[The following is a compilation of  essays on “time-tested” ancient shamanic practices and belief systems utilized for thousands of years amongst peoples around the globe and their application to the world we face today, and the world we create for tomorrow. These essays are the result of an experiential work in progress, an exploration started in 1966  into the realms of transpersonal education.  It is about relationship with the sacred.  It is about walking a Path of Heart, A Good Medicine Path with the Full Circle of Life.]

Background
In the late 1960’s I graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a host of degrees, credentials and licenses.  Along with certification as a counselor I was also certified as a teacher.  My first job after graduate school was  teaching  at a local junior college and at an alternative school I helped start.  I was getting paid to teach, I had students, but  there was something very wrong with the picture.

What was wrong was that  I didn’t feel I had anything of real substance to teach. Yes, I could parrot what I had learned and find creative ways to “get it across” to others but somehow that didn’t feel right.  I just didn’t feel like I was a real teacher -- someone who really had something of worth and significance to impart which they really knew about and wasn’t just mouthing words.  I’d heard plenty of that in my day and did not want to be a part of that kind of “education”. 

I remember sitting down at my desk late one night after a particularly unsatisfactory day of “teaching” and thinking to my self,  “If there is any truth to the notion that I am supposed to be a teacher, I better learn how to be one that I can respect.”  My thoughts raced on:  “To teach something of worth, I will have to know it, so, what do I really want to learn about?”

I took the question deep down inside, like dropping a weighted fishing line into the  depths of a lake to catch the big ones.  After a few minutes up came my catch -- “I want to learn how it works!  I want to learn how the universe works.  That’s what  I’m most interested in and that’s what I really want to learn about!” 

So that is what I’ve been pursuing ever since and I am still tracking, still sniffing around, still picking up rocks to see what  is under them and still opening doors and windows to see what I can see and still trying to get  as much practical learning about how it all works as I can.  Practical is important to me because I want to be able to use what I learn to make my life better --  more joyous, more productive, more in touch with the healing presence of love and inner peace with which to create healthy,  loving relationships with myself,  family,  friends, work colleagues, community members, with nature and the mysterious source from which it all comes.  I want to enjoy my stay, get all I can out of it, learn, grow and give back something worthwhile for the privilege of having been here.

One of the most fertile, exciting, meaningful and rewarding areas of exploration has been my experiences with indigenous peoples of North America, Meso America and South America, plus some experience with aboriginal peoples in Hawaii  and Bali.  For over thirty years now I have been spending time with Elders -- Medicine men and women, shamans --  teachers of “right relationship”, who still follow the way of their ancestors based on living close to the earth, listening to  and respecting “her” rhythms.

The essays present “keepers” from my explorations --  teachings and practices “field-tested” in my personal and professional life that held up under pressure. Applied correctly they lead to higher levels  of success, effectiveness and real  prosperity.  Let’s dig into the pile and see what’s there, maybe you’ll find some keepers too.

What is Shamanism?
Shamanism is not a religion.  It is humanities oldest expression of spirituality.  It involves a set of beliefs about how the universe works and  practices to explore different levels of reality in order to gain guidance and power on how to interact with it to the benefit of self and community.  If you go back far enough into the history of any people around the planet, you eventually arrive at shamanic roots.

Our stone age ancestors experienced direct, intimate, attunement with the natural world without any artificial input, only those of nature within and around them at all times. They were natural beings in a natural world, living in intimate attunement with the seamless web of nature. Not being the biggest,  fastest, or strongest creatures, in order to survive they had to practice one specific  function particularly well -- paying attention to everything they heard, smelled,  saw,  sensed, dreamed,  tasted and experienced. If they didn’t, it could mean instant death.  If they did, they  could learn what worked to sustain life and then pass those “seeds of knowledge” on to the next generation.

They paid attention to what their physical sensory modalities conveyed to them and they also paid attention to what their deeper intuitive  or “inner knowing” conveyed to them. It was from  this attentional process that our primitive ancestors discovered  the same truth attested to by all the modern world’s “perennial wisdom” traditions -- that everything is connected and related to everything else.  Or as  modern biologist Barry Commoner puts it, “There is no such thing as a separate thing.”

