I, like many of you, watch the news on television and on June 29th, it was revealed that 39% of the people of America believe that American Culture is in permanent decline and that our deepening financial crisis will never be resolved.  In response, I recalled the words of Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson from their book ‘The Cultural Creatives’  published in the year 2000:

“We should take hope for we are traveling in the company of an enormous number of allies…”

In many of the essays I have written over the past several years, I have repeatedly made mention of the fact that a new spiritual complex is coming into being in the West, one that exists beyond the well-patrolled borders of organized religion, one at whose center lies the realization that each of us has the ability to make the direct, transpersonal connection with the sacred realms that defines the mystic... the shaman.