Shamans in conversation
(I know it looks like it ought to be shamen, but trust me, shamans is correct.)
Suppose you could sit down with nearly two dozen contemporary shamans, and ask them anything you liked. Suppose further that you yourself knew enough to ask the right questions. And-one more supposition-suppose that the only way you could talk to these shamans was one at a time.
Welcome to Traveling Between The Worlds: Conversations with Contemporary Shamans, by Hillary S. Webb.
And such shamans! Among others, Sandra Ingerman. Serge Kahili King. John Perkins. Ken Eagle Feather. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Hank Wesselman. Brooke Medicine Eagle.
Now, perhaps you think that only the American Indians had shamans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Every indigenous culture had them, men and women. As Webb says:
“Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors experienced the world very differently. Their reality was animated by spiritual intelligences. Through their experiences, they discovered that one could communicate with the trees, with rocks, and with the elemental spirits of nature…. According to their worldview, divine power permeated the physical world. Divinity was everywhere and in everything, and all things that existed were parts of a whole, bound together as one in the great web of life.
“It wasn’t until the early part of the 17th century and the emergence of the Cartesian worldview that these experiences became labeled as `superstition.’ With the Age Of Reason came a new belief system: science. Science could explain away all the old fears and myths…. The farther we got from a symbiotic relationship with nature, the greater became the chasm between the sacred and the mundane, until the physical realm became a dead world of inanimate objects.”
And the result is the world we see around us, spiraling downward out of control. It is what could only be expected from a culture divorced from reality. The conversations with shamans in this book may serve to reconnect you with a reality that science has denied. How could they do that? By evoking in you a sense of recognition, a remembering. That is the value of this book.
Wisdom is, among other things, the ability to say a lot in a few words. As for instance, Oscar Miro-Quesada:
“The farthest we’ll ever have to travel is from our heads to our hearts. If people start down this path using just their head, it can take a lifetime. Two lifetimes. Three lifetimes. Four lifetimes. But if people wake up to this path with their heart, they don’t need to study with any teacher. They are already there.”
It doesn’t get any simpler than that.