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www.shamansociety.org 25 Shamanically speaking living in the middle world as if it is the only world is one sure way of guaranteeing the unsus- tainability of that world. Such a one-world-consciousness reminds me of the nightmarish situation depicted in the film The Matrix the 1999 brainchild of the Wachowski brothers. The Matrix is a super-program in which all of humanity minus a small num- ber of rebels has become imprisoned. It is no secret that we are in fact on the verge of imposing a Matrix-like destiny on ourselves. That being said it is even more accurate to compare a monopolistic middle world to a collective lucid dream in which the lucidity of the dreamersor the intra-dream awareness that we are dreamingis all but unanimously lacking. In other words we by which I mean humanity are missing a golden opportunity to effect change on the level of our Dreaming. Middle World as Void By itself the middle world is little more than the dressing of a void. It has impermanence written all over it like a carnival that comes together overnight and when its over disappears just as quickly. Lets assume that there are two kinds of voids the chaos that is breaking down into nothing the dreamless void and the nothing that is always on the verge of building into something unprecedented the vacuum plenum. The middle world is a void trying to decide whether it wants to collapse in on itself or become real and true. Sound far-fetched Internationally respected author critic and theorist Damien Broderick writes that some physicists find it useful to postulate the existence of a probability field to ac- count for how probability space can bend in the presence of some psi paranormal element of consciousness. He asks Can coupling between intention and matter or energy cause a warping of. . . the probability field1 In the 1950s when UFO sightings were a dime a dozen some were so real they were pursued by Air Force jets and the government has never come clean on what they learned from all their classified mid-air encounters. But what was even more interesting to Jung who coined the word psychoid to describe archetypal structures that straddle the psychic and material realms was the relationship of ordinary people to the UFO phenomenon. Folks were so anx- ious to experience UFOs first hand that some published sightings were nothing but homemade models of airships caught on film or a snapshot of a dish tossed over a suburban clothesline. Suffice it to say the middle world is always in a state of flux. It is half-baked floating on a vast relativity of values and dreams and barely functional systems secretive bellicose governments the ruins of ethnicities great train wrecks of religions the stirrings of new and renewed visions environmental breakdown a soup of disparate energiesmoral restlessness continuous war cultural mayhem. Fortunately as shaman and Buddhist Joan Halifax re- minds us Shamans are trained in the art of equilibrium in mov- ing with poise and surety on the threshold of the opposites in creating cosmos out of chaos.2 A Dying Middle World Living shamanically in the middle world means living here lu- cidly knowing that there are co-existent worlds of equal or even greater significance that are readily accessible. I want to suggest that this is the great work of a lifetime precisely because so much of the middle world is dead or dying. I am worried about the vital energy of Turtle Island waningher energy life-force or what the Australian Aborigines call guruwari a potency that the first ancestors injected into the land that infuses the soil and every liv- ing thing. We have all witnessed dead zones quasi-abandoned strip malls with vast parking areas or whats left of once thriving neighbor- hoods where the life energy has dried up where people appear defeated and vacant and streets are a maze of permanent one-way detours with signs that read to borrow from T.S Eliots J. Alfred Prufrock like a tedious argument. The same ennui or doldrums pervade certain forests where trees appear to be dormant or just biding their time. One can only hope that the ancient giants of Sequoia National Park the most polluted national park in the country where the ozone level is comparable to Los Angeles will be able to make it through this time of trouble. Energetic partnership with the land is something our culture knows very little about. If the guruwari of a locale is strong it can pass power or potency to people and people for their part can enhance the life energy or guruwari of a place through timely ritual. But this symbiosis can reverse. If the energy of a place has been downgraded or obliterated by human projects or neglect or perchance by a natural disaster this can sap the energy of the people who inhabit that place and they in turn become sponges for the life energy of other locales. Citing the example of Sequoia essay Lucid Living in the Middle World or Follow the White Rabbit by Gary Lindorff