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Your Shamanic Initiation Fantasy?
Question: how many people have had a similar on-going fantasy to this? You’re walking down the street somewhere, totally minding your own business. Maybe you’re shopping with your significant other or walking back to your car after a day of work. Something catches you attention in a window, or on the sidewalk, and you focus your attention on it for a split second. And then BAM! You accidentally walk right into some strange old person (man or woman). Flustered and embarrassed, you immediately apologize. Looking up to meet their gaze, you’re immediately transfixed and neither of your speaks. Suddenly, they say something about how they’ve been looking for you. And when you ask what they mean, they explain that they had a dream which said they were supposed to teach you. “Teach me what?” you ask confused. Their eyes glint in the afternoon sun, and they give you a card with a phone number on it, instructing you to call when you’re ready to find out. Weeks pass and you’re too nervous to call them. You almost do it a couple times, but keep chickening out. Finally, all of a sudden, you call and thus begins a long strange journey where you become apprentice to them, and they initiate you into some kind of secret shamanic practice…
Yadda yadda yadda. You get the drift. The details may be different, but I think that does a good job laying out the basics of how the fantasy goes. By a show of hands, how many people secretly wish something like this would happen to them? (Or maybe it already has?) What would be different in your scenario? What does this type of daydreaming really mean?
- Gurdjieff on the Teacher
- Notes: Christ Correction Code
- The Call & Spontaneous Initiation
- “The Epistemology and Technologies of Shamanic States of Consciousness”
- Depictions of Fantasy
- Prev: God, the Anomaly
- Next: New Age Embarrassment?
August 24th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
This type of daydreaming is the greatly diffracted reflection of the (Revelation, Apocalypse, Unveiling, Eschaton, Cosmic Joke, Appearance of the Hidden Imam, Transfiguration, Kubrick’s Monolith).
Think back on the most numinous moments you have lived. He has been seeking you in all things at all times. You have seen the hem of His garment vanishing around every corner, and maybe, when you were a child, felt the Eye’s gaze weigh heavily upon you.
The story of your life is the Zahir, the experience of your life is truly the Batin.
The uncovering of conspiracies reflects “the conspiracy of One” that you have been tracking down since you first said “I.”
Turn around. It has always been there.
August 24th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
Oh hell yes. I’ve definitely had this fantasy as far back as I remember. Sometimes I meet a dragon that rises from a lake, other times it’s a spirit-wolf that comes to me in my dreams, or just a hot chick from another dimension. And they reveal to me a secret world with different rules.
August 24th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
yes. i had a man approach me in a pizza shop and ask me if i was interested in coming to a meeting one time and he left me with a number to call. he said his group was looking for serious people to join and i was to call when i was ready to learn more. i never did and god knows what it was all about. it could have been a coven for all i knew.
August 24th, 2005 at 2:41 pm
I’d probably get on with the shamanic initiation after I bumped into them and they told me they’d been looking for me. Who needs to wait to call?
August 24th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
I have no idea what that means, Pruney, but I love all of what you said.
Alistair, yeah, if somebody approached me and said that they wanted me to come to a meeting, that would be something totally different. I would neither call nor go to any such thing.
One of the interesting questions this raises for me is say something like this really did happen. How do you know if somebody is just trying to scam you or what? Obviously, you gotta go with your gut while keeping your wits about you.
August 24th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
Zahir == exoteric, batin == esoteric. In conventional use, these words refer to the interpretation (ta’wil) of the Qu’ran by religious scholars, but somewhere in medieval Shiism (afaik) they were applied to the whole of human experience. (The qabala came from this tradition, but was applied to the books of Moses.)
Mirrors of Enigma by Borges, who knows what’s up.
The Pure Bretheren of Basra
August 24th, 2005 at 5:49 pm
I think, psychologically, it’s like an escape fantasy. You want someone to take you by the hand, out of the mundane, and into the mystical. Or maybe it fulfills this urge to be acknowledged as special.
I think we’ve all had it–I still do.
August 24th, 2005 at 6:30 pm
I do think there’s an element of sort of waiting for somebody else or circumstance to thrust me into another level, so I don’t have to do it myself. Is that wrong though? How do you overcome that?
August 24th, 2005 at 6:54 pm
I think that’s a completely natural feeling
“Oh Tyler deliver me…”
I think it’s what most of us need, but the lesson in Fight Club is that Tyler Durdan was inside us all along, and there’s similar speculation about that with Carlos Casteneda and Don Juan.
If any story fits the shamanic initiation fantasy it *is* CC’s Don Juan series.
August 24th, 2005 at 7:07 pm
Hm, that’s a good point. Perhaps there’s something to the idea of trying to externalize that part of yourself. From the Jungian perspective, I think that would probably be the archetypal mana personality, the wise old man who helps the hero along the way. In terms of the anima, Jung talks a lot about how you can never be satisfied in a romantic relationship until you withdraw the anima projection back into yourself. Otherwise, you are never seeing the other person for what they are, but for what you are projecting of yourself onto them. Maybe that’s the lesson for the mana personality as well.
