Simone Weil (1909 to 1943), a French philosopher, teacher, factory worker and activist, gave the name ‘affliction’ (malheur) to a kind of suffering that strikes the body, the mind and a person’s place among others all at once, uprooting a life and leaving the afflicted hard to hear. Against it she set attention, a patient, self-emptying way of looking that waits, receives, and can ask another person, “What are you going through?” Her attention sits close to the shamanic discipline of hollowing-outHollowing-out. The core, lifelong discipline of setting aside the middle-world self, its stories, agendas and preconceptions, so the Guides can work through us. The image: the shaman as hollow bone. Read the full answer and to witnessing a person’s pain instead of rescuing them from it; Therapeutic Shamanism parts company with her over her picture of a soul pulled downwards and saved only from above.
Who was Simone Weil? #
She was born in Paris in 1909 and studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, the only woman in her year. From 1931 she taught philosophy in girls’ schools, and in 1934 she took leave to work for about twenty-four weeks on factory production lines, to know from the inside what such work does to people. In 1936 she went to Spain and joined an international anarchist unit in the civil war, until she badly burned her leg. In the late 1930s a series of religious experiences turned her towards Christianity. In 1943 she worked in London for the Free French, and she died in Ashford, Kent, that August, aged thirty-four.1
Almost all her books were published after her death, among them Gravity and Grace (1947), The Need for Roots (1949) and Waiting for God (1950).1
What did she mean by affliction? #
Something more than pain or sorrow. Affliction, as she came to see it in the factories, joins physical pain, mental anguish and social degradation, the loss of standing and of being counted. She called it “an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death.”2
That is what makes it so hard to meet. Thought flies from the sight of affliction, as the body flinches from a wound, so that people look away, explain it, or offer quick comfort, anything but stay with it. Affliction can even make God seem absent for a time.32
What did she mean by attention? #
Not effort in the usual sense. Weil distinguished the clenched, muscular kind of concentration, frowning and straining, from real attention, which is a kind of negative effort, suspending our own thought, leaving it detached, empty and waiting, ready to receive what is actually there.4
In a short essay of 1942 on school studies, Weil held that the real value of schoolwork, even of geometry problems a student never solves, is that it trains this capacity, and that its true use is in prayer and in love of others. Love of one’s neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to ask, “What are you going through?”, and being able to give one’s attention to someone who is suffering is “a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.”5 In a letter of the same year she put it in a single line, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”6 The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch later borrowed the word from Weil, in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), for the just and loving gaze at another person that she saw as the heart of moral life.7
What did she say about roots? #
That uprooting is the great sickness of the modern world. Her last book, written in London in 1943 as a plan for France after the war, opens: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.” A person is rooted through real, active belonging to a community, a place and a living past. She saw uprootedness spread by war and conquest, by money and the kind of work that gives people nothing to love, and by an education cut off from any living tradition.8
How does Weil’s teaching connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
First, in attention as an emptying. The shaman’s power does not come from the shaman. The shaman seeks to become the ‘hollow bone’ through which Spirit acts, and hollowing-out is the practice of stepping aside, as far as possible, from middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer stuff, from one’s own agendas, drives, beliefs and preconceptions, so that Spirit can work without being got in the way of.9 Like meditation, it is never finished; it is a lifelong practice.10 Weil’s waiting, empty attention describes much the same movement, arrived at through prayer and schoolwork instead of journeying. See What are hollowing-out and stalking our stories?
Second, in meeting suffering without fleeing it. When someone is grieving, the natural urge of anyone at all empathic is to rescue them, and outside a real emergency rescuing usually does far more harm than good. Feelings need to be felt and allowed to move through the body, not bypassed or suppressed, and grief is a process that cannot be rushed.11 A good healing has no messages, no ‘shoulds’ or ‘oughts’, and no telling the person what to do.12 Weil’s question, ‘What are you going through?’, is the same refusal to look away or to hurry someone out of their pain. See What does animism teach about grief? and What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Third, in roots. In the shamanic account, the move into totalitarian agriculture and then into cities took us from being part of the land to seeing ourselves as owning it, and domesticated us, so that we lost touch with who we really are.13 Weil’s uprootedness names a modern form of the same loss, and her insistence that roots are a need of the soul, not a luxury, meets the work of rewildingRewilding. Recovering the wild, undomesticated Soul: the practical healing work that follows from the Fall diagnosis. We cannot go back, only forward: ancient wisdom for future solutions. Read the full answer. See What does domestication do to us?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On up and down. Weil pictured all the natural movements of the soul as obeying laws like those of physical gravity, pulling downwards, in the image that begins Gravity and Grace, gathered from her notebooks after her death: “Grace is the only exception.”14 Whatever its depth, the image puts everything natural on the downward side and everything good on the upward one. In Therapeutic Shamanism the hierarchical judgement that ‘up is good and down is bad’ is a spell cast deep into the culture.15 The Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, below, is a spiritual realm every bit as much as the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer above, a place of deep healing, of the soul as well as the body.16 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
And on the self. Weil’s ‘decreation’ is the undoing of the self that says ‘I’, modelled on God’s withdrawal in creating the world.17 Hollowing-out sets the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer aside for a time, but the self is not to be undone: part of the purpose of spiritual practice can be to learn not to serve the ego but to re-form it, so that it can serve and express a greater, more mysterious reality in the everyday world.16
