Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @SophiaCycles

@SophiaCycles "The book of Nature is that which the physician must read, and to do so he must walk over the leaves." ~ Paracelsus

"Shamanism is not, in these traditional societies, a terribly pleasant office. Shamans are not normally allowed to have any political power, because they are sacred. The shaman is to be found sitting at the headman's side in the council meetings, but after the council meeting he returns to his hut at the edge of the village. Shamans are called on in crisis, and the crisis can be someone dying or ill, a psychological difficulty, a marital quarrel, a theft, or weather that must be predicted.” Terence McKenna.
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"Shamanism is not, in these traditional societies, a terribly pleasant office. Shamans are not normally allowed to have any political power, because they are sacred. The shaman is to be found sitting at the headman's side in the council meetings, but after the council meeting he returns to his hut at the edge of the village. Shamans are called on in crisis, and the crisis can be someone dying or ill, a psychological difficulty, a marital quarrel, a theft, or weather that must be predicted.” Terence McKenna.

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Nick Routledge@nick_routledge · 15 Sept 2022

@SophiaCycles Claiming the human mind "caught between the downward reductionism of the mechanists and the upward reductionism of the spiritualists," geologian Thomas Berry also identified a form of 'anthropocentric autism' inherent to the schism and the root therapeutic illiteracy it sustains. x.com/covidyoga/status/1364322840003047427

It is the nature of indigenous communities that everybody within them embodies such equilibrium to some extent. But the shaman-healer or medicine-person is the exemplary voyager in this regard. Here's David Abram in Spell of the Sensuous: "Countless anthropologists have managed to overlook the ecological dimension of the shaman's craft...Only those persons who, by their everyday practice, are involved in monitoring and modulating the relations between the human village and the larger animate environment, are able to appropriately diagnose, treat, and ultimately relieve personal ailments and illnesses arising within the village...Hence, the traditional magician or "medicine person" functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer.
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It is the nature of indigenous communities that everybody within them embodies such equilibrium to some extent. But the shaman-healer or medicine-person is the exemplary voyager in this regard. Here's David Abram in Spell of the Sensuous: "Countless anthropologists have managed to overlook the ecological dimension of the shaman's craft...Only those persons who, by their everyday practice, are involved in monitoring and modulating the relations between the human village and the larger animate environment, are able to appropriately diagnose, treat, and ultimately relieve personal ailments and illnesses arising within the village...Hence, the traditional magician or "medicine person" functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer.

Without a continually adjusted awareness of the relative balance or imbalance between the local culture and its nonhuman environment, along with the skills necessary to modulate that primary relation, any "healer" is worthless - indeed, not a healer at all. The medicine person's primary allegiance, then, is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded - it is from this that her or his power to alleviate human illness derives... Mimicking the indigenous shaman's curative methods without knowledge of his or her relation to the wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the focus of disease from place to place within the human community. For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the living land that sustains it... Only in reciprocity with what is Other do we begin to heal ourselves."
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Without a continually adjusted awareness of the relative balance or imbalance between the local culture and its nonhuman environment, along with the skills necessary to modulate that primary relation, any "healer" is worthless - indeed, not a healer at all. The medicine person's primary allegiance, then, is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded - it is from this that her or his power to alleviate human illness derives... Mimicking the indigenous shaman's curative methods without knowledge of his or her relation to the wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the focus of disease from place to place within the human community. For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the living land that sustains it... Only in reciprocity with what is Other do we begin to heal ourselves."

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