The Shamanic Journey: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Shamanism (The Therapeutic Shamanism series Book 1) by Paul Francis

Author:Paul Francis [Francis, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Francis
Published: 2017-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

How We Can Recover: and shamanism's vital role in this.

Baboons!

Biologists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share studied a troop of wild baboons in Kenya for over 20 years, starting in 1978. Sapolsky and Share called them “The Garbage Dump Troop” because the baboons took much of their food from the garbage from a nearby tourist lodge. However, the aggressive, high-status alpha males in the troop generally did not allow the lower-status males, or any females, access to the garbage. Then, infected meat in the dump led to the deaths of nearly half of the adult males in the troop, with the biggest proportion of the deaths being the aggressive, dominant males. Essentially, all the alpha males died.

Now, the Taker culture, with its view about the innateness of aggression, would tell us that what would happen next is that the beta-males would now rise up. They would seize their chance, and step into the vacancy left by the alpha-males deaths. They would become the new, dominant and aggressive leaders of the troop. But that is not what happened. Instead, aggression and bullying dropped off dramatically. New leaders did step up. But these new male leaders, in stark contrast to the previous alpha males, directed little aggression to lower-status males, and none at all towards females. Instead the troop began to spend much more time in grooming and other bonding activities, and sat closer together than they used to in the past. Blood samples taken by the scientists studying the troop showed that levels of stress hormones in the baboons showed a dramatic decrease. Most interestingly of all though, if any adolescent males showed any sign of aggressive and bullying alpha-male behaviour, then they were slapped down for it, and so grew up learning that such behaviour was not tolerated in the troop. So, the new, kinder, less stressful culture persisted. It became a permanent cultural change, passed on from one generation to the next. Even when adolescent males who had grown up in other troops joined the “Garbage Dump Troop,” those adolescents too displayed less aggressive behaviour than in other baboon troops.

The ‘great forgetting’ exists to cover up a lie. If you look at the whole of human history, and not just the period of Taker culture, it shows that for the vast majority of the time we have exhibited nothing like the levels of violence and destructiveness that we have in the last six-thousand years of the Taker culture. The violence and destructiveness of the modern, Taker culture era is cultural, not innate. And that means that it can be changed. Knowing this is ‘the great remembering'.

Taking power back.

The culture we call ‘civilisation’ is a psychopathic culture. At the time of the Fall, we handed our power over to psychopaths, and put them in charge of things. If we are to have a healthy society again, in fact if we are to survive at all, then we now have to take power back from them. It will not be easy. They will not willingly relinquish control.

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