Beyond the Human Imagination

The Construction of Shamanic death can be seen as the release of the imaginistic from the confines and parameters of the dualistic and mundane mood of consciousness. This area cannot be accessed through the modes of thought that are prior to initiatory experience of death. A new mood structure has to be encountered in order to understand the imaginistic. I use the word encounter because the first principle of understanding this area is the realization that death means the death of the prior form of consciousness and the releasement from all aspirations to ego-related control structures.

The term "mood structure" is used with care. The entrance into this territory is sometimes described as a ‘tracking’ or a form of ‘scenting’. It is related to what we understand by an emotional response rather than an analytic one. It is aligned to a feeling and a sensing, a form of remote sensing which defies attempts at entrance by logocentric methods. All that the rational achieves in any attempt to enter this region is to reinforce the inadequacy of this approach in our minds. In The Mushrooms of Language, Henry Munn describes the entrance into the imaginative world of the shaman.

"Let us go to the cornfield looking for the tracks of the spirits' feet in the warm ground. So then let us go walking ourselves along the path in search of significance, following the words of two discourses enregistered like tracks on magnetic tapes."

"Let's go searching for the tracks of her feet to encounter the sickness that she is suffering from. Animals in her heart? Let's go searching for the tracks of her feet, the tracks of her nails. That it be alleviated and healed where it hurts. What are we going to do to get rid of this sickness?

In this sort of experience the relationship between language and thought is not the subject and object directed form of thought of mundane experience. Rather, the shaman is the prey of language. The imagination of death becomes new imagination precisely because the imagination has been released, or prised by death, from the strictures of the mundane consciousness.

"It is not I who speak," said Heraclitus, "it is the logos." Language is an ecstatic activity of signification. Intoxicated by the mushrooms, the fluency, the ease, the aptness of expression one becomes capable of are such that one is astounded by the words that issue forth experience. At times it is as if one were being told what to say, for the words leap to mind, one after another, of themselves without having to be searched for : a phenomenon similar to the automatic dictation of the surrealists except that here the flow of consciousness, from the contact of the intention of articulation with the matter of rather than being disconnected, tends to be coherent: a rational enunciation of meanings. Message fields of communication with the world, others, and one's self are disclosed….."

THE IMAGINATIVE METHOD

"And the method of looking, from the right side to the left side, is the articulation of now this intuition, fact, feeling or wish, now that, the intention of speaking bringing to light meanings whose associations and further elucidations are like the discovery of a path where the contents to be uttered are tracks to be followed into the unexplored the unknown and unsaid into which she adventures by language, the seeker of significance, the questioner of significance, the articulator of significance: the significance of existence that,signifies with signs by the action of speaking the experience of existence. "

(p.94.Ibid.)

If we compare the above to the imaginative journey into Hades by Hillman, we see obvious correspondences.

"So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of refection, by reflective means: pausing, pondering, change of pace, voice, or glance, dropping levels. Such reflection is less willed and directed; it is less determinedly introspective like a heroic descent into the underworld to see what's going on there. Let us rather imagine it to be more Hermetic, a cocked ear, a sideways look, a suspicious fish eye, or intuitional feel- ings and thoughts that appear in the midst of life and twist life into psyche. "

The references that Hillman makes in the above is an attempt to describe the Shamanic poise, the methodology of the Shamanic praxis which is not a calculated or logical movement but one that listens and leans intuitively in the direction of the sound that is given.

There is a completely different mood structure that is suggested in the above piece which must not be mistaken for a sort of imprecision or vagueness. The hearing and the intention of the Shamanic shifts in consciousness have an intense correctness in them. This intensity is informed by death itself and it is a precise moving which occurs on the very edge of the nerves. What Hillman is also suggesting is that the directional movements or positioning in the Shamanic mood structure is attuned to the everyday items that appear before it; always alert to those things that "appear in the midst of life and twist life into psyche." It is in this framework that the imaginal has to be thought. It is also this context or mood structure that Martin Heidegger explores in his later works. Furthermore, the praxis of Zen Buddhism advocates a similar attention to the everyday in order to see beyond the boundaries of the mundane into the self-transformation of all that is . To see the is-ness of what-is. The shadow of death is constantly the informer, the agent, and the necessary precursor to such a mood structure. Death provides the urgency and the need to see and hear without any unnecessary boundaries. One could say that the mood structure that the Shaman and the western searcher find is enravelled in death and embedded in it. This again challenges, if not destroys, the conception of death as only an exit. This area is worth a lifetime of study but would take us too far at present from our immediate subject.

