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“The dramaturgical structure of a ceremony is not an end in itself but a means to an end – to evoke an altered state of consciousness in the healer/patient/spectators. Primal drama involves a revolution in the experience of reality, a radically transformed space – time experience, a heightened, archetypally and transpersonally orientated level of perception. The altered state is the crowning achievement of the dramatic ritual, initiational-visionary process.
Ceremonies work through symbols. It’s the most effective way to express the abstract forces of nature.
Inner purification comes from sweating, using incense, dancing and singing over a long time, solitude, loss of speech.
Becoming a shaman then is, in the last analysis, nothing but an extension of inner purification. The more transparent the inner world, the more transparent the outer, and the greater the power of magic.
Purification, transparency and magic are the core words of shamanism.
Speechlesness is the sacred language of shamans.
The supreme principle of being is the change back and forth between accumulation and emptying, filling and purging, space and emptiness. The greater the emptiness, the greater the shaman.
Our western culture focuses on accumalation, enrichment, storing up. Other cultures have made emptiness their goal.
Energy/matter is generated spontaneously out of nothingness, resulting in the developing of the material world.
The shaman seeks out emptiness so he can draw fresh knowledge and energy from it.”
