I was watching Twilight Zone on hulu tonight, and caught an episode called A Hundred Yards Over the Rim, starring Cliff Robertson as the leader of a wagon train in 1847, traveling between Ohio and California, but stranded in New Mexico. They are out of water, food, and Christian’s (Cliff’s) son is dying of pneumonia. When the rest are about to give up, Christian asks them to wait while he walks a hundred yards over the rim of a nearby sand dune… perhaps he’ll see something from there. When he crests the rim, he finds himself in 1961, walks to a nearby diner, marvels at all the ‘new’ stuff. He talks to the locals for a while, says his family has been searching for water. They tell him that there is a natural spring just to the West of town, with plenty of game (noticing his antique rifle).
The people that he meets there think he’s crazy, but he finds an encyclopedia and reads an entry in it about his own son, who, it says, made it out to Santa Barbara California, and became a successful doctor, an immunologist in fact. So, he grabs a vial of penicillin tablets from the first aid kit and takes off back to that ‘rim’. As the authorities are chasing him, he crests the rim, and he’s back in 1847. He gives the tablets to his wife to treat his child, and he leads the wagon train on to the west, to the natural spring he now knows exists.
This is the role that shamans have played in virtually every society throughout recorded time. Tasked with the welfare of their tribe, they step through other dimensions to learn the ‘truth’ through direct means, then they bring that knowledge back to the tribe, so they may survive. The information they bring back varies with the times… perhaps they know where the elk will be in one week’s time or perhaps they know that a natural phenomena is approaching and they must seek shelter.
My friend Pam reminds me that there are 4 stages to becoming a shaman. The first stage is to be aware of normal human consciousness. The second stage is understanding that we are all connected. The third stage is learning that we can manipulate reality, that we can move through and even change the ‘dream’ reality we are living in. And, the fourth state is realizing that we ARE everything; that there is no duality.
This sounds an awful lot like the practices of The Natural Light in Dream Yoga, as well as the Tibetan Rebirth Process as outlined in the Tibetan Book of the dead. Too much alike to be coincidence!
In any event, I look around and ask myself ‘who are our shamans?’ Who will step up and lead our tribe in the right direction? And, what I see is a mirror. No, the answer isn’t me… it’s us. We all need to step up now, achieve this level of awareness, help all of humanity proceed in the right direction. Behold the age of the shamans!
Urban Sannyasin 