jma182 said:
This is so interesting i must say the shamans are indeed unique individuals, man what an intense feeling it must be, i can only wonder. shamans always seem to be respected and feared by their communities, it a long fascinating path you're walking, your input is so cool and appreciated, first person i've talked to that knows about shamans and the realms they can access. i will review your post as well, T Mack was really an unique character, thanks to him a lot of us got interested in this path.
Heres hoping that i got the stuff, i understand there are people that disregard this experiences as BS, me personally i think its really interesting, and wether the experiences can be explained or not in my short little account they feel very real, the repercussions are not ephemeral to me at least. your wariness is well founded in my experience most people i've met rarely care about the spiritual realm past what they were programmed to believe. they usually look at me weird when i engage in this subjects so i only do so with a select few nowdays.
also do you find it possible to show some skills without any training or initiation? cause when i was a kid i had some really weird dreams, some people i've told them to claim i lfet my body, for instance i was able to see myself lying in bed and i climbed some stairs like in one of those kid slides, so i was at the top looking down at my body in the bed and then i descended on the slide, and i could feel a void form in my stomach as i reached my body, then i went up the stairs again, and kept these going for a while, i was around 8-9. it was also around these times i got the most scary nightmares i've ever experienced, I saw myself at my grandparents house with all my family, i was playing tag with my cousins so for some reason i alaways ran towards the garage and stood there looking out, this was the point where a huge hole would appear beneath me and as i was falling i remember screaming in terror, and landing in darkness i could see the dirt around me but not past a few feet it felt like a tunnel, cant remember how it appeared but i was being chased by this huge monster, i remember running and crying in terror. usually my mother had to wake me up crying kicking and screaming, and it wasnt that easy to pull me out. i got so scared that i stopped doing what i used to trigger the slide dream, cause i didnt always got the slide,
i remember that when i could go down the slide i always repeated the idea about doing it within my head when i was going to sleep over and over, but on some occations the nightmares kicked in or nothing happened just regular dreams.
since i stopped dreaming like i did when i was a kid, i can rarely recall what i dream, and never have nightmares or weird dreams like i did in my younger years. usually its a very peaceful night of sleep.
nowdays after experimenting with dmt and specially after seeing the lady for the second time but this time on cannabis, i must admit that i left out a bit which im unsure what to make of it, at some point she stops dancing and i dunno if my brain is playing games on me but as i wondered what was going on, i asked her to help me become a better man and i see her move towards me and touch me and then i felt warm energy irradiate from my back and all my body when her hand moved i felt it too, makes me wonder what is happening why does weed allow me to see and now feel all of this.
now i've been having really vivid dreams, so much so that I can feel the people in them, i can read, have loquacious conversation, objects have substance in my dreams, it has happened twice this week, the one i posted earlier and yesterday i dreamt about my moms and grandma and felt so much love and hugs and stuff it was really nice.
my mother also has dreams where shes not in her body, she wakes up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and when she tries to open the door she see's her hand go straight thru it, then she looks back and boom there she is in her bed laying down, so she walks back to her body lay on top of herself and then open her eyes again, and now its back to this reality, she also dreams about flying over mountains and oceans quite frequently. and has had several dream in which she see's someone she cares about dying and it has happened that on several occasions that she was right, happened with my great grandmother most recently, last we had heard of her was a week before and she was doing fine then she dreamt about her dying, we receive the call that she's being moved to the hospital, my aunts fly back home to be with her and stuff, 1 week later she was gone. she was old sure, but had a lot of vitality in her it was surprising to see her go. my grandma has weird skills like that too, but doesn't like to talk about it, she's very religious.
It's impossible to respond to these posts in any traditional sense, so I'll just start typing, and hopefully something useful results, I'll try to stay on topic, but again, I'm not sure it's possible to respond in any traditional manner...
Anybody can be a shaman, all you have to do is express your spirituality through shamanic techniques...people who get struck by lightening, or even people who have conquered deadly illness, make great shamans...
In my case, I was unable to believe in anything without empirical evidence, I thought spirituality was a delusion, I was not an atheist, as there's nit much proof the other way either, but that's the side I was leaning towards, then, out of pure curiosity, I smoked an overdose of DMT, and was thrown into a life or death crisis, and like "Thomas the doubter"* I ended up with "my finger in the wound of Christ"
My favorite story in the Gospel is the story of Thomas the Doubter because, remember, he wasn't present when Christ came to the upper room the first time, after the Crucifixion. And so Thomas came a couple days later and the apostles said to him, "the master was here, he was here," and he said, 'you guys have been smoking too many of these little brown cigarettes from Lebanon, we saw him crucified!" Well, so then Christ came a second time and Thomas was present and he said, "unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it." So Christ said to Thomas, "come forward, put your hand into my wound," and he did.
