Quotes About Shamanism

Of a techno-human culture that wants to be more than a successful barbarism, two things above all are required: psychological cultural formation and the cultural capacity for translation. Mathematicians must become poets, cyberneticists must become philosophers of religion, doctors must become composers, computer scientists must become shamans. Was humanity ever something other than the art of managing transitions?

More recently, western enthusiasts of shamanism (and anti-psychiatry) have reversed this process of labeling and asserted that people as schizophrenic, psychotic or epileptic are proto-shamans. Current trends in the study of shamanism now recognise the former position to be ethnocentric—that researchers have been judging shamanic behavior by western standards.

In the 1980s one would see rows of silent commuters in the crowded undergrounds of Moscow and Leningrad, their heads buried in serious books covered in newspaper to protect the binding (and, in those open but still uncertain times, perhaps to hide the title: in 1988 I was roughly arrested on the Leningrad metro by young Communist vigilantes who noticed that I was reading a book on shamanism).

Humans are a part of creation and shamanism is our way of connecting with the whole.

In shamanic cultures, sychronicities are recognized as signs that you are on the right path.

I gather from Don Juan's teachings that psychotropics are used to stop the flow of ordinary interpretations and to shatter certainty. CARLOS CASTANEDA, VOICES AND VISIONS Why

The true shaman, the true naturalist, works to reconnect conscious human life with Nature and Spirit through totems and ritual.

Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.

Rather than resign herself to the fate dictated by her medical history, she has chosen a different, if less probable, outcome—one in which she is a shaman.

True shamans live in a world that is alive with what is to rationalist sight unseen, a world pulsing with intelligence.

Plant spirit medicine is the shaman's way with plants. It recognizes that plants have spirit and that spirit is the strongest medicine. Spirit can heal the deepest reaches of the heart and soul.

The technical skills of medicine are becoming increasingly routine and may soon be done better by computer programs - but the shamanic skills of medicine will always be important to patients and to society.

On the other side of the dark coin of psychosomatic synergy: a South Sea shaman points a death bone at a tribesman who has offended him. The victim receives the best possible medical care from sympathetic doctors, who don't believe in Black Magic, but he shortly dies anyway. It appears that the unfortunate man died of the belief that death bones can kill people.4 ~•~ 4Rossi, op. cit. p 9-12.

Most shamans, and many mystics, have been through similar negative-to-positive neurosomatic sensitization. Christian Scientists call it "chemicalization. " St. John of the Cross called it, poetically, the Dark Night of the Soul. Cabalists call it "crossing the Abyss.

Shamanism is not a religion. It's a method. And when this method is practiced with humility, reverence and self-discipline, the shaman's path can become a way of life.

The thing about Red Lanterns is that, while they have light powers and they have a power battery, they also have this weird shamanistic kind of blood magic side to them.

As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next.

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

In truth, ayahuasca is the television of the forest.

According to Eliade, the shamanic ladder is the earliest version of the idea of an axis of the world, which connects the different levels of the cosmos, and is found in numerous creation myths in the form of a tree.

In shamanic traditions, it is invariably specified that spiritual knowledge is not marketable. Certainly, the shaman's work deserves retribution, but, by definition, the sacred is not for sale; the use of this knowledge for the accumulation of personal power is the definition of black magic.

One, Western culture has cut itself off from the serpent /life principle, in other words DNA, since it adopted an exclusively rational point of view. Two, the peoples who practice what we call 'shamanism' communicate with DNA. Three, paradoxically, the part of humanity that cut itself off from the serpent managed to discover its material existence in a laboratory some three thousand years later.

classic Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy. To this day, it is the only attempt at a world synthesis on the subject.