Through a Shaman's Eyes: Perspective
January 7, 2010
by Jeffrey Pierce
"Not Your Typical Night Sky" - photographed in Salem, Oregon (March 17, 2009)
One of the drawbacks of being a shaman is that you live in an entirely different world from the rest of Western Culture. Instead of living in a world of cause and effect, you live in a world of relationships where not just the symbolic nature of a person, place, or event is seen, but all of the connections it holds in the present moment as well as the themes that led up to its creation and the potential of what that moment will give birth to.
This photograph is a perfect example of how I see my world.
It wasn't taken through my telescope.
It wasn't snatch from NASA's collection of "deep field" photographs.
It's mold growing on the suface of a glass that one of the kids left in the bathroom.
Try living in a world where EVERYTHING is alive, where you feel every thought, every emotion from each person around you. Now turn the volume up. Add subtitles. Stick electrodes into your own head and monitor all of your responses and how all of that weaves together.
Now multiply THAT by a factor of thirty and you have the tiniest idea of what it's like to see the world through a shaman's eyes.
Everything is beautiful - the love, the joy... the pain. Nothing exists in a bubble, isolated from everything else. Someone hits you and you see all of the reasons why they do so... the walls that came down, the things they're struggling with, the lessons that they're teetering on the edge of, ready to make breakthrough, to push through their shell, spread their wings and fly. You get everything in the cosmic spectrum - every color, every sound, every wavelength... simultaneously, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And because shamanism is a spiritual path, you do your best to ALWAYS act appropriately with this information, to grow wisdom, love, and compassion in the face of any trial, test, or tribulation.
I'm certain that if I sat down with a shaman who spends his days in a tribal culture, in a place where all of the people around him also experience the world in this manner to various degress, he would tell you that it sucks ass. And I'd laugh and say, "Try it in a machine culture, where the biggest interaction people have with reality is when they point a remote at something."
So try it for a day. Instead of saying, "Damn those kids - I've asked them a thousand times to take their dishes into the kitchen when they're done," try seeing the patterns that brought the glass their, the beauty - as strange as it may be - that grows on the top of that cup. Then do your best to bring it to life.
These aren't stars, people. It's scum. And yet, when seen through the right pair of eyes, in the right light, it's beautiful.
We're all like that. Even the pieces of us that we don't like are beautiful. We simply need to learn to see ourselves in the right light. And when we do that, it will change how we see the world around us.
"Mold In A Cup" - photographed in Salem, Oregon (March 17, 2009)