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Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, john Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now his john,

John Moore 0:56

everybody. Thank you for joining me again, a little later, getting this podcast out than I normally would be. Forgive me for that in the realm of spirit, time doesn't really exist. So I guess it's okay. Anyway, at least that's what one of my teachers told me. It is just after sunrise here in Maine, and we had a couple of storms come through over the past few days, which, you know, dumped a little bit of snow on us. And it's just beautiful. The sun is out the sky is blue. The sun is streaming across the snow and through the trees. And it's just beautiful to look out. And I hope that wherever you are, you don't have to be in a spot as traditionally beautiful as Maine. But I hope wherever you are, you can find some beauty and some thing that you can see or touch or hear today, and you know, looking for beauty, you'll find it, your intention will guide you. So if you take a little bit of time, or just to set the intention to look for beauty today, something that really touches you and makes you feel good and connected. today. I think it'll make your day better. I hope so. Today's topic is near and dear to my heart. I want to the topic is What is shamanism. And I'm going to talk while I'm going to talk about shamanism. And that is my spiritual home for lack of a better term. shamanism is not a religion. So I don't can't really call it my religion, I could call it my practice. But it's more than that. So I'm going to talk about it, I'm going to shamanism is also a big buzzword right now. It's become increasingly popular, certainly in the United States, I see evidence of that happening in other places. And I will talk about why I think that's happening as well. It's not just in my opinion, a some kind of New Age buzzword. There is there is a reason why the shamanic impulse is waking up or waking people up across the world at this moment. So let's talk about what is a shaman and what shamanism is and where the word comes from. And all of those things in this will give you some, some background and why why this, you know, women are talking about in the, in the ways that I do. I'll say this, that we apply the word shaman and the word shamanism to a lot of different things. And some of that is because it's a challenging, they're challenging words to define. And another reason is their loan words into English. And their actual origins are a little bit lost at the moment, maybe some linguistic research down the road, but I'll talk about where we get the word from in English anyway. And the you know, the words have been applied cross culturally, to all kinds of spiritual workers, spiritual medicine, that sort of thing. And, you know, definitions are useful when they're agreed to, but there certainly may not be universal agreement. So when I give you my definition, that certainly is not going to agree with with other people and that's fine. We can disagree about that because words are words or symbols. They're not the thing that we're describing, right? They're shortcuts into our consciousness. I use that This, I use this example a lot if I use the word dog. That's not a dog. But if we have a common understanding of what the word dog means we can talk about a dog. The map is not the territory, the model is not the thing. The word isn't the thing that it describes. It's just a shortcut. It's a symbol. So, the word shaman

