| The Hindu
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| Divide life into certain stages
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| What are called the Ashamas
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| The first is called Brahmacarya
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| The second Grehasta
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| And the third Vanaprastha
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| Brahmacarya
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| Means the stage of the student, the apprenticeship
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| Grehasta the stage of the householder
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| And Vanaprastha
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| The stage of the forest dweller
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| This is related
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| To the cultural history of early India
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| Before we have agrarian communities
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| We have a hunting culture
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| Which is on the move
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| In a hunting culture
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| Every male
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| Knows the whole culture
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| There is no division of labor
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| And the holy man of the hunting culture
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| Is of course called a Shaman
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| A Shaman
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| Is a
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| A realized man
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| A man who knows the inner secret
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| He’s seen through the gate
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| And he finds it by going away alone into the forest
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| And cutting himself off
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| From the tribe
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| That is to say from social conditioning
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| And he goes maybe for a long period into the forest
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| And comes back
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| He’s found out who he is
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| And he sure as who he was told he was
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| But as hunting cultures settled into agrarian patterns of life
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| What do they do?
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| They build a village
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| And around the village they set up a stockade
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| Which is known as the Pale
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| And the village is always of course standing at crossroads
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| And there you get in an agrarian society a division of labor
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| And the division of labor comprises four
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| In Medieval Europe we call them Lord spiritual
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| Lords temporal
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| Commons
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| And Serves
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| In India they are
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| Brahmins
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| Chatria
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| That means fighter
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| Vaicher
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| Merchants
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| Traders
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| Chutara
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| Labour’s
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| So, you’ve got the priests
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| The warriors
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| The merchants
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| And the laborers
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| Division of labor
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| The four Sections of town
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| So, the four basic casts
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| So, when you are born you are born into a caste
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| And your duty as a Grehasta or householder
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| Is to fulfill your caste function
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| And to bring up a family
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| When you’ve done that
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| You go back to the forest
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| Back to the hunting culture
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| And you drop your role
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| And you become nobody
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| A shaman again
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| So a Hindu calls one who does this
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| Ashramana which is of course the same word as Shaman
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| And the Chinese called him a Shia
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| A Shaman is an immortal
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| Why immortal?
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| Because it’s only the role that’s mortal
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| The big front
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| The persona
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| The one who you really are
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| The common man that is to say the man who is common to us all
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| Which you could call the son of man
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| That’s the real self
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| That’s the guy who’s putting on the big act
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| And of course, he has no name
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| Nobody can put a finger on him
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| Because
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| You can’t touch the tip of the finger with the tip of the finger |