Announcer 0:30

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 0:53

Everybody. Normally, I record these early in the morning, I don't know there's something about sunrise that keeps my creative juices flowing and and I like that time in the morning it's quiet the the sort of mental noise of the world quiets down today, it's a little bit different. I'm recording this early in the evening. I don't know if that makes a difference to you or not. But I thought I would point that out. And it's kind of interesting. As I do this, it's the sun is setting I normally do this as the sun is rising. And sunrise and sunset are these beautiful, interesting transition times. In other powerful times of day, powerful times to meditate or to get things done or to soak in the beauty of nature, which is what I love to do. I am blessed to live in a place where I have spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Almost any time the weather is fine. And it was chilly but fine today where I am in the state of Maine in the United States, which is in the the northern Northeastern most corner of the of the continental United States. If you're not familiar with Maine, we're known for lobster and, and skiing and all kinds of stuff. Stephen King grew up here if you like horror movies and horror books, excuse me. Now normally some podcasters would edit out their little cough I'm not going to do that I don't edit these at all. Or thumping the mic as I just did. I do not edit these. So you get the raw, unfiltered me. And maybe I'm just too lazy to edit these. But no, I prefer to just have these come out naturally. So it's I realize it's one sided, but it's more like a conversation when when I'm talking to you. Today I chose the topic of dreams. I'm going to talk about dreams. I'm going to talk about lucid dreaming. I'm going to talk about astral travel or astral projection. And I'm gonna talk about shamanic journeying. And these things are all sort of Allied under a heading I will sort of, you know, sort of call it soul travel. Right. And we'll talk about why that is I'll talk about the differences between these things. Um, interestingly, I was watching or I'm still watching a series on Netflix called behind her eyes, which is based on a novel. I will not give spoilers but you know, there is some amount of soul travel lucid dreaming stuff going on there. And so, you know, kind of inspired me to talk about this. And I'm very, very interested in in dreams and dreaming in general, as a shamanic practitioner, I do. I do a lot of dream work. And I you know, locally here in my state I, you know, once a week, I actually am on the radio, doing dream analysis for listeners, which is mostly a fun thing. You know, it's a fun thing that I do and get to connect with people here and the gyms are always interesting. And, you know, sometimes I'm able to provide some clarity or some relief around some issues with dreams. So I'm going to talk about dreams. I'm going to talk about lucid dreaming what that is astral travel or astral projection and how that sort of equates to shamanic journeying. So let me start out With dreams in general, and again, I'm going to, I'm going to sort of present my take on dream material. And my feeling is if you're listening to this podcast, you have interested in spiritual topics, that your beliefs may overlap mine a little bit, and that what dreams are and what they represent. Now, from a psychoanalytic perspective, you know, we go back to young and Freud sort of big, big minds in psychoanalysis

