Where is our compassion and tolerance for others? Where is the love and the healing that we were all created to share? Not only to we ignore our oneness with all those on the planet, we guard and horde our heritages, tribal knowledge and wisdom. We look at our heritages, customs and beliefs as belonging only to us. We look at the views, customs and beliefs of others as belonging to them. Where is the wisdom in sharing and expanding the limits of our minds, hearts and souls? We have a need to separate not only by oceans, forests, mountains and other physical boundaries, but by the definitions we instill—culture, race, creed, ethnicity and language, thereby dividing us further. This isolation narrows our view of the world, of people. It prevents us from absorbing ancient knowledge. More importantly, it robs us of compassion by instilling prejudice and fear of the unknown. This fear is the monster rearing its ugly head in the shadows. This fear of losing our identity prevents us from maturing as a species. It destroys compassion and feeds our ego’s need to establish security in what we know. How sad to allow ourselves to allow this fear to stand in our way of evolution. How despairing to know that this fear prevents us from growing and living the life our Creator intended. This fear compels the ego to seek and maintain power and control. Thus, the stronger we are individually and as a tribe, the more power and control we have, the more we are safe within our comfort zones. This fear is limiting and a prison that we establish. If we allow the walls of fear to break down, we can escape this prison and be free to grow, learn and evolve with all people of the world, both physically and spiritually. This freedom from fear allows us to love and become one with all people. Darwin maintained that the strongest of the species survived. Yet is survival the same as actually living? This Darwinian view has its place in science; it explains why we are here on a physical level, but what of our evolution as spiritual beings who are one with each other? As we have seen, our separateness only destroys us. Wars over religion, territorial boundaries, cultures and races have wrecked havoc on us. We are not fighting any more for food to sustain our physical selves, but food to feed our beliefs and cultures. We should be searching for the common ground, the spiritual oneness embracing all people, all cultures, in order to be at peace and love, thus reaching and embracing God. Our similarities to each other and our Creator will bring forth peace, love and healing for humankind. The drum beats for all with one beat. Life is fluid; the world is always fluctuating, shifting and changing. Wars, disagreements and unrest among people within the same country and between countries perpetuate. Yet, we still sing our songs, in every language of the quest for peace, love and understanding. Here lies our similarity: the underlying quest of compassion of humankind. In pursing this quest for peace, we seek our souls, the basis of who we are individually and collectively. We are in constant pursuit of our spiritual connection to all. In this quest for that which we cannot see, we seek the God with us and each other. We recognize, like Eve in the Garden of Eden, that there is something more. This quest for God is shared by people of all tribes. It is the core of our existence. It is what breaks down the barriers and brings us together. It is a journey of our hearts. It is the journey that makes us one. Humans are perpetually on a quest to find their own soul and feel the connection to their own hearts. The quest expands universally to the pursuit of connection to the souls of others in the world. Carl Jung, the famous twentieth-century psychoanalyst, coined the phrase “collective unconscious.” Jung in his astute delving into the souls of humankind recognized the “oneness” among us all as a special species. Collective unconscious refers to the inherent memory in each individual of past experiences of the human species as a whole, preserved within the unconscious mind or soul of each one of us, thus creating a universal mind. Within this universal mind, we can recognize our oneness and connection on a soul level to each other. Together, we can have the courage to forge ahead, symbolic hands clasped tightly across towns, cities and nations. We, as one people, similar in our quest, can help each other on the path to the unification of our souls and the spirit realm that exists for us all. How can we get to this place? The first step is to recognize it and give it merit. The second step is to embrace traditions that recognize the importance of bringing people together in order to help us all to evolve and not just coexist with each other. Many ancient traditions promote the oneness of our collective soul. One of these wonderful traditions is shamanism. The spiritual tradition of shamanism has existed on every continent of the world for more than 40,000 years and it continues to exist today. Mircea Eliade and Michael Harner, two anthropologists, brought the ancient technique to all of us in the 1970’s. Through their studies and their making available to us the techniques of the ancient tribal people, we are fortunate to be able to reawaken and revitalize our own cultures. Shamanism is a spirituality that reveres, encompasses and views everything on our planet as interrelated with everything else. We are related to our families, to the human species, and to all things in the natural world. Shamanism focuses on the well-being of all and establishes balance and health, whether it be personal or for the planet as a whole. It gives birth to harmony.
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