Shamanic Bits and Pieces

I took a look at Facebook first thing this morning, and there was Tom asking if anyone wanted to talk about shamanism. Liz Jones Iwasiuk had commented, “From what I understand it's a very very old way of life........I met one about three years ago and he was very interesting. He said to me that "women are the leaders of men and as soon as a man relaxes and lets his woman lead him life is much much easier" ........he has a point!

I then made 6 comments in the next 25 minutes:

I'm reading 'The Secret Fire of the Philosophers' by Patrick Harpur (who wrote Daimonic Reality). It's a History of the Imagination, but it's grounded in the experience of daimons in the natural world, from pixies to animal helpers.

Neptune is in Pisces for the next 14 years, so I think there's going to be a lot of interest in the Dreamtime.

I tend to think that for many men, their strength is in getting things done, and for many women their strength lies in the wider vision of what needs to be done and how to go about it. Women can act as a sort of soul guide for men, who also need to woo their own anima, move towards a sort of ecstatic union within. It probably works the other way round too, though I wouldn't know how. (Any women out there care to comment?) I think women's leadership can be esoteric, not everyone will see it.

A shaman or a poet who is a man has more than the usual sense of the feminine within, which is experienced as ecstatic. He follows it and trusts it, it is what gives his life meaning. There is little place for this in our society, where it is having a job that validates you!

What is the opposite of Death? The answer is Birth. We think the answer is Life, and that causes a lot of problems. That when you die, life ceases. That is not traditional. The dead are dead, but they are still with us, they have moved on, they have had the next initiation. (Pinched from Harpur’s book above.) Jung found that the unconscious of very old people did not behave as though it was about to be extinguished, it behaved as though it were continuing indefinitely.

You've caught me when I've just got up and thoughts come to me! I think the above might go on my blog! I guess when I'm just up I'm fresh, but still close to the dreamworld.

;) Emoticon with a hairy right eyebrow.

End.

It is because we fear death that Pluto appears to us as a dark god. That is our own projection. Pluto is certainly a god of power, the power to live and the power to survive. He is weighty but has a sense of humour. He is the power beneath our feet, pushing upwards. If you live from that power, then you don't need to fear him. He is the bountiful nature of life.

Here's an interesting quote from Harpur's book that brings together fairy abduction and conspiracy theory:

The Sidhe need human robustness, wrote Yeats, while we need their wisdom. Just as they take young mothers to suckle their babies and young women for wives, so the modern 'aliens' - the so-called greys - take female ova or foetuses in order to strengthen their race. The lack of reciprocity in early versions of this interesting folklore was later amended when it became widely believed that the aliens were in cahoots with the government, who sanctioned their activities in exchange for their 'wisdom' - in this case an advanced extraterrestrial technology.

Here's another one I picked up from Facebook, by John Perkins (who wrote The World is as You Dream It, as well as Confessions of an Economic Hitman):