By Michael Harner
The revival of shamanism has puzzled many outside observers. This article explores the factors contributing to this resurgence and how shamanism adapts to the modern age, offering a spiritual approach based on direct experience and connection with nature.
The Age of Science and the Search for Evidence
Age of Faith: Many educated and thoughtful people have left the Age of Faith behind, no longer relying on ecclesiastical authority and dogma to provide evidence about spiritual realms.
Higher Standards: These people demand higher standards of evidence, seeking firsthand experience to reach their own conclusions about the nature and limits of reality.
Shamanism as a Methodology: Shamanism provides a way to conduct personal experiments, as it is a methodology, not a religion, allowing people to test their own hypotheses about reality.
Influence of Psychedelic Experiences
LSD and Psychedelic Experiences: The Age of Science produced LSD, and many who came to shamanism had already conducted "experiments," albeit informal ones, involving "trips" under the influence of psychedelic substances.
Searching for a Framework: These people discovered that they had no framework or discipline to situate their psychedelic experiences.
Shamanism as a Guide: In the books of Castañeda and others, they sought a guide who could illuminate their experiences and felt that the secret cartography lay in shamanism.
Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)
Medical Advances: The Age of Science produced the NDE (Near-Death Experience) on a large scale. New levels of medical technology have allowed millions of people in the United States to be revived from a clinically defined state of death.
Impact on Beliefs: Near-death experiences, although unplanned, have also proven to be personal experiments that have tested (and often changed) NDE survivors’ previous assumptions about reality and the existence of the spirit.
Map-Seeking: These individuals have also sought maps to understand their experiences, and many have turned to ancient shamanic methods in this search.
Contemporary Shamanic Methods
Discipline and Focus: Shamanic methods require moderate discipline, with focus and concentration.
Percussive Sounds: Contemporary shamanism, like most cultures of origin, uses percussive sounds to enter an altered state of consciousness.
Safety: This classic, drug-free method is extraordinarily safe. If practitioners do not maintain focus and discipline, they simply return to their normal state of consciousness.
Speed of Results: Classical shamanic methods work surprisingly quickly. Within a few hours, most people experience experiences that would take years to experience with meditation, prayer, and silent chanting.
Shamanism and Holistic Health
Holistic Approaches: The recent development of holistic approaches to health, actively using the mind to help heal and maintain well-being, is contributing to the return of shamanism.
Rediscovery of Ancient Methods: Many New Age practices represent the rediscovery, through recent experimentation, of ancient methods, widely known in folk and popular practices.
Shamanic Techniques in Health: Specific techniques long used in shamanism (alteration of the state of consciousness, stress reduction, visualization, positive thinking and assistance from unusual sources) are some of the approaches now widely used in contemporary holistic practices.
Spiritual Ecology and Shamanism
Connection with the Earth: Shamanism provides something that is fundamentally missing in the "great" anthropocentric religions: reverence and spiritual communication with other beings on Earth and with the planet itself.
Two-Way Communication: In shamanism, this is not simple worship of Nature, but a two-way spiritual communication that resurrects the lost connections that our human ancestors cultivated with the incredible spiritual power and beauty of this garden called Earth.
Conversation with Nature: Shamans today may be the last humans capable of communicating with animals and with all of Nature, including plants, streams, air, and rocks.
Shamanism and Survival
Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors: Our hunter-gatherer ancestors recognized that their environment held the power of life and death over them; they considered this communication essential to their survival.
Current Environmental Crisis: Today, we are also beginning to recognize the power of life and death that our environment holds over us.
Need for Communication: We need to communicate intimately and lovingly with “everything we are related to,” as the indigenous Lakota people would say.
Contemporary Shamanism
Autonomous Groups: From Zurich to Auckland, from Chicago to São Paulo, humans today are returning to the ancient path of the shaman, often in drum circles or groups that gather frequently for practices and healing work.
International Community: These informal communities are part of a larger, truly international community, but without hierarchy or dogma.
Direct Experience: Spiritual authorities, as in tribal times, are encountered directly in non-ordinary reality, through each individual shamanic traveler.
The Authentic Shamanic Experience
Authenticity: Using the essential or fundamental methods of shamanism, these new practitioners are not “playing Indian,” but are accessing the same revelatory spiritual sources discovered by ancient shamans in ancient times.
Personal Transformation: New shamans often cry tears of ecstasy as they experience and relate their experiences. They tend to transform themselves as they discover the incredible safety and love of a normally hidden universe.
Universal Connection: They share the Siberian shamans’ perception: “Everything that exists, lives!” Wherever they are, they are surrounded by life, by family. They have returned to the eternal community of the shaman, without the limits of space and time.
Aldeia da Vida / Village of Life ♥️
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