Eros & Logos

Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest.

art -Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri

Eros et psyché : de l’attirance à l’union

L’histoire d’Eros et de Psyché est une merveilleuse représentation du Chemin de la conscience qui cherche à s’unir à ce qui est plus grand qu’elle, qui s’élève vers le divin, tout en restant très incarné dans le monde.

Voici le conte:

Il était une fois une belle princesse, Psyché, si belle qu’on la comparait souvent à Aphrodite, déesse de l’Amour. Mais celle-ci aurait bien voulu qu’on la demande en mariage plutôt que de la vénérer. Cependant Aphrodite, énervée qu’on veuille prendre sa place, demanda à son fils, Eros, que Psyché tombe amoureuse de l’être le plus monstrueux qui soit. Mais Eros tomba amoureux d’elle et il concocta un stratagème. Psyché fut emmenée par un doux zéphyr dans un palais inconnu incroyablement merveilleux, où tout est en or. On la pare, la restaure, et une voix suave issue d’un être invisible, Eros, lui dit qu’elle est mariée à un être merveilleux mais qu’elle ne doit jamais essayer de le voir à la lumière sous peine de le perdre pour toujours. Elle passe quelques temps ainsi à vivre le jour dans cette demeure, belle mais vide, et à retrouver Eros la nuit, sans voir sa forme humaine pourtant ravissante. Mais un jour, poussée à la fois par l’ennui et par ses soeurs qui prétendent que son époux n’est qu’un horrible monstre qui viendra un jour la dévorer, elle transgresse l’ordre d’Eros, et elle tente de le voir à la lumière de sa bougie, découvrant ainsi le plus bel homme qui soit. Mais en étant dévoilé, Eros disparaît. Il s’ensuivra toute une série d’épreuve pour Psyché qui lui sont imposées par Aphrodite pour retrouver son aimé:

– Elle devra d’abord trier en une soirée un énorme tas de grain, dont elle ne pourra arriver à bout que grâce à l’aide d’une colonie de fourmis.

– Un roseau lui viendra en aide lorsqu’elle devra rapporter à Aphrodite de la laine de la toison d’or de moutons.

– L’aigle de Zeus lui portera secours lorsqu’elle gravira une montagne pour rapporter de l’eau du Styx, le fleuve qui sépare le monde des vivants et celui des morts.

– Elle doit enfin prendre un flacon de la beauté de Perséphone, la déesse des enfers. C’en est trop pour elle, et Psyché préfère se jeter dans le vide du haut d’une tour. Mais là, la tour lui donne des instructions pour surmonter l’épreuve et arriver à amadouer Charon et Cerbère, les gardiens des enfers.

– Mais elle pense que l’onguent de Perséphone lui permettra de reconquérir Eros, ce qui la plonge dans un profond sommeil, semblable à la mort.

Mais l’amour d’Eros sera le plus grand et il la ranimera doucement avec une de ses flèches. Puis, intercédant auprès de Zeus, Eros obtint de ce dernier qu’il les unissent par le mariage, conférant en même temps à Psyché l’immortalité et un statut de déesse. Quelques temps plus tard, de l’union d’Eros et de Psyché naquit Volupté (Edoné en grec), personnification de la volupté, et du plaisir sensuel.

De nombreuses interprétations peuvent être faites cupidon-psychede ce conte raconté par Apulée au IIème siècle de notre ère. Mais celle que je voudrais partager avec vous concerne le développement de la Conscience, Psyché, dans son rapport avec l’impulsion animale de Vie, Eros. Mais qui est Eros ? Dans la mythologie grecque, il possède plusieurs représentations. Parfois il est une divinité primordiale, qui est la force à partir de laquelle le monde va pouvoir engendrer. Il est l’Amour, non encore sexué, qui va accompagner la naissance d’Aphrodite et donc de l’Amour/Désir humain. Mais Eros est aussi le fils d’Aphrodite, version héllénisée d’Ishtar-Astarté, la Grande Déesse, origine de tout. Il est donc à l’origine de la Vie, mais aussi une figure incarnée et visible dans notre vie quotidienne de ce principe d’attraction qui meut les particules, les planètes et les êtres vivants. Eros n’est pas seulement une abstraction des forces physiques mais aussi un vécu personnel de cette attraction qui me pousse à désirer/aimer l’autre. C’est l’élan de l’homme vers la femme ou de la femme vers l’homme, cette attraction qui pousse les adolescents les uns vers les autres, cette force de vie qui entrainent les jeunes adultes à fonder une famille et à avoir des enfants, et qui jusqu’à la fin de notre vie crée cette attirance pour l’autre.

