My Predestined Date With Shamanism

Here’s what I did pick up: Shamanism is a culture relegated to a spiritual society. It’s formed out of everyday experiences that are based on a spiritual journey. It’s people engaging themselves and their environment in order to alter their current state of emotional being, consciousness, and essence. Clearly.

According to the shamans, through spiritual guidance, trances, and a retraining of the mind, one will experience a change of self. They say that once you unlock these techniques in the altered reality, you can work through the hierarchy of mastery into your own reality of daily life and invoke your principal guide through any and all situations.

Sounds like a great video game.

There is no dogma that you have to believe in; you just need to explore what’s already inside of you. Oh, and then there are the “principal guides”: they are omniscient, always truthful, knowing, and well-connected with all OTHER spirits. I wondered if I could find him, her, or it on Twitter. So how does one summon the principal guide? Well, according to Hamilton the guide comes from the invocation of the definition itself. No, I don’t get it either and I live in California, the weed smoking capital of the United States.

Tangible experiences however, are things I can wrap my head around. The first exercise involved a clear cubed space that roughly comprised the size of the ballroom. There is a clear wall in front of you, one behind you, a surface below you, to the side of you, and above you. They’re everywhere, man.

You are standing inside the space. You pick up the rubber ball that is on the floor next to you. You bounce it and catch it in your hands. As I’ve added “ball bouncing” to my list of life experiences, I know the ball’s texture, what it looks like, and can hear the sound of the ball hitting the ground and popping back up. OK, done.

Next, you bring a glowing sphere into your space. So there’s your space, your ball, your glowing sphere, and you are currently standing in the middle of the sphere in the middle of the space. Fine.

Now, bring in a red disk. OK, subconscious: you know what a disc looks like and what you associate with the color red, now place that in your space with your ball and your sphere. Now add an orange disc. Now add a yellow one. A green one. And then a blue disc, a purple disc, and finally an indigo disc. Indigo, really? Whatever, all right.

Now jump from disc to disc. Great. Tack a door onto your blank space, open it and walk into a new space that isn’t clear but rather blue. Meanwhile, Hamilton quickly chanted ROYGBIV as participants manipulated the different colored spaces, jumping through time until their partially digested granola began to climb back up their throats. Imagine the acid trip boat rides and the glass elevator scenes from Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. Yeah, it was kinda like that.