particularly young, very interested in people's dreams, right? Very interesting people's dreams, because dreams allow us to surface a lot of unconscious material, a lot of stuff that, you know, we would not have conscious awareness of, and in my experience, doing dream analysis, dreams, kind of loosely fall into a few categories, right. One category of dreams, are I sort of how would I put this they're sort of warning posts or flags, you're particularly sometimes there's a recurring dream that happens. It's not necessarily a warning of danger, but it's your, your subconscious mind is trying to really get you to pay attention to something and you haven't you haven't figured that out yet, you haven't sussed out that information isn't dealt with whatever issue that is, yet it's buried somewhere in your subconscious. Now, your subconscious, your unconscious mind, processes things, very metaphorically, which is why a lot of dream material that comes up as metaphorical, and it's why dream analysis can, can be really helpful. If you, you know, talk to somebody who's intuitive, and works with dreams, and, you know, that sort of thing. can sort of help you walk through, you know, issues that are coming up. And that is something that I encounter a lot when I'm doing sort of dream analysis work. You know, somebody will tell me, you know, I dreamed about my dream about my father driving off a cliff or something along those lines. And as I suss it out, as I, I'm like, well, you really, you know, concerned about, you know, the driving situation is, you know, really a symbol of independence and, and, you know, being able to take care of oneself, and you know, your father driving off a cliff and you're witnessing it or you're involved and you're worried about, you know, your father's independence. And, you know, the person was able to oh my gosh, yes, my father had a stroke 12 years ago. And in this, this is really, really tiny example, and I'm sort of general, generalizing. Because analysis can take a long time, it can be very in depth, right? Um, very frequently, dreams can surface trauma. Right? So trauma is stored in the soul, from a shamanic perspective stored in the body, but stored in the soul body, from the demonic perspective. So things that happened to us can sometimes surface in dreams. So again, this is your this is your unconscious mind going, Hey, you know, there's something here that you really kind of want to deal with. Right? There's something here that you may, you know, you may want to get some therapy around or process or something along those lines. And that is another, you know, that's another really sort of common thing that comes up. Right. So, you know, I believe that all dreams hold some importance. I don't think, you know, I'm not sure what the exact scientific consensus is on dreaming. I don't think it's just random noise. Right? Why would that? Why would that possibly be? Why would we have evolved to just have random noise go through our head into our consciousness, right, on a nightly basis? Like, completely random, and ultimately, experience doesn't bear that out, you know, frequently, I'm able to determine with some degree of accuracy, some issues that are going on in somebody's life based on some dream material that may not be related to the actual issue right there, symbolic things are happening. So these things are related. I think it's the uncut, you know, the unconscious, if its surface to the surface of the consciousness, sometimes it's trying to pay attention to something sometimes it's trying to, you know, do what therapists might call processing, right processing. You know, you're going through this, you're going through this information and organizing it into You know, the way that your brain holds information and deals with it, that sort of mundane, everyday dreaming. Now I do have a number of people who tell me they do not dream, I don't, I do not dream.

And that is just not true. What you're saying, when you say that, when you say I don't dream, what you're actually saying is, I don't remember my dreams, but that doesn't mean you don't dream. Because if you take somebody who is, um, you know, asleep, and they're going through rat rapid eye movement, right, you can see their eyeballs moving under their eyelids, and you wake them up and you ask them what was going on. They could, they can say, you know, most of the time, nearly all the time they can, they can describe the dream that they were in. But what happens when we're dreaming, we're in a certain mind, state, a certain state of mind, meaning you have, you know, your brain is processing things a certain way parts of your brain to turn off parts are turned on, you know, the, the brainwaves going through your brain are not like you're waking consciousness. And when you wake up, your brain shifts, right, you know, some parts shut down, some parts turn on, it is a huge shift in consciousness to go from asleep to waking, even REM sleep, which is sort of close to your waking state from a brainwave perspective. So many, many people have the experience of having a dream and having it fade as they wake up. And that's really common as well. Right. So that's that process where, when we're shifting brain states, we often forget within the first five or 10 minutes. So if you're a person, you want to remember your dreams. My suggestion to the to you is keep a notebook next to your bed with a pen or pencil. And as soon as you wake up, as soon as you remember, take down some notes about, you know what you were dreaming of, write it down before it fades. You know if, you know, if it's not going to wake up somebody who's sleeping with you, you could also use a like a voice recorder app on your phone and talk into that and record, record your dream, you know, whatever, just, you know, if you get it out, you're gonna be less likely to forget it. And then the other thing that happens when you start to keep a dream journal is that you are sort of training your brain that you want to remember your dreams and you'll begin to remember them more frequently. Okay, so I talked about dreaming and sort of what dreaming is, from my perspective, and you know, that everybody dreams and they talked about a certain category of dreams, which I sort of are, you know, these metaphoric, signposts or, or pathways or pay attention to me pay attention to something, right, it's like a flag, pay attention to this. I'm not always on warning, not always, sometimes it's, you know, you have some untapped potential, you have some creativity, you want to get out, you are attracted to somebody and you're not willing to admit it. Those things, you know, those things can all happen. Um, you know, there's, you know, there can be some on it also some, you know, sort of a second category, which sometimes has some overlap here are the, on unresolved unresolved feeling dreams, right. So, you know, you break up with somebody, and you dream about them, or, you know, you never fulfilled a life dream and you dream about that. Even you know, in that in that category can also be overlap one another category, there's, you know, there's these categories are not really firmly defined. They're just sort of things that they're ways that I think about, you know, when I about dreams when I talk about them with people, right? Another big one is wish fulfillment. Right? And sometimes our wishes can be pushed down into our shadow. I did a whole podcast episode about the shadow. But very briefly, the shadow is the exiled part of ourself, it's the part of ourself that due to socialization, or our values or whatever, like we push thought, feelings and desires into that we don't accept about ourselves. So some of that may be sexual, for example, right. So if you have