D’un autre côté, Psyché est la conscience ordinaire de l’ego qui vient au monde, cherche l’autre en ayant du mal à le trouver, mais qui ne peut s’unir à la puissance de vie qu’après avoir suivi un long chemin initiatique. Ce parcours évoque ainsi le chemin que devra parcourir le moi humain pour s’ouvrir à la pleine conscience de la Vie. Aphrodite représente ici l’élément tentateur du Divin, qui va mettre le moi à l’épreuve jusqu’à ce qu’il se rende compte de l’erreur de sa vanité.

A l’origine, comme Psyché, l’intellect est perçu comme l’égal des dieux. Mais c’est la vanité de l’ego, qui est en permanence en quête de validation et de valorisation. Mais la Vie, représentée ici par Aphrodite, se charge de nous interpeller en nous demandant d’avancer sur notre chemin. La déesse joue ici le rôle de l’aiguillon du destin qui n’a de cesse de nous interpeller pour nous faire avancer, qui met des épreuves devant nous, pour nous aider à nous dépouiller de toutes nos croyances, nos jugements et nos attachements vis à vis de ce que nous pensons être. Dans ce conte, elle ressemble à Satan dans le livre de Job, qui met à l’épreuve le plus fidèle des croyants. L’un comme l’autre ne sont que les facettes obscures du divin, qui nous placent devant le miroir de notre propre vanité, ce qu’est justement le « miroir de psyché ».

La première étape, lorsqu’elle ne voit pas Eros, est celle, de la vie ordinaire faite de réalisations matérielles, de petites satisfactions sexuelles et amoureuses, mais qui s’avère d’un ennui profond pour notre âme. Car intérieurement, il s’agit d’une simple cohabitation de la conscience du moi, Psyché, et de l’inconscient désirant, Eros. Nous ne sommes pas conscient que nous sommes profondément aimé par un Dieu, et nous sommes en fait insatisfaits dans notre vie quotidienne, même si «nous avons tout pour être heureux». Cela peut durer des années, tant que tout se passe a «peu près bien», c’est-à-dire tant que la puissance de vie reste dans l’ombre et donne quelques satisfactions à la conscience qui peut s’en satisfaire pendant un temps. Pour beaucoup, cette situation ne changera pas. Mais certains, poussés par la curiosité, l’ennui, ou la peur de l’inconnu, vont demander d’aller plus loin. En transgressant l’ordre donné par Eros, Psyché bouscule le train-train de sa vie habituelle, et donne l’impression, pendant un temps de tout perdre, car elle commence juste son chemin d’individuation, que j’appelle souvent simplement «le Chemin» pour décrire ce voyage que l’on fait vers sa propre essence.

L’enjeu n’est plus la cohabitation inconsciente de l’ego et du Soi, mais l’Union de la Conscience et de la puissance de Vie. Démarre alors un long chemin initiatique pour le moi, qui va subir de nombreuses épreuves et vivre des moments difficiles, dont il ne pourra sortir victorieux qu’en faisant confiance aux forces vitales intérieures qui viennent en aide à Psyché sous la forme d’énergies animales (les fourmis) ou de puissances spirituelles (l’aigle de Zeus, qui représente le 3ème oeil). Jusqu’à la Tour, objet minéral dressé représentant le masculin, qui lui permettra de vaincre les gardiens de la mort, au cours d’une pérégrination qui s’apparente aux voyages chamaniques.

