4. Discussion
4.1. S. maltophilia transient resistance to antibiotics
I
have been a shamanic practitioner for over two decades and I feel I am still a beginner. This is because compassionate spirits are always teaching me new healing techniques when they perceive I am ready to receive them. What follows is some basic information you may find helpful about shamanic healing techniques and their underlying assumptions. This cross-cultural spiritual practice is believed to be over 30,000 years old. As the foundation of this practice, the shaman enters another reality (what Carlos Castaneda has referred to as “nonordinary” reality) and directly interacts with the beings that inhabit this reality. These beings are most often referred to as the compassionate spirits. Harner (1982, xxi) refers to these beings as follows:When I speak of “spirits,” it is because that is the way shamans talk within the system. To practice shamanism, it is unnecessary and even distracting to be preoccupied with achieving scientific understanding of what “spirits” may really represent and why shamanism works.
Though there are shamans known to access this other reality by using psychogenic plants, Harner’s research indicates that approximately 95 percent of shamans worldwide use some sort of percussive or sonic drive to enable them to make the shamanic journey. This is usually done with rattles or drums. The shamanic journey enables the shaman (or shamanic practitioner) to enter into the state of nonordinary reality by generating an altered state of consciousness. I suppose this would be characterized as an out-of-body experience; however, in this case it is intentionally generated and under the shaman’s full control. The shamanic journey is a vehicle to bridge this world of consensus reality and the world of the spirits in nonordinary reality.
When I am journeying, I am aware of what is going on around me if I choose to be.
The experience is of being slightly dissociated and able to access both realities simultaneously. Certainly it is best to set up the context for journeying where the shaman will not be disturbed by the outside world. However, if there were an emergency requiring my immediate attention, I would be able to attend to it without delay.
In indigenous societies, the shaman has many tribal responsibilities and will journey for a variety of reasons. As shamans gain experience, their abilities and skills increase.
The unique thing about how shamans work is their total reliance on obtaining information directly from the spirits.
It must be understood that for practitioners to embrace shamanism as a healing path of heart, they must first acknowledge that our consensus reality is a cultural trance—
an unconscious, unspoken agreement that we Westerners choose to believe about how reality is organized. Shamanism has certain presuppositions that are very different from
Western consensus reality and that are consistently empirically corroborated by the shamans’ journeys, including these:
1. The compassionate spirits are as real as you and I and inhabit a reality that is as real as our everyday outer reality. This other, nonordinary reality can be easily accessed through the shamanic journey. The spirits and this other reality are not imagined or made up; they are just perceived differently from how we usually perceive the outer reality (i.e., through consensus thinking about the way the world should be).
2. Nonordinary reality is made up of three realms—the upper world, the middle world, and the lower world. The upper world and the lower world are purely spiritual and operate out of time. In these two realms, the spirits (in animal and anthropomorphic form) are deeply compassionate and always interested in helping the shaman alleviate pain and suffering in our world. The shaman experiences no pain or suffering in the upper or the lower world during the journey. The middle world includes the physical realm where we live. In this realm, there is and always has been pain and suffering. We often refer to the spiritual beings found in the middle world as ghosts who have become disoriented, trapped, and wandering aimlessly. These disembodied middle-world spirits are of all species, not just human. They have not yet progressed to continue their evolution to the upper and lower worlds. They can become a disturbance, an intrusion, or an attaching spirit causing involuntary possession.
They can also be a cause or source of illness. Shamans journey in the middle world with the same ease as journeying in the upper and lower spiritual realms.
3. When shamans call in the spirits for help, they are calling in “power.” The healing energy bestowed upon the shaman by the spirits is power, and it is often conveyed to the client or patient. Miraculous healing can occur via this power and via the energy of the universe (which also includes knowledge and healing information provided by the spirits). This can happen through the direct intervention of the compassionate spirits themselves or when the shaman embodies a helping spirit (also referred to as merging) and becomes a direct conduit of its healing power.
4. As shamans become more proficient in their skills, they are able to move back and forth between our consensus reality and nonordinary reality at will. This ability to have access to both the visible and invisible worlds is sometimes referred to as the dreamtime experience. Like any spiritual practice, this requires discipline. Shamans must also have the clear intention to help alleviate the pain and suffering of other humans with the support of their helping spirits. If the personal needs of the shaman’s ego violate and supersede this dictum, sorcery—with its emphasis on power and control—is often the result.
5. Helping spirits are typically beings (human or nonhuman) that once lived in ordinary reality. The degree of compassion and personal power that each helping spirit has is a reflection of its own spiritual evolution in either the upper or lower world. The spiritual realms of the upper and lower world occupy the same interior spaces visited by spiritual masters and enlightened beings, and they are described by the sacred scriptures of all of the great religious traditions. Upon their death, these masters and saints transition into the upper or lower world. Millions of devotees pray to them, and shamans visit them and solicit their help in their journeys. There is no correlation at all between the upper world and what is traditionally called heaven; similarly, there is no correlation between the lower world and what is called hell.
