What a rich vein I opened up with yesterday’s quotes! 

  Might as well work it a little more I figure. 

  In the past I’ve written that utterly lacking a Shaman-Type mentorship tradition our modern educational system utterly fails our potential present day ST incarnations and the end result is their tragic tendency to crash and burn, not to mention the total absence of a vitally functioning mythic and ritual component in our day to day lives for the rest of us. 

  Campbell wrote: “… the earliest individual creators of myths and rites must not have been merely freely inventive fantasists, but inward-gazing, inward-listening seers (shamans), responding to some inner voice or movement of the species.”

  The italics are mine in the above quote, as I want to stress the inwardness of the shamanic process. The attunedness to the inward Music of the Spheres (movement of the species) so to speak. Especially given the overriding outwardness of our current educational system.

  Today learning and understanding is implanted from without rather than fostered from within, and our teachers, counsellors and psychologists are merely the best representatives of this outwardly oriented fact-based educational process. Consequently, for our potential Shaman-Types that is devastatingly insufficient. Growing up in such a system cannot but lead to some form or other of psycho-spiritual breakdown, the divorce of their richly active inner world from the hard intractability of outer reality. 

  It isn’t hard to see the sad corollaries of this wherever we turn our eyes these days. It’s everywhere, on the news, on television and in our cinemas. And I see it everyday out on the streets and in the parks where I enjoy spending my time. 

  I often wonder how many of these poor, dirty, sometimes furtive, sometimes defiant, distracted, mad, histrionic, babbling, shattered souls were potential Shaman-Types who fell off the rails of our modern educational process toward sober and decent adulthood? 

  Reminds me yet again of the old fable of the Ant and the Gracehoper, as that nearly indecipherable Gracehoper James Joyce put it.