Shaman Path

The late, brilliant alternative thinker Terence McKenna (1946-2000) spoke eloquently about the shaman's role in society. Many videos, articles and interviews are available which present McKenna's thinking and experiences. These ideas have helped me reflect on my own path. I quote here Bartley R. Troyan: Newsgroups: alt.drugsSubject: "Re: Evolution" by T.McKenna Fri, 24 Jun 1994. Transcribed from a song on Shamen's album _Boss Drum_, called "Re: Evolution", written by McKenna, Angus, and West.

"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 causality, 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 presense 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.

Shamanism is not a religion, it's a set of techniques, and the principal technique is the use of psychedelic plants. What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female, and so forth and so on. So, what shamans have to do is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world. The planet has a kind of intelligence, that it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind, I mean I think it's fairly profound, it's fairly apocalyptic. History is ending. I mean, we are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the eschaton. History is the shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for those of us who will live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably since the birth of the universe. The twentieth century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept.If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed."

Terence McKenna on Wikipedia.
Terence McKenna on Youtube.

Quantum Theory & a Map of Consciousness

Stuart Hameroff interviewed by Regina Meredith on the Conscious Media Network. (Please support this excellent Alternative News source.)

If you've ever wanted to sort-out the link between quantum physics and consciousness, listen to this brilliant explanation. There are interesting implications for energy healing, shamanism and magick.

Stuart Hameroff

Blessings

Click on Picture (Click "back" to return to this page)

FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS I have done New Years readings for my self and my children, as a sort-of personal "tradition." This is a reading I did at 12 am Jan. 1st.

If you can read my writing, you'll see that this is a very positive spread, and that by focusing on my health (emotional and physical) I can experience greater spiritual growth.

Understanding Therapy

For years My friend Cole and I have talked about a thing we call "Understanding Therapy" which essentially relies on a certain style of empathy that requires one to intuitively 'feel like' another person to 'understand' what they are experiencing so that you may help them to decode the experience from another perspective.

Here is an excerpt of an article by Micheal Erlewine explaining this same 'healing method' from the shamanistic paradigm.

"...the shaman is able to... (display) signs of experience that the client can recognize and acknowledge as true. Once the client understands that he or she is not alone, and that the experience of the shaman in fact encompasses their own experience, they can submit to allowing the shaman to lead them out of their current predicament and on toward another place—one hopefully more comfortable for them. The act of realizing that they are not alone, and that someone else has had similar experiences, is often a key step for a client in this process..."

I believe we all can learn to heal each other through this method of deep understanding.

Reading the Shaman Stones

So you’d like to learn an easy method for divination? Casting stones is one of the oldest and simplest methods of divination still in practice today. I have used this method for a number of years, always with pleasing accuracy.

This type of reading is excellent for revealing our blind spots and for insight into areas of life we usually to avoid. It is also possible to look at a snapshot in time, but free will and "the Butterfly Effect" insure that predicting the future is difficult. At any rate, my teachers tell me, "we have to learn to deal with our present before anything else."

7 ordinary stones, a bit of cloth and a pendulum will be your tools. Follow this link to learn how to select and prepare your stones. Follow this link to learn to use the pendulum.

Have the querrant hold the stones in their left hand and think of a question or a specific area of their life for which they want guidance. A question can focus the reading, allowing you to give more specific answers.

Write down the question, or if they request insight into a specific area of their life, write that down in the form of a question. If they don’t have a question, tell them to choose one stone from their hand and let that represent the theme for the reading or just ask Spirit to show the client what they need to know..

Begin by having them gently roll, or spill the stones onto the cloth or leather.

You will try to read the lines and groupings like sentences. It may be necessary to repeat the sentences aloud 2 or 3 different ways, changing the emphasis and order of the words until the answer feels right. Trust your intuition to help you.

First notice which stones are closest to the querrant. Which are in the middle? What are their meanings? Ask the querrant if this seems significant.

Next, consider any stones that are grouped together or touching each other. These may represent important themes for the reading.

Next, check to see if any of the stones are lined-up in straight, curved or diagonal lines, (even if they are far apart across the leather form).

Also, consider the over-all shape or pattern made by the stones and ask the querrant if they can see any thing – you will sometimes imagine a number, a letter, perhaps a bird, or another recognizable shape. Ask if this shape is significant.

If something is unclear, use your pendulum to ask your intuition for clarification.

Here is how the sample reading above would be interpreted:

· West is the closest stone to the querrant indicating that the theme of the reading is communication.

· Moon + North + F&F are grouped together (almost touching). This could mean that the querrant could feel a subconscious pull toward more “spiritual” pursuits.

· Sun + North + F&F + East aligned may mean that the querrant's family life will take on an aspect of spiritual growth.

· Health + F&F + Moon + West reveals that the querrrant should talk about their emotional health with their friends and family.

· The spread seems to symbolize an airplane, which could literally mean air travel or metaphorically that things are about to “take-off.”