THE SHAMANIC IMAGINATION

"I am he who speaks with the father mountain. I am he who speaks with danger, I am going to sweep in the mountains of fear, in the mountains of nerves." "I am he who speaks with the father mountain. I am he who speaks with danger, I am going to sweep in the mountains of fear, in the mountains of nerves."

"The conception of existence manifested by the Shaman’s words is one of peril, anxiety, and terror: experiences of which he has become knowledgeable by virtue of his own traumas, his life as a hunter, and his adventures into the weird, secret regions of the psyche. Where there is foreboding and trembling, the medicine man tranquilizes by exorcising the causes of disturbance. His work lies among the nerves, not in the underworld, but on the heights, places of as much anguish as the depths, where the elation of elevation is accompanied by the fear of falling into the void of chasms."

THE ALIEN IMAGINATON

"Where the tenderness of San Francisco Huehuetlan is, says. where the Holy Virgin of San Lucas is, says. Where San Francisco Tecoatl is, says. San Geronimo Tecoatl, says." He begins to name the towns of his mountainous environment, to call the land- scape into being by language and transform the real into signs. It is no imaginary world of fantasy he is creating, as those one has become accustomed to hearing of from the accounts of dreamers under the effects of such psychoactive chemicals, fabled lands of nostalgia, palaces, and jewelled perspectives, but the real world in which he lives and works transfigured by his visionary journey and its linguistic expression into a surreal realm where the physical and the mental fuse to produce the glow of an enigmatic signifi- cance."

There is a very important difference between fantasy and imagination, the imaginary. Whereas he former is a construct limited to subjective predilections, the later is the imaginry which is informed by the meaning of death.

" Fantasy is mere nonsense, a phantasm, a fleeting impression; but imagination is active, purposeful creation . . . A fantasy is more or less your own invention, and remains on the surface of personal things and conscious expectations. But active imagination, as the term denotes, means that the images have a life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their own logic."

The reference in the above to "their own logic" provides a clue as to the meaning of the imaginary. It refers to that freedom from the constraints of pettiness and the dimensionality of expansion that the experience of death-in-life provides.

THE MODERN IMAGINATION

" We now possess a technique that permits us to create the foundations of mental processes that have never before existed, processes for which words like " sensation," "perception," " desire," " thought," and " decision," are inappropriate, since they describe only processes we already know. In short, the statement that we can now create new forms of life implies that we can now create " spirits" that we are incapable of understanding. Is this not a description of magic, and of the magical power that is said to characterize artistic creation?"

From the above statement we could turn to thinkers like Martin Heidegger who realized the potential of non-conceptual thought in his attention to Listening and Hearkening. The resemblance of the most contemporary of modern thinking to that of Shamanism is evident. Flusser suggest pictures from calculations. This is an interesting aspect, if we see calculations as estimates of mood configurations, and not calculations in the linear sense.

" The new imagination involves the capacity to make pictures of calculations."

" The old imagination produces pictures of things. ....to clarify them we use writing.. and thus permit an orderly handling oft he world. But writing is linear..."

" With each key they press they enter into a field of virtualities. Entire worlds emerge that the themselves had not expected. A new level of existence is opening up, with new experiences, sensations, emotions, concepts and values proper to it. Homo sapiens is about to bring a faculty into play that so far has only been dormant."

Two aspects of above are significant for our discussion.
1) the revolutionary magical attitude towards life and
(2) the conversion of desires etc. through the entrance into a mood structure or mode of thought which is alien and radically different to the textures of the past. The question that may be asked at this juncture in terms of imagination is whether the computer or any other human device is not already and intrinsically limited in its conception?

"From the point of view religious symbolism, this preoccupation of modern man with his historical and existential situation springs from an unconscious sense of its impending end. It is in this unenviable position, then, that we find the modern temper: anguished by the imminence of Death, yet trapped in profane, historical nothingness; the saving presence of a sacred, transcendent mode of being is absent from the contemporary world view. Thus modern man stands today at the very edge of the abyss of death and nothingness"

".. and it is precisely here that one can perceive a useful role for a modern shamanism… there is a need for a doctor of the soul, a figure who can bring mankind again into close and fruitful confrontation with the collective unconscious, the creative matrix of all that we are and have ever been."

But such an imagination must, in the very first instance, conform to the teachings of death and the experience of initiation. The imagination that we are speaking of is not the subject centered imagination of the ego structure, and therefore can have no human theoretical or conceptual basis. Art becomes a possible medium for this imagination.

