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The Share
Guide: For our
readers who haven't read your books, can you give us an introduction
to shamanism and how you got involved in it in South America?
John
Perkins: In 1968 I
joined the Peace Corps and was sent deep into the Amazon to live and
work with the Shuar people (pronounced Shwah), who are
an Amazonian tribe that had never been conquered by anyone. They are
probably most famous for head shrinking--whenever you see a shrunken
head, it was done by a Shuar because they're the only contemporary
people who do this. They really don't do it any more though, now that
they're in contact with the modern world. That trip started a
relationship that's gone on ever since 1968. I spent three years in
the Peace Corps in Ecuador and then became a consultant to the United
Nations and World Bank, then a businessman in my own right. Now I run
a non-profit organization that works principally with indigenous
people, including the Shuar. The Shuar were one of the organizers
behind this non-profit organization, which is called the Dream Change
Coalition.
The Share
Guide: Can you tell me what the definition of shamanism is and
what it means
to you?
John Perkins:
My favorite short definition of a shaman is a man or a woman who
journeys to other worlds in order to obtain power, wisdom and energy
from those worlds to affect change in this world. When we talk about
other worlds, we can use terms like the unconscious or the
subconscious--there are a lot of different terms that can used. But a
shaman is a person who journeys into these other realities and uses
the things that he or she gains in these other realities to create
transformation in this reality. That transformation can be
healing--many shamans are great healers. They don't work like medical
doctors, but they work to accomplish the same thing, which is curing
people. Or the changes that they affect could have to do with growing
cycles of plants, migratory habits of animals, the relationship of
the community to the environment. It could be any number of social or
environmental factors they are called upon to work with.
The Share
Guide: Are
you still leading retreats to visit the Shuar in their
native
land?
John Perkins:
I do. I just got back recently from the Shuar and also the Quechua
(pronounced kee-chwah) in the highlands of Ecuador. We took a
group of sixteen people to both places--to be with Quechua shamans in
the Andes and Shuar shamans in the Amazon.
The Share
Guide: How
often do you take people there?
John Perkins:
Last year I facilitated five trips and this year I'm facilitating
three, but we've expanded tremendously. My organization, Dream Change
Coalition, is leading twelve trips this year. We now have four other
trip leaders, all of whom are women. They're taking on more trips and
I'm kind of dropping back the number of trips I do. I've been leading
them for many years and I'm moving into some other areas.
The Share
Guide: So you now have some help to share the work.
John Perkins:
Yes, and they each bring a different perspective, based on their
backgrounds.
The Share
Guide: Are the Quechua and Shuar homelands the main places that
you go?
John Perkins:
Yes, we have a standard trip that we do, if you can call any trip
like this standard. Each trip is different, although we go to the
same places. We have a couple of Ecuadorian partners, who live in
Ecuador and have been working with us for ten years or more and
always go with the groups, too. Each trip leader has developed her
own trip. There's really nothing standard about them at all! We have
also been doing trips to the Himalayas, we're developing trips to
Guatamala, to the Pacific Islands and to Siberia.
The Share
Guide: You go to traditional groups in all those areas?
John:
Yes. And each trip leader is free to design their own type of trip.
The way Dream Change Coalition works is that we're totally
non-hierarchical. There is no boss, nobody that checks over our
policy and makes decisions. As long as you fit within our three goals
in our mission statement, then anyone is free to develop whatever
project he or she wants.
The Share
Guide: Let's back up a bit. When did Dream Change Coalition form?
John:
As a concept and as a worldwide grassroots organization it's been
around ten years. Our original vision was to create a worldwide tribe
that would carry out these three goals: the first goal is to change
the dream to a more earth honoring and sustainable one, throughout
the world; the second one is to preserve forests and other natural
places, and the third is to utilize indigenous wisdom to foster
environmental and social balance. If anyone has a project that fits
within any one of those three goals, they're welcome to do the
project under the Dream Change umbrella. Now, we soon discovered that
the actuality of the whole situation was that you need to incorporate
in various countries in order to legally do things. In the United
States we have several non-profit organizations. The main one that
manages our work here is Dream Change Inc. That has existed for three
years. We also have other organizations, both non-profit and for
profit in places like Ecuador, Italy, Australia...all the different
places fall under the umbrella of the Dream Change Coalition.
The Share
Guide: As far as actual projects that you do, there's a regular
schedule of
South American trips?
John:
Yes, that's really the heart of our business. In addition
to the
trips we do a lot of workshops in the United States and in Europe. We
did one last year to India. We're doing a lot of work with the Dalai
Lama. There are many other projects. You can find them on our
website. For example, a third grade teacher in Newton, Massachusetts,
takes her children, and this is in public school, on what she calls
Mind Vacations. It's really a shamanic journey to the
rainforest where the kids learn about the animals and plants and
people that live there. They've written a beautiful book which we're
publishing and it's all written by third graders. It's been an
incredible experience for them and their families. Another project is
producing sustainably harvested necklaces, made from nuts, vines and
flowers. We want to provide a forum for everybody who's ever said
"Why doesn't somebody do something about this?" or, "If only they
would change this" or "I certainly would do something about this if I
only had an organization to work with". So Dream Change Coalition
provides that organization--we provide the forum whereby anybody who
has a dream can change the world.
