Blue Fox Shaman

Let’s dive right in with a little story about the family of Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic psychology.

Jung’s mother was an eccentric and depressed woman; she spent considerable time in her bedroom, where she said that spirits visited her at night. Although she was normal during the day, Jung recalled that at night his mother became strange and mysterious. He reported that one night he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from her room with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body. Jung had a better relationship with his father. [Wikipedia article on Carl Jung: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung%5D

Ya think!?!

In another Wikipedia article on the Jungian concepts of the “Anima and Animus” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_and_animus) we find the following:

Jungians warned that “every personification of the unconscious—the shadow, the anima, the animus, and the Self—has both a light and a dark aspect. … the anima and animus have dual aspects: They can bring life-giving development and creativeness to the personality, or they can cause petrification and physical death”.

One danger was of what Jung termed “invasion” of the conscious by the unconscious archetype: “Possession caused by the anima … bad taste: the anima surrounds herself with inferior people”. Jung insisted that “a state of anima possession … must be prevented. The anima is thereby forced into the inner world, where she functions as the medium between the ego and the unconscious, as does the persona between the ego and the environment”.

Alternatively, over-awareness of the anima or animus could provide a premature conclusion to the individuation process—”a kind of psychological short-circuit, to identify the animus at least provisionally with wholeness“. [emphasis mine]

Now, what could we possibly want you to get from all this? What has this got to do with Self Mastery? Are we writing this while intoxicated, again? No. Please be patient and we shall reveal all. But first, allow us to point out, as these paragraphs suggest, the Way of Self Mastery is hard, fraught with danger, and (we would add) never “done”. Nevertheless, it is a way whose guiding principles, like the stars of The Great Dipper, may help direct us, even though we will never reach the stars themselves, at least in this mortal sphere…

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. [Matthew 7:14]

Wait, wait! But this is now. How, in our secular Western culture, are we to follow the path of Self Mastery today? Who will teach us? Perhaps the mantle of teaching has fallen on our beloved and long-suffering Psychologists, especially the Jungians, and ye others who are recognized as Counselors by the State, or by the Almighty … Dollar. (Yes, we are looking at you, Tony Robbins!) May the Powers That Be grant that you teach it aright and not descend into, or lead those under your care into, the path of Self Aggrandizement.

Ahem! Maybe we can help you out with this… Which way did you come in?Seriously, we’ll stop with the jokes. It’s time to get this Self Mastery thing figured out. Let’s call in the Big Guns:

Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.
If you realize that you have enough,
you are truly rich.
If you stay in the center
and embrace death with your whole heart,
you will endure forever.
[Tao Te Ching 33]

You knew we were going to bring in the Tao te Ching, didn’t you?! Come on, admit it, you thought of it yourself! What else can we do, now that the Great Sage has expressed it concisely and clearly, but shut up and sit down?!

[cue inspirational music, roll credits…]

Uhhm, WAIT! Not so fast! We haven’t given you your homework assignments yet. (Boy! are we going to get slammed on Rate your Professor!)

Actually, the homework is there in that passage of the Tao te Ching, but you might not… well, okay, let’s go through each line.

“Knowing others is intelligence.” Yes, pretty clear. It’s a smart thing to know what makes others tick, in both cooperative and competitive relationships.

“Knowing yourself is true wisdom.” Yeah. Because you have rightly evaluated both your strengths and weaknesses and allowed for them in your planning. Brilliant! (Oh, sorry, the Mystics are raising their hands. Yes? … Oh, yes of course, this could also refer to the wisdom that arises when you see that you are God/Divine/Saved/Initiated. That’s also known as Self Realization. Yes, you’re right, this lies on the same path, dontcha know. Good catch!)

“Mastering others is strength.” You see the parallels forming here, yes? We might suggest a slightly different interpretation than the usual, however. Usually people will say, oh, “mere strength”, not (as it says in the next line) “true power”, implying that that one is morally, or somehow, superior to the other. Quite often it is just so. But how about “Leading others is powerful”? If you can truly master leadership, the type of leadership that values, nurtures and allows for both the strengths and weaknesses of those you lead, you will (all) be strong. Nice!

So, then, if that’s good, what does the next line mean by “mastering yourself is true power”? Probably just this– if you can apply this same type of leadership to the psychic elements of your own personality, oh boy! Look out! You got a heap of power. And this time the right kind of power. True power.