They  “discovered” that everything is “alive”, filled with it’s own “spirit” that needed to be respected and interacted with in such a manner so that harmony, balance and survival of life could be  maintained. Everything was considered sacred since everything contained spirit. They didn’t call it religion.  In poet  Gary Snyder’s words, “It’s called `the way normal people see things`.  Everybody normal, all the way through human prehistory, assumes that every thing is alive.  It’s not a theory.” 

There was no  differentiation of spirituality apart from the daily activities of life.  Every one was involved with maintaining what author Joseph Epes Brown calls “sacred reciprocity” -- the harmonious balance of life wherein every “taking” of game, plants, materials for shelter or tools, was balanced by a “giving back”, a “giving away”, honoring the spirit of that which was taken. 

The shaman was the person with a particular sensitivity to inner knowing, a predilection for accessing different states of consciousness along with the ability to return from these journeys with information useful to the tribe for healing, restoring balance, divination, retrieval of “lost souls”, ensuring success in the hunt and other such related activities vital to the survival of the tribal group.  The shaman was the practical practitioner who intuitively  knew “that Nature is directed from within by a higher intelligence or mind; that all minds in the universe are linked together by participation in one universal mind or source; that various mental or physical rituals can sometimes effect what they symbolize, or set the proper conditions in motion for the desired events or result to occur,  that prayers, thoughts and mental projection might directly heal sick and diseased persons through the release of powerful, life-giving energies; that all individuals have a powerful, if hidden, motivation to discover and identify with a higher Self which is, in turn, in immediate connection to the universal mind.” (Willis Harmon in Institute of Noetic Science newsletter Winter 1990-91.)

The shaman is the prototype mystic and research/explorer of other dimensions of reality who voluntarily elicits shifts in consciousness, enters into states of non-ordinary  awareness, successfully navigates through them and returns with “gifts” for the welfare, healing and empowerment of the members of their social group.  The shaman is not primarily a ritualist or ceremonialist though ritual and ceremony may be involved with what they do.  The shaman is primarily a traveler into the mystery that underlies the material world of sensory perception in order to gain knowledge and power of the secrets of life and death and who uses this knowledge in a practical manner.  The shaman  is the wise Elder who knows how things work.

What is Wisdom
Recently the Executive Director of a internationally famous mental health agency with whom I was doing high-performance coaching made the statement to me, “Tom, you are very wise.”  I was a bit taken back and embarrassed but did manage to thank her for her what she intended as a compliment.  As I was driving back to my office after the session I began to reflect on the notion of wisdom.   I thought of Martin Luther King’s statement that “we have guided missiles but unguided leaders”.   I thought too of the Native American “Ishi” in Theodore Kroeber’s book of the same name and how, upon seeing electricity, the automobile and  machines of various sorts for the first time, readily agreed that white people were smart,  but that they didn’t know how to live.  Ishi is right, wisdom is something different than having the information and knowledge (how to use the information -- i.e. the “smarts” ) with which to put a man on the moon or splice genes or create a linear particle accelerator.  Wisdom isn’t really a possession that one  keeps  tucked away in a safety vault at the bank to protect it from being stolen.  It is something much more.

I watch my ego’s response to being given what it experienced as a compliment and how it now wanted to try and act wise (what ever that is!).  It felt good being put in a category it liked and it desired to provide a continuous performance of “wisdom” so that it could continue getting the compliment it coveted.  I watched the machinations of my ego from the place of the observing witness noticing it’s elaborate posturing all lined up to try and act wise.  I  laughed out loud at the ludicrousness of it all, for in truth wisdom is not a thing, but  a process.  It emanates from  the ability to attune and commune with deeper being so that one is able to respond to the contingencies of the moment in a way that promotes harmony and balance. 

True wisdom means knowing how to be a channel for love and peace extended out into the world, no matter what the situation.  It involves deep roots into the infinite presence of a peace and unconditional love  that is inherent within us all.  You don’t own it, you don’t create it.  What you do is to  work to remove the mind-created blocks to the awareness of these gifts of spirit  -- within and available  always for they never truly leave us.  We leave them through the conscious and unconscious “programs” we create in our minds and the incessant mind-chatter that maintains them in their place. Thought forms like --“I am separate from others, from nature, from the earth.  All that exists has to fit into the box of rational/logical explanation based on the intellect.  If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t exist.  Life exists only in the body and consciousness solely in the brain.  The physical material world is all that exists.  The human being is the most important living creature. Spirituality is a cop-out for those who can’t adjust to the rigors  and demands of “reality”.  Love is wishy-washy passivity for wimps.  Peace is letting others walk over you.  My inner state is dependent upon external events.” 

