We are born into a group, and membership in the group and the boundary with other groups can be symbolized by a hoop. Looked at that way the Olympic Rings insignia represents the coming together of human groups, the Greek City States, in the spirit of competition. 

  Now the group might be as large as a civilization or as small as a tribe or clan, and often we navigate our way through life with allegiances to a number of groups great and small. Plus, groups form, are born, grow, mature, and can die or dissolve. It is a shifting psycho-spiritual landscape, this group dynamics. 

  The shaman is a sort of psycho-spiritually aware tender and maintainer of the group’s identity, balance, and place in the larger world about. His vision is the glue or hub around which the group’s energies and activities revolve. In a dynamically evolving environment such as the life of a nomadic tribe he with his visions, ceremonies, and rituals is tasked with maintaining internal accord as well as the external relationship with the surroundings nature affords. 

  The priests gain the upper hand from the shaman when the group settles down, takes to a town and to agriculture let’s say, and domesticates the animals it once hunted or followed. The ceremonies and rituals of the shaman become fixed, even institutionalized, by priests and the shaman then becomes suspect, mistrusted as an ‘upsetter of the common ways and beliefs,’ a rocker of the boat. Henceforth he is vilified as an agent of unwanted change. Jesus the shaman was crucified by the Romans at the behest of the Jewish priests, and then again fictionally told to get lost by the Patriarch in Dostoyevsky’s famous Grand Inquisitor scene in his The Brothers Karamazov. 

  You could say in settled society the shaman are forced underground, now and then poking their heads cautiously up with artworks, writings, poems, paintings, dance and music. 

  Mystics are sort of super-shaman. They pose less of a threat to the priestly order because they communicate in riddles and nonsense mostly, at least to the common folk. Plus some get along indifferently within the priesthood. Remember the group’s hoop? Well the shaman and the priests conduct their affairs largely within the confines of a specific group’s hoop, while the mystic has flown free of any one hoop. He becomes something of a freelance shaman, so to speak. The shaman relates the balanced group into harmony with outside Nature, while the mystic deals directly with Nature. 

  Today the groups we live in and identify with have grown brittle and seem to be in the process of disintegrating. It can be a tremendously uncertain and unsettling time for us all. Unfortunately, the various groups’ priests are of little help because they can only preach of stasis and fixity. 

  It is to the remaining shaman and mystics that we must turn for a new vision. 

  A living vibrant vision for the future of us all….

  A new tomorrow….