Eros et PsychéDernière vanité de l’ego : la croyance qu’un onguent supposé provoquer une beauté spirituelle, pourra l’amener à l’amour d’Eros, à l’union spirituelle. Après toutes ces épreuves, le moi n’a toujours pas compris qu’il ne trouvera pas l’Amour dans un artifice mais que seul, l’humilité et donc la dissolution de l’ego lui ouvrira les portes de l’Amour divin, authentique. Et c’est pourquoi Psyché doit pratiquement mourir pour être ranimée par la Vie, qui l’aime depuis toujours.

La fin de l’histoire est celle d’un apothéose, lorsque Eros et Psyché peuvent enfin s’unir devant Zeus, et atteindre à l’Unité. En cela il s’agit d’une merveilleuse représentation du chemin tantrique, dans lequel le moi vient progressivement à la rencontre du Soi, dans un chemin où les épreuves sont les propres conséquences de nos croyances, de nos blessures et globalement de notre ego qui ne peut s’empêcher de vouloir quelque chose au lieu de s’abandonner à l’amour divin. Mais l’enjeu est de taille, car il s’agit ni plus ni moins que de l’union de notre âme, et de la vie dans la félicité, représenté dans le conte par Volupté, la fille d’Eros, la Vie désirante, et de Psyché, l’esprit devenu Conscience.

(c) Jacques Ferber

“The material world is all feminine. The feminine energy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.”

― Zeena Schreck

Sexual Energy & the Systematic Indoctrination of Education

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” ~Alvin Toffler

Sexual energy is known as different names depending on culture, tradition, and lineage of teachers and language. In the West, this energetic force is the generative or bioelectric energy that enlivens us. In the East, erotic Kundalini energy of Tantric Yoga is the primary evolutionary feminine force or spiritual Earth wisdom that lies coiled within the base of the spine to produce full somatic enlightenment as it consummates with masculine spiritual force. In Taoism, Chi (Ki) is the primary life force that gives us energy to preserve our being and to transform it with right application and balance of masculine and feminine principles. In Shamanic traditions, snake energy or Rainbow Serpent power is the primary psychobiological force that vivifies and motivates the body-mind with connection to the greater whole. Whatever name we wish to define it, the vibrations of erotic sexual energy is the elemental power harnessed by all forms in creation endowed by planet Earth.

This generative impulse is the survival urge or instinct for life that provides the link of how we move through the world and what becomes accessible to us in our evolutionary journey. Its creative principle is the core of our nature, our Eros, which builds our self-image and is all that our potential relies upon, sexually, emotionally, creatively and spiritually. When we negate, suppress or restrict the flow of this natural and fundamental erotic expression of Nature we risk addiction, dis-ease and dysfunction individually, socially and globally.

Using the faculties of desire and imagination turned onto the Earth body, we channel the subliminal frequencies of the planet in a two-way stream for co-creation. With our own bodies as instrument and Earth, the Revealer, we need only to ground into the sentient presence of Earth’s tantric energies to evoke a silent cognitive lucidity in our ordinary mindstream. Rapturous immersion with our immediate and imminent Source – planet Earth, we also align with the galaxy, the Source of Mother Earth, and to the Unity field, the Source of the galaxy. Alignment Circuit: Human>Planet>Galaxy=Unity Field. Aligning within this frequency circuit attracts information from other dimensions and awareness outside of the manifest form and direction. With our extrasensory capacities rooted in Nature, phylogenetic memory awakens. This network of hyper-intelligence acts like a biological internet as we entrain within the stream of wellbeing into a singularity of human potential.

Humanity cannot find its way into alignment without mastering the problem of extra human predation, Archontic intrusion that deviates the human species into self betrayal of our discriminating powers and authenticity in Nature, as beings of Nature. This intrapsychic intrusion often goes unnoticed as it is disguised in the way we think, in the way society conforms our thinking to the synthetic processes of its virtual realities. Virtual reality is fake and takes us off our emergent path with Nature. Virtual reality is a mental fantasy and of pretending and is thus, disconnected from Source. It is anti-erotic, anti-nature, and anti-feminine at the core often driving humanity into error beyond the scale of correction.