The Share
Guide: Excellent.
That really encourages people of all ages; it's
an
opportunity to step forward in an organized business way.
John:
It's very powerful. We've had a tremendous number of people
responding. People really want to do something and normally they feel
powerless. Alone it's too much, they need an organization. We can
provide that. They have to do the work, they're the project manager.
But we get mailing lists, we get extra resources, including sometimes
financial resources, although that's not a major job of ours. We've
researched how to raise money.
The Share
Guide: You have a non-profit organization and you can teach
people how to
find resources.
John:
We also publish a magazine, and our website was cited by Time
magazine in their Earth Day issue of 1999 as one of the thirteen
websites in the world that most express the philosophy of Earth
Day.
The Share
Guide: How would you compare a retreat with a vacation?
John:
Our trips are set up to be transformational. We tell people before
they go that they're going to die on this trip and be reborn. And it
happens to everyone. People go through some amazing, shapeshifting ,
transformational processes on these trips. They are not what I would
call a vacation. I think of a vacation as lying on a tropical beach
someplace and just relaxing, or perhaps going skiing and then going
to the ski lodge afterwards and having a hot toddy. But these trips,
these retreats, allow you to really get into yourself. To see your
dream, the new shape you want to shift into and then to really get
the process moving so that you change your life.
The Share
Guide: I
think a key word that you said was "transformational".
John:
To me that is what a retreat is all about, at least the kind of
retreats we offer. Even in the Himalayas, where we look at retreats
as being much more meditative, than adventures, cultures where it's
not so much a physical experience as one of going in , you may see it
as an escape from the hustle-bustle of the business world, the
everyday world-but it's really about going into yourself to create
transformation.
The Share
Guide: Let me ask you about the Gathering of the Shamans in Fall
2000.
John:
We're bringing the shamans back to America, to the Omega
Institute in upstate New York. Last September we brought ten
shamans to the United States from the Amazon and Andes. We did one in
Malibu and one in Michigan and then one at Omega. We found the Omega
Institute campus to be the perfect place to do this. So this next
year we'll just bring them to this one place and staying for a full
week. There will probably be at least fifteen shamans visiting this
year.
The Share
Guide: And it will be inner transformational work. It's not as
exotic as
traveling to South America, but it's closer to home.
John:
Yes, exactly. Some people cannot or do not want to go to the Amazon
or Andes may be more comfortable going to upstate New York.
The Share
Guide: One
thing I want to do is facilitate a group going from
here to the
Gathering of the Shamans this year. That is part of my dream, as
readers respond I'd like to go with a group to Omega this Fall.
John:
Wonderful. One of our trip leaders, Mary Tindall, lives in Nevada
City and she came last year to New York.
The Share
Guide: What
work do you plan on doing, or have you done, on the
West Coast,
for those of us who are all the way in California?
John:
We would like to do more in California. I usually do an annual
workshop at Esalen, but not this year. We have an annual workshop in
Florida where I live and all the trip leaders are there and usually a
couple of visiting shamans. We're talking about doing the same sort
of thing in California, but we haven't yet.
The Share
Guide: The
work you are doing is very powerful, uniting the
world's native
cultures with one another and with us here in America. Northern
California is a hotbed of consciousness. I think there are a lot of
people around here like me who, once they got turned on to Dream
Change, would be very excited.
John:
Thank you very much. We had a very good response at Body and Soul in
San Fransico last year and we'll keep growing in California.
The Share
Guide: From
your books, relating to inner work, can you talk
about
psychonavigation and camaying?
John:
Psychonavigation to me is a huge body of techniques and knowledge,
many different journeying ways. There are many different approaches
and they're all about navigating to a place where we need to be, in
order to accomplish what we need to accomplish. For each person that
may be different. But I think we're seeing as a species that in the
long run we're all headed to the same place. And if we don't head
toward that place, we're probably not going to stay on this earth as
a species. The shamans like to tell us that Mother Earth isn't in
danger, this idea of needing to save the planet is ridiculous. That
human beings aren't going to destroy the planet. But the planet may
just shake us all off like a bunch of fleas. She's giving us a lot of
warnings right now. El Nino as a message is a great gift. Climate
change, the fires that have swept through the Indonesian rainforest,
the drought which for the first time ever has hit the Amazon, are all
amazing warnings. Receding glaciers...and so she's giving us a
message and this is a very exciting time for human beings to live in
and to react. Because we don't want to be shaken off. Yet it really
doesn't matter a whole lot if we do get shaken off, for we know that
everything shapeshifts. We never die, we never leave. Einsteinian
science confirms that. Matter and energy never leave they just
change--they shapeshift. But since we're getting these messages from
the earth, it's an incredibly wonderful opportunity to be able to
respond to the challenge.
For more information about John
Perkins and the Dream
Change Coalition, please visit www.dreamchange.org
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