|
Book
Reviews:
Dreaming
Awake the Shaman
Reviews by Dawn
Brunke
When
author Robert Moss was 9 years old, he underwent an operation to remove
his appendix. On the operating table, he stepped out of his body and
entered another world. The people there not only welcomed him; they told
him they had dreamed his coming. And so he lived among them, growing
older, learning, marrying, celebrating and eventually dying. As his body
burned upon the funeral pyre, he rose above it and traveled far above
the earth, floating, watching, and descending—into the body of a
9-year-old boy in a hospital, nearly dying of appendicitis.
Moss
was thus initiated into the world of dreaming—not ‘dreaming’ as we
in the West so often delineate that word, but dreaming in the larger,
shamanic sense: a way of merging our larger self into the multitude of
worlds that co-exist with our own. Through meetings with friends,
strangers, animals, spirit guides, dream friends and ancestral elders,
Moss was led further to experience first-hand the enormous value of
dreams, and came to appreciate the dream world not merely as a nightly
diversion, but as a real world—just as real (or, sometimes, more real)
as the one we inhabit during our days.
It
was through his approach to dreaming that Moss was “called” by
Island Woman, a historically real Iroquois dream shaman who, by virtue
of her dreaming abilities, was able to reach across time and space to
tell her story and help her people. As Moss came to learn in a variety
of incredible ways (his first dreams were in Mohawk Iroquois, a language
he did not know), we are all able to communicate with one another in
dreaming. Across the boundaries of culture, history, language, great
distance and even parallel existences, deep dreamers are called “to
find a path for humanity through the Dark Times, to defend the Earth,
and to open (or close, when necessary) gates between the worlds.”
This
is a wonderfully written, intensely engaging and spiritually important
book. As a former professor of ancient history, novelist and shamanic
counselor, Moss is a first rate guide. Through searching at deeper
levels for the secret wisdom encoded in our stories and myths to sharing
practical ideas for re-opening the ancient dreamways that were once
alive and bustling, Moss encourages his readers to rebirth the dream
culture, one in which dreams are honored and celebrated. As he so aptly
notes, “We must not let our minds fall into forgetting that we are
soul and spirit, and that our journeys and our obligations begin and
continue in worlds beyond the surface world.”
Not
only is this a great book about dreaming, it’s a fascinating
exploration of the Iroquois peoples and an illuminating adventure into
the world of shamanism.
Like Robert Moss, author Simon Buxton was
also 9 years old when a serious illness (encephalitis) opened his
consciousness to a different kind of world. As he stands on the edge of
a dark and still abyss, an old man appears, assuring him there is
nothing to fear. Holding hands, the two leap into the abyss and fly. As
the boy turns to regard the old man, he sees not the eyes of a human,
but the deep, ancient, knowing eyes of a bee. Several weeks later, when
Buxton is well again, he goes to see his friend, Herr Professor, an
elderly neighbor who has been instructing him in the ways of nature.
“How lovely to see you,” Herr Professor says, “I told you there
was nothing to fear.”
As
Buxton notes, many cultures believe that a person is called to be a
shaman by the spirit via a mysterious illness that carries one very
close to the brink of death, only to be saved through the intervention
of another shaman. It was through his illness—and the help of Herr
Professor, the Bee shaman—that Buxton experienced his first taste of
the Path of Pollen. Later accepted as an apprentice by an elder of this
Path known as Bridge, Buxton comes to live an extraordinary series of
meetings, rites and rituals that plunge him ever deeper into the
mysteries of relationship with one of our most ancient allies: the
honeybee.
As
Bridge notes, “The Path of Pollen is our yoga, our means of union and
communion with the incredible hidden universe and this beautiful
blue-green jewel that is our Earth.” Indeed, it is in this yogic
fashion that Buxton experiences the healing properties of honey and
pollen, propolis and royal jelly. Through initiations with the Bee
Mistress and the Melissae, the female members of this tradition, he
discovers intense flights in and out of the body. And through the stings
of the bee (the origins of Chinese acupuncture have been traced to the
ancient practice of applying bee stings to the body’s meridians),
Buxton travels to worlds not known by many humans, at some points
virtually becoming a bee, joining his mind with the hive mind, flying,
and seeing through the eyes of a bee.
In
a similar way to Moss’s book, The
Shamanic Way of the Bee is superbly written and powerfully engaging.
Buxton is a gifted storyteller, a discerning writer and exceedingly
sensitive to the synchronous patterns that link inner and outer worlds.
It was a pleasure reading a book that offers so much, not least of all a
rare look into a very old and not well known shamanic tradition.
Dawn Brunke is the editor of Alaska Wellness and author of Animal Voices and Awakening
to Animal Voices. See www.animalvoices.net
for more.
|
The
real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in
the mystery.
~Fred Alan
Wolf
|
In
1979, up and coming
New York
artist Jerry Wennstrom destroyed all the art
he had created, gave away most everything he owned, and began to
consciously empty himself of his identity. Thus, he began a new
life—an unstructured way of living, an immersion into spontaneity and
a letting go of resistance to whatever life presented. In releasing the
form of the known, Wennstrom began his move towards formlessness—a
deep, intense journey into the hollowed out, bare bones presence of here
and now living.