Deviation from our Source and medium of instruction begins at birth. The processes of building the self-image of our potential is entwined with our psychosexual and spiritual development, which relies upon three factors: Our biological inheritance, imposed education or indoctrination and self-education. 

Our biological inheritance provides our unique shape and form of our physical structure. Our genes provide the strength of our constitution, nervous system and glands, metabolic processes and organ systems of our gender body. Continuous immersion in Nature awakens dormant memory of Gaia’s biography that is also part of our biological inheritance. The integrity of our bio-physiology determines our ability or disability to move us through life. 

Education is particular to time and culture of imposed or forced ideologies and modes of government and religion taught in the family through such institutions. These ideologies or programmed realities are the synthetic expression of our cultural identities that handicap the liberation of our true self and choice of freedom to live creatively and in harmony with Nature. It is the pretense of real education that serves as the foundation for imprisonment of the human spirit into automaton. Through its separative or divisive models of social organization that sexualizes and dumbs down our thought processes through sexual roles, linguistic rooting, sound frequencies, sexual metaphors and the culturally determined myths about “real men” and “real women,” a synthetic identity is manufactured. It is through this unintegrated system that is separated from the inner learning of the Soul that determines what and how we learn from the outside world and what becomes the accepted pattern of concepts and reactions common to society during a particular era in time. 

Self-Education or Individual Development is inspired through the urge to know and understand divine matters, imagination and the curiosity that seeks to evolve in the development of our gender body, individual characteristics, and spiritual nature on Earth. Choosing to act in accordance with our own authentic nature is a self-initiated effort. It is where our intellect and heart integrate into spiritual Will to use our creative abilities to thrive. And it is through this mode that we seek liberation from intrapsychic control, manipulation and exploitation, fear and organized lying by powerful dominating groups whose culture of death does not function on behalf of human or planetary freedom. 

Of the three self-image builder’s, self-education is the only factor that is basically subject to personal will, while the others are determined biologically and by the governing environment and mental structure we are born into. Inasmuch that self-education builds the power of personal will – imposed education is actually the most active element in our developmental process because it operates in two directions at once. From birth it parallels self-education until societies patterns, values and behaviors have been instilled in us over-laying our natural feelingness and spontaneity for its expectation of what we should think, feel, say and do. It then rewards us when we follow its social values and it punishes us or withdraws when we think and act spontaneously upon the will of our inner promptings. Social withdrawal is a conditioning mechanism that is effective and painful because it ostracizes individuals or groups by pushing them outside the social grip of acceptance. Amidst varying degrees, we are all enmeshed within this social control system – a simulator of organic life experiences that operates out of the false personality of pretext and not of the Soul life. The educational process is part of the social control system of role uniformity and it differs according to whether we are male or female, however we are all perceived as consumers and the best consumers are those that are not united. While our gender influences our position in society, the method of suppressing non-conformist tendencies or expressions of desires and needs affects both genders, but plays out differently. To the point that we have internalized sex-role stereotypes is the depth of our conformity to the pervading ideological virus i.e. dominant power.

This illusory system or method of “the noble lie” is not only subversive to our authentic nature, it is inversive. What is true is inverted with a lie or perverted to reflect the opposite. The heresy against our imminent and immediate Source is pathological and ecocidal. It is the ultimate hoax against a well-meaning humanity to divest our Divinity, our free will, of fostering human potential and co-evolution with Nature through intimate communion with the living intelligence of the Earth. Instead, our gifts born of Nature are co-opted through the diversion of our attention onto superficial importance and slavish obedience to the dominator culture.

For instance, all survival is temporary and thus, many of us use our finite time here on earth doing other people’s work, dream others dreams and exist in a box created by others instead of living our own essence, a life constructed of our own imaginative desires and expression of our own inner genius. The dominator culture has us so steeped into social control programs that we have lost our feeling edge, our authenticity of being and imagination that we are unconscious of societies imprint upon us. Most of us live behind a mask or face-plate that covers our authentic nature in our daily actions that we actually become the escape artist of the true self. Entirely caught up in the projected image of the false self we are barred from authenticity of feeling and spontaneity, imagination and freedom of thought, which shuts down our psychic thermometer. Sadly, many of us die without ever knowing our substantive being, our inner spiritual life through Nature and instead settle for a counterfeit life that is a modicum of our innate creative potential. This is the HOAX, the ultimate control over humanities Divine heritage from ever coming to fruition and keeping people so distracted and mechanized from even knowing there is a divine inheritance to claim.

