Introduction

This book is the result of my doctoral/PhD research into the mechanics of the shamanic soul retrieval (and soul restoration) procedure. Of course, at the energy level of shamanic healing modalities – in the realm of spirits, of consciousness – we do not find operational mechanics influencing physical parts. Mechanics refers to the Newtonian world of matter, where things bump into each other and where happenings follow a one-dimensional trajectory on the timeline from past to present to future: phenomena we encounter on the macro level of existence. In the quantum world of existence, on the level of consciousness (where the present can influence the past, the future can alter the present, and the past can be affected by the future, all being contained in the ever now), next to our whole-brain faculties, the mental powers of imagination, intention, and decree become operative. These mental powers also guide the shaman's operational thrust and the aiming force of purposive intervention on behalf of a fellow human being. On this level, we find quantum relationships, and the shaman understands (and takes into account) that everything is relational and behaves relationally.

Because they were so intimately connected with the surrounding ecosystem, indigenous shamans, seers, and wise ones intuitively sensed that life is interactive and interconnected, that it is a production of seen and unseen forces; of possibilities and actualities; of intent, of desire, and creation, all geared towards manifestation for the sake of expression from thought to form. They understood that physical life is not only infused with spirit, but that it has been engendered by spirit. These millennia-old insights (also detailed in the Indian Vedas) are now corroborated by modern science, expressed so eloquently nearly a century ago by the English physicist and mathematician Sir James Jeans:

The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought to rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.

Of course, there is the existential conundrum: the physical body is quite resilient, yet it is also rather fragile. The dual make-up of our suchness – spirit housed in flesh; transcendence cloaked in immanence; the monad (God) expressed in the dyad (matter) – carries the risk of breaking apart: body failing, spirit leaving. Meaning that the soul, our indwelling spiritual component, which leaves its physical residence at death, can even partially move out at the chance of the body being maimed and potentially dying.

Shamans, as the original doctors and psychologists, had to come up with methods to remedy such incidents. Returning an injured body to physical health was, and is, always the first order of intervention; bringing back the possibly lost soul parts, the second. Only then can a person continue to live the life of a fully restored being. The shamans understood that.

Flashing forward to our modern world view and the mostly material understanding of life; with its resulting contemporary healthcare, we resigned ourselves to the mechanical maintenance of the body and the replacement of parts. Notwithstanding great advancements in today's medical procedures, we chose – speaking generally – to neglect that each body is souled, that the impermanent physical form is partnered with permanent spirit. And shamans always maintained that every physical illness has a spiritual component.

Through my studies and my shamanic work with clients, I became ever more intrigued by the how and the why of the shamanic modality's effects, and I got interested in the mechanics of soul retrieval work. The question was, what mechanisms are at work when shamans collect lost soul parts in non-ordinary reality and returns them to ordinary reality; when they operate outside of space-time and facilitate healing in space-time?

Simplified, one explanation comes via quantum physics' insight into the nature of existence, proving that consciousness is part of the equation. In the words of one of my professors, quantum physicist Dr. Amit Goswami, "Consciousness is the ground of all being." Biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake added another important piece to the puzzle with his proposal of morphic resonance and morphogenesis and their respective fields of consciousness, which are specific to each species and guide how their forms unfold. And from ancient India comes akasha, a Sanskrit word for the understanding of higher spheres of life and existence, of a universe filled with energies and information. Ervin Laszlo talks about the akashic cosmic memory fields, and frontier scientists are discovering deeper dimensions of the universe, surpassing what had been accepted by classical science. Indigenous shamans intuited (without using the same terms) nature's mysterious, multilayered depth. They sensed those fields of virtual existence (virtual reality: an augmented understanding of existence, where beyond-space-time-reality informs actuality) and, outcome-oriented, they acted on their knowing. For the sake of a client's body mind spirit health, the shaman would enter those transcendental realms to find and return to the individual the soul essence that had left due to a traumatic event; thus, shamans restore people, in toto, to their original homeostasis.

My book offers the reader insight into shamanic work and into my research. To probe into the subtle happenings during soul retrieval, I utilized two established scientific methods: brain mapping and dark field microscopy (DFM). Each – independently of the other – provides insight into the shaman/client connection during an actual soul retrieval procedure. The results of my work attest to the relational holism of shaman body-mind total and client body-mind total, and they give evidence of their quantum entanglement during the process. These are novel findings, and I hope that more research into these phenomena can be done.

