I'm still playing around with the notion that the term "shaman" is a derivative of "shame man" or a person who cures one of their shame through fear. That's why prophets and healers can't do their business in their home town where their scaring people they grew up around would only make them bullies instead. Shamen have to learn what they can't do most of all. There are only so many places in the world to run to in order to escape one's own flawed need for self-importance. Deliberate, excessive pride is a sham a shaman can't practice his profession without.
There is also a connection to the word sham through the medicine man's masks and rattles and other scary paraphernalia. Although their exhortations are not doing the healing themselves, and it's in that way that the shamans manipulations are a sham. They use fear to trick people into healing themselves of their contaminated, tainted emotions. If they do it right the implications of the rituals they provide their victims with allows them to reset to Default. I've read that sky-diving for the first time or getting struck by lightning and surviving can do the very same thing.
Resetting to Default doesn't always do the trick if you look at it like a computer problem. Neither does restarting your computer. Granted, a lot of time that's all it takes to make things right. A brief intervention to get back to square one. The same way the appearance of a third party can douse the fire of a romantic moment. People get healed from some serious shit simply by some jerk threatening to betray their deepest, darkest secrets that they're only pretending to know just to push they button.
I'm never gonna be elected Mister Congeniality. I have a "don't ask/don't tell policy". I never ask people to forgive me for doing what it took to rid them of their shame. Some still hate me. Their self-inflicted shame was so great it took more than they were willing to give to me out-of-hand. Sometime, the brief shock of mild embarrassment appears to remove ills people have arranged their entire lives about, by the uncertainty of betrayal scaring the fuck outta them. If there's any hurt done, it's by them to theyself.
Cops are said to do stuff like this all the time. They take people who might change their ways and put them in a cage with a bunch of really pissed off people, walk away, and not come back for a good long time. Some never wanna come back. Some can't stay away. Nobody knows what's gonna happen when the well runs dry.
The way dis-ease takes root nearly always resolves to a self-generated sham of the afflicted person's own making (karma), so one might legitimately claim that the dharma of the shaman is to alleviate his customer's self-induced negative karma. That's what sick people are usually ashamed of. They know it's their own fault. Worse, the shame man does too. Just getting the courage to ask for help in curing one's own faux pas seems to be half the battle. Homo sapiens are possessed by a species-wide flaw. They can't know their own possibilities in real time, so they can not say what they see.
[Fade in beauty contestant singing the national anthem]
If such is so, then a potential healer who has the touch might benefit from studying theater more so than medicine. Most medical doctors whose bedside manner is meant to be duplicitous in order to heal, actually seem to feel guilty because they're not really nice people, but objective craftsmen trying to make a living frightening evil spirits away. '-)
People get sick when they think they can stop denying the world to fulfill their need for an ongoing thetic consciousness. They have an urge to wing it. To fly by the seat of their pants. Usually, because they've convinced themselves they hae established their own ground-of-being beyond the pale of nothingness. All fall down. My Fair Lady. If the sham guy somehow manages to re-install their illusions through trickery, then they can go back to being what they never were.
The only thing about a nice, socially correct person that's gonna heal anybody, is that the person who they're trying to heal might scare the shit outta themselves when they realize their physician is a fraudulent prig. So, the mojo can still work even if the doctor IS a false prophet.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
