SENTIENT TIMES Dec/Jan 2001

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Global and Social Shaman
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a powerful shaman whose ideas and dreams challenge all nations to maintain an ecological respect for the earth and all of its inhabitants. He realized that the source of wealth in the world lies in keeping our children safe and reducing the economic, educational, and health discrepancies between the world's classes and races. We need love, justice, and an economic equality that enables all of God's people to have clean air, water, and healthy, viable land. This combination of spirit and concern for the sacredness of all life and the health of the natural environment is a traditional shamanic and prophetic vision. King was indeed a global and a social shaman of universal appeal and importance. We would do well to honor his memory and the sacredness of all things on Christmas and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday.

The Imaginal World and Interrelatedness of the Universe

The world of the imaginal is the window to the spiritual world, through which shamans, prophets, and mystics are able to see the universal world of light. This is the fundamental reality of the shaman. Shamanism tests normal perceptions of reality by making use of the imagination to penetrate what Carlos Castaneda called "a separate reality." The shaman uses his or her imagination to search for wisdom in the reality of invisible knowledge. This reality is as concrete and real to the shaman as our everyday reality is to us. Shamanic wisdom, the channel to experience the luminous energy that underlies all reality, bypasses the intellect. This manner of accessing nonordinary reality is in contrast to the dominant society's way to gain understanding, which is the collection of information based on scientific knowledge, not imagination.

Shamans like Castaneda's Don Juan have learned to navigate the archetypal world. Don Juan tells Casteneda that when the apprentice learns to see he can perceive the energy that flows through the entire universe. Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to see this energy force. Through the creative power in his imaginal oratory, King lifted the spirits and minds of his audiences with the energy he called the love-force. We were able to feel and experience the love-force, or soul-force, through his words. Don Juan would say that Martin had learned to see without looking.

Don Juan taught Castaneda "Death is the only wise counselor we have." He advised Castaneda to "ask for that counsel when you feel annihilated." The Native-American shaman has learned to enhance daily life by being aware that death always follows us and that all things in the universe are alive and are related. Chief Seattle said, "There is no death. Only a change of worlds." When we see death in this manner, the path of life can be said to continue into death. Daily actions become important when we are aware of the constant accompaniment of death with life.

Dr. King was aware that he was looking in the face of death on an every day basis as he fought nonviolently against segregation and racism. He expressed despair and pain in his public sermons because he felt annihilated by man's inhumanity to man. As he talked about death, it inspired him to lift his audience to heaven through his words. It seemed that he gained strength by speaking about his own death and that it made him feel like he could continue to be a creative and courageous leader of the civil rights movement. Martin used his imagination to see without looking, to perceive the energy of lumination, that light within all things, when he talked about his own death. On the night before he was assassinated he said, "I have no fear of any man. I have seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you." This was how close his path of life was to his path toward death.

Another Native American saying, "All my relations," expresses the idea that all things in the universe are dependent upon each other, and sees the total world in a conversational relationship where the self and world are one. There is no self and world separation that imprisons us in lonely pockets of egocentricity, apart from a non-trusting objective physical world. Shamanic philosophy of life wraps all life in an inseparable wholeness. Traditional western theory isolates and alienates the self from the world. Paradoxically, the self is also lost if it is absorbed in the outer world. Native American philosophy offers a balance of the individual, nature, and community.

Native-American shamanism is an ecopsychology embracing a path of life that indicates that everything in the universe is sacred. Native Americans, the People, have a relationship psychology that shapes and forms the physical natural world and the social world, and puts them into continuous relationship with the spiritual world. This means that the air, the water, the trees, the animals, the insects, and the amphibians are our brothers and sisters. If they are diminished in the world, it diminishes us.

King's Theology of Shamanism

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a true shaman who tried to heal the earth and the world order that he called the "World House." Three areas of life that Dr. King referred to in his theology of shamanism were the importance of the individual, the sacredness of place, and the interrelatedness of all things. His theology of personalism reflects his shamanism, in which he sees the entire universe filled with selves and that all the selves are balanced and unified by the Supreme Personality. His theology that individual personality is sacred does not accept the sexism that dehumanizes women. Dr. King's creativity and integrity would have most likely put personal demands on him, if he were alive today, to rid himself of the sexism that was prevalent in his paternalistic worldview that reflected the social philosophy of his time.

