El juego ritualizado como traspaso de conocimiento

My awareness had been quite altered when I uttered my statement of intent. It seemed to come from a place of knowing outside of my usual awareness. I tried to critically examine it but was unable to, because it felt beyond question. This troubled me when I considered the atrocities committed by people convinced their actions were beyond question, often decreed by some god or other. I took heart that the ‘rightness’ I felt contained no judgement of or intent to harm others.

The gradual changes in awareness that I experienced were not linear, in that I

frequently switched between different modes of being, or rather, other modes were in operation, but one or two held dominance at any one time. An example of this was on the first day of the solo Fast, when I was operating largely in the conceptual and practical modes, or the North Shield. It was odd then, that I had made a symbolic circle around my camp to ward off unknown entities in the full knowledge that it would not present an obstacle to any wild animal. I had not even questioned my motivation for this action. This indicates that although one mode may be dominant, the others are still functioning and able to exert influence on their own terms. According to Castaneda (1988), the nagual51 _{is always on the edge of consciousness,}

unnoticed for the most part when we are in our “rational minds”.

Whilst I remarked at the time upon not feeling any different on day two of the Fast, it is clear from the way my field-journal writing changed that I had shifted, in the language of the Four Shields, into the East. I had begun to interpret signs and symbols, and become more imaginatively contemplative, moving from my habitual conceptual mode. I was functioning in the imaginal mode from both individuating and participatory aspects, allowing intuition to guide my imagination. I was unaware of this shift at the time, indicating I must have had a different expectation of what a shift in awareness would feel like. I find it odd that I wasn’t aware of it, because I believed I was paying close attention to any changes. Maybe I was focusing on individual thoughts instead of noticing the subtle shift occurring throughout my being, or, perhaps it was just such a natural way to be that it did not feel abnormal. In the imaginal exercise on the evening of day two of the solo Fast, I drew on my knowledge of participatory and shamanic literature, e.g. (Abram, 1996) (Skolimowski,

51 _{The nagual and tonal are the two qualities of the world we know. The tonal is all}

that we know, everything in our perceptual inventories. The nagual comprises the unknown: that which can become known to us if we venture beyond our usual ways of perceiving, and the unknowable: the majority of the universe beyond our

Rachel Lovie May 2017 171 1994) (Castaneda, 1988) (1993), to invite a world full of mystery, wonder, and endless possibility to reveal itself to me, offering myself up for participation in its creation. Working on the premise that we construct the world according to our expectations, I was attempting to change my expectations in order to summon a different

construction of the world.

There did seem to be an incremental shift in my awareness toward the participatory aspects of being. The most profoundly noticeable shift was on the third day of the solo Fast, when I felt guided. Although I mean guided by intuition, it was a most unusual feeling because it was so strong that it felt almost as if it came from outside of myself, and I wonder if it is because it originated beyond the ego, so felt alien to it. In Heron’s (1992) terms, the participatory aspects of the modes of the psyche were dominant. In the affective mode of feeling, resonance, and unity took precedence over emotion. In the imaginal mode, I seemed to have an immediate and intuitive grasp of what was happening, an “holistic cognition” (Heron J. , 1992, p. 17). My image-making capacity was highly active, but it seemed to be led by the participatory intuitive aspect. The conceptual mode in both aspects of reflection and discrimination was suppressed. It was not that I didn’t think at all, but that conceptual thought was sparing, and did not have its usual dominant place in the proceedings. In the practical mode, intention and action were intertwined.

I include quotes from comparative phenomenologist Lee Irwin, speaking about the nature of historical Vision Quest experiences of peoples of the Great Plains52_{, which}

corroborate my contemporary experience.

“The encounter with the sacred is charged with power, mystery, and transformation. In all cases, the phenomenology of the visionary experience involves the crossing of a critical threshold from the explicit world of the everyday to the implicit reality of the visionary world. That such a threshold is recognized is evidenced by the preparations and concentration of thought necessary for an actual encounter.” (1994, p. 119)

The individuating aspects of emotion and imagination were active in my willingness to participate and to perform the ceremonies as if they were real. The participatory aspects of intuition and feeling perhaps accessed or generated an “empathic

resonance” (Heron J. , 1992, pp. 93-94) between my body, psyche and the landscape, and I might speculate, tapped into the archetypes of the collective unconscious, producing symbolic or “metaphorical insight” (Heron J. , 1992, p. 17). My experience was not one of gaining self-knowledge as such, but of healing, the integration of previously unidentified, or misidentified aspects of my psyche (Jung C. , 1940). This

52 _{Irwin’s historical ethnographic study is of accounts by Plains Indians spanning 150 years. His}

Rachel Lovie May 2017 172 kind of healing is alluded to throughout Heron’s writing with regard to affective and imaginal modes (1992, pp. 83, 86-87, 133) (2000). Of these kinds of empowering experiences Irwin writes:

“The primary consequence of the encounter is the transformation of the visionary – his[sic] immediate sense of empowerment… There is an unquestioned energetic charge to the experience that leaves the visionary feeling that the gift of power has transformed him[sic] in a profound and lasting way.” (Irwin, 1994, p. 129)

Figure 41. Visionary landscape, R. Lovie, 2013.

That evening, my conceptual capacity returned, functioning in the participatory aspect of reflection as I tried to gain an overview of the past few days, and in the individuating aspect of discrimination as I attempted to make sense of my personal experience. I experienced a shift towards the individuating aspects as I returned to a state of mind I was more used to.

Early in the VF programme I abandoned the use of Petitmengin-Peugeot’s (1999) process of intuitive experience because the whole experience was full of intuitive knowing and I became aware that, as Heron (1992) points out, it is an intrinsic aspect of consciousness, permanently present in the participatory ground of being. We have intuitive experiences all of the time, but do not attend to them. Here, free of

distractions and an excess of inner dialogue, intuitive experience was easier to attend to.

My experience was one of constant shifting between the mundane and the extraordinary. One minute I was deep in meditative contemplation and the next I craved nachos, and a mattress. It was an insight to realise that there is no huge divide between the aspects of the world that we polarise. Jung describes the Archetypes as conjoined, Janus in nature, two sides of the same coin. The gap between polarities seemed smaller to me than ever before. My dreams on the last night of the solo Fast

Rachel Lovie May 2017 173 confirmed my integration of the masculine and feminine principles. Is psychic healing achieving the dialectic of polarities? This is what Laub and Weiner suggest in their therapeutic pyramid model (2007) and, I think, what Jung meant by “achieving unity” (Jung C. G., 1973).

Watts suggests that, "what lies between the poles is more substantial than the poles themselves" (Watts, 1963, p. 49), in the sense that what we denote when we speak of two poles is that which is absent in the description: the field that the poles bound. I now had an embodied sense of the interdependence and interpenetration of polarities (Heron J. , 1992, p. 171) (Reason, 1993). The ability to hold multiple

perspectives, it would seem, is dependent on a tacit understanding of this principle.