" Naturally, the modern shaman will have to search for means of fulfilling his psychopompic functions which are different from the relatively straightforward ritualistic techniques of his predecessor. One of the most potentially effective of such means lies in his artistic and poetic capacities; the soul of modern man is still open to influence by aesthetic means. Hence one of the first places we should look for signs of a modern shamanism is in the artistic sphere. "

To stress the difference in the use of the word artistic, McKenna continues with the central idea of art but includes the scientist in this definition. This points to the difference in what is perceived to be artistic and the permeation of boundaries in an artistic encounter based on the transformation of consciousness which emerges through the understanding of death.

"Although it is not too difficult to recognize the role of the artist in the modem world as being in some sense shamanic, it is perhaps more difficult to understand our second nomination for a contemporary counterpart to the shamanic practitioner, the scientific researcher. Eliade (1967) has pointed out that scientists are the creators and keepers of a new mythology of matter. Indeed, the scientist who charts the unexplored levels of organization to be found in nature, from the bizarre paradoxical realms of quantum physics to the staggering vastness of the metagalaxy, has much in common with the shaman who journeys through the magical topography of the spirit-world.

The Imaginary and Surrealistic.

" Long live the painting of the imaginary! The only one worthy to express fully that knowledge of the world and that will to transform it which constitutes the primary moral qualifications of the whole human search. But what is the imaginary but the future of reality, and for what values must we battle for if not far those, in a century in which we are swept by our revolutions, and why are we not at liberty to prefer this 'future of reality' to the now famous' reality of the future' which at this very moment is exhibited in full daylight and is coloured with the sinister tints of reactionism, of overpopulation, and of the bomb?"

Here the distinction between the imagined and the imaginary is a key to the understanding of some of the problematics of post-modern theory. As Aldo Pellegrini phrases it "The imaginary constitutes the world of pure invention, and has nothing to do with planned and rationalized fantasy".(Ibid., p. 285.)

The Imagined constitutes the planned, logocentric efforts of man to create and re-create his world within the limits of a world view already constituted. On the other hand the imaginary is a move away from the confinement of restructuring, or reassembling in different ways to that, which is already there. This leads to a direct encounter with the unknown and the impossible, beyond the confines of a predetermined human subjective sensibility. This summarizes the Surrealist mode of action.

The conflict that underlies the problem of modern art and literature is between world and language ideologies. No matter how these structures are decentred or distorted, there is still a need to extend art beyond these areas of constraint. It has been realized, and this is the essential problem that many see in modernism, that although the ' old' realities may be criticized and totally rejected in favor of something new, yet it is the foundations on which these old realities are based rather than their outer manifestations that have to be swept away. It is not enough to pay lip service to the idea of a new dispensation form modern art and yet still retain the substructures that inform and perpetuate the old. And, at the most fundamental level, it is the tyranny of a vision of reality that must always be reduced to the standards of a specified human scale and that must simply recycle and reshape the already given, that provides this unseen foundation.

The Expansion of the Imaginary

Guénon sees the meaning of true knowledge, firstly as not being bound to the human point of reference.

" our dwelling on the human order implies in no way that the human state occupies a privileged rank in the ensemble of universal Existence, or that it is metaphysically distinguished in relation to other states by the possession of any prerogative. This human state is in reality only one state of manifestation, like all the others, and among an indefinity of others; it is situated in the hierarchy of the degrees of Existence in the place assigned to it by its own nature, that is, by the limiting character of the conditions which define it, and this place confers on it neither superiority nor absolute inferiority. If we must sometimes envisage this human state in particular, it is solely because, being the state in which we find ourselves, it thereby acquires an especial importance for us-but for us alone. This is only an altogether relative and contingent point of view: that of the individuals which we are in our present mode of manifestation. That is why, especially when we speak of superior and inferior states, it is always to make this hierarchical division from the human point of view, taken as the only term of comparison directly graspable by us as individuals."

Guénon moves the point at which any discussion of imagination beyond the purely human realm and sees the nature of human existence as a composite of multiple states of being, an interpenetration in the Hwa Yen philosophical sense of many dimensions which cannot be dualistically envisaged.

