Claude Poncelet - The Shaman Within

For Nolle

T he year is 1947, and I am ten years old, wandering by myself in the open country surrounding a small village in the Condroz of Belgium. It is a relief to be here, crossing a valley with a meandering stream and a great orchard filled with cherry, apple, and pear trees, instead of in Nazi-occupied Brussels, where my family and I spent five years, facing constant bombardments, killings, daily encounters with the enemy, and a perpetual lack of basic necessities. Now that World War II is finally over, my family has come to stay in the countryside sixty miles to the south of the city, something we regularly did. Being able to be in nature, especially by myself, is deeply meaningful and nourishing to me.

On the other side of the orchard, about a quarter miles across, is a huge forest called Les Bois des Fonds (the Woods of the Bottom). It is thick with big elm, oak trees, and much undergrowth, and rich in fauna and flora. This forest is mysterious and sometimes a little scary, and I love to hike and at times get lost in it.

I also love to make plaster impressions of the tracks of wild animals such as deer and boar. Today, with my plaster mix and a small ax, which I use for cutting thin hazel branches to encircle a track, I enter the woods at my favorite spot and make my way to a small pond where animals come to drink. There are usually beautiful fresh tracks in the moist soil surrounding the pond, and I am hoping there will be a distinct set of deer tracks. I want a precise mold that will reveal every detail.

Suddenly I hear an explosive noise on my rightdead branches bursting and feet stamping. Turning toward the roar, I see a large doe barreling at full speed straight at me. I gape in awe at the animal flying toward me, her eyes open wide. Feeling a mix of wonder and raw fear, I do not know what to do. At the same time, I think that she probably knows better than I, and I realize the deer and I are engaged in a strange kind of communication that I do not understand.

Just as she seems about to crash into me, she turns, swiftly and gracefully, without reducing her breakneck speed, and vanishes into the woods.

Silence once again prevails. My heart is thumping, and yet I am strangely at peace.

I continue on my way, and as I come to the pond, I find the beautiful tracks I had wished to see and make my best deer-track impression ever. I feel connected with that deer and thankful to her.

My encounter with that deer has always stayed with me. While it was perhaps the most striking, it was just one of many, many experiences I have had in nature where I felt in communion with another entity. I am not different or special in this regard; on the contrary, I think most people in this world have similar experiences. We just do not often share them with one another.

Years later, in the early 1960s, I am living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with my wife, Nolle, and our two small children, working on my doctoral thesis in physics. My research is primarily theoretical and centers on the behavior of neutrons in space and time in confined, complex geometries such as those found in nuclear-reactor fuel. I am developing elaborate sets of equations in four-dimensional space and time, and looking for solutions both analytically and by using computers.

As I become more and more deeply involved in theoretical developments, a visitor begins appearing in our bedroom during the night. A young man, perhaps in his early thirties, stands in front of the dresser against the wall directly across from our bed, with his right elbow resting on the dresser top. I sit on the bed in something of a trance, and we talk. We continue for a while, until Nolle, hearing my voice and feeling an outside presence, begins to stir. Then she sits up with a jolt, I come out of my trance, and the man vanishes.

The man comes back on several occasions over the course of a few months. I somehow know that our conversations are about my research, yet when I awake the next morning, I cannot remember what we have discussed. The encounters with the visitor are not frightening and are so vivid and real that even though I do not understand them, I do not reject them. I accept these conversations with my nighttime visitor as they are, just as I have accepted all the unusual, magical, and unexplained experiences I have been having since childhood. And because of my scientific training, I do not want to ignore or reject the recurring experiences just because they do not fit the concepts of reality I have learned.

I do not, however, share these experiences with my thesis advisor.

Several months later, after defending my thesis and receiving my doctoral degree, I have begun doing applied research for a major energy corporation and am very interested in Soviet nuclear physics, which differs in many fundamental ways from the concepts and approaches used by physicists in the United States and Europe. I spend many hours in the research library, poring over English translations of major Soviet physics journals.

One day I come across a Soviet article that astounds me. In an appendix to my own thesis, I had included an analytic solution to my equations for a simple, though unrealistic, geometry; the more realistic geometries required computer solutions. As PhD students are wont to do, I had introduced a number of new variables as well as their definitions and symbols, usually a capital letter along with multiple subscripts and superscripts using ancient Greek letters. Now I am looking at an article that replicates my mathematical solution for the simplified geometry with amazing similarity, including the exact same definitions of variables and use of symbols, subscripts, and superscripts!

A look at the publication date when the article first appeared in Russian in a Soviet journal tells me there is no way the author could have had access to my own research; my thesis had not yet been made available to anyone else. I have a strong feeling that this otherwise inexplicable coincidence is related to the bedroom visits and conversations, but I do not understand how. Had the Soviet author of the article somehow come to visit me at night to discuss our mutual research? Or was the visitor a messenger between us? I do not know. Again, I simply accept this experience as part of my reality.

It was not until about twenty years later, in 1984, that I found a framework with which I could make sense of the strange occurrences that had happened throughout my life. I was introduced to shamanism at a workshop in Berkeley, California, taught by Michael Harner. Before then I had run across the word shamanism in various articles and books, but it did not mean much to me. Michael, an anthropologist and founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, has played an immense role in reintroducing shamanic practice and knowledge to people in the Western world. He helped me establish my practice on this path.

What I lived and experienced during my first formal encounter with shamanismand in the many shamanic journeys, rituals, and other practices in the years that followedconfirmed what I had sensed since childhood: there is another reality in addition to the ordinary reality of space, time, matter, and energy that is accessible to me through my physical senses.

A core principle of shamanism, a worldwide spiritual tradition that goes back thousands of years, is that this other reality is as real as ordinary reality, and together they form a bigger Reality in which we live our lives as human beings on this planet. I later came to call this other reality the spiritual dimension of Reality, and here I use