True wisdom is when we are able to respond to everything that comes our way with acts of loving kindness from an open heart of courage and compassion.  True wisdom is found in indigenous Elders who have walked the “Good Red Road”  from the south to the north.  In the south new life begins.  It is a place of faith and trust, a  surrendering with faith and  trust to the Great Spirit’s presence always.  You don’t actually know Great Spirit really is present but you are strengthening your faith muscles by having trust that this is so and trying to act as if it is so.  By going to the “Looks-Within Place” of introspection, the west, to  face  your  personal darkness, fears and shadow forces along with the inevitability of your own eventual death, and doing so in a manner that brings in the Medicine Gift of the East, Illumination, you can discover the gifts that live in the center of all human beings, along with  your own personal gifts. As you birth these gifts by taking responsibility for them working to  develop and actualize them through the struggles, challenges and crisis of your daily life, you gradually grow into the place of the Elders, the North, the place of Wisdom.  It is through paying attention to the deeper teachings of the drama of your  life, staying present and open to see and learn what the Great Mystery is trying to show and teach you for your  soul growth, that you too can eventually reach the place of wisdom and join the Circle of Elders.  It is then that you no longer have to work at trusting the presence of the Great Spirit always, you  know that the Great Spirit is present always -- in every one, every thing, every where and all the time.  It is from this knowing that the great inner peace and love of true Wisdom Elders  basks us in its glowing warmth. 

Relationship
What the Elders really teach us about is “right-relationship”.  For one of the few things you can count on in life is that you are in constant relationship. It is impossible  to be alive without being in relationship -- with the air you breath, the food and drink you consume to keep you alive, the excrement projected back into the surrounding environment.  Within the body there is an incredible set of complex relationships going on constantly serving to promote homeostatic balance while externally, you are interacting with others in the course of work, family and society.  Relationship is unavoidable.  What you have choice about is what kinds of relationships are you going to have -- positive, productive and healthy ones or toxic, destructive and unhealthy ones.

Our starting point  for relationship in the west appears to be predicated on “what’s in it for me?  What can I get out of it?  It’s a getting/extraction motivation, me first, me, me. It is a myopia of dangerous proportions.  It is not that we shouldn’t be taking, that it’s wrong to take. In fact, we have to take in order to live.  The issue is, do we take consciously, and do we do so in a manner that promotes harmony and balance?  Or do we take in a way that furthers disharmony and imbalance? 

Think about it.  When was the last time you really opened your heart and gave thanks for your health, your eyesight, your hearing, your ability to walk, to talk, to sing, to be able to eat and digest food.  What about for your family, friends, relatives?  What about for the beautiful gifts of flowers, blossoming trees, for sunshine, for the wind, stars, the moon, for rainbows, for little children, for butterflies, birds, for your lovers, your teachers, awareness, your imagination, your body, mind, your feelings? 

When you  take and take and take some more, without expressing thankfulness and appreciation in some way that is meaningful to you, you add to imbalance because there is no giving.  Disharmony is the result.  It gets you into all kinds of trouble.  I remember a time in 1976 when I spent the whole night talking with a Medicine Man who was visiting  Sonoma County.  We talked through the night and in the morning I drove home just as the sun was coming up over the eastern horizon. I felt great elation for the sharing we had done and for the beauty of the new day.  Suddenly I felt a rush of itching energy charge up my body.  A horrible recognition overwhelmed me --I  knew what this familiar rush was -- a poison oak attack!  The previous day I had been cutting down poison oak plants that were invading my yard.  I carefully wore a long sleeve shirt and long pants, gloves and made sure no plants made contact with my skin.  After cutting down the 40-50 plants I  threw the clothes in the washer and immediately plunged into the shower and lathered off.  I thought I was safe from the ravaging bouts of poison oak I had experienced many times before where I’d be out of commission for a week to ten days, my face swollen, miserable, taking cortisone and itching to death.  But I was wrong  -- it was back again! 

