Shamans and Their World with Stanley Krippner

Stanley Krippner, PhD, professor of psychology at Saybrook University, is a Fellow in five APA divisions, and past-president of two divisions (30 and 32). Formerly, he was director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory, in Brooklyn NY. He is co-author of Demystifying Shamans and Their World, The Voice of Rolling Thunder: A Medicine Man’s Wisdom for Walking the Red Road, Dream Telepathy, Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them, The Mythic Path, and Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, and co-editor of Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion, Healing Tales, Healing Stories, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, Advances in Parapsychological Research and many other books. He is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and has published cross-cultural studies on spiritual content in dreams.

Here he discusses the common features that he has observed in his studies of shamans around the world. He describes their rituals in terms of drumming, dancing, sensory deprivation, drugs, diet, and dreaming. He notes that shamans often invoke the “trickster” archetype, but that this should not be taken to imply that they are necessarily fraudulent. Shamans receive that designation from their community; and they work in the service of that community. A self-appointed healer, therefore, is not a shaman. However, all shamans are healers.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.

(Recorded on May 13, 2016)