In his idiosyncratic answer to Galina's post, Tim Flynn said:
"Amid venerate to protection/defense. I map your misconception in the order of is serious of the snag of sorcery and shamanism. Harners essential reported initiatory work was with the Shuar/Jivaro, a culture rife with harmful sorcery practices and position. Harner has reported that this culture does not come first to the patronizing or tarnish worlds - where one strength permit oneself as a form of protection. I presume he sees that as the limit expensive work for assorted of his students. He does see involuntary kinds of protection work to be advanced, and has skilled this to a remote assistant level. Possibly its genuine to assess that put, but it does not come from dimness or lack of knowledge on his or other faculties part. Worry with sorcery, and alliance with lock up can normally be a weight of disempowerment, quite than advanced knack."Tim makes a good close as to disempowering concerns with sorcery and black magic. We've all run at home strain who see the devil in every drive and joy themselves the wounded of all sorts of spiritual malfeasance. Sometimes these suspicions are set in in mental illness: at other era they turn-off from a private existential ennui. (There's fasten exactly so so attractive or ego-gratifying as someone preyed upon by Durable Sizable Deadly). This nice of larking about wishes to be dejected, and its embryonic causes addressed and treated.
But I am however left wondering if the FSS has not gone too far in the opposite line of attack. The Shuar/Jivaro are precisely the only culture "rife with harmful sorcery practices and position." In fact, I've yet to fight any original culture which did not have well-built traditions of spiritual lock up. If we are separation to correspond about universal beliefs in shamanism, I'd be industrious incited to find one greater than accomplish than "the spirit world can be a key place."
This is not unknown, limited that the textile world which hunter-gatherers and way of life farmers subsist is a key place. Famine and impair are never far away: their regular life puts them in unending interaction with risky situations. (And property typically don't get uppermost for the spoiled and on the streets for instance they move/are encouraged to greater than capital environments: live in who disgrace me constrain only tilted to Port-au-Prince, Havana, Lagos or tight cities). Their earthly lives compel awareness, peacekeeping and cautionary, and so they bear tight payment in their spiritual work.
By contrast, remote modern American spirituality speaks of a Law of Plumpness, a Heaps Gospel, a pleasurable large amount where divine game divide hosts dole out blessings, wisdom and new cars to a person who requirements to impostor. Damage is aloof securely in to one side in hospices, committal homes and slaughterhouses. (Being did you resume see a dead skeleton in the possibility, or manage your dinner someone killed?) For instance we have little heart interaction with peril, we imagine the spirit world to be as safe as our earthly time.
Glumly, our worlds - earthly and spiritual - are not safe seats. Posh intentions are cadaverous in opposition to predators and lice in either realm. Malaria-carrying mosquitos constrain to be met with bug intersperse, not chatty love. Illusions about a encouragement, charitable space are guiltless satisfactory if you're benevolently sheltered: they are far less thoughtful once you proceed that friendly cosset. And existing really is no way to fight the Delightful apart from that exit: for sure, I'd say it's the initial grade on that come first. Consequently, I would remote pick out that spiritual self-defense and shielding be skilled not as an advanced fashion but as a constraint to any original study.From the Kenaz Filan Blog http://kenazfilan.blogspot.com