THE FORCE OF THE PRIMAL # 3a

Lessons from the hunter-gatherers and other indigenous wisdoms

 SKILLS RESULTING FROM THE PRIMAL LIFE 

The Field

Most of the Field is Unknowable – more was made knowable to indigenous peoples, yogis, sages and mystics.  

“Whatever being (Still, Growing, Wild or Talking) comes to be,     be it motionless (Still Beings) or moving, derives its being from Field and Knower (The Creator) of the Field.” Bhagavad Gita

"Out there beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a Field. I will meet you there..." Rumi

Information, knowledge, doubt, denial, disbelief, ego and judgment get in our way of being there.

 God’s voice is heard in quietness and stillness. Beware the noises of ego which drown out the Divine Spirit.

"Blessed are the meek..." Jesus

The Bushmen easily adopted qualities usually seen in mystical communities. In my time with them they seemed to naturally embrace humility and ego subordination, a lack of judgmental attitudes, an unconditional positive regard for each other and an unconditional love for children. Their healers especially had open and loving hearts. They slept on the earth together around the fire. It was all for one and one for all in order to survive.

The indigenous mind was schooled by their experiences in nature. 

It is better to experience the learning than to learn the experience (we usually do the opposite.)

“Kabir talks only about what he has lived through. If you have not lived through it, it is not true.” 

Wilderness was their Yoga and their Zen until civilization’s temptations intruded. Before that they were mindful of needs, not wants. They enjoyed the magic of polarity balance and entrainment in the natural meditation offered by the wildness around them. This helped them to find the middle way of the Buddha. They learned to coexist with the dark, the negative and the profane with acceptance and realizing it was part of the necessary tension required for the magical to occur.

Balance is achieved by harmonizing polarities. Dualities come into harmony by negotiating a third or middle path, a path not of assimilation but a path of coexistence.

    They adopted a profound connection to Gaia - their Earth Mother.    Their spiritual practice of being immersed in nature gave them the vibration required to travel out of body during their healing trance dance and obtain non-local information, protection and healing critical to the clan. 

There are many paths to the mystery wisdom exuding from the growing things that surround us, from the color of the sky and  from all the Beings of nature.

Magical Powers

The Out of Body Spirit Trance Dance

With their trance dance and mastery of Num the San Bushmen describe similar energetic phenomena mostly seen in advanced spiritual practitioners such as; heat rising up the spine, creeping sensations, tingling, vibrating, shaking, light experiences, inner sounds and smells, an empty mind (“my thoughts were nothing in my head”), connection with Self (“I feel my-Self again”), out of body experiences and astral travel, paranormal powers, spontaneous movements including adopting yoga-like postures, paralysis, falling and mastery of fire.

Rock art left by them showed some of the visions they experienced in trance such as: The large body experience – as they travelled out of body they saw themselves below, as a much larger, elongated figure. We also see this in Native American rock art.

Beyond the veil they connected with their ancestors and some, even saw an anthropomorphic representation of the Great Spirit; "when I make myself very small," (Bushmen healer to Richard Katz in his book Boiling Energy.)

The Medicine Person or "Shaman"(The Seer")

and Healing

With our potions and charms we arouse in the sick one’s brain the will to be healthy. Without the strong will to be alive a human can be carried into the valleys of death by even the mildest sickness.” Credo Mutwa

 Credo Mutwa a Zulu sangoma, or more accurately a sanusi or prophet, was profound in his spiritual teachings.

The soul is like an orb inside which are two worms, one blue, the other red that move constantly. The blue represents good and the red, evil.  These components balance the soul. A balance of the two is essential for all souls to exist. If there is only blue or good, the soul cannot long survive. If there is only red or evil the person deserves not to survive”
Credo Mutwa 

There is similar Native American teaching about a grandfather explaining the soul to his grandson. “Within all of us there are two wolves fighting for domination – the one good and the other evil.” His grandson asks, “which wolf wins?”  and the elder answers, the one you feed.

How does one integrate the intuitive - how does one learn it?
The thing about a shaman is that s/he is able to integrate left brain - right brain and have whole brain function and this comes out of initiation.
You cannot just "think" it for it to happen – it is a process that comes from the training.

