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Last Christmas I bought a book on Bonpo Shamanism.

The author of the book was brought up in the Bonpo tradition, which from my perspective looks a lot like Tibetan Buddhism. The student learns under a master and his progress is checked by observable signs that lets the master know the student has achieved the required level of skill. From the descriptions, the curriculum seemed very methodical and systematic, something honed by many, many generations of practice, discovery, and correction. Something not unlike Western science.

Like the Dalai Lama, the author was familiar with Western thought and the scientific method. He thought that it was a good thing. He was aware that the views presented in his work were outside of what was considered realistic in Western terms. He knew that people thought his perceived reality was merely a collection of hallucinations. Yet, he said, one must go through training to be sensitive enough to perceive what he has learned to perceive, and in his experience what he was talking about was real and produced verifiable results.

Now, here I am, a 37 year old American, and I have had no truly supportable encounters with nature spirits. I do not consider my thoughts to have any sort of influence on the weather or events in the world. Sometimes I like to think I do, and sometimes I wonder. But my influence, if I do have any, can be considered extremely unreliable at best.

And on the other hand, here is a gentleman from another culture with a totally different upbringing. He has been through a rigorous form of mental, emotional, and spiritual training from a very young age. His book presents a very reasonable man who takes into consideration many factors surrounding the problems he discusses. He approaches them in a methodological fashion. It is apparent that he has been raised in a method that uses evidence in the world as well as in one's internal experience to mark progress or failure in any given endeavor.

Here is where this person (as well as others in his tradition) earns a great deal of my respect: he is able to make very fine distinctions about subjective experience. Whether or not one progresses with something like meditation is marked, depending on the activity, by very subtle changes in one's subjective experience. A master has to be able to question a student properly and discern fact from fiction, actual progress from fantasy. Where else can this be more tricky than in the realm of the human mind? Yet these people do this. And they also describe amazing and unbelievable feats as signs as meditational progress. For instance, one early meditation is designed to re-soften the fontanelle and ultimately open it. The test for success is putting a stalk of some kind of grass through the scalp and down through the opening in the skull! The student keeps the stalk in for a day or so as a mark of progress. Unbelievable, but this is what he claims with nonchalance. Some kind of trick? Not having observed this, I really cannot say.

If he and I were to talk, I would say to him, "Here is my problem: you have to be trained to perceive these things (spirits, subtle energies, et cetera). On the one hand, you may be right. And here I have no ability to make any sort of useful remarks or judgments about your proposals, because I am unable to see them for myself without years and years of rigorous training. On the other hand, your training may just be a form of group hypnosis. You see things that aren't there because you are trained to see them. Your perceptual apparatus has been conditioned in such a way that validates your training. So you live in a self-perpetuating illusion with a group of other people. Regarding this subject matter, there is no real way for me to know what is valid. If I take the blue pill, I'll never really know. But if I take the red pill, I may never really know but I will think that I do know, because my consciousness, my ability to tell otherwise, will have been changed by the red pill."

This, I think, is the reason why this stuff is such a hairy issue and, honestly, anyone can be wrong about it. It's only going to be verified for the goats when there is a goat that remains skeptical enough even though he's going through a process that changes what he perceives... moves him away from what he uses to typically verify the validity or invalidity of something. For the believers it's no problem. They can just believe in it, and it's no big deal. But for the goat, it's a painful prospect riddled with failure at best.

But perhaps the spirits that the Bonpo Shaman sees are real? Perhaps they aren't. I've played around and experimented with this sort of thing all my life. I haven't experienced anything that makes me want to get off the fence and go really far to either side of the camp. Though I lean strongly in the direction of the world view in which nature spirits are merely the products of fancy.