The South was a sacred place to Martin because of his black church, black family, and black community. The old slave spirituals, hymns, folktales, soul food, and the blues created the magic of the South for him. The Native American and the African traditions both considered the landscape sacred. This sacredness was the basis of King's ecophychology.

Dr. King's writings, sermons, and speeches stressed that all the people in the universe are our brothers and sisters. He would refer to the idea expressed by the saying, "All my relations," through his assertions that the entire world is interrelated and connected, and that all people are sacred beings. Dr. King described his ecopsychology in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, as he worked to heal the social order. His "Christmas Sermon of Peace," given in 1968, captured his global social shamanism

"It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality."

This is the shaman's world and mystical, prophetic consciousness of the imaginal realm that allows us to see the luminosity of the world soul or energy penetrating our lived physical space.

Martin shaped and informed his Christian shamanic theology with the guidelines that he learned through his family and community, of the slave religions and the black churches. These personalist cultural institutions have always considered all personality as sacred. From his father who was called Daddyking, Martin learned about his great grandfather, Willis Williams, an old slavery time preacher and exhorter, and his grandfather, A.D. Williams, an important preacher in his own right. Martin had the knowledge of the slave conjurer, diviner, and African medicine man traditions. These traditions helped Martin to develop his shamanic vision and his ecopsychology.

A Christian Shamanic Initiation

Shamans go through a dismemberment experience, a feeling of being torn apart, as part of their initiation and development as a shaman. King had a crisis conversion after being arrested during the Montgomery Boycott. Slave preachers and healers in the past, along with modern black preachers, experienced crisis conversions as part of their experience of the calling. Dr. King was up late at night when a phone caller made a horrible, sinister threat to him and his family. King was anxiously thinking about how he could lose his newborn daughter and his wife. This despair and agony tore him apart with fear and it made Martin fall to his knees to pray for help. Then a spiritual revelation came to him in his kitchen. Martin describes his shamanic vision to heal the world with emotional intensity.

"It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world.' I tell you I've seen the lightning flash. I've heard the thunder roar. I've felt sin breakers dashing trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised to never leave me alone. At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything."

The shamanic initiation of feeling fragmented, torn apart, and then re-balanced makes the beginning shaman feel confident and steady in order to help his or her people. The initiation experience endows them with a social responsibility to their people. This kitchen mystical vision of nonordinary reality was a vision that Dr. King revisited many times during the Civil Rights Movement.

It is obvious that King was having non-ordinary reality experiences during several of his speeches and public sermons because as we listen to recordings or read transcripts of them, his words uplift us to the heights of heaven. He absolutely lifts us off the earth as he rises into a shamanic, mystical, or prophetic state of consciousness. His beautiful extemporaneous words of poetry and vision about the Promised Land and the Beloved Community initiate all of us into a parallel universe as co-creators with Dr. King creating the sacred city.

Dr. King's Christian shamanism states that deep in the recesses of our unconscious we have the image of God and that the universe is alive with the Spirit that enlivens the whole universe. King talked about being concerned about people living in an ecological environment that was not good for their mental or physical health. According to Martin's vision of a beloved community, the whole world house requires an ecological environment that has love and justice, and a clean healthy Earth, with clean air and water, and economic equality for all. If he were alive today, Dr King would be a leader in cleaning the earth of its dangerous pathogens that are polluting the planet and making it dangerous to all of the children of the universe. Martin's shamanism warns us that a spiritual way of life needs to take into account the conditions of life in which we are making people live. He knew that the poor hard workers live and work in the most polluted environments on the earth. His flights into shamanic and prophetic nonordinary reality constantly fed him the information he needed to lead us to the Promised Land.

References: Beck, P. V. and Walter, A. L. (1977). The sacred: Ways of Knowledge sources of life. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College Press. Carson, C. (Ed.). (1998). The autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. NY: Warner. Castaneda, C. (1971. A separate reality. NY: Simon and Shuster. Washington, J. M. (Ed.). A testament of hope: The essential writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D., is a Licensed Marriage, Child and Family Counselor, co-founder of the Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychotherapy Center in Arcata, California and adjunct faculty at Saybrook Graduate School in peace studies, conflict resolution, creativity and shamanism.

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