There is always a price to pay for conformity, for second hand experiences mimicking truth by way of compensation. Our minds are so impressed within the reward and punishment system that our inner critic or negative ego-mind arouses such intense anxiety and conflict in our psychology should we think beyond its conditioned template. Any time there is an erotic urge to express creativity, invent something new, immerse in Nature, imagine with great feeling or realize our aspirations, we let in fear and inadequacy. Here doubt takes over to quash the creative Soul impulse. These fear packages manifest effects in our ability to produce or perform keeping us in light code lock down, blinded to truth. The blockage of creative life flow produces problems in our ability to interact with others and form intimate relations that suppression becomes the best antidote to confusion. The distortions of doubt, inadequacy, and fear has borne an epidemic of loneliness and the ability to be fully sexually responsive and creative in life. I say, feel the fear and break free from the Lie!

Individual confusion and disconnect always releases its way back into society and its subcultures. The frictions produced between the stirrings of our inner world and the expectation of the outer world promotes pathological relational extremes. These points of tension reinforce the gender war, impact family life and arrest the natural tendency towards spiritual relation and Earth revelation. When sexual or generative energy, our potentate life force, is not elevated and properly utilized there is error, some would call sin. Errors when detected require correction if we are to participate in the development of life and the consciousness within the shared matrix of Nature where new elements constantly arise to express and optimize the integral properties of the whole.

Cultural identification patterns do not correct, they deviate us off our natural course. Often what a dominator culture considers to be appropriate does not necessarily mean that it is healthy or right especially when it is based upon novelty production, tangibility and profit. Mass-mind consciousness works by co-opting what is natural and then denigrating it. For instance, dysfunction becomes the norm when identities blur through the regressive attachment to things where the focus of life becomes more about how things appear rather than how they really are. Life’s meaning becomes superficial and all purpose is lost.

Remember that the Archontic formula and its psychopathy is to invert or make opposite that which is real and make us believe that the false is true. This mind game keeps us polarized in extremes at the base level of existence. Diverting Natures generative functions bifurcates the relationship between female and male, mind and body, body and soul, humanity and Earth, and life and death. With the creative impulse controlled through redirection, dulling and distraction, the great drama of sex remains on the physical plane lowered to a static survival frequency that eludes the true significance of sexual relation and pleasure, ecstatic bliss, creativity, joyful living and somatic enlightenment.

The Archontic infused dominator culture has no creational focus and teaches no creational focus, only destructiveness through self-absorption by perpetuated thinking of the same distortion – a virtual reality program. I call this pattern the “vicious cycle of addictive consciousness.” If we observe the patterns we emanate in the world and become conscious of these divisive principles of orientation, we begin to recognize how the social patterns embedded within our psyches are used to negate ourselves by depressing the expression of our essence meant to destroy the psyche of enthusiasm, creativity, and moral nature of our divine human intelligence.

Let us probe the pattern and sexual paradigm layer by layer to reveal how we misuse and misunderstand the masculine and feminine energetic principles of “life” that fragments wholeness into parts, makes love into war, and turns virtue into vice.

” A virtue is the mean between two vices.”~ Aristotle

Alisa Battaglia ©2008-2018 Excepted from “The Essential Self, Cultivating the Sacred Feminine through Polarity Integration

The Four Pillars of Disaster Shamanism

“We need shamans, and if society doesn’t provide them, the universe will.” ~Joe Lewels

In the article The Archetypal Path to Getting Your Shit Together, I wrote about the power of archetypes. A Disaster Shaman is an example of using an archetype to make the world a better place; to become the change we want to see in the world.

The Disaster Shaman recipe combines aspects of The Shadow with aspects of The Hero and then mixes in a little Trickster tomfoolery. The combination of these archetypes creates a particular flavor of nontraditional shamanism that spearheads healthy Cosmic Law through the heart of unhealthy lawfulness.

