Shamanism and Nature and the Nature of Shamanism

Chapter 1 Shamanism: No Feathers, No Rattles, No Crystals, Just You and Consciousness

My first opening into shamanism occurred in 1975, just a year after my opening into Tantric knowledge. So within one year, I had openings into two totally different pathways. Since that time I have combined the two, and I have decided that the best title that describes my pathway now is Zen Tantric Shamanism.

I had made plans to be in Mexico in 1975 for the purpose of studying with Ivan Illich, who at that time was probably the world’s most radical social critic. He’d written a book called Deschooling Society, which was about getting rid of schools and developing learning networks. I was really taken by his ideas, so I decided to take eight months leave and study with him. Now, as it happened, before I went to Mexico, I’d read Carlos Castenada’s books and fallen in love with Don Juan Mateus, who was Castenada’s Yaqui Indian teacher. I was particularly moved by the third book, Journey to Ixtlan: The Last Lessons of Don Juan. It was simpler than the others—more direct and more beautiful—and it touched me very deeply.

I was on the verge of leaving when news arrived from Mexico. I’d already taken leave from my job, let my house and car, when I received a letter saying that the institute where I was intending to study would be closing a fortnight after my date of arrival in Mexico. It was too late to pull out, so I went anyway. There I was, with my wife and children, in the canoe, in the creek, without a paddle—in a country where I didn’t know the language, where I didn’t have my books and with no access to the material that I needed to write my PhD. But strange things started to happen.

Within a week of arriving in Mexico, we visited a little place called Guanavarca, which is a beautiful city about 80 km out of Mexico City, up in the mountains. It’s called "La Citad Prima Vera”, the city of eternal springtime. It is like that—eternally spring. Every day is around 25 degrees C. In the wet season it only rains at night. It’s very considerate —in the morning everything is totally dry again. We connected with some American people there who invited us to accompany them to an old ceremonial site at a place called San Juan de Teotihuacan. At the time that our British forbears (if you have British ones) were still living basically in small tribes around A.D. 400, one of the major cities in the world was San Juan de Teotihuacan, a very large and cultured city full of magnificent murals. Ancient Mexico didn’t produce a written culture in the same way that Greece did, but it had a very advanced culture. The largest pyramids on earth are not in Egypt, but in Mexico at San Juan de Teotihuacan. The very largest is called the Pyramid of the Sun, "Pyramide de la Sol” and it is at one end of what was once a ceremonial city that has a main street two kilometres long with temples and altars on each side. The original inhabitants used to have celebrations that moved from the Pyramid of the Moon, "Pyramide de Luna”, down to the Pyramid of the Sun, with all of the temples in full swing.

I was stunned by the size of the pyramids. They are such immense structures and are not made completely of rock. A large proportion of the structure is actually earth, formed into the shape of a pyramid and then covered with rock on the outside. A large amount of the rock had fallen away over time, and the Mexican government was reconstructing the pyramids with archaeological help, because they were such a wonderful tourist drawcard.

I knew very little about Mesoamerican culture, but the one name, or the one word, which seemed to ring for me—the word that had some magic—was the word Quetzalcoatl. I was to discover later that Quetzalcoatl was the godform. In a way, he was the first expression of monotheism that had manifested out of the unconscious of the Mesoamerican people. He is considered to be white and blond. He urged human beings not to hurt each other—to chase butterflies maybe—among many other things. He was considered to be the morning star and the evening star, and he was the godform in the consciousness of the people who brought something of the understandings of love to the Mesoamerican race.

While wandering around the site, I climbed onto the rebuilt temples. They had steps going up on four sides and a large area at the top where people would either have stood, watching a procession go past, or where various rituals would have been enacted. I was quite taken by the power of just standing there with the pyramid of the sun on one side and the pyramid of the moon on the other and simply feeling what it would have been like to have perhaps 80,000 people there participating in something that had more meaning to them than Moomba does to us. I turned and looked at the surrounding mountains, which are now bare, but once were covered in trees. Part of the downfall of Teotihuacan and its people was the fact that they used all the surrounding timber, which affected the ecology so severely that eventually the land couldn’t support a city of 100,000 people. It seems that there was some internal rebellion against the priestly caste, and the whole city fell into misuse and disrepair, although it’s still a bit of a mystery to archaeologists as to how that happened.

Anyway, I was having a great time feeling what this place was like. I turned around and started to walk back down onto the ritual avenue when suddenly, right in front of me, I saw a medicine man in full regalia. His costume was of the deep azure blue and vibrant green colours found in the jewellery that Mexican Americans still wear. I was quite blown away by the way he appeared out of nowhere to be standing just in front of me. It was extraordinary. I could see him as clear as day, but no-one else seemed to be aware of him. My kids were nearby, but they didn’t remark on this strange character who was so close to me. My former wife was there, and later said that she saw nothing, that I’d just imagined the experience. After a little while, he just dissipated—the energy form disappeared, and I was left wondering what had happened. At that time I was teaching philosophy at Latrobe University, and was well trained in the sceptical forms of Western philosophy.

Immediately prior to my time in Mexico I had spent one year studying tantra yoga and was still working my way into that way of understanding the world. I had also been reading the works of Rudolf Steiner for about a year and was writing a thesis on him for a postgraduate degree. While this gave me some sort of framework in which to place the experience, I struggled with the impact of the vision and what it signified for me.

