One of the most interesting things about ‘Shamanism’ and all religious traditions that practice it, is that when Shamanism was first discovered 24k years ago in Lake Baikal only a very very small minority of people had the Shaman’s Gift, but in 2025 ~90% of people seemingly do. This forces you to recontextualize how the ancients speak about those with the ‘Gift’ of sooth, it was spoken about as rare, needing lengths of validation, yet when you look at many of the barriers to entry, take for instance the Sanskrit Tantric tradition, many of them are just the basic capacity for visualization, basically “Don’t have aphantasia”.
Another barrier to entry is the subjects ability to be aware of duality. It may seem strange to Modern and even many Medieval or Late Classical People, but the further you go back in time, the less people have a full grasp of dualism in their lived lives, this was the common and natural state of man, before duality as a cognitive tool was discovered. This allowed the ego to develop, and with it kingdoms and empires, and essentially the start of history.
Nowadays we seem to have the opposite problem, people are so stuck in duality they completely forget about non-duality, our primordial state, and this causes extreme psychosis and neurosis in people, as such; spiritual traditions in modernity focus not on bringing people into the material world of matter and energy, but directing them backwards into the womb of non-duality, reconnecting their umbilical cord with Mimir’s Well.
These days you are hard pressed to find someone without the ability to visualize and who is able to exist in a non-dual state. In the Ancient world, people spend their entire lives trying to visualize things in their mind’s eye and to develop an understanding of matter & energy well enough to dig inspiration from the Heavens and take chisel to it upon the Earth.
Therefore, I think it is very important to reconsider how we approach Shamanry in the world we now exist within, the Ancients had a completely different context, but now most people have powerful & latent shamanic abilities if they try at all, the objective of our ancestors to make everyone into a shaman basically was successful, but 24k years is a long time, and most of that was spent sleepwalking with our newfound ability to do things, and so we stand here eyes open in a bustling empire with cars & electricity, and the last thing we remember is the dark icy cold winters of Siberia.
