Future Primal: How Our Wilderness Origins Show Us the Way Forward by Louis G. Herman

Author:Louis G. Herman [Herman, Louis G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608681167
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2013-02-28T22:00:00+00:00

The crossing of boundaries also deepens the four primal values — each within itself as well as the back-and-forth dynamic among them. Kia expands the soul beyond the socially constrained persona, actualizing hidden potential. The dance begins by crossing the mind-body boundary as the stamping, singing, and clapping come together in a single shared intention. “Dancing makes your body happy,” one shaman has said. Deeper levels of trance give the experience of encountering the animal within, the gatekeeper of the spirit world. Since “animal” is one of the complementary opposites of “human,” moving into animal consciousness helps expand one’s sense of self to include a richer spectrum of opposites — beyond what is conventionally good and bad. Keeney learned this earlier in his quest from a Cheyenne medicine man, William Tall Bull. Keeney writes that Tall Bull asked him: “How can you help others unless you know what it feels like to be drunk, financially broke, and filled with guilt?”

Tall Bull tells Keeney he knows too much about being good; he says, “Go out and make a fool of yourself. Then you can come back and I might teach you something else.” So Keeney practiced being a bad boy, flunking out of class, cursing, drinking, and generally going over the top.

I learned to recognize and appreciate the integrity of scoundrels, gangsters, tricksters and outsiders. Different truths are revealed when you change where you stand in life. From the muddy swamps, the successful city slicker looks rather moronic in the manicured suits and sterilized fingernails. As all good and low-down radicals know, from the outlook of Deep Truth the whole culture appears as a greed machine devoted to making profit off of ignorance and addictions. I went way down and got some views that changed me forever. That was part of my becoming a shaman.34

This is also the teaching of the whole person C. G. Jung recommended to the would-be psychoanalyst: “to bid farewell to his study and wander with human heart through the world” in order to “know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.”35 We can also understand this teaching as a therapeutic version of the Greek ideal of the whole person — that is, pursuing arete, human excellence, by exploring strong and extreme experiences, by integrating opposites into the health and beauty of the whole human being.

As I discussed earlier, for Jung a central part of this process involved integrating the shadow aspects of our psyche into consciousness. Everything ugly, primitive, abnormal, antisocial, and evil fills this cauldron of forgotten traumas, transgressions, impulses, and potentialities. Erich Neumann was one of the first of the Jungian thinkers to develop an ethic and a politics out of this Jungian concept. In Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, he points out that the processes of individuation, or psychological maturity and spiritual growth, all converge in the cultivation of a “living relationship with the shadow.” Such a relation brings home to the ego its solidarity with the

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