and I'll preface this by saying that in my tradition, I do not call myself a shaman I use when describing myself. I prefer the phrase, shamanic practitioner. Sometimes people will call me shamanic healer, that's also fine. If I'm doing healing work. I don't limit myself to healing work, but that's one type of work that I do. And I consider myself a teacher. I teach shamanism and other you know, spiritual topics. I teach meditation, Qigong, and some other you know, but my main, my main focus is shamanism. So it could be a shamanic teacher, shamanic practitioner, shamanic healer. I don't use the word shaman, and I'll talk about that a little bit later. The word shaman comes into English from Russian and German. Okay. And before that, before it was in Russian and German. It was a word from the Tongass people in Siberia. So it's Tim Lucic, I believe is how you say it in Siberia. And there it means you know what you think, you know, the word shaman means what you think it's this, you know, this holy person that you go to, that does spiritual work for you. They're a spiritual officiant for lack of a better term. However, roots of the word shaman do show up in some Chinese languages. They show up in Sanskrit they show up in Pali Lang, you know the language that the Buddha spoke. And so it's exact origins are a little bit lost. In in those cultures in Pali, and I believe Sanskrit and in the dialects of Chinese where it exists. It basically means like priest or monk or something along those lines. In the Tongass people, the word shaman means one who sees in the dark, or one who sees clearly. And if you ever see video or photos of a Siberian shaman, frequently they're wearing a cover over their eyes. What we would refer to as Siberian ikatan, sometimes it's, it's a hat with fringe that covers the eyes. And this is a tool that they use in their work. So what are we talking about when we talk about the word in English? To me, shamanism involves three main components. And if you're not doing them, you're doing something else. And it's fine that you're doing something else. But when I talk about shaman Ising, we turned that into a verb. When you talk about shamanism, I'm talking about three components, spiritual acts that comprise three components. And these will be at the center of what we're talking about. And these are things that, you know, back in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, anthropologists went around the world, looking at what we consider shamanic cultures, cultures, where they would have someone you know, fulfilling the role of shaman and looking at what these cultures did in common, what were the common practices, techniques, technologies that they were using. And so, there are three of them. One is a so the definition is a shaman is a, you know, a spiritual worker who uses altered states of consciousness to travel in or experience non ordinary states of reality. And who works with helping spirits to do work and that frequently healing or getting information or you know, other things, ceremonies, rituals, that sort of thing. Usually, there's a healing component of some kind. So those three components are using altered state of consciousness. That's component one, when to traveling in non ordinary reality, okay, so most shamanic cultures recognize spiritual worlds that they travel in and this is the main practices journeying in the spiritual worlds, okay, different words for them. In other cultures dream time other worlds in core shamanism we refer to sort of upper world, lower world, middle world. Lots and lots of cross cultural stuff here.

And then the last component is working with helping spirits. So shamans always working with other spirits. And they might do that in different ways that might involve, you know, in some cultures being taken over by the Spirit in some cultures, they're just communing with them or communicating or merging or calling upon them, evoking them, invoking them. But all three of those components are present when we're doing shamanism. So, let's talk about altered states. How do shamans enter altered states and a lot of people so there's a misconception that all shamans use drugs or hallucinogens, plant medicine, what have you. So in some cultures, I Alaska silicided. And there's lots and lots of chemicals and plants that can be used to enter altered states of consciousness. And it is true that the use of plant medicines exist in traditional cultures all over the world. So we see you know, the Sami people in you know, in in northern Scandinavia. There are rituals involving fly a garlic mushrooms. We see in you know, South America, South and Central America, we see things like Iowa aska. We see pod in the southwestern United States, we see Boga coming from Africa. So there's it, you know, these hallucinogens exist all over the place, and they are used and they are used. Shimano. For the most part, though, the majority of shamanic cultures use other means to alter their consciousness. A big one that I use a lot is to use sound, such as rhythmic drumming, or rattling or, you know, some sort of sound to enter the specific shamanic state. And what we know is that you know, there are different patterns of brain we know this now in modern times, obviously, before the invention of things like IE G's, and, you know, much more modern science, we didn't specifically have this information, but for 1000s of years, shamans knew what they were doing when they were altering their brains. And so they, you know, generate these brainwaves using sound called theta waves, right? It's around four hertz, if you're scientific or four cycles per second, or, you know, drumming at 220 beats per minute, would give you a theta brainwave state. And in this state, your ego breaks down a little bit, you become much more open, and are able to do the things that you need to do to get into a journey much more easily. So drumming is one another way. There are cultures. I'm thinking of Bushmen, cultures in Africa that use you know, this, use a sort of, like extreme form of dancing, where they might dance for 24 hours without food or water. It's put themselves in, you know, these crazy altered states. And, you know, dancing is another are another really common way to enter altered states. I'm sure there are lots of them. I'm sure there are lots and lots of ways. But there's a specific state that shamans use, whether they're aware of, you know, Eg research or not, but it's it's common all over the world. And people I guess, just knew that either through experimentation or through some sort of divine revelation that this particular state you know, brainwave state was tuning the brain to the correct frequency for doing shamanic work for lack of a better term. If we think of the brain, not as the generator of consciousness, but as the as a receiver of consciousness because I believe that consciousness is non local, but that the human brain is a As a receiver that can be tuned. And so tuning the brain to a specific vibratory pattern opens it up to shamanic work. So that's part one, so and then, so Part one is entering these altered states. Part Two, is,

