October has been a month of changing direction. Not in any particularly dramatic or outwardly visible way, but internally, where some of the more interesting things tend to happen.
I’ve found myself putting Buddhism to one side. Not abandoning it, exactly. I don’t think I’m someone who makes definitive spiritual declarations anymore. There is always the possibility that I’ll come back to it, or that it will quietly carry on doing its thing somewhere in the background. But for now, my attention has wandered elsewhere and rather unexpectedly, it has wandered back to shamanism.
It’s funny how these things happen. You can spend years thinking you’ve moved on from something, only to discover that perhaps you haven’t moved on at all. Perhaps you’ve just been taking the scenic route. This has taken me back to my late teenage years, when I was fascinated by mysticism, paganism and anything that hinted at there being more to life than the rather ordinary business of getting up, going to work and remembering to buy milk (yes, by the time I arrived in my late teens I’d been kicked out of home, had a flat and a full-time job but that’s another story).
I was particularly taken with Carlos Castaneda. His books, supposedly recounting his encounters with a Yaqui shaman called Don Juan, opened up a world of altered states, spiritual journeys and mysterious encounters. I found them utterly compelling. Of course, we now know that Castaneda’s stories were largely discredited and that he was not quite the authority he presented himself to be. But back in the late sixties and early seventies, his writing seemed convincing to an awful lot of people and I was one of them, although I was a little younger and perhaps more impressionable.
I also read Lobsang Rampa, who claimed to be a Tibetan Buddhist guru or mystic and wrote about all sorts of extraordinary spiritual experiences. He too turned out to be a fraud. In fact, my teenage spiritual education seems to have involved a surprisingly large number of people who weren’t quite who they said they were. Still, I don’t regret it. They introduced me to ideas that fascinated me, and those ideas sent me off in search of more substantial reading and sometimes even a questionable guide can point you towards an interesting landscape. And now, decades later, I seem to have found myself back there but the difference is that this time the attraction hasn’t come from reading a particularly intriguing book or becoming intellectually interested in an unfamiliar tradition. It has felt more like being pulled towards something.
I’ve found the pull surprisingly strong. Strong enough, in fact, to overcome my usual scepticism about such things. Which is quite an achievement, given that scepticism has become something of a travelling companion over the years. I’ve started practising shamanic journeying, and, for the time being, this has replaced my Zen meditation.
I wasn’t expecting much from the first experience. Or perhaps I was expecting something but wasn’t entirely sure what. It’s difficult to approach something like this without bringing along a small committee of internal critics, all armed with questions about what you’re doing and whether you really believe any of it. But something happened that I wasn’t expecting – I felt completely at home.
In shamanic terminology, the place I entered is known as the Lower World. I don’t want to get too caught up in explaining the mechanics of it, or describing the experience in detail, but what struck me immediately was the sense of familiarity. I didn’t feel as though I was visiting somewhere new. I felt as though I had come back and that is what has stayed with me.
I have no conscious memory of ever having done this before. I can’t remember journeying as a teenager, although I do wonder whether I might have encountered something similar without having the language or understanding to recognise it at the time. Perhaps I did. Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps the mind is simply very good at creating feelings of familiarity in unexpected places.
But then there were the spirit animals. I’ll say no more about that for now, other than that I met them, and they seemed to remember me. Which is quite a thing to contemplate over breakfast later in the morning. I’m still trying to make sense of it all, although I’m increasingly aware that this might not be the most useful thing to do. My instinct is (or was) always to understand, analyse and find a rational explanation. I can spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to work out what something means when perhaps the better approach is simply to experience it.
There is a tendency, particularly in our rather intellectually demanding culture, to assume that if we can’t explain something logically, we haven’t really understood it but I’m not sure that’s true. Perhaps some experiences are best left alone for a while, allowed to settle and reveal whatever they might have to reveal in their own time. This is also where my interest in Internal Family Systems (IFS) comes in. I’ve been fascinated by the work of Dick Schwartz (the founder of IFS) and the idea that our inner world is populated by different parts, each with its own feelings, needs and perspectives. What’s interesting is how comfortably some of these ideas seem to sit alongside shamanic thinking. Schwartz has increasingly explored the relationship between IFS and shamanism, and I can see why. Both seem to invite us into a relationship with our inner world rather than encouraging us to stand outside it and analyse everything from a distance. I find that connection particularly interesting. Perhaps there are different ways of describing experiences that are not quite as different as they first appear.
I’m not suggesting that I have suddenly become a shamanic expert, or that I’ve arrived at some great spiritual understanding. Far from it. I’m still very much at the beginning of this exploration, feeling my way around and wondering what on earth I’m doing half the time but there is something rather lovely about that. I think one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that I don’t necessarily need to turn every new interest into a belief system, a philosophy or a project. I don’t need to know where something is going before I’m allowed to enjoy the journey.
My Buddhist thinking may return. It may even find a way to coexist with all this. I’m no longer particularly concerned about consistency when it comes to my spiritual life. Perhaps being willing to change direction is more important than sticking rigidly to a path simply because I’ve spent time on it.
So that’s been October, really. A month of unexpected spiritual homecoming, old interests resurfacing and a growing willingness to explore something that, until recently, I might have dismissed as a little too far outside my comfort zone. I don’t know what it all means. I don’t know whether the sense of returning to the Lower World is a memory, a metaphor or something I don’t yet have a framework for understanding.
And perhaps I don’t need to know. For now, I’m happy to keep journeying, remain curious and see what happens next. After all, it’s quite possible to spend years looking for something new, only to discover that what you’re looking for has been waiting for you all along.
Or at least that’s how it felt in October. I’ll see where it goes.
