Quotes About Shamanism

Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy.

Drug-taking, it is significant, plays an important part in almost every primitive religion. The Persians and, before them, the Greeks and probably the ancient Hindus used alcohol to produce religious ecstasy; the Mexicans procured the beatific vision by eating a poisonous cactus; a toadstool filled the Shamans of Siberia with enthusiasm and endowed them with the gift of tongues.

En cambio, la vida del contemplativo, del chamán, del santo, de las comunidades ecológicas y de algunos grupos indígenas reflejan la acción anti entrópica del atractor extraño del futuro ideal del hipercampo sobre sujetos capaces de vivir en estados de alta sintergia. Estos últimos reciben una influencia hipercámpica que los acerca a la unidad, trascendiendo la influencia repulsiva de la lattice.

Good analysts and therapists can help us to recognize parts of ourselves we have repressed and denied. The shamanic concept of soul loss reaches further. It recognizes that soul healing is also about retrieving pieces of soul that have literally gone missing and need to be located and persuaded to return and take up residence in the body where they belong.

It's a vanity to think that a legitimate shamanistic experience can be purchased.

We must become aware of the astonishing fact that as a species we are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood. As human beings, we once had a symbiotic relationship with the world-girdling intelligence of the planet that was mediated through shamanic plant use. This relationship was disrupted and eventually lost by the progressive climatic drying of the Eurasian and African land masses.

Dan Murphy's diagnosis added Lia Lee to a distibguished line of epileptics that has inlcuded Soren Kierkegaard, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all of whom, like many Hmong shamans, experienced powerful senses of grandeur and spiritiual passion during their seizures, and powerful creative urges in their wake.

I do not wish upon anyone a descent into hell. But if your life has to be turned inside out in order for you to know yourself—if the shadow of a shaman crosses your path and you turn and follow it down—I pray that you use its force wisely. I hope that you take the ultimate responsibility for your actions and that you consecrate any destruction to the rebuilding of your higher self and a more radiant life.

The widespread shamanistic notion of a tiered cosmology – the level on which people live and spirit realms below and above – probably derives from certain universal experiences of altered states. These include sensations, on the one hand, of rising up and flying, and, on the other, of entering a vortex and passing underground and through water.

Algunos chamanes consideran el estrabismo como signo de que se posee un don profético.

I grew up with my mother as a Tonic Shaman.

Who am I to tell a man to live? Who am I to claim the powers of the Ancestors? I moved aside so the shawman could have more room to do his holy work. He's climbed the Scared Mountain and seen the face of the Ancestors. I have no place beside him. -Dashti

Eye of newt? Ragweed? Mold off your bathroom floor? Peyote?

I cured with the power that came through me.

The fact that so many different cultures throughout human history have found shamanic techniques useful and relevant suggests that the holotropic states engage what the anthropologists call the "primal mind," a basic and primordial aspect of the human psyche that transcends race, gender, culture, and historical period.

In truth, ayahuasca is the television of the forest.

The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.

The Archaic Revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that 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 and its fear of dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revival that our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies.

It's very rare that you meet someone who would prefer to shamanize, rather than to talk about it, you know. And it's the shamanizing that is important, not the talking about it.

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?

What is crucial here, however, is this anthropological point: that contemporary science is as cultural as shamanism, opera, Catholicism, or the Boy Scouts. It does not stand outside of culture in a space of perfect objectivity.

The internal dialogue is what grounds people in the daily world. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such and so and so. The passageway into the world of shamans opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off his internal dialogue

Broken Wind believed that we are traumatized as babies by intestinal gas or colic. The great shaman invented a technique called "gastral projection" to help release these traumas. His philosophy was simple: "To air is human ... but to really cut one loose is divine.

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