Visionary Shamanism: Activating the Imaginal Cells of the Human Energy Field

By Linda Star Wolf & Anne Dillon

Chapter 2:
Becoming the Visionary Shaman

I believe that we are all born with a power­ful shamanic spirit. Like the rest of the natural world that we are so deeply related to, we are given many wonder­ful shamanic gifts from our Divine Source. One of the most power­ful gifts given to us from the Creator is the inner know­ing and wisdom that informs us when it is time to let go and to die and be reborn into a whole new level of consciousness.

I accepted many years ago that I am on earth in part to assist and guide others in connect­ing to their shaman within, partic­u­larly now as we are moving into the Aquarian Age and every­one can open to their inner shaman. We can open to our inner shaman by utiliz­ing tools like Shamanic Breathwork, which helps us to learn how to develop the nonlo­cal mind in order to avail ourselves of ancient wisdom as well as to receive the fertile down­loads coming in from the future realms of consciousness.

To access the nonlo­cal mind means being able to access differ­ent peri­ods of time and differ­ent places with our thoughts instead of merely being able to focus on the here and now. The nonlo­cal mind is not restricted to past, present, or future events but can travel between all three realms. It is the field that prayer, mira­cles, visions, and reve­la­tions draw from, includ­ing the sense of déjà vu. The laws of synchronic­ity are active in this kind of shape-shifting real­ity, and cause and effect are not what they seem to be in linear time.

According to many of the great spir­i­tual traditions–Hindu, Buddhist, esoteric Christianity, and some indige­nous teachings–everything already exists and, in a manner of speak­ing, has already happened on some imag­i­nal plane of exis­tence; every­thing already is. I refer to this as Isis = is is. Events are not going to happen, nor will they happen some day. However, because of our innate need to focus on times and events sequen­tially in order to have a "human expe­ri­ence," we are created and designed to see the past, present, and future in a linear space-time contin­uum. They are self-styled refer­ence points that we have collec­tively created so that we can exist in a spatial real­ity where our life lessons are learned, and synchro­nis­tic occur­rences congre­gate to give us clues about the truth of our power­ful shamanic natures.

Some of us know how to gaze into the future to read the Akashic Records, which are vari­ously described as a cosmic library or a kind of super­com­puter whose esoteric data includes every­thing that has ever happened in the cosmos and every­thing that ever will. Psychotherapist and author Michael Newton has writ­ten exten­sively about his expe­ri­ences with clients who, in a state of deep hypno­sis, have been able to access these records in order to make deci­sions about their own life’s path.

Visionaries like Buckminster Fuller and others such as Henry Ford and Albert Einstein could easily draw upon this energy. Barbara Marx Hubbard, a well-known spir­i­tual evolu­tion­ist, refers to this energy as the imag­i­nal cells. The imag­i­nal cells are the very valu­able part of us that already have an exis­tence in another realm. They are the seeds of the future that are constantly down­load­ing into our human energy fields and into our human levels of consciousness.

You might say that the imag­i­nal cells repre­sent our human poten­tial, but it’s actu­ally more substan­tive than that because our imag­i­nal cells already exist within the matrix. If we can tune in to them we can open ourselves more easily and allow them to come in and create who we are meant to be more quickly. They will do this over time anyway–with or with­out our consent. However, when we consciously invoke them and actively surren­der to the process of change, we accel­er­ate the process so that we can bring in our newest incar­na­tions in a much more rapid fash­ion and thereby speed up our evolu­tion­ary process as it pertains to conscious­ness and making the quan­tum leap.

Walking in shamanic aware­ness in the Aquarian Age is not neces­sar­ily about know­ing the "correct" order for call­ing in the four direc­tions or the "exact" number of stones to be placed in the medi­cine wheel, or the "right" way to behave in a partic­u­lar ritual or cere­mony. Awakening the shaman within is much more about learn­ing how to heal oneself by know­ing oneself–the light, the dark, no difference–and through this aware­ness awak­en­ing the inner wisdom keeper and shaman.

The inner shaman is not only inter­ested in further evolv­ing power­ful spir­i­tual tradi­tions by respect­fully honor­ing what has been but also being able to stand on those teach­ings as foun­da­tions while contin­u­ing to dream the dream forward in an upward spiral of spir­i­tual wisdom. It is time to ask ourselves what the twenty-first-century shaman looks like and take a long hard look in the mirror while we are listen­ing for the answer to our question.

When we learn to accept our multi­di­men­sion­al­ity we become respon­si­ble for our creations in the world of time and space. In so doing, we actu­ally become co-creators with God, living out our destiny as univer­sal humans and actively co-creating the future with the Great Mystery. At this point, no matter where we find ourselves in this vast universe, at last we will know that we are and always have been home.