you know, traveling in non ordinary realms, and again, like this, there's an, you know, as I said, shamanism appears all over the world, in every culture, it shows up in, you know, it's called different things. And it has, there's always a cultural overlay. Right, there's always, you know, the information about it comes filtered through the culture, and the cultural understanding of the people that, you know, the, the group that the, the shaman, you know, identifies with the culture that they've grown up in. So in, you know, in many cultures, they're, you know, the non ordinary reality exists and is called, you know, the other worlds or dream time, or lots and lots of different things. Okay. And what we find that's really common is, there is there are usually experiences of traveling down into the earth, which we have called the lower world. And don't worry, it's not, you know, those of us who grew up in a predominantly Christian culture might think that that's hellish, or going to hell, because we just think of Hell is down and lower, and that sort of thing. Those are just, you know, those are symbols that don't really apply here. It's, you know, from another system, those are symbols from another system, they don't really apply, I travel to the lower world nearly every day, and it is a beautiful nature like place, when you when you when you tune into that, and in the lower world, this is where we meet power animals, not to be confused with what have been called spirit animals, or totems, power animals are different, they're animal spirits, that we have sort of one on one relationships with. And in most cultures, you know, working with power animals is very common, very, very common, these spirit allies that are that come to us, as you know, sort of in the form of deceased animals. Very powerful work to be done with helping spirits. So a non ordinary reality that we also consider and what we call an upper world. And really, these again, these are models, these are labels that we're placing on states of consciousness that are experienced as traveling up or down in non ordinary reality. There are, as far as I know, infinite levels of, of reality, there's many, many, many, many, many, but it just makes it easier, we can't, you know, makes it possible to talk about it if we break it down into rather large chunks of description. And so there's an upper world and and, you know, a lot of shamanic cultures talk about being you know, born on the wings of an eagle or flying upward into heaven or being pulled up somehow. And it's a little bit of a different experience there. And there we meet teachers that might be more human, like less animal like, although that's not always the case. That's where you're sort of human like helping spirits hang out, where you might meet gods and goddesses and angels and you know, deceased ancestors, and that sort of thing, is the sort of upper realm and then there's this middle world, which is the world that we live in. In an Old Norse, we would call that mid guard, right? The middle world. And that's the world that we live in. But there's a spiritual overlay there. Right? This is spiritual overlay. And middle world is where we encounter things like nature spirits, fairies, and sprites and gin and genies and all kinds of stuff, right? So um, so that's non ordinary reality. And then I've touched a little bit on working with helping spirits, right. We have power animals that we work with to do a tremendous amount of work. We have what we call upper world teachers. Most people practicing shamanism will start to gather a community of spirits that they work with, and in my experience, these spirits are a little specialized. In other words, they work out I'll work with a spirit for a specific piece of work. One of the things we do one of the things that most practitioners do is a ceremony called soul retrieval. And it's a shamanic way of helping to deal with trauma amongst other things, but

