A shaman is someone who has been to the end, it's someone who knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture and learned and embedded language, into the domain of what Wittgenstein called "the unspeakable", the transcendental presence of the other, which can be absanctioned, in various ways, to yield systems of knowledge which can be brought back into ordinary social space for the good of the community, so in the context of ninety percent of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery I believe, and what shamans are, I believe, are people who have been able to de-condition themselves from the community's instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors and so forth and so on. Terence Mckenna
In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence? Gabrielle Roth
Poets, it’s said, are shamans of words. True shamans are poets of consciousness. Journeying into a deeper reality with the aid of sung and spoken poetry, they bring back energy and healing through poetic acts, shapeshifting physical systems. When we dream, we tap directly into the same creative source from which poets and shamans derive their gifts. When we create from our dreams, and enter dreamlike flow, we become poets and artists. When we act to bring the energy and imagery of dreams into physical reality, we become poets of consciousness and infuse our world with magic.Robert Moss
Shamanism is a path of knowledge, not of faith, and that knowledge cannot come from me or anyone else in this reality. To acquire that knowledge, including the knowledge of the reality of the spirits, it is necessary to step through the shaman’s doorway and acquire empirical evidence.
Michael Horner
“Man’s predicament is that he intuits his hidden resources, but he does not dare use them. This is why warriors say that man’s plight is the counterpoint between his stupidity and his ignorance. Man needs now, more than ever, to be taught new ideas that have to do exclusively with his inner world—shamans’ ideas, not social ideas, ideas pertaining to man facing the unknown, facing his personal death. Now, more than anything else, he needs to be taught the secrets of the assemblage point.” Carlos Castaneda
"Shamans heal. They heal this visible world and the invisible one, they heal 'the breach between sacred and profane, between divine and mortal, between eternal and contingent.' They heal because they have journeyed into their and society's wounds. David Paladin, a Navajo artist and healer, was tortured for years as a captured soldier in World War II to the point that when found, he was comatose and a paraplegic. Years later his elders told him that this suffering was his initiation into shamanhood, and he exclaimed: 'Shamans know that those wounds are not theirs but the world's. Those pains are not theirs but Mother Earth's. You can gift the world as shaman because you're a wounded warrior. A wounded healer and a wounded warrior are one.' The warrior-shaman rises above his own dead body and says, 'I have died, too. Now let's dance. We're free. The spirit is ours because we have died. Now we are resurrected from the ashes." Matthew Fox
Comments