A Disaster Shaman is a force of nature first, a person second; sowing radical revolution in order to reap progressive evolution. Healthy balance is primary. Even if it comes at the expense of comfort and security. Disaster Shamanism (otherwise known as Apocalyptic Shamanism) is the interdependent shamanic response to apocalyptic times.

The primary tasks of a Disaster Shaman are as follows:

–Heal disaster situations through shamanic cosmology and ecopsychology.

–Listen to Universal Laws to discern the difference between healthy and unhealthy.

–Live moderately so that others may moderately live.

–Diagnose and heal Nature Deprivation.

–Transform weaponry into livingry.

–Bring “water” to the Wasteland.

The sub archetypes of the Disaster Shaman archetype are The New Hero, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, The Sacred Clown, and The New Oracle. The four pillars of Disaster Shamanism subsume these sub archetypes. Let’s break them down…

Hero-expiation (New Hero or Cosmic Hero):

“Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve.” 

The average person is not heroic (courageous). Likewise, the average hero is not prestigious (provident). A New Hero, as opposed to a typical hero, is a hero with prestige. A New Hero has gone Meta with the concept of heroism itself.

The New Hero sub archetype is the first pillar of Disaster Shamanism. New heroism is gained through hero-expiation. Hero-expiation is the voluntary, wise, honorable, moral, and compassionate distribution of power so that power doesn’t get to the point that it corrupts.

It is through the wise distribution of power that a typical hero becomes a New-hero (cosmic hero, next-level hero) with skill, power, honor, and prestige, as opposed to just a typical hero with only skill and power.

Hero expiation is all about getting power over power. Whether one’s own power or the overreaching power of others. It’s about turning the tables on entrenched power by “counting coup” on it.

A Disaster Shaman as New Hero is a social leveling mechanism par excellence. They count coup on power through strategic humiliation (shaming) so that power never has the chance to become absolute.

When a New Hero comes to town, fear-filled blue pills are swapped with wisdom-filled red pills. The Disaster Shaman has come to set the record straight. To recondition the culture that has been conditioned into believing in competition over cooperation and narrow-minded one-upmanship over open-minded compassion. They teach that competition has always been secondary to cooperation; otherwise we wouldn’t have survived as a species (Darwin).

Eco-consciousness (Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse):

“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Eco-consciousness is about uncontrolled order overcoming controlled chaos. Whether the culture (tribe) has become too obese, too greedy, too violent or some other unhealthy excess, the Disaster Shaman arrives to set the record straight; to plant a seed of overt moderation within the covert immoderation.

The Fifth Horseman is the one that cleans up after the original Four Horsemen (the Four Horsemen is a metaphor for anyone caught up (aware or not) in any kind of unsustainable, unhealthy, violent, immoral, or mass-destructive social system). The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse is an archetype representing rebirth and renewal in the face of conquest, war, famine, and death.

The Fifth Horseman is ruthless with her healing powers. Her name is Providence, Phoenix-like, she rises up from the ashes of war & decay to spread self-actualized love, open-mindedness, and progressive sustainability by digging up the decay and unsustainable residue of past and present civilizations and then using it all as compost in cultivating and growing a healthier more balanced future.

In that capacity she has devoted herself to planting gardens of eco-centric heroism in the humus of war, hate, close-mindedness and greed, and anything else left behind by the original four horsemen. She is dedicated to, as Buckminster Fuller said, transforming weaponry into livingry.

She subsumes the original four horsemen by teaching them that the new definition of right & wrong must be derived from the universal dictation of healthy & unhealthy rather than the human opinion of good & evil.

The Fifth Horseman is the Goddess of Recompense. She is the Verdant Force. She is the soft hammer of evolution. She has come to blur the false boundaries that have been erected between nature and the human soul.

She is Gaia. She is Lady Justice. She is the return of the Sacred Feminine. She is all of us, men and women, realizing that we are nature first and humans second, that we are soul first and ego second. She is weighing the worth of the human world with the Scales of Justice. With or without us, she will not fail to bring water to the wasteland.

