manitou

The more we mention shamanism on this forum, the more confused it gets. I take a share of the blame because I have used that word loosely in the past, I'll be more careful in the future. Seems like there are two types of shamans we're talking about. There's the traditional shaman we all think of - the medicine man, the healer, the mystic. But the word 'shaman' is also used liberally in the New Age vocabulary, the Toltec tradition of Castaneda. The new age shamans are people who have developed the third eye and apply the various uses, whether for healing, understanding, vision, or triangulating. I apologize for any confusion in the past - in this thread there is certainly a difference between the New Age shamans and the historical shamanic cultures mentioned in an earlier post. Apples and oranges in a sense, but the New Age 'shaman' is capable of getting to the same genuine place of uncarved wood, just different methods. The New Age shaman gets to his place of genuineness by recapitulating his life; seeking the pivotal points of his life and either thanking or apologizing. He goes deep within himself to root out undesirable habits; in essence, he attempts impeccability in all he does and Thinks - he gets to the point where he can control his internal dialogue (no different than meditation - except he tries to be impeccable about keeping the internal dialogue and all judgment out of his head at all). It's all the same thing as what we talk about here, only a different vocabulary. When the shaman (or the Sage) can get down to the bottom of his character to his heart and the pure essence, this is when the magic starts to occur. The Sage would call it wu-wei. Castaneda would call it the Power of Silence. Either way, it works.

It appears from where I sit that you are separating yourself from your internal dialogue. It is frustrating you, it is critical, it is annoying. This was the very thing castaneda spent years having to do - shut the critic up. This is a good thing, a very good thing. From my perspective it appears that you are just short of realizing Who you are. Please consider the possibility that there is a god and we're it. When we get through our personality and inner dialogue we get down to the original Idea of manifestation of love. We can tap in willingly, and when we do, the channels open. I'm not referring to an electrical channel, I'm speaking of a vocal channel that will appear through your words when it needs to. There are several here who can tap the source and channel the thoughts. It sits at the base of our personality, before our personality was formed by reaction.

Exactly. The uncarved wood.

To Do or not To Do. That is the Question.

Yes - it does have to be done without expectations. The highest result will arrive, we don't know what it will be. that much can be trusted. When an action is required to be taken by you in the dynamic, always do it from the highest place you can, the highest action. That way you will know you are not interfering with the action of the Tao. Sort of an agape love or compassion look on everything, but without attachment. Your understanding is very deep.

A perfect point, to my eye. It does seem like everybody got here from somewhere else, is my thinking. A Buddhist walks a very long Buddhist path to possess what they attain. An old traditional shaman would have had to walk a very long shamanic path to possess what they attained. The same could be said for the Masons, I guess. The Masonic path is long to the 33rd degree. But it just seems like most of us here 'found' the Tao after years of searching in other directions. We are all here at the same point in time, but this is more like a nexus than an actual path. The only thing that binds us is the behavior of the Sage. But I think I see the answer to my own question. I'm guessing many got to this philosophy through the martial arts and related disciplines? And certainly through traditional Chinese medicine or any of the Eastern practices. I guess I just like the catch-all nature of this place.

Thanks for the link to that wonderful video, Everything. I watched about half of it. What a fabulously understandable film that is, the graphics are great - did you throw that together?? I don't know how the film ends, and I don't know what it infers, if anything. But I would like to share an 'Aha!' I had today while driving home from Giant Eagle with groceries. Everything, we are Everything. This means we are God, or however we want to look at it - the supreme intelligence that underlies everything. The tumbler that fell into place for me today was that the perfect analogy is the brain itself. The fact that so much of it is subconscious, so little of it is conscious. (Isn't it 80/20, or something like that?) The flash I got this afternoon was that the conscious part of our brain runs us, individually (as does some of the unconscious, obviously). But the rest of it, the unconscious part, runs the world. My subconscious is communal with your subconscious, and ad infinitum. We manifest all of this from the inside out; before people were here, the evolving Brain manifested through apes, before that lizards, before that fish, before that worms, all the way back to stardust. The molten center of the earth - that piece of the sun that we inhabit. The piece of sun is inside all of us; we come from stardust. It really is all One, and we are apparently the Manifester, at least in this dimension.