I gradually worked my way into Mexican culture, and learned Spanish. I spent a lot of time visiting ancient buildings. Mexico is a civilisation built on vast ruins. I learned of the many different cultures that have been there—really strange cultures like the Olmecs. There are statues and carvings of them with huge, amazing heads. There is no race still alive on the planet that looks like the Olmecs. They made perfectly carved figures out of obsidian, which is a very hard rock that no ancient tools that we know of could have worked. There were many cultures: the Olmecs, the Mismecs, the Zaphotecs, the Aztecs, the Mayans. The Mayans, who lived in the jungles, had such an advanced astronomy that they had built astronomical observatories that had features such as apertures in the building that at noon on the day of the summer solstice directed the sun’s rays to a prearranged spot on the floor.

The Chitzanitzu temples are immensely powerful Aztec step pyramids. They have a vibratory memory of hundreds of thousands of rituals in there, and some of them have the vibratory memory of thousands of human sacrifices. I purchased a statue of one of the gods of these temples—Shakloon. Shakloon was the rain god for the people in the south. The statues were shaped in a way that allowed a human being who was going to be sacrificed to be held over the statue while the priests either ritually disembowelled him or her or else took the heart out. The still-beating heart was an Aztecs specialty, because they believed that the sun god was fed by blood and human sacrifice. If they didn’t keep feeding the sun god, he would die and there would be no more sun. So they had to keep taking captives and sacrificing them to sustain life.

I began reading about the magical practices of these people, and I travelled to nearly all of the major archaeological sites. One that I learned about but didn’t visit was Tula, a centre of Toltec culture where there are statues of what are called Los Atlantivs(?) (The Atlanteans). These are huge statues with beautiful carved faces. The Toltecs were probably the one culture in Mesoamerica that continued with the memories of a lost Atlantean knowledge longer than any other cultures. I felt deeply attracted to the Toltec people, as they were a very beautiful, non-bloodthirsty people.

Other things started to happen. I went to a village about 40 km from Guanavarca that was considered to be a centre of shamanic practice. Behind this village, when I looked up into the cliffs, I could see huge sculpted faces with trees growing over them. Again, no-one else seemed to notice them, but to me they were obvious. Some months after I had first been there I picked up a book called La Storia d’un Discoveriamento Historica, "The Story of a Historical Discovery”, written by a Peruvian mason. He had found a number of sites around the world where there were huge rock carvings. There is actually one place like this in Northern Australia that very few people have seen. This chap developed the idea that these carvings were, in a way, representations of the Atlantean gods created by the people who came from Atlantis after it was destroyed. They made it to Mesoamerica, down through Guatemala to Peru—where the Inca culture developed—taking with them the memories of the titanic, godly forces of Atlantis and sculpting them into huge rock forms and art forms.

So these were the surroundings that I was living in, with my original study plans frustrated. I couldn’t write my thesis and the guy that I went to study with wasn’t there. I decided to immerse myself into a study of archaeology and Aztec magic and absorb as much of that knowledge as I could. Now, my kids needed schooling. I was idealistic at the time and felt that we should not put them into a privileged school position. A couple of blocks away from our house there was a small school that met by the roadside, under some trees. We sent them there, but the kids got lice and my daughter was almost run over by a car. We thought better of it and found an independent preschool based on the ideals of A. S. Neill and his Summerhill school. Around the corner from this school I came across a small private institute that taught a wide variety of subjects. Many American college students studied Spanish, anthropology and various other courses there.

I started hanging out there and met the director, Paco Cadera. He was running a course on Shamanism. I got talking with him and decided that I would offer a course on the correspondences between what I saw in Indian culture, particularly the Tantric notion of the kundalini, and what was in Mesoamerican culture with Quetzacoatl, who was the plumed, winged serpent. So in 1975, I found myself teaching a bunch of American college students for eight weeks, where we explored all the interactions between kundalini yoga and the inner essence practices of Aztec magic, which centred on the raising of the serpent until it flew. Because I had been initiated spontaneously into Tantric knowledge during the previous year, I was able to draw on that knowledge to teach about gaining Quetzalcoatl consciousness through the raising of the kundalini.

The deal I made with Paco was that I would teach my course, and in return I could take Paco’s course. Now, Paco was not a shaman, but he had lived with shamans for seven years and knew their ways very well. He had a whole range of amazing stories, some of which I have included throughout this book. One of the stories that impressed me deeply told of the time when he first decided to study shamanism. It was in the mid-sixties that he decided to write a PhD on Mexican shamanism. To begin his research he went to the vibrant city of Wihaca, a place filled with both memories of ancient Indian culture and a flourishing existing Indian culture. It also has many shamans, and just happens to be where Don Juan and Carlos Castenada often met. The Yaqui Indian tribe that Don Juan belonged to lives in that area.

Paco was driving to Wihaca during the night and was about 70 km short of the city, when he had a strong urge to stop the car. He got out and in the dark could see a path leading away from the road. He followed his instinct and walked along the path until he came to a large hacienda, inside of which there was a party in full swing, with people dressed in 16th or 17th century dress. He knocked at the door and went inside, and people said, "Welcome, we’ve been wondering when you were going to come…” There was one white-haired man there (shamans of import always have white hair, that’s part of the mythology) with whom he felt a very deep connection. At about 4 a.m. he left the party, returned to his car and drove into Wihaca. There he met his brother and said, "I’ve had a fantastic experience” and proceeded to describe his experience. His brother said, "Well, let’s go out and find this place!”. So they went back, found the car tracks where he had stopped by the side of the road, followed the path, and found the hacienda—in total ruin. It looked like the hacienda he had partied in, except that it looked four hundred years older. He returned to Wihaca freaking out a little bit, and just put that experience on hold.

