Ulises

I resonate deeply with these words from a Zen master: "My heart burns like fire but my eyes are as cold as dead ashes" and from this great mystic, St. John of the Cross: "no other guide or light/But the one burning in my heart bright"

Thank you! I'm just a shaker in the making...but this I feel. Each day, I feel before a crossroads: mastery/mistery, separation/union, poverty/poetry....Is it my heart owner of my mind, or my mind owner of my heart...? Or, as Keeney says: "We sacrificed our link-to-the-universe-heart for a delusional body-less-head-trip that has imprisoned us far too long." A call for wild ecstatic experience "Shaking medicine is the trembling, shaking, and quaking associated with the experience of ecstatic bliss. This major transformative experience is an entry into the numinous – the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Arguably all religions and pre-religions initially felt this ecstasy and regarded it as an awakening of the original mysteries, the most extraordinary experiences possible for a human being. The emergence of social institutions to house ecstatic rapture - whether as temples, ashrams, churches, synagogues, medicine societies, shaman guilds, or pagan societies - resulted in the quieting of the originating experience in exchange for uniform narrative understanding and maintenance of social hierarchy. The ecstatic experience was sacrificed for normalized belief and group conformity. This was true for shamanism as well as the major world religions. In the sociology of religion this social process is called the “routinization” of the founding charismatic experience. Wild ecstatic experience is replaced by standardized ritual that overturns spontaneous play and improvisation. Guided imagery, clichéd patter, and loyalty oaths overtake raw unadulterated creativity, free expression, and heightened emotions. The shaking traditions propose that we most deeply thirst and hunger for an ongoing immersion in ecstatic experience. The source of this shaking bliss is what the Ju/'hoan Bushmen call n/om. They wisely never give a totalizing definition of n/om, but respectfully allude to it being a mystery responsible for bringing forth life’s vitality and acknowledge that its root is open-ended limitless love. When you have n/om, it makes you shake with ecstatic delight. For members of textually constrained cultures, it is often difficult to loosen the cognitive habits and tightly constructed belief systems that inhibit fully awakened feelings. We rarely are encouraged to stand under the sky with raw and naked presence, available to be hit by ecstatic lightning. Even most shamanic cultures, old and new, became “tamed” and conducted in a calm routinized manner. The shamans of old were wild, unpredictable, and appeared out of control. No one, including the shaman, knew what would happen in a ceremony. The so-called “spirits” took over. The same is true of early religious ceremonies. Then Buddhism chased out the Bon shamans, Christians went after their ecstatics, and shamans became reduced to hereditary entitlement or homogenized, standardized training. Shaking medicine is a call for wild ecstatic experience. It is shamanism, spirituality, religion, and transformational performance in its fully improvised elemental form. Ecstatic shaking radically encourages the practice of wild shamanism, wild religion, wild spirituality, and wild transformative performance. This does not refer to trivial, irresponsible, or unethical behavior. The deep wild involves hyper-complexity, the greater mind of nature that holds our psyche as a small part of a more encompassing interdependent though always-changing network of relations. We can choose to move toward the unpredictable, unknowable, and untamable wild. The sacred lives in the wild. The sacred constitutes the wild. The problem began when someone said that words and meanings must explain, domesticate, and cover up wild experience. Within this hegemony of words, we demystified whatever was mysterious and walked away from the wild in order to become semantically tamed. We sacrificed our link-to-the-universe-heart for a delusional body-less-head-trip that has imprisoned us far too long. Consider a re-entry into the wild. Become a wild shaman, a wild pagan, a wild Christian, a wild Buddhist, a wild Jew, a wild Taoist, a wild agnostic, a wild artist, a wild performer, a wild whatever you want to call it because the name is less important than the experience of being wild in this natural though always uncommon way of giving priority to mystery over mastery. In these challenging and complex postmodern times, shaking medicine is arguably best held by the aesthetic freedom granted by the performing arts. Some explorers of the human spirit are walking away from overly rigid institutions, explanatory frameworks, and reductionist training (whether spiritual, therapeutic, or educational) in order to invent a shape-shifting stage and ceremonial ground for the liberating performance of wild ecstatic transformation."

