> Once taken out of their milieu, and into this large and universally
> studied, comprehended, uncomprehended, perceived and shared universe, no
> shaman's magic is measurable.
> It is also rarely useful, although I do not deny all utility.
>
> What there is transferable from shamanic magic into this universe ruled
> by the Random Quanta is not magic, nor is it separate from this universe.
> Claims of 'otherness' is always a sham.
I do have work to do today, so I'm definitely slacking in taking the
time to transcribe more of "The Spell of the Sensuous" but this passage
seems to speak rather directly to your concerns about "otherness."
------------------------------------------------------------
"To be sure, the shaman's ecological function, his or her role as
intermediary between human society and the land, is not always obvious
at first blush, even to a sensititve observer. We see the sorcerer being
called upon to cure an ailing tribesman of his sleeplessness, or perhaps
simply to locate some missing goods; we witness him entering into trance
and sending his awareness into other dimensions in search of insight and
aid. Yet we should not be so ready to interpret these dimensions as
"supernatural," nor to view them as realms enterely "internal" to the
personal psyche of the practitioner. For it is likely that the "inner
world" of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural
heaven of Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral
reciprocity with the animate earth. When the animate powers that
surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than
ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly definded as a
determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the
sense of a wild and multiplicitious otherness (in relation to which
human existecnce has always oriented itself) must migrate, either into a
supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human
skull itself--the only allowable refuge in this world, for what is
ineffable and unfathomable.
"But in genuinely oral, indigenous cultures, the sensouos world itself
remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can
either sustain or extinguish human life. It is not by sending his
awareness out beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact the
purveyors of life and health, nor by journeying into his personal
psyche: rather it is by propelling his awareness laterally, outward into
the depths of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the
living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the
stone silently sprouting lichens on it coarse surface."
And this, from "Time and the art of Living" by Robert Grudin;
"Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and
aspects of it from each position, but never the whole work, we must walk
mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of
metaphor. No insight or association, however outlandish or
contradictory, should be forbidden us; the only thing forbidden should
be to stand and say, "This is it.""
Anyway, back to the grindstone. Take care.
-KMO