Even though we do not have all the answers yet (and might never have them), I think it is safe to conclude that we exist in a universe of living energy where everything is conscious, is interconnected, and participates purposively in the unfolding of life.

1.1 1 Why I Chose This Subject

The reasons for choosing my dissertation topic are manifold. What prompted me particularly to select the theme of shamanic soul retrieval can be listed as follows:

• the issue of trauma in the society/country where I grew up

• out-of-body experiences in my early childhood and teenage years

• a near-death experience (NDE) as a young woman

• precognitive experiences throughout my life

• spiritual insights gained during my studies with indigenous shamans encounters with the entheogen ayahuasca

• my shamanic work resulting from these studies

• my intellectual curiosity, fuelled by the desire to explore the parallels of shamanic knowing and quantum understanding

• and certainly, the conviction that shamanic soul retrieval has merits as a quantum healing modality Above all, it was my yearning to inquire into the mysteries of life.

1.1.1 Trauma

Unacknowledged trauma was the paramount shadow over the space-time in which I grew up. After World War II, Europe was de-spirited, and so was the environment. Nearly every feature – house, plaza, forest, mountain, and so on – was visibly or invisibly marred by the horrors of war. Daily life seemed to run its natural path, as most people just felt glad to have survived the horrors of war. In Germany, the healthy substrata of existence, like joie de vivre, inner peace, or a sense of life's purposiveness, were mostly missing. Emotional numbness reigned. People's psychological misery was compounded to various degrees by the conflicting emotions of internalized guilt and the perpetrator's misguided feelings of having been victimized. Growing up in such a milieu, the urgent question was whom to trust. The very fabric of civilized life had been torn.

I escaped into study and reading. The poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the guiding signposts assisting me in navigating the difficult times of adolescence. As I came to realize only much later, Rilke's mind and his eyes were those of a shaman, and he invented a language suitable to name and describe the mysterious, that which could not help but emanate back into life from underneath the crud and drudgery of daily survival. Rilke's poetry touched my spirit, lifted me up, saddened me, and seemed to address, even validate, the negated out-of-body and telepathic experiences of my childhood. His poem The Panther spoke to my own feelings of being caged:

The Panther (Jardin des Plantes, Paris)

His gaze, so numbed by narrow-passing bars,
resigned the joy to see.
To him, there are a thousand bars which bar
a thousand worlds or none.

His supple pace of measured strides is
rhythmed to the smallest circle,
a spiral dance for vast environs –
compelled to negate its own intent.

At rare moments the pupils open silently –
a long-forgotten image enters from within,
tenses the still strong limbs –
and is extinguished in the heart.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), my translation

1.1.2 Paranormal Experiences

A near-death experience in my early twenties made me understand both cognitively and emotionally that life is more than I had been taught and allowed to believe. While there, in the other realm, I gained understanding of life's mystery and sensed the profound difficulties which physical existence poses to us, yet I also comprehended the purpose and beauty of life in the physical. And I glimpsed life after life. When I related my experience and voiced my insights to the people around me, they couldn't comprehend; some even ridiculed me. Nobody knew about NDE at that time. I shelved my knowing in the back of my mind.

Many years later, after moving to the United States, I was shaken to the core of my being – thrust into emotional trauma – by the untimely death of my husband, whose illness I had seen in my mind's eye prior to its diagnosis. The experience caused me to throw away all reservations regarding conventionally perceived reality and Newtonian correctness.

I decided to study anthropology and explore shamanism.

1.1.3 Shamanic Studies

Parallel to my academic endeavor, I visited indigenous shamans in Central and South America and in Nepal. As I studied with them, I learned about their understanding of life and its meaning. I gained confirmation of many of my own insights and mystical experiences. Thus encouraged, I delved deep into studying core shamanism as it's been practiced for at least one hundred thousand years. During my studies, I was initiated into two indigenous shamanic lineages; I graduated from a three-year-long program of advanced initiations in shamanism and shamanic healing and a two-year-long shamanic teacher training program. It was in 1991, during one of those advanced initiations, that my teacher, Michael Harner, led me through a paranormal experience for which, still today, I cannot find a rational explanation.