Greetings, just to say that this forum look very interesting... Zhang Zuang, 8 Brocades, Shaking Medicine/Seiki Jutsu, Inner Smile/6 Healing Sounds..plus shamanic practice. These are my toys...; )

Yeah it's a shame...always the same sad story: Taoists abusing mystic knowledge for energy vampirism, Christians burning gnostics, Muslims killing sufis,Buddhists of different sects killing each other in battles...and so forth and so on.. I like what the N/om Shaman Brad Keeney says ( as he was told in the Kalahari, by the wisest mystics there): "The only difference between a shaman and a sorcerer is self-control...or lack of it". He also tells that it comes a phase in the spiritual growth, where you are before a fork and you have to choose: the path of power, or the path of love warm regards Uli

Deep Awake: Big Mind/Big Heart http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1v6yHMfCwQ&feature=player_embedded

Big Heart:YES!!! "Eternity is in love with time productions" William Blake

Once again, I want to introduce a text that kept me fascinated (and confirmed my own vague, but strong, intuition), articulating a view that I see unfolding recently in more and more spiritual teachers... I'm not looking for controversy, just the desire to stimulate free thinking/feeling/intuition... ; ) These are samples only; the complete text: link at the bottom "Indeed, the crux of the problem lies here: for thousands of years sages, saints, yogis, philosophers, and men and women of wisdom have described the purpose of birth on this planet as simply a passage to a reality beyond not only our planetary home but entirely out of the cosmic dimension. The course our civilisation has taken can therefore be directly connected to this factor. The influence a vision of this nature has wielded has been devastating--for it has carried the planet and its multiple societies to the brink of total annihilation. We may call this development a conspiracy of the spiritual elite which gradually influenced the whole tenure of life on Earth, spreading its tentacles of influence through religions and philosophical systems during the past several thousands of years, but now through scientific, political and socioeconomic systems. The latter can invariably trace their inspiration to some spiritual or philosophical source. For even our most material ideologies that apparently deny the higher realities of existence and focus entirely on the physical dimension, have done so by virtue of a reaction to those more metaphysical postulations. Many profound thinkers throughout the world have perceived that it is only a spiritual renaissance that can save our civilisation. Only if we attain a different consciousness, rooted in some higher seeing, can there be any real change, they feel. This may well be true, but what is not appreciated is that the present chaos is a direct outcome of our past mystic and spiritual perceptions. There are two aspects to this development. One is the course spirituality took in the West, which founded itself on a certain form of negation of life; and the other is the Eastern orientation, in its own way equally a denial of life. In the West, out of denial and suffering there developed a certain strength. Believers had been encouraged to accept suffering as a way to God and the means to attain a heaven beyond this life. Indeed, life on Earth came to be considered a prison and the fall of the soul. Salvation, through negation of life, could only come in a beyond, namely in some transcendent Heaven. The final outcome of this negation has been the materialistic philosophies and political ideologies which the West has given to the world. Presently there is a clear dichotomy on the planet, whereby western civilisation has aligned itself clearly and decisively with what has come to be called in spiritual circles the 'materialistic consciousness'. However, in the East we find a similar denial of life, also as an outcome of its spirituality. Interestingly, this negation took hold of the consciousness of eastern wisemen at about the same time that a similar denial caught hold of their western counterparts. About the end of the first millennium Indian spirituality veered fully toward a quest for otherworldliness: the philosophies of the day made the conclusive proclamation that all creation in matter was an 'illusion', a deceptive veil that seekers of Truth must tear through in order to reach the immutable, immobile, transcosmic and static Brahman; or a Self devoid of all relations in this material web of time and space.(...) For this is the self-evident purpose of evolution. It is to bring forth evermore perfect forms in order to create more complex and sophisticated networks or patterns of structured energy that can express more harmonious states of consciousness-being. Our present stage is merely one step along the evolutionary way, albeit a decisive one. We have reached a major evolutionary turning point. There is a choice: Before us lies a totally new way of life and by consequence a new world order. For this, a finer, more refined instrument has to manifest. And this is the major focus of the present crisis. We are in the process of evolving a human instrument capable of sustaining the greater cosmic forces at play through life and matter on this planet, without experiencing destructive collapse of energies or succumbing to the old ways of escape through outdated solutions and methods the world has known until now.(...)" Patrizia Norelli-Bachellet http://www.aeongroup.com/emercos.htm

Beginners By Denise Levertov (1923 - 1997) Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla "From too much love of living, Hope and desire set free, Even the weariest river Winds somewhere to the sea--" But we have only begun To love the earth. We have only begun To imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope? -- so much is in bud. How can desire fail? -- we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, only begun to envision how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors. Surely our river cannot already be hastening into the sea of nonbeing? Surely it cannot drag, in the silt, all that is innocent? Not yet, not yet-- there is too much broken that must be mended, too much hurt we have done to each other that cannot yet be forgiven. We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle. So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture, so much is in bud.

