Shamanism Quotes
Shamanism is a path of knowledge, not of faith, and that knowledge cannot come from me or anyone else in this reality. To acquire that knowledge, including the knowledge of the reality of the spirits, it is necessary to step through the shaman's doorway and acquire empirical evidence.
Michael Harner
There is a certain amount of sham in shamanism. There is a certain amount of theatre. It's as loosely knit as that. We're sort of coming out of the closet a bit more over the next couple of years. We're going to be bringing out – manifesto's too pushy a word – if it's a theatre of marvels, we're bringing out a theatre programme in the next couple of years. We're working on it at the moment – our unified field theory of spookiness where we try to explain everything from language, consciousness, grey aliens to Rosicrucianism or whatever. It is a grand, mad theory which I'm working my best on at the moment to make it rational. It is an anti-rationalistic theory but I'm trying to couch it in rational terms so that it is not as insular as a lot of magic stuff.
Alan Moore
If a state political organization is founded in part upon a state religion with a dogma based on one or a few 'official' prophets, then shamanism, where every shaman is her or his own prophet, is dangerous to the state. [...] Shamanism, as I said, is not a religion. The spiritual experience usually becomes a religion after politics has entered into it.
Michael Harner
It isn't that a warrior learns shamanism as time goes by; rather, what he learns as time goes by is to save energy. This energy will enable him to handle some of the energy fields which are ordinarily inaccessible to him. Shamanism is a state of awareness, the ability to use energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the everyday-life world that we know.
Carlos Castaneda