees language not as the familiar enterprise conveyed and manufactured by man, but rather as something that man becomes aware of through its shaping force; a force which shapes man and not the other way around. Therefore, for Heidegger the most common feature of ordinary consciousness, language, is in fact alien to the mode of thought that would appropriate all to the will and desire of the human:

" Man's silence is the basis of his speech. This silence is not elicited from him as co-player from within himself, as Being and Time would have it. Rather, it is elicited by the call of Being, by the soundless Saying of the Event of appropriation. In and through his thoughtful response to this Saying, man finds that this Saying itself springs forth from that which must remain unsaid. In the face of the unsaid, man must cease to speak. He must remain silent. Though he has not said it in so many words, Heidegger has now made it clear that not only man's speech but also his performances of silence are needed to allow to appear that which Being grants to him."

(P. 132. Dauenhauer, B.P. 1980.)

In the Heideggerian mode of thought the link between language, imagination and the alien is made. The function of language is to allow the alien to appear in the midst of the ordinary. Therefore, for Heidegger the poet is the " messenger" of the alien:

".......poetic images are imaginings in an extraordinary sense: not mere fancies and illusions but "imaginings" that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar. The poetic saying of images gathers the brightness and sound of the heavenly appearances into one with the darkness and silence of what is alien."

(from Heidegger- poetry language and thought/ p 226 in Avens. 1984. P.57)

EXPRESSING THE LIMINAL.

An initial example of the difference that is encountered in the Shamanic experience of death is the lack of definiteness. This is usually seen as an ambiguity, a move away from the need for resolution in definite understanding. The complex of ambiguity can be related to the need of the ego for certainty and validation of its own parameters. The following is a ethnographers report on the clarity of Shamanic interpretation.An initial example of the difference that is encountered in the Shamanic experience of death is the lack of definiteness. This is usually seen as an ambiguity, a move away from the need for resolution in definite understanding. The complex of ambiguity can be related to the need of the ego for certainty and validation of its own parameters. The following is a ethnographers report on the clarity of Shamanic interpretation.

" I would like to note an absence of definiteness in my interpretation of data obtained from Tokiko and tadoa. Tokiko once told me. " I cannot use the word definite to characterise things concerned with the gods. I must qualify my statements with such words as perhaps I think, or give my interpretation at this moment."

(P 18. Takaguchi, N. 1984)

Yet , once again, this ambiguity is only ambiguous when viewed from the stance of the metaphysical duality and its insistence on an either-or binarity. We cannot speak of ambiguity in the Shamanic world. The multi-dimensional and interpenetrative experience of Shamanism is a further move away from the conformative demands of metaphysics and another reason for its alienness.

The centrality of the concept of alienness to this discussion on death follows the same trajectory as the idea of the tradition in Guénon. The idea of the tradition, which Guénon says modern society has lost, is not something that is humanistic in essence. This follows a central thematic within Heidegger which sees the dehumanisation of the mode of thought as the only possible development for thinking.

The following quote from René Gúenon on tradition expresses his attack on humancentric modernism and can easily be aligned with the tone and meaning of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism. It is enlightening to follow the thought that when Heidegger speaks of the "forgetting of Being" he is in fact alluding to the same thing that Guénon refers to as the loss of the tradition.

"besides, the fact that somebody calls himself a traditionalist does not necessarily imply that he knows even vaguely what tradition signifies in the true sense of the word. As far as we are concerned, we refuse to apply this term under any circumstances to anything belonging to the purely human order; it is as well to make this point clear in view of the frequency with which such expressions as "traditional philosophy ", for example, are to be met with. A philosophy, even though it be everything that a philosophy can be, has no right to this description, both because it is entirely confined to the rational order even in cases where it does not actually negate what lies beyond it, and also because it is simply a structure raised by human individuals, devoid of revelation or inspiration of any sort-which amounts to saying, in other words, that it is something essentially "profane ".

(Pg. 24. Rene Guenon, 1962)

The sentiment expressed by Guénon that " The task of evil is to confine man within an individuality." Expresses the need for an anti-humanistic approach

" For the very word 'humanism' implies a pretension to bring everything down to purely human elements and.... to exclude everything of a supra-individual order."

(Ibid., Pg. 232.)

THE UNDERSTANDING OF DEATH AS ENTRANCE

There is also a further dimension to the understanding of Shamanism as the entrance into the alien. It is essential that Shamanism should not be understood only in terms of the Western metaphysical malaise. The understanding of Shamanism also implies an understanding of alienness as an essential component of Shamanism. In the Tamang culture of Nepal, the Shaman is the specialist, not in the creation of the narrative certainties of myth or legend, but rather of the liminal, uncertain and ambiguous. It is his function to "hold open the face of the divine" and this face is always at the edge of form. This role, within the Tamang culture , is balanced against the function of the Lambu or priest, whose role is to humanise the divine and malevolent, while the Shaman acts in counterpoint to this. Guénon and others have mentioned this necessary balance between the Shaman and the Priest in traditional cultures, and this is evidenced by the role of the Tamang Shaman as a specialist in the transmission of the alien.

"It is sight of the divine that the bombos rescue in their mediation. Their bodies are the meeting place of the human and an enigmatic divine and a terrific malevolence; they travel between heavens and earth; they reveal, unveil, and open up cosmic uncertainties and dwell in them. The shamanic sounds in counterpoint to buddhist and sacrificial ritual which blind humanity to divine and malevolent uncertainty...."

(P. 54. Holmberg:1983.)

Holmberg sees the function of Shamanism as essentially a counterpoint to the " blindness" that society develops to the divine. This has a specific importance in the present attempt to understand altered states of consciousness as post-metaphysical.

The possibilities of the recognition of the alien, of altered states of consciousness which are foreign to the climate of our thought has numerous proponents in many diverse fields throughout the modern world. One of these is David Bohm who clearly sees the need to lift the veil that inhibits our consciousness:
The possibilities of the recognition of the alien, of altered states of consciousness which are foreign to the climate of our thought has numerous proponents in many diverse fields throughout the modern world. One of these is David Bohm who clearly sees the need to lift the veil that inhibits our consciousness:

" According to the emerging paradigm, "matter" and "consciousness" no longer seem to be essentially different. This opens a new avenue for understanding consciousness. One of the most challenging dimensions of this deeper understanding is the question of whether altered states of consciousness offer us a valid, perhaps more comprehensive, picture of reality. Different levels of consciousness disclose different levels of reality. To limit knowledge only to the products of the rational mind-which is the rationalistic-scientific paradigm that emerged in the seventeenth century and has since dominated Western culture-is nothing else than a form of reductionism, though an extremely successful one from the point of view of technology."

(Corless and Knitter:1990)

At the end of all the discussion, and the pinpricks of light that are made to shine through the heavy veil of our world, there merges a new desire, a need for a new consciousness in the real sense of newness, and not in imitation of anything that has gone before. This refers to thought textures , mood structures and praxis which enable us to see the image of death as an trance and not as an exit.. There is no self-pity or morbidity in this search but rather a freshness that a true understanding of the facticity of death can bring.

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Gary Smith. 1999.

gary@imaginet.co.za