6. When a client is experiencing a challenge, weakness, or illness, power animals are retrieved to augment the client’s personal power. During this process, the shaman is guided by his or her own helping spirits to find the helping animal spirit that wants to merge with the client, help empower the client, and infuse its essence into the client’s core.
7. Healing processes and interventions of the shamanic practitioner most commonly facilitated through the shamanic journey include trapped in the middle world) or the suffering of the dying;
e. receiving personal healing and specialized teachings from your helping spirits, as the spirits determine your readiness (as a shaman) to receive them.
For individuals with a strong spiritual inclination, the desire for greater closeness or contact with one’s soul or essential nature has frequently (and historically) been a cause of great pain. The yearning for greater closeness to God has made individuals do all sorts of things to achieve this closeness. These practices have included fasting to the point of starvation, flagellation, celibacy, ingesting psychogenic plants, and self-isolation (including monasticism), all of which enable uninterrupted prayer or meditation for extended periods—even an entire lifetime.
Though this may sound irreverent or blasphemous to adherents of well-established religious traditions, experienced shamanic practitioners are easily able to establish and maintain a personal relationship with one or more compassionate spirits. The great souls that millions of devoted adherents pray to every day exist now in the realm
of nonordinary reality! Shamanic practitioners commune with the great saints through their direct experience—using all their senses through the shamanic journey. Having the love of Jesus come into my heart, or being filled with the power of another helping spirit, is the blessing that the shamanic journey provides.
Historically, shamans were systematically hunted down and murdered throughout the world. Perhaps the main reason for this is that the shamanic journey provides the direct experience of connecting to and merging with Spirit. This technique is easily learned and has been empirically validated repeatedly and consistently over time, and individuals who practice it are often no longer dependent on a traditional religious institution. When traditional religion no longer holds sway over someone who has a reliable methodology for a direct experience of Spirit, the religious institution is threatened. Experiencing the numinous, heretofore reserved for the elite priestly caste (the interpreters of the Holy Scriptures and of the word of God, as revealed through the one chosen prophet), suddenly becomes possible for everyone! The hypocrisy of institutional religions, which claim to serve the people by providing an accurate interpretation of the word of God through their prophets, is revealed and their interests are jeopardized. The shamanic practitioner doesn’t need a church, doesn’t need Holy Scriptures, doesn’t need priests, and doesn’t need faith in a God that is described by others. This was true for shamans 30,000 years ago, and it remains true for shamanic practitioners today.
Contemporary Western civilization is set apart from nature by its attempts to dominate and control nature, but the shaman’s experience of being in harmony with all things is continually reinforced through the shamanic journey. Consequently, today’s shamanic practitioners are not only antithetical to institutional religion but also at odds with the dominant cultural paradigm of the exploitation of nature and unrestrained consumption of natural resources.
Sociologists of religion have said that traditional religious institutions are linked to the dominant cultural paradigm of directing people to think in prescribed ways. After all, if people are told to believe in a certain way or risk their soul suffering the pain of hell, those who choose the latter will likely be labeled as sinners and ostracized by the collective. Shunning and exclusion are merely the first step. Throwing Christians to the lions, as the Roman Empire did when it perceived them as a threat, is just one example of a dominant culture responding to a threat to its worldview.
In Civilization and Its Discontents ([1929] 1955), Freud suggested that social chaos will result from the erosion of the church’s influence and the increasing number of disbelievers. He recognized that through fear and guilt induction, the church has been able to keep the powerful impulses of what he called the id (primitive animal impulses) in check. Freud claimed that the church has managed the id by conditioning people’s minds. When enough people fall away from the church, morality as we know it will dissolve into social chaos.
I would argue very differently for what might occur if enough people were to open up to the shamanic journey experience. After all, since Copernicus revealed that Earth is not the center of the universe, and since the Apollo space missions have brought us pictures of our planet suspended in space, the existential and very human need to feel connected to something greater than ourselves has become stronger than ever.
Recurrent themes borne out of the shamanic journey experience consistently revolve around the individual’s connection to all of nature and the universe. Additionally, alleviating pain and suffering by soliciting the compassionate spirits of the upper and lower worlds and the spirits of nature remains central to the shaman’s experience. In my practice, the most common presenting complaints of clients involve feelings of depression and anxiety related to abandonment, alienation, and feeling alone. Due to the very nature of life in the middle world, we struggle just as hard now as our ancestors did 30,000 years ago to survive and to ensure that we have food and the other basic necessities of life. Because we must compete in order to survive, it is our shared legacy to be raised in families that are, for the most part, accurately labeled dysfunctional.
Unfortunately, the experience of receiving unconditional love and regard within the family, especially as a tender, sensitive child, is rare. Therefore, connecting to and interacting with beings that are dedicated to compassionately and willingly helping us not only comforts our souls but also opens our hearts to another way of being in the world.
It is very humbling to know that each of us can receive this spiritual help and support from these beings of enormous compassion and power. It is not necessary to study for decades at the feet of a master in order to receive the benefits from the compassionate spirits. To learn the shamanic journey method and reap the benefits of being fully human, all that is required is sincerity of heart and the guidance of an experienced shamanic practitioner.
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