Spiritism Versus Shamanism

Spiritism leads to damaging and malicious states like panic, terror and madness. The low-level practice of spiritism attracts negativity and sorrow. The way to identify these lower order levels in ceremonies, is when spirits try to offer you attractive things - do not accept. Attractive, and therefore desirous, objects become attachments; which trap you in these lower realms.

Conversely, celestial beings bless with their calm presence; and allow us to merge with only the highest universal spirits. Spirituality leads us to just and pure things. It invites us with the highest spiritual origin; with justice, rectitude and service. Justice, rectitude and service bring peace; and peace allows for the higher realms to manifest.

The problem is that, novice drinkers of medicine and uninitiated facilitators don’t recognize the point at which they become trapped by evil; not realizing that spiritism requires far less skill and personal discipline than shamanism. The master drinkers of medicine and their students clearly distinguish between the dualism of good and evil.

Thus, choosing to always follow the path of goodness, selfless service and virtue is at the root of the authentic and original form of shamanism. However, some practitioners and facilitators - often lacking appropriate training and a good ceremonial guide, and possibly having experienced many negative incidents in their lives due to hardship and despair - have deviated from the spiritual path and operate with a nebulous distinction between good and bad.

Lower order facilitators and practitioners only know the lower levels of the cosmos; they “only know the sky up to the house of the sun.” They have never seen the celestial immortals; instead they make contact with inferior beings, including the earth spirits. For their part, true healers don’t linger at low levels of knowledge, but drink medicine continuously. Not for the pleasure of it, as it’s a great sacrifice, but because they desire greater knowledge.

This is the fundamental challenge for modern urbanized people in following the medicine path. We are removed, either physically or spiritually, from the source of the medicine. We don’t live among the plants in the forest. The further away we are from the forest, the closer we are to a material and egocentric existence. Some practitioners and facilitators can avoid becoming trapped by this world, others can’t.

To give the benefit of a doubt to some of these wayward practitioners and facilitators, perhaps they consider helping someone to be an act of goodness; even though what they are colluding with may be evil. Some may simply be trying to make a living, clearly unable to see the harm they are causing. Others may be trying to satisfy egoic needs, such as inferiority complexes or narcissistic disorders.

It is up to the adored children of heaven to use their acute discrimination and discernment, to distinguish between the lower and higher realms; as well as the practitioners and facilitators that occupy each respectively. More importantly, to recognize that all human beings are such children; even though some have chosen apparently easier paths, which have actually turned out to be far more dangerous and difficult.

Sacred Convergence

Much has been written about the juncture where psychology and shamanism converge. Both are instances of the same primordial image or instinctual pattern known the world over. Both shamanism and psychology acknowledge the importance of the sacred in healing processes. Both recognize how the sacred is manifest in wild nature and areas where modern humans have fallen out of consistent connection with wholeness. Both observe how loss of contact with the sacred results in loss of soul, and understand that recovery requires initiation and successful integration of direct experience.

Shamanism defines health as being in balance with the sacred, and lack of health as violation of the will of the sacred. Psychology characterizes the sacred as an experience of something that evokes rapture, awe, exaltation or ecstasy; something that is even dreadful in its intensity and power. As opposed to the profane or ordinary, the sacred is often perceived in modern culture as something alien or other; while indigenous and earth-based cultures make no distinction between the sacred and the profane. In urban life, at least, the sacred is not something we experience in our busy everyday routines; unless we somehow slow ourselves to witness a sunset or feel into a sudden sense of longing or love.

Only then, in the spaciousness of attention, are we aware we have generally tuned out the sense of something powerful and unknown. Something sacred often invokes a feeling of mystery beyond the power of words to describe. The term numinous is a connotation for the sacred, describing it as something which provides an experience or alteration of consciousness independent of human will; arousing, affecting, bedazzling or blinding one to other realities. Both sacred and numinous are words connected to the idea of soul; the creative, sacred life force that imbues all things with energy and meaning.

The soul is not just an element, region or dimension; but rather a perspective of deepening, noticing, penetrating and insight. The soul can extended beyond humanity to the world at large, to forms and objects around us, whether natural or man-made. Each thing has a spark of soul at its core. Psychology is deeply tied to soul; so much that we can refer to psychologists as doctors of the soul. Similarly, the province of the shaman [as technician of the sacred] is disorders of the soul. We can call shamans masters of ecstasy, they are great specialists in the human soul; they see it, know its form and its destiny.