I started freaking out.  The peace of the morning  instantly vanished and I was in a  panic state already seeing myself in misery for a week or more.  But then the words of the Medicine Man began to come back into my head.  He had been talking  about harmony and balance and the importance of giving before taking.  He stressed over and over again that “the Great Spirit” is present always, in everyone, everything, everywhere and all the time.  “Yeah sure” I said out loud, “how the hell is the Great  Spirit present in this mess!”  I was angry and afraid of what was to come.  But then I started thinking back over what I had done with the poison oak plants.  I saw to my horror how I had taken their lives and if the Medicine Man were right, that all life was equally important in the Great Spirit’s eyes, I had done so with absolutely no respect or giving on my part.  I had just taken, taken, taken.  I wondered how many other areas in my life I had and was taking unconsciously and without any giving on my part thus causing imbalance and disharmony in my own life and for those around me.

I felt “busted”.  Caught in the act with “no place to run to baby, no place to hide”.  I took

stock of my situation.  The plants were dead, I couldn’t bring them back to life.  But I could at least try and address in a responsible way what I had done.  Stepping into shamanic belief system I saw that I could go and talk to the spirit of the dead plants  and apologize. I could offer tobacco purified in sage smoke as a  Give-Away Gift.  Then it struck me -- a way to make this situation of misery and suffering into a vehicle for growth.  “Every time I feel like scratching,” I resolved, “instead of doing so I will focus my concentration on looking for other areas of unconscious taking and try to find ways of healing them.”  I felt good about this  and when I arrived home went immediately out to the area where the dead plants lay in a heap. 

I felt  self-conscious and looked around to make sure no one was around.  I felt foolish.  “Yeah right, here you are talking to dead poison oak plants.  This makes a lot of sense!”  But I went ahead and did it anyway.  I offered by gift of tobacco, apologized for my actions and  prayed for the  relatives of the poison oak “family” that were still alive.  Slowly I began to see how the plants were teachers for me, bringing me into greater awareness of my actions and how when I wasn’t conscious of the importance of maintaining balance between giving and taking, the “poison lady” could bust me with feedback that most certainly got my attention.   I began to feel thankfulness for the Medicine Teachings coming through me and gave thanks to the Great Spirit and to the Medicine Man for helping me to see  deeper reality and how to be in balance with it. 

Several hours later when the itching began in earnest, I shifted my focus from responding with angry, fearful scratching to thankfulness for the Medicine helping me become conscious about respectful right relationship.  To my utter surprise and delight, the poison oak was completely gone in two days.  Ever since then I thank the Poison Lady for her strong teaching power and consider her an ally.  She treats me well and through respect and right-relationship, we live in harmony together.

Seeking Vision
My first visionary experience that I remember took place when I was nine years old. I was miserable, delirious from a high fever caused by a virus that was a potential  precursor to polio. Nevertheless I was still utterly fascinated when the lines of my bedroom wallpaper suddenly began undulating before my eyes. I was transported into another reality where previously solid objects were now moving as if alive in their own right.  This was a whole new ball game to me. I learned then that the world of vision based on sensory perception in ordinary consciousness was merely one level of  a much richer universe than I had ever thought  possible. 

Our culture tells us that if you have visions it is pathological, “ yer crazy”, and we drug you up or put you away to get them to stop.  And while it is true that some visions lead to self destructive or antisocial behavior and need controls,  we have gone overboard and thrown the baby out with the bath water.  Other cultures, shamanic ones in particular, think there is something wrong with you if you don’t have visions for they are believed to provide guidance, healing and empowerment messages from the “spirits” necessary to help one live a good life.  Visions are valued, even sought out.  At adolescence when the young person is ready to step into responsibility for their life, they would  first go through preparation with a wisdom elder,  then go into the wilderness to endure a period of isolation, fasting and prayer seeking a vision of  their  purpose, their Heart Path, and the power to bring it to fruition.  This is the transcultural, transhistorical questing for deeper vision.  Moses went up on Mt. Sinai.  Jesus and Mohammed  into the desert. 

