My spiritual life, for want of a better expression, had hit a brick wall: it was the end of the road for orthodox Buddhist practice, as I saw it at any rate. It was taking me nowhere. In an effort to revive flagging spirit and soul, I decided to give the technique of shamanic journeying a go. There was nothing to lose; plus, a friend of mine was embarking on a similar experiment at the same time, so there was ready opportunity for sharing.
One of the first tasks is to find your power animal; or let the power animal find you. Shamanic literature abounds with tales of helpful power animals. Wolf, eagle, mountain lion; owl, bear, crow: these are typical animals you will read about. In my case, however, the power animal emerged from behind a thicket on the edge of a dry limestone mountain in the shape of....... a Great Ape. I was astonished to see such an animal, since I had never given any thought or consideration to this kind of creature before. It seemed to appear from nowhere. And it is at this point that the theories of behavioural psychology come tumbling down. This was no memory from childhood, no image absorbed then forgotten from my infant picture book. A repressed encounter at a zoo, a story told by an uncle. No. This really seemed like a new kid on the block.
My power animal journey came easily, effortlessly almost, despite my never having done a practice remotely like this before. It was accompanied by a remarkable release of physical and emotional energy, and a state of considerable bliss. It was as if I had opened a doorway - or, in the case of shamanic journeying, descended a tunnel - that had been ready and waiting for me for a while. It was easy, seeming the most natural thing in the world.
From then on, shamanic journeying became a regular item in my diary. To the accompaniment of recorded shamanic drumming, I would meet my animal friend and guide at the entrance to the lowerworld. Together we would descend a long, dark tunnel, to exit into a landscape of some description or another. We would walk or fly, sometimes traversing enormous distances. Typically we might then meet a female figure, who I came to regard as a teacher. Following this encounter we would plunge further and deeper into mysterious lands, engaging in all manner of adventure and bumping into all kind of beings animal, human, supernatural, or just plain weird. When the drum beat changed to the callback, the animal and I would scurry back, returning the way we had come.
I recently reviewed the journal I kept at the time, and was astonished at how much journeying I had done. Over a period of twelve months beginning in Septemer 1998 I travelled on 32 journeys. Some of it I don't recall very well. But, for a while, my life seems to have consisted mainly of teaching work Monday to Friday, with shamanic journeying sessions fitted in most weekends.
At the time, the journeys were nearly always vivid, imbued with an unmistakeable numinous reality. One of the most amazing things was that they were never 'willed' or 'intended' on my part. Sometimes I set off with a distinct purpose, on other occasions simply to explore, but the events taking place during the course of these journeys were always independent of 'me' guiding or directing. I was not so much the creator of the narrative, but a character who turned up in a story that was taking place anyhow.
The journeys seemed to open a doorway into another layer of consciousness. As can happen with psychedelics, it was very different to 'normal' experience, and worked in very different ways. At the same time, it appeared very close, just around the corner, a storehouse just waiting to be tapped into.
I didn't 'understand' it very much at all, but my instinct was that this was very important if you wanted to know how things and the universe work. It was my friend who was experimenting with journeying at the same time who put me onto Jung. I was amazed to read about Jung's nekyia, or 'night-sea journey'. He would deliberately descend, or fall into, a dark tunnel, and meet a whole bundle of characters that he would later refer to as archetypal images. Jung's technique and experiences during his night-sea journey mirrored precisely what my own shamanic journeys had thrown up.
Delving more deeply into Jung, I came across another idea of his which seemed to resonate, and to describe concisely what I had encountered. 'Autonomous contents of the unconscious' is the phrase he created for the figures who walked through the landscapes that I entered during the shamanic journeys. There is no need to get caught up in the minutiae of Jung's terminology, as some folk are inclined to do: endless wrangles about whether the unconscious truly exists as a thing; about whether it can be considered as having 'contents'. I prefer to take Jung's phrase as an image in itself, rather than literally.
To accept that there are 'autonomous contents' in our psyche; that our everyday conscious ego may not be ruling the roost all the time, in fact might not know what's really going on in our life: all this dramatically turns round how we regard and live our life. It should be humbling, positively so. That there may be forces running the show that we do not control is, to many people, too scary to consider. It's a reality that will truly bring that Tower in the Tarot crashing down. It is a notion that is anathema to much of the edifice of modern society, built as it is on the values and ambitions of a cut-off ego. It is this sense of being individuals isolated in our ego-structures, ego-wishes, ego-insecurities that is manipulated and exploited in the constant clarion calls to personal ambition, success and fear of failure, material gains, career path etc etc. Listen to, make conscious, the voices issuing from the figures roaming around the lowerworld, and much of this just gets blown away.
In my case, I have at times found the emanations from the unconscious scary - very scary. At the same time, an abiding curiosity that amounts to a personal need, has led me to explore this element in life. To live a complete, whole life means calling up, having a decent chat with, whoever, whatever, might be around in the realm of psyche that is all that I know, all that I am. This is not a 'path' that I have chosen. It feels truer to say that it has been chosen for me; 'I' have had little say in the matter.
After that year, journeying became more intermittent but still powerful. I continued for another eighteen months or so, but by that time the effectiveness of the technique had begun to wane, with the journeys becoming less vivid and themes increasingly repetitive. I eventually stopped, apart from the very occasional venture. Looking back, maybe I didn't need to make so many trips to the lowerworld, and could instead have spent more time reflecting on and absorbing what had been happening. I don't know. For sure, I ended up with a real bucketload of archetypal adventures, many of whose sense and meaning continue to elude me. But I became familar with a different and special landscape, intuitively coming to know how to negotiate its features and how the whole thing worked. Since then, life has not been quite the same.
Image: from our friends at Reality Sandwich
