John Perkins - Shapeshifting: Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation

To Mom, who taught us during her final forty-five days that ecstasy is about feeling our oneness, and whodespite her painguided me through the pages of this book.

Acknowledgments

The events described in this book actually happened. Names and certain other details about people, places, and chronology have sometimes been altered. This was done in order to protect anonymity where I felt that was important, or because individuals requested that I do so.

I owe a great deal to many people. Without them this book would never have been written. I especially want to thank the shamans and shapeshifters from around the world who have been my teachers and who have inspired me and so many others. It would be foolhardy to list them all here, but I do want to single out a few whose teachings were especially instrumental in elucidating the subject matter of this particular book (and whose real names are not given in the text): Maria Arcos, Juan Arcos, Charapa, Chumbi, Daniel Guachapa, Atun Juank, Jose Joaquin Pineda, Roberto Poz, Maria Juana Yamverla, Manuel Yamverla, Esteban Tamayo, Jorge Tamayo, and Jose Tamayo, Rafael Taish, Alberto Tatzo, Amalia Tuitsa, Bosco Tuitsa, Tukupi, Tuntuam, and Abu Xerxes. I also thank all those teachers who are named in the text. How can we, who owe our childrens futures to you, honor you enough?

My wife and daughter have been my partners throughout, and have shared so much pain and ecstasy. Thank you Winifred and Jessica.

My grandmother, Nana, all those years ago got me started on this paththe journey within as well as the one to other lands. Her spirit has stood by me.

And you, Dad, whose courage this past year has been a guiding light. You who rose above your personal agony of watching Mom go through such a painful shapeshift out of this life, and in the process performed your own act of magical transformation. A teacher by profession all your life, you shifted into your own form of shaman this past yearat least for me. Thank you.

Kwan Sung and Chu Young Lee taught me the power of mind over matter; I thank you for the inspiration your lives have provided to so many generations.

I am grateful, too, to all my colleagues at Inner Traditionsmore than I can possible name here. Your dedication to shapeshifting through words has served as a great inspiration to me. I especially thank Ehud Sperling, who was my companion and advisor throughout many of the adventures described in these pages and is publisher of four of my books. Were it not for Ehud, there would be no Dream Change Coalition. I also want to single out Susan Davidson. It is not often that a writer can have as his editor one whose life so exemplifies the subject matter of the book. Susan is a shaman in her own right, an agent of change who teaches people to transform themselves through dance as well as words.

An immense feeling of strength infused me. It was no longer the illusion of power, which causes one to become weary of the battle and to want to give in. Astrain whispered to me again... He said that I should always confront the world with the same weapons that were used to challenge me. And that I could confront a dog only by transforming myself into a dog.

Paulo Coelho
The Pilgrimage

Introduction

I was asked to speak at the 1995 International Womens Conference in Miami shortly after my third book was published. Five authors were invited, four of us men. My topic was the potential impact of indigenous women shamans on the future of the world. Four men out of five presenters at the International Womens Conferencesomething seemed out of balance. I decided to turn my time at the lectern over to a woman.

Although only twelve years old, my daughter Jessica was highly qualified. She first visited indigenous people when she was eight months old; my wife, Winifred, still talks about the time she and and I waited while a group of Mayan women, standing knee deep in a lake where they wash clothes, embroidered skirts tucked into their sashes, passed Jessica around, amazed that such a large baby was less than a year old. Later, Jessica trained with Quechua shamans in the Andes, was initiated during a fire ceremony in the Guatemalan highlands, and was a member of the first group of outsiders ever to visit a remote clan of headhunters deep in the Amazon.

There are three points I want to make tonight, Jessica told her Miami audience. First, I feel that my generation was saddled with a burden heavier than that of any other people in history, a legacy of polluting our world to the brink of destruction. Second, changing it will require far more than recycling and other environmental Band-Aids. And third, we women must play a major role. We are the nurturers. Above all else, this transition will be about shifting ourselves into earth-honoring and sustainable ways of living.

I, like the rest of the audience, was deeply moved. More than the others, however, I knew that the credit for Jessicas expansive point of view, and her impassioned plea, belonged to the shapeshifters who had influenced her young life.

Throughout history we humans have found shapeshifting to be one of the most effective means for transforming ourselves, both as individuals and communities. A Lakota Sioux warrior shapeshifted into a buffalo in order to become a better hunter and to honor the spirit of an animal that provided his family with food, clothing, bowstrings, and fuel. Entire tribes adjusted to glaciers, floods, and other environmental changes by radically altering their perceptions and lifestyles.

Modern cultures have exchanged such practices for a belief in mans ability to control the world around him. The hunt has been replaced by industrialized farms, slaughterhouses, and meat-packing factories. Rather than attempting to adjust to flooding rivers, we build levees. Both individuals and communities appear to live apart from what we too often refer to as the rest of the world or nature, as if we were separate from them.

Yet now, poised at the edge of a new millennium, we face a multitude of crises. Painfully aware of our polluted air and water, our inadequacy to combat poverty, and our increasing tendency to resort to violence, suicide, drugs, and other destructive behavior, we wonder what is to come....

But stop! This is not a time to lament the past or despair over the future. It is a time to open the door to all the wonderful possibilities inherent in the awarenesses and technologies developed over the past decades. This is a time for optimism.

We are the first people in history to harness the miracles of physics, inhabit homes with heating and air conditioning, travel to the moon, and watch it all on television. We know what we haveand what we miss. We are the first to be able to make rational choices about the tradoffs involved in developmentto say that, based on actual experience, the fruits of economic expansion are not always worth the price. Never before have any citizens of this planet been in a position to evaluate the benefits (and costs) of power plants that generate electricity (and greenhouse gases), highways that unite us (and destroy our once-sacred land), or chemicals that provide amazing diversity on supermarket shelves and department store racks (and poison our rivers and bodies).

Ours is a time of great hope because we have learned so much about ourselves and our relation to our home. Our giant leap for mankind may be symbolized by Neil Armstrongs footprint on the moon, but it took thousands of years for us to get there, and, in the process, we proved that we are not the masters of the universe. Although that footprint is an indelible symbol, the real leap was deep inside our psyches. When we took it, we entered a realm that offers an extraordinary opportunity for us to change ourselves.