On this land of Turtle Island the quest experience played a significant role for many of the indigenous inhabitants.  Many sacred questing sites abound and are still used by traditional people when they have not been fenced in, built upon or desecrated in one way or another by the advance of “civilization”.  These sacred places of power are for indigenous people what the Vatican is to a religious Catholic or the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is to  religious Jews.  The Native American questor may go on only one quest in their life or they may go again at a time of crisis or challenge.  They may go many times if they are on the Medicine Path seeking to explore and develop shamanic wisdom and power.  It is not for everyone.  It is difficult, demanding, confronting and it involves deprivation, suffering and self-denial.  But for those who seek the deeper vision in a respectful way, it brings life itself.  It takes you out of the unconscious cognitive-perceptual “mind-prisons” that you don’t even know you are in and rebirths you back into your heritage as a natural being in a natural world that is totally alive, “todos unidos”, all united,  and filled with spiritual power. 

It brings you “back home” into the oneness of the Sacred Circle of Life with the Great Spirit at the Center. It brings you back to clear vision of what is true, instead of the untruths of illusion, of maya.  It shows you what you need to do in order to  return to, or create,  a life of harmony and balance.  It shows you how to walk the Good Red Road from trust and  innocence which are some of the beginning gifts when you are born, to the place of wisdom where you know the Great Spirit’s presence in everything.  It shows you where you have been, where you can go and what steps you have to take to get there.

In 1974 on the fourth night of fasting and solitude in the Yosemite wilderness, I had a powerful vision that came through the dreamtime and still “carries” me today.  In the vision I was in a strange and mysterious land in the company of outlaws. They knew I was among them but not really of them.  I desperately needed to escape for I knew they were planning to do me in as I was some kind of threat to them.  I finally saw an opportunity to escape as we walked up over a rise in a hill.  Far off on the horizon I saw a large stone gate just starting to swing shut.  The gate was the only opening in a high stone fence that stretched out in either direction for as far as the eye could see.  I knew immediately that getting through that gate was my only chance for survival.  The problem was that the gate was at the end of a pathway that was a good quarter of a mile away.  As fast a runner as I was at the time, there was no way I could get there fast enough to arrive before the gate finished closing.  It was impossible!  At least that’s what my rational mind said.

It was too late, I was doomed.  But then a deeper “voice” inside me said, “Jump with all your might.  Just jump!  Don’t think about how it’s impossible.  Cut loose of all the thoughts that say you can’t do it and just give it your absolute best shot.  Go for it! ”  The gate was closing, panic desperation raced through me. I didn’t have time to think.  So I jumped.  At that very instant  a mysterious wind  shot up from nowhere, picked me up and whooshed me through the 30 foot high gate just before they slammed shut behind me. 

I awoke in a  start. I was totally disoriented.  It took several minutes  to remember that I was up in the mountains and had come seeking guidance on what life decisions to make at a time of great confusion, fear and uncertainty -- whether to stay with the economic security of a job that had become toxic, or leave it to face the insecurity of the unknown with no job to step into, no money in the bank and a wife, new baby and mortgage to support all depending on me to “bring home the bacon”.

As I calmed myself down I reflected back on the “Medicine” of the vision.  I saw it was showing me what I had to do and how to do it and that if I honored my part of it, i.e. going for it with full effort, with total faith, trust and abandonment of all negative thought, I would receive help from the Great Mystery.  But first I had to commit and surrender to a power greater than my own.   I had to go forward into the unknown, into the “impossible” that rational, logical fear-based ego mind said could not be done.  Only if I gave it my full effort with nothing held back and with total commitment and faith, only then would the Mystery come forth and give me what I needed to succeed in the task at hand.

“Trust, surrender and go for it totally” seemed to be the operative concepts.  I came home from the quest and acted on the visionary guidance, quit the job and went out on my own, and it all worked. out  It’s still working after all these years,  stronger actually, for its been time-tested and holds up in every situation I’ve put it into practice.  Thirty one years later I still go up into the Yosemite wilderness every fall for a six day quest.  The learning  deepens and gets richer and richer.  I hope to keep it up for as long as I am physically able to get up over the 11,000 foot mountain and into the secluded lake which over the years has become my sacred place of vision and power.

The years have taught me that anything is possible with Great Spirit’s help but the start is to listen to your heart, your dreams, your inner guidance, your vision.  Remember you are “Wakan”, a Sacred Being.  Speak up. Act on what you “get” from your listening, from your own quests for vision.  Only then can you live and grow in a healthy way.  Ho.  May it be so for all our relations.