Eventually he tracked down one of the villages where a couple of shamans lived. He had heard that one in particular was a profound shaman who followed the healing path. He negotiated with the villagers and rented a small single-room cottage. He would spend four or five days at a time there, asking "When is the Cuandero arriving?”, "When is the magic man, the shaman, coming?”. He would never get a precise answer so he would return to Wihaca for a while. After a couple of months he was in the village one day when a young boy knocked on the door and said that the Cuandero had arrived and that he could see him. He walked to the Cuandero’s house, knocked on the wall outside and went in. The man inside was the same guy who had been at the party in the 16th century hacienda!

These experiences of altered states of consciousness are common in the initial opening into shamanic knowing. Hearing of Paco’s experiences gave me a little bit of purchase on my own vision of the medicine man. I saw it as one of the signs of my calling to shamanic knowing. Later in the book I’ll come back to some of my experiences in Mexico. Let me begin to explain the topic title: "No Feathers, No Rattles, No Crystals”. For most Australians, Shamanism—if we know anything about it at all—is something we see as being outside our own culture. Most current popular teachings on shamanism in Australia are derived from the indigenous cultures of either North or South America. The work of Michael Harner provides an example of this approach. He has written several books on shamanism and trains people in the knowledge that he learned from South American Indians.

This approach to understanding shamanism from another culture involves taking on a form of knowing that is not yours, that is, you have to think yourself into another culture. This is not always clear to people. For instance, the basic way that shamans are trained in Mexico is with Peyote—that is the fuel that they use for loosening their consciousness from their body and moving into the realms of the spirit. This method is so well recognised in Mexico, that when the Witcholi Indians go to pick their peyote, the government provides them with support and protection so they don’t get raided by peyote thieves. It is recognised that it is their psychopharmaceutical for moving into the realm of the gods. It is used to maintain their culture. One of the ways that happens can be seen in the approach that traditional Indian people have to older teenage boys who are losing their connection with tribal culture—when the attraction of rock’n’roll, fast cars and jeans takes over, and the old ways have no value at all. Often a shaman will appear and say, "I think it is time you came to find out who you are” The shaman will take them to a sacred site and fill them with peyote. Then, whoosh—up into the realm of the gods, with the shaman navigating the young man through that opening, letting him see the vision of his life, letting him see his purpose, his function, and then bringing him down. when he is sure that the young man has got the knowledge, he sends him off, knowing he will be fine.

This connection with the visionary states is the same sort of thing that Aborigines talk about with the Dreaming. The Dreaming is a knowing of our life that is pre-incarnational. You may have heard about what happens when consciousness is leaving the body, from reports of people who have had near-death experiences—how you see the whole of your life. It happened to me when I almost died a few years back. I literally saw the whole of my life before me. What is not well known is that as we are incarnating, as our consciousness is assuming form, we see a vision for our life—what we have dreamt in godspace for this lifetime. That vision is encoded into the DNA and we usually experience it as the hunches and feelings that we have, and the unusual coincidences in our life. The vibrational vision becomes genetically encoded just before we fully assume the body consciousness.

It may be worth making clear that virtually all that I am sharing with you in this book comes from my own experience, my own exploration, my own knowing. If you ask me who the authority is on it, I have to say, "I am”. It is not that I am claiming authority, it is simply that this is my knowing and what I have to share. this is not knowledge that I have derived directly from shamanic literature or from other cultures. It is simply what I have experienced. This is my dreaming.

But back to Mexico. The shamans connect the young men to their dreaming, their envisioning. It is as if they help them read out from their genetic code, their knowing for their life. While we might think of their consciousness as going outwards into godspace, it is equally valid to think of that consciousness as going inwards into godspace, and literally reading out the godly information that is encoded in their own genetic structure. If you want to read a beautiful scientific explication of this, Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson have done precise work on the neurobiological maps and the neurobiological chains that exist within us. They talk about the relationship between different maps of consciousness and cellular memory, for instance.

So all these approaches to deep knowing are absolutely valid and absolutely wonderful in those cultures that they belong to. Most of us tend to come into contact with this sort of shamanism through people who have been trained by people who shamans once trained. In other words, we get it three or four times removed. We might be taught a ritual that is not part of our cultural context, and then we adopt some of this practice in an effort to get into shamanic space. Now sometimes such practices are useful and sometimes they can achieve that. Everyone can sit in the longboat, do the rowing, go down the shamanic tunnel and meet their power animal, etcetera. Consciousness is so malleable that if you set up any program for consciousness to experience and then get your own consciousness into a surrendered space, you will experience that program. For instance, the Centre for Human Transformation, which Rachana and I direct, has a course called "Returning to the Source”—it is a 15-day exploration into shamanic states. At one point in the course we say to people:

OK, now normally if you want to learn to speak in tongues, which is considered to be a sign of the gift of the holy spirit, you have to hang out with the Pentecostalists. However, in the next 45 minutes, you are all going to talk in tongues. This is the way we’ll do it … We’ll take you into trance, and we give you permission to start talking in tongues. What you will find is that one of you will start talking in tongues, and then the others will soon move into that space and join in”. And people get it!

Another technique we use might be introduced by us saying: OK, you know what shamans do in some cultures. Know that there are visionary shamans who are sometimes different to the healing shamans. It is the visionary shamans who can tell where the caribou are going to be. They will dream themselves into the collective consciousness of the species of the caribou, locate a herd and follow their movements. Once they have dreamt where the caribou are, the tribe begins the hunt.

