The Shamans invoking the great spirit of the Native Americans are just another expression of the exact same principles, as well as many other forms of folk religion and Shamanism.
From the opening of the Central Doctrine, first edition
Drum and dance in the parks
In my late teens and early twenties in Salt Lake City I joined theurgy, ritual drumming and the dance together into one practice. I gave every hour I could spare to the trance states that rhythm and movement can open. My interests in those years ran in many directions at the same time, with rites in my room, books on every tradition I could find and long talks about spirit.
I spent countless hours every weekend in the burning Utah sun, drumming, dancing and inviting spirit to move through me. A summer afternoon in a Salt Lake City park is very hot and very dry. A few hours of drumming under that sun is real work for the hands, the arms, the back and the lungs. I came home tired, and the next weekend I went back and did it again.
I began to alternate between drumming and dancing. At the drum I had to stay alert enough to keep time, to listen to the players beside me and to follow the changes when the rhythm shifted. In a long dance the heart beats faster, the breath deepens and the skin runs with sweat in the heat. I learned to keep dancing through the stretch where the legs grow heavy and the mind wants to stop, and on the far side of it the movement became easier and the trance came more freely than at any other point in the day.
Castaneda and the bloodline
Two things drew me into the study of shamanism, the work of Carlos Castaneda and the knowledge of my own bloodline, the Mapuche line of my family in southern Chile.
Castaneda wrote as a young student of anthropology from Los Angeles who went into the deserts of northern Mexico and became the apprentice of don Juan Matus, a Yaqui man of knowledge. His books tell of long nights in the desert, of plants of power, of a teacher who laughed at him and tested him, and of an apprenticeship that went on for years. Don Juan taught him to stop the talk that runs without end in the mind and to tell looking from seeing. He taught him to live as a warrior, with his attention fixed and his life in order, and to wake inside his own dreams by finding his hands in them. In don Juan's seeing a human being appears as a luminous egg made of fibers of light. The world in those books is alive in every part, the wind, a crow on a fence post and a dry wash in the desert. The man of knowledge speaks to that world, and it answers him.
I read Castaneda in the same Salt Lake City years, beside everything else I was reading on spirit and practice. His books were read by a great many young people in those decades, and many of them came to shamanism through him, as I did. He was my first author on the subject, and over the following years I read widely in many works on shamanism by practitioners and by scholars, until Castaneda was one voice among a great many on my shelves.
The anthropology
I did not confine myself to the popular New Age versions of shamanism that filled the bookstore shelves in those days. I wanted to know what the people who carried these traditions had actually done. I went to the serious literature, to anthropological texts and to academic research on indigenous practices across the Americas. I read the studies of single peoples and the broad surveys that set the healers of many continents side by side, and in those years shamanism became one of the steady subjects of my study.
Shaman is a word of the Evenki people of Siberia, and the scholars carried it from there to the healers and visionaries of many other peoples, the nations of the Americas among them. The word ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis, a standing outside of oneself, and the scholars used it for the state in which the healer leaves ordinary awareness to meet the spirits.
From that reading I learned how widely the same pattern stands among the peoples of the Americas, from the far north to the forests and mountains of the south. A healer is called, often through illness, a dream or a vision, and is then trained for many years by an elder. The healer learns to enter a state in which the spirits of the land, the animals and the dead can be met. The drum, the rattle, the song and the dance are the means of entering it. The healer goes into that state for the sake of the community, to find what is wrong with a sick person, to bring back what has been lost or to ask the spirits for help. While the work is done, the community holds the ceremony around the healer with song and rhythm.
The scholars wrote often of the drum as the vehicle that carries the healer into the other world and back again. Among some of the peoples of Siberia the drum is called the shaman's horse or the shaman's boat, and its beat is the road the shaman travels. The dance in that literature is the body's way of giving itself over to the spirit. I read those descriptions in the evenings, and on the weekend I went looking for the states they described with the drum in my lap or with my feet on the grass.
The living world
I hold the tenets of animism, the understanding that nature is alive with its own spiritual agency, as a vital pillar of my own awareness. Whether one speaks of the Holy Spirit in the Christian traditions or of the spirits of nature in shamanic practice, I recognize these as manifestations of the same transcendent current, which the Platonists named the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World.
In our Central Doctrine we teach animism as the ground of the religions of humanity, the original grammar by which humanity related to the cosmos. The anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor made the word a term of scholarship in 1871 and thought it a primitive stage of thought to be outgrown, and with much recent scholarship we hold it to be far more enduring. Its roots go back at least forty thousand years, into the painted caves of Paleolithic Europe and the steppes of Asia. They reach older still into the cave art of Sulawesi in Indonesia, where a painted scene of human-like figures and a wild pig has been dated to at least 51,000 years ago.
The same living world stands at the beginning of Greek philosophy. Thales is reported by Aristotle to have said that all things are full of gods (On the Soul I.5, 411a8), and Plato called the cosmos a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence (Timaeus 30b). Among Native American nations the land is kin, and in many of their traditions the mountains are grandfathers, the rivers are mothers and the animals are relations with whom reciprocal respect must be kept. Every hunt, every planting and every ceremony is framed within the recognition of a living cosmos, where human beings are one participant in a wider community of life.
Out of that conviction came a teaching of mine, Animism, Synchronicity, and the Voice of the World. In it the one world speaks to us as well as answering us, and the theurgist's first discipline is to listen. Our Doctrine names the Native American spirits of animals and places among the witnesses to the Anima Mundi met in place, and we honor them without claiming them. The Great Spirit, Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka among the Lakota and Gichi-Manidoo among the Anishinaabe, stands in our teaching beside the God of the Christian and the Allah of the Muslim. Each is one more name of the Totality State of Existence.
