Sacred Places and Ancient Ways

Shaman Way

Dharmavidya writes:

Being a shaman is a particular attitude to life and death, this world and other worlds. It could be called a way of being a soul artist. An artist is moved to create, moved by a power that is not their own, using materials drawn from nature but used in novel ways. They may have a skill, but the skill is guided. The attitude of the shaman is that of being open to such guidance, valuing it, cultivating it, being willing to be surprised by it, finding channels for it.

This sometimes means bearing difficulties, aridity of soul, lostness, longing; and sometimes enjoying transports of ecstacy, altered consciousness, trance or dream states. The shaman values the dream and the vision and keep his or her mind in a fluid state, not to tightly anchored to categories or ego control. The ego of the shaman is a boat, not an anchor. It rides on a great ocean. Sometimes that ocean is fire, sometimes water, sometimes it is the crust of hell, sometimes the gossamer skin of heaven. It is the lake of ice beneath which lights of many colour shine. On the far shore jewel trees grow.

When a person has been traumatized by life, and we all have, rigidities are set up in the soul to enable us to bear that fact that some portion of the soul has been lost. This is how and ego and then a super-ego are formed. A person does not just have one ego or one super-ego; rather they have all the wounds that life has inflicted upon their love, all the amputations of soul fragments that the whirling knife of fate has severed and the scars left behind. Healing is not so much returning to wholeness - we are never whole - but to openness. There is a greater whole and we are part of it. In ourselves we are not much, but we can be channels and mirrors. There is a great light that can play in and on our lives.

Sometimes the shaman is involved in helping a person to find and recover the lost parts of their soul through exploring the karma drama of their life. Sometimes in helping the soul to grow and shine in completely new ways going beyond what it formerly was.

The shaman travels into that world of light. When Buddha travelled to the world of light and visited his mother who had died giving birth to her and received the milk of her breast that she had never been able to give to him and taught her the Dharma that she might enjoy peace and bliss he was a shaman. To many people in the east this is one of the most important bits if the story of the Buddha whereas for Western educated people this is a part that they generally miss out.

There is a hint here of the fact that much of our Western education is itself a rigidity imposed upon our culture by the traumas of our unfortunate and bloody history. The collective ego and super-egos of our modern world close out the light and encourage us to think that we can all stand on our own feet, when in fact the modern person is probably actually less self reliant than people of any time in history. Our energy is repressed in this process. We do not disbelieve in the other world because of our experience, but because of our education.

The path of the shaman, therefore, is one of loosening up, of letting go, of release rather than submission. It is the path of awe and wonder. To enter it is not easy. Something must have happened in the person's life - often a severe illness or disruptive experience - that serves to jolt the habitual certainty of the ordinary mind. The shaman is an oddity. He or she does not fit in very easily. They live on the edge of the tribe and provide something vital from beyond the boundary, from the other world. A shaman is lokavid, seer of worlds.

::link

An Introduction to Sacred Places and Ancient Ways - The Shamanic Studies Programme with Amida Trust

AN INTRODUCTION TO SACRED PLACES AND ANCIENT WAYS - THE SHAMANIC STUDIES PROGRAMME WITH AMIDA TRUST.

 

WHAT THE TERMS SRAMAN, SHAMAN & SRAVAKA MEAN:

The term sraman or sramanera, from which shaman derives, refers top one who keeps to a discipline or undergoes austerities. Usually a sramanera is also a sravaka, a disciple (literally one who listens). The western word disciple includes some elements of each of these ideas. However, the sraman also tends to be somebody who, with his discipline or with the formation of soul given to him by the ordeals he has passed through, often lives alone whereas the sravaka tends to be part of a community. I think that our usage of the term shaman can draw on both sets of ideas.

 

The basic idea of the shaman is somebody who goes into the spirit world either to perform work there or to return to this world with wisdom. Thus when Buddha went to visit his mother in heaven he was being a shaman. Sometimes the shaman visits the spirits and sometimes the spirits visit the shaman. However, a shaman is slightly different from a medium. In the case of the medium or oracle the spirit enters and takes over the whole or part of the body/mind of the medium and uses it to communicate with or act in the common world. In my life I have had many encounters of a shamanic nature but have never been a medium. 

 

HOW ONE BECOMES A SHAMAN:

Being a shaman is not something that is easy to transmit to others. Many people have such experiences in childhood, but "grow out" of them, or are educated out of them. Others have them as a result of tragedies or ordeals that they encounter in life. Sometimes openings come through the effect of extreme experiences that are hardly replicable. Sometimes they come as from nowhere. Often they come to people who are close to the dying or recently bereaved.