"I Think I'm a Shaman."
You'll have to forgive God, he can be a little rude sometimes. Although he does have a point. There's a lot of people out there who do a lot of nutty stuff for absolutely no reason other than the fact that they're delusional. For example, you might have a friend who thinks they're the reincarnation of Hermes Trismegistus. But if they were, they'd be two different people running the show in Egypt and Greece instead of stroking their ego all over the YouTube. Not to mention they could recite The Emerald Tablet in its original Atlantean. But you're smarter than that. You know that Hermes wasn't even a shaman in the first place. And you probably also know that shamanism is just a term that scientists made up to describe the people in northern Asia they thought were the weirdest. They dropped the -ism like it was hot, gave it a few years to pollute the english language, and now every suburban teenager with a chakra poster thinks they can contact the spirit world. Boy will they be shocked when they realize the only thing they're contacting is the internet. But I digress.
I think it's fair to assume that shamanism isn't real. Why would you believe the billions of people who have had direct experience with this phenomenon over the last 30,000 years when there are more than dozens of modern people who have proven its lack of existence? So what if tribal communities used spiritual forces to heal their loved ones? We have pills that can do the same thing for a mere five-hundred dollars a pop. It just doesn't make any sense. I mean, why get something for free when you could just as easily make someone rich by paying for it? I'm just sayin', it seems like we've got it figured out.
Then again, there is another way to look at it.
Let's say you're a lowly hunter-gatherer living in a house made of rocks with nothing else to do but interact with nature. Things would get pretty dull to say the least. Your mind would be so blank that you'd have to let your imagination run all over the muck just to stay sane. You'd start formulating all sorts of strange ideas like, "plants are alive," or "animals seem to know what's up." It would also be totally psychedelic. You'd start seeing THINGS and PEOPLE in your dreams instead of complete and utter blackness. You might wake up on a cold day after one of these dreams and see your breath making little clouds. Which would automatically cause you to assume the wind and clouds in the sky were the breath from some gigantic being. Unfortunately, because neither you nor your mates have the ability to use verbal language, you'd come to the false conclusion that nature doesn't have a verbal language either. You'd start thinking that the sounds made by birds were a form of communication, or that the big round thing in the night sky was using geometry to let you know what day it was. You'd be so brainwashed that you'd actually believe this was somehow "normal," and that your thoughts were rooted in reality. If only you had a doctor that could tell you you were schizophrenic.
From then on out the diagnosis would only get worse. Your brain would start coming up with rudimentary shapes corresponding the things you see around you. You'd scratch them into the walls just to get them out of your head. Eventually your mates would find out you're doing this and they'd stage an intervention. But, seeing as none of you can talk, you'd have to sit down and try to communicate telepathically. Obviously this is when things would really start to fall apart, and you'd be left with nothing. People would begin using sex and herbal drugs as a coping mechanism for their existential plight, and thousands of years of sheer chaos would ensue. Everyone would get so sick of being locked inside their own heads that they would HAVE to come up with words.
That way, when someone is found in the woods dancing in a circle while blitzed on plant juice in an attempt to cure their insanity, they can say, "this is what the big breathing being in the sky told me to do, and the birds said so too."
And everyone will think that it's perfectly natural.
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CHARLEY