Dog Walkin Shamanism
A reliable form of Empty Hands divination
The writers of the 1985 show MacGyver were modern shamans.
MacGyver’s nearly unavoidable in the social ether of pop culture, but let’s back up and refresh your memory. The titular character creatively engineered his way through every episode’s life-or-death predicament. He’d invent these devices—these MacGyverisms—with household items. Satires poke fun showing him building a bomb with bubble gum, a paperclip, and a rubber band.
What does this have to do with shamanism? It’s how the writers came up with their ideas that qualifies them.
I’m using John Vervaeke's definition from the series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
The shaman is getting into the flow state… they're getting an insight cascade. And they're also getting enhanced implicit learning picking up on… real, complex patterns.
In Steven Kotler’s flow manifesto, Art of the Impossible, he describes how MacGyver’s writers would use flow states to trigger intuition that synthesized multiple ideas that snuck into their subconscious via implicit learning.
Write down the problem you’re trying to solve. Pen and paper supposedly work best, but I just use a Google Doc on my phone.
Do something that only halfway distracts your conscious mind. Taking a shower works better than watching TV, for example. I walk my dog, hence the article’s title.
Collect the answers that arise from your subconscious while your conscious mind is busy.
As I often do, I did a little Dog Walkin’ Shamanism to come up with the structure for this article. Each heading in this essay is a real example that can elucidate how the method works and why it's worth trying.
Image from the Creekmason Initiates’ Discord bot!
Charging, barking barrier frustration: what do you want, what do you feel held back from getting, what are you fixated on?
My dog, Lady Chaos, loves the dog park. She romps, plays, wrestles, runs, and woofs. What this sixty-five pound doodle doesn’t do is scare anyone.
Walks are another story.
They call it barrier frustration: because she’s leashbound and can’t roam up to other dogs and people, she goes apeshit. Without the plays and pets she believes are her due, she turns into a snarling Kujo.
Near the beginning of the shamanism walk that I took to plan this article, we passed another dog walker. Lady’s lunge abruptly jerked me from mindlessness.
After wrestling her back under control, I inspected this distraction with playful curiosity. What did it have to do with the question I wrote down before leaving the house? How could it “help me write an interesting article?”
I realized that—exactly that—was the first thing the universe was calling me to write about.
The selection of a question.
You have to look at what you feel you’re being held back from, like my dog yanking at the edge of the leash. The way Lady was restrained from meeting the other dog, what joy and connection do you want more than anything, but feel held back from? The way my dog was zeroed in on the dog across the street, what are you fixated on achieving that is just outside your reach?
Through this contemplative practice, I’ve zeroed in on myriad objectives.
A list of virtues I’d like to embody.
The immediate next steps in my path to householder enlightenment.
Countless articles and podcast intros.
The resolution to ongoing arguments and conflicts.
The concrete behaviors of a better worker, father, husband and friend.
What do you want to ask yourself?
Don’t pee on the fake grass: artificial substitutions don’t satisfy our true selves’ needs so don’t misdirect your urges toward consumer goods.
Appropriately, this “Dog Walkin’ Shamanism” practice centers heavily on observations of the behavior of my dog.
The next thing that pulled focus and made a distinct emotional impact was Lady Chaos doing the potty sniff around a neighbor's artificial turf.
There are innumerable unique yard signs around my neighborhood: cartoons of squatting dogs behind a red circle and slash; corny messages like, “Your dog is welcome as long as one of you cleans up;” aggro jokes like, “Lawn electrified by dog urine.”
There’s intrinsic motivation too. I’d feel responsible for the ruination of smelly, disgusting fake grass that couldn’t absorb her urine.
I gave Lady a little yank, said “leave it,” had an “a-ha” moment of introspective awareness, and pondered over the message.
My interpretation—and every one of these moments is very much up to personal interpretation—was that Lady’s sniffing was calling me to emphasize that this MacGyver Method yields deeper, more authentic truths than we typically default to.
We’re told what to want by consumerist propaganda constantly, but it’s all fake grass.
Following your capitalist brainwashing by directing your desires toward products is a lot like my dog attempting to urinate on a lawn that appears real but can’t actually handle it. It’s like falling for an illusion.
This Dog Walkin’ Shamanism calls you to get in touch with your True Self and faithfully execute your own authentic self-expression. Don’t get distracted by things that can’t really satisfy you, figure out what you truly want.
And then go for that, instead.
Swooped by an exuberantly cawing crow while on I’m taking notes: nature wants your attention and even suburban wildlife has a message
MacGyver’s writers didn’t use it this way, but their method for writing solutions to the show’s engineering riddles actually works as a potent form of divination. You can attack questions only your subconscious mind has enough information to answer. This works because you’re taking in information constantly. Mostly, you’re habituated to it. Ignoring it; classifying it unimportant to your goals and survival.
But it’s there, hiding in the wings. It’s been processed and stored away and, through this empty hands form of divination, you can cue it onto center stage.
