🪬 Introduction to Itzhak Beery’s Bestselling THE GIFT OF SHAMANISM
Featuring My Original Artwork on the Cover
Itzhak Beery, THE GIFT OF SHAMANISM
Don José stopped on his heels in the middle of a dark busy avenue of Corona, Queens. He turned to me, paused, and looked up at me with his fierce black eyes, “Did you start doing healings?” he asked. Perplexed, I watched this short, powerful shaman whom I admired, dressed in a blue llama-wool poncho, white cotton pants, white fabric sandals, and a gray felt fedora, in total disbelief. I pretended to not understand him.
“So, did you?” he prodded me.
“Oh no, I didn’t, was I supposed to?” I finally said and went on anxiously protesting, “I’m not ready. How can I? I know nothing about it. I’m not even sure that this is what I want to do with my life.”
“You are ready,” he declared flatly and with authority. “Vamos, let’s go eat now,” he said as he opened the door to a Chinese restaurant.
This was unexpected. My thoughts were racing. What does he mean? Do I have to change my life? I was confused and also frightened by the weight of the enormous responsibility he put on my shoulders. Immediately my old self-doubts cropped up like monsters looming out of their cage. Is he tricking me? What does he want from me or see in me? How can he be so sure I have what it takes to do what he does? Besides, I am a declared skeptic, cynic and atheist. I’m just an ordinary middle-aged man who was brought up as a communist Jew. Oh my God, what did I get myself into? Do I have to? Why me? Why now?
Before we start on this fascinating journey I must confess to you that for the longest time I did not allow myself to believe in the mounting evidence of the existence of unseen worlds, nor did I take the time to learn about them. But despite my doubts I was slowly forced to admit their existence and relevance; I found that I just did not have any other choice. At this point I no longer tried to intellectualize or understand these things in a rational way, as the shamanic experience is truly about learning to surrender to the magical and join in the workings of life’s mysterious forces. I’m now convinced that we human beings are truly living in multidimensional realities and that as humans we have the ability to perceive knowledge, images, and information otherwise hidden from our ordinary senses by shifting from the earthly plane into a shamanic state of higher vibrational consciousness. I believe that this is the key to humans’ survival for hundreds of thousands of years. It is not trickery or self-delusion as many more scientific and logical people might say, as we’ll see later.
Like me and perhaps you, there are millions of people who are now awakening every day, like sprouts after a long rain, to the call to embrace this age-old knowledge. Many indigenous societies have continuously lived with this wise worldview from the very beginning of time. We, in the technological, so-called First World, have forgotten it and in many ways have learned to despise it and label it as backward or primitive, rejecting it outright without even examining it. As the ancient Maya and Inca prophecies point out, since 1993 we entered into a new Pachacuti, a time of realignment and correction of the human journey and consciousness. It is time to be awakened and accept our true nature, by living in equilibrium and harmony between the two opposing and complementary forces of feminine and masculine that exist within each of us. It is a time to take the long overdue journey from our minds to meet our hearts. Only then, when the heart and the mind live in harmony, we can resolve war, poverty, and environmental destruction and ensure future generations’ survival on this miraculous planet.
I must confess that like many contemporary males I’m truly excited to play with the latest technologies and gadgets, read about new scientific discoveries, and hear about fresh innovations in every field, and I am sure I passed this enthusiasm to my kids. The future fascinates me, ignites my imagination, and sets free my fantasies. Growing up, I admired my dad’s constant search for new ways to improve machines to achieve better production and develop processes to make life’s tasks more efficient and convenient. I believe inventiveness and curiosity is ingrained in our DNA, as it is essential to our successful survival as a species on Earth. We have truly achieved a lot in the past few hundred years. We are now able to communicate in an instant all across the planet. Distances have become shorter; we travel into space; we predict the weather a year in advance; our homes are becoming digitized and weather insulated; we harvest solar, wind, and water energies; we engineer food to have long shelf lives; we have a DNA map of our bodies, better medical diagnostic tools, and robotic machines; and we all live longer.
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A fascinating essay - especially as we grasp at remaining cultural roots which may allow us to survive this current dystopia. The distinction between the things you point out are fundamentally important.
You write about our tendencies to "intellectualize or understand these things in a rational way" We do way too much of this in our current cultures.
You point out that "the shamanic experience is truly about learning to surrender to the magical and join in the workings of life’s mysterious forces." The shamanic experience provides a sharp contrast to the deadly matrix which has led us to 2023 and a hope for the future.
The Political Significance of LSD https://open.spotify.com/episode/5d24TUJkyxaE2C6EkgtbG9 "The shifts in consciousness brought about by psychedelics could help to dissolve our fear of the other."