it deals with soul loss, soul separation, soul fragmentation, that sort of thing. And I have a specific helping spirits that I work with for that work. And then another piece of work might be we call psychopomp work, which is helping helping people who are deceased to cross over to where they should be going, sort of, you know, helping with that kind of work. And I have other helping spirits that I work with for that, that type of work. And so they're a little bit specialized, and they're helping spirits for doing ancestor work for doing weather work for doing all kinds of stuff. Okay, so we normally we gather, we gather a team, right, a team of specialists. And that's really, that's really helpful. And, you know, one of the things I like about the practice of shamanism is one of the ways that it keeps my ego from getting really big is that it reminds me that I'm not the one doing the work. We always consider that it's the helping spirits actually doing the work. I'm just acting as a clear a conduit as I possibly can for the work to happen. Right. So that is that shamanism in a nutshell. Well, that is the definition of shamanism. In a nutshell, you have these three components, right? That I've been talking about. So why do we have people acting in the role of shaman in showing up in every culture in every you know, every location on the planet where people where there are people? You know, why is this? Why is shamanism this universal phenomenon? Right, why is it showing up everywhere at all times in recorded history, and it actually looks like shamanism is prehistoric. Slowly. We'll, I'll talk a little bit about that. But I think you could make a really good argument that would probably be backed up by modern science, that shamanic practice, the practice of shamanism is the oldest form of human spirituality, at least that still exists today. So we might say it's the oldest continuous form of human spirituality. Okay, so we think about, you know, the oldest, I don't, I don't know what the oldest sort of, you know, modern non prehistoric religion would be. But we'll say, you know, we'll say, Judaism is pretty old for Western religion. Right? And, you know, it's, I don't know, if I traces back five or 6000 years. I'm sure there are Eastern religions that are equally if not older than that. So religions in in Asia, I'm not sure how far back the you know, what we would consider the Hindu faith. We go go back. I know the texts are pretty some of the texts are pretty ancient. So yeah, I mean, there's there's, there are forms of spirituality that exists today that go back several 1000 years. The thing is, we have evidence now that we think cave paintings done by humans not but done by, you know, what we anatomically modern humans anyway, going back as far as 30 40,000 years, have are displaying. shamanic states of consciousness we see these things called m entoptic. patterns in this artwork we see therianthropy so we see paintings of things that are half animal half person. There's lots of evidence that this is the case and there is some support for that some belief for that. So we think that shamanism is probably the oldest practice of spirituality, that you know that that still exists today. Goes back 10s of 1000s of years,

we don't really have evidence of humans doing much more symbolic thought before that there was looks like there was a time about 50,000 years ago where humans started, you know, painting pictures having symbolic thought. But that's just current archaeological evidence. That's just what we have. Now, certainly things could become much older and new discoveries happen all the time that push timelines back for things. So it's possible then to consider that shamanism might be the original form of human spirituality, as soon as humans were able to alter their consciousness to experience, you know, experience what what shamans experienced, they were using that as a tool. And if you think about it, you know, we didn't have modern allopathic medicine developed yet, or even, you know, traditional Chinese medicine or a lot of forms of herb ology and stuff. And so humans had to survive as a species in conditions that, you know, can end with conditions and tools that weren't fantastic, right? Humans are not the fastest runners that we don't have the sharpest teeth, the biggest claws, we're not the strongest, we're not the best climbers. But what humans are there, we're adaptable. And we have, we're social. And we have the ability of symbolic thought, right? We have the ability to paint pictures, we have the ability to describe things using language. And that has been a huge survival advantage to us. Right? We, we, you know, that symbolic thought, that ability to form even spiritual ideas, and gather people together for a common good, though those things are what kept humans alive, while other ancestors died out. There's not evidence of Neanderthals, for example, doing cave paintings yet? I mean, I don't know that might, they might discover that at some point. You know, and certainly, Neanderthals were probably capable of some symbolic thought. But we don't really have evidence of the level that modern humans had Homo sapiens. And the same is kind of the same is true for other so you know, around. You know, in the early days of Homo sapiens, there were lots of other races of humans out there. And when I say race, I don't mean the way we think of race today, I mean, genus and species, you know, or at least species of humans were different. Right? We have Neanderthals denisovan, man, we had all kinds of hominids out there. And then the one thing that we definitely can see that's different about modern humans is this capability towards symbolic thought towards religiosity, for lack of a better term spirituality. Right. And, you know, the ability to do spiritual work really, I think provided a an evolutionary advantage that modern humans survived and other other species either, you know, interbred with humans, but didn't continue to exist as a species they died out, at some point. We did not still have Neanderthals walking around, although, you know, some people like myself, I've a bit of Neanderthal DNA. So there was some, there was some interbreeding going on there. But we don't have pure DNA, as you know, species of Neanderthals walking around these days. And there's a lot of speculation as to why that is, but I'm just saying that I think one strong advantage that Homo sapiens had was this ability for symbolic thought that at a level anyway, that we don't see in any other species on the planet. I do believe now they're doing research with primates and birds and showing that they are capable of some symbolic thought and perhaps, maybe even, you know, super primitive forms of spirituality or ritual. Certainly