In creating this type of space we have had people go into all sorts of states. I remember one fellow who went into a lizard state. He was phenomenal! His tongue became very long and blue. I have never seen a human being so lizard-like as this man. He was crawling around the room sniffing for ants. He was totally into lizard consciousness. This is part of shamanic practice, to find how to get into the consciousness of the animal. It might be done because you want to hunt the animal, which can be done with such beauty, where you thank the animal for the gift of its life in nurturing, knowing that it goes back to the earth. It could also be done because you want some of the skills of the animal—you might want the eagle’s capacity to see, the baboon’s capacity for trickery, the dolphin’s capacity to feel at a long distance. Cultures all around the world have worked with teaching people how to get into animal states of consciousness.

It is actually more common than most people realise, and it happens at many levels. Some people are really good at working with horses—they really get inside the consciousness of the horse. The horse knows that this person understands their consciousness and they respond accordingly. Some people are really into dog consciousness. Some people get into plant consciousness, even particular forms of plant consciousness to the exclusion of others. For example, I can’t get into orchid consciousness yet—there is just something about orchids that I don’t get. My father and uncle were into the consciousness of roses. There are ordinary green-thumb gardeners who actually get into shamanic practice. Of course, they don’t know it. If you said to them, "Hey, you’re a shaman”, they might respond with, "No I’m not, but I do grow beautiful roses where no-one else can grow them”. Why can’t anyone else grow them? Because no-one else can get into the genetic information in the rose in the same way. These people have simply found the capacity to tap into the information that is there in the plant. So shamans are everywhere, or at least people who take on a part of shamanic practice are everywhere.

Let me continue with my point about culture-specific shamanic learning. There are so many beautiful rituals and ceremonies, such as those of the medicine wheel and its healing, They are lovely to experience, but you cannot go further with them unless you live with the tribe for 10 or 15 years, learn to speak their language, and finally get initiated into their way of knowing. Because some forms of shamanism are so picturesque, people often get hooked on the symbols or on the rituals. They get hooked on the longboat—"You want to get into shamanic space? OK, we’ll all row on the longboat ... then we go down the tunnel … we meet our power animal … and finally we get into the shamanic states ...” Or perhaps they set up the medicine wheel … or do this or do that.

The title of this section of the book came from my response to an ad that I saw in The Whole Person Almanac placed by someone was running a shamanic weekend. The ad said, "Bring your rattles, feathers and crystals”. It made me laugh, and I had the thought, "Well, you don’t need feathers, rattles and crystals to get into shamanism. All you need is your own consciousness!” There is a pure form of shamanism that is not dependent upon any tradition, it is only dependent on nature. I know this because it is the path that I follow. I have never had a teacher apart from nature, and nature has taught me time after time. It has taught me how to talk to the wind ... It has taught me how to talk to the trees … It has taught me how to talk to the stars, how to talk to the clouds. I used to live by myself where the Centre for Human Transformation now is. At that time, I was going in and out of craziness. So much shamanic knowing was settling on me, and I was alone in the bush. I would go into the forest and suddenly step out of linear time into what I call synchronic time—where there is no cause and no effect, only everything interrelating simultaneously. A question would arise in my mind and the wind would blow the answer. I didn’t cause the wind to blow, and I didn’t cause the answer to come. My consciousness moved out of cause and effect into some totally OTHER state of consciousness. This was happening at a time before I was with my wife, Rachana. I was immensely lonely and freaked out. and felt that I was never going to be able to get my life together. I had a favourite spot on the side of a hill and I often stood there at the time when the two worlds changed—that time when the world of the sun is changing into the world of the moon, when the day is changing to the night, where the inbreath of the earth changes to the outbreath. During that 15 minutes of the day when stillness comes consciousness is so malleable. I used to cast my prayers out to the trees or the clouds or whoever was there to listen. I was crying out my needs, asking for my healing, something I could hold onto. And in that willingness to be open to nature, I got it! It was as simple as that. I just got it.

A few years ago, I was in a tree nursery that we had, and I was looking at tree lucerne. Tree lucerne is an amazing plant. It just wants to give, and it needs frequent pruning to grow well. We fed it to our animals, pruned it, and were soon feeding it to the animals again. It just grows and grows and gives and gives. I was standing next to the tree, trying to feel my way into its consciousness, when suddenly—BANG. It felt as if the spirit of nature suddenly gave me full immediate knowledge of the tree. I went into one of the buildings where some of the scholars-in-residence were at the time, and I talked for two hours about the structure of the elements and how all of nature is the four elements in relation to light. The process of receiving this knowledge was simply, "Bink! Here you are … You’re open, you’re ready. You want to understand? OK, here it is”. We don’t have to have any rituals.

A ritual is simply a good way to let the unconscious know that you want something. You set the ritual up as your doorway into the unconscious, and it can be anything. When I used to give lectures in the philosophy department that I was chairman of, I used to arrive at the university without knowing what the lecture was going to be about. I had a title, I knew that much. I would sit with a cup of tea and dunk a biscuit in it. That simple routine became the ritual for my consciousness to change. I have given wonderful lectures on the nature of magic and shamanism, and the relationship between magic and science. I didn’t know the stuff till it was coming through me. The ritual of the cup of tea opened the doors in the unconscious for me. I would test it out sometimes by walking into the lecture hall and saying, "OK, give me three questions”. People would give me diverse questions, and I would give a lecture that was built around those three questions. It worked perfectly, and the lecture would end exactly five minutes to the hour just when it was supposed to. Sometimes I would admit, "Hey, this is amazing guys. I don’t know this stuff till it comes out”. People couldn’t quite handle it. A philosophy lecturer is supposed to be extremely rational and logical in his approach, and here was I learning it and giving it simultaneously.

