I am continuing the discussion that moves toward a shamanically informed psychology, one illumined by an ontology of the heart, what I call the “ontological core.”
My books and articles are indebted in no small part, to my work as a medical anthropologist and Jungian psychologist, and I would like to say more about its influence in this Blog. In researching indigenous health care systems across cultures and historical eras, I have been seeking healing wisdom that can help up in modern western culture develop our own kind of shamanic resourcefulness, and bring that into our healthcare practices and way of life.. In seeking cross cultural understanding, I have used phenomenological descriptions, and ontological insights to elucidate common facts and concerns that underlie the great diversity of local cultural forms of healthcare and healing wisdom. I have been particularly drawn to the power of the implicit psychologies or philosophies of the heart in the Americas, North, Central, and South. I came to the conclusion that we need, in modern Western culture, an explicit psychology of the heart that carries the kind of life-giving and ecological power of the “indigenous systems of the heart.” The creation of a viable and enduring psychology of the human heart entails, it seems to me, the intersection of the mythopoetic imagination, ontology, and phenomenology.
My endeavor here is to briefly sketch the foundations of a psychology of the heart for our time, and those foundations are the ontological foundations of the person. These foundations are what I call variously the ontological core, the core of aliveness, or simply core or heart.
There is an implicit ontology in indigenous healing systems. I shall use the term ‘Being’ (from the Greek ‘ontos, on) in place of any specific term for ultimate reality, keeping the concept open. The word Sacred I sometimes use interchangeably with Being, following Eliade’s precedent, and sometimes call the ‘holy’ following Heidegger’s precedent.
Indigenous healing, ( especially the “shamanic” type), is first of all a healing that is concerned with and addresses the spiritual dimension, the loss and restoration of this dimension. I sometimes call this “the loss of the Sacred” and the Retrieval of the Sacred.”
The ontological, i.e. Being, gives us a way to say what all mythic metaphors of ultimacy name (Spirit, Wakan Tanka, Tao, God, Jatun and so on).
The “spiritual dimension” (mythological vocabulary) is the ontological dimension (viewed from within a philosophical vocabulary). It is Being, becoming, presencing, sheer vitality, life- forward energy pouring into world and body. It is the Sacred, as saturated with Being.
Thus we can say speaking both vocabularies in a mutually illuminating way: What is called “soul loss” is a spiritual illness, and it is ontological illness. Both vocabularies clamour together and saying there is a grave condition which is a matter of disconnection or being cut off from the ultimate source of life, of vitality, connectedness, purpose, meaning, centeredness, groundedness, freedom creativity, gratitude, and our humanity.
Within this framework, a ‘shaman’ is a healer who deals with the spiritual dimension of sickness. When cut off or disconnected from that dimension, imbalances that engender trauma and sickness arise, and trauma and sicknesses themselves can knock one off center, disconnecting one from the ‘ontological core.’ However the breach comes about, it is the shaman’s role, above all, to facilitate restoration the vital connection with the core of aliveness, with the spiritual dimension. Being disconnected from it constitutes a loss and there must be a recovery, a reconnection to the vital sources through the heart of the person.
There is a central axis, a navel of becoming in each being-in-the-world, each creature, we shall call the heart and mean by it the ontological core of aliveness, or simply, and sometimes refer to it as the “core” when speaking of psychological life. The spiritual or ontological dimension may thus be implicit in our meaning of “psyche” and “psychological life.” This in fact was achieved by Jung’s concept of the archetypal Self, which like the atman is the unborn and never dying core, the absolute spiritual or sacred center of the person, around which he built his psychological theory. The Self, in Jung, is the ontological dimension.
There need be no duality between dimensions, planes, or spheres of existence as they are each expressions of Being on some level, however forgetful we may be of the ontological.
The connection to the ontological dimension [spiritual dimension] is thus through the heart and its feeling capacities. The heart is ‘always already’ attuned to body, earth, and social world, just as it is attuned to being. This has moral and eco-psychological implications.
Loss of connection to the spiritual [ontological] sets up imbalances and sickness related to our way of being-in-the-world, physically, socially, ecologically.
Loss of connection to the Ontological Core is ultimate cause and reconnection the cure.
The loss of soul is viewed as the most serious kind of sickness. Jean Achterberg argues that we have a cultural equivalent of this condition on a wide scale. She translates into ontological language saying it is an “injury to the inviolate core that is the essence of the person’s being”:
Soul loss is regarded as the gravest diagnosis in the shamanic nomenclature, being seen as cause of illness and death. Yet it is not referred to in modern Western medical books. Nevertheless it is becoming increasingly clear that what the shaman refers to as soul loss—that is, injury to the inviolate core that is the essence of the person’s being—does manifest in despair, immunological damage, cancer, and a host of other serious disorders. It seems to follow the demise of a relationship with loved ones, career, or other significant attachments. [cited in Ingerman 22]
The Voice of Being arises in myth and story, in song and chant, in dance and rite, in art and architecture, in philosophy and theology….it has many languages, but those which say it out most directly and potently are metaphoric and takes us to the Edge of language and the known, and transfer us into what is beyond the Edge.
Mythology increases consciousness of Being and can help you reconnect. Mircea Eliade repeatedly emphasized that myths “respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the hidden modalities of Being.” Joseph Campbell saw myth as “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations. Mythology carries the human spirit forward.”
Mythology (sacred histories, not mere fiction) because it helps reconnect you with Being can be an agent of healing and a great support in heart-centered living [from core of aliveness]. We see this in shamanic healing systems and it was noticed by Jung for whom the mythic imagination was of tremendous importance in engendering and sustaining sickness and health.
Indigenous healing systems [of the shamanic type] bring the ontological dimension implicitly into diagnostic and healing efforts, and the culture supports this where the mythology is still alive, lived by the people. The fullness of healing presupposes this kind of reconnection with and support of the ontological dimension, the ground of the patient’s being.
The Rishis of Vedanta distinguished three major ontological planes: gross, subtle, and causal.
The causal or ultimate plane is associated with Emptiness/Fullness of Buddhist understanding and is the source from which image and subtle phenomena and gross material world arises or manifests. This causal realm is the pure ontological dimension, of Being itself. The mythic imagination expresses Being [the causal plane] in the subtle realm of archetypal or mythic images [mundus imaginalis]. Mythic images bring tangible, subtle bodied images that carry an affective power (Ricoeur) to move the heart and stir its imagination (Hillman), and increase consciousness (Winquist) of the ontological dimension of life (Guenther/ Levin).
C. Michael Smith, Ph.D. (c) 2008