Making reference to the concept of neoshamanism ("new shamanism") in the title of this work is a completely premeditated act. But, what exactly is neoshamanism and why do I label this psychological and existential model as neo-shamanistic? How is shamanism and, by extension, neoshamanism related to the study and management of the different possible levels of human consciousness?
To begin with, it is necessary to clarify that there is not really an exact definition or even a school or current of homogeneous thought which can be included under this term. The concept of shamanism encompasses a diverse set of ritualistic practices, myths, dogmas, beliefs, and religious as well as cultural archetypes. All these have small or large variations according to the ethnic group or tradition involved or the historical period to which they belong. Generally, the rituals practiced are directed and personified by a key figure (man or woman according to the specific tradition) who is present in almost all the tribes and cultures of antiquity – the shaman. These were (and are) considered to be the conduit between the everyday world and the worlds of the dead, the gods and the spirits: a bridge between everyday reality and the realms of energy. The shaman has served as healer and spiritual guide, due specifically to their apparent and extra-ordinary ability to change their states of consciousness. The perceptual modifications to which they subject themselves are frequently induced by the consumption of entheogenic drugs as well as via other means such as repetitive chants or the use of percussion instruments and ritual dances.
The word shaman was introduced in the West by the Russians in the sixteenth century and has its origin in northern Asia. In the twentieth century, the words shaman and shamanism became common thanks to Western academic anthropology’s growing interest in studying and demonstrating the universality of certain practices and paradigms, with components and features more or less common in all continents and different cultures throughout millennia. Shamanism is considered in many cases to be the precursor of modern religions. Religion and shamanism are both interpretive systems that share both the transcendent vision of life and the adoption of dogmas and rituals, the latter carried out and repeated in an intent to connect the ordinary human being with the spiritual world, almost always under the pretense of obtaining some kind of worldly favor or help after death. The beyond is separated from the physical, it is the realm of what is outside of the perception of the everyday world. In traditions that are geographically, culturally and temporally distant, one can find abundant similarities in the categorization of the different spiritual spheres: the heavens, the hells, the worlds of benevolent spirits, those of the demonic spirits, those belonging to the Almighty Creator, and even the worlds of dreams, as well as containers of past and future times. Most of these worlds, except for that of ordinary dreams, are beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. The gap that separates them from our daily experiences has led us to consider these dimensions as ethereal or immaterial in nature. The shaman is recognized, in this way, as the connecting link between the different worlds and, sometimes, between the different times – past, present and future – assuming thus the role of oracle. Nowadays some cultures maintain the figure of the shaman as part of their idiosyncrasy. The title has also been used in various practices associated with Western groups linked to the heterogeneous movement of the New Age. The westernization of shamanism has sown the seed of neoshamanism.
In my particular case, I do not feel close to traditional shamanism. I am neither interested in using drugs nor in practicing rituals – both fundamental elements in these disciplines. Nor is my path that followed by Carlos Castaneda or other shamans of our time, given that I do not belong to a specific tradition or lineage. It is true that, in relation to Castaneda, I share, as much by personal preference as by my own experience, a substantial part of the essence of his theoretical principles. I have been able to experience first-hand and understand at least a significant portion of their tenants and I feel a special affinity for the code of conduct practiced in their lineage and which they called the warrior’s path.
I am not a scientist; nor am I a philosopher, much less a mystic. Therefore, when I categorize myself as a "neoshaman" it is simply a label to make things easier. It is, on the one hand, a declaration of affinity and, on the other, expressing out loud the longing for some of us to be able to leave behind that stale, heavy and simplistic part that is still very present in the spiritual world and in the world of alternative therapies – a result of western culture’s attempt to absorb other ethno-cultural models. The past had its moment and its purpose. Traditions and folklore represent customs or signs of identity that try to hold together peoples or traditions in the face of the unstoppable, and not necessarily negative, process of globalization. I believe that, in this era characterized by the incessant and recurrent emergence of the new, it would be a good strategy to maintain in the present only the essence of the old that will help us to evolve. We can banish everything else without compassion: leaving room for knowledge instead of belief and innovation instead of superstition. In this new era, scientific knowledge, technology, interconnectivity and reason need to be a natural part of the spiritual human being, along with the audacity to explore territories beyond the conventional. I never tire of repeating that we live in a time of unprecedented opportunities in the history of humanity.
Although this is a pseudoscientific model, with sufficient funding, time and resources it could perfectly well become a scientific one. Although it may sound far-fetched, I believe that Emoenergetica and Bioenergetic Resonance could change the paradigms of this society. So, if you dedicate yourself to philanthropy and want to risk something really different, you know where to find me; we will spend the coming decades learning and exploring in ways that had never before been possible.