I’ve still never read the Don Juan books, but they’ve been on my list for forever.
August 24th, 2005 at 7:21 pm
They’re all good, but the first three probably have the most mystique.
Yeah, Anterro Alli wrote about that in a preface to his article about building a shrine to the anima. I think the master-student thing is a bit different though; a lover is your equal so she should not have to be responsible for being built up by your projections.
However a master in a lot of ways voluntarily becomes the vessel for that sort of mythologizing. As beneficial this may possibly be for a disciple we can see the dangers of it in a lot of cults (which may be why the enlightened zen student traditionally becomes an iconoclast and begins criticizing his old teacher ruthlessly; inscrutability must be undermined every so often.)
A funny little addendum: Tim Leary reportedly flipped out when Casteneda told him that one could not travel this path without a teacher.
August 24th, 2005 at 7:28 pm
I do find myself wondering that a great deal lately. Up until this point, I thought you could totally do-it-yourself and that that was *always* preferable. And I’m realizing how much of that attitude was simple rebelliousness and is partly because I’ve only had a very few number of teachers who could really push me like I needed to. I guess I’m wanting that again as my rebelliousness subsides…
August 24th, 2005 at 9:58 pm
as a kid i liked the last starfighter, that film where the kid does so good on an arcade game that he is recruited as some kind of intergalactic fighter pilot. shit, star wars, the karate kid, the neverending story, harry potter, it seems like most of these stories are something more than just escapist fantasy, like a kind of preparation for initiation: ok, at some point you’ll be initiated, alright? a wise and powerful adult is going to see your inherent qualities and bestow upon you the opportunity to manifest those qualities in the world.
so we wait. and when that role-model doesn’t show, you eventually have no choice but to invent him, to be that adult. is this process of self-initiation what we are forced to resort to since our culture has failed to provide any decent initiations of its own? no decent role-models or hero(in)es? do we externalise our image of what an “adult” should be, and then make the transformation real by acting it out? that is like fight club.
and luke skywalker’s absent (then revealed to be evil) father. luke didn’t want the banality of his uncle’s(?) frugal existence either, so sought out the mythological obi wan. it all sounds kinda freudian, but it’s like how jung, after falling out with his “father” freud, turned to mythological archetypes for role models and eventually philemon “showed up”. others like ran might be like “fuck all those old fools, let’s try something new!”
is the spiritual journey little more than “how to act like a grownup 101″? or an rpg? (for example: ooh, i’m going to be a dwarf this time, what are you gonna be? oh i’m a deadbeat dad cos that’s all i know. i’m an extradimensional entity manifesting in the materia for the pupose of achieving redemption, and so on)
actually adults (initiates of whatever flavour) seem like children with masks. but is the whole “mask of adulthood” even necessary? what is the purpose of being old and wise like our false image of god. why can’t i be a child forever? did leary flip out because he didn’t want to be a teacher?
are “spititual” people like children greedy for awe, but tricked into wearing an initiation mask that merely makes them appear awsome? it may be that initiation into the mysteries is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you, and our initiation fantasies have been planted in our minds by cultural magickians who want us to be “adults” willingly, for whatever purpose that may serve.
was it socrates who refused initiation? did he refuse because he had conducted his own initiation and was an adult already, or did he see some hidden danger in initiation itself?
if you see the buddha on the road, whatever you do, don’t get in his car.
(but maybe i’m still “just” a rebellious child)
August 24th, 2005 at 10:05 pm
You always come through in the clutch Carlos. That’s just the fuel I needed, all around. I forgot all about the Socrates reference and I love the idea that Leary felt trapped because he knew he’d become a guru, and that’s not what he wanted.
Fuck, I just thought of something. You know how Muslims and some other groups that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross, but that it was somebody else, or he later on escaped? Well what if Jesus faked his own death because the popular image of Jesus the guru was something that Jesus the man didn’t want and didn’t feel like it fit him? So he staged an elaborate charade, so detailed that even his friends believed it, and then he ran off to wander the world in anonymity and just relax.
God, why have I never heard that as an explanation before?
August 24th, 2005 at 10:19 pm
[…] I just thought of yet another way to read the story of Jesus’ death, inspired by some comments Carlos made on one of my posts from ear […]
August 26th, 2005 at 3:04 am
I once had someone ask me on a bus if I believed in God and did I want to come to his Bible study group. I said thank you but no and was grateful that I was only going a short distance on the bus. I later put this person into a Cthulhu Mythos story where he was one of a group of cultists trying to destroy another group of Nyarlathotep worshippers.
August 26th, 2005 at 11:47 am
Just found a really good Gurdjieff quote about this:
http://www.kesdjan.com/exercises/ask.html
August 26th, 2005 at 2:13 pm
[…] on Gurdjieff has everything to do with what we talked about a few days ago with the “shamanic initiation fantasy“. This is from a page of Gurdjie […]