From Part Three | re-imagining

Extracts from PART THREE

EXTRACT ONE: In Part Two, when describing trees as ‘energy shapes,’ I briefly mentioned the Shamanic world-view in which everything is alive and has a spirit, not just animals and plants but rocks and hills and lakes and clouds. In this world-view everything is also connected – connected by virtue of being alive. The exercises outlined above, whereby you transform yourself into a tree or into different animals, are excellent ways of appreciating this underlying connectedness, what might be called the web of being.

It is also appropriate, I believe, to think of ‘becoming’ a certain animal as a means of discovering, communing with and even taking into yourself the spirit of that animal. Here, ‘spirit’ does not mean some kind of weird substance that might glow in the dark when outside its normal fleshy habitation. It is the structured, concentrated vitality that is expressed in the animal, the way life flows in and through it.

Spirit is not separate from body, and it is only distinct from the body in an abstract way. The body is spirit, says the Japanese philosopher Ichikawa, when we experience our existence in a unified way (see Appendix 1 for some discussion of this idea). I suggest that this kind of unified experience is necessary when you are ‘being an animal,’ for although your focus might be on, say, your spine, it should be so in such a way that it feeds through and ‘irradiates’ your body as a whole.

To Shamans, human beings are far from being alone. Each of us is accompanied in different phases of our life by a Power Animal, a specific animal spirit – perhaps by more than one simultaneously. This is nothing like having a ‘fairy godmother’ who turns up occasionally to perform the odd beneficent trick. While the Power Animal is other than us, it is also intrinsic to our way of being-fully-in-the-world. If, for whatever reason, we lose our Power Animal, we suffer, perhaps becoming sick. This is simple enough to understand: the Power Animal is really a certain kind of energy – if we lose the animal, we lose its energy too.

With which of the animals that you managed to become through metamorphosis do you feel the greatest affinity? Could this be your (current – but perhaps long-standing) Power Animal?

There is a way to dance your animal, through which you can discover what your Power Animal is. To succeed, you must truly let go. You must dance down past your social body to the level of your body-as-your-unconscious, and then dance deeper.

EXTRACT TWO: Even so, the padded dancers were an anti-ideal, as I’ve said, which implies an ideal, and the Ancient Greeks certainly idealized the (male) body in much of their art. But what we really need to grasp here is the underlying linkage, the deep-rooted connection, between the grotesque and the beautiful. The next exercise is aimed at this.

EXERCISE: BECOMING A ‘BUTTERFLY’

Given the iconic status of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, this, you might assume, ought to be an obvious or essential metamorphic exercise. Not at all! For one thing, it’s far too easy to pretend to ‘be’ a butterfly in a silly way. Why, all you have to do is imagine yourself very lightweight, up on the tips of your toes, ballerina-style, while waving your arms up and down!

To avoid such reductive absurdity, you are going to become a ‘butterfly’ by becoming a human being – a human being that emerges from a larva! (We’ll simply skip the pupal stage.)

The reason that the metamorphosis of caterpillar into butterfly has such iconic status is that something beautiful emerges from something (comparatively) grotesque. Now, caterpillars are not truly ‘grotesque’ – at least, not compared to maggots. Still, we’re not quite so wonder-struck by the transformation of a maggot into a bluebottle, are we? Perhaps the fly’s relatively fat body ‘echoes’ the earlier stage too much? Perhaps what matters most is the ‘dancing delicacy’ of the butterfly...?

For your own transformation, the crucial thing is to become as grotesque as possible in your larval stage. So lie on the floor. Make sure your legs are together, ‘joined’ at the inner thighs, knees, ankles and feet. Similarly, your arms and hands are ‘joined’ to the sides of your torso, all the way down to your thighs. To complete your initial transformation into something like a worm, simply close your eyes. You are completely blind.

When you start moving, you will only be able to do so by some combination of rolling, twisting and undulating. All the while you must keep your legs joined together and your arms joined to your sides. You will be moving in search of food. You are blind, but you have a dominant sense of smell. You will simply move around, larva-like, trying to catch a whiff of something that will tell you which way to go. To do so, you will often ‘rear’ your head as high as possible.

Before you start moving, however, you have to complete your transformation into a larva. What I ask you to do next is the essential step.

It is also terrible to experience.

Imagine the features of your face being erased. Imagine your face becoming a kind of blank space.

(Did you know that the word ‘larva’ comes from the Latin for mask? The scientific name for the adult form is ‘imago,’ – which means the representative image of a thing, that which it is truly like. A ‘larva,’ then, ‘masks’ or hides the true form. That is why I have just asked you to don a blank non-face mask in your imagination.)

Now start moving around.

At first you will feel very constricted and awkward. Keep moving, then, until your highly restricted condition comes to feel ‘natural’ to you. Only when you have achieved this can the metamorphosis begin.

Now lie still and begin to feel your limbs (your normal limbs, your arms and legs) ‘budding’ at the shoulders and hips. Imagine your limbs getting longer, growing outwards. Imagine separating them, your arms from your sides, your legs from each other, before you actually do so. Experience all this as inner movement before you let it turn into outer movement. The movement of your limbs will be small at first, but let it grow bigger, finally becoming a full stretching out.

This is the time to let your face come back. This should happen slowly and smoothly. Be as precise as possible in your imagination. In the end, open your eyes. This should recall WAKING FOR THE FIRST TIME – but don’t start to explore the new world around you. Simply let yourself be aware of it.

Now you can stand up. Once up, walk a few steps, feeling your limbs very relaxed. Finally, perform the ‘archetypal gesture’ of OPENING.

The goal of this exercise is to discover the beauty of your developed and extended human form, by letting it emerge through metamorphosis from a grotesque kind of primal form. The ‘ideal’ emerges from, and was in a sense contained in, the anti-ideal. In experiencing this, you come to understand that the ideal that really matters for you as a human being is within the human form itself. It is not a particular, restricted version of that human form.

Because the emergence of the imago from the larva must be very ‘easy,’ the way you get up into a standing position is important. The movement needs to be economical, well-balanced and smooth.

EXPERIMENT 15: It’s a good idea to try out different ways of standing up from positions either lying or sitting on the floor. Through this, you discover that the more you can avoid any moment or phase of the process during which you need to work hard to avoid overbalancing, the more easily controlled the standing up feels and of course the better it looks. Ideally, all muscular effort should push upwards with little or none working ‘sideways’ (that is, to pull or hold you vertically), for the latter always feels and looks awkward. Whether or not you achieve this will depend to a large extent on the precise position from which you begin to stand up, above all (pun intended) where your centre of gravity is in relation to your legs and feet.

Upright posture was long regarded as distinctively human and even given theological significance in Judaeo-Christian thinking. What distinguished us from 'mere beasts' was the fact that we would naturally look towards heaven, though with our feet still on the ground. For some, upright posture was the image of God in Man. Whatever one’s response to this, we should realize that the differences between quadrupedalism and bipedalism, both anatomically and functionally, are very great indeed, and that for this reason there is no simple consensus as to how and why upright posture evolved. During the 20th century, in fact, approximately thirty different hypotheses were put forward to explain it. Looked at in this light, it’s maybe not surprising that standing up from a position on the floor can sometimes seem quite awkward! In doing it, after all, you’re performing a kind of ‘miracle’! (This is not as fanciful as it may seem. The main problem of explaining the evolution of fully upright posture lies in the many selective disadvantages that would arise in the transition to it. In standing up you are also ‘transitioning’ and thereby experiencing some of these disadvantages, such as increased stress on certain joints.)

That’s merely standing on your own two feet, by the way. Actually walking on them is yet another marvel!