paleo ancestors inhabiting temperate and tropical ecosystems had no contemporary diet-related diseases, they did suffer dis-eases, and generally had”medicine men, “likewise known amongst anthropologists as “shamans.” As a medical system, shamanism preserves that many obviously physical dis-eases have spiritual causes. Indigenous/shamanic tribal cultures “think” that spirits exist and play functions in individual, tribal, and ecological health. Shamanic interventions resolve injuries affecting the soul/spirit through direct interaction with the spiritual realm, achieved through altered states of awareness that supply entrance to a non-ordinary reality.All this talk

of spirits definitely makes anxiety for modern-day “scientific” atheists and Judeo-Christian religionists alike. The previous will dismiss such talk as mumbo-jumbo without empirical basis, a threat to rationality and logic. They will tend to dismiss shamanism as dealing with non-existent “supernatural” entities. The latter believe that for some odd reason the One Real God decided to reveal himself and the Guidelines for the Right Method of Life just to the members of a number of middle Eastern desert tribes, leaving everybody else in the dark. They also think that this God offered these selected people not just the right but the duty to convert all other people to their faith and method of life, if not by persuasion then by force. These individuals call non-believers by various names like heretic, infidel, heathen, pagan, and so on, and have called shamanic culture “demonic.”

In either case, shamanism directly completes with the “authorities.” Atheists might consider shamans a risk to the authority of “reason,” science, and researchers, and religionists certainly consider shamans a danger to the authority of their faith, dogma, and priests. Shamanism originates from non-hierarchical tribal culture in which nobody has supreme authority over another, and hence it disputes with civilization and all types of authority.To illustrate

the modern discomfort with shamanism, in 1892, in a speech at the Smithsonian Institution, John Bourke called shamans “an influence antagonistic to the fast absorption of brand-new custom-mades” and stated “just after we have completely routed the medication guys from their entrenchments and made them a things of ridicule can we [whites] hope to bend and train the minds of our Indian wards in the direction of civilization.”

Shamanism as Speculative Science

Shamanism refers to a universal conceptual structure discovered amongst native, uncivilized (i.e. politically unstratified), tribal people. It includes the “belief” that nature (the world) has two aspects, the normal world, accessed through regular consciousness, and the spiritual world, accessed through an altered state of awareness, or “trance,” induced by shamanic practices such as repetitive drumming, fasting, or organic drugs. According to shamanic theory, the spiritual and normal worlds communicate continually, and a shamanic practitioner can acquire understanding about ways to alter or to assist interaction with normal reality by taking direct action in the spiritual aspect of the world.Importantly, according

to the shamanic point of view, the spiritual realm is NOT what both atheists and theists would call”supernatural.”The spiritual world explained by shamans does not lie beyond nature or experience. On the contrary, similar to gravitational force and the subatomic world of quarks and photons, likewise invisible in normal states of consciousness, the shamanic spiritual realm occurs as part and parcel of nature.I put the words”belief”in quotation marks because, unlike modern faiths, the shamanic” belief”in a dual aspect world is not faith-based. Rather, it arises from direct and replicable experiences caused by particular, repeatable procedures. That makes it a speculative science, not a faith system.To wit, the native belief in a spiritual world and spiritual entities is no more”mystical “than the belief that the normal contemporary educated person has in quarks and other subatomic particles. It might be less so.The common contemporary individual’s belief in subatomic particles is based on rumor and authority, not on direct experience. To get anything like a direct experience of subatomic particles, you need to go through a specific procedure. You have to complete adequate training in the conceptual framework understood as modern-day physics, which will prepare you to perform specific types of experiments and supply you with the conceptual tools you will need to analyze certain types of information(e.g. particle movements in a cloud chamber)as evidence of the existence of quarks. Few people have completed the required training and experiments, that makes modern physics a type of non-ordinary understanding of a non-ordinary reality accessed straight by just a few people, the high priests of physics. The rest of us accept their description of subatomic worlds on faith.In contrast, the normal tribal human’s belief in a spiritual world occupied by spiritual entities is based on individual direct experience of that realm and those entities

by following particular speculative treatments, i.e. inducing non-ordinary states of awareness utilizing shamanic methods such as recurring drumming, fasting, vision missions, dreams, or organic drugs. Thus, we should not confuse neolithic religion with paleolithic spiritual experience. The typical modern follower in God does so not based upon experience, but on doctrine or hearsay. In contrast, shamans do not”believe”in spirits, they in fact understand and work with them directly in altered states of consciousness.I desire to stress that the shamans’ claims about a spiritual realm are as clinical as the physicists’claims about quarks. They are open to verification by speculative treatment. If you have not carried out the experiments yourself, you actually are not in

a position to deny the claims of the shamans or the physicists. Likewise, if you wish to verify(or disagreement )the claims made on basis of these experiments, whether shamanic or modern physics, you will have to do the conceptual training and the experiments yourself. Philosophers stone– picked views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk