s of introversion. Before the advent of written language, the word psyche was understood to mean something akin to breath or wind. After the written word created the possibility of a timeless, independent self that can exist outside of the context in which words were generated, psyche was torn from that larger presence and squeezed inside the human skull. It was only after the psyche migrated from the all-pervasive power of wind to the interiors of “mind” as we know it that mental illness began to be seen as an individual pathology instead of a collective issue.
Indigenous cultures seem to recognize an individual’s sickness as a symptom of a larger problem that the entire culture plays a part in. The traditional medicine man or woman negotiated the space between human sickness and nature’s woes, since the sickness was thought to be brought on by a trespass of the people with the land. To heal an individual was to repair the damaged bond with the earth itself. And so, I wonder if personal healing can be expected without addressing the broken bond with the wild, given that one’s individual health is helplessly contingent on the health of the place one inhabits.
It may be hard for us to imagine what life felt like for people whose language did not contain distinctions between physical forms, internal states and celestial beings. Most of us are nested deeply inside the comfort of our protected homes where air temperature is regulated, water is mechanically funneled in and out without any thought on our part, and walls block out sound to create an isolated container. We are allowed to choose to what extent we interact with the forces of nature. If we were exposed to the full ferocity of every dense thunderstorm, a winter full of frigid nights, and the blistering mid-summer sun then we might begin to feel the presence of something larger than ourselves inside these phenomena. If our water needs were completely dependent on the frequency of rain, we might even begin to pray when we felt the desert drought in our own dry throat. We might feel the reality of our life’s contingency on nature’s beneficence.
For a culture whose conceptions of mind and matter were split centuries ago (most ostensibly by Descartes in the seventeenth century) and which reserves the qualities of awareness for our species alone, the muscle of imagination must be exercised like an under-developed bicep. Imagination is the connective tissue between “self” and “other,” between “inside” and “out.” Abram writes that imagination is “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly.” Imagination can be the counter-pose to introversion, and the antidote to our neurosis.
Paracelsus used ambiguity in his texts to stoke the starved imagination of his students. The layers in his language force the literal mind into metaphor, creating a linguistic bridge between mind and material. He exploded the perceptual field this way, continually forcing thought outside of polarization and into the vibrant space of vitalized chaos where the senses had space to breathe.
We are collectively in a space of cultural chaos. It is a fertile place of necessary re-organization. The collective psychological portrait of this moment in history would look something like a finger-painting made by an artist whose body was in flame at the time of rendering. One in ten Americans is on an antidepressant. Suicide rates have increased thirty percent over the last ten years making it the tenth leading cause of death in the United States (this equates to an alarming one hundred and seventeen suicides per day). If those statistics don’t adequately capture the collective desperation, then one need only look at the ongoing instances of mass shootings to see that the American psyche is struggling.
I often wonder what the indigenous shamans would have to say about the current state of health in America and the Western World in general, given their beliefs about disease