metamind*medicine - urban shaman

But it really isn't music you are hearing directly.
You are experiencing a vibrational wave pattern moving through the air which hits your eardrum and is translated into an electrical nerve impulse received by your brain. Your brain then gives out a signal that you interpret, based on memory again, as music.

Finally, the objects that you see are only seen because light energy bounces off other energy fields toward your eyes, where the frequencies are translated into patterns that you interpret as objects.

What appears to be external reality is really all in your head. Why, that sounds like a dream.
While you're still reeling from that, think about this. Have you ever had a dream at night that seemed just as real or even more real than your daily experience?

If so, then you know the only way you could tell the difference was that this dream (or reality) had more memo-ries you could hook into it.

However, from the shaman point of view, memories are only other dreams.
If you've not had such a realistic dream, you may have heard or read about people - mystics, drunks, schizophrenics, people taking drugs, who are sleep deprived, sick, the elderly, children, or shamans - who have had what psychologists and psychiatrists like to call "hallucinations" that for them were every bit as real, or more real, than the dream we call ordinary experience (hallucination means "your dream doesn't match my dream").

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Parts of our dreams would be shared and parts would not. Of course, you could always bend closer so I could smell you and put the earphones on me so I could hear the music, and I could teach you how to sense the jade's energy, but that doesn't prove anything about dreams and reality because we can learn how to share those other experiences usually called dreams as well.

Being practical, urban shamans know there is a point to this point of view.
If this life is a dream, and if we can wake up fully within it, then we can change the dream by changing our dreaming.

We will explore many ways to change the dream of life in this book, most of which will work for you whether you decide that life is a dream or not.

But for those who dare to experiment with such an idea, a rich adventure filled with challenge and opportunity will open up for you.

else´s interpretation, and the decision to accept a basic assumption is also arbitrary.

Therefore, all systems that describe life and its workings are arbitrarily made up based on certain decisions to accept certain interpretations of experience.
So what really matters is not whether a particular system is true (an arbitrary concept), but rather how well it works for you.

The system known as Huna, with its seven principles, is acknowledged as being just as arbitrary and made up as any other system. So it isn't presented as Truth, but as a set of hypotheses that allow you to practice shamancraft more effectively.

It's similar to learning the scales in music or the rules of perspective in painting so you can practice those crafts more effectively.
The principles of any craft are useful for the practice of that craft or a different aspect of life.

This is why the seven principles are not presented as dogma, and why they do not have to be defended.
If they work for you, use them: if they don't, then use something else.
A wise shaman feels free to change systems at will, according to the situation at hand.

This corollary also allows a great deal of tolerance for other systems because they aren't seen as antagonistic or threatening, but simply as different points of view.

Depending on your point of view a water gourd can be half-empty or half-full.
Depending on your plans the rain can be good for the crops or bad for the picnic.
Depending on your attitude a problem can be an obstacle or a challenge.
These are clear, obvious, and understandable ways in which our thinking affects our experience. In a more subtle way — but a way very well documented in the fields of psychosomatics, psychoimmunology, and moti-vational psychology — we know that thoughts of fear, worry, anger, and resentment con make us sick and diminish our effectiveness, while thoughts of confidence, determination, love and forgiveness can make us well and increase our performance. Extending into the metaphysical realm, we come across the idea that thoughts will telepathically attract their equivalent.

In addition to recognizing the effects on experience of attitude, expectation, telepathy, and belief, shamans also hold the exceptionally subtle idea that life is a dream; that, in fact, we dream our lives into being.
This does not mean that life is an illusion.
It means that dreams are real and reality is a dream.
It means that the reality that your are experiencing right now is only one of many dreams.

Now at first this sounds so weird that it's confusing and seems illogical because you can knock your hand against a wall and feel its solidity, you can hear the sound around you, and you can see lots of objects in great detail. What's so dreamlike about that?
But think a moment.

