Shamanica Institute

02/02/2026

This week we will talk about the four Yugas in Vedic cosmology

Vedic tradition describes time as cyclical, unfolding through four great ages (Yugas), each representing a gradual decline in consciousness, virtue, and harmony: Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga and Kali Yuga.

We are currently said to be in Kali Yuga. This age is marked by materialism, disconnection, moral confusion, and the collapse of traditional values. Ego, greed, fear, and addiction dominate. Truth becomes obscured, and appearance is often mistaken for reality.

Despite its darkness, Kali Yuga carries a unique gift: liberation is more accessible. Because suffering is intensified, awakening can happen faster. Even small acts of awareness, compassion, and sincerity carry great spiritual power.

To walk consciously in Kali Yuga is not to escape the darkness, but to bring light into it through grounding, shadow integration, and reclaiming personal responsibility.

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01/19/2026

This week we will explore two key psychological dynamics that emerge when the psyche is out of balance: projection and ego inflation. Both are natural functions of the mind, but when left unconscious, they can become signs of deeper fragmentation, even the roots of psychological suffering and pathology.

Projection occurs when we unconsciously place disowned parts of ourselves onto other people or the world around us.
At the heart of projection lies a split in the psyche: the persona (who we think we are) and the shadow. This split keeps us from living from wholeness.

When left unconscious, projections can create:
Conflict and judgment: we criticize in others what we cannot face in ourselves
Distorted perceptions: we see the world through the filter of our inner wounds
Victimhood and resentment: we lose our power by blaming the outside world

Becoming aware of projection calls us to take responsibility for our inner life and our actions, and see others and reality with greater clarity.

Ego inflation happens when the ego identifies with energies, archetypes, or insights that are too big for it to hold. This can occur after powerful experiences (spiritual openings, psychedelic journeys, deep psychological breakthroughs) or as a defense mechanism to mask vulnerability.

Both projection and ego inflation point to a split within the psyche and, if left unintegrated, can lead to psychological imbalance or even breakdown.

Sacred plants and psychedelics can accelerate healing and self-discovery, but they can also amplify our projections and inflate the ego if not approached with grounding and integration.

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01/11/2026

We will continue exploring the ancient Tibetan text Bardo Thodol as a practical guide for navigating states of consciousness during a psychedelic journey, with a particular focus on the transpersonal domain.

The transpersonal domain becomes accessible when ordinary identity, personal history, and self-referencing fades away. As the ego relaxes, consciousness is no longer confined to the personal story and may open into impersonal, universal awareness.

Transpersonal experiences are not pathological or imaginary. They are not hallucinations, but expressions of unfiltered consciousness, states beyond time and space and encounters with archetypal or cosmic intelligence.

In the visionary phase (Chonyid Bardo), images arise: deities, demons, heavens, and hells. These are manifestations of the transpersonal psyche, not personal fantasies. Liberation comes from recognizing these forms as expressions of consciousness itself, not as “me”.

If transpersonal states are not recognized, consciousness re-enters form (Sidpa Bardo), reconstructing identity, habits, and karmic patterns. How we return to ordinary life is shaped by how the transpersonal was encountered.

In The Psychedelic Experience, Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner describe psychedelic experiences as temporary initiations into transpersonal awareness. The authors emphasize that insight alone is not enough. Without preparation, guidance, humility, and integration, transpersonal experiences can inflate the ego rather than dissolve it.

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12/29/2025

This week we will explore the ancient Tibetan text Bardo Thodol as a practical guide for navigating states of consciousness during a psychedelic journey.

Across cultures, deep states of consciousness have always been understood as rites of passage, symbolic deaths followed by rebirth. What modern psychology calls ego dissolution, ancient traditions described as entering the bardos: transitional realms between one way of being and another.

The text outlines three main stages (bardos) that commonly arise during a high-dose psychedelic journey:

The Chikhai Bardo – Ego Death/Clear Light
This stage corresponds to the dissolution of the ego and ordinary identity. If surrendered to completely, it can lead to experiences of unity, transcendence, and direct awareness of consciousness beyond the self. This stage can feel ecstatic or terrifying, depending on one thing: resistance. When the ordinary identity collapses, the Transpersonal domain becomes accessible.