...and another approach - experiential - same resonance: "Robert: It would be helpful, to start off, if you could tell me a little about how you came to focus on exploring the domain of consciousness. David: Like many children, I grew up having numerous psychic experiences. My earliest memories are of being aware of presences and qualities in my environment that other people didn't seem to be aware of. There was nothing in that awareness that said anything about connectedness; it was simply an extension of ordinary physical awareness. Then, when I was seven years old, something else happened. The domain of consciousness itself broke through and I had a classical mystical experience of dissolving into an oceanic feeling of oneness and infinite connectedness. I became pure consciousness, which was limitless and, if I were to give it a quality, infinitely loving. It was a beingness of love. I had been riding in the car with my parents, looking out the back window, when this happened. All at once, I felt an energy rising within me as if I were a balloon and someone were inflating me. I found myself momentarily floating in the air outside and above the car, looking down upon myself and my parents, whom I could see quite clearly as if the roof of the car were nonexistent. Then I went through a series of rapidly changing stages of awareness and perception, which culminated in my entering the domain of pure consciousness. It felt like I was in that state for a long time, but when the process reversed itself and I came back to my body, I discovered that the car had hardly moved at all. So very little earthly time had passed. That experience not only left me with an experiential conviction of the interconnectedness - the oneness - of all things, but it also gave me tools for altering my consciousness so as to experience some of the other worlds that are not physical in nature. Robert: Could you say more about those other worlds? David: Perhaps a distinction would be helpful here. There is what you might call the domain of pure consciousness, what a mystic might call the state of oneness or of no-thing - consciousness without an object. Then there are the manifest worlds that unfold from this state, of which the physical world is one. Some of the other worlds, though, may seem by comparison to this physical one to be places of pure consciousness because we cannot recognize the kind of forms and conditions they manifest. The manifest worlds can lead to the domain of pure consciousness itself and vice versa. That is, by contemplating the nature of the physical world, I might find myself entering a state of pure consciousness, and from that state, I could find myself re-entering the physical world with a new perspective. This is generally what spiritual paths are all about, taking us from conditioned consciousness to pure consciousness and back again. Or, I might become aware of an "inner" world, one of the places other than the physical that also emerge from the primal domain of consciousness; such an experience could take me further into an awareness of that primal domain and also help me see that consciousness is not simply, as you say, an attribute of the physical. (...) As for what has come out of my explorations, one insight that stands out is the need to move away from a pyramidal or hierarchical view of creation and spirituality. That view usually puts our physical existence at the bottom and spiritual existence at the top. As a consequence, we are either overtly or implicitly encouraged to leave the Earth in some manner because it is less real and less important than the realms of consciousness and being that are found towards the top of the pyramid (with God, of course, being at the very top). Instead, I take a systemic view. There is pure consciousness on the one hand and the various manifestations of consciousness on the other, and they all interact with each other in co-creative ways. They are a lattice, a network, a pattern of creation, in which each entity or world has something unique and valuable to contribute. The contribution of my earthly life, therefore, is as important and as powerful in its way as the contribution of some cosmic archangel. My contribution may not have as wide an effect as an archangel's, but it is not less important because of that. Another way I think about this issue is to use the metaphor from quantum physics of the particle and the wave. Consciousness, the sacred, the mystical: these are wave-like. But I am a particle. Actually, I am a continuum between the fluid, wave state of pure consciousness on the one hand and my specific, particulate, physical identity on the other. Between those two extremes of being - the wave and the particle - is a very dynamic intermediate state, which has elements of both particle and wave to it, of being an identity and of being something much more cosmic or universal. It is these states that the shamanic and the Western magical traditions explore: the intermediate state between undifferentiated oneness and the specificity of our particular nature. These approaches help an individual go beyond ordinary consciousness, but they do not dissolve into a purely mystical union of oneness. Some differentiation is maintained; some boundaries are maintained, but they become highly permeable. These traditions look at what I would call the architecture or the patterning of consciousness as it interacts with itself to create the phenomena of the world. But these traditions also look at the ways in which consciousness creates patterns that can - like vessels - take on and embody deeper or more mystical states of being. (...) David Spangler http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC34/Spangler.htm By the way, Spangler just released a book containing a distillation of his experiences with the subtle worlds - 60 years of experience - : fascinating reading, a goldmine of insights...: http://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Worlds-Explorers-Field-Notes/dp/0936878266

