Secrets of Shamanism

88 SECRETS OF SHAMANISM

Then he grabbed me and we flew back up the tunnel and

came back to where we started."

"Great," exclaimed Cathy. That's the best way to do it.

You always want to end up back where you started. Well,

time's a-wasting, so to speak. Better hit the books."

Sally was amazed at her energy level. She seemed to

go from one chapter to the next without getting tired.

When she glanced at the clock, she was surprised to see

that it had hardly moved. What's going on here, she

thought to herself. I've never covered so much material in

so little time! And on she went.

One week later, Sally got the results of her final. Max'd

it, she thought proudly. I thought Cathy was a nut with her

wolves and weird uncle. Now I'm not so sure.

For shamans, Sally's experience is not an unusual event,
but rather an everyday possibility. Shamans view time differ-
ently from the way most of us are taught. Time, if held rigid,
creates containment, restriction and limitation. For shamans,
time is a flexible, malleable vehicle that can be manipulated
with simple know-how. When time is made to stretch or con-
strict, it becomes a tool of power necessary for success. How
can this be?
Picture the world this way. Ordinary reality is the world of
form or, as some shamans call it, the "tonal." It is the reality
where differences exist and where everything seems to be
separate. It is the world of tables and chairs and trees and
rocks. For shamans, the source of this world of form is the
nagual or spirit world, where everything that cannot be
named exists. Thus the physical world and its source create a
reality where the tonal and the nagual exist in a dynamic
tension to one another continually.
Within the nagual or spirit world, time does not exist as
we know it in the tonal or physical world. Since the nagual is
the source of the tonal, in order to manipulate time, you
simply need to dip into the spirit world and call forth its
resources. Putting it another way, if you want something
done, you go to the top. In this case, you go to the source.
By going to the source, shamans gain access to all time
frames. As a result they are free to retrieve information from
the store of all knowledge both past and future. Imagine for
a moment that all present experiences are being eternally
recorded on a giant blue record. Imagine however that this
record is alive with life energy and animated continuously.
Envision that the record has an infinite number of green
records stacked on top of it and below it representing the