"There were once people who lived profoundly on this planet, essentially without the self consciousness of doing so, and some survive precariously in a few isolated places today. They were people who lived in reciprocal, respectful relationship within ecosystems of which they recognized themselves a part and whose sacred nature they knew and understood. They lived lives in which the everyday activities of living were more akin to ritual or sacrament, paced by the rhythms of nature and linked to and in harmony with the greater movements of the cosmos - blending the sacred and the profane, past and future, time and timelessness, in the present moment. They were people who inherited an uninterrupted transmission of the knowledge of a way of being that stretched back to their distant ancestors. They knew the anatomy of the land in which they lived, dreamed its dreams, learned what it taught, and felt the same pulse stream of life flowing through the veins of the universe that they heard singing within their own bodies.
It is the lives and the beliefs of such people, who in the West until recently were considered as merely 'superstitious', 'primitive' or 'backward', which we are now beginning to realize were dynamic and vivid ways of experiencing and understanding the universe, ways that we have forgotten, and which were far more precious, far truer and far beyond anything our modern scientific belief systems or our pale interpretations of religion have been able to give or teach us.
In the West we have created a 'culture' of anaesthesia and amnesia, a 'culture' that encourages us to stop feeding our bodies and minds and prevents us from experiencing and realizing ourselves as part of the universe, instead of existing as paranoid strangers within, and divests us of all the knowledge of our spiritual destinies - our true natures. This is a result of our having developed philosophies or descriptions of reality that are based on an egocentric dualistic rationalism. For the paths of innate wisdom and insight we have substituted the schools of acquisitive, second-hand knowledge, placing intellect over intuition and raising it to the center point of human endeavour. By doing so, we have disinherited ourselves of our own insight and of our wise ones, our Elders, the custodians of true knowledge of the Way and of those paths that could lead us, with all the self-evident and terrifying consequences.
We need to relearn and assimilate into our own lives what has survived of this ancient knowledge, in order to begin to heal ourselves, each other and the planet on which we live. In so doing we may also in some part, pay homage and respect to those peoples and their traditions and cultures that were banished and forbidden a place under the sun and the moon..."
From "The Shamanic Healer - The Healing World of Ikuko Osumi and the Traditional Art of Seiki-Jutsu" by Ikuko Osumi and Malcom Ritchie
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