dreams of a sexual nature with somebody who is not your spouse, or you know, somebody who is, you know, might be inappropriate to have a sexual relationship with, that can be that sort of thing, right. And, um, you know, wish people were sort of less alarmed about this, okay, you know, you can have a dream about somebody and never act on it. And, you know, some stuff can be some stuff can be coming up some thoughts, some desires, it's natural to have this stuff. When you when you, you know, when you push it into your subconscious, that's, you know, when you push it into an, you know, in your shadow, that's when it can become problematic. Okay, so that's sort of another category, then there's this, this sort of larger category that is, you know, sort of spiritual dreams, write dreams that are maybe pre cognitive, maybe they foreshadow something happening. Or maybe they're indications that something has happened or is happening. You know, a relative of mine, a very close relative of mine, woke up from a sound sleep, at the exact moment, another relative of mine was declared dead, unexpectedly in hospital, and, you know, knew that something was going on and said, I'm gonna go, you know, I'm getting up now, because of my phone's gonna ring anytime now with some, something has happened. So pre cognitive stuff can happen in dreams, and what's going on there? Right. So when we dream, our ego, our conscious mind starts to shut down. And I honestly think that we are normally receiving all of this, what you might call psychic input, these impressions, that we're getting these signals from the world. And they're not surfacing, they're not sort of loud enough, above the things that are coming in through our senses, our sensory input is overwhelming. All of that, right. So imagine that you're in a very crowded restaurant, and everybody in that restaurant is having a conversation at the top of their lungs, you know, as loud as they possibly can. And there's a couple sitting in the corner, whispering to each other? Are you going to be able to pay attention to that whispering? Are you even going to hear it or be aware of it? Probably not. And it's probably, even if you were aware that something you know, something's going on, there's a conversation there, they're whispering, the other stimulus in the room is going to overpower that so much, you're not going to be able to pay attention to it. And that's why a lot of, you know, many spiritual systems pay close attention to stuff that comes up in dreams. The issue here is not all dreams are pre cognitive, I have lots of people call me up. And you know, I dreamed about dying, I dreamed about this, but that dreams of death are not always pre cognitive, particularly if they're about yours. They're usually about a life transition. If you think of the death card and the Tarot deck, it is a card of change, transition, you know, that sort of thing. It's not about physical death. And I have never had an incident or an incidents where somebody talked to me about dying in a dream where that has been pre cognitive. So in my experience, it's just not it's just not the case, where those things happen. So that, you know, that can happen the other. Another thing that can happen is we can become really, really receptive to loved ones who have passed, for example, right? I talked to a lot of people who tell me my grandmother showed up in my dream, and said this to me, and it turned out to be true. Absolutely. your grandmother's probably looking at on you from the afterlife. And, you know, it took you entering a dream state to be able to hear that person. This is something so mediums who are really good, who can talk to people who've crossed over, they're able to enter that that sort of receptive state at will, you're able to train that. It's also why meditators like meditation, that centers around learning to quiet the noise in the environment is is an effective and important tool. For, for doing certain types of psychic development, right, being able to tune out the noise and listen to the signal that you want to listen to. And tuning is a really great

