with cold beer, no snack foods, no up-to-the-minute football scores. Following a communal sweat lodge ceremony during which we confessed our individual fears about being alone . . . in the wilds . . . in the dark . . . we created individual campsites at a distance of at least a half-hour journey from each other.
I insisted on sleeping in a tent rather than out in the open since I was operating under the assumption that if I couldn't see the scary things I knew were out to get me, they might not be there. Although we were fasting, we couldn't be sure that the collective wild kingdom had agreed to the same rules. So, even though we were each on our own, we agreed to create a designated clearing where we would leave daily evidence of our survival, assuring one another that no one had been devoured by some sort of man-eating forest creature.
The challenges of the Sierra trip paled by comparison to my current location in this remote part of the rain forest. We were visiting tribes who, until recently, settled their differences by removing their opponents' heads. John Perkins, the leader of our little expedition, repeatedly assured us that they don't do that anymore . . . or at least not often. In any case, I was more focused on potential encounters with snakes than the possibility of losing a portion of my body to the locals.
John had written a book, The World Is As You Dream It (Destiny Books, 1994), that had caught Shirl's eye six months before. Being a self-taught dream counselor, and always seeking a new adventure, she had somehow convinced me that this was the next exotic place we should visit in our pursuit of esoteric knowledge. Since John's credentials were impressive and his shaman contacts unique, I reluctantly agreed to go along.
Planetary Consciousness 101
John Perkins was a volunteer in the Peace Corps right out of business school, and then a management consultant to the United Nations and the World Bank. He had spent most of his time in the rain forests of South America, assisting and teaching the natives the advantages of the modern mechanized world. He helped them clear the forests and build factories and power plants in order to bring the primitive culture into step with the twentieth century.
Until he woke up to what he was doing.
John realized that he was not helping the indigenous culture. In fact, he realized that he was actually a part of the problem. Although the Corps did much that was good, it was ultimately denying the local natives their own way of being. John felt that we were imposing our culture, our lifestyle, and our belief system on people who not only didn't understand it, but were perfectly happy with their own culture's status quo.
Journalist Joe Kane wrote a moving story about this issue (San Francisco Examiner, October 29, 1995). The article is about a man named Moi, an Ecuadorian native from the Amazon rain forest who traveled to Washington, D.C. to communicate the harm being inflicted on his people. He left his world of loincloth and bare feet to hand-carry a letter addressed to the "President of the United States of North America." As Mr. Kane recalled the story, Moi traveled two weeks by foot, canoe, bus, rail, and air to ask why the United States was trying to destroy his culture. "The whole world must come and see how the Heroin [tribe] live well,” he wrote. "We live with the spirit of the jaguar. We do not want to be civilized by your missionaries or killed by your oil companies. Must the jaguar die so that you can have more contamination and television?"
You can imagine the official government response.
Fortunately, our planetary awareness is beginning to change. John Perkins is one of an increasing number of environmentalists beginning to touch the consciousness of the world view. Because he has devoted much of his energy to raising money to purchase the rain forest in the name of the "people," the local shamans are reciprocating in their way. They have made themselves available to teach sacred knowledge—a practice all but forgotten in the hustle and bustle of our fast-paced world.
Our trip to this isolated location, this outer edge of my Westernbased comfort zone, was to seek additional understanding about this ancient knowledge, this seldom understood nature of"reality."
The World According
to Shamans
So, what exactly can the shamans teach us? To begin with, let's look at their view of physical existence and how it differs from what we Westerners were taught in school. My generation was led to believe that all of reality can be defined, explained, and understood by studying the well-known laws of physics. Sir Isaac Newton said that all observable events are predictable once they are categorized and understood. He lumped all of what he termed reality into specific edicts such as the law of gravity, perpetual motion, and so forth.
Now, several generations later, our highly educated scientists have modified their views. My grandchildren are learning about a relatively new concept: quantum physics. Einstein and Bohr discovered that the act of observation changes the reality of the object or event observed. They profess that if we expect something to happen, our expectation influences the result. Modern scientists point to quarks, the smallest building blocks of physics, and tell us that the act of observation actually influences an object.
The shamans have yet another view of reality—one that hasn't changed for centuries. They believe it is not the act of observation but how one observes that dictates reality. They claim that we each see the reality we intend to see . . . and it is an illusion.
Who is to say that the ways of the shamans are outdated or incorrect? Doesn't our perception affect our reality? We certainly laugh more easily at someone whom we anticipate will be funny. Are we not less successful when we expect to be? Physicians are even beginning to articulate the notion that attitude has a lot to do with health. The placebo that we expect to cure our illness has been clinically proven to be a positive influence on recovery.
Shamans (often called seers) not only "see" things by means other than the standard five senses, but are able to project their intentions, effectively altering the energy of people and objects through various consciousness-changing techniques. They do not consider what they do to be a religious practice or even a belief system—it is a way of being.
Ecuadorian shamans communicate with the many aspects of nature, often singing and interacting with the plant and animal spirits of the earth. Since they depend on their environment for everything of value to them, they treat it with the respect it deserves. The Amazon Shuar people call the ground Nunkqui, the earth goddess. The Andean Quechuan [pronounced catch-uan], in the high altitudes of Ecuador and areas of Bolivia and Peru, call it Pachamama. Both words roughly translate to "mother earth" but, in truth, these terms encompass all of nature and the universe as a whole. These people live a simple life. They truly live in the moment. They live with an inner peace—a connection with their environment that transcends all conventional understanding.
What particularly fascinates me about these Ecuadorian rain forest shamans is that they truly live in the moment of now. However, when they wish to alter a present condition that arose because of past events, they simply re-dream the related events—essentially revising history with the goal of transforming the present and therefore, the future. By modifying old, outmoded belief systems, they alter the perception of what is to come. They believe that by redreaming or re-experiencing the past, the future will take on new meaning. Following this logic, they suggest that if we in the "modern world" were to change our perspective about a past emotional event, then we, too, could modify future perspectives and judgments about the way things are. Since these shamans believe that many diseases (dis-eases) are the result of an emotional difficulty, they contend that if you can eliminate the trauma associated with the original event, you will lessen the resultant negative physical manifestation.
One of the physical tools they use to accomplish this change and healing is ayahuasca, a foul-tasting hallucinatory substance derived from a local