Thank you, friends, a couple of youtubes in the same resonance... ; )

Sorry but I disagree... my intention is not to create controversy, just to offer other views, for a more complete picture.. Many living traditions work with entheogens integrated in their spiritual practice. Here is a "sober assessment of some of the ups and downs of integrating sacred medicines into a life of spiritual practice" from a serious practitioner of Vrajayana AND psychedelics: http://www.shiftinaction.com/discover/audios/chris_bache/renewing_the_psychedelic_conversation Here is a extract of the sessions with psychedelics (along a period of twenty years) whose result was one the most important books in the field od spirituality/transpersonal psychology in the last years: "Dark Night, Early Dawn", by Christopher Bache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3WBPGOGqQIUJ:www.kingsleydennis.com/Christopher%2520M.%2520Bache%2520-%2520Dark%2520Night I think there is a place for the wise use of entheogens in spiritual practice More food for thought here: http://www.maps.org/media/bulletin/special_edition_psychedelics_and_ecology/ http://www.maps.org/media/bulletin/special_edition_psychedelics_and_self_discovery/ http://www.maps.org/media/bulletin/the_chrysalis_stage/ http://www.maps.org/media/bulletin/rites_of_passage_kids_and_psychedelics/ http://www.maps.org/media/bulletin/sex_spirit_psychedelics_2002/

Hi Hardyg, About the pineal gland: http://www.serendipity.li/mcclay/pineal.html Lots of experiences here http://www.serendipity.li/trypt.html

3 great audio interviews about Shaking Medicine: http://www.podfeed.net/episode/EPISODE+259+-+The+Bushman+Way+of+Tracking+God/2764633 http://arewelistening.net/podcasts/BradfordKeeney_2010_9_28.mp3 http://www.futureprimitive.org/2008/05/shaking-up-bradford-keeney-phd/ ...and this one: "This connection with the life force is something that we've forgotten. It's become dormant. If you look at an ancient ritual and try to copy it, it may be rather silly. But if you see that underneath it there's a body that pulses and moves in rhythm to the life force, there we can pull away some basic principles, some ways of opening ourselves. Its form may be different to us; in fact, it's appropriate that it be different. Let me go on and say that every elder I've spoken with would agree that however the form of ritual, whatever you need to do to make access to spirit or to the life force, it's appropriate that you find it in your own way. It will come on its own accord ... like a musician has to eventually find his or her own style." http://www.lightworks.com/MonthlyAspectarian/1997/September/0997-08.html Spontaneous Movement: a fascinating article by a transpersonal psychologist with experience. Evolutionary biomysticism: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7642/is_200901/ai_n39234948/

Hi Dainin! Subud, Spontaneous Qi Gong, Seiki-Jutsu, Bushman N/om Shaking, Viking Seidr, Shakerism of St. Vincent, Native American "Shaking Tent"...endless living examples of the same human experience: opening to the Life Force/Holy Ghost/N/om/kundalini and being attuned by the Mystery... ; ) I began to experience it when I was adolescent and years later - in a really strong way - through a series of 15/20 Holotropic Breathwork Workshops. Here is two great interviews with Bradford Keeney - who had his first blissful spontaneous shaking when 17 years old; years later, he dreamt of the Bushmen (and the Bushmen dreamt of him) and was initiated in the Spontaneous Shaking by them. Now he is regarded by the Bushmen as a "Heart of the Spears" (a fully developed shaker/medicine man/shaman): http://www.podfeed.net/episode/EPISODE+259+-+The+Bushman+Way+of+Tracking+God/2764633 http://arewelistening.net/podcasts/BradfordKeeney_2010_9_28.mp3 ...and here a fascinating view - from a transpersonal psychologist with trans/personal experience: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7642/is_200901/ai_n39234948/ warm greetings Ulises