Shaman in the World of Experience: A Journey Exploring Conciousness (original) (raw)

Certain experiences, such as for example shamanic journeys to other worlds or encounters with spirits, have such an “impossible” nature that they pose a challenge for people who experience them as well as for those who hear reports of them. In this book I explore a possible ground on which such experiences may be understood. As empirical basis I use experiences from Saami shamanism. The focus is first and foremost ontological. One of the main paradoxes caused by such experiences is that otherworld things, like spirits, don’t obey the same laws as physical things (they change shape, move through walls, appear and disappear before our eyes). Still they seem to be more than just “mental things” (imaginations). Starting from the only thing we may say for shore about their nature - that they are experienced, I explore their nature. This begins as a phenomenological exploration, but becomes ontological. It is the nature of these otherworld things I seek to understand. This implies a general ontological investigation of all things, in what I call “the world of experience”. The book consists of three parts: In part one I introduce the world of experience. Focusing on the ontology of things, I argue that the nature we assign to the physical world (as consisting of discrete objects) actually demands that we project upon it a nature that only can exist as experience, (the gathering and separation that make discrete things is an act that takes place in experience). The nature of experience and the nature of physical things seem to be confused. My approach to solve this problem is to focus on the process of objectification, in which things are constituted as things. The key to understand otherworld things is to locate them in the process of objectification, rather than assign to them the nature of physical or mental things. I explore questions regarding their boarders, what kind of logic they obey and how our own role in the experience of them. In part two I explore some challenges in the research of otherworld experiences. It is not enough to understand such experiences in theory, how do we reach them? I suggest a hermeneutical approach using our own experience as a tool of exploration, focusing on studies of texts, ethnographic fieldwork and participation in shamanic practice. In part three I move from a focus on otherworld experiences to a more general exploration. Here I let the paradoxes posed by otherworld experiences serve as openings, or “koans” for a general understanding that also includes “normal” experiences. . The focus is still ontological. The whole book is written as an exploration, or a path of questioning. I have therefore called the different chapters “explorations”, and I invite the reader to join the exploration to see in his or her own world of experience.