Intent is what sends a shaman through a wall, through space, to infinity.
I remember there was this one lady shaman who said that having children puts a hole in your soul. And the only way to get it back is for your children to die. And, you know, monks don't have families.
I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.
He (the Shaman) is a self-reliant explorer of the endless mansions of a magnificent hidden universe.
It's been important to cultures throughout history with the court jester and the witch doctor and the shaman - all preach the same thing.
The knowledge of the realm of death makes it possible for the shaman to move freely back and forth and mediate these journeys for other people.
No wonder psychedelics are threatening to an authoritarian religious hierarchy. You don’t need faith to benefit from a psychedelic experience, let alone a priest or even a shaman to interpret it. What you need is courage—courage to drink the brew, eat the mushroom, or whatever it is, and then to pay attention, and make of it what you will. Suddenly, the tools for direct contact with the transcendent other (whether you call it God or something else) is taken from the hands of an anointed elite and given to the individual seeker.
Sanctified by their initiatory experiences and furnished with their spirit guardians, the shaman alone among human beings is able to consciously travel into the spiritual worlds as cosmic explorers.
The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
The shaman is a self-realized person. She discovers the ways of Spirit through her inner awakening.
Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. . . . Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity.
A shaman is someone who has a wound that will not heal. He sits by the side of the road with his open wound exposed.
The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