" It must not be forgotten that since every expression is an enclosure in a form and therefore effective in the individual mode, when we wish to speak of anything, even purely metaphysical truths, we can do so only by descending to an altogether different order-an essentially limited and relative one-in order to translate them into the language of human individuals. our dwelling on the human order implies in no way that the human state occupies a privileged rank in the ensemble of universal Existence, or that it is metaphysically distinguished in relation to other states by the possession of any prerogative. "

" Furthermore, to avoid all possible confusion, it must be understood from now on that when we speak of the multiple states of being it is not a matter of a simple numerical or even more generally "quantitative" multiplicity, but rather of a "transcendent" multiplicity, of a truly universal order, applicable to all the domains that constitute the different "worlds" or degrees of Existence, considered separately or all together. This multiplicity is outside and beyond the special domain of number and even of quantity in all its modes. Quantity, in fact, and more particularly number (which is only one of its modes, namely that of discontinuous quantity), is but one of the conditions which determine certain states, amongst which is our own. It cannot therefore be transported to other states, and still less can it be applied to states which obviously escapes such a determination. That is why, when we speak in this respect of an indefinite multitude, we should always be careful to observe that the indefinity in question exceeds all number, and also everything to which quantity is more or less directly applicable, such as spatial and temporal indefinity, which are similarly relevant only to the conditions of our world."

Hence the difficulty that we encounter in understanding the Shamanic and the ease in which the Shamanic suffers reductionism at the hands of anthropologists and others. The same applies to the idea of illness, death and imagination.

The imaginative world is more than the fantasies of the human subject running through the possible permutations of the this world. According to Guénon, the infinite, and in our sense the imagination as infinite, " cannot admit of any restriction, which supposes that it is absolutely unconditioned and indeterminate, for all determination is necessarily a limitation simply because it must leave something outside itself..." (Ibid.p.28)

Guénon analyses the mode of western thought as a series of philosophical systems which, by their very nature, are closed from the infinite. This prefigures the work of Martin Heidegger and brings us closer to the problem of western consciousness. The importance of this for the west is expressed in Heidegger’s radical critique of Western Metaphysics.

The danger that Guénon saw in the thinking that remained confined to the human system of thought is echoed in the works of Heidegger as a crisis of such proportions as to threaten the continued existence of mankind. Man, for Heidegger, has forgotten Being. This statement, often misconstrued as being a fit of nostalgia, is in fact the realization of the separation between man's consciousness an his connectivity with the unverse as a living entity. The true nature of man lies in the Heidggerian concept of dasein which was initiated into existence by its appropriation with Ereignis. The true nature of man lay in the connectivity with the larger dimension of himself with his states of multiple being and infinity. The Shamanic imaginative is not a creation fashioned from the limited field of one world or dimension, but is a contact with and an entering into the infinite as an appropriation of the infinite through the appropriateness of authenticity. The Shaman, throughout the illness-unto-death, is given and appropriates forms of imagination which are active beyond the confines of his human limitations.

" Part of the shaman's activity consists in the trance. During initiation and during artistic creation the essential thing for the shaman is a displacement of the plane of consciousness. Clear consciousness is eliminated. Images are activated on another plane of consciousness. These images are always taken from the world-view, mythology, and religion of the tribe or culture group in question. But instead of these images being given form in a conscious state, this takes place in an unconscious or subconscious state. The shaman sings, dances, mimes-he may even paint and draw in a trance, from which he then awakes. Once awake he often no longer remembers, or remembers only dimly, his actions while in the trance. If the calling to be a shaman may be described as a kind of selfcure of a profound psychosis, `shamanizing' consists in a repetition of this healing process."

In Hillman's work The Dream and the Underworld, the imaginal psyche is "placed more definitely within a psychology of dreams and of death. . . ." Depth psychology becomes now "a bridge downward"; it must begin in the mythological under- world, i.e., "with the perspective of death." However, the. world of Hades is not the place of decay or literal death. Hades, the brother of Zeus, is synchronous with life: it gives to life its depth and its soul. Somewhat as in Heidegger, the end of life for Hillman is "not in time but in death"-the "ghostly twilight."
(p. 87. Avens: 1984.)

For Hillman the entrance into death and Hades is the entrance into a region which we can describe as the true imagination.

"…earth in the imaginstic and psychological sense means "the telos or fulfillment of anything . . we can stop anywhere, because from the final point of view everything is an end in itself the goal is always now." Hades is celos as "the unseen one and yet absolutely present." Rilke has expressed the integral phenomenon of life-in-death and death-in-life in a way that should satisfy both Heidegger and Hillman. Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished from both . . . there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the 'angels', are at home. . . . We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it; we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us.