way of describing what the brain does. Okay? I personally, and I'm not alone in this, this is not my theory. I personally do not believe that consciousness that human consciousness or any consciousness is located in the brain. I believe that consciousness is non local, and outside of time, however, I believe that the brain, the human brain, and in my case, hope I have a human brain. Some people might say that I have a monkey brain. But as far as I know, I have a human brain. And I believe that the human brain is a receiver, very much like a radio receiver of consciousness, the signal of consciousness, right? When we go to sleep for the night, we the our brain, even though the sensory input is still coming in our brain changes frequencies, right and tunes out, tunes out the input, but also tunes, you know, changes to a different frequency of consciousness. And this is exactly what's going on with people who are clairvoyant, intuitive. Our mediums are our shamanic practitioners. They're people who have learned to intentionally change the frequency they're receiving, you know, they're receiving signals on in their brain. They're changing, they're, they're changing their consciousness. And there is evidence, there is a lot of research around the nonlocality of, of consciousness. Consciousness, if you think about it, right? consciousness is what we call a nominalization. A nominalization is a noun, it's a thing that you cannot you could not put in a wheelbarrow, right? So it's a noun, it's, we're talking about a process, something that is happening, but it's not a physical object, right? Most nouns are like, pen, table, lamp. ship, right. If you had a big enough wheelbarrow, you could put a ship in it. So consciousness, right consciousness, love, respect all these things. These are, these are nouns but they you couldn't put them in a wheelbarrow, they're formless. These are foremost nouns. And consciousness is a formless noun, we so often associate, ourselves or consciousness with our physical reality with our physical body, with a physical brain, with our sense organs, all of those things. Um, just empirically, I do not believe that to be the case, I do not believe that brain, the human brain is the source of consciousness, but it is a receiver of consciousness. And just like a radio set, you can tune that receiver to different channels, the brain is an absolutely amazing organ, it is an amazing thing that we have the fact that we're able to use it to tune consciousness, right. But saying that it's the source of consciousness is a little bit like saying, the radio show you're listening to, is actually generated by the radio. Right? The podcast that you're listening to, I'm sitting in my living room, talking into a microphone, I am not sitting inside your, you know, your computer or your phone and talking to you. So your computer, your phone is not the source of this podcast, the source of this podcast is, you know, me talking into a microphone. And yes, there's all kinds of stuff going on. As I talk into a microphone, my voice, the sound waves are changing to an electrical signal, which is digitized and recorded and then uploaded and downloaded and all kinds of stuff are going on. But it wouldn't be right to say that your phone, your computer is the source of this podcast in the same way. That is not correct, in my opinion, to say that the brain is the source of consciousness. Right? And so what happens when we die and I realized that's probably a whole other podcast, what happens when we die and the brain ceases to function or consciousness does not go away. It is not it is just not being received anymore by this body. Mind this brain is shut down. This brain is no longer functioning. But consciousness is non local. So it's it carries on. And trust me like this is

you know, this is something I experience every day as a shamanic practitioner, conscious being elsewhere. Okay, so I've talked a lot about dreams and a lot of the different categories of dreams. And I really like I want to talk a little bit about lucid dreaming. And if you haven't heard that term before, lucid dreaming is when you are dreaming. And you know that you're dreaming, if you've ever been in the dream and known that you were dreaming. That technically is what a lucid dream is. But there are a lot of other implications of the term lucid dreaming. One of the implications of lucid dreaming is that you can take control of the content of your dream, right. I do know people who lucid dream really regularly, and they're able to sort of shape their dreams into whatever, whatever they want. And there's lots of reasons to do that some of those esoteric, some of those merely recreational imagine, you could go anywhere in the world you want on vacation, do anything you want, eat anything you want, hang out with anything you want, and have a conversation with anything you want, that can be expressed through lucid dreaming. Um, what's going on with lucid dreaming in, you know, my take on this is that the, you know, so you're, you're there, your brain is not a simple system. And so, actually tuning to two different frequencies at the same time. So part of your brain that would normally be asleep, the cut, you know, the conscious, you know, what we might consider a sort of the conscious waking state of the brain is actually awake and active, and the dreaming part of the brain is active at the same time. And those signals kind of mixed together. And you can take control of the dream. And this is, this is pretty interesting. So this, as well brings me to another type of dream, another sort of category of dream that I have experienced myself and I know people have experienced and you know, I don't know how common it is. But is the category of dream I would call actually soul travel. And it is more common, in my opinion with lucid dreaming. And this is where the part of your, you know, your consciousness that we might refer to as your astral body, which is a semi formless body, but can you know you can perceive it as having the same shape and characteristics of your body? is able to travel? Right, able to go around looking on friends, talk to people talk to ghosts, go to heaven? Who knows? Right? wherever you want to go? How is this differentiated where like? So I want to talk a little bit about how this travel takes place. And I'll I'll use this to segue into talking about astral projection and astral travel as well. Where are you traveling? How are you traveling? How you know what? What's sort of the mechanisms involved here. These soul travel dreams are very closely related to astral projection, and they're very closely related to shamanic journeying. And so what happens is this formless part of you is traveling in other realms, and so in demonic terms, the world that we live in, in ordinary reality in your conscious waking state, the physical world that you walk through, we refer to this as the middle world. And the middle world