High humor (Sacred Clown):

“What is a tragedy but a misunderstood comedy.” ~Shakespeare

Most of us are familiar with the prototypical clowns: red-nosed clowns, court jesters, and Tarot fools. But sacred clowns take clowning to a whole other level.

Almost all types of sacred clowns combine trickster spirit with shamanic wisdom to create a kind of sacred tomfoolery that keeps the zeitgeist in check. Their methods are unconventional and typically antithetical to the status quo, but extremely effective. They indirectly re-enforce societal customs by directly enforcing their own powerful sense of humor into the social dynamic.

The main function of a sacred clown is to deflate the ego of power by reminding those in power of their own fallibility, while also reminding those who are not in power that power has the potential to become corrupt if it’s not balanced with other forces, namely with humor. But sacred clowns don’t out-rightly derive things. They’re not comedians, per se. Though they can be. They are more like personified trickster gods, poking holes in things that people take too seriously.

Through acts of satire and showy displays of blasphemy, sacred clowns create a cultural dissonance born from their Crazy Wisdom, from which serious anxiety is free to collapse on itself into sincere laughter.

The high humor of Sacred Clowns leads to a higher courage and the audacity to speak truth to power. And they do so with silver-tongued proficiency. There exists no perceived construct of power that’s above their enlightened rebellion. No idol too golden. No high horse too high. No pedestal too revered. No “wizard” too disguised. No God too godly. No title too contrived.

Nothing is immune to the exactness of a Sacred Clown’s rebellion. It’s all merely procrastinating compost. It’s all just well-arranged armor waiting to rust. It’s all an illusion within a delusion. And the Sacred Clown has the enlightened sense of humor to reveal that absolute fact.

Lest we write our lives off to unhealthy stagnation and devolving inertia, we must become something that has the power to perpetually overcome itself. The sacred clown has this power. Paraphrasing William Blake, “If the fool (Sacred Clown) would persist in his folly, he would become wise (New Oracle).”

Self-overcoming (New Oracle):

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” ~Lao Tzu

A Disaster Shaman is a New Oracle who has come to inform the old oracles that they have failed. The self-centered “culture” has been declared a wasteland, and the unhealthy surroundings dubbed unworthy for healthy humans attempting to evolve into a more robust species.

The New Oracle teaches this, above all: Pain should not be avoided at the expense of love. Love should be embraced at the risk of pain.

As such, a master with high humor is needed to resolve the disaster of the self; to usher in an eco-centric, as opposed to an ego-centric, perspective. This master lies dormant inside us all. It can only be found by having the out-of-mind experience of no-mind, in the courageous throes of self-overcoming. There, in the stillness, the master is meditating. The master is connected to the source of all things, his thousand-petalled lotus spinning like a galaxy above his head.

He is radiating inside of you, bursting with wisdom and nth-degree-questions. She pirouettes like Shakti. He foxtrots like Shiva. He/she is the all-dancing, all-laughing oracle of the primordial self, interconnected with all things. And it can only be found there in the silence, between inhale and exhale, between being and non-being, between mind and no-mind, between finitude and infinity.

After disaster, but just before mastery, the Disaster Shaman as New Oracle persistently self-actualizes toward enlightenment.

There, above thought, is the source of human creativity: the place where artists, poets, musicians, and even scientists have discovered the secrets of the universe. Like Leonard Cohen said, “You lose your grip, and then you slip into the masterpiece.”

The mind of Everything holds the heart of Nothingness; the void of Nothingness holds the core of Everything. The masterpiece is the working, self-overcoming, canvas of the New Oracle’s life. The New Oracle is forever in the process of seizing the moment in order to seize the day in order to seize the life.

In the end, the Disaster Shaman is a healthy response to our unhealthy times. Wielding the courage of the New Hero, brandishing the mettle of the Fifth Horseman, harnessing the humor of the Sacred Clown, and channeling the wisdom of the New Oracle, the Disaster Shaman is determined to tonalize an otherwise atonal world.

Death and Life

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” 

J.K. Rowling

Death and Life by Gustav Klimt