Laurence James Lucas

A Broader Perspective on Shamanism

A Broader Perspective on Shamanism

My Journey into Shamanism

My life’s work developed primarily from shamanic practice and astrological research throughout the 1990s. Childhood and adolescent contemplation and experience in the psychic and subtle realms started to integrate once I undertook this full-time, daily shamanic practice and astrological research.

I began a shamanic practice early one morning after reading some of a Kenneth Meadows book on the medicine wheel and Native American philosophy the previous day. The concepts he spoke of felt so familiar to me that I was compelled to experience the medicine wheel for myself, after first stalking power spots to create shamanic spaces. I used my creative intuition to gather objects from the space around me to mark the directions and to demarcate the circle that I worked in. I quickly felt directly connected to the environment as a living intelligent field. I allowed the living environment to then direct me and teach me as I added movement and sound, often linked to primal or animalistic energies. This evolved to a more qigong-type movement, combined with toning and overtoning.

Throughout my autodidactic training, I felt an interconnection between my energy field, the circle I was working in and the larger environment, initially in the common land that I visited every morning for over three years. This particular place is an area called Horsell Common, near Woking in Surrey, UK. (The Sandpits of Horsell Common, to where I was drawn most often, also inspired H.G. Wells. This is where he located the first Martian landing in his War of the Worlds). I had played there as a child and had trained there as a teenage athlete, so my direct connection to the spirit of this area was very strong. On this common I had a multitude of vivid experiences that included access to other lands and times, as well as connections to spirit guides, extraterrestrials, elemental and animal spirits.

As the work expanded over the next decade, I was able to connect to other spaces and, simultaneously, I experienced a gradual realization of subtle interconnection with the planet as a whole. The practice evolved as I explored the multiple dimensions of my energy body and the expanding interconnections with my locale and the whole Earth, as well as dimensions within the Earth’s energy field, including time–space portals that enabled access to stellar energies and all manner of beings.

The Doorway of Perception

Through undertaking hundreds of quests, including past life and soul retrieval journeys, I learned to differentiate between my own internal filters of perception and images and those from outside myself.

A shamanic journey is the projection of some or all of our consciousness into another world. You can be physically sitting in this world, but you can send out part of your soul into another world, thus seeing and feeling the journey on the screen of the imagination. Nothing is manifested in our world unless it first comes through the imagination.

The imagination is a two-way mirror or plasma screen onto which we can project our consciousness, thoughts and emotions, but we can also receive energy from the ‘other’ via this plasma screen of our imagination. The plasma screen—which is encoded with our own beliefs and conditioning—at times heavily filters the ‘other’, but at other times is almost transparent.

The essential experience I gained from my daily practice was of the holographic or fractal nature of the human energy field. The individual energy field is a fractal harmonic of the whole planet and of the whole solar system.

Once I had fully grasped this, it became clear that my astrological research and my experience of shamanism were truly two sides of the same coin.

All our endeavours and experience interconnect through the doorway of our perception.

The Mayan Influence

Around this time, I also began a deep and lifelong study of the 260-day Sacred Calendar of the Maya. The way we attune to the frequency described by the Mayan Sacred Calendar—which resides at the heart of their complex, interlocking calendrical system—is predominantly through acknowledging each day in the system.

In the early days, I followed the 260-day count uninterrupted for 10 years. It was through this resonant attunement that I was able to appreciate the significance of the 2012 end date, which is derived from the Mayan Long Count Calendar.

The Maya were (and are) a unique shamanic culture, for their brand of shamanism is entwined with the varying scales and frequencies of time. The Sacred Calendar is truly a shamanic-astrological system.

The six-month adventure from October 1996 in Mexico and Guatemala, when I explored the sacred sites, was one of the most powerful and transformative periods of my life. The energy of the Mayan land lends itself to experiences that are simultaneously archaic and futuristic. Appropriately, there are significant UFO phenomena within the area. It is from the Mayan consciousness that I learnt to connect to different time frames that coexist within the planetary field.

The Living Environment and Contemporary Shamanism

A shaman is traditionally someone who moves easily between the worlds, using various techniques to induce ecstasy and trance, altering their consciousness to travel to different realms and to engage with different spirits. The spirits can include ancestors or other disembodied spirits, animal spirits, tree spirits, plant spirits, insect spirits, rock spirits and other elementals or Devas. To the shaman, everything is alive or has a spirit that can be engaged and communicated with. This is how the shaman discovers the natural plant medicines.

There is no real difference between the shaman, who is essentially interested in healing, divination and communication with the subtle realms, and witches and traditional midwives.

The shaman engages directly with the worlds both seen and unseen that are all around us. As our world has changed, so has the practice of shamanism.

The shamanic tradition does lend itself naturally to all manner of what we might think of as contemporary alternative practices, healing, beliefs and paradigms. The form of shamanism that emerged within me can be described as energy and information exchange with the living environment in which we walk around and have our existence within. This environment is alive, meaning that it is inhabited by many, many life forms and is itself a life form, a living being. However, it is not one big soup of undifferentiated amorphous energy; rather, the environment abounds with complex structure.

Within the environment are psychological and sociological forces, spatial and temporal structures and energy rhythms that can be mapped. These include the lunar cycle, the 260-day count and the solstices and equinoxes, as well as the civil calendar with its minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. The shamanic approach of engaging with the living environment can therefore encompass and integrate what is often thought of as isolated, disconnected factors.

The way that I describe the complex structure of the environment is through the Enchantment Principle and the Enchantments of Life. The way that I map that structure for the individual is through astrologically based consultations, while the way that I help people shift energy is through shamanic ceremony and energy field practices.