What is Shamanic Healing?

Excerpt from the lecture “Wisdom Teachings on Shamanic Healing” by Maestro Manuel Rufino, given at The Ark in Brooklyn, NY on January 13, 2016.

I really don't like to talk too much about these topics, but people continue to ask me about them. A lot of you are practitioners or people who are serious on this spiritual path. As we go through life, knowledge keeps opening up, so we see that science is finally catching up with the traditional teachings. I was just listening today to a lecture on transhumanism. There is some new scientific discovery about the vision of the new human that was already foretold a long time ago but science is just beginning to discover this, beginning to tap into it. Even now they are beginning to say that it is possible to become immortal, that it is possible to transfer consciousness to something else more than the human body: computers, microchips, or something else. This is knowledge that the tradition has had for a long time, that the consciousness can be transferred to anything: a tree, an animal, a stone, a planet, anything. Consciousness is transferable, and it is immortal and infinite. This is knowledge that the tradition always had. It is not the first time that we are trying to mix things. There were many mixes before between human and animal, between humans and angels, many other forms of life. Now we are beginning to see the possibilities, that it is possible. 

It is possible to transfer a negative thought to somebody, and it can disturb you deeply. It is possible that you can catch a very negative energy from somebody or an environment or a stone or an animal or a vegetable, a plant. It is possible. Now we see with the new technology that they are trying to get into nanotechnology, that it is possible to change into something else, so the material world starts to become something not as solid as science thought it was. Traditional people kept talking about being able to change something into something else. In many traditions they talk about a shaman becoming a jaguar or eagle or an object. Now science, nanotechnology is beginning to acknowledge that it is possible. Eventually things will be seen as being very plastic; things are not as solid as we think they are.

As we go deeper we will discover that all of this is mental, that the mind guided by willpower can change things. We are beginning to develop that possibility. The ancient people said they not only believed it is possible, they have done it, but they don't want to show it. We said that we want you to show it to us. We will talk later about it as we encounter the transhuman a little bit beyond the need for money, power, sex, destruction and other things that just bring us to a very low state.

I went to see the movie called ‘The Revenant’. It is very interesting. Are we evolving or devolving? I don't know where we are going! We can become closer to becoming animals than to being human. Thank you for those types of movies that are showing us that it is possible for us to also go down. It is possible to go up, and it is also possible to go down into the realm of just being another animal, not much difference. So the movie is trying to show us that there is not much difference between a bear and a human. You are just struggling for things. It does not go beyond that. And at the end the bear is more powerful anyway. If we go that way, we are going to lose because they catch up with us.

This lecture is about a lot of questions that people ask continuously: ‘How do I protect myself?’,  ‘I think I am under the spell of somebody.’ ‘I think that somebody has sent me some type of bad thoughts.’ ‘I think I am a victim of something.’ I think all those things are possible. But it’s not always exactly the way that we think things are. Because a lot of things are all mental. Our mind is continuously playing games. Everything that exists in the Universe is mental. It all comes through our mind. Develop your mind, not the intellect, because the intellect does not bring you to become more than a doctor or a lawyer. It stops there. The only thing that you are going to become with the intellect is maybe a doctor. And a bad one maybe. There is something beyond that. The mind is not the intellect. The intellect is only a very small fraction. The same with reason. The mind is very slow. It takes many years to discover that. 

Cigarette smoking is dangerous for you. It took years of observation to conclude something that you can observe naturally. Many people that smoke die of cancer, so you don't need a PhD to realize that it is a problem.  And when you need a PhD to realize that many smokers are dying of cancer, that means that you were not being allowed to use your mind. Somebody has taken it already. So until you begin to use your own mind and not somebody else's (Socrates, or Buddha or Jesus or Gandhi), you will not discover what mind really is. It is somebody else's mind, somebody else's thoughts. 

So our mind and our senses are being trained, they have been trained to see things according to the culture. So you don't have your own senses. Senses do not belong to you. They belong to the culture. If the culture says that is a very beautiful woman, and she is fat and round, and has a big butt, then that becomes your column of beauty; then when you see a woman, that's what you see, you do not see something else. If the column of culture is that you have to be very skinny, almost dying, when you look at a woman you look at her that way. But it is not you looking, somebody is making you look at things in a certain way. 

In the shamanic tradition we leave the mind in its natural state. It lets you see what is really there. You are the one looking at things and judging it, if you need to judge it. We prefer you not to, but the mind likes to do that. 

In the tradition we do not believe in meditation, because the mind is always meditating. It is the nature of the mind. It doesn't need to learn how to meditate. It is doing it 24 hours a day. But if somebody is selling you meditation, then you think you need to buy a course, you need to go to a monastery, you need to look at things in a certain way to learn how to meditate. It is already there. It is the nature of the mind. So then a lot of things happen daily due to your thoughts and the way that you use your mind. 

The activity comes in, it takes you over, it can be for one day. If you are in love with negativity it can take you for three days, if you are really in love, it takes you for a week, a month, maybe a few years of negative things, thinking that you are the worst person, thinking that everybody is bad, thinking that you know life is just negative. A lot of this is because we engage our mind into a process which is natural, it is a meditation. You are just not aware. Then you just engage yourself into negative thoughts and it will take you over for many months or years. Sometimes people come to tell me things. I say:

‘Wow, when was that?’ 

‘Oh my mother did that 35 years ago.’ 

‘God bless you, are you still carrying that? Can you just clean that up? Make space and use it for something else? Why are you still angry? Why are you still involved in that?’

‘Oh somebody did something to me.’ 

‘When was that?’ 

‘That was 50 years ago.’ 

And not just that, you are carrying things from many reincarnations ago. You are still holding on to it, and it does not let you live happily in the present and enjoy your mind naturally, to create and to manifest things. 

So the magical mind is coming back. It was part of the ancient technique. And through what they call nanotechnology, and quantum technology and all of that, the magical mind is coming back. Science is now beginning to reveal that it is possible. But for the ancient people it was just natural. They observed that their thoughts become things. So the mind and your field of energy is continuously bombarded by all things around you, especially your inner thoughts. That's the worst enemy, your own mind untrained, and unguarded, and totally abandoned because you do not think that you can control your thoughts. 

You think that thoughts just come in like that. They come because they are invited. You invite them and you host them and you feed them. You are angry with somebody, you host the anger, and you begin to feed the thoughts. For many months and years to a point that you are not able to see the other person. You never know anything about that person because you have been angry with that person since childhood. Every time you see the person you are not seeing the person. You are just projecting your anger and your thoughts, and your ideas and things that you think about the person. But it is not the person. It is just a bunch of thoughts. And this is what is called black magic. It is just engagement of the thoughts, a projection of negativity towards somebody or towards yourself. When you engage in that for too long, it will make you into a very dark mind, and it will guide you into the dark thoughts, dark ideas, and then when the mind is really in a very dark place, it goes against you, it begins to persecute you, it begins to hunt you. 

So, we now live in a very clean environment, there is no jaguar to eat you, there is no rain to flood you, maybe once in awhile just to show you who is still in charge, but the main thing is that you don't have any of those things that we use to have in nature. But now the images in your head that hunt you every day are worse than the jaguar. With the jaguar you can see that there is a jaguar over there. But when you create a mental jaguar, it hunts you everywhere that you go. In your dreams, as you walk, anywhere. A very negative mind, hunts us continuously. It doesn't let us sleep, it doesn't allow us to be happy. Even though we have the best homes ever with the best bed, the person is not able to sleep. We have the best food and the person is not able to digest it.