Цитаты из книги Тело шамана

In have seen in my practice how many shamanic abilities appear when you stop doubting the reality of spirit. In this moment, something in you transforms, and you develop a deep attention, a steady focus on irrational events. This basic shamanic tool is attention to the dreaming process. When your inner life calls and you stop doubting, a personal transformation begins. But all of this is not up to your will. You can work at transforming your personal life to make it more meaningful, but success with your attention is like a blessing that cannot be produced at will. Inner or outer teachers may spur you on, but it is finally up to the spirit to move your assemblage point--the way you identify, assemble, and conduct yourself, and your sense of reality.

Waiting for this special move is both sobering and challenging. Perhaps everyone has shamanic or intuitive abilities, yet few are able to use this capacity at will. Shamanic ability, like other talents, is not entirely at your disposal. You cannot simply determine that you are going to have important and healing experiences, though you can prepare for them through various practices.

The average person, your own naive unconsciousness, leads you to believe that medicine will heal your body, that psychology will make you more reasonable, and that being nice will help you in your relationship problems. Prayer should reduce the impact of fate, and technology will tame the universe. Whatever happens, you cling to the belief that you will either be saved from the unknown or discover new solutions to your problems. You believe that you are the center of a world that belongs to you.

Only your momentary terror and insecurity betray your impotence. The wiser oart of you, your sorcerer, realizes that life is ultimately something beyond your mind and changing body. No one theory can completely explain anything, and the origins of even your simplest impulses seem to be connected with the universe itself.

Shamans heal by reminding you of the dreamingbody. they model awareness and the dance of the spirit. Archaic systems of ecstasy, the community's living centre, give a village its life. the tradition of community healing, the idea that one person's suffering is part of the whole community, creates human warmth and contact. Without such trance dancers, a group of people becomes an abstract and meaningless entity, a city whose members are obligated to fulfill empty duties. No one can lead a meaningless life for long or tolerate cities with no purpose.

(...) the master's teachings are always somehow incongruent. They speak about living the nagual in everyday life, yet they always seem to take place mainly in an ashram or a wilderness. Most masters do not work in town. Most will not run for political office. (...)

Why do great teachers live only in our dreams or in seclusion? Why does their path of heart take them into mountains or into an ashram? Is it because they do not value ordinary life? Or is it that some teachings do not deal with relationships, everyday life, and today's world? Perhaps we must become the new teachers, who sit in the midst of a fist-fight or a race riot and claim that this is the right hunting ground. Teachers who say that fights are bad, that people should not riot, and that the city is somehow wrong may simply mean that, like us, they do not know how to deal with the world as it is.

There is a crucial difference between Western and Eastern teachings, between what you might call modern European and aboriginal or spiritual thinking. (...) Systems based upon the development of ego consciousness stress stability and individuation. Self-knowledge is the core. Indigenous systems stress becoming everything or worshipping nature and finding a path with heart.

Each system has a part of the truth. The right tradition is the one you believe in at any given moment. When you interested in the future of the world, however, you find yourself searching for paths with heart. They make you keep a watchful eye on your own sustainable and available energy and upon relationships to others. indigenous heartful systems include community and environment. The ego systems informs you more about the nature of specific parts of yourself. When you need answers about your individual nature, you find yourself with therapists (...). When you have questions about life as a whole, the environment and path of heart are the teachers.

To find the path of heart--to follow the stream of nature--you need more disciplined awareness than self-knowledge.

When the world speaks to you, it is impossible to tell whether the world is doing things to you or you are doing things to it. You may perceive yourself as causing some events and being the recipient of others, but you never know for sure whether you send messages and get responses or whether the world sends you messages to which you respond.

This inherent message symmetry or invariance means that you cannot assume that you are the center of the universe, initiating or creating things. You are an aspect of the world. This radical shift in identity from being the center to being a participant is the goal of mystical and spiritual traditions.

Sensing yourself as a part of the entire world would create an identity crisis if you let yourself experience the environment. However, synchronicities, though momentarily shocking, are not enough to shake apprentices like you and me out of our person-centered world. We may need another lesson.

If for example, I ask a member of a couple, family or group a question, it can be a perceptual prejudice to expect an answer from the individual addressed. The answer may come from any part of the environment; someone else may speak up, or the environment may announce itself in other ways. Of course, there are times when each person must speak for himself, but you should be careful not to become one-sidedly attached to the paradigm that the individual is located only in your own body. You must consider the possibility that each of us is a channel for the world, just as the world is a channel for each of us.