(from Centre for Human Transformation
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I found this website, with some very interesting articles - below is a particularly interesting section on a non-indigenous Australian connecting with the land and with Australian Aboriginal "shamans" to discover a white-european Australian shamanistic view of Australia.
blessings, Wyrmwood
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Question: Where do you see yourself culturally within the Shamanic theme, do you identify with Aboriginal cultures or Native American?
A: The task that I have taken on, I haven't chosen it but I have taken it on, is basically to try to answer the question: 'what is the appropriate form of Shamanism for white people in this country?'
Here we are in the oldest country on the planet, where the dreaming is still strong particularly in the uninhabited regions. This is the ultimate argument for keeping old growth forests-this is where the spirit is strongest, where there is the least disturbance of the natural flow of things. This is where you can go and be refreshed and be healed and feel that subtle shimmer of spirit on the wind or on the lake or in the mist. If our hearts don't get touched by that or by the extraordinary emptiness in the desert places then we're dead. It's like we're dead from the head down and from the neck up.
So I occupy an extraordinarily challenging place because traditionally Shamanism is taught within a cultural context. What I've tried to do is what I started teaching when I was a philosopher, teaching a course called Religion, Science and Magic. The magical aspect that I looked at was Shamanism, as one of the three great ways that human beings have tried to understand the world. The others are the religious way and the scientific way.
What I was trying to do was to extract the essential shamanic understandings out of the cultural ritual and the cultural definition and the planes of cultural uniqueness. Then it's a matter of, once you do that, and you understand how all of that's going and moving, then, how do we apply that? How can we ritualise it, how can we live it? How can we experience it, how can we explore it in the context of this country?
Now certainly interfacing with Aboriginal people who are prepared to share at this level is an important and profound part of that, but we have to face the fact that we are not Aboriginal people, that our whole linguistic thought structure comes out of the European heritage. For me it's no good going back into Celtic Shamanism, although that's part of the flavor of the month, because we don't live in that country. Shamanism has to come out of the dreaming of the country that you're in. It's always to do with the unique spirit force that, that country, is trying to manifest through the forms of consciousness that are living there, whether that's the rocks, the rivers, the animals or the human beings.
So over the years, with some assistance and challenges from very dear friends, I've tried to create a Shamanic process that isn't derivative. One of our teachers is qualified to carry a Lakota pipe and perform ceremonies and from time to time he'll do an amazingly beautiful Lakota lodge. But we'll do that because it is a profound healing ritual. In the lodge you open up to the blessings that spirit can bring to you.
Outside of churches, there are few places where people sit down together and pray out of their deepest most profound most exquisite need for healing, for love to lift them in their own sense of worth. I've been in lodges where I've just been touched to extraordinary depths by the prayers that people offer. And it's, as much for that as for anything else that one would enter into one. I don't experience that as being derivative. I know that there is a whole argument that it should be a pure form, in some ways; I am almost offering a counter-argument here. It is not about eclecticism, but the precision with which a specific tool can be used to assist the movement of spirit within a group of people.
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