Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018
Fundamentalism
Closing in on Fundamentalism
When applied to groups, excessive closure equates with fundamentalism. Fundamentalism can be quiet or loud. It can easily take the form of professionals who refuse to hear new perspectives just because they think their position bestows the correct answer. A wrong medical diagnosis is then made or a bridge collapses. Or it can be a rabble-rouser inciting others to conform to some type of thought or behavior, leading scores of people who are caught in a current of emotion to follow a make-believe flag. No matter the context, the result of this form of closure is that misinformation is held as truth by group consciousness. This is where the individual must be able to stand alone. Navigating these travails forms an inherent part of the journey to self-actualization.
Whether a fundamentalist cohesion is based on intricacy of reason or emotion, the associated routines and rituals cement its unquestioned acceptance. We can think of this as a house of cohesion, with walls, windows, flooring, carpet, and so on. Various industries manufactured and distributed each element, particular cultural values spawned its architecture, and the building of it requires a number of skills. When all of this comes together in one construction, the complexity and power of the cohesion is immense. A person can get fascinated by logic and its interlocking structures to the degree that he loses sight of something beyond it. A person may come to accept the rote beliefs of a philosophy without taking time to measure its effects other than it offers participation within a group. Social acceptance is, after all, is one of our key motivators.4
At the heart of fundamentalism is common understanding, the very thing that leads to significant gains. Perhaps institutionalized thinking that calcifies thought and behavior marks a dividing line from more fluent behavior. It becomes the driving force that determines values rather than a template for encouraging learning. A point of view may make sense and thus no one wants to relinquish it; people become unwilling to entertain new states of consciousness, especially if doing so might make their current view obsolete. When this is backed by group consensus, the power magnifies. While collective knowledge can significantly add quality for the individual, the downside is that individuals surrender their autonomy to the group, forgetting that individual independence enables the group to flourish. Moreover, the bigger the impending changes to an established norm, the greater is the resistance to making the changes: the energy of inertia at work.
Political scientists refer to a mobilization of bias when organizations actively promote fundamentalist ideas by requiring a “non-decision” for people to remain in compliance with dogma.5 In this type of setting people cannot stray from the fold through genuine inquiry or by entertaining answers that lie outside the organization’s doctrine. This type of entrainment also applies to individuals who try to unduly influence others by using a prevailing bias, like race or gender, in order to restrict the flow of contradictory information. Unchecked, fundamentalism leads to tyranny and signifies estrangement from your core.
When individuals cement their allegiance to the group by moral self-righteousness, then others need to beware the tide of emotion that follows. The values comprising a fundamentalist stance help produce such responses. As neuroscientist and Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman points out, “emotions are complex states arising from core interactions with value systems.”6 This complexity forms a potent cohesion, which then dominates the person rather than the person managing cohesion.
Any cohesive lifestyle has great power, enough to lead its adherents away from convention. Whether it is a cult, a corporation, an intentional community centered on shared values, or a metaphysical path, the adherents of any social group develop some version of a shared conditional energy field. In the same manner, participants within mainstream society develop a conditional field. In general, then, a gathering of like-minded people generates a force—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
The better aspect is that a group can usually explore aspects of the unknown and accumulate knowledge faster than one person alone. The worse aspect is that the shared understanding that results from these explorations may be misconstrued as being true reality. Whether this distortion comes from scientists, religious leaders, or philosophers, it indicates fundamentalism. Whenever there is an attempt to define, confine, or otherwise limit awareness—whenever a step is taken away from potential—that denotes fundamentalism.
Shamanism, like science or any other endeavor, finds itself subject to this same consideration. The vast accountability of the energy body model can provide a fast track to consciousness exploration or produce a swamp of knowledge from which you’ll never escape. The philosophy itself contains remedy, though, and is found in using the craft as a boost to enter yet another realm.