posted on Saturday, January 21, 2006 7:28 PM
by
Kevin
Voicing Change
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we usually use Change as a sort of self-help device. Maybe that’s part of our personal development culture, all those psychological gymnastics, something I have certainly bought into in my time. But when I took a look at what divination does in traditional cultures I got my eyes opened to a whole different world. It’s a thing they use to create sacred space. It tells everybody in the community that the ancestors and the spirits haven’t forsaken us. A consummation much to be desired.
Those other kind of diviners see themselves as a kind of “talking instrument.” People use them to speak to the spirits and, mirabile dictu, they get answers that open their hearts and minds. The words help heal them. And this kind of divination does something even more interesting. It opens up what I call the Secret Sickness Pathways that connect what we might think is our own little problem or crisis to a disorder in the culture we’re born into. So it helps to heal the culture, too. And face it, we live in a pretty sick culture.
I want to look at this. I want to explore some of the ways we can give Change this kind of voice, how we as diviners can make its mythic images work, not just for personal development but to help heal the world we live in.