Santa Fe Spirit?

Recently I attended one day of a multifaceted conference on shamanism, enlightenment, and sexuality as spiritual force. Most of the Presenters I spent time with were trying to teach us how to make things (most centrally but not exclusively oneself) better: they wanted us (about 150 people, 95% white, 75% middle-aged, maybe 2/3 female) to dance, to chant, to pray and consult or locate our "guides", to become global activists protecting the environment and each other, to find ways to fight the Reactionary ugliness that's taken over our government, and to try to heal ourselves and others, working together and (in future) as spiritual individuals.

In other words, to get out there and fight for a decent, healthy, humane society using the techniques of shamanism, magic, vibrations of drum and voice and dance-step, interpersonal energy and connection.

A worthy goal, to try to raise some effective opposition to all the garbage that an illegitimate leadership is forcing upon the US: color-keys to how terrified we should be, an imperial mission to subdue and "civilize" the rest of the world, concentration camps full of prisoners stripped of all rights, our young people sent off to bully and kill foreigners while their own government finds ways to keep them in the Army longer than they signed up for, deliberate efforts to loot and sack the environment once and for all and to smash dissenters of all kinds back down into the humble slots traditionally reserved for them (especially uppity women and Blacks), and on and on and on.

Anyone who's half awake knows at least some of the litany of our current woes. Anyone who knows all of them is probably too depressed to get out of bed in the morning.

So form a circle, step to the left, sing and stomp to this or that set of syllables chanted to the beat of a drum, and then scoop up the good energy you've spun among you and throw it out into the cosmos for all to share. Or, all rise and join into a benevolently humming mob closing in around a supine volunteer (her exact affliction unexpressed, but God/angels/Spirit knows all so not to worry) and heap kindly vibrations upon her until she says she feels better. Or — well, no, I didn't attend any of the "sexual energy" sessions. Sexuality is too easy to exploit in this culture because of our twisted attitudes about it, and besides I'm a bit squeamish about finding out more than I ever wanted to know about the sex lives of strangers, or revealing my own to them. Life is weird enough as it is.

Everybody meant well. Sometimes it was painful, how well they meant, compared with how grossly inadequate their efforts were.

There was the guy with the drum, who would think for a while and then throw out a question like "What is sacred space?" and then just repeat (in slow, portentous tones) each answer that someone volunteered, as if uttering a great revelation. Later, while we were all given a "group work" task, I saw him take a young woman aside and go through the motions of what I can only suppose was meant to be a faith healing. He made gestures as if yanking something out of her midsection while she did her best to be in a trance, both apparently imitating the scrap of film he had shown us about a famous practitioner of "psychic surgery" in Brazil.

The rest of us were sitting on the floor in smaller circles of about twenty-five to thirty people each, assigned to talk about miracles and "sanctify" each other, whatever we decided that meant. In my circle we spent that quarter hour haltingly assuring each other that childbirth is a miracle, since most of us were women, and nobody had anything manifestly miraculous to offer instead.

I'm sorry, but it was a crock. Sure, birth is amazing — so is light, so is spit. Sheep give birth. Skunks give birth. It's how mammals procreate, it's graven into our cellular design. The miraculous is supposed to be above and beyond that design, or how is it distinguished as "miraculous"? Not that I spoke up and said so; these folks were there to feel better, and I wasn't about to draw their fire by pointing out that the Emperor, while sweet and eager and not a bad drummer, had no clothes.

I should have joined that other floor-sitting group, the one that spent the time singing "Amazing Grace" and, judging by the laughter, telling jokes.

For all I know, somebody there did actually benefit. But most of what I was seeing was a pathetic imitation of some Fundie prayer gathering, with people shaking their fingers over their heads or rushing forward to get their unhappy souls juiced up by contact with the "holy" man.

As for me, I walked out after the second time this particular Presenter said, "Let's drum and dance". That is, "I'm out of ideas, so let's you do some work to fill the time." Many attendees got up and danced, some more self-consciously than others. A few seemed to me to merely indulge their own exhibitionism, as I expect they had often done in similar settings before. People can grow addicted to such conferences, and if you get great jolliness by grunting and howling and writhing in front of an audience that's disposed to be friendly, why wouldn't you indulge?

Except for the cost, of course. There was a fee for the weekend, and a hefty day-pass charge.

