Thinking out loud late at night in my van in the Peak District. Faith has always underpinned my life. I had a deep experience of it when I was 22, listening to a Buddhist talk about faith. I had a deep, joyful experience of homecoming. I felt I'd found something I'd been looking for all my life without knowing it. Buddhism was the nearest vehicle to hand. But there was always a wholeness, a soulfulness that was lacking.
Shamanism gives me that fuller experience of faith. Faith in what? Not in anything objective. That is why it is a nonsense to talk about the existence of God as if he can be objectively apprehended. It is faith in the subjective pole of existence, which begins with the personal experience of Spirit, and expands to the realisation that the one Spirit underlies and underpins everything.
Spirit is vast, compassionate, all-powerful, and all-knowing. It is not an aspect of life, it IS life. You look at what went into building the old churches, and it is apparent that our ancestors experienced a level of faith of which we have no conception. We truly live in the Dark Ages.
This is why I object to the teaching of Shamanic healing ways as a mere add-on to other modalities, which may themselves have the need for rational respectability lurking behind them. That is all wrong, it is the cart before the horse.
Shamanism begins with the experience of faith in the Spirit, and in the natural world, to which we belong, as the expression of Spirit. You may or may not end up doing healing work, coming out of that foundation of faith, that takes years to build, and which is the stuff of life. Fools Crow's remarkable healings were always based in prayer to the Great Spirit, to 'the holiest of everything', as he more literally translated Wakan Tanka.