Over the years I have come to see that we can go straight into nature and get knowledge ourselves. If we develop any rituals, they can be the spontaneous rituals of the moment. Nature is so diverse, it will provide us with them. Where Rachana and I live, if we start to talk about the wind, the wind blows. It comes and says, "Hi”, just like a dog! You call a dog’s name, the dog comes. Osho comes in on the wind nowadays, since he left his body. He just blows in. And this is the world of the shaman, the expanded world, the feeling world. We might feel something and suss out, "Well who’s coming in now? ... Oh, it’s him! OK … Haven’t felt him for a while These senses are totally trustworthy. In everyday life everyone knows how one person feels different to another. It is the same in shamanic states. Sometimes Buddha comes in, sometimes Jesus comes in. What is the difference between Jesus and Buddha? They feel different. If you are in that space you can check out your nervous system and say to yourself, "Who is this person coming in? … Oh, it’s Buddha … He hasn’t been round for a while”. Or perhaps, "Oh, Jesus … Thank God, he’s a great healer”. For the rational mind, this is craziness, but for the shaman, it is life.

This is the world of the shaman. You don’t have to go through all the paraphernalia. You don’t have to have your feathers, or your rattles or your crystals, you only have to have your consciousness, your preparedness to surrender and a willingness to ask nature to teach you. You have to set the time aside for nature to impact on you, and then trust what comes. If you start to feel something, then trust what you feel. You need to be aware that your neurosis is going to be in there as well. There is no way you can go into the world of the shaman and not get hit by your own stuff.

Shamanic consciousness is not as rare and remote as you imagine. I know a beautiful German rolfer, a Sannyasin, who teaches anatomy in the Rolfing Institute. He is a magnificent bodyworker. We were talking once about being bodyworkers and teaching bodywork, and how bodywork teachers have to know so much—the unconscious life of the body, what manifests through the body, what lives in the body, how to work and talk with the lifeforce and how to move it through the body so that it heals. At one point we just looked at each other, and I said to him, "When a great bodyworker is working, he’s a shaman” He felt the truth of it and agreed. Shamans are everywhere, particularly in the modern forms of healing that combine Western and Eastern forms of therapy. Any person who feels called to these approaches to healing is inevitably open to the world of the shaman and its tests.

A common feature of this calling is that it will often occur in a person’s youth and it may be missed because this culture is not alert to such matters. Often it is associated with a spontaneous illness that may last anything from a week to three or four months, the child does not seem to be able to recover, and no-one understands what it is. For the healing shaman, in particular, that is often the call. In Mexico it is very well known. It will usually occur around thirteen. Often a shaman will actually see a young boy who has the mark of the shaman on him, and will consciously, or even unconsciously, call him. It is quite likely that an illness will then come onto the boy, which someone will recognise and say, "Looks like he’s being called by a shaman, we’d better find out who is calling him”. He is then apprenticed for 20 years, sometimes, until he’s 33, before the fullness of his shamanic knowing can come.

A lot of people unwarily and unknowingly enter into the world of the shaman, and then do not know how to navigate the space they find themselves in. One of the most popular ways that people enter into that world is through hallucinogens and narcotics. They do not realise that is what they are doing—they do it for the trip—but basically they enter into the spaces of high-level shamanic practice, and then cannot cope. It is similar to putting a learner driver into a Ferrari and saying, "You press this to go and this to stop—go for it”. The kid heads out and gets out of control. There are forces of the unconscious that any shaman has to know how to work within, and not only the forces of his own unconscious, but also the forces of someone else’s unconscious, the forces of a group unconscious, and sometimes the forces of a cultural unconscious.

The cultural unconscious is the collective unconscious, and the manifestations that come out of that can be very powerful. Imagine meeting the form of all the anger that is in the Australian unconscious. There is a space in consciousness where a skilled person could navigate through it, but anyone unprepared would get lacerated—and this is one of the major things that happens in the disorganisation of consciousness when people get into heavy drugs. Even strong marijuana can do it. We have worked with many people who have been blown into those states. One young man who came to us had sat on the banks of a river for months and continually ate mushrooms. His consciousness just kept opening, but his unconscious kept pouring his own messy stuff into it, and he blew right out. He was into realms of very heavy-duty magic that he had absolutely no way of controlling. Hardly any psychiatrists would recognise what was happening in this kid’s unconscious. They have other names for it, and they have other ways of navigating and negotiating, but they certainly do not know about the shamanic way of getting inside the unconscious, calling down the light and dealing with whatever comes out until the kid returns to his ordinary awareness. They do not know how to do that. These are extremely powerful forces, that even at a minimal level can knock over objects in a room. If two shamans get together and start making love, pictures are likely to start falling off the wall and statues start falling over, simply from the energetic release that is happening in the room. So, if you have had this experience, backtrack and claim your right as a shaman!

In the remainder the book I look at shamanism and magic — whether there is a difference between sorcery, shamanism or magic. Then I discuss the shaman as healer, look at techniques for contacting the shaman within and then, finally, talk about shamanic initiation. Basically, initiations are expansions in consciousness, expansions of your capacity to allow the power that is available to come through you. They are really very simple things even though they are often shrouded in mystery. Much of this is left over from the Western temple tradition where people trained for initiation for many years until they were accepted in. From then on they were never allowed to talk about their path. One of the things that has happened with shamanism over the last couple of decades is that a lot of that information is being made public, but being made public in such a way that unless a person is really aware, they will not understand it. There are some books and other materials on the market now that, if read with openness, can evoke change in the reader’s own nervous system. What is being conveyed in the words is like a vibratory input to you, and if you are ready for it and open to it, you will get the reorganisation in your nervous system. If you are not ready for it, and you just read it as another bit of information, you will not get the change.