What we got for our money, in my estimation, was a pleasant but expensive group high — which is not worthless, mind you. I do believe that singing and dancing together are good for us (unless it's, say, the "Horst Wessel Lied" we're singing), energizing and comforting. But I was sure that this was not transcendence, no matter how enthusiastically some people flung themselves about. This was not even, except maybe accidentally in a few cases, spiritual growth. It was not the imparting of skills (no, not even the chant made up by another session leader for us to sing while we shuffled around in our lockstep circle).

In fact these activity sessions struck me as very similar to the party after my grandson's bar mitzvah, but for (putative) grownups. That party, in a public park structure in San Francisco, was led by a professional DJ who provided structured fun and games for the teenagers attending; but the DJ was more skillful than some of our Presenters, and I think the kids had more fun.

Now, I missed the sessions the day before when the group lay with their eyes closed on the floor and were led in a "shamanic journey" (maybe more than one) by a self-styled shaman from meso-America. I've done this sort of thing myself with a half dozen other people and a local teacher, so I know from experience that specific techniques can indeed be taught (how to auto-induce trance, how to visualize entering the lower world and deal with encounters there, etc.).

It's all in the books of people like Michael Harner, who have made extensive personal studies of these practices. The books cost a lot less than joining a class of 150 or so laid out on the carpeted floor of a hotel ballroom, which brought to my mind nothing so much as those mass marriages conducted by Sunyung Moon some years ago in which hundreds of paired strangers were married simultaneously by the — uh — Presenter?

Back out in the hall, I decided to head home; but on the way out I wandered into a lecture about "Enlightenment".

This was a very different story. The room was the size of a modest chapel, with a small and attentive audience facing a woman who sat up front in an armchair. She wore no beads, no feathers, no charms or tokens that I could see, just a comfortable looking dress and a scarf over her shoulders; and all she did was talk while the rest of us listened.

She said that people who meditate or do Sufi dancing or a ritual or some other form of spiritual practice may suddenly achieve a breakthrough — a burst of bliss, a dawning of perception, a dunk in the ocean of the Oneness-with-All that they think is what they're seeking; and afterward they wonder, "That's it? Is that all? Well, what now?" And "How do I get back to that place again?" Some even become addicted to the pursuit of samadhi, satori, whatever you want to call that glowing moment (I've had a few of my own over the years, so I think I know what she was talking about).

But, she said, delightful as such a moment is, it is only a flower alongside the path that leads, if you persevere, to what you really seek: the truth of your being.

And that's a whole different matter. What the path leads to if you pass by the pretty flowers and continue walking, she said (more or less — I'm paraphrasing), is not to anything that can be "achieved" at all, or "found", or "lost", or "regained". Instead, it's a realization (often a slow dawning rather than the quick, blinding flash that one expected) that one's self has been pervaded by a way of being that has nothing to do with paths or flowers — at least no more so than it has to do with hungry tigers and rushing trucks full of toxic waste -- but that is a way of seeing that makes no judgments. It's not only attention to the present moment but acceptance of it, just as it is, and just as we are, and now onward — to the next moment, and then the next, accepting all the way.

I listened hard, remembering what I'd read about Zen masters scolding their students for becoming fixated upon the very act of meditation, of sitting, even of actually attaining moments of no-minded bliss. These masters all said that that stuff, no matter how pleasing, was merely distraction, not the goal; which hadn't really made sense to me before.

For some reason — perhaps the calm, even weary way in which this Presenter doggedly persevered in finding words to speak about indescribable matters — it began to make sense now.

What some of the audience members said in question or comment (many of them were therapists of one kind or another, with serious concerns about being better able to do their work) brought home her meaning even more clearly. One woman said, more or less, "Before enlightenment, therapy, and after enlightenment, therapy. How do I get it back again, and hold on to it this time — that moment of enlightenment in between?"

I could see the Presenter's dismay; she had just explained how enlightenment is not achieved, it is lived, as acceptance. So you probably wouldn't continue with therapy after you had reached true enlightenment, I reasoned, because in your enlightenment you would accept yourself as you were, without further therapy. And there would be no "after" anyway: you would be permanently changed. Once you see, you can't unsee again, that kind of thing (I know it from the experience of suddenly realizing what feminism is about); you have become that way of seeing. It doesn't switch off again, but informs the way you see everything else from then on.