To give his students a taste of the spirits' prowess, Dr. Harner guided us through an experience whose outcome defied logic: the "bound shaman" ritual. The objective was to bind each participating volunteer with ropes in a way they could not free themselves; then, in darkness and under shamanic drumming, to bring in Harner's helping spirits to untie and free any or all participants. Kneeling on the floor, I had been tied up into the shape of a little cube, to the point that I had difficulties breathing. The drumming started and soon I felt the bodily restrictions slowly producing a fear response. Suddenly I sensed tiny fingers working around my wrists and my tied-up ankles. While my this-world brain tried to follow these "who-does-it?" ever-so-gentle movements, trying to calculate the time it would take to untie my whole body (with two layers of blankets, ropes in between, and ropes on top), in the blink of an eye, I was free. No sensation of ropes or blankets having been removed or put aside; just free. When the drumming stopped, and the lights were turned on again, I was sitting on the floor, tears streaming down my face. The blankets and ropes were lying on the floor, in a neat heap, about twelve feet away.

What had happened was outside anything that could be explained per our rational brain and per our normal sensory apparatus. Yet it had been very real, and I had lived the experience.

In my academic studies, I also inquired into quantum theory. I concluded that its discoveries might apply to the unfolding of life on both the micro and the macro level, and that its insights might assist in explaining life's mystery.

I came to understand that indigenous shamans – though using different terminologies – intuitively applied quantum principles to the tasks of daily life in ordinary reality and non-ordinary realities, and that they utilized those principles in their healing work; more to the point: The shamanic understanding of life's intricacies was and is very much quantum-like. Consciousness, according to quantum physics, is the ground of all being; it precedes physical manifestation and succeeds its cessation. Reality has many levels, and we can enter them at will. Past, present, and future are features that exist simultaneously and can be accessed from inside of time-space; what we call soul is the energy/spirit conglomerate, the quantum monad (a term coined by Dr. Goswami) that enlivens our physical body, fuels our individual suchness, and carries our learning over from one incarnation to the next. And we are powerful participants in the creation of our life, for we are more spirit than matter, as is everything else around us. That, in a nutshell, is also the shaman's position.

1.1.4 Shamanic Insight

Over the course of living my life, I discovered that, of course, trauma is part of physical existence. No denial of that. We are subjected to emotional and physical pain; we experience the loss of a loved one; we have to undergo surgery; we come face-to-face with death; we are subject to accidents; we experience the dark-night-of-the-soul moments. These are all major impacts on the body-mind system; all are instances of possible soul loss. Of course, humans have known this since they've existed. Indigenous shamans, the first healers and first psychologists, knew all this, as they experienced it themselves and observed it amongst their fellow human beings. The shamans listened into the field of consciousness. They journeyed into non-ordinary reality (which quantum physicists call non-ordinary states of consciousness). There, they encountered helping spirits who assisted the shamans in their healing and divinatory tasks. Today, we might call these spirits personified energy, possibly the all-pervading subtle energy or life force we know from Eastern traditional medicine and philosophy. The shamans learned to interact with, and utilize, this power to minimize trauma, to rectify illness, and to return balance to people and the environment.

By listening into nature's emanations and by trusting their revelations, dreams, and intuitions (which all became more profound as a function of usage), the shamans were able to devise methodologies for healing and for influencing and manipulating the often-times adverse conditions of daily life. One healing method, so derived and successfully employed, is soul retrieval.

1.1.5 Shamanism and Frontier Science

Many years of practicing the shamanic healing methodology of soul retrieval convinced me of the efficacy of this time-tested procedure. Unfailingly, an intervention like soul retrieval brings clients back to health and well-being, both emotionally and physically. It's as if their life-force had returned — which it actually did with the return of soul energy; their eyes suddenly shine (the result of an endorphin rush, as a medical doctor once explained it to my teacher, Sandra Ingerman).

I have successfully used the soul retrieval technique to assist animals, plants, landscapes, and houses in overcoming the experience of trauma. And I am convinced that there is an underlying principle to the healing method, which science will be able to explain.

Quantum physics – the science allowing for a higher principle guiding life (for no quantum experiment could be explained via a mechanistic world view) – is the science that, in my view, confirms what healers and sages have always known: that, at our core, we are spirit; we are the derivative of a divine principle, the Creative Force. Dean Radin phrases it this way: "Physicists interested in quantum ontology are painfully aware that some interpretations of quantum reality are uncomfortably close to mystical concepts." And, he continues, "In the eyes of mainstream science, to express sympathy for mysticism destroys one's credibility as a scientist. Thus the taboo persists." Yet Bill Roll, a psychologist, commenting on Radin's book Entangled Minds, assures us, "Radin demonstrates fact by fact that psychic experiences and discoveries in physics spring from the same spiritual well."