The bibliography contains a number of good books on shamanism. You will notice there are also some on tantra, because both paths have been a strong part of my own development, and I find the meetings of the two traditions quite extraordinary. If you have a real capacity to live on the edge, both these paths can be powerful means for personal growth.When I originally presented the material in this book as a series of five talks, each talk ended with some members of the audience asking questions. I have included the questions and my responses to them at the end of each topic. They have been slightly edited, but only to make the reading experience easier. The essence of each remains true to the original. The names of the people asking the questions have been changed.

Alan: What happened to the man who had the 16th-century experience? Did he gain apprenticeship?

Daricha: He kept hanging out with shamans. Did he become an apprentice? He certainly had a lively intellectual interest in their world, and there were a number of shamans who taught him a lot. When he wrote his PhD, he showed it to them, and when they read it they said, "We told you this but we didn’t know you were going to give away our secrets.” So, he never presented his PhD. From that I take it that he was a man of integrity and a man of knowledge. but he never made that claim. After all, he was heading up an institution, and American colleges were sending their students there. I can imagine what he would have had to deal with if some hippy went back and reported, "Hey man, the guy who runs this is a shaman!” ... Although, it was the mid-seventies, so maybe it would have been alright.

Belinda: What is the process of working with people who might have been labelled and treated as psychiatric at some stage? One person I was thinking of in particular has heard voices, that there are people out to get him. He is paranoid, and he was on medication for years. Through the therapy that I did with him, he has begun getting off the medication.

Dar: Working with people who have either had shock treatment or medication is very hard, because their whole etheric system is totally damaged. You need to get them into homeopathy and acupuncture and treatments like that to try to get their bioelectrical field together, because it’s as if their radar centre is distorted, as if it has big dints in it and it just keeps getting the same bad massages directed to it. A book that could be useful for you is called The Natural Death in Man by Wilson Van Deussen, a Californian psychiatrist with great insight. He used to work with people who heard voices, and rather than saying, "Nonsense, you don’t hear voices”, "Try not to hear voices” or "The voices are sick”, he would say, "What do the voices tell you?”. He then worked with that as information, and he found that sometimes the voices were very precise in what they told. It depended whether a person wanted to go to the light or wanted to go to the darkness as to the nature of the voices, and if they kept going’ towards the darkness, they just went into irredeemable craziness.

B: Is the choice that stark — either you can go towards the light or you can go towards the dark?

Dar: It’s just a metaphor or a model. I’m not claiming any ultimate reality for it, it’s simply that a model, or a certain way of looking at things, is useful to work with at times. Sometimes you can come across forces that feel really dark, and you may have the feeling, "I don’t want to touch that stuff”. You can feel something coming in, and you get the hell out of there, because it’s just too heavy duty. Or, if you have to stay in, then you call down as much light as you can. I am totally ecumenical in my shamanism — I’ll call down angels, I’ll call down the living fire of Christ, I’ll do anything to get out of a tight spot! If you do call on beings of light, something of them will come. Once get into certain levels in consciousness, an echo of your plea goes through the universe and something starts coming down. You will feel the input of their energy into your nervous system.

B: Do you mean that you call the vibrations verbally, or do you think the vibration as a thought? Dar: It depends how freaked out I am! Whether I shout, "OH, CHRIST!!!” The things that provoke this type of reaction don’t happen to me very much now. I thinks I am past a lot of my early struggles, but when your own deep karma is coming through to be cleared, and the nature of it resonates with other disorganised bits of karma from the universe, you just call in as much light as you can, however you can. That’s the good thing about not having a tradition, I can use bits and pieces of anyone’s. If something seems to work, great, I’ll use it. Boomerangs are good? Terrific. You may even find that crystals are good! But don’t think that you can’t be a shaman unless you’ve got one, or that getting one makes you a shaman.

Colin: You were talking about people who would be labelled as insane or mad as people who have special gifts …

Dar: I was saying that there are certain symptoms, such hearing voices or having visions, that are some of the attributes that shamans develop.

C: But then you mentioned "irredeemable craziness”.

Dar: What I was talking of was the insight that Van Deussen got from his work with people. If they went towards the light, they got better, while if they kept following the darkness, they went into irredeemable craziness — they simply became lost in their unconscious. Another author worth looking at in this area is Julian Silverman, who wrote Shamanism and Schizophrenia. Silverman has done good work with schizophrenics for a long time. Basically, he started to see that they were shamans who didn’t have a teacher and had lost their way. He set up a place in San Francisco called "Diabysis” for schizophrenics to hang out and start finding their own way through their condition.

We had a guy with us once who had an exquisite nature-sensitivity. He was a second-year medical student. He was going to come up and spend quite a lot of time at the centre ... He was planning to spend time in residence at the Centre for Human Transformation and I know he would have opened and opened, but he returned to the city and was unable to cope with the level of things that he could pick up. He started doing crazy things, and was labelled a schizophrenic with a disability. We have seen him briefly since then, and he gave us some of his poems, one of which was total genius. That guy was touching depths of insight in himself that were amazingly profound for a kid of twenty-four. But he is locked into certain ways of not knowing. His energy starts to come up and he feels disorganised, so he takes a tablet that pushes his anxiety down. His anxiety may well be his birth trauma that needs to get cleared, but he never deals with it because he is on medication.

If people start going through birth trauma when folks around them are not sensitive to what is happening, everyone thinks they are going nuts. A person might start moaning, "Oh, my head”, and if someone comes to help, the response might be, "Don’t come near me! You’re going to hurt me! You’re going to kill me!”. It could be that they think it’s the forceps coming to get them again or whatever. To be able to help you need an expanded view of it and some real understanding of the different levels that consciousness operates on. Consciousness can go anywhere from the microcellular level and reading out the genetic imprint, out into the furthest realms of the constellations of the universe … and anywhere in between. Consciousness can also go somewhere and get stuck.