The Chonyid Bardo – Visionary States
If the Clear Light is not sustained, the mind generates symbolic visions, archetypal images, deities, heavens, and hells. These are understood as projections of one’s own psyche. Recognizing them as such leads to liberation; identifying with them leads to confusion.

The Sidpa Bardo – Re-entry/Rebirth
Consciousness begins to reassemble itself into form, personality, and narrative. This is the return to ego, identity, and life, shaped by how the earlier stages were navigated. This is the moment where patterns are rewritten (how we relate, how we choose, how we inhabit our lives). This is also where integration begins.

These states are highly sensitive. Set (mindset), setting (environment) and guidance shape the journey profoundly. Psychedelics temporarily dissolve the ego, revealing the same archetypal death-rebirth process described in spiritual traditions. Suffering arises from resistance; freedom arises from recognition and surrender.

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12/23/2025

I want to express my deepest gratitude to each of you. Your trust and commitment have been truly inspiring, and it has been an honor to walk alongside you on your journey this year.

I wish you real and lasting breakthroughs in the year ahead.
May the spirit of this season bless you, keep you safe, and surround you with the love of family and friends.
Happy Solstice and Merry Christmas!
Dan 🌵🎄🩷

12/16/2025

The Axis Mundi and the value system

The Axis Mundi is a universal symbol found across cultures: the sacred center that connects Above, Middle, and Below, Spirit, Psyche, and Body, Transcendent meaning and everyday life.

But beyond cosmology, the Axis Mundi is also a map of values. Every human being lives around an inner axis, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that axis determines what matters, what guides decisions, and what gives life coherence.

This week we will look at the Axis Mundi from a psychological perspective. Psychologically, the Axis Mundi represents the organizing principle of the self.
- When a person has a stable inner axis, values are coherent.
- Choices align across time.
- Suffering is contextualized rather than chaotic.

Without an axis, values fragment:
- impulses contradict long-term meaning
- desire overrides direction
- the self becomes horizontally dispersed, reactive rather than oriented
In this sense, values are not just beliefs, they are expressions of where the axis is anchored.

Further we will discuss Vertical vs Horizontal Value Systems, and the distinction between them.

In essence, the Axis Mundi is the hidden structure behind every value system. Tell me where your axis is anchored and I can tell you what your values will be under pressure.
When the axis is clear, values organize naturally. When it is lost, no amount of moral reasoning can replace it.

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12/09/2025

12/09/2025

In a world undergoing rapid transformation, ancient wisdom offers a compass for navigating both personal and collective evolution. This meetup explores four powerful archetypal forces: Karma, Dharma, Apocalypse, and Apokatastasis, as interconnected patterns within the psyche and cosmos.

We will look at:
- Karma as the result of action — psychological, ancestral, and energetic — that shapes our experience and repeats in cycles until brought to awareness.
- Dharma as our deeper calling — not solely duty, but the soul’s alignment with truth, balance, and service to life.
- Apocalypse not as destruction, but revelation — the tearing of old veils, the death of false identities, the collapse of illusion.
- Apokatastasis, the forgotten promise of restoration — a return to original wholeness, where all that was fragmented is reintegrated and redeemed.

Drawing from Jungian psychology, shamanic traditions, and mystical theologies, we will explore how these forces manifest in our personal stories, in the state of the world, and in the deeper process of spiritual evolution.

We will reflect on questions like:
- What must end in me for something true to begin?
- How do I meet collapse without bypassing it?
- Are Apokatastasis and Singularity one and the same?

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12/01/2025

The Labyrinth and Addictions

Addiction is one of the most direct modern expressions of the Labyrinth archetype. It is the experience of being caught in a structure the mind cannot easily exit.

In psychology, addiction is the perfect image of the looping corridors of the Labyrinth::
- Compulsions repeat even when we know the way out
- The Minotaur appears as the core wound fueling the addictive cycle, ususualy early childwood wounds - insecure attachments
- The corridors are habit loops: triggers → cravings → behavior → relief → shame → restart.
Addiction becomes the attempt to soothe pain while actually reinforcing the maze. Ariadne’s thread here is: therapy, somatic awareness, attachment healing, emotional regulation and community support.

