“This is probably my first interview with many spirits, not a single one at the same time, and I’m doing it consciously. Although it sounds a bit weird, since it’s a shaman on the phone, things are different.”
This is a full online re-paste of a Bone Magazine piece about Shaman Durek. Re-Produced with permission.
At first sight, you get to understand why Daily Candy calls Durek a ‘Hipster Shaman’. More than being a hipster, he’s the first shaman who uses more hashtags than me in social media.
Although he unsettles all your beliefs at first sight, Durek actually starts his workshops by saying “Don’t be judgmental” in Turkey. Gotta do him justice; one can be completely judgmental even while thinking.
How could a shaman dote upon to his wearings and accessories, go to catwalks, and even use social media heavily… These judgments pass through your mind for the first ten minutes. So I’ve spent lots of time on all my judgments and Shaman Durek.
I attended to his workshop first and then trapped him with my questions for about four hours. Here’s the result:
Shaman Durek and messages of the spiritual world… Be careful, this may cause enlightenment.
Who is Shaman Durek?
A Spiritual guide and a healer who lives in LA. Born in Northern California to an African-Haitian father and an East Indian Norwegian mother. He comes from a long lineage of spiritual practitioners including Seven Day Adventist ministers, oracles and spiritualist faith healers.
His natural abilities first became apparent at an age of 12 and he began his spiritual and shamanic studies at the same age.
The main purpose of all his works is to bring happiness, success and healing to people’s lives.
He serves as a bridge/ambassador between physical and spiritual worlds. At age 20, he started traveling the world to practice Christianity, metaphysics, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Catholics.
At age 30, he has experienced serious complications from an illness that’s been seriously risking his life. However, he accepted it as a challenging part of his journey as a shaman and by using his healing powers on himself, he got recovered completely in a year.
He examined works of Sufis in Turkey and practiced meditation sessions with many families in Izmir.
During the time he lived in Istanbul he displayed sensitivity about empowering women and he still continues working on it.
He works with clients from all walks of life some of which include; Hollywood celebrities and insiders, musicians, CEOs of major corporations and European royalty.
There are four types of shamans: root shaman, fire shaman, water shaman and spiritual shaman. Durek is a spirit shaman. So he’s a shaman who’s guiding people by talking to other spirits.
Durek’s Projects
BONE : You have some sorts of book projects, that’s also why you come to Turkey frequently…
SHAMAN : I’m writing a book titled ‘God’s Got a Bad Rep’ in USA. We blame god for everything. My purpose is to ask the questions like who the god is, what it means to us, briefly to make people look back to their belief systems one more time.
God is conceptually very distant to us (Shamans) yet it’s right next to us; it’s enough for you to see the God only by looking at the nature, the seas, the skies, the incredible details of our bodies, hands and eyes. The thing that’s called creation has never been ordinary. So how come we can interpret something so amazing in a very terrible way? As an angry, punishing, revenging god?
I ask extremely religious people one question all the time: “How a being could be that much hateful and judgmental who’s created all these incredible beauties? People usually answer: “That’s what it says in the book”. Alright, I got it, however it’s the people who put words in to the books.
The idea of “women stays under man”, is because they’ve stolen the apple from the Heaven’s Garden, for example. How do we know that apple shouldn’t be taken? And why that story isn’t being told as women have taken that apple to bring life on to earth? The book I write doesn’t tell that is the reality but it tells you to think about it.
My book in Turkey has four volumes; the first one is ‘Awakening’. It’s about waking up to realize what’s really going on, why things would affect you so much. In a simple way, could the reason to confront difficulties be about reaching common sense?
BONE : So how does a society awaken?
SHAMAN : It’s very interesting that you’re asking this. Martin Luther King asked the same question to one of his friends. “How can we awake black people to the reality of they can have their own rights?” The answer is: “You awaken somebody, he awakens another, that goes to one other and to another one…”
When you tell people the truth, they listen, if you lie they don’t. If we go back to your question, how do you awaken a society? Just by awakening a person.