We once worked with an eighty-year-old man with Alzheimer’s. We worked using special sounds that reprogram cellular information. At the end of the first session, I played some whale sounds. When he heard these sounds he said, "Oh, the spirits, they’re calling me, they’re calling me”. My instant reaction was, "Got him! I know where he is. His consciousness is out of his body, right out in the realm of the spirit”. Once you know where they are, you can bring them back in, but if you don’t know where they are, if you don’t even know that there are realms where people’s consciousness can go and where it can get stuck, you can’t get them back.

C: It sounds like you need a map!

Dar: You must have a good map, and it must be multidimensional. It’s no good having a map that just shows you the terrain. You need one that shows you the vegetation, the minerals, the water supplies, the weather, the rainfall. You need as many maps as you can get, and they don’t all have to be coherent. You just use the map that seems to suit. Your intuition or feeling tells you which map to use. We teach people to be intuitive in our bodywork course. The first intuition that people get is usually a mental intuition. When it arises we say, "Don’t do that one”. The next one they get will often be an emotional intuition, and when we tell them not to do that one, they start to get very edgy, because they have then started to push down into themselves about as far as they normally go. We wait for the next one that’s organic, that is, it comes from the organism as a deep knowing — that’s the one to do. Until people actually touch that level of having the whole nervous system as the radar and feeling the input coming and saying, "Yeah, got it, this is the one”, then you can’t just say, "Trust your intuition”, because the first thing they do is trust their mental preference or a mental judgment that is disguised as intuition. This sort of training in which you cut away at limited responses is quite an art. You have to have gone through the process yourself to be able to recognise that they are coming from a level that is no longer appropriate, and then they have to have enough trust in your judgment as teacher to keep saying, "OK, I’ll let go of that one”.

Eve: Can the knowing that you talk of come from clairvoyant-type dreams?

Dar: I decided a while back that working with dreams was a bit boring, because what happens is that you actually have to interpret the symbology of the unconscious and I would rather go straight into the unconscious and get it in full technicolour. So don’t pay much attention to dreams because I have found that if I go deep enough into trance, I can actually observe the workings of my unconscious in a way that is not disguised by symbolism. It only has to disguise itself into symbolism when the conscious mind isn’t open to getting the direct access. If you can go down deep enough in there, you’ll see constellations of psychic forces working and coming together. I decided that was the way to get the understanding, not to wait until it came, veiled with symbology that I then had to interpret. I only take notice of dreams if they really impinge on me. The way my unconscious organises that for me is that it wakes me up right when the memory of the dream is still there, and I know I need to take notice of it. So, I don’t know about clairvoyant dreams because I don’t focus on dreams.

E: I’m just a bit confused because an the one hand you talked about a simple openness, or the ability to surrender, and on the other hand you talked about all the different maps we need. One way is quite a mapless, traditionless path and in the other way you are taking from lots of different traditions. I’m not quite finding them connected.

Dar: I’ll tell you a story about a friend of mine who has been doing a lot of work with the Pitjantjatjara people. He’s a white man, but they are really pushing him towards becoming a medicine man. They tell him dreaming stories and take him out bush. He has told me of times when three or four elders have taken him out into the desert, and they will say something like, "Cook us a kangaroo, will ya?” He said, "You know, I was there thinking ‘God, here it is, 40¼C heat. They could do it, but I’m the youngest, so they think I have to do it ... moan, moan, moan’, and then I suddenly realised, here I was, a thirty-three-year-old Australian, out in the desert with four medicine men — something that a lot of people would give their right arm for, so I threw the kangaroo on the fire and it was great!”. Still, some of the things that happened were troubling him, and he said, "I want to talk to you about things. I don’t know if I’m going crazy or whatever”, and he started telling me about many seemingly strange experiences. He had been learning in the Pitjantjatjara tradition, and it was only because he was prepared to surrender that he had these experiences. Through my own work with my own consciousness I was able to reassure him that all these events that were happening to him were experiences that consciousness can have. The overarching map is found through the question, "What is the nature of consciousness?”, or "What can consciousness have as an experience?”. The nature of consciousness is that consciousness is everything, and the nature of what it can experience is that it can experience all. Full stop.

Of course, if we want we can break that down. If you want to see the way in which that has been beautifully done, look at Stan Grof’s Observations of the Human Unconscious. He maps the macrolevel, the microlevel, the personal, the collective unconscious, all those sorts of things. That sort of map doesn’t come from a tradition, it comes from the nature of consciousness itself. You can get it in American Indian tradition, you can get it in Buddhist tradition, in many ways. There is a point where people literally burn up toxins in the DNA. In Buddhist tradition it is called burning up your karma. They don’t know that it is coming out of the DNA, but they know that it’s karmic and that you literally burn it up. So, if you know that that is in the Buddhist tradition, when someone says to you, "I’m on fire. I’ve been on fire for two or three days! I’m freaking out!”, you can say, "Listen, you are burning up your karma, part of the Buddhist path! That’s terrific, keep going, you are doing a good job. You just have to keep breathing, don’t panic, drink lots of water ...” If you are feeling inspired you might add, "Maybe there’s a homeopathic medicine that’s good for it, go and check out your local homeopathic shaman”. By the way, there are a couple of homeopaths around who are great shamans! They don’t put signs up like, "Shaman available for consultation”. Their signs just say, "Homeopath”. I was talking to a woman the other day about my own journey and the seven-year sequences that I have experienced in those times. She said, "That’s interesting. After the first seven years of homeopathic practice the remedies started to talk to me”. She would go to a remedy and it would talk. She would experience in her own being the resonance of the communication between the information in the bottle and the information inside her, and she would gain information about whether this was appropriate for a client. Then over the next seven years, another capacity developed.

