Shamanism's legacy can act as a steadying force to redirect our awareness toward the collective fate of the biosphere. The shamanic faith is that humanity is not without allies. There are forces friendly to our struggle to birth ourselves as an intelligent species. But they are quiet and shy; they are to be sought, not in the arrival of alien star fleets in the skies of earth, but nearby, in wilderness solitude, in the ambience of waterfalls, and yes, in the grasslands and pastures now too rarely beneath our feet.

• shamanism
• awareness
• religion
• nature
• fate
• humanity
• faith
• force
• collective
• struggle
• birth

The essential fate of man, at least of the mature modern man, is enacted on three fronts which, although interconnected, are nonetheless clearly marked off from one another.  The world as the outside world of extrahuman events, the community as the sphere of interhuman relationships, the psyche as the world of interior human experience - these are the three basic factors which govern human life, and man's creative encounter with each of them is decisive for the development of the individual.

• collective
• conscious development
• humanity
• fate
• life
• experience
• relationships
• community
• psyche

Although the separation of the World Parents is, strictly speaking, an integral part of the hero myth, the developments which, at that stage, could only be represented in cosmic symbols now enter the phase of humanization and personality formation.  Thus the hero is the archetypal forerunner of mankind in general.  His fate is the pattern in accordance with which the masses of humanity must live, and always have lived, however haltingly and distantly; and however short of the ideal man they have fallen, the stages of the hero myth have become constituent elements in the personal development of every individual.

• the hero
• conscious development
• creation
• fate
• humanity
• individuation
• ideal
• parents
• personality
• symbols
• myth
• separation

The typical human being, whom we will call 'Jeder,' represents nearly every member of the human race in every soil and clime.  He carries out his script because it is planted in his head at an early age by his parents, and stays there for the rest of his life, even after their vocal 'flesh' has gone forevermore.  It acts like a computer tape or a player piano roll, which brings out the responses in the planned order long after the person who punched the holes has departed the scene.  Jeder meanwhile sits before the piano, moving his fingers along the keyboard under the illusion that it is he who brings the folksy ballad or the stately concerto to its forgone conclusion.

• fate
• humanity
• mechanicalness
• transactional analysis
• life
• parents
• will
• flesh

To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming - in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the Ruler within you - means a loss of opportunity for some other task. See then that the flow of your thoughts is kept free from idle or random fancies, particularly those of an inquisitive or uncharitable nature. \r\n\r\nA man should habituate himself to such a way of thinking that if suddenly asked, 'What is in your mind at this minute?' he could respond frankly and without hesitation; thus proving that all his thoughts were simple and kindly, as becomes a social being with no taste for the pleasures of sensual imaginings, jealousies, envies, suspicions, or any other sentiments that he would blush to acknowledge in himself. \r\n\r\nSuch a man, determined here and now to aspire to the heights, is indeed a priest and minister of the gods; for he is making full use of that indwelling power which can keep a man unsullied by pleasures, proof against pain, untouched by insult, and impervious to evil. He is a competitor in the greatest of all contests, the struggle against passion's mastery; he is imbued through and through with uprightness, welcoming whole-heartedly whatever falls to his lot and rarely asking himself what others may be saying or doing or thinking except when the public interest requires it. \r\n\r\nHe confines his operations to his own concerns, having his attention fixed on his own particular thread of the universal web; seeing to it that his actions are honourable, and convinced that what befalls him must be for the best - for his own directing fate is itself under a higher direction. \r\n\r\nHe does not forget the brotherhood of all rational beings, nor that a concern for every man is proper to humanity; and he knows that it is not the world's opinions he should follow, but only those of men whose lives confessedly accord with Nature. As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad, and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes, has no value for him.

• gossip
• stoicism
• the fourth way
• fate
• humanity
• society
• power
• nature
• evil
• attention
• public
• struggle
• passion
• loss
• gods
• other