Now my interpretation for that Gospel story is that ALONE, of all the apostles, it was Thomas the Doubter who touched the resurrection body because he was the only one who had his shit together enough to DOUBT! And so if you doubt, they will actually let you put your hand in the wound; if you don't doubt, they will give you any kind of crap and send you happily on your way. -terence McKenna
I was, and still am, a skeptic, a doubter, I will question everything 1 billion times over and I will demand proof, I demand empirical evidence, but I seek the unbelievable, again I'll quote McKenna, who was not the only person to say these things, most psychedelic explorers will say something similar, I just think McKenna said it best:
"My method, my style, has always been to be open-minded, to be critical, to be rational, but to seek the weird. And to seek it seriously. Now, if you seek the weird without a critical intelligence, it will find you faster than you can lock your apartment behind you! The number of squirrelly ideas on the market these days is truly alarming. I coined a phrase (I hope), "the balkanization of epistemology". This is what we're dealing with now. You understand what I mean? It means people can't tell shit from Shinola, but they wanna talk about it, a lot! This is a place where you have to bring to bear what are called razors, logical razors. One is: hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. Another is: equations should not be multiplied without necessity. Razors always seek what is called the principle of parsimony. In other words, keep it simple, stupid. The simplest explanation is always to be preferred first."
- Terence McKenna
About McKenna "saying it best" here's an example:
..I have taken DMT thousands of times. I never had two trips
that were the same. Mostly I had good trips—only a few were
unpleasant. But I figured out why; it was always a mistake in
preparation, set, or setting...
...
The world of DMT is incredibly vast. What DMT opens in us is so profound that it is impossible to truly express. I have been making, using, and initiating people into DMT use, for around 40 years. I was the one who first discovered that the free-base could be smoked. It has never ceased to amaze me, nor have I ever felt that one could fairly arrive at any hard and fast conclusions about what was happening during a DMT trip -Nick sand
Now we use some Terence McKenna quotes to say the exact same thing:
Any attempts to begin to describe the DMT experience is fraught with the immediate dangers of either over-simplification or a swift flight into metaphor since it is almost impossible to describe with words alone the fantastic swirling multi-faceted gateway visions that are only the beginning of the DMT experience. Intrepid travelers report that past these jeweled-gates can be found mechanical-Elves, Aliens, Egyptian Gods, temples, pyramids, and palaces of pulsating light, and some would say, the entire possible population of the Collective Unconsciousness. A magical place where the totality of phenomenal existence can be experienced in an often terrifying transpersonal flash.
* No two DMT experiences are alike, and no two people should expect any similarity in their individual experiences. (Unless, in one of the many mysteries of the DMT zone, two experiences are indeed shared as One!) It is commonly said that DMT causes far many more questions than it does answers; for it is a flowerbed for all the mystery in the Universe. Mystery is an increasingly difficult thing to find in our Fact-or-Fiction society but the on-going mapping of this tryptamine accessed Inter-Zone may ultimately lead to the birth of powerful new spiritual metaphors for Mankind, and a new Mythology great enough to both resonate within us and encompass the incredible Universe we all occupy. So in this section, you will find collated here a number of DMT accounts as recounted by different psychonauts over the last 40 years, each one mapping out a small piece of this mysterious 8th continent of the Mind.
Metaphorically, DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once one knows about it, it is very hard for others to understand what one is talking about. One cannot be heard. The more one is able to articulate what it is, the less others are able to understand. This is why I think people who attain enlightenment, if we may for a moment comap these two, are silent. They are silent because we cannot understand them. Why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, I am not sure, but I recommend it to your attention.
~ Terence McKenna
And while I have nothing but respect for Mr. Sand, I prefer McKenna when it comes to eloquent articulation of abstract concepts.
I think like McKenna, it's more appropriate to call myself a "shamanologist" rather than an actual shaman.