“Shamanism as an inner experience is timeless. It as old as the moment when humans first observed that night follows day and day follows night. The shaman is s/he who walks with the elements, he who speaks with the wind, he who travels through space, and who sings to the music when the music dances his song. The shaman is the son of the fire. The shaman is s/he who keeps himself like a river – never the same but always one thing. The shaman is the son of Pachamama.” James Chaski Arevalo

“He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope” Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All medicine men and women, shamans or similar, inspire hope through their charm, charisma, compassion and their competence in doing magical divinations or rituals. They enhance the power of placebo. Allopathic medicine, often unknowingly, does the opposite by invoking nocebo with prognoses and describing every detail of all the mishaps that could occur when obtaining the legally required informed consent.

"Only love can generate the healing fire,”  

Agnes Sanford 

Possession, trance channelling and getting scripted information from spirit guides in and out of the dream state

Indigenous peoples were connected to their ancestors and guides in the dream state and in real time. Some hunters did not follow the spoor they just "knew" where to go. Their guides were telling them in one way or another.

Spirit guides are not subject to time and space. They are always around but not always to be known, always within call but not always to be heard, always present but not always to be sensed, always holding us, but not always to be felt.

The San Bushen travelled out of body - astral travel - in the trance state to get information that told them where to find water and where to hunt the next day, who might be sick, how to find a lost child...

The Bantu healers of Southern Africa differ from their Bushmen neighbors in getting "possessed"during trance.The healer's ego would step aside and the spirit of an ancestor would take over and impart information not confined to the space-time continuum. 

This differs from trance channelling when the spirit is giving the channel the information without taking over the body. 

In Kabbalah this information is provided in other ways short of giving up one's free will to a spirit which is not sanctified.

“The sages who have died are present in this world to a greater extent than when they were alive.” The Zohar

“When a word is spoken in the name of its speaker his lips move in the grave. And the lips of him who utters the word move like those of the master who is dead. A sage cannot speak words of teaching unless he first links his soul to the soul of his dead teacher or to that of his teacher’s teacher.” Talmud

Knowledge of Plants

If you want to learn the language of rocks and trees you must first slow to their pace 

which is different from animals and wild flowers.

Although they are soundless they are not silent, so listen long and deeply in order to hear what hearing ears do not. 

Sacred plants are there to help us but they also have to be honored and respected. Only what is needed should be taken for the task at hand and one should show gratitude in some way.

Being of the breath of God, all creation is responsive to love, gratitude and petition.

Each as it is acknowledged becomes receptive to giving and receiving. That is how we experience the other.

 Music of the Spheres

"ˆWhen the stars of the morning sang together." Job

Pythagoras was said to be able to hear the music or singing of the spheres or the stars as did the ancient Chaldeans. The Druids called it the Oran Mo'or, the sacred tune of the universe. 

The Bushmen too talked about the singing of the stars as did the Zohar. To hear the music or sounds of the spheres requires an exquisite purity and an absence of ambient noise.

The Silence of the Stars
 
When Laurens van der Post one night - in the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen he couldn't hear the stars singing they didn't believe him. They looked at him, half-smiling. They examined his face to see whether he was joking or deceiving them… . 
Then they led him away from the crackling thorn-scrub fire and stood with him under the night sky and listened. One of them whispered; Do you not hear them now? And van der Post listened, not wanting to disbelieve, but had to answer - No. They walked him slowly like a sick man to the small dim circle of firelight and told him they were terribly sorry
And he felt even sorrier for himself and blamed his ancestors for their strange loss of hearing… David Wagoner

“Because we are stars we must walk the sky.”                      

Song of the Bushmen Lion Shamans

We should thank the stars for their song. Their light emanates from their singing and when they sing they glow. That is how they reveal themselves. 

The Zohar teaches when we pray in the morning it is a continuation of the singing of the stars.

Aldo Leopold who was a wilderness adept also seems to have heard them.

The sound of waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all.  To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers.  Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand.  Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. Aldo Leopold

In the next blog we will look at shape-shifting and animal whispering #3b