Totemic awareness

Where there is an understanding that a person is made up of manifold identities, such a person is free to explore totemic identities. Achieving this requires that the person explore the depths of his imaginative life. He may then recognize experientially how he is a certain object, whether the object lives in some way or whether it possesses an an inanimate existence (such as a stone undulating on a river bed, rain falling, or fire flaming from a tree). He is then able to partake of that existence in addition to his own, embarking on a manifold existence in keeping with a certain alter-ego as rich and mysterious as the identity that he conventionally allows to nest in himself. The person is then free to be both himself as conventionally recognized by others as well as an inhabitant of the imaginary world of any particular totem with which he identifies. People identify with chosen totems because of the sense of enlarged life which they then enjoy and because of the imaginative vitality which this identification excites. The totemic condition allows the individual to partake of innumerable languages, free from the confinement of the logic inherent in word patterns. The individual finds for himself a new form of interior expression. This also implies a new kind of dialogue with nature, not one of classification and exploitation, but one that prefigures an inchoate courtesy more in keeping with the language of heraldry. The person becomes other than he normally understands himself. The totemic experience gives the individual access to other lives, fulfilling his own by inhabiting the realm conventionally known as that of the imagination.

For the peoples that practice the totemic experience (such as the Australian Aborigines), a person can only be considered as such if he has become a "lord of two worlds". They must be able to bestow their puissance over wider realms, to include the territory that lies beyond all frontiers, thus transcending the ordinary by way of what is most distinctive in themselves. For them the totemic experience is partly characterized by the the possibility that the individual may not set out to acquire a totem. Exposure to nature leads to a situation in which the totem may be better understood as acquiring the person. Within that totem the person never dies, living on through re-integration into something larger.