Sometimes
it was easy. Friends brought food; strangers serendipitously offered up
messages from God; things took on a dreamy, shape-shifty sort of feel in
which deep lessons were learned in a spontaneous flash of beauty.
Sometimes
it was hard. People came and dumped their feelings on the floor,
regarding the strange, quiet man as a kind of guru, hoping for,
expecting, or—worse yet—demanding answers, insights and blessings.
There were days without food; weeks of weariness, headaches and worries;
dark hours of sharp-edged despair and broodingly heavy, damp blankets of
thought.
Through
all of it, however, Wennstrom followed his own longing to be open to the
energy of life itself. In trusting and learning to appreciate the
significance of each moment in his journey, he followed the signs
offered to him by everyday living, relying on his intuition, listening
to the deeper nature of his inner feelings and honing the grace-carved
wisdom of his heart. Thus is the title of this well-written book really
quite perfect. For Wennstrom’s journey is one of evocative
transformation—and not only for himself, but for his reader, all of
us, as well.
“We
are at a rare time in the history of our world,” he reminds us.
“Consciousness is attempting to come through the spirit of our lives.
It brings with it all that we need to live out its gift. At the same
time, our old ways of being on the planet are beginning to fail. Our
social forms and structures are radically changing and breaking down.
Our mother, the Earth, is ailing! We are truly in uncharted
territory.”
It
is precisely in this sense that journeys such as Wennstrom’s are so
important for our world. For it is in the process of releasing our old,
outdated ways of knowing that we come to discover they are really much
more a projection of what we think we know than what is truly known.
Thus we are freed to move ever onward into the new—into the mystery.
In such a grand adventure, stories such as these offer guidance. And,
they offer promise.
“A
time may come when you are asked to let go of everything you think you
are and all that you think you possess. If you can give yourself to this
process, what will emerge will be a truer self in a truer world. All
will be well. All that you had hoped for, all that is most important to
you, all that seemed to be impossible or gone forever will be sanctified
and returned to you.”
In
short, this profoundly moving book offers not only a personal journey of
finding one’s true self, but a universal sharing of the awe and wonder
of life becoming.
|
What
the Bleep Do We Know: Discovering
the Endless Possibilities for Altering your Everyday Reality
By
William Arntz, Betsy Chase and Mark Vicente (Health
Communications, Inc., 2005; hardcover, $26.95).
For
more, see www.hcibooks.com
or www.whatthebleep.com
|
|
This
instantly engaging and continually thought-provoking book is written by
the same three authors who created the popular movie of the same name.
The idea, by their own admission, was simple: “We trooped around the
country interviewing brilliant people so we could get on film what they
had to say.” What happened, however, was that many of these brilliant
folks had different ideas—“different from some of our notions,
different from each other, different from what we were taught in school,
different from what was preached in church and different from what we
see on the nightly news.” Yeah, that kind of sneaky different that
gets us thinking outside the box. The adventure thus came to be to a
personal exploration of truth, consciousness, perception, paradigms and,
of course, reality itself. Or, as the authors put it, “to decide for ourselves where the truth lies and what to try out in our lives.”
Don’t
think of this book as the movie in words. Rather, think of it as where
the movie left off. Or, what fell through the cracks of the movie.
Though many of the same ideas and notions are explored, there’s much
more idea storming, roundabout musing and personal investigation
encouraged here.
As
the authors note, it is the great questions that open us up to what we
previously didn’t know and grant access to the other side of the
unknown. However, we first need to summon up the courage to ask these
questions and allow ourselves the journey of discovery and
self-awareness. Thus, each chapter in the book ends with a page of
questions that poke beneath the layers of consciousness to the murky
(and thus not often explored) layers of the subconscious. They are fun
questions in that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and yet they
are also challenging questions, urging you to ask yourself why you do
the things you do or think the things you think.
The
whole of the book, in fact, is an exploration of questions: What is
reality? What paradigms govern your/my/our realities? How can you know
your consciousness? Do we really create our own realities? Or (one of my
faves): Was time invented to keep instant karma at bay?
With
the help of quantum physicists, mystics, philosophers, book and film
characters, the authors and more, a wide variety of topics is
covered—from emotional addictions and quantum logic to mysticism and
the connectivity hypothesis. The pages are colorful and rich with
illustrations, photos and intriguing sidebars. It’s a kind of
crash-course workbook of life’s big questions for adults. Indeed, the
whole thing is a wild ride, full of rabbit holes and shapeshifting
paradigms, science and philosophy plunging into the unknowable core of
spirituality, while all the time everyone seems to keep pointing out
that we are all on this ride together—co-creative participants in an
ongoing, deeply meaningful, ingenious and inspired adventure. What could
be more fun?
Dawn Brunke is the editor of Alaska Wellness and author of Animal Voices and Awakening
to Animal Voices. See www.animalvoices.net
for more.
|
|