Being traditionless simply means you are formed in no tradition. Let me return to the notion of maps. If you don’t have maps, when you get lost, you are in severe trouble. A map can either show you a way out, or it can let you know that what you are confronting is serious. Maps are very important. If you have a map of a city area it doesn’t show you everything that is there, it just shows you how to get through all these one-way streets. That might be all that you are interested in — "How do I get out of this space?” Now this is what a tradition does. It gives you a way of getting into and out of certain spaces, but it also confines you to those spaces and its’ own way of navigating those spaces. What I am suggesting is that there is a simpler way, where you go direct to the source and you get it! Getting to the source is relatively simple, but getting out can be tricky, so why not use whatever is available that best fits the situation. When you want to get out, you need as many maps as you can get! I’ll take them from Witcholis (?) I’ll take them from the Aztecs, I’ll take them from the Aborigines, I’ll take them from a psychiatrist who seems switched on and understands the nature of consciousness. I’ll take them from Osho. I’ll get as many as I can fit in my rucksack! Are you still feeling that there is some contradiction in my approach?

E: It’s not there anymore.

Dar: Great, so we’ve got it out! Basically, all I want to say is that there is wonderful pathway that lets you go straight to the source for yourself. If you don’t know how to go straight to the source and you want a teacher, I’m available. That’s simple, isn’t it? To test me out all you have to do is ask your questions, and I’ll give you answers. I’ll tell you if I don’t know, I’ll tell you if I can’t do it, I’ll tell you if I’m not familiar with the space. If you want to know how to get into a space that I am familiar with, I’ll tell you how to get there. If you feel like you are trapped, I’ll tell you what you need to do in order to get out, using my maps. Its’ not a total guarantee, but it usually works. Often when people come to see me, I can tell where they are — it’s written all over them. My wife is one of the first people I met who could do this. She would see someone in the street and say, "Ah, attempted abortion”. When I said, "That’s amazing, how can you tell that?”, she would reply with something like, "Oh, you can tell by the way they hold their face and the energy around parts of their body”. At first I was sceptical, but I have gained much respect for her knowing after seeing her in operation for years. She just picks it instantly. she is an example of a person who has the capacity to keep learning and expanding, refining her nervous system, feeling her own responses and then making the correlations.

Some people get so good at this sort of sensitivity that they can walk through an area and feel the water. My Dad is a water-diviner. When I was a kid he would walk along with a stick, sensing the water. I always wondered how he did it. When I took the stick and tried it myself nothing happened. I said to him, "It doesn’t work, you can’t do it, you’re just bending the stick down.” He said to me, "Hold the stick and walk with me”. He put his hands over mine and I felt electricity go through me and the stick move in my hands. "That’s where the water is”, he told me. I had never felt anything like that before. It completely puzzled me, but I knew it was real. It was his specialty. He used to work with farmers as a dairy supervisor. When anyone was deciding where to put a pump or a bore in, he’d just pick up a stick and say, "Oh, I reckon you oughta put it there”. He was good.

Now, the rational mind typically says, "There’s no way people can do that, and I’m going to prove that they can’t”. It could say, "We have got 5 billion nervous systems on the planet, and some of them are going to be able to do some very interesting things. Let’s see what this nervous system can do”. There are people who run their hands over maps and say, "I reckon there is oil down there” Drilling companies take this sort of person up in an aeroplane and fly him backwards and forwards. The guy just scans his nervous system, and when he gets that certain, sudden feeling, he says, "Drill down there”. There are recorded instances of people with this sort of ability who are very good. They are just different sorts of shamans! Fred: Is it obvious when you reach your source of knowledge?

Dar: When I talk of going straight to the source, I am talking of nature as the source. Is it obvious when you get to the nature? If you are talking about the wind and suddenly the wind blows, is it obvious that you’ve been talking about the wind and the wind is now blowing? Of course. So when I was say that you can go straight to the source, I am saying that nature is the source. That’s the part that is simple. I don’t mean that it is simple to go straight to the source and immediately get the full inner knowing that is there. I’m just talking about the steps along the way. I suspect that a lot of people think that to be a shaman you have act a bit strangely or wear funny clothes. Another notion about being a shaman is that you can only be one if you can tell when a shaman is around. It’s not a precondition. It is true that when you are a shaman and another shaman walks in the room, you feel it. The feeling can be warm and empathic or prickly and challenging. Sometimes there is only room for one shaman on the block! If another one comes in it can sometimes be a case of, "One of us has to move, and this is my territory”.

F: But isn’t there a shaman within all of us? Dar: Absolutely. That is what I have been saying. Maybe I have not used those exact words, but you are right — and there is one in you too … And you know it. Gabby: Where do you work?

Dar: I’m director, with Rachana, of the Centre for Human Transformation. It is about 70 km northeast of Melbourne. We are surrounded on three sides by national park. It is a place with very high resonant frequency, which means that often when people come, simply by being there, they start to change — things starts to move things in them. If people understand that, and they want the change and the release, they say, "Hey, this place is fantastic!”. If people actually hold against it, they say, "Oh no, I’m not going up there again, there’s something weird!”. What is weird is what moves in them.

We run many courses that help people open to other spaces inside themselves. Part of that includes picnics and games and all sorts of fun … There are a few giggles around the room from some people who are currently doing courses there, and who seem to agree with me.

>> Chapter 2