is also sort of a shorthand for the spiritual template, the formless templates in which ordinary reality exists. And I use the metaphor if you've ever had, like, if you're my age, you remember in school, teachers used to use overhead projectors, and they would have these clear sheets that they would project up onto the screen and they could write on them or they would have stuff printed on them and you could stack one on top of the other, or you might have seen in a book somewhere where you have these Clear acetate sheets maybe have saved the human body. And you can peel back the layer that has the skin on it and see the muscles and the organs and you peel back the muscles in the organs. And underneath that is the skeletal system. And you can fold it all over. And those, you know, shining light through them, you can kind of see all of those layers. The middle world is like that, right? The middle world is made up of lots and lots of different sort of frequencies of things. So we have this very physical reality that we move through every day. And we have physical light that we see and all these things. But every object every being that we encounter, in physical, everyday ordinary reality, has a spiritual counterpart, right? The chair you're sitting on is a spirit tool thing. As an object, it has a spiritual component, which if you were doing shamanic journeying, soul travel, astral projection, you would, you would see that you would see that in and might be a little different, because you're only because your perception is changing, you've shifted your consciousness. So this this sort of spiritual overlay of the middle world, the middle world, the spiritual aspects of the middle world, is also where we encounter sort of what I might call nature spirits, mythological creatures. You know, things like ghosts, right, a lot of paranormal phenomena happens in the middle world. And because, because the middle world frequency is, you know, the spiritual component frequency is very close to the physical world, sometimes, that's when we can have this paranormal stuff that affects the physical world. Okay. And when I talk about nature spirits for a moment, just really briefly, because that again, that's a whole other podcast. Um, so every culture that I can think of has some sort of concept of a nature spirit, right? So in sort of, in the, in the UK and Ireland, and you know, Scotland, Wales, so England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, sort of the Celtic areas of the world, we have things like fairies, Pixies brownies, the fairy faith is still in many areas of the world taken very, very, very seriously. In Hawaii, they have lots of spiritual creatures. But when I think of like, fairies, Pixies brownie sprites, they have what are called the mental hooni. And the men of hooni are these like little people, right? So they, these little spiritual people exist in so many cultures around the world. And so sort of Nordic countries, right, Scandinavian countries. You know, I don't know all of the words for them, but they have, you know, trolls, and elves, and, you know, that sort of thing. So all of those sort of little people, which is a weird word for it, because they're all different sizes. But, you know, these spiritual creatures, in these folk belief systems aren't just, they're not, for lack of a better term fairy tales. They're real, they're real creatures, that people who have spiritual sight can interact with. And, and I have, you know, I have certainly done a fair bit of work with nature spirits, there are religions existing to this day that that deal with them. A lot of a lot of folk religion, from Africa, to Australia, to the Pacific islands to United States, or, you know, the Continental North America, South America, not just the United States, but indigenous cultures throughout the world