BONE : So many people in Turkey think that Shamanism is a religion…
SHAMAN : Religion defines what spiritual beliefs are, it means rules and doctrines. So it has a certain structure like you can do this, you can’t do that. To put it in its simplest form, a religion has made up of rules and teachings to protect you from yourself. Shamanism however, is not a religion, we may think of it as an embassy. The ambassador goes there, negotiates and brings back information about what’s going on.
Shamanism is the embassy of nature’s kingdom and spirit of humanity that’s been blocked by the world. I’m here to remind people who they actually are. You for example, you don’t actually live your own truth. You’re living the world that your mother told you to live. The biggest problem is that people suffer from their nonfunctional thinking. So what does nonfunctional thinking mean? It means that you’re not living in harmony with yourself, with the planet and with your soul.
People think that shamans live in the woods but that’s totally a Hollywood fantasy. Shamans also need money to make living but I almost use most of my time to help people. Then I like indulging myself with goods of the world in my limited remaining time.
BONE : Other shamans consider you lucky for hearing the call of Turkey, why?
SHAMAN : Turkey is an amazing place to grow and transform. It’s a place where the old world meets the new world and there’s Islam here. Turkey is a spiritual-mental place, people’s skills and powers, thinking and working methods are different. You’re passing through the process that some relatively free places had left behind. You’re free with your choices; it’s up to people whether to choose watching TV all the time or being stimulated on an intellectual level, to become involved with what’s going on and what’s making a change in the country and in the world. There’s mixture from that aspect, there are people addicted to TV and far away from the real information, on the other side there are people and artists who’s got the information, who’s thinking and creating. This creates an incredibly powerful transformative energy, also Turks are coming from shamanism. This how they have influence on the other people of the world, whenever there’s a big tension here, all the world is hearing about it.
BONE : It’s a taboo to talk with spirits in Turkey…
SHAMAN : People don’t even talk to themselves in Turkey. If you don’t communicate with yourself, you can’t do it with your spirits at all.
BONE : All meditation techniques are trying to teach how to leave thinking but you’re telling the vice versa.
SHAMAN : I think it’s nonsense to stop thinking. The reason to be silent is to listen but many people don’t do it. I’m not talking about being peaceful, I’m talking about connecting with yourself.
You have to get to know yourself, you’re the one who’s going to live with yourself until the end of your life. We have to speak with ourselves; it’s the part of our nature, that’s why we have the ability. People don’t do it however, and they’re being told not to.
When you don’t know yourself, it gets easier to hurt somebody else, to kill an animal or to cut a tree, briefly it’s getting easier to show disrespect to the creation.
Let’s consider one to one communication; there’s a person sitting next to you and speaking to you but your mind is at somewhere else, so you may not hear a single word from that person.
When you don’t give your attention to this person, it’s not important what he is talking about or how long is he speaking. So when you contact to yourself, your attention must also be on yourself. If you ask yourself “what is disturbing me?” you’ll get an answer.
Your mind is familiar with this process, it was doing it in its childhood and was doing it so easy. If you don’t start processing what’s inside your mind in the outer world, you would destroy yourself. Because your mind then starts thinking “Am I making this or is it real? Is it a dream or not?”
After you start communicating yourself then you can start communicating with your spirit and with the other spirits. But we can’t see them in a physical form like humans. They exist on an energy level, so that it’s normal to hear voices, getting more power on feelings or seeing new things after that point.
What’s really important is to go towards those perceptions; giving full attention to that sound, that feeling and keep on going by knowing that the communication will be responded.
The fear of ‘Don’t speak, they cut your tongue if you speak’ is still causing problems for Turks about expressing their emotions and freedom of speech. So inside the chapter of ‘Your Mouth Is Shot’ in one of the books that I’m preparing for Turkey, this is exactly what I’m talking about.
BONE : How many spiritual guides do you have? Which one do you love the most?
SHAMAN : Almost 72. I know 34 of them. Elorian is the one that I love the most.
BONE : Does Elorian have a message to Turkey?
SHAMAN : People in Turkey are passing through a time in which their lives are being transformed by big events. They have to have their lives being defined and they need to think about how they’re using their energies and powers.
