I watched a detective series from the mid 70′s called Murder She Wrote the other day and I must admit it blew my mind. The main character is a middle aged, middle class white American lady with the steely eyed determination of a reptile and the gentle charm of a pigeon.
The series is just far enough removed from my everyday life ( I am a middle aged, middle class white woman living in Britain in 2012) to reveal a caricature mirror image of every day life. Watching an episode is akin to entering the House of Mirrors in a fun fair – you know the one where all the mirrors reflect back  different images. But in the House of Mirrors you are aware that the mirrors are skewered and that it’s all a game, really. Watching Murder She Wrote 40 years after it was made, the society and the values portrayed there seem almost absurd. The sense of absurdness is intensified by the absolute, straight faced conviction of the actors.
It made me think that reality is like an onion in that there are so many different layers and each layer is a definite entity with it’s own particular set of rules. I think that each layer pretty much live in isolation and ignorance of the surrounding layers. Each layer is convinced it is the true onion, their reality the only reality. The dividing factors can be time, geography, religion, or level of consciousness.
I live in 2012, in a small town in England. I live in a country where some people are millionaires and others sleep rough, a country where  many can’t afford to feed their children. I live in a country at war with a large proportion of the Muslim world because officially the British government say they object to innocent people being killed and harassed. I live in a world where materialism is the new God and the ruling church is led by males who side with the rich against the poor. I live in a society where  we are encouraged to seek to meet the Divine only through intermediaries.
I must admit that very little makes any sense to me. I don’t understand much of what is going on in the world, but I have got one area where I thrive and that is exploring what Carl Jung named the collective unconsciousness. He devised a method called active imagination allowing for constructive meetings with the archetypes inside us all. This method is built on an ancient  Shamanic tradition of  going into an altered state of consciousness to journey outside time and space into non-ordinary reality .  I  view it as a way to slide and glide like Alice between the many layers of the onion in the strange funfair of life. Carl Jung brought Shamanic techniques into the light of the scientific world and he called it Psychoanalysis. Again, why use intermediaries?
I can’t say that I have found a lot of answers through Shamanic Journeying, but I have found that my questions shift emphasis and a lot of anger and pain is transformed into a sense of detached wonder. And it does make me appreciate just how transient any culture or ideology really is.
For those interested in Carl Jung and his link with shamanism I can recommend his autobiography ‘ Memories, dreams, reflections’ . The Red Book is also a (very expensive) delight.
To find out more about Shamanism in modern society I think Michael Harner’s ‘ The way of the Shaman ‘ is good, and for a do-it-yourself book of journey techniques I would recommend Sandra Ingerman’s ‘Shamanic Journeying’, a beginners guide.
Faith Nolton is a visionary painter  I have a huge respect for. You can catch her here

The picture on top is of a sculpture  called ‘The Abduction’. I based it on an old Swedish fairytale about a young girl who was abducted by the fairies. To see more of my work, please go to www.annakeiller.com