have these nature spirits, and they all have different names, and they all have different characteristics because they're filtered through the consciousness, but what's going on here? What's going on with these cultures that were separate, you know, separated for, you know, for ever geographically separated and, you know, didn't necessarily have any recent interaction, any historical interaction or even like, you know, interaction with 10s of 1000s of years. How did they all spontaneously generate the same thing? Well, they didn't. I can, I can tell you that nature spirits are are real. And I will do a whole entire podcast on them, but we experienced them in the middle world. leprechauns sprites fairies can Tom lay men hooni I cannot. Someday I'll see if I can find a reference to to maybe there's probably hundreds and hundreds of names from all in all different countries, all different cultures for, for these nature spirits. And so you don't have to necessarily believe me, but I, you know, I believe in them and I have interacted them with them in shamanic journey. So sometimes, so these soul journeys, for the most part happened in the middle world, right? If you've ever dreamed of like, checking in on something or experiencing something, and then happens, some pre cognitive stuff is middle world. And the thing is this spirit world, the formless because you know, I'm not a physicist, I'm not a quantum physicist or physicist of any kind. But time and matter are really closely interlinked in ordinary reality, so when you get outside of the space, where things are solid and made of matter, time starts to break down. So that's why we can, you know, journey into the past journey into the future. Because those things like our human minds are going to place them in time. But they're not necessarily, you know, going to make exact sense, it's not going to be as linear, as we experience going through life in ordinary reality. Right, because time, really, really starts to break down. And I have had some pre cognitive experiences in journeys that have been sort of a sort of blown me away, you know, experience things that have that have come to pass. And I, you know, certainly have talked to people who have had had dreams where that's also the case. So soul journey, and let's, you know, so sojourning happens to, in my experience, primarily during lucid dreaming, happens primarily in the middle world, although when you're lucid dreaming, you can do things like fly, go through walls, that sort of thing. Because the part of you that's traveling is not made out of matter, in the way that we think of it. It's not made out of physical material. It is, um, you know, non physical, so you can defy the laws of physics. Most of them anyway, as far as I know, I don't have haven't tested a lot of a lot of physical experience experiments, while lucid dreaming, but maybe that'll be a thing. So yeah, I mean, and you can, it's beyond the scope of this podcast, but you can train yourself to lucid dream. You know, it takes a little bit of doing but it's not, it's not incredibly challenging to do, you will not be successful 100% of the time, but you know, you can get some successes. And there is a bounty of things that can happen from lucid dreaming, right, from being able to experience things to rehearsing activities to taking advantage of, you know, the dream state to do some spiritual work. That's lucid dreaming. And when you're traveling in the middle world, in a lucid dream, you're essentially doing the same thing is what we call astral projection, or astral traveling. The difference with astral, the only difference in my opinion, between astral projection and soul travel in dreams is that with astral projection, you are not dreaming. You're not asleep. Right? So, people do these meditation exercises to get into the right brain states, but they are they have not fallen asleep. And they're able to

separate their astral body from their physical body. Some portion of it, you're actually what you're doing is you're splitting off some piece of consciousness from your soul. And I'm able to travel that way in in the middle world. I will caution this. This is my I don't. I don't use scare tactics, tactics just to scare people. But when I teach people to journey to do shamanic journeys, which is basically the same thing as astral travel. Middle world journeys are not always 100% safe, and some of the risks of of traveling in the middle world without what I would call likes. demonic protection without taking steps to make sure that you're safe. You know, include you may you may encounter spirits that don't have your best interest at heart, you may encounter spirits that can drain you of energy that can attach to you that can do you know, some do some things that can cause some physical effects, right can cause you to get sick. Can you know if you've been doing this kind of work and you start having in your in, you know, you're not, if you've been doing a lot of astral travel practice or you've been, I don't know, playing with journeying in the middle world without proper training or that sort of thing. And you start to experience symptoms of psychosis, like breaks from reality, like when you're in ordinary reality, it's time to seek out a shaman and get some help for that. Could be lots of things. But you may have picked up a hitchhiker, which some people call possession. I don't need to find a better word for that. Because when I say position, people think of the movie The Exorcist, and they think it's like a demon is taking over their body, that's not always the case. Sometimes spirit will just follow you home. Because if you see them, they can see you kind of thing. And sometimes you're intruding on a territory. You know, nature, spirits can be territorial, they can be protectors of space, it's important to have good relationships with them. So you know, just be cautious when you're experimenting with this stuff. I know there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff out there about astral travel. And if you you have to imagine a silver cord back to your body. And if you don't, you know, if the silver cord gets severed, you'll die. And I you know, that's not my experience. That is, I don't know where that comes from. Maybe that's true. I mean, there are there are what we call a theory cords that attach people to things and to other people and all that sort of thing. Um, you know, and that's just the different to me and it's just a different phenomenon. When I journey I don't have to visualize or think about or, I've never even experienced a chord like that and I'm able to journey which brings me to shamanic journeying, which I've talked about a little bit already, but what, what are shamans doing when they journey when they go into trance and they journey? So a shamanic journey consists of three components. A shaman alters their state of consciousness, right goes into a trance travels in non ordinary reality. Right? So that's exactly what we're talking about here with astral projection and sometimes lucid dreaming soul travel. And the shaman the important differences is shum always works with helping spirits, right? We form alliances with spirits. Normally, if you're a shamanic practitioner, normally, you'll start to build relationships with lots of helping spirits. Because it can be like specialists, right? I work with one helping spirit for soul retrieval. I work with another one for doing past life work. I work with another one for doing, you know, divination, you know, they sort of specialize. But so. shamans, you know, the big, the big difference here between somebody who's just astrally projecting or whatever is that shamans are working with helping spirits will they do this?