For now, it remains to be seen if this generation will consolidate new groups of perceivers, explorers of spirituality and conscience that can transcend the heavy and outdated baggage that we drag behind us. For this to happen, it would be necessary to establish common premises, a consensus of basic principles – as the different branches of science do – in order to deepen, share and expand both perception and knowledge.
Either way, I believe Castaneda to be the turning point in the history of modern shamanism. At the end of the 1960s a, then unknown, anthropologist living in Los Angeles, California, published what was to be the first in a series of books, which originally professed to deal with the ritual and medicinal use of hallucinogenic plants by some cultures of Mexican Indians. It focused specifically, by sheer chance, on a particular and closed lineage of shamans belonging to a singular and extremely minority tradition called nagualism. What began as field work, first for a master's degree and then for his doctorate in anthropology, ended up becoming a whole new paradigm about the conscience and spirituality in the West. Carlos Castaneda, as he was known, was a controversial character from start to finish. According to himself, the teachings he received in the world of those shamans affected him in such a way that he had no choice but to become one of them. Despite his massive success, his figure remains veiled in mystery, even after his death in 1998. According to him this was a deliberate effect, the result of an exercise of incessant discipline, practiced for years through the techniques promoted by his shaman teacher – specifically those pertaining to the art of stalking and the part called erasing personal history, essential means in his path to total consciousness through the warrior’s path. Several dates and places of birth, nationalities and different names, as well as the existence of a few photographs that clearly belong to different people, attest to the haze in which Carlos Castaneda was involved. Many believe that Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian of whom he spoke in his books, was only an elaborate literary invention. Castaneda nevertheless repeatedly assured that not only had he shared with him and his group of sorcerers almost 15 years of wanderings and training, but that Don Juan was also a nagual, a man of knowledge, an exceptional human being endowed with a special "energetic" configuration who ended up becoming his teacher and guide.
In my personal opinion, the knowledge system that Castaneda depicted in his books and that appears under such disparate terms as shamanism, witchcraft, nagualism or the path of the warrior seems too impressive to be the invention of a sole individual. Should this be the case, it would likewise be an act of genius for its ability to collect, synthesize, transform and unite a series of old, or rather outdated, ideas and models leaving as a result a heritage perfectly adapted for the human being of the twenty-first century. Reality or fiction, thanks to him one of the conceptual revolutions on the most important issue of consciousness of modernity has begun.
To this day, I have little interest in knowing if the stories that Castaneda relates in his 13 books are mere tales or, as he affirmed until the end, true autobiographical experiences. The truth is that if you study the work with adequate depth, what is found is a tremendously compact knowledge system at the psychological, philosophical, transcendent – and, most importantly, practical – level. Over the years I have met a multitude of people who have boasted of having read Castaneda (and even of having known him). Surprisingly, it has been extremely rare for me to come across those who have studied his work in depth, much less those who have understood it and put it into practice. Castaneda's oeuvre is an advocacy for the magical side of human beings, of that "immaterial" side of human nature. I do not believe it to be about the use of psychotropic drugs as many think, having superficially come into contact with his first books, nor about ancient cultures, nor about strange rituals. Everything in his teaching revolves around attention as a basic element of reality and the almost infinite possibilities available to human beings by means of the controlled use of perception. Castaneda insistently emphasizes the idea that we have, or could have, a destiny as luminous beings beyond our physical and social dimension.
Moreover, by means of the voice of Don Juan, Castaneda points again and again to the keys of our disaster as humankind, through our lack of awareness that we are much more than a physical body. We are a luminous cocoon that is in turn a transforming receptacle of the most fascinating energy in the universe: awareness. His legacy is that of a guide who challenges the seeker to decipher the proposed riddles, although often in a covert manner, so that each one can verify the truth and validity of the teaching of their own accord. Through his books, he reveals an inflexible and impeccable attempt to catalyze and keep awake the thirst to cross traditional cognitive limits, maintaining sobriety at all times – since madness or stupidity are enemies of knowledge. On the way, the practitioner is allowed to saturate themselves again and again with amazement and wonder as they fill themselves to the brim with love for life. Castaneda managed to reach the general public, but, nevertheless, he himself told how he had paid a great price to have broken and far exceeded the boundaries within which academic anthropology remains. Ultimately, his work has not been considered or recognized as a true anthropological study. But the truth is that even so its impact on Western culture (thanks to its enormous publishing success, with more than 50 million books sold) is beyond what many recognize, permeating – almost inadvertently – a part of Western thought, psychology, neurosciences, physics and even cinema and art.
