Some fundamental points of intellectual shamanism

1. Heraclitus is actually the early modern prototype for intellectual shamanism.

2. Intellectual shamanism considers that social stability and indeed power relationships themselves are maintained by means of psychological projection. This is in direct opposition to the ideology of meritocracy, which holds that those who are in power are there because they deserve to be there. Rather, intellectual shamanism suggests that those who are in power remain there because they are the most capable people in terms of projecting their worst qualities onto anybody who is not in power. Thus do they get rid of their worst qualities and appear to be morally pure without effort, whereas those in the lower echelons of society appear to need to purify themselves again and again.

3. Intellectual shamanism maintains that social reality -- although not material reality, which functions differently -- is a product of both negative and positive psychological projections. Thus, women will generally project their positive qualities out of themselves and into the world, whereas men will project their negative or frivolous emotional qualities in a way that they perceive to be "downwards". At any rate, they will project them into women.

4. Initiates of intellectual shamanism do not need to bother to analyse every individual action of the ruling powers in order to understand their meanings in their generality. Individuals or actions that threaten the stability of the social order will be targeted with mind-bending projections. Thus, those who threaten the system as it is will be destroyed by means of invisible attacks which cause their peers to look upon them negatively.

5. Intellectual shamanists believe in the law of reciprocity and test the authenticity of their relationships this way. The difference between an innocent action and a power hungry (projective) action is established on the basis of this law of reciprocity. If a woman is referred to using the diminutive version of her name, she can easily test the character of the one who does this by referring to him, publicly,in the same way. If he recoils from this, he was obviously engaged in a power play of projection. If he does not mind the reciprocation, she can assume that the way of speaking was naive and was not intended offensively.

6. Intellectual shamanists "journey" by using abstract ideas as containers for new experiences. They don't believe in fixed states of being, but rather that they can metamorphise from one state of being into another whilst exploring the interior meanings of complex abstract ideas.