How your dog can be your spiritual teacher – and how you can become a shaman

Not to knock Eckart Tolle but your dog can be a far more profound spiritual teacher when you remember that one of the gifts that dogs give you is they bring you into the now because that is where they live. BUT are you noticing it? Next time you see someone taking their dog for a walk look to see how present that person is or isn’t. Most of the time it’s like the dog is awake taking this sleepwalker for a walk.

What you often see with spiritual teachers is they end up using the language of different spiritual traditions to express themselves. But are they actually expressing themselves, or parroting profound truths of others?

Years ago I trained in an Hawaiian Shamanic lineage, Huna Mua. And I had the profound good fortune of my teacher Phil Young being someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He enjoyed the incongruence of being a “middle class white guy” to use his phrase who had the extraordinary experience he was living (which is chronicled in the book A Promise Kept). And what I’ve realised more recently is that if you want to be able to make a difference in the world you need to learn how to become a shaman. BUT…

What this is NOT is copying what a shaman did in some indigenous culture. Unless you are going to live in that culture that is kind of pointless. It may seem to satisfy your longings to go back to a time where there weren’t the problems we have today with the poisoning of the environment and therefore the food we eat and how that then affects us. As well as all the financial difficulties and trouble the world has shared recently. The romanticised view of going back to the past unfortunately just isn’t true. I apologise if I’m spoiling your illusions. But that’s part of the problem we share today, so many people living in delusion where they think only of themselves disconnected from the reality of the people around them. Many people love the idea of the Native American culture, or rather how they think it was. And don’t realise in their naivety that they just wouldn’t have survived. That is what the job of the shaman was all about, helping their tribe, their culture not just survive but thrive.

This is what a modern day shaman does. They help not just their tribe but their culture thrive.

Remember you can’t do this if you JUST want your tribe to survive. The boundary of your tribe is the boundaries of planet earth. The mess you make washes up on the shore the other side of the world, just as their mess washes up on yours.

Another way of saying this is most people live in the world of ‘OR’. The choice is this OR that, if we’re successful someone else has to lose out. If you learn to live in the world of ‘AND’ you realise if we’re going to be successful we also have to make everyone else successful as well. There is no choice. You build ecology into your decision making process. This is one of the things the MythoSelf process does, it teaches you an embodied ethical decision making process. So you think ecologically.

The secret to getting other people to change is that you can’t make them. But if you become a leader worth following and embody the change that you want to see then people will happily change to follow the example of what works.

How many dogs do you see taking their ‘owners’ for a walk? Most of them, yes? Listen to your dog.

Time to wake up it’s not about transcendence

So you wake up. That’s it.

OK, that might not be too much help. But like that IS IT.

How you do it is of course a completely different question.

What’s interesting is that there is so much interest in waking up, or enlightenment or spirituality, but how many people have actually woken up?

I’m awake, but I should really define what I mean by that.

I have the choice to not react automatically to what is happening around me and to me, but to act intentionally for what I want.

So yes I have an “I”. I disagree that the purpose of enlightenment is to get rid of the ego. If you didn’t have an ego you wouldn’t be able to function in the world. OK if you have sangha or an ashram to take care of you but I suggest this is a fundamentally disabled way to be as opposed to an abled way to be. You want to be becoming more able to do than less able to do. I’d point as an example to some of the Buddhist teachers who have fabulously healthy ego’s. They are nice people to be with, they are living life and enjoying this life.

Another way of saying this is that it is not about transcendence. As in going beyond the physical level. That is death.

A lot of ‘spirituality’ confuses this idea promoting transcendence in that you can ‘bliss out’ and leave the problems behind. This of course is very popular as people want to get away from their problems. One of the psychological tools that is often appropriated by ‘spirituality’ is the idea of changing your environment. If you were in a better environment you wouldn’t have the problems that you do have now. You would have more freedom to grow without the difficulties and limitations that keep you stuck where you are now…

Nice idea but the reality is of course very different as exemplified by the people who in the 1960′s went to India to ‘find themselves’ and of course took all of their problems with them because they were their problems not a product of the environment.

Yes if you radically change the external environment enough you can’t sustain the problem. But that change needs to be so extreme, like living in India like an Indian with the standard and quality of life that the majority have not the wealthy minority. Often having a bigger problem, like being able to get food and survive, drives the smaller problems into insignificance or the boundary conditions that keep the problem intact as a problem dissolve because when you change that boundary they can’t be sustained.

In other words if you change your direction and rather than heading towards transcendence you head back in the other direction to the visceral real world and immerse yourself in accomplishing something here. Something worthwhile let’s say. Something that would make your life worthwhile, a reason for living let’s call it. Then when you take on that bigger problem you can’t sustain the boundary conditions of the other problems that you were trying to transcend away from.

Why do you want enlightenment, why are you interested in spirituality? If your answer involves ‘other’ that’s futile, like all the good you could do or the benefit you could be. This is all delusion. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world. It has to start with you.

Time to wake up.