The drum healing sessions
During those years I began offering drum healing sessions to people who came to me in need. Each session began with a Tarot reading, and by then I had been reading the cards for some years. I used the reading to see the energetic patterns at work in the person, the places where they were stuck and the challenges in front of them.
With that picture in mind I picked up the drum. I used the rhythm to help shift, clear or strengthen the person's subtle energy fields, depending on what the reading had shown. The person rested while I played, and I moved the drum around them, slowing the beat, quickening it or holding it steady over one place for a long time. Where the cards had shown a weight, I drummed to loosen it, and where they had shown a weakness, I drummed to build it up.
The pairing of divination and rhythm became a signature practice of mine, ancient principles joined with my own creativity. I put it together without a manual, from what I was reading, what I was practicing in the park and what I felt in the room with each person.
The circle in Liberty Park
What came out of those weekends took on a life of its own. Together with a small circle of other drummers, and later with an expanding group of dancers, we started a weekly drum circle in Liberty Park. It is one of the oldest and largest parks in Salt Lake City, with wide lawns under big old trees. None of us set out to build anything large. We came to drum, people came to listen, and some of the listeners came back the next week with drums of their own.
Each week the gathering grew, and in time it was drawing more than thirty drummers and twice as many dancers and spectators. At its height the circle was so large that we could hold hands and encircle the entire section of the park where we met, a living wheel of rhythm and intention. I remember standing in that ring of hands with people I knew and people I had never met, all of us holding the same circle at the same moment.
I was part of the circle for three years, and over that time it swelled to more than four hundred participants, with over fifty dedicated drummers bringing their gifts to it. Many of the same faces returned week after week. As the community deepened, the drumming became more refined, more powerful and more harmonious. The drummers learned one another's habits, and the dancers learned to feel a change in the rhythm before it came.
Early in an afternoon the drums would wander, each player with his own idea of where the beat should go, while the dancers moved in their own separate worlds. Then at some point the rhythms locked together, and the whole section of the park moved to one pulse. After that, holding the beat took no force.
The collective energy at those moments lifted us into states of ecstatic trance, and in those states vision and insight broke through ordinary perception. I used my growing knowledge of shamanic practice to focus on the ecstasy and vision states described in the books I had devoured.
In time I began to experience powerful lucid visions during these communal rituals. I was awake inside them and clear in my mind, aware of the park, the heat and the drums around me and of the vision at the same time. They came most often after a long stretch in which the circle had locked into one pulse and stayed there. Those visions deepened my conviction in the ancient techniques of rhythm, trance and communal ceremony as gateways to the divine.
A healer in Salt Lake City
During these years I was also blessed with the opportunity to learn directly from Indigenous teachers of the shamanic ways. I worked with a number of them. Three Native American teachers connected to the local tribes stand closest in my memory. The Salt Lake Valley and the lands around it are the homelands of the Shoshone, the Goshute and the Ute, whose name the state carries.
The first was a respected healer living in Salt Lake City, whose name was spoken with reverence by many people, and many went to him for healing. With what little money I had, I sought his counsel too. Where others asked him for a personal healing session, I asked him to teach me how to conduct Native American ceremonies, as I wanted to learn to do the work myself. Generously, he did teach me, and he shared precious knowledge rarely offered to outsiders.
The Shoshone woman and the sweat lodge
The second was a Shoshone woman, trained traditionally in her people's ways. She guided me in digging and constructing my first sweat lodge, in my own backyard. She taught me the purpose of the lodge, its structure, the spiritual benefits of the sweat ceremony and the proper methods to lead one.
A sweat lodge is a low, round shelter built over a pit dug into the earth. Stones are heated for hours in a fire outside and carried into the pit, and when water is poured over them in the dark the lodge fills with steam and heat while the people inside pray, sing and breathe. We dug the pit, raised the frame and covered it, and she explained each part to me as we built it.
For the six months I lived in that home I used the lodge often, usually alone and sometimes with others who were willing to enter that deeply transformative space with me. In many Native traditions the lodge is understood as the womb of the Earth, and the people who crawl out of its low door at the end come out of her renewed.
The Medicine Man next door
The third teacher was the one I least expected, my neighbor in the duplex apartment we shared. He was a Medicine Man to three different tribes, including the Bannock of eastern Idaho, whose lands I had grown up near. The Bannock and the Shoshone share the Fort Hall Reservation in southeastern Idaho.
Circumstance had brought him to Salt Lake City, where he supported his people by selling T-shirts printed with traditional art and sending the proceeds back home. Many evenings we sat together on the porch and talked long into the night about the mysteries of healing, the subtle worlds of spirit and the sacredness of ordinary life. Those conversations are among the most cherished memories of my young adulthood, a humble and real apprenticeship on a porch in the city.
What the drum taught me
Together these experiences, the drum circles under the hot sun, the guidance of my Native teachers, the wide reading and a sweat lodge built with my own hands, make up a full season of my spiritual life. They taught me that sacred knowledge lives in temples and old texts, and just as much in the beating drum and the rhythm of our bodies. It lives as well in the stories passed from elder to student under the stars. I came out of those years with a lasting respect for community, for the wisdom of the ancestors and for the presence of spirit in all things.
The drum in our practice today
Our School's rite is performed without the drum. When we teach the breath of the rite in Ritual Praxis and Instruction, the belly moves visibly, the chest stays quiet, the shoulders stay low and the rhythm is even, like a steady drum.
In our Raja Kundalini we teach Anāhata, the heart center, whose name means "unstruck". Every ordinary sound is made by one thing striking another, the drum by the stick, the string by the finger and the voice by the breath on the cords. The unstruck sound is the one that no striking makes, the sound the Tantric traditions hear in the heart. Our students learn to hear it beneath their own voice, when the Name sounds from the boundary of the field and no longer only in the throat.