The wall you knocked your hand against isn't really solid, and neither is your hand. Both are composed of molecules which are composed of atoms which are mostly energy fields vibrating at different frequencies.

The only reason your hand didn't go through the wall was because both it and the wall are vibrating at frequencies so close in range that they interfere with each other. At the same time, radio and television frequencies, for instance, pass right through the wall and your hand as if they weren't even there. When you struck the wall you weren't hitting a solid object. Instead, two energy fields met and the information was transmitted to your brain, where it was interpreted by you, based on memory, as the experience of hitting a wall.
And the sound that you hear? Let's assume it's music.

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Think about the fact that the only test we use for the reality of such experiences is whether or not someone else experienced them. And even that isn't always enough. If you are angry about being left out or you don't like what others say they've experienced, you can always call it "mass hallucination."

For the shamans, the experience we call ordinary everyday reality is a mass hallucination, or, to put it more politely, a shared dream. It is like we are all having our own individual dreams about life and the sharing occurs at points of agreement or consensus.

If you were in my office right now we could both agree that I am working at my computer which has a carving of the word love and a jade carving of Maori tiki from New Zealand in front of it.
But you might not be able to feel or see the energy field around the jade and I might not be able to smell your perfume or after-shave lotion, nor hear the music coming from the earphones of your walkman.

There is a story of a young man who embarked on a dangerous and time-consuming journey to find a wise old man and ask him the meaning of life.
When at last he confronted the wise one and had asked his question, the old man replied,
"Life is just a bowl of cherries."
At first stunned speechless and then furiously angry, the young man said, "That's it?"
I've come all the way here, past oceans and mountains and deserts and jungles to find you and ask you the meaning of life, and all you have to say is that life is a bowl of cherries?!"
The old man smiled, shifted his robe, and replied,
"All right, so life is not just a bowl of cherries."

For untold ages humans have sought to find the Ultimate Meaning and the Absolute Truth, something solid and eternal for their lonos to cling to.
They have tried Mysticism, Religion, Science, Metaphysics, Art and Philosophy in order to make sense of life so they can feel more secure within themselves, and often, to control life in order to feel more secure out-side themselves.

Shamans have come up with their own solution to the problem of meaning by a logical extension of the ideas that everything is a dream and the world is what you think it is.
If those are accepted as basic assumptions, then obviously all meanings are made up and the Absolute Truth is whatever you decide it is.
The meaning of experience depends on your interpretation of it or your decision to accept someone

If the world is what you think is is, then you ought to be able to change your world by changing your thought.

Sit up comfortably with your eyes open and turn your head as far as you can to the left and look straight ahead.
Find something in your line of sight that you can remember as a marker and bring your head forward again.
Now close your eyes, keep your head still, and imagine that you are slowly turning your head to the left very easily and loosely, without any strain, way past the marker until you are looking directly behind you without any problem at all.
Imagine the sensation and the feeling as well as the sight.

Then imagine bringing your head slowly back to the front.
Now open your eyes and turn your head physically to the left.

To the degree you were able to imagine the feeling in your mind you will now find that your head moves easily farther than it did before and your line of sight is well past the marker.

What you just did was change your body by changing your mind.
You imagines being able to do something different, and your body responded to your thought by changing what was possible only moments before.
It´s a simple demonstration full of powerful implication.

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In other words, to put it very simply, positive thoughts will attract positive people and events, and negative thoughts will attract negative people and events.

This is less obvious than the previous examples, but millions of people acknowledge the concept and a careful and honest appraisal of your thoughts and your life will clearly demonstrate the effect.
Then there is the deeper esoteric idea shared by many spiritual teachers around the world that your experience is determined by your faith, by what you believe in.
And both ancient and contemporary history are full of examples of the power thought in form of prayer, faith, and conviction to change physical conditions, events, and circumstances.
All of these ideas are included in the first principle of this philosophy — plus a bit more.