Since this blog is about Shamanism, I am obliged to put this in terms familiar to those cultures (or sub-cultures) that follow that way. This is Mastery of the Spirits. So, now that you know the true way, and highest purpose, for undertaking the Otherworld Journey, you probably have everything you need, except perhaps to refine the Art of Divination, which really should be part of every Shaman’s bag of tricks anyway. For the rest of you, or those Shaman’s who would like a little more “oomph!” in their practice, read on. (What?! Has Carlos Castaneda given you an inferiority complex? Did you expect anything less?)

Jung saw two ways in which the quest for wholeness can go wrong: his mother was most likely the model for those who experience what he would later call “anima possession”, and his father a model for the “premature conclusion to the individuation process”. (The Wikipedia article on Jung states ‘…whereas “father” meant for him reliability but also powerlessness.’)

Uh oh! There’s that word again–“power”. Or, in this case, “powerlessness”, a lack of power. A lack of True power. Why? Because of a “premature conclusion to the individuation process”. In other words, ya gotta stick with it. Oh, and by the way, it’s a path, not a destination. The destination is where the Great Mystery is headed. We’re just along for part of the ride. Emphasis on “part”.

The other pitfall, observed by Jung, was, well… Fox will only let me say so much, but she wishes to remind her brother and sister spirits that humility is a virtue in both Ordinary and Non-ordinary realities.

But our Tao te Ching passage doesn’t stop there. There’s still some gold nuggets to mine…

“If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.” This addresses the training of the emotions through the sublimation of desires. That’s a beauty of a concept! (Er, actually, that is Beauty, as a concept.) Why has sublimation gotten such a bad rap of late? Oh, right, because we’re living in a Consumer Culture. My bad. Maybe I can just mumble something about “Heavenly Aphrodite” and move on to the next part before anyone notices.

“If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart,
you will endure forever.” My, my, this is a tricky one! The Master Jesus said something similar:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” [Luke 14:26]

Christians speak of being “born again”, and Shamans speak of undergoing “dismemberment”, which is also a kind of death and rebirth. Whatever you may believe about the afterlife, the point of all these metaphors is a change of your relationship to the “World” (by which we mean not only “Nature” but “Society”).

Let’s put it this way–imagine the aeons of time and the long chain of lives which gave rise to you, and the aeons of time and the lives linked ultimately to yours which will do their best to survive after you are gone (or will do their best because you are gone). How does that make you feel? If it makes you feel like a little piece of shit, then you’re getting closer. Of course, it should also make you wonder at the marvellous Mystery that brought forth you and will, very soon, and despite your efforts to help or hinder it, bring forth something even better. When you finally are at peace with that, when you are “ready to embrace death with your whole heart”, that is, to recognize and accept that death is a necessary part of what drives such innovation, then you’ll be on the right path.

These are the necessary first conditions, then, for fully and completely walking the path of Self Mastery–learning to deal with what you have and how much time you have been given. From there, you create the best Life you can, wielding whatever power you have in service to Nature, Mankind, and the Great Mystery. Come on, it’ll be fun, I promise. What have you got to lose? Oh, yeah, your life, that little piece of flotsam and jetsam. That isn’t going to be a problem, is it?

Before we go, let’s revisit the notion of power. Perhaps, from the moment we brought it up, you’ve been asking yourself “Are they finally going to tell me how to get some? How to keep it? How to get enough so that nobody, not even the whole Universe, can take mine away, ever again?” (Ha! we got you on that last part, didn’t we?! What did we just say about life and death?) We know you were thinking about this because that’s what your mind was made for–to think and plan how to get enough power, friends, and stuff to keep you going tomorrow and, preferably, forever. Everything we’ve said before that was like a slow-moving freight train that was keeping you from getting across the tracks to where you really wanted to go– Powerville. Right?!

Probably you’re confused because nobody talks about this. About Self Mastery, I mean. Religions don’t. Gurus don’t. Self Help gurus don’t. They’ve got a different agenda–a nice little exchange: you give us something and you get back something. But hey, it’s something even better than what you’re giving. We promise!

Self Mastery isn’t about giving up something so that somebody will see your sacrifice (or anybody else’s) and reward you with what you really wanted all along. Rather, it’s the pursuit of the Pearl of Great Price:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it. [Matthew 13:45-46]

Why didn’t Jesus say anything after that tidy little koan? Think about it. The ability to do that is a nice little bonus feature of this thing you call your mind.

So, that’s it for this session. To sum up, your homework is to walk the Way of Self Mastery using the Eight Excellences (Principles) that Fox shared with you two posts ago. (You did write those down like she asked you to, didn’t you?) Progress reports are due next week, or sooner if you kick the bucket before then. (It could happen. Just sayin’.) Questions?