The castrated shaman

I think people are extraordinary beings. I think they are part and parcel of the cosmos, and their intelligence is very wide and luminous. I think the human mind though, is usually like a sunny sky where the sun is never visible. Forever there is a cast of clouds that hampers the shining through of the true spirit.

I have come to this vision through contemplating the daily lives of the common man, and the history that presents itself to us throughout our school books and high school curriculums. We see decisions that seem to be taking us down, and a never ending succession of wars. We see people giving power to other people who are sure to betray their trust. We see a race sabotaging itself and always neighing towards the abyss, the fall that leaves their bones crushed and their flesh breathless. We see so many self-destructive behaviors, that we must wonder whether the human race really wants to live at all.

I believe we are a product of the wonderful force of life, the same cosmic current that lets the flowers bloom and gives each animal its movement and majesty. However, creation I believe has something very special in store for humankind. For although the clouds are still keeping away the shining of the sun for the time being, there will come a time I believe, when man will rise up to his full potential and the realization of nothing more or less than his fundamental and initial birthright.

As I watch the times around me, the slaughtering of nature, the ruthless abuse of our brothers and sisters the animals and the plants, the merciless killing of people on scales that weren’t possible before, the despair that sets in as we speak about greenhouse gasses and the rising of the oceans, we seem to be in the end of days. It seems we are on a steep decline towards our final days of inhabiting this planet. It seems maybe in a hundred years, the Earth will no longer harbor human life.

But I have a faith, and I have a belief, which is wonderful and subversive. I believe that sometimes darkness all around can motivate us to find the light within. I think when things get difficult, we start to think, we start to meditate, contemplate, we start to search for a way out, we seek freedom, we thirst for a breath of fresh air. And I believe we are not merely human. I don’t believe we are simply animals bereaved of their instinctual knowledge. I don’t think we are helpless and without hope. I do not believe we are dead already.

For you see, through years of reading and studying the human spirit, I have come to regard human intelligence as comprising two different and opposite kinds of intelligence. There is the intelligence of the ego, and the intelligence of the universal field. The latter is our true light, the brightness of genius and the source of creative renewal and progress. The first, the ego, is but the compromising agency, the instance that forever makes us doubt and make a second choice. It is the cloud that comes before the sun, bereaving us of our native splendor.

Psychoanalysis talks of castration. It speaks of the unity between mother and child, the symbiotic relationship of love where true nurturing can grow and be. This is the field where intelligence blooms, this is the cradle of the animal, the plant, the tree, the mineral. It is the one life we see all around, and from which it seems we have been cast out, for no reason perhaps than some Adam eating from the forbidden fruit.

In man, there is a tendency to organize feeling and instinct according to the mirror image. The feelings are not taken innocently at face value, but they are inspected in a paranoid fashion, which stems from the ego, the instance of the mirror-self. This ego wants to keep a sense of individuality, isolation and mastery, and cannot let man be part of the world. It is the ego which casts us from the original garden.

Psychoanalysis teaches us that this ego is a force of death. It is a force which opposes and suppresses the original impulse. The ego is our history, it is our personality, it is all which is stale and known, precalculated instead of fresh and surprising, uplifiting. So the ego, the mind, comes in all too often in the realms of the soul. It knows it better, it preaches caution, it preaches conservativism, it preaches clinging to old models instead of a shedding of the skin.

This death-drive is what kills the original sexuality from an infantile age on, and it is this which has been known to many a psychoanalyst as castration. It is the ego, the self-image, which is responsible for the castration. From then on, we seem to be stuck with a cloudy sky, and we blame god, although god is the one inside us suffering from our selves, our better knowing. God is to be pitied, not blamed. God suffers in man. He is the soul inhabiting the human body, and inhabiting the tens of millions other beings around us as well. God is all we know, god is all we can see. And god is the wisdom of love. God is patience. And sometimes, god is a warrior too. Sometimes he fights the ego, sometimes he fights for sunshine, sometimes he can rise above the clouds. Then he becomes a shaman, an enlightened one, and returns to the cradle of creation, which is the true home of every being on earth and scattered throughout the universe.

Man is a problem unto himself. Man is darkened within. Man is confused in his own heart and his head is forever full of a thousand fears. The many threats of castration, and the anxiety it provokes.

In the East, people have known about the ego far longer than Freud has told us about it here in the West. In the East, many ways have been devised to help us reach once again above the clouds. Meditation, tantra. And all over the world, people have always believed that they were one with creation. They have honored their shamans for being so deep a part of the web of life, that they can draw strength from all of its threads.

I think if it were not for the ego, casting us now into the darkest of times, man could be full of sunshine and intelligence, full of surprise and creation. And I believe not the death drive will be the last token of man on this planet. I believe the spirit of god will arise on this planet to help us reach above the clouds collectively, as a race, as a species. And we will all be shamans, we will all know the plants and animals within. No more will our love suffer from the ego, no longer will we live in fear of the instance of castration. We will know our full power, and there will be prosperity and abundance in a harmonious symbiosis of all of the earthly life. We will know our brothers and sisters as being of the same breath, and we will share the open space of the endless sky with an intelligence that has been darkened far too long.

I believe man will make it, I believe he will fight, when he is in dire straits, I believe he will fight from and for his spirit, to find the magic, to find the spark, to find the faith and the strength to overcome the shit his past has left him with. I believe this as a therapist, who lives for this kind of struggle in his patients. People who are at their end, and who are starting the fight for their life, for their love, for their heart and souls and their true fulfillment and wellbeing. I believe humanity is in urgent need of therapy, and I believe the time has come when the world around him shows him so. We cannot pretend that we are sane. We are insane. We are stupid and destructive. We never have enough and we are always miserable. But there are other ideals, and there are other ways.

If I believe in psychoanalysis, it is because I believe it points us to a new way full of possibilities and joy, a way of freedom and fulfillment, which leads us out of the strongholds of castration, which takes us from the claws of the paranoia. If only we could get rid of our selves, and just be, like waves so gentle on the cosmic currents of eternal time. There is no need to hurry, but the time nevertheless is now.