The other the other aspect that comes from training and shamanism is that shamans don't only work in the middle world. shamans work in lots of different worlds, you know, a very broad, you know, painting, painting the spiritual world with a very broad brush. You know, the shamans generally work in what we call the lower world, middle world and upper worlds. But there are infinite worlds. And these are just really big distinctions. It's sort of like somebody's asking me for my address. And I say I live in the Milky Way galaxy. Right. So if you addressed if you wrote me a letter and addressed it to the Milky Way galaxy, it's probably not going to find its way to my house. So These are broad strokes, and it just helps us sort of talk about things. So the practice of shamanism over you know, over a really long period of time as you practice and you learn different ceremonies and you learn different healing techniques and you learn all these things. You know, part of what you're doing is you're also exploring other worlds and bringing back information, healing energy, all kinds of things, if you work with, if you work on behalf of yourself, or you work on behalf of clients, or you work on behalf of a community, you know, and then a lot of indigenous cultures, you know, shamans work for a, you know, whatever tribal unit they're a part of, right, they're doing lots of work for everything from determining the best time to plant corn to, um, you know, interpreting the dreams of an elders to, you know, doing his, you know, actual physical healing work. That sort of thing because shamans traditionally, have played the roles of doctors, spiritual leaders, storytellers, all all kinds of things. There are ways that the, the archetype of the shaman plays out and all these things. So all these things that I've mentioned, so soul journeying during dreaming and lucid dreaming, astral projection, shamanic journeying. They're all very related activities. And the reason we're able to do these is because human beings have, you know, all human beings have a number of things in common we all have. We all have consciousness, we all have soul bodies, we all have spirit, we all have a theory of bodies we all have, we're all made up of the same stuff. We're all very, very, very different. Right? No two people are alike. Everybody has different DNA. Everybody has different thoughts and feelings, and aspirations and all of those things. But we have a lot of stuff in common. We all breathe oxygen, we all have blood in our arteries and veins. We all have hearts and lungs. And you know, that sort of thing. on a physical level, and on a spiritual level, we have sort of the same thing. We're all made up of the same stuff in the same way. Even if you don't think you dream, you do. Right, you just don't remember. And I believe that anybody can learn how to how to do a shamanic journey. I'm firmly convinced that anybody can learn how to do a shamanic journey. Does that make everybody a great candidate for being a shamanic healer? No, I don't think so. It's sort of like saying, every anybody can learn how to throw a baseball. But not everybody can be a major league baseball pitcher, right? Everybody can, you know, learn how to apply a bandaid to somebody's arm, but not everybody can be a surgeon, right? You know, on one part, it's it's a matter of there is a matter of makeup, some of the differences and makeup. But on the other hand, it's it is also a matter of extensive training and focus. You know, if somebody was really, really, somebody has the calling to learn the stuff, they they will, they will learn it, they will do it.

But there's certain things that certain things that happen that we know culturally, that that make people naturally better at this stuff. Right? And so, for example, if you were, if you were a person who was genetically very tall, you might have a advantage playing basketball over somebody who is much shorter, somebody who's much shorter, learn how to play basketball and be a professional basketball player. Sure, absolutely has happened, right? There have been some shorter basketball players. It's rare though, right? Because there's certain advantages from being born tall. And not to say they, you know, shamanism is a genetic thing, but there's certain life experiences that make a shamanic calling, more likely to happen and that make you better at dissociating from your body. Which is kind of what we're doing. When we journey. We are leaving our body to take a trip. So that is a lot of information. This has been i don't know i hope packed full of information and interesting and I hope you learn something today. I will be Hopefully bringing on won't not hopefully I will be bringing on more guests on my podcast I'm very excited about some of them coming up. I would be remiss if I did not mention that tomorrow. The day after this podcast goes out is St. Patrick's Day. My grandfather was was Irish, so I guess I feel a special I feel a special kins kinship with the Irish because I'm, you know, I'm a quarter Irish. And so to those who are to those who are celebrating, and if you are not Irish, but still celebrate Happy St. Patrick's Day. And I look forward to talking to you again. I wish you peace and love and all good things.

Announcer 51:20

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 M A I N E S H A M A N.com