Born A Shaman

Lots of talk about "shamanism" these days. People want to visit exotic countries and adopt the lore of indigenous tribes to turn themselves into shamans. But if you really want to be a shaman, you just need to return to your original nature.

You were a shaman when you were born, a master by the time your were six months old!  Your throat was the rattle, your belly the drum. The sounds you heard in your body were sutras and godspells full of Earth-power. You uttered ecstatic bija mantras as you gurgled milk from your Mother's breast: "Bawa!" "Ma!" "Om!" "Ah!" Hum!"

As a fetus tumbling through the womb, you achieved every healing posture, embodying all the constellations of the zodiac. And in your crib, rolling, stretching, curling, bouncing, you performed the complete sequence of yoga asanas, your wrists and fingers ceaselessly playing in secret mudras of tantric blessing.

Through the soft spot in the crown of your head, star music poured into your body; and whichever way you turned, your vertebrae were aligned with the black hole at the center of the galaxy. In a cave at the core of your brain was a tiny altar, where you hid a medicine bundle called the amygdala.

Whenever you felt a thirst for light, you simply closed your eyes and turned inward, walking down the forest path from your eyeballs to the pineal gland. There, in a wilderness of dendrites, you drank sapphire streams of wisdom from a bottomless well.

Through the radiant field of Astonishment, you absorbed waves of prana from the empty space around you: it was the true ayahuasca. No need to squeeze the sacred soma juice from rare mushrooms: it was the nectar of your own neuro-peptides, streaming from heart to hypothalamus.

The glowing tendrils of your nervous system did not stop at the edge of your flesh, because your flesh had no edges. Your neurons rooted in loam through the soles of your feet; while your eyes, ears, nostrils and tongue entwined with the planets through filaments of radiation.

The vegus nerve, spiraling like a grapevine round your backbone, was the Tree of Life in the Garden of Paradise, your body, its branches sparkling up into the frontal cortex, bearing the fruit of your joy back to the Milky Way.

Thus your human form, streaming with currents of bio-energetic fire, was a Burning Bush that revealed the one and simple commandment, "Love!" And the symmetry of that commandment contained all the laws of nature in its vast singularity.

O yes, there was a Serpent in your Eden, wound at the base of the tree. But the Serpent was not evil, for no evil existed. How could there be original sin where there is only love? You were born to Original Innocence.

Now that serpent was Kundalini Shakti, who did not dispute with Eve, for the Serpent was Eve herself. They were one and the same Goddess.

Therefor, friend, your unfallen nature is pure wonder. And you may return to your nature now, in an instant, by taking this breath. Nay, by receiving this breath. For breath is not taken, but given. And every breath you breathe is the Spirit of the Creator.