Shamanism, God and Religion.

REVISED and UPDATED. Oct 2018....

One of the benefits of shamanism is that it is a practical way to rekindle our spirituality because it helps to re-new our understanding and feelings with respect to God and Religion.
Religion, far from being a name to describe different institutions built up around one or another expression of spirituality, means to make reverence to or communion with God or Gods and Goddesses.
Shamanism is, essentially a method of direct communion with the spiritual reality and is the origin of religious expression for it is direct communion with spirit as revealed through nature.
The institutionalised religions have distanced God from Man but our connection to the spirit can be awoken with the help of the spirit beings most readily accessible to us; the elemental spirits of the plants, the earth, the air, the fire and water and being part of God these beings will act as bridges for us in order that we can receive revelation, insight, inspiration and approach the spirit anew learning for ourselves through our lived experience.
God is not a dirty word.
The word God has been abused by the impostors that have infiltrated religion and imposed their mental model. Religions have been taken over, in many cases, by people that are not God conscious, although they may give the appearance of being pious or saintly. They have made God into a distant figure hidden from the view of all but those that make themselves into an elite and proclaim themselves to be the "holy ones" or the “chosen few”.

Those that are truly "chosen", however are those that have a living communion with God inside their hearts and who live by the hearts law. In other words it is we that choose to enter into communion with God and not that God chooses us because we belong to some particular sect, social class, priesthood or whatever. The secrecy around certain kinds of spiritual practices and rituals can have a valid reason in that in order to enter the realms that can be accessed through ritual a preparation and orientation are necessary. However, the flip side of this has been the creation of elites that abuse that secrecy for their own ends. Today we hear much about this and of the existence of different secret societies that attempt to control world events. Many of those societies started out as genuine esoteric orders dedicated to discovering inner wisdom and doing so hermetically because of the need to protect those teachings from people who would use them for selfish ends. However many of them became corrupted from within because they forgot to keep checking that they also didn't use such secrets for egotistical gain... hence the confusion sometimes about whether the Templars or the Masons are good or evil (etc.)

God is not an old tyrant in the sky that goes around sadistically punishing sinners;

God is the living presence, the flame of life, being, is-ness, spirit, intelligence, and light. God is that which a child feels when in innocent awe at the immensity of the sky and the wonder of creation but we have been taught in schools that God and religion are houses of greyness and repression where the imagination and freedom of a child is frowned upon. In school we were taught to feel God as colourlessness and guilt in boring sermons uttered by religious education teachers.

Yet, to imagine is to see and to see is to perceive that creation is full of beauty, harmony, intelligence, wonder, and connection.
In shamanism, by accessing our internal world, our feelings, thoughts, dreams, visions and ideas we learn to open our eyes anew and see that the force of life itself is fire and light, is consciousness, the seeing eye, the feeling heart, the breathing air and through the energy of life itself we can connect with being and being is God.

All we need to do is open our minds and see, for it is the mind that is like a steel trap that blocks our vision.

Cosmology & Cosmo-vision.

Over time religion has become less a matter of direct experience and connection with the spiritual dimensions and more and more a thing of books, dogmas, superficial interpretations and something onto which humanity projects its inner conflicts and traumas. This rigidity has pushed many people away from the spirit and confused people into seeing God as a punishing tyrant and as a result many people become atheists.

The error here is not with God or any of the God’s and Goddesses that are aspects of the one God. The error is in the human consciousness (or lack thereof).

If we analyse the word Cosmology we can observe that the root of ology is from Greek logos, which is verb or word. Cosmology is DESCRIPTION IN WORDS of the cosmos. The word was always sacred and in oral form as living sound the sacred verb re-news creation – for this reason in shamanism the chants and invocations are so important BUT the other side of this is that once “the word” i.e. the description of the revelation, is written down the mind tends to reduce the written words to DOGMAS… this is, largely what has happened to most religions, especially the Judeo-Christian ones.

Religion has become DOGMA.. Even the most enlightened teachings can be twisted and turned into a mental prison in which people fight over interpretations.
For this reason its important to re-new with art, poetry and music and to understand that it was not for nothing that many traditions did not write down the wisdom and that the tradition was ORAL.

Cosmo-vision is based upon the CONSTANT OBSERVATION…

It is interesting to ask why the more dogmatic expressions of religion enclose the people in churches where THEY CAN’T SEE THE SKY and are forced to access “the word” through a sermon giving priest. Those kind of religions form cabals of learning among the “select” and even go as far as naming whole peoples or races as “The Chosen people.” They are the ones that decide what is right and wrong, what mode of life people should adopt, what taboos they should have and in general the over-riding societal morality.

The peoples that choose to have COSMO VISION instead of lots of OLOGIES have temples of astronomical observation where the cosmos is observed and where the manifestations of the wonder of creation are visible for the people in general, the same with the use of the sacred and psychoactive plants.. The connection is direct and leads to experience with the supreme personality of God – leads to direct inner knowledge. This is precisely what those obsessed with control of man and society do not want, for this is the way that our spirits can be free.

Shamanism takes us back to the origin and back to an awareness of our interior world. The sacred plants are especially helpful in this.
The fact that such plants have often been made illegal is a reflection of the tendency to push away into the realms of subversion the elements that we have been come scared of… the thing we are most scared of is ourselves and of seeing ourselves as we really are.
Religion in reality, in being communion with God is also communion with ourselves, it is the seeking of God inside us and shamanism helps to comprehend and to clean and heal all that which has become a block inside us to our inner journey.
As the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung said in the introduction of his book "Psychology and Alchemy"; true religion is something that has to be lived in the psyche or soul (psyche=soul) and religious feeling emerges from the soul through its own experience. He was much criticised for this stance by dogmatic religious types (not surprisingly) but Jung had a lifetime of experience and he observed that the psychological problems experienced by many people.. i.e. the illness of their souls, was precisely because a direct experience of the spiritual realities which human beings need to feel truly healthy and whole was in some way denied and prohibited by the dogmatic rules of religion and society, leading to an inner emptiness and dis-satisfaction with life, hence the kind of modern psychological illness that is so common to day in the advanced technological societies.

Jung leant more and more over his lifetime toward the techniques of meditation, of shamanism and direct experience (GNOSIS) as being the keys to comprehension of all of these mysteries of life, death and the soul. We would add that, further on from this, the sacred plant and the shamanic techniques teach us to explore and know ourselves and our souls, showing us our inner reality, the different planes of the mind, consciousness, the inner cosmos and the outer as well and it is from these experiences that we can re-new our understanding of religion, nature and God.
Humanity has not only strayed from God and deformed religion, we have also disconnected from nature.

By the recuperation and practice of shamanism we can return to nature and to God and recover the true religion, which is direct communion – Gnosis.

Intiananda, Shamanism of Light, Colombia