It’s the same process that makes the Tarot powerful. What you get out of the cards is dependent on everything you studied carefully and then intentionally forgot for that one moment of perfect presence where the surprising truth bubbles up to become a meaningful insight.
Historically, shamans worked off the animist assumption that everything was alive with spirit and bursting with to the desire to communicate. According to Vervaeke, they would “learn the language” of wildlife. By paying close attention to animals, they could intuit valuable data informing their tribe’s decisions about what to hunt, where to gather, and how to defend themselves. Materialists might argue they were really only subconsciously picking up on the animals’ subtle physical conditions, behaviors, and body language. Those things could certainly have signaled broader ecological patterns. Regardless of the model used to explain it, though, their wisdom was frequently actionable.
The crow that swooped my head—cawing as it passed a half-foot from my left shoulder—while I was taking a voice memo on the previous section’s header… that crow was making an insistent declaration that even suburban flora and fauna are screaming messages at us.
Messages we mostly ignore.
Mostly, we’re too wrapped up in the games and illusions of “civilization”—our captivating screens to—pay attention to our intuition. Essentially, we’re programmed through our compulsory modern screen addiction to never check in with our surroundings or our guts.
More and more, our digital lives resemble casinos. Environments where the clocks are hidden, it’s always daytime, and a din of captivating coos and dings combines with a visual cacophony of fast-moving, flashing lights to produce nothing but numb dissociation. That disembodied detachment separates us from decision making that is coherent with our self-definition and authentic ambitions.
It separates us from our introspection, agency, and, of course, money.
Obviously when I’m engaged in Dog Walkin’ Shamanism, many of my insights revolve around the behavior of my dog. But other elements of my manicured suburban nature—unkempt yards’ super-blooms of California wildflowers; the epic majesty of a cloudy sky; the skittish behavior of squirrels; and yes, the roses I stopped to smell—they have each unfolded like clamshells packed with shiny epiphany-pearls.
Discord message preview on my Apple Watch: though they trigger intrigue, the Universe’s messages are typically incomplete and you’ll have to connect the dots yourself.
I’ve just finished trashing Big Tech’s manipulation of our identities and behaviors, and now I have to admit that I own an Apple Watch. Embarrassing.
I could say that I mainly enjoy it for exercise tracking and that I carefully control which apps and notifs can ping me, but truth is: it intrudes into my awareness in exactly the way it’s designed to.
By design, my unexpectedly vibrating wrist sparks urgency of attention on par with the crow that had buzzed me a half-block back.
Carefully designed attention capturer that it is, it only provided a tantalizing half-a-Discord-comment preview in the notification.
Again, the “a-ha” moment of introspective clarity arrived, and again, I set myself against the task of decoding the message.
The interpretation is pretty straightforward: you’re going to have to decode messages.
You’re going to be drawn in to do some deeper thinking, like a person pulling out their phone to get the full context of a watch’s dopamine hook. Despite being teased with a hint by your subconscious, you actually have to interpret the metaphor.
This practice might not be for you if you weren’t one of those nerds who loved picking apart F. Scott Fitzgerald’s symbolism in high school English.
Or maybe you’ve grown to appreciate that the only meaning this world holds is that which we create. Maybe you want to live a meaningful life.
Echoing incessantly, the words “Meditative absorption”: consistent orientation toward extracting lessons from experiences leads to a meaningful life and successful navigation through trauma and grief.
Sometimes the message doesn’t come from outside at all. Sometimes there’s a song stuck in your head, or a memory that picks at you aggressively. “Empty hands divination” means there aren’t any robes, tools or ingredients necessary to produce insight into the object of your contemplation.
There might not even be outside factors at all when you’re rocked with a sudden epiphany.
The call can come from inside the house.
On the home stretch of the dog walk that produced the outline to this essay, a paraphrase from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali was looping in my head like a lyrical ear worm.
“Samadhi is meditative absorption.”
When I finally tuned into the repetitive tape loop broadcast by my subconscious, I enjoyed an instant realization that it related to the question I wrote before leaving the house.
What would it be like to be habitually oriented toward the potential lessons that each experience ferries along with it into your conscious experience? What would it be like to be deeply mindful, meditatively present, absorbed in the consistent contemplation of the messages that prompted your incarnation into soul school?
Isn’t that the path through misfortune? Through disaster? Through trauma, grief and tragedy?
Obviously you won’t have bandwidth to look for lessons as your house burns down—you’ll be looking for a fire extinguisher. It’s right to focus on your crisis while it’s happening. You’ve earned the right to valid feels, and every feel is valid.
But when the smoke clears and you have that “a-ha” moment where you realize you’ve been caught up in the dramas of the illusory simulation that is our 3D reality, what would happen if you confronted it as an opportunity for self-improvement? For shadow work, alchemy and self-actualization?
Presumably, you’d be doing exactly what you’re meant to.
Of course, what else could you be doing?
But if you’re reading this, I’m betting you’re seeking to matriculate from the video game fully awake.
Dog Walkin’ Shamanism might be training for the wall-to-wall meditative absorption that only drops briefly and occasionally—and that always yields a lesson when it does.