I was so busy thinking this over that I don't recall what the Presenter actually answered, but that was okay because —

The next questioner asked how she could get rid of her anger instead of just finding surcease from it, from time to time, in spiritual practice. This was, of course, the same question as the first one, in a slightly altered form.

For a moment the Presenter seemed too dispirited to reply at all. She had talked earlier about how words can't create enlightenment because they are tools of the mind, and the mind's job is to fight off enlightenment by keeping our attention fixed on grappling with what we know as "reality" so as to insure the safety and well-being of the body (enlightenment doesn't give a flip about physical survival; total acceptance is dangerous to the body).

How was she to use words, creations and weapons of the reality-bound mind, to really answer this persistent question?

She finally said, "You might try to accept that you are an angry person."

Brave words, teaching words. I admired her for saying them.

And I learned something, something I wasn't all that pleased with learning.

I began to see how she was talking about a higher order of study than the shamanism and other magical systems that the other Presenters had focused on. All forms of magic are attempts at manipulation, efforts to change things and make them better in one way or another; so is intentional prayer. "God, make me a more sympathetic person" is not the same as "Here I am, being a not very sympathetic person; that's who I am right now."

The guy with the drum, the woman leading the chanting, both had spoken about the power of intentionality to improve the world. I heard this third Presenter talking about a surrender of intentionality, I think; about stepping outside of the desire for improvement, of self or other. Shamanism, alchemy, wicca, vodun, you name it, it's all about empowerment of some kind, about making something happen. Enlightenment is about the replacement of intentionality with acceptance of what is.

And this woman dared to say it! What nerve! As the Zen teachers say, "Those who know don't say; those who say don't know." This isn't about the wise being snooty and stingy with knowledge; it's about how words are instruments of mind, and the instruments of mind are the enemies of enlightenment.

So she used words to tell us that words are not The Way but are in the way. Presumably she assumed and hoped that even so, what she said would be of use to some of her audience, somehow.

It was of use to me.

For one thing, it became clear that this was a much older soul than I am; she was ready to at least contemplate just being (although coming to talk to a group about it is action with intentionality, isn't it?). I, on the other hand, still want to Do, to change things, or I wouldn't have the interest in techniques like shamanism that had brought me to the meeting.

Magic is about making something happen.

Enlightenment — isn't.

Things, persons, events, values, conditions, just are. One acknowledges, embraces, and there is no reward. You just live it, as it is. Chop wood, carry water; you don't bespell the broomstick into doing it for you, like Mickey in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in "Fantasia". You do it. You be what you are doing.

Me, I'm not ready for that. I can barely wrap my mind around trying to imagine it, and I feel my will pushing back, hard.

Now, I've known for a long time that I'm just a middling-mature soul here, still trying to dope things out, still fighting (or indulging and, yes, enjoying) my urge to pass judgment, to discriminate and distinguish, to press for betterment as I see it; I'd lie if I said I didn't like being that way. But it's uncomfortable to have it all clarified and confirmed quite so bluntly, on the spot and in my face.

This wasn't what I had come to this conference to hear, exactly; or, on the contrary and at the same time, it was exactly what I had come to hear.

So my visit to Santa Fe was not just a waste of time, or an amusement, or another confirmation my skepticism about commercialized "spiritualism". I did learn something — about what enlightenment is not, and what I am not, yet, either. And if I learned, how can I assume that others didn't learn — something, whatever they were ready to learn — too?

But here's my question: if enlightenment embraces everything, it also embraces action; so then how the heck do you tell an enlightened person from the rest of us?

On the other hand, why should you need to? If you accept another as they are, then you accept their enlightenment and — or — their unenlightenment or both as well, right? What must go is the need to pass judgment (the persistence of which need in me is well illustrated, of course, in many of my remarks above). But if I accept myself, then I accept also my judgmental nature, and then nothing "needs" to change; which is what the Zen masters have always said. You just wake up to who you are.

What is the sound of one hand just being?

A later Presenter was to lead the attendees on a walking meditation in (or rather on) a labyrinth laid out on the floor.

I didn't stay for it. The day was closing, and I was wandering in enough of a labyrinth already.

So what else is new?

--SMC
February 2004

Copyright © 2000 by Suzy McKee Charnas