Melanie Esparza - Week 4

In his article "We Are Not Alone" The Shamans Of The World Tell Us, John Broomfield describes the way that all organisms on Earth are alive and conscious. While modern Western civilization will claim that humans are the only creatures capable of wisdom, as the scientific name Homo sapiens implies, Broomfield writes that this is largely a result of humans overestimating their importance in the grand scheme of things. Broomfield tells us that we are all descendants of shamanic people. Although different groups might have practiced differently, spirituality was much more widely accepted and used by our ancestors. This connection to spirituality allowed for greater flow of information between species and even inanimate objects such as the wind and sky. Shamans are those individuals who are able to connect with the spirit realm in order to ask for aid or counsel in order to restore harmony and balance. Broomfield mentions the bioremediation efforts of the bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico as an example of the important role that organisms other than humans play in the survival of the Earth. This is something that is really fascinating to me because one of my biggest passions is conservation. I find that people tend to not care about not only other people, but also animals and plants simply because they do not feel that it affects them. Not only is that ideology faulty-- it is flat out wrong. I don’t think that people realize that our survival is inextricably tied with the survival of countless other organisms. Most people were taught about food chains with humans sitting comfortably atop as “apex predators.” The reality is that food chains do not exist; instead, there are food webs. This simple distinction changes everything, and it shows interdependency between most organisms in any given environment. All living things on Earth are connected, and we need to take great care to reestablish our connections with nature in order to repair the damage we have caused.

Question: Does one need to be a shaman in order to connect with spirits through a meditative state?


References Cited: June 2019. Retrieved from https://www.guideposts.org/faith-and-prayer/bible-resources/4-important-spiritual-lessons-from-trees-in-the-bible