Healing in the Modern World
A Medium reader recently sent me a private communication from my website. I’ve extracted the essence here: “I came across some of your writing on medium.com and I sensed that we think and feel along similar lines. I am interested to read more on your views of spirituality in politics. Being in the US, I often feel truly sickened by the state of our political system and it’s BIZARRE AND SHAMEFUL machinations… I often feel like a tortured soul, not knowing where to turn for solace. I had one rather profound OBE as a teen and it did change how I view reality, though I long for more views of a true reality beyond the physical. At age 69 I increasingly feel like a complete stranger on a strange and hostile planet, but I would love to move beyond this FEELING… somehow. I desire to experience MOKSHA…”
I understand moksha to mean release from the cycle of rebirth, which suggests that my correspondent no longer wishes to live on this planet. Here is an alternative solution, which might possibly help him to reconcile himself with life down here. It seems to offer the type of experience he is seeking. I came across this recently in my reading:
“The modern person drawn to the shamanic archetype — the vision of sacred earth, revelatory word, and multidimensional cosmos — finds himself horrified by contemporary society and the accelerating processes of global destruction it has unleashed. Yet he is cut off from the archaic traditions he might like to embrace. Our tradition seems to deny us access to spiritual vision, and we have lost the Indians’ innate relation with the natural world as sacred being. And yet, if shamanism is a universal human phenomenon, we possess the innate ability to regain everything we have lost”. (Daniel Pinchbeck, Breaking Open the Head)