I was speaking as to the self-realization stuff. From my perspective there remains a tumbler yet to fall in the back of your mind. Beyond that, I can't explain... That movie sounds like a nice analogy for tearing off the mask of fear all across the board.

Only simple and quiet words will ripen of themselves. Simple and quiet words come from the place of stillness within us, the I Am, the Be Here Now. It is the place that self-realization takes us to, the place from which the Sage is able to truthfully say the words that will ripen...come to pass. Because he is Here Now, he is not confused by internal dialogue of any type, positive or negative. His vision is clear for the past or triangulation of the future. For a whirlwind does not last a whole morning, Nor does a sudden shower last a whole day... This section seems to affirm the fact that the only thing we can trust is Change. It may be saying that it is pointless for us to run around in our rash endeavors trying to make conditions better and better for ourselves. There really is no new condition that will change the Here Now, your awareness level, or your happiness level. A new condition may distract us from an unhappiness level for a while, but never permanently. Hence, he who cultivates the Tao is one with the Tao; He who practices Virtue is one with Virtue; We have a current thread about So What if we're Not Good, or something like that. It appears that this may be indicating that being one with Te (virtue) is part of being one with Tao. Virtue does count for something; my view is that virtue is meant in the sense of lack of impediments within our character that distort our view of what's real. LIN YUTANG translation (last two lines) He who is identified with abandonment - Abandonment is also glad to welcome him. He who has not enough faith Will not be able to command faith from others This reminds me of the straw dogs analogy the TTC uses elsewhere. The rain falling equally on all, etc. I'm not crazy about Lin Yutang's usage of the word 'faith' in his last stanza; sounds too religious to me. Faith 'in' something. I actually think that smacks of duality, but maybe that's just me.

If you think you are a cluster of functions, you haven't gotten quite down to it yet.

I love your use of the word hybrid - I'd be interested to know if anybody on this site at all is a pure Taoist. I don't even know what one is. All I know is I fell in love with the Tao and did an almost daily meditation on a chapter at a time (various translations) over a 20 year period. As for leaving Christianity, as the Lerner said, it seems like many of us here have outgrown the traditional Christian mindset of our youth. It is hard to walk away from Jesus Loves Me This I Know, because the mindset is so comforting. It truly is a feat to merge all this stuff, and in some ways I really don't think we can totally turn our backs on something that was imprinted on us at young ages. But it does merge, or at least in my experience it does. I found myself unexpectedly on a shamanic path, not of my own doing, some years ago. It occurred to me one day that this is easily merged with my old Christian roots if I look at Jesus as a shaman. Hey. He manipulates energy just like a master, if the incidents in the bible are to be believed at all. Walking on water? Calming the winds? Turning water to wine? Healings? The man was a shaman, pure and simple! He was one of us, only he did it really well. Assuming a little further that he was a true person who underwent the trial, got crucified, etc., it seems to me that the man was practicing wu-wei at the end of his life! (Not that it worked out all that well for him...) He spent the night in the Garden of Gethsemane, where perhaps he was able to 'see' the plan as it would unfold. He knew what was coming. He prophezied what was coming when he told his disciples that they would betray him. When he was arrested and went to trial, they tried to get him to say or do something in his defense; he chose non-action. They practically pleaded with him to defend himself, he still chose non-action. Wu-wei. He let it play out, knowing full well what was going to happen. I think it's food for thought, at least...