In shamanic worldviews, addiction isn’t only psychological, it has its own energetic presence.:
- A compulsive pattern behaves like an inner entity: it feeds, grows, and takes space.
- It whispers false promises of freedom but actually binds the person deeper into the corridors.
- The Minotaur becomes a spirit wound or loss of vital energy, often linked to trauma or disconnection from the soul.

Healing comes through Extraction (removing the parasitic pattern or intrusive energy), Soul Retrieval (bringing back the lost part the addiction is replacing), and Reweaving identity so the person is not hollow and vulnerable to the same loops.

In other words: Addiction is a disoriented journeyer in the Labyrinth. And healing is the rediscovery of the thread.

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11/24/2025

Exiting the Labyrinth of the Mind

The Labyrinth is one of the most important archetypes of inner transformation and it perfectly mirrors the structure of the mind we are trying to exit. This week we explore how different traditions understand the Labyrinth, and how each one provides tools for finding the way out.

The Psychological Labyrinth
- From a psychological perspective, the Labyrinth is the mind: a place of looping thoughts, emotional patterns, attachment wounds, and shadow dynamics.
- The corridors represent unconscious patterns we keep wandering through.
- The Minotaur symbolizes the parts of ourselves we fear: rage, abandonment, inadequacy.
- Ariadne’s thread becomes the tools of healing: therapy, memory reconsolidation, somatic awareness.

To exit the Labyrinth is not to bypass it, but to navigate it consciously, confront its traps, reclaim our inner resources and emerge with an integrated self.

The Shamanic Labyrinth
- In shamanism, the Labyrinth becomes an experiential realm encountered in altered states.
- Initiation often begins with getting lost: confusion, symbolic death, ego fragmentation.
- The Minotaur becomes a spirit guardian — an ally, not the enemy.
- Ariadne’s thread appears as: icaros, ancestral spirits, plant teachers, rituals.
- The center of the Labyrinth is where the shaman retrieves lost soul parts, releases intrusive energies, and restores balance.

For the shaman, exiting the Labyrinth means returning to the community with clarity, power, and medicine.

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11/17/2025

In this meetup we will explore how shamanic traditions understand the ego through the lens of Karl Popper’s Three Worlds model.

Instead of treating the ego as something to eliminate, shamanic systems approach it as a dynamic structure that can fragment, inflate, dissolve, or align — depending on the relationship between matter (World 1), experience (World 2), and symbolic knowledge (World 3).

This presentation is an invitation to see the ego as shamanism sees it: a fluid bridge between visible reality, inner consciousness, and the mythic frameworks that shape healing and evolution.

We will explore four major shamanic ego models, each across the three worlds.
1. The Fragmented Self (Soul Loss)
2. The Inflated Self (Ego Expansion)
3. The Hollow Bone (Ego Transparency)
4. The Balanced Self (Integrated Ego)

Popper’s framework reveals how symbolic teachings (World 3), inner experience (World 2), and ritual technologies (World 1) work together to reshape the ego, not by eliminating it, but by transforming its structure and function.

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11/07/2025

This week we will discuss a few concepts that are important to understand in our spiritual journey. We will do so from the Hermetic, Gnostic or Psychological perspective and also from the Shamanic standpoint.

We will go over Karl Popper's three-world structure to describe different levels of reality:
World 1- The Physical World - consists of material objects and physical phenomena.
World 2 - The Psychological World - represents subjective experiences, thoughts, emotions, and includes feelings, perceptions, and inner mental states.
World 3 - The World of Objective Knowledge - value systems, moral systems, ethical theories, and philosophical concepts that become part of the collective knowledge, evolving across cultures and time. This world includes all human systems of knowledge, values, meanings, and cosmologies that exist independently of any single person’s mind once they are articulated.

Further, we will discuss this framework from the shamanic perspective.
World 3 in a shamanic frame becomes the Living Library of Spirit, the realm where all human knowledge, myths, and archetypes dwell as beings or energetic forms.

The shaman, through altered states of consciousness (World 2) and embodied ritual (World 1), enters the World 3 field, not to think knowledge, but to meet it.

Popper saw World 3 as objective but non-living: a realm of ideas and structures. In shamanism, however, this world is alive.
The entities of World 3 — ideas, symbols, archetypes — are ensouled. They appear as gods, spirits, ancestors, or animals carrying wisdom. Each mythic form is a living vessel of meaning.

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