Almost inadvertently – or perhaps on purpose – Castaneda began a reconfiguration of the very idea of shamanism itself, sowing the seed of neoshamanism (although, as far as I know, he did not use this term). He established a fundamental separation between traditional witchcraft (cultural shamanism) – which lasts to this day through healers, herbalists, seers, charlatans and santeros among others – and the unusual nagual traditions. According to him, his teacher Don Juan was the guardian of a line of the latter. Despite being a Yaqui Indian of origin, Don Juan claimed that the time of Western thought had arrived and that ancestral knowledge should be translated into academic language (which is why he gave Castaneda the task of writing books), leaving behind all the cultural, folkloric cultural and ritualistic baggage. In this sense, Don Juan was a revolutionary within his tradition; Castaneda was his herald and at the same time, like Don Juan, a nagual.
Within this system the naguals (men or women) were distinguished by the double nature of their luminous cocoon, unlike most people who have a simple cocoon. This special morphology is what would grant the naguals the possibility of being masters of others – provided that they had previously developed their potential.
I have previously pointed out the dual nature of reality – physical and subtle. The energy body is made of subtle matter and energy, while the physical body is comprised of physical matter and energy. The luminous cocoon encompasses the physical body, its associated subtlesoma, the energetic body, the mind and the world. The luminous cocoon, in reality, is the complete attentional bubble associated with an individual. The energy body or soul would evolve through the experiences associated with a physical body and would be linked, by its nature, to awareness, which in turn would be the most essential component of reality.
All the teachings of nagualism revolve around the controlled expansion of ordinary perception until it becomes extraordinary. This would be a fundamental means of increasing consciousness to the point of being completely transformed by it, body and soul; leaving our egoistic side (which we will talk about later) behind and thus reaching the possibility of total freedom, to then continue to evolve beyond the limitations of our current stage as human beings. For this to happen, it is necessary not only to understand, but to individually witness the ultimate nature of life, death, attention, matter, energy and even that of the Spirit. The naguals of a particular line act as guardians and transmitters of accumulated knowledge within their closed lineages; they form their own groups of apprentices and take care to choose and instruct a teacher for the next generation. Thus they ensure the perpetuation of inherited knowledge, enhancing it as much as possible in order to deposit it and store it in a cognitive framework that they call the Rule. Yet Castaneda was different: his personal configuration was that of a nagual at the end of the cycle, a phenomenon that, apparently, only happens once in many generations of naguals. As such, his mission was to finish his lineage, something that was already contemplated in the Rule. For this reason he left neither successor nor students. His style of spreading knowledge was in an open way, through his books, which he said were the seeds of an opportunity to help the awakening of many individuals throughout the world, opening a new stage in which perhaps some could develop without having had a teacher. I consider myself to be the heir of one of those seeds.
The influence of Castaneda's work permeates my very being and is somehow part of who I am. The fact that he was not my teacher nor I his student is precisely what has allowed my independence to open a new path of knowledge, which was unprecedented until now. I am someone who did not settle for what they saw or what others said. I perceive the nature of everyday reality and also the non-ordinary reality through modalities and parameters that are, to date, unprecedented. In addition, I perceive emotions as energy bands, I explain, define and relate them in ways that I did not think were possible. Nevertheless, seeing is not enough, I am also interested in understanding. I am fully engaged in a creative, research and developmental process that involves the rest of my life. I walk this path in spite of the enormous personal challenge that I have to constantly struggle to maintain my balance by being considered an outcast, both by the conventional world and by the "alternative" one. This path is a personal choice and, in any case, I believe that neither discomfort nor harshness should ever be the driving force. For me it is the fascination, the opportunity to be alive and to know; this is the strength that marks out my path and that urges me to take advantage of every moment because I keep in mind that one day I will die.
Although I do not like it, I nonetheless accept the fact that the collective consensus is not (yet) ready for the work of trying to understand, let alone accept, most of the knowledge that I am retrieving. Even many of those who shout to the four winds about how interested they are in knowing the mysteries of life are, at the moment of truth, still trapped in the same routines as the rest, only even more deceived. I'm not talking about needing to spend time in a cave: I believe that the spirituality of the twenty-first century must occur within the world in which we live, not outside it. I find myself, however, constantly with people who do accept the challenge of going against the current, individuals who struggle on a daily basis to keep the flame of inner longing burning. We move forward together, learning a little more each day.
Want to know more? www.emoenergetica.com
Neoshamanism by Chema Sanz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.