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Shamanic abilities are generally brought on by a personal crisis, such as illness or sudden shock. Where this is not naturally forthcoming, initiations designed to produce the effects of such a state are used to bring about re-birth as a shaman. The shaman sees through everything, dies and is reborn, suffers the pangs of the world, and sees into its darkest corners. The near-death of initiation is common to shamans the world over and a metaphor for their experiences. Afterwards, they are never the same; everything has changed for them. They have known total knowledge and, to a degree according to their skills and strengths, have permanent access to it from that moment on.
( -shamanism bible; mathwes )

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Part of the thing I found with hanging with shamans in various places and times is that once you get past the language barrier, what shamans are are simply curious people. Intellectuals of a certain type. In Australian aboriginal slang, a shaman is called a “clever fellow”. If someone says “I’m a clever fellow”, they mean, you know, I’m a shaman. Well, that’s all it is – it’s somebody who pays attention to how things actually work, and sort of transcends the culture by that means. It’s a weird paradox. It’s that the shamans, who are the keepers of the cultural values, are also necessarily the keepers of the secrets of the theatrics of the cultural values, and so they live their lives in the light of the knowledge that it all rests on showbiz. You know, everybody else is a true believer, but these are the image-makers, the people who actually pull the strings and control the evolution of the mythologies. And in a way, it’s a situation of alienation. -Terence McKenna

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Even in traditional societies, the shaman is central to the social functioning, and the health, and so forth – but is never allowed to be physically central. There is a leader, a head man or something; the shaman lives off at the edge of the village, sometimes off in the woods; he is approached with fear and trembling; he is loathed and respected, and feared and loved, because it is understood that he represents a dimension that nevertheless must be tolerated, because it is the channel through which knowledge, and healing, and higher values, come. -terence mckenna

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the shaman is socially marginal, politically marginal, lives at the edge of the village, and so forth and so on, and is feared by the people, because dealings with the shaman are always dealings about life and death. But then the shaman comes forward in this critical role, as go-between, as mediator, between the cultural mind and the real world, which is this potent set of forces and planetary cycles and meteorological events and diseases and, you know, fate; and the shaman mediates. In many languages, the word for shaman means “go-between”. So the cost of this, or the price of this, for the shaman himself, or herself, is a kind of alienation from the cultural values, and a kind of understanding that it’s a game that’s kept in play. -terence mckenna

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