Shamanic Christianity: The Direct Experience of Mystical Communion

Brad Keeney is my hero. This book isn't a hymnal or a book about going to hell for not believing in Jesus, nor is it a book about day dreaming your way into a hole in the ground to get an animal to help you escape from life. It is the work of someone who wants to shake your mind to it's foundation, but with no small help from you. Inside you will find stories about Brad's experiences with his grand father the evangelist, Kalahari Bushmen, and the Spiritual Baptists of Saint Vincent. But most important are the rituals that Brad produces to shake the cobwebs out of your mind (to make you "out of your mind" in a very good way). These rituals don't follow a specific formulaic structure nor do they have a strong "inspirational" religious flavor to them, they are simply mad. They are deliberately nonsensical in such a way that they will take you outside of yourself. I should point out that this isn't just some Michael Harner rehash either, this is the ecstatic part of the equation that brings you to a state of real, temporary divine insanity. Brad doesn't say that an imagined trip to an underground forest is a real shamanic event (neither does Harner either really although so many people act like it is and thus miss the whole point. Then everyone's expectations of spirit get lowered to the point that a visualization is enough). Keeney's view is one that sees the boiling energy of ecstasy that defines the word "shaman" as central to the experience of spirit and gives real advice on how to open oneself to the real thing, not just a mental picture of a serene white light that inspires neither ecstasy nor real experience. Brad is a crazy wisdom teacher in the truest sense of the term. Get Shaking Medicine to make your body shake with divine energy and get Shamanic Christianity to shake out your mind. You won't be sorry.