Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension.
Persistently, Western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of kind of end of the world.
It isn't going to happen according to any of the scenarios of religion, but the basic intuition that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendence is confirmed.
It's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past as mystic, but a kind of map of the future.
This is what shamanism has always been about. A shaman is someone who has been to the end. It's someone who knows how the world really works.
And knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space-time and kazoo history, and actually seeing the wiring under the board,
stepped outside the confines of culture, and being built into ordinary social space for the good of the community.
So in the context of 90% of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas.
This higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery, I believe.
And what shamans are, are people who have been able to decondition themselves from the community's instinctual distrust of the mystery,
and to go into it, to go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time,
to save souls, to save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors, so forth and so on.
A shamanism is not a religion, it's a set of techniques, and the principal technique is the use of psychedelic plans.
What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries,
one cannot continue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of 2,000 years of unchallenged dominator culture,
based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female, so forth and so on.
So, what shamans have to do to it, is act as exemplar, this cosmic journey to the delta to save the world.