Or

The shamanistic endeavor I've embarked on is my own.  The origins of my invention took me from making my own emotional investigations, through putting myself in the shoes of Marechera, via my own African experiences.  Along with this, I simultaneously moved from Nietzsche's notion of viewing one's life in terms of power to Bataille's notion of inner-experience.  I superseded, but did not erase the previous ways of looking at the world.   My exposure to those first authors gave me ideas, methods, certainties and questions, which I took on through to the next level.   More definitively as regards "intellectual shamanism", I also brought my own needs and questions to the issue of how meaning is established by my own departing from what was already known and attempting to go beyond the theoretical structures of Nietzsche and Bataille as well as the structures of meaning implied by Marechera's creative formulations.

575. We aeronauts of the spirit! All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch down on a mast or a bare cliff-face and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop [...] it will be the same with you and me! Other birds will fly farther! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in flying up and away; it rises above our heads and above our impotence into the heights and from there surveys the distance and sees before it the flocks of birds which, far stronger than we, still strive whither we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea! And whither then would we go? Would we cross the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the sums of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers. Or?

[Nietzsche, THE DAWN THOUGHTS ON THE PREJUDICES OF MORALITY]

I've gone as far as I can go. I've established "the void" as a feature of intellectual shamanism.  This also defines the proximity of my mode of thinking to Buddhism.  In the process of my flight, I've learned that there are many ways of thinking that circumscribe the realm of experience, so that we are certainly not free to investigate the world on one's own or determine what one's morality should be.   Priests of all sorts shield one from this direct experience of the world.   One's conclusions, if derivable from authorities, are not able to be made through an encounter with nothingness, which is the blank canvas on which on draws one's own meanings.

Or.