And so, there is that, but certainly not developed to the level where human beings developed it. So one thing about shamanism is that, you know, we consider if you look at the work of young and he talks about the collective unconscious, and we have these archetypes that spring up, which are universal, they're universal patterns that exist in the collective conscious, right? We're not always aware of them. One example is the hero. And we talked about Joseph Campbell's, you know, the hero's journey, which is common in every mythology on the planet. Right? So the hero is an archetype. It's a pattern that shows up. And I think the shamanic archetype is the same thing. I think the shaman shows up I think every mythology on the planet contains elements of shamanic initiation, voyages to underworlds, to above worlds, dealing with spiritual creatures. All of these things I think, I think the shaman is, is, you know, on one level, you know, a shaman is an actual physical human being doing stuff on this planet. But I think there is an archetype, and I think it pops up everywhere in the planet, and I think it is as old as humanity itself. I think it'd be hard. You know, I, again, I'm proposing a lot of things that would be difficult to disprove. But this is, you know, I'm posting as this is my opinion, this is my thought on this, after having, you know, read significantly in this area and done a lot of my own research, and, in fact, journey and quite a lot about this. The shamanic archetype activates in human cultures and in human individuals as the result of crisis. And in fact, a lot of the literature talks about shamanic crisis and what does crisis mean? crisis is some sort of, we'll say abnormal threat. Right? So right now, as I record this, we are in the middle of a global pandemic. That is a crisis because it is an existential threat to many people, it has changed lives, it has threatened livelihoods, it has profoundly affected our culture, the way you know, no matter where you are, the way things have been done has changed. And in my opinion, this is one of the reasons why there has been this sort of wave like resurgence of interest. In shamanism, people are waking up to spirituality, they're waking up to this shamanic impulse, as a way of dealing with this. It's a response the awakening impulse, the awakening, demonic impulse is a response to crisis. on an individual level, most people I know who there are a certain number of people who are just interested in shamanism might take a weekend workshop or something like that. But most people I know, who go very deeply into shamanism become practitioners and teachers and that sort of thing. have gone through significant life passages. So this could be you know, I know someone who had several near death experiences. For me, it was, you know, it was a, what we might refer to as an have referred to as a nervous breakdown or psychological breakdown that I went through years ago that I didn't know that I could come back from. And it was a mental and physical crisis on an individual level. So we see this showing up again and again, and and in many, in many shamanic cultures around the world. shamans are chosen on the basis of having gone through some sort of crisis. Sometimes they have to be born with a physical deformity. Sometimes they might be struck by lightning. Have a mystery illness. This is called the demonic illness. And you'll see it frequently somebody falling ill with something that medical science has a hard time diagnosing a hard time treating that sort of thing, and they'll come out of it, you know, somewhat awakened or with the impulse to do shamanic work. I think I don't I don't know how really to estimate how frequently this happens. Everyone goes through crisis. Does that awaken the shamanic impulse in everyone? I think no. I think there are people who have a