What a nice way to express this. Not interfering is a great way to say it. When I am in wu-wei mode on something in particular (maybe it's a relationship with someone that's gotten bumpy), I find there are a couple things that are pre-cursors for the wu-wei effect of magically seeing that things happen on their own: - First, decide to do nothing to interfere with a dynamic already in motion. - Respond to each and every stimulus in this situation with a loving attitude, or at least the closest you can come to this. Everything from this point on must be done with kindness. Try no judgment of any kind. - Eliminate all negative expectations of another's behavior, and expect the very best result to come around in its own time. then just watch and wait. It will come around of its own volition. The problem with the wu-wei process is that it requires a certain impeccability with one's own character for it to work. It's really hard to explain - Don Juan Mateus demonstrated it best to Carlos Casteneda when he had him recapitulate his life, looking for the pivotal moments in his life where he either owed someone a thanks or an apology. This took Carlos years, but it cleared him out sufficiently (although some would argue that he got strange later) for the wu-wei process. The internal vision must be clear for this process to happen. The Sage of the Tao has certainly mastered the impeccability of spirit, by the description of the Sage's behavior you can see that. What the Tao doesn't seem to tell us is how the Sage got to that point. apparently we're on our own to find this spiritual cleansing device. The comments on following your heart are interesting. This meant one thing to me as a young woman, another thing to me as an old woman. As a young woman it merely meant to fall in 'love' every time I turned around. Now it means that if I have a burning desire in my heart to do something, because I am confident enough that I am somewhat aligned with the Tao at any given moment, I do it. I figure if it's burning that bad it must need to be expressed for some reason. This does combine with wu-wei or not-doing; my belief is that a burning desire is an indication to act, but Only if our own house is in order, in an emotional way.

To put the whole sex/marriage/guilt/lust thing into perspective, it's fun to look to the opposite. We happen to live in an uptight culture that puts a heck of a lot of weight on a stupid piece of paper. If we were all just walking around naked, newly sprung from the Tao or something, we would have no thoughts at all about sex, nakedness, or shame. We would be as an animal, that inner layer of our onion skin. But in our supreme sophistication, we have created the self doubt as human animals that we know how to act at all! You're stifling yourselves so much it sounds like a couple of you are going to explode soon. We are sexual beings. Kundalini energy is sexual energy. Let's try Honesty if we insist on living in monogamous relationships. Maybe monogamous relationships are not what the human is in its natural state. If we are in a long term victim of a relationship, it's because we are manifesting victimhood for some reason, and the relationship is merely the vehicle for reinforcement of that old familiar feeling. We need to change That Old Familiar Feeling, whatever it is. The clue is in the extended feelings we felt as youngsters in the presence of our formative people. Until we change that need to continually reproduce the feeling because it's familiar and safe (even if it's not), we'll keep manifesting that which gets to replay the Old Familiar Feeling again, over and over. I have a history of dating and marrying men that scared the bejeezus out of me at some level. That was my comfort level when I was a kid; that was the way I felt every day when dad came home from work. The underlying thread with every man I've ever "loved" was an undercurrent of absolute terror. It takes a lifetime to work out of things like this; but luckily we can change or modify the behavior once we see the problem. And we don't have to keep passing this stuff on to our kids

And the further down the line the rituals go, the further from source the participants would find themselves. Rituals rob 'religion' (or crystallized habits) of the Here and Nowness of where Is Is, as Bill would say. It raises to an art form the delusion of Time, for example. Here and Now is constant within us, and yet crystallizing beliefs at any moment in time merely serves to rob us of real time awareness from that moment on.

Well, this worked out well. Ramacharaka tells us to laugh at the beast in the above passage...

Seven - beautiful sentiment. To see the incredible joy in these people...and the length of time that the cheering goes on! I have never seen such an outpouring of combined happiness. I am thrilled for these people. I feel guilty that I didn't know just how bad the repression has been - but to see the image of the men on horses and camels with whips was like looking at something from the medieval times; that particular scene shocked my soul, for some reason... that people in this day and age must be subjected to such things. The fact that the whole (free) world can experience this catharsis in real time cannot be understated. The human spirit will win out, if only the means for communication are there. Perhaps one day the entire world will be peering over the rim at North Korea.

