The terms “medium” and “media” have strangely evolved. A medium could be chemical or electronic – transmitting or holding some force the way air transmits sound or wires electricity; or a psychic medium who channels an invisible spirit’s message. Early people knew the air and winds as media for communication from nature or from the gods. “Something in the air” might tell of weather changes, animal activity, or a portent of something approaching. The smoke of sacrifices and pipes was sent into the air to carry prayers and petitions to the Otherworld. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, (as Abram notes in The Spell of the Sensuous), our smoke offerings to the sky have been chemical wastes. “It was as though after the demise of the ancestral, pagan gods, Western civilization’s burnt offerings had become ever more constant, more extravagant, more acrid – as though we were petitioning some unknown and slumbering power, trying to stir some vast dragon, striving to invoke some unknown or long-forgotten power that, awakening, might call us back into relation with something other than ourselves and our own designs.” It’s tempting to see multiple climate crises and pandemics as an answer from those not-so-slumbering Powers.
Intelligence was once a property of the natural and supernatural worlds in which humanity could participate in a dynamic interchange that was then given meaning through the stories and myths of oral traditions. This seemed to change with the introduction of increasingly abstract media. First came writing and printed alphabets. (Again, see Abram) The first letters were pictographic and referred to the natural world. But pictographic alphabets became increasingly divorced from nature, and thereby abstract, so that the books we read today come through an alphabetic medium related solely to the phonetics of a human voice carrying human-generated ideas of other people’s scientific, social, or fantasy revelations. The intelligence of the world was reduced to marks on a page and our relationship with nature crippled, if not broken.
Today, when we think of media, it’s a television, computer, or phone screen. We are divorced from nature as a medium or as a source of intelligence. Intelligence is now confined to a human constructed device that offers us human-created content. Even this news medium over the decades has devolved to separate itself not only from nature but, for many media outlets, divorced from anything related to truth as well.
In turn, we – our human selves – have been progressively narrowed to an abstracted, closed-loop, intellectual bubble of human-generated, human-content organs of commercial exploitation and political propaganda (with a few exceptions). Even if the content is true and reliable, the structure of our dependence on a human device and human-defined information has all but replaced our ability to trust our own senses, intuitions, and information processing, not mention to be able to engage in relationship with the greater-than-human natural world for its intelligence, its companionship, and its messages.
With my recent shamanic offerings I’ve hoped to re-awaken our senses, intelligence, intuition, receptivity and engagement in relationship with the landscapes within us and outside of us. This may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not. This is my mission these days: to attempt to restore the sacred through our integrated relationship with visible nature and with the invisible Otherworld. In retrospect, it was there in my psychotherapy work and in my books about reincarnation and karma, ghost investigations, and the evolution of religions.
If I had any general advice, I’d say, “Turn this device off and go outside. Listen for the sounds of nature. Smell the air. Feel the Earth beneath your feet. Feel on your skin the warmth of the Sun, coolness of the air, or wetness of rain. And then stop and listen some more.” I think I’ll do the same.