Quotes About Shamans

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

Cherokee men were active traders. They traded silver ornaments they had crafted, as well as deerskins and beaver pelts, with other tribes and European traders. A man could become wealthy, but if he did he had to deal with the disapproval of others in the clan and town who were not as well-off. They might scorn his wealth, and the shamans might wish him ill.

The second point I want to make is that you are right; the boy does indeed have to learn human customs. He must be taught to take off his shoes in a mosque and to wear his hat in a synagogue and to cover his nakedness when taboo requires it, or our tribal shamans will burn him for deviationism. But, child, by the myriad deceptive aspects of Ahriman, don't brainwash him in the process. Make sure he is cynical about each part of it.

Once formulated, "morality" serves as not only a check on genetic drift but a brake against Circuit III innovation. The shamans, priests etc. define which ideas are "moral" and which are "immoral." Anything new — anything that will break the tribal cycle, i.e., take us out of cyclical mythic "time" into linear, progressive, revolutionary "time" — is usually defined, very quickly, as "immoral.

Modern businesspeople and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.

Thanks to Luis Eduardo, I learned a number of things about Pablo I hadn't gathered during our previous conversations. The big surprise was that Pablo had been a powerful ayahuasquero years earlier, but had given up that practice after getting into fights with other shamans, brujos, on the astral plane.

The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that.

The shamans are forever yacking about their snake-oil "miracles." I prefer the Real McCoy - a pregnant woman.

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamens call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link.

Art-making is an extension of the kind of spiritual process that shamans unfold in order to demonstrate the connectedness of the world beyond reality.

No doubt the world's shamans have run the gamut from true believer to calculating fraud, and no doubt many true beliefs have been peppered by doubt. But so it is in other spiritual traditions, too. There are deeply religious Christian ministers who urge the congregation to pray for the ill even though they personally doubt that God uses opinion polls to decide who lives and who dies.

Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying.

In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.

The ancients had instincts and abilities that are lost to civilization today. Magic was real. It lived inside the shamans. Inside the priests. They passed it on from generation to generation. You have the dregs of that power in you. It it not the strength that it was, but you can access it. But to do so you must be willing to travel deep into your own darkness and be open to risk. To pull from the earth's energy.

Somewhere behind the bland emotionless labels favored by contemporary culture lies a tangled realm of unmentioned motives and murky passions, where petroleum – the black blood of the earth, as shamans and loremasters in a surprisingly large number of cultures call it – has become an anchor for fantasies of omnipotence and dreams of destiny, and that realm must be confronted directly in order make sense of where our civilization is headed.

Use gemstones. Carry a crystal to help ground you and ward off an emotional hangover. Try black tourmaline, amethyst, or black obsidian. Shamans say that if you carry or wear black, you will be more protected.

The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.

On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of course. But mostly evil, on the whole.   On nights such as this, witches are abroad. Well, not actually abroad. They don't like the food and you can't trust the water and the shamans always hog the deckchairs.

Only psychos and shamans create their own reality

As we know, bears hibernate in caves. They appear almost lifeless. This is an analog to the practices of ancient shamans, and to Sufis who practice the forty-day halvet (retreat), in which the Shaman would enter a cave, have an experience of dying, explore the spiritual realms, and then is reborn as the Initiate or Master (just as the bear is reborn each spring as it "wakes up" and leaves its cave).

The shamans are forever yacking about their snake-oil "miracles." I prefer the Real McCoy — a pregnant Woman.

I have taken part in ceremonies with North American and Mexican shamans, as well as Brazilian ceremonies.

In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamans call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link." — Carlos Castaneda