Kind of a makeup that's geared towards that. And, you know, might have been drawn to spirit their whole lives but never really had a had a place to do it or a place to put it. But, you know, crisis kind of opens you up and kind of cracks you open. And in, it's in healing that those wounds where they're never completely healed, there's always a resonance there. You know, there's a, there's a poem that says the, you know, the cracks are where the light comes through. Right? It's that cracking apart, that breaking down of the ego, sometimes that allows people practicing shamanism to become clear channels, or in some cultures, it's called the hollow bone, right, the hollow bone that spirit passes through. So, yeah, so shamanism arises as a response to crisis, personal and cultural. So when culture goes through crisis, a lot of people sort of wake up. And that doesn't mean when I say wake up, but I'm not putting that in the sense of, you know, of like Buddhist awakening, or, you know, Ascension or any of those, like, you've reached another level. What I mean is, I've been going through my life, and then all of a sudden, I realize that, you know, there's this huge crisis I need to deal with, and ordinary methods I might use to deal with crisis are not working for me. And it's, it's a wake up call, maybe that's a better phrase wake up call, rather than than awakening. There's a lot of baggage around terms like awakening and ascension, and, and all of these things. So the shamanic viewpoint, there is a viewpoint, there is a way that shamans commonly look at things. And again, it's different culture by culture, of course, everybody looks at everything through the lens of the culture that they are, you know, they have been raised in or that they have adopted or that they have lived in for a really long time. It's good to be aware of these things. Right? So I'm speaking to you in English. And I know that for many of you English is not your first language. And so when I use words, I know inherently, that they may have slightly different meanings for you, and you might be looking at them in a way that you haven't, you know, I have experiences with certain words with certain symbols that you have, have experienced differently, and that's fine. So So when I say that, you know, there's a thing that's, that's common, it shows it does, you know, it shows up in different ways. But this is a fairly common thing. I, you know, I can't say if it's universal, because then somebody would, I said, This isn't every shamanic culture, you know, I'm sure somebody out there could say, Oh, no, this tribe from here does not believe that way. But when I say common, I would say almost every shamanic culture practitioner has a viewpoint that I would say describe as animistic animism is the belief that, you know, one way of describing the animistic belief is that it's the belief that spirit is in everything. This is the way I see it. So I see spirit in trees and grass, in rivers and rocks, in animals and people. I see spirit. I see the earth as a sort of giant spirit, a giant collective spirit. But spirit also exists in manmade things. So anything you can perceive as a separate object is a spirit. It just has a physical component to it. Okay, so if I make something, let's say I make I have this coffee cup in front of me and I have a sip as a matter of fact. Delicious, this coffee cup in front of me. So some human made that right, say, took some, some clay from the earth has some spirit, some bit of the earthly spirit was in that lump of clay and it was formed, it's the cup and then you know that there's this in non ordinary reality there is this spirit of the cup. But the cup also has a physical representation here on earth because I can pick it up I can put coffee in it and I can drink out of it.