For now, whatever happens in the society is happening as a result of their emotions and attitudes towards themselves and others. It’s important for everyone to understand the nature of being a human, it’s in human nature to understand each other.
Understanding somebody else’s life and culture is a must to survive your genes in this world. They’re passing the poison of fear, jealousy, feeling of guilt to each other by hurting others and they stick to these negative emotions.
This situation might make oneself feel superior but they’re not to who’s observing them, actually it’s the opposite. All of these create an imbalance and disharmony in the society. This fighting to show who’s stronger and who’s weak is weakening everyone.
The truth of the matter is Turkey and it’s people are holding a great power in themselves and spirits support the awakening of the region from all around. This awakening is necessary for them to realize the power within themselves, therefore they’ll be available to influence the energies of other people, which means the world.
Once they get to understand what ever happening is forming because of their own energies, they’ll be able create a transform on the other people of the world and share it with the world.
Whatever happens in Turkey is also happening in the other places on earth, only they happen in other scales and levels. So when people look at Turkey they will see the top of the transformation and the awakening, the other places will awaken this way and they’ll start experiencing this amazing thing called life.
This will raise the consciousness of people in Turkey, and it is going to cause a change on an infrastructure that will make everyone work in harmony and leave in peace both on a family and society basis. This is how it’s meant to, so that’s why all of these things of the moment are happening intensely because people must go deeper within themselves and face with what’s real and what’s not.
By doing this, the society will be forced to face the parts of itself being ignored until now, and then it will embrace its own being and start the real change.
This information is being delivered to you from a place full of love, we’re here to support your people, to make them stand up. However the reality doesn’t have only one side, if the society doesn’t care about what’s going on now, which means if it doesn’t see and accept how treating others affect the whole picture, there will be no change.
Once these truths are accepted, the change will start and all the difficult experiences will finish.
BONE : How do angels look like?
SHAMAN : Many people see the angels and God in human form. Since human kind couldn’t find out how to live in harmony with its own species, it’s not expected that they can face with the original forms of beings, which means they’re not ready.
If they could see, they would probably be disturbed because of their fears. Since humans cannot love its own species, rather destroying and hurting them, the other kinds don’t think we’re safe. The human kind still separate others for their creation, their religion, sexual preference and lots of other unimportant things.
On this level it’s impossible to qualify other kinds, probably if e.t.’s come to visit us, the first thing that humans think would be war and that they came to kill us. This where we are at evolution now, we take everything as a threat.
We have to love ourselves first, then we will see the god and the others, then we will see the god inside everyone, we will stop hurting other people and animals because we will see the creature inside every living thing.
Until then we should stop hypocrisy, the passion for power and the abuse of power, we should help people to get to know themselves and set up a good relationship.
BONE : Is there reincarnation?
SHAMAN : Yes there is but it’s not linear. Humans totally have a linear perspective. Reincarnation exists on a quantum level; so that every part of me did exist and will exist, all my parts exist and it was existing in the past. So there is reincarnation on a wider time level, as an existence.
BONE : Is there any thing you would like to add?
SHAMAN : I want the people of Turkey to acknowledge how wonderful and amazing they are. How they’re thinking and how they’re using their minds will create all the change. They should really consider judging others, they should accept people as they are, they should help women find their roles in life.
Mothers are choking their kids as if they don’t need to grow so they grow people who don’t need to be adults, full of ego, who cannot really communicate with others around. Wives of these children are mothering them but they have to take care of their own kids and suddenly their husbands also become their children and this cycle goes on and on. It needs to stop at some point and set up a balance.
What does balance mean? Each time you smoke for example, you kill vitamin C in your body, when you take alcohol you need to consume more water so that everything has to be in balance. Consuming so much meat, smoking cigarettes, acting like that and then wondering why you look old when you’re in twenties make no sense.
I cannot tell you enough how unhealthy are the institutions of Turkish society, how people are not questioning their choices because they don’t want to leave their comfort zone… All they have to do is to put a step forward. It’s actually as easy as wearing shoes or brushing teeth, this is an active doing action, not a thinking action. Just do it, that’s enough.
