Metash dialogue BW NT

I'm glad you like “redefining peace as conflict done well.” Of my original expressions, that one seems to resonate most with most people.

“Metashamanic” activates people in all kinds of ways, which I like and which seems appropriate to the archetypal orientation of the idea. There is certainly obscurity in it, but more multiplicities than "obscurity," as such. It can mean transcending, encompassing, above or beyond, something describing or conscious of itself (metalanguage describes language). It also implies analogies with metaphysics, pathology uses it as "consequent on," anatomy and zoology as "behind," botany and zoology as "later" or subsequent, geology makes of it analogies and derivatives, chemistry uses it to compare numbers of water molecules and in isomeric benzene derivative positioning. It situates process consciousness and gives it a "place" to happen.

SO, it sounds like your ideas about myth are more literal than mine. Meta-shamanic does not refer just to an esoteric framing called "myth," but certainly can include it. Metashamanism has to do with the ritual practice of imagination, in community, as archetypal piety (relationship with rather than reduction of the gods/notions/complexes).

The “beyond” is necessary, when dealing with the "shamanic" because contemporary pseudo-ritualism based more in the literalisms of nostalgia than in fictional consciousness (consciousness of fictionality in thinking) has the floor in the popular chamber of shamanic considerations and has been loudly pounding its Authentic Handmade Drum for some time. It can become hard to hear (read?) the fictional call of the imaginal world with all the ruckus. Drumming is GREAT. I am a drummer and a Men's Grouper (visualize the fishiness of it) and a SNAG, and let's take it to a deeper level.

"What is there in this beyond the shamanic?" is a wonderful question. I would answer that my interest is not in _what_ is "beyond." I am fascinated by the idea that Beyond is a _how_ question. Ed Casey suggests "soul" is how you see, not what you see. This is the "realm" that requires the "meta-" be made explicit in my (and Dan Noel's) idea of "shamanism."

Regarding AtplPsych getting too much credit in advancing the tenet that there is no single Truth, any credit given to anyone for achieving this feat is often too much, as the move is culture-wide. Of course, it is a well known feature of postmodernity, but the community of thought that is AtplPsych articulates it with great subtlety and depth. Also, I dig our way of doing it. There is something about getting at "truths" by way of "image/soul/psyche" and plurality of conception that warms the cockles of my being.

Regarding Hillman's semantics, it is problematic to take a thinker of his scope to task for denying “monotheism” and practicing it at the same time when a) he has agreed in public that this is in the nature of the problem, for him no less than any other, and b) one cannot "see" within his conception to know when he is baiting the hook and when he is unconsciously ideologizing. I prefer to err on the side of humility, when making guesses about the inner man (horrors!), and always mistrust everyone of pushing too hard for singularities. This is especially true when passing my bathroom mirror. As for argumentation and blame, they are not inherently monotheistic, and more than any other archetypal configuration. Witness your argumentative style. Blaming and opposition are expressive of the puissance of conflict itself, and have a vital voice that is hardly the solitary purview of Xtians/monotheists. Opposition of literal and symbolic is for rationalists a "thing" to be argued. For Hillman it is a trope, a strategy to inspire process-level discoveries, which does not fall (very often) within your "Xn 'monotheistic' framework."

I'd love if you came to the defense, with these questions and others. I will present here, for my community in Berkeley, this Sunday at 3pm, and at Pacifica, for the actual Defense, Wed. March 31st at 1:30pm. If you can't come to either, please consider signing in to the webinar associated with either date (or both!) by going to MythOfPeace.com

May peace, which will always be a myth, thanks the "gods," shape the future through the literal realities of present communion.

I will post this exchange at mythofpeace.com so others may see it and I may collect questions and responses for the Defense.

Norland Tellez Yes, the “argumentative style” is not a feature of monotheistic consciousness alone, although it seems more fitting here, as it were, as a preparation for a defense question.
Yes I am glad that you too have heard Hillman's own acknowledgment of the question of falling into the framework, not of “monotheism,” but of Christianity, where the psychology of blame which he uses to blame Xty for losing our “pagan” sentiments actually originates. Hillman has himself admitted this, and Glenn Slatter, as you know, a great sympathizer of Hillman, also has admitted to us in public. Hillman is no means above this criticism--as any one aquainted with Giegerich's critique of arch psych can also understand. And that is what I find lacking in your argument to support his formulation of depth-psychology. Hillman and Giegerich are opposites but if one drops one of these extremes then the subtlety and depth you claim for arch psych is also lost. Because it would be an appropriation of arch psych WITHOUT any conflict. That is perhaps my biggest point. if you have not brought G into play then you would be guilty of the same “conflict-free,” i.e., uncritical, appropriation of his ideas that we can find everywhere in the PGI community. That would perhaps be a more telling question: is your appropriation of Arch psych in the name of conflict resolution itself not free of conflict? No one except G can exacerbate the discussion.

The other more important point to be made is the tacit reconciliation of arch psych and the postmodern. From the pov of Lyotard, Derrida, Irigaray, Foucault--to name a few--the enterprise of arch psych appears well within the logocentric logic of the metanarrative--which in Campbell is frankly out of the closet as the monomyth--and the traditional (neo-Platonic) framework of the metaphysics of presence. This is the first thing that jumps at you when you read Hillman in a postmodern key: it is undaunted neo-Platonism. But once again, only a conflict free and one-sided appropriation of his work could blissfully afford to ignore this point.

Now as to the “metashamanic”--this is coming from someone who argued on behalf of the shamanic--the term fails to redeem itself from superfluity in view of the real phenomenon of shamanic consciousness--which is not this nostalgic literalism and acting out by Western sympathizers you allude to. The latter is a sad and misguided distortion, which we indeed should “go beyond,” not by claiming another “meta” but simply by returning to the authentically shamanic. I am willing to bet that what you call “metashamanic” amounts to what is properly called shamanic in Native contexts. The term “metashamanic” is not only superfluous then, but also somewhat annoying since it tacitly claims a superiority over the shamanic as it appears in Native contexts. Unfortunately, the shamanic has become an abstraction in arch psych since as universal it is uprooted from any ethnohistoric context. The shaman of Siberia works very different than Day-Keeper in Maya contexts. But since arch psych continues to invite decontextualization and empty universalisms, such differences would be flatly ignored in favor of yet a new abstraction: the metashamanic. It is also hard for me to ignore the ring of Western ethnocentric superiority in this term as construct which is posited “beyond” and implicitly “more advanced” consciousness than the Native Shaman's, i.e., of the shamanic consciousness when authentically considered--but not, of course, when considering lame imitations of it by Western would-be adepts.

Keep in mind, that I am someone who introduced a whole host of neologisms in my diss-text. I believe, with Richard Rorty, that only new words can save us from old words. But the word “shamanic”--or rather the phenomenon of the shamanic, has hardly been grasped by Western audiences. It is still a new word. In your explanation too, I sense a strawman in place of the authentically shamanic, a straw shaman on the basis of whose critique you feel the need to posit the meta-shamanic. But, just as metaphysics was not invented due to the spuriousness of physical knowledge but as an entirely different, qualitatively new realm of inquiry, you have to begin with a solid (contextualized) understanding of the authentically shamanic and then prove to me on such a basis that you need to go “beyond” it. Only then will the term prove its necessity in the lexicon of mythological studies. On the strength of my research into Maya shamanism in particular, I could tell you that there is no “getting beyond” the shamanic. As Giegerich would say: This is it! (not as ultimate Truth, but as the ultimate of ITS truth). To go beyond it, would mean literally to die and to go to the “otherworld.”