So we see everything as a spirit, we can talk to, you know, we can talk to most things, sometimes they talk back, particularly during journey, middle world journeys, you can talk to trees and rocks and get information. And as I said that a blue bird just flew by my window, I'm, I'm, you know, not making that up. And it just flew by again, it's sweeping back and forth across my window. So it's lovely to see I talked to the birds, especially lots of birds where I am. And, and so the shamanic viewpoint is animistic that their spirits everywhere and travel, and I mentioned this before, but in the middle world, there are you do encounter lots of spirits that do not have a physical component, right, they do not have a physical body. And those spirits sometimes are seen as and, and Gosh, every culture has some name for little people, right? Little, little people that are sort of on the edge of spirit and physical reality. I can't think of the term but there's, you know, in Hawaiian culture, there are these little, little elves that build things overnight. Like they're, you know, giant walls are built overnight by these. You know, these, you know, these little elf like creatures and in, you know, in, in countries that were sort of Celtic at one point, so, you know, parts of, you know, UK and that area, we have a whole fairy faith, a whole faith built up around the faith of the fairies. But we have, you know, all kinds of, you know, European cultures, with fairies and trolls, and elves and gnomes, and all of these things. And we think of them as we have the phrase in English fairy tale write a story that isn't a story that isn't real, where we talk about fairies and supernatural creatures and that sort of thing. I'll tell you that, you know, reality is kind of a flexible thing. So are there things that are real, that aren't reflected in physical reality? Well, sure, your subjective experience of consciousness. You know, we can get it we could go down the rabbit hole of discussing consciousness, but your your entire subjective experience of reality does not really have a physical representation. And yes, I, you could, you know, go into a functional MRI machine and say, this area of your brain is lighting up in this area of your brain is lighting up. But none of that explains your subjective experience. That's electrical activity. But how do you go through life experiencing the world? How do you? How do waves made in the air sound like a symphony to you? How do you recreate a symphony in your consciousness? To me, electrical signals bouncing back and forth. can't really explain that can't really explain what I'm feeling when I touch something, or when I taste something. You know, my experiences of not of electrical symbols, passing back and forth to me consciousness is, is reality. And so is it possible then, that there are things that are real? I believe my consciousness is real, maybe I'm imagining my consciousness. But what is consciousness conscious of that? imagining? I'm sorry, as I'm kind of joking, but it's a little bit of a brain teaser, right? So consciousness is my experience of reality, and does not necessarily have a physical representation. So are there things that are real? I can make it simpler. If you have a thought, in your in your head, if you think of a if you think of a purple elephant, is that purple elephant real or not necessarily real? But is the thought real? Did you really have the thought the thought occur in this reality? Were you conscious of it? And the answer to that is yes. So even on just a mental level, there are things that exist that do not have physical represent Do not have physical bodies. And so whether or not you believe in fairy tale creatures,

and you think I'm psychotic, when I go out and talk to land spirits, or trees or whatever, is beside the point like we could, we could potentially agree that there are things that we would describe as real, that don't have physical presence. And, you know, there are no, there are no cultures, I can think of that do not have the belief in non physical entities, right. So every culture out there believes in spirits of some sort, whether that's the spirit that, you know, whether they're animistic or not, right, we believe that people have spirits that there are ghosts, that there are, you know, so these things are universal, these things exist in cultures that had no contact with each other for 10s of 1000s of years, at least, right? Maybe maybe longer. Right, when when humans started, you know, migrating all over the planet, and that that timeline keeps getting pushed back further and further, you know, they find evidence of human activity in Europe now going back, you know, 10s of 1000s of years earlier than they thought humans went out of went out of Africa. So that timeline keeps getting pushed back. So these are universal thoughts. These are things again, the shamanic impulse, the animistic impulse, the all these things are fairly universal. That doesn't mean every you know, that doesn't mean every human being on the planet believes in these things or believes in them in the same way. Right? There are atheists out there, there are material realists who think anything you cannot measure with equipment doesn't exist. And that's fine. That's their, that's their belief. That's their reality. It can't measure their consciousness, right? We can't measure can't attach, you can attach electrodes to your brain, that that is not your subjective experience of consciousness. So go back to the the idea that we can experience things that don't have physical representation. So I just want to recap a little bit and I hope this has been informative for you, but I talked about shamanism and how it is the, you know, it is a universal set of spiritual technologies, practices, ways of ways of interacting with spirit that go back at least 10s of 1000s of years, goes back into prehistoric times. It exists, the shamanic impulse exists, well, it is filtered through culture, it exists everywhere on the planet where there are human beings. It arises as the result as a response to a crisis, both on an individual cultural and global level. And that shamans are in general animists where we believe in spirits inhabiting things particularly in the natural world, but I extend that to things that are manmade as well. I really hope this has been informative. shamanism is my what I refer to as my spiritual home. please reach out to me if you have any questions or wish to contact me. You can find me at MaineShaman.com. That's ma i n e Sh aman.com.

Announcer 49:57

You have been listening to speaking spirit With your host, john more. For more info or to contact john, go to MaineShaman.com that's maineshaman.com