15 - Learning of Martín Prechtel
Ugh, I've been trying to write a post for over a week, about becoming aware of Martín Prechtel and his books and teachings. It's been difficult because of just how much impact he has had on my life. No other author or teacher has influenced me as much as Martín, or given me such a complex and compelling view of the possibilities of being human. In some ways, it feels like my life ever since becoming aware of him, has been a tug-of-war between finding my own path in the world, and feeling inspired and magnetized and validated by the stories and worldview that he presents.
So this is me starting over from the beginning, with a whole different post, trying to pare down all the things I could say, to just what I need to say at this point in my story, to introduce the first main ideas of his that impacted me.
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When Ed and I moved to Pine River in 2006, we were plunged into a community whose diverse people inspired me and helped me to find parts of myself I had been missing. I mentioned in an earlier post that I'd become interested in shamanism. One of the healers I was seeing told me during a session that she saw me as a shaman in two previous lifetimes. A part of me was skeptical about this past-life vision, but at the same time, it felt weirdly comforting and not at all surprising. And it also felt like a legacy to live up to that I didn't know how to begin to implement in the present.
I looked into the New Age shamanic movement a little and felt like it was too disconnected from the real natural world to interest me. I didn't know of any living shaman who felt authentic to me, much less one with whom I could study.
Shortly after Ed and I split up, he told me about a shaman that a friend of his knew, who was giving classes in New Mexico. I didn't know anything about this shaman, but something inside me sensed that this was an authentic indigenous shaman, and that I wanted to know him. But Ed didn't want to tell me his name. This was infuriating to me. I let it slip back in my mind because I wasn't going to get anywhere with Ed's stubborn protectiveness of this man's name.
Finally, a year later, shortly before Ed was going to actually start classes with this man in New Mexico, he told me his name. Martín Prechtel. At that point, Martín had written four books, and had put out a CD of a talk he had given. I think it was December of 2008 when I finally found out his name. His first book was titled "Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, memoirs from the living heart of a mayan village."
I've read a lot of books. It's hard to describe the effect this book had on me. Even the acknowledgments in the beginning were written in a way that felt different from anything I had read before. It felt more deeply alive. And the "Author's Note" that came directly after the table of contents read like a portal into a way of being human that felt anciently familiar, and intensely magnetic, impossibly alien to my civilized sensibilities and irreconcilable with the life I was living, all at the same time.
I was hooked from the first sentences. I devoured the whole book hungrily, like I'd been living on rations of only unseasoned white rice my whole life, which only minimally sustained me, and I'd had a vague feeling something was missing but didn't know what. And then I had suddenly found a banquet of mouth-puckering juicy wild berries, and bitter, stringy, crunchy roots, and the roasted savory tender meat of unknown animals, and discovered that, though the flavors and textures were new and strange to my taste buds, I could feel my body recognizing and absorbing these new foods as what it had always been hungry for, and feeling truly nourished for the first time in ... how long? .... countless generations.
He had grown up in New Mexico but ended up in a traditional Mayan village of 40,000 people in Guatemala in his early 20's, where they had recognized his heart's love of the divine in nature, and taken him in as one of their own. They named him the "magnificent orphan." The village's most respected shaman took him in as his main apprentice, and he spent the next dozen years becoming fluent in the languages and rituals and beliefs that had been passed down since pre-colonial times, and becoming thoroughly enmeshed in the village's relationship with the divine dimensions of the mountainous jungles and jade-watered Lake Atitlan.
I have just given a very perfunctory and dis-respectfully brief summary of an incredibly ornate and intensely and beautifully detailed saga of his immersion in an ancient intact indigenous culture, one that has since been demolished by civil war and modernity. Even the way he uses language to describe his life before he arrived there is a living demonstration of the difference between the indigenous relationship with words and our own efficient enslavement of them.
As I was reading his stories, and the descriptions of the context of history in which he placed them, something that I had always suspected began getting confirmed, which is that everything we in this society assume and get taught from birth, and take for granted as "human nature," or "human evolution," or "human history" is a narrow, distorted, truncated, sickly, flattened, wildly ignorant fairy tale about what happened in the "primitive" past.
It's a fairy tale that tells us that the society and industrial economy and science that we have these days is the most sophisticated and wonderful way of being human that we as a species have ever come up with. It is a fairy tale that is completely divorced from the reality of who we used to be, and completely devoid of any understanding of the magnificent beauty and usefulness we humans are truly capable of being, in relation to each other, but even more importantly, in relation to the rest of the world we live in, and most importantly of all, our usefulness to what he calls the "holy in nature," which is what makes life live.
The vast chasm that I could feel between the human culture of his Mayan village, and our modern supposedly advanced technological society was difficult for me to grasp, never mind to navigate. The descriptions of life and understandings in his village were both the most inspiring view of being human I had ever encountered, while at the same time feeling impossibly difficult to actually bring to life where I lived in the present.
There are so many aspects to this difference between what Martín defines as "intact indigenosity" and the "irreality" of modernity, but the over-arching difference that was obvious to me is that the worldview and therefore the cultural practices of intact indigenous cultures are based on the understanding that non-human life, including what we consider to be just dead "matter," does in fact all have it's own sentient consciousness and divine dimensions.
I began to realize that it wasn't really shamanism that I was after, in wanting to know this man. What he was offering was an entirely different universe of possibilities for my life. It was a universe that took into account the anguish I had felt the evening that the Tree had revealed itself to me as a loving witness of my own dimension of Love that I had forgotten about, and the subsequent horror of realizing I had unconsciously cut down a tree just like it, just the day before.
I had been thirsty for stories and methods of how to relate to our world with this awareness of the divine-in-the-material as the foundation, instead of the purely materialist foundation that our civilization is built upon, and along came Martín to plunge me fire-hose fashion into a stream of stories about just this very thing.
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Another fire-hose of stories and ideas came in the form of a CD of a recording of a talk he had given in Minneapolis several years earlier. It was only an hour long, but the powerful fractal universe that came through his mouth in that one hour felt like a lifetime's worth of "information" to be somehow integrated into my own body.
One main theme of the talk, which is titled "Grief and Praise," is that in his village, the doing of emotions of all kinds, and especially grief, is considered one of the ways that humans feed the divine dimensions, and is welcomed and relished by the people. I will at some point write a whole post, (or maybe several,) on the subject of grief. In the chronology of my story, the impact of this talk was mainly to add a whole new dimension to the value of "doing my emotions," and this revelation came within months of hearing Amy talk about it for the first time. In this talk, Martín didn't just give me permission to do my emotions, he laid out why NOT doing emotions was the root cause of so many of our problems here in our civilized Western world.
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So those are the first glimpses of my introduction to Martín Prechtel. Lots more will come out in subsequent posts that I hope to write.
I'm going to give y'all a list of ways that you can get your own glimpses of his worldview and stories, should you be interested in exploring them. (And I'm pretty proud of myself that I figured out that I can google how to insert a live link into a blog post!)
1. The talk that I've listened to a hundred times on CD, is now uploaded to YouTube, in three parts: (youtube automatically takes you to part 2 when part 1 is done, etc.)
"Martín Prechtel, Grief and Praise, Part 1"
2. I love this interview that Derrick Jensen did with Martín in The Sun Magazine, from 2001:
3. His website is Flowering Mountain. You can order any of his (now nine) books, read about his classes, and find links to a lot of fairly recent interviews from podcasts and radio shows.
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