Modern culture has repressed the contents of the unconscious and summarily forgotten it entirely; disregarding the magic and mystery there. Conversely, shamans rely on the power that issues from the sacred to conduct their healing activities. Yet, the enormity of the split between urban lifestyles and the vast depth of the psyche looms over modern humans. Modern humans do not understand yet that, the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task; which must be accomplished if they wish to preserve their civilization. The only way to address the deep loss of connection to soul, they experience as a species, is to reestablish their connection to the sacred.

In the physical or material world, the sacred manifests through wild nature as an infinite source of life and creativity; waxing and waning in eternal cycles of death and rebirth. Shamans read nature, regarding and interpreting the elements and events that communicate through soul at all times and places. Modern humans’ increasing analytic thinking and desire for progress through the manipulation of the natural world is devastating to their well-being. Their lives are dominated by reason, who is their greatest and most tragic illusion. By the aid of reason, they assure themselves, they have conquered nature.

As humans, of all cultures, our connection to nature is ancient and undeniable. At the most profound levels of the unconscious, everything becomes less and less differentiated until our ego no longer exists as a separate entity. The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into the darkness. Here they become increasingly collective until they are universalized, merging with the body’s instinctual and biological functions; and eventually with nature itself. Hence, at bottom the psyche is simply world.

Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on unnameable transcendental factors, psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. Whatever the external landscape, the internal psychic landscape mirrors it; inhabits it, gives birth to it but also dies into it. The degree to which we are able to perceive the sacredness of what is manifesting around us in nature is the degree to which we are able to believe in the divine aspect of what we commonly know as our own human nature.

Medicine Future

It is a sad truth that despite the medicine’s great potential to steer humanity and the benefits it has granted many people in the past (not to mention its straight-up and barely-believable magic), this art and science is fading fast in its traditional context. Simultaneously we see that it is passing to the West, in a new form of syncretic medicine use that is developing among interested people the world over.

It seems as though as one door starts to close, another opens, and one could reckon that the medicine is moving to where it needs to go, striving to offer people the ultimately satisfying challenge of awakening and becoming a conscious human being.

Despite all this, while the traditional modes of transmission crumble, hope for the future of the medicine tradition comes, ironically, from outside the rainforest; from elements within the very cultures that seem bent on destroying it all. Globally, as more and more people seek reconnection with original nature and their true identity, they are participating in medicine healing ceremonies and/or seeking health through the use of various botanicals from the Amazon rainforest.

The ability of indigenous science and traditional Amazonian medicines to assist people in attaining insight, balance and wellness has been proven on countless occasions. Due to the effectiveness of this medicine, it is inevitable that we will see it gain in popularity, and this will - in ways beyond imagining, as medicine assists people in their personal journeys - help salvage both the medicine traditions and the rainforest environment itself.

In a world governed by corporations and driven by profit margins, even the knowledge of top scientists is not respected, let alone that of feathered masters. Nevertheless there will come a time when indigenous science and modern scientific methods will merge their strengths to help steer humanity back on course. The spirits, deities and immortals revealed through the drinking of medicine want this more than anything else.

Meanwhile this knowledge will continue to help people and communities as it expands beyond the jungle, and I want to believe that nothing can stop it. It is evolution at work, the constructive cycle of the universal energetic flow manifesting itself, gaining momentum and daily getting stronger. More and more sincere Westerners are studying with maestros or joining a type of church that honors this medicine, and more and more books are being written on it.

So despite the loss of much of the original body of knowledge, peripheral forms are being passed along. From these seeds, there can exist a future when the vines again flower, and these arts and ways are respected and able to flourish anew in the rainforest and the world over.

Sun Canoe

The Sun Canoe cruises far from planet Earth; on its deck ride celestial immortals of a peculiar and unique nature. This cosmic boat is said never to come between the Earth and the sun; it always stays far from the Earth on the opposite side of the sun. In the old days this boat could be seen in visions when the people underwent deep-level ceremonies, after months of Dieta in the wilderness. The apprentice was brought to the Sun Canoe by the master shaman in order to be cleansed thoroughly of all traces of contamination that, could potentially lead to the abuse of power.