Though I do play a shamanic role, I'm central to groups of individuals Which I want nothing to do with, and who equally want nothing to do with me...here's an example, when you see through ego and culture, those who have not imitate your choices, I will wear a style of clothing, and within a week everybody who saw me is wearing this same style, all the while I really have little interest one way or the other, because I know it's meaningless, yet I'm guiding culture in this sense...just like the shaman, this is a very small example, and there are many more. By pure coincidence I play a shamanic role...
he is loathed and respected, and feared and loved, because it is understood that he represents a dimension that nevertheless must be tolerated -TM
Even in traditional societies, the shaman is central to the social functioning, and the health, and so forth – but is never allowed to be physically central. There is a leader, a head man or something; the shaman lives off at the edge of the village, sometimes off in the woods; he is approached with fear and trembling; he is loathed and respected, and feared and loved, because it is understood that he represents a dimension that nevertheless must be tolerated, because it is the channel through which knowledge, and healing, and higher values, come. -terence mckenna
the shaman is socially marginal, politically marginal, lives at the edge of the village, and so forth and so on, and is feared by the people, because dealings with the shaman are always dealings about life and death. But then the shaman comes forward in this critical role, as go-between, as mediator, between the cultural mind and the real world, which is this potent set of forces and planetary cycles and meteorological events and diseases and, you know, fate; and the shaman mediates. In many languages, the word for shaman means “go-between”. So the cost of this, or the price of this, for the shaman himself, or herself, is a kind of alienation from the cultural values, and a kind of understanding that it’s a game that’s kept in play. -terence mckenna
ok, back to your post:
Heres hoping that i got the stuff, i understand there are people that disregard this experiences as BS, me personally i think its really interesting, and wether the experiences can be explained or not in my short little account they feel very real, the repercussions are not ephemeral to me at least. your wariness is well founded in my experience most people i've met rarely care about the spiritual realm past what they were programmed to believe. they usually look at me weird when i engage in this subjects so i only do so with a select few nowdays.
I always thought spirituality was delusional "BS", which may be why such extreme means were needed to change my mind, I still think most of it is pure nonsense, I only accept that which I can not deny due to my experience, again, I'll quote McKenna:
There are two impulses in the human psyche, at least two in this case. I just don’t resonate with believers in anything. I get insulting to Buddhists for God’s sake. It’s just something about their smugness and their whole bit, I just want to squash it. So you can imagine how I behave in the presence of scientologists and the rest of it. Belief is again, it’s a form of infantilism. There are no grounds for believing anything. -TM
And again, McKenna articulates an attitude towards these things in a manner which is fairly close to my own:
It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling the truth, because the demons are of many kinds: "Some are made of ions, some of mind; the ones of ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind." The reaction to these voices is not to kneel in genuflection before a god, because then one will be like Dorothy in her first encounter with Oz. There is no dignity in the universe unless we meet these things on our feet, and that means having an I/Thou relationship. One say to the Other: "You say you are omniscient, omnipresent, or you say you are from Zeta Reticuli. You're long on talk, but what can you show me?" Magicians, people who invoke these things, have always understood that one must go into such encounters with one's wits about oneself.
you can't just believe or buy into the majority of what exists in the field of spirituality and religion, 95% of it is nonsense, but there is real mystery out there.
"My method, my style, has always been to be open-minded, to be critical, to be rational, but to seek the weird. And to seek it seriously. Now, if you seek the weird without a critical intelligence, it will find you faster than you can lock your apartment behind you! The number of squirrelly ideas on the market these days is truly alarming. I coined a phrase (I hope), "the balkanization of epistemology". This is what we're dealing with now. You understand what I mean? It means people can't tell shit from Shinola, but they wanna talk about it, a lot! This is a place where you have to bring to bear what are called razors, logical razors. One is: hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. Another is: equations should not be multiplied without necessity. Razors always seek what is called the principle of parsimony. In other words, keep it simple, stupid. The simplest explanation is always to be preferred first."
- Terence McKenna
jma182 said: also do you find it possible to show some skills without any training or initiation
Absolutely! I even see individuals like Albert Hoffman as being a shaman, even though he probably would have known little about, or cared little about, shamanism. Hoffman had mystical experiences since childhood, and inadvertently released entheogens back into the mind of western culture. Hoffman would not say "I'm a shaman" though it's clear that he was in every way.
jma182 said:nowdays after experimenting with dmt and specially after seeing the lady for the second time but this time on cannabis, i must admit that i left out a bit which im unsure what to make of it, at some point she stops dancing and i dunno if my brain is playing games on me but as i wondered what was going on, i asked her to help me become a better man and i see her move towards me and touch me and then i felt warm energy irradiate from my back and all my body when her hand moved i felt it too, makes me wonder what is happening why does weed allow me to see and now feel all of this.
I always distinguish seeing forms or beings, from actually having an "entity" experience. An entity experience will be similar to shamanic initiation, genuine mystical experience, certain types of abduction phenomena/contact phenomena, and so on....
Any way, I lost my thread on this topic and will return later...
-eg