I say that because of my direct experience, not anything that I've read about anyone tracing anything before. I claim no anthropological or historical context... The commonality is in the concept of wu-wei and the Castaneda/Toltec concept of the power of silence. They both involve not-doing to achieve, plus acting from a point of impeccability, whether it be the Sage or the warrior. This I only know from direct experience; other than that, I can't prove it. I think the indigenous, wherever they lived, were given the instinctual instruction manual for how to manipulate energy. I think we have devolved over time, in this particular aspect. Doesn't matter whether the medicine men were in China, Russia, Australia, or anywhere. The commonalities are just too, well, common.

I do apologize for the use of the phrase 'character defect'. That was my usage, not the usage of the author. I seem to have that phrase ingraned in my mind because of my recovery work years ago - sorry! Actually, I sort of love the imagery of the animals as the brute instincts. For ones really advanced, I'm sure this level of analogy is laughable. But I've definitely noticed that there may be one or two within our ranks that haven't given self-examination a second thought. It's so very important, regardless of the semantics. It's where the feet must be planted for the inner journey, if one hasn't taken it yet.

I'm going to sound so arrogant here that I'm reluctant to say this, but I will. At a certain point the beliefs change instead to a Knowing, one that is self evident and the heart resounds with the knowledge that this is the Truth. It is my experience that the Truths are common to all, and it's within the realm of each to find it. The journey is an inward one, not an outward one. I really don't know much about the Taoist way, other than loving the Tao Te Ching. I don't know if there is a type of Taoist structure that provides a pathway to Sageness - the inner path. The Sage is certainly a self-realized fellow, but I'm wondering if there is an instruction manual for how to get there. I'm suspecting that in Buddhism, for example, the meditations on non-attachment, if applied to everything in one's life, would ultimately lead to a foray through one's personality problems, if one were persistent. How persistent would you have to be? Pretty persistent, I'm thinking. I'm guessing it's quite possible to be a knowledgeable Buddhist who has walked this path, but who ends up with head knowledge only, because he hasn't purged his innards. My guess is that Buddhists, like the rest of us, have different levels of self-honesty. Some deep, some shallow. Or even look at Christianity, my alma mater. Maybe things are a lot different today in churches - I haven't been in one in 30 years - but I don't recall any sort of awareness classes or even personality inventory classes that helped anybody cut through all the dross that mucks up our insides. I am thrilled that I am a recovering alkie, because it provided a vehicle for the above process (12 steps). It merely takes you IN. I wouldn't have any depth of understanding about any of this were it not for the inner work. It wouldn't have mattered how many times I studied the Tao. Does anybody know if there is a Taoist answer to the going-in process?

I see what you're saying here Otis - as to the mastery thing. Yes, perhaps it could have been said better. They are never mastered, they continue to arise. Less often perhaps, but they do reappear. But the author's main point about being able to see the beast because you are becoming somehow separate from it is a spiritual dynamic that I continue to experience as my own character develops over the years. When the beast has full sway over us (when we are acting out a character defect, for lack of a better word - I see what you're saying there too) our vision is distorted by the presence of the unwanted mass of repeatedly acquired energy manifestations, for simplicity's sake can we please call it a character defect? Like....I don't know....too much ego, too much knowledge, too little tolerance, not enough humility. Whatever the defect or unwanted personality manifestation is, until it is seen, understood, and "mastered", we will never have pure clarity (to me, 'mastered' in this sense merely means that when I see this particular animal coming up in me, I can choose to put it back in its den, because I now have the control).

There's no doubt at all we're spiritual kin, Songs. Kissing kuzzins, at least! We could switch avatars on any given day and no one would notice, lol. I'm going to look up The Way of Inner Vigilance. My response to that book, with the same intro that you gave, is The Impersonal Life, by Anonymous. The sort of short book about the I Am consciousness that needs to be read at least 20 times to see all the facets. Whoever said 'The unexamined life isn't worth living' knew what he was talking about.

Hi 3bob - can't quite figure out what you're saying here. When you allude to mastery, are you speaking of mastery over the character defects? When you say divorce, are you referring to elimination of the character defects?

Beautifully stated. The magic of the Tao is that things really do happen of their own volition when we keep our input out of the dynamic; and then, when we do have to act, it is done with the minimum amount of impact and the maximum amount of love, as we understand it.