About shamans, wise men, healers, warriors and wizards.

It is hard to define a person that stands out from "normality" and classify them into these very few names commonly given to them. While two different people may call themselves "shaman", the difference between them can be great. Accepted etymology of the word shaman is that of a Russian background and describes a person that has the capacity to contact spirits and heal people thanks to a special connection. But did anyone know that in the Maya language there is the word "xamen" that means "man of the north"? Cultural groups from around the world -"natives"- seem all to have shamans in their tribes or a tag for a person of similar description and while their culture's beliefs and cosmology  are different, they all share common traits.

 We might easily think that a shaman is related only to tribal lifestyle and that it would be a farce to find a shaman that for example is fluent in English or has knowledge of computers or modern things. When we find a person like this, we can be stepping into the other side of the line that divides the description of "shaman" from "wise man". If we think of a wise man, a sage, we might imagine a person that has great knowledge, but of a philosophical type and might still seem strange if we see that person in an internet cafe or at a disco. Luckily, those are all stereotypes, and stereotypes exist to blur us from reality. There are hundreds of shamans and wise men all around us, in large cities, on the bus, on the plane, dressed like us, of any race, speaking any language, doing anything and everything. Wisdom does not discriminate, and what  apparently might seem  not very wise, like drinking a beer on the street, can have a transcendent purpose in an ignored context.

Wisdom and special perceptive and shamanistic abilities can be profoundly obscured by a complex human trait called ego. The battle against this apparent enemy of the wise and enlightened is carried out by people who for that purpose call themselves warriors. In this context, the relation that the word warrior might have to physical aggression, violence or war is completely nonexistent. The battle here is carried out solely within the self and for purposes of enlightenment. Hence great wisdom is achieved and perceptive abilities that might give this person the traits of a shaman and a wise man.

Then we have wizards. People with special abilities to transform people and objects, time and reality. Not to be confused with magicians, who only create the illusion of doing these feats. Only until the last years has modern occidental science achieved to understand that physics can be "bent" and thus these feats are theoretically possible. Modern anthropology has also proven that people with these abilities exist. For wizards there are infinite traditions and types of wizardry. These types of wizardry are normally labeled by colors: "white magic, black magic, red magic" etc.  When the consciousness reaches a certain degree of wisdom and enlightenment, lineal, two dimensional -good and bad-, -before and after-, -better or worse- perspective is lost, and the consciousness enters a multi-dimensional understanding where different things are simply different and don't have to be defined by a line or by a two dimensional way of thinking. Here the self understands that reality is  beyond -good and bad-.

For thousands even millions of years humanity lived in harmony with nature in a state similar to what the bible describes as "paradise", or the garden of eden. This chapter in genesis actually happened in a less metaphoric way. Ancient shamans, by taking plants that took them into alternate states of perception, where able to contact inorganic beings. These inorganic beings tought them incredible powers of what can be called wizardry. Wizards and shamans then, lost themselves to an enemy of the light warrior called power. They dedicated themselves to have more and more power, and with  it they tricked themselves and cursed humanity into a prolongued dark era from which we are barely coming out of today. Later, the same wizards discovered that there was something beyond power, called freedom, and began to search for this freedom, liberating themselves from the curse of power. Today we might still find many wizards who are caught in the ilussion of power and practice great wizardry feats. But these feats are completely unecessary to accomplish the ultimate purspose of a warrior of light, or a shaman wise man: Freedom.