At some point in their shamanic training, if they are fortunate to have a good teacher and when they are ready, the initiate learns a shocking and disturbing truth. What begins to dawn on them is that, what they assumed was their concrete unassailable reality, is actually a dream and it is mostly an unpleasant dream at that. They discover they are actually functioning like a machine or robot, totally programmed and patterned by unconscious forces that feel inaccessible and impossible to change. They further discover they are slaves to their thoughts and that these thoughts are driven and influenced by a huge force that is much bigger and stronger than their own puny identity. They perceive this force as a massive mind that is like a collective ego, a false personality that has taken over this physical universe like an enormous parasite and is using it for its own ends, for drama, suffering, and conflict. With more insight and training the initiate also realizes that in the background, apparently hidden from view, is the eternal benevolent and loving presence of Spirit that is more powerful than anything else in the universe. The initiate notices that not only does the parasitical force appear to be in competition with the invisible power of Spirit camouflaged in the background, it wants to blot out any notion of what Spirit actually is because, if it doesn’t, it will cease to exist. This powerful pretender force likes to present itself as an attractive, powerful, indispensable alternative to Spirit and tries to appear as the real giver of knowledge, power, and sorcery skills. In shamanic language it has a very simple name, Self-Importance and in other systems it is called ego or false personality.

Now a shaman is someone who is trained to walk between the world’s, the various dream worlds and the world of every day reality. Again, with training, the shamanic apprentice learns that the everyday world is actually only another dreamscape, a world that masquerades as a fixed reality but in fact is malleable or shapeable, to some degree predictable, and deeply riddled with self-importance, drama, and of course conflict. The shaman in training learns to navigate the various worlds (lower, middle, and upper) and travel regularly between them and the everyday dreamscape. Not every shaman realizes that that there is a fundamental source of life behind all these realms and that among many names one could call Essence, Great Spirit, or the Great Eternal Now is where real power resides. Many shamans get caught in the various games of self importance and thus never realize freedom and develop only limited powers instead of maximum potential.

As a shaman proceeds in their training they get used to the fact that the world is not at all what they had thought. They no longer place such importance on the everyday problems and challenges that once occupied their total attention. More and more they are motivated to separate the wheat from the chaff and to pursue greater truth about the nature of reality and thus they discover greater and greater freedom from the hypnosis of the dreamscapes. Eventually all good shamans discover the secret portal to power contained within the heart and with this their greatest initiations begin. With continued study the shaman discovers that since the heart is the doorway to find Spirit or Essence within, the big force of Self Importance is hell bent on keeping it closed at all costs. Therefore it creates wars, conflicts, arguments, judgments, blame, shame, guilt, anger, jealousy, greed, envy and a host of negative forces that work very effectively to keep the heart closed. Anything that creates separation is in the interest of Self Importance because it is a divider, not a uniting force. The shaman sees that this dark force has co-opted all of life and created a tale told by an idiot, its machinations in all of the world religions, all politics, almost all relationships, economies, nation states, businesses, corporations, resource collecting, career creation, education, medicine, and so on. Anywhere a human turns they can see the complete dominance of this influence so it is easy to believe that this is simply the way reality is supposed to be. This realization often leads to deep discouragement, depression, despair, and even suicide. Yet none of these reactions lead to an escape, a solution, or freedom from the horror of what does not feel like a game.
   
    So the shaman in training presses on, paying ever more attention to the subtleties of Self Importance and becomes better and better at avoiding and erasing its snares. The shaman soon learns that this Self-Importance, also known as selfishness or self- consciousness, manifests itself in human miseries of all kinds and its greatest manifestation is through fear. The fears take the form of avoidance of abandonment and/ or the avoidance of and resistance to entrapment. These then form the seven dragons of self- destructiveness, greed, self-deprecation, arrogance, martyrdom, impatience, and stubbornness.

Eventually the initiate learns to take responsibility for self importance and all its projections in the world and finds that it is actually being promoted by a part of themselves, a giant shadow within, capable of creating a whole physical universe and projecting it outward to seem as if it were objective and real.  It then dawns on them that there is no objective reality out there, that they have truly been lost in a projected nightmare of their own making. Everything they ever thought or believed about being victimized, martyred, or at the effect of, they discover to be simply not true. It is all just a projected nightmare. All the time it has been a vast projection of their own greatest fears, resistances, shames, and angers. This insight enforces a deep realization that they are responsible for the nightmare and need to erase it by not believing in it anymore. By not focusing on it and contributing to the daily dramas, they starve this old nightmare of its food.

This is indeed a very tough series of awakenings for the shaman initiate, and few actually succeed in the short run. What does one replace the old nightmare with? If it’s all a bad dream then what is the alternative? Is there a good dream or a reality with no dream? So they sit with these considerations for a long while in a state of absolute confusion and even uproarious laughter about what an absurd thing this state of affairs is.
   
    Eventually the initiate discovers what all shamans and mystics eventually discover on their path to freedom. They are gently reminded to pay attention to the vicinity around their heart. At first they think it might have something to do with their physical heart and that something might be happening with it, perhaps a heart attack or palpitations or something. Then they realize that, no, it is not the physical heart that they should be interested in but something behind it or in the same vicinity of it that is not physical. They discover the little invisible doorway that has its physical counterpart in the sino atrial node of the heart and they begin to wonder what is behind that door. They begin to work at it and pry at it mentally and what they find is layers of patterns of grief and suffering that throws them into painful states but still they claw at it out of desperation because somehow they know that behind it is something good, very good. Little by little they wade through the patterns of pain forgiving and letting go of resistance. They may abandon their efforts for awhile but then they always return and just when they collapse to the ground exhausted from their efforts (relax and let go) the door cracks open a tiny little bit and shows a glimpse of an incredible world in sharp contrast to the nightmare projected outward by the giant Self Importance mind. That inner world is extraordinarily beautiful and glows with an incomparable warmth and a brilliant light of home, the home of the Great or Holy Spirit, the indivisible source of the Christ force, the All That Is, the Great Spirit, the Eternal Present, the Tao itself. Once the shaman gets a glimpse of that light, even if for only a fraction of a moment, they can never again be satisfied with anything less and this is what the Self Importance Mind is so afraid of. For when the heart opens, the giant illusory separated mind ceases to exist and then rather than separation there is only unity. When the heart opens and the person steps through it figuratively, suffering ceases, light radiates, and the world transforms. Yes, there is still a world projected out there and in many respects it looks the same as before but it is totally transformed. It is still a projection of a mind but within it one can see only the reality of Spirit glowing through it, gradually erasing its separations with beauty until it vanishes.

Stepping through the portal of the heart is the shaman’s doorway, the beginning of the end of believing in only one reality, the initiatory step to really walking between the worlds. This is where real freedom begins but of course there are a lot of odds and ends to clean up. That cleaning up process may go on for quite some time but in the end it is as if no time passed at all. It was just a dream.

Now there are shamans of all soul ages and some have no clue to the greater realities even though they may have developed some powers. The path I have just described is the path of an older soul shaman, one ready to make the journey. Does one have to be a shaman to make this journey? Not technically but the truth is that anyone who has made the journey will make an incomparable healer, one who knows the unity of all, a powerhouse teacher, in other words, an excellent shaman.

originally posted: 05/31/2007