shamanism and schizophrenia

I am an amateur shaman, professionally trained but way off the track of shamanism the last decade;

And I always liked the line my teacher gave me, on the difference between the schizophrenia experience and the shamanic, the thin line dividing the similar professions: "The dreamer must control the dream, not the dream the dreamer". I have effective control over all my visual and audio hallucinations, the "movies" in the "demon world", an alternate universe I simultaneously have lived in for about 27 of my 47 years, but alas I am plagued with extreme allergies, or extreme skin sensitivity, or if the psychiatrists are correct, extreme incurable schizophrenic tactile hallucinations, and I have never, in my 27 years with this escalating and currently life-threatening affliction, had any control over that, other than my current MO which is to eat only raw vegetables and sleep in an antiseptic room on a cold floor, or in a bathtub, with a parka for a blanket. Yeah that's my life now, full time, weird shamanic path where I have to meditate and hallucinate all day because I don't get much sleep at night; I really do live some saint monk lifestyle.

And I have a theory of what schizophrenia is, this madness I focus on in myself and casually observe in others.

I think consciousness is the problem, some people way over develop it, (like me, I know), so I work on curing myself here in my hotel room, which I use as a private insane asylum with myself as full time nurse over myself, cause I've been through the system a dozen times and they have nothing to offer me, and they kick me out now they don't want me there.

I have a line from the taoist encyclicals, samizdats, and tractates I drag around as anchors, allowing me to catapult so far out into madness, well the line is "host and guest must be distinguished". Consciousness has to learn respect for its host.

Cause consciousness can be an asshole, commandeering the host for some destructive joy rides, when a more appropriate humility of consciousness in relation to its host -the organism - is what the majority of the herd - the "normal" people - practice.

I used to think, 'why would anybody avoid reading or exposing themselves to anything whatsoever?' I was always encouraged to research infinitely in libraries and bookstores and whatever else, by my parents and by my educators; my whole high school education was to go to the library to research and write papers;

I was surprised when the first president bush one day on the news said, about some book the liberal media had asked him about or had pointed out some democrat challenger had been reading - oh yeah this was gore - and bush said "if I were him I wouldn't read that kind of thing". And at the time I just couldn't understand it, reading myself everything and anything all the time everywhere, like a two year old desperate to learn for pleasure. Infantile personality syndrome. Human neoteny, in the same vein as playing baseball, or valve trombone and piano, for a living, it's something the human species is known to push way past the typical envelope compared to most species, the stage of "play" that most animals grow out of early on, desperate to survive and be serious. Like the "normal" people of our culture, blue collar hard working or just lazy but friendly with their kind, relaxed and stout and hale in their ways, that tell me they don't think about the things I do because they are "just trying to get through life", they don't care about the non-existence of gravity or the structure of the universe or the nature of the demon world. It's hard for me to relate, what do they all think about while they are waiting for the red light to change, or the next song to come on, or during the commercials, I'd think to myself for years, maniacal mind running away with me.
I thought time was the enemy. Thinking about the nature of time is a gateway to madness in dozens of authors I've read and posters I've conversed with, as it has been with myself; some of my most psychotic moments in life are related to my battle with time, me, the leader of all matter and energy in the war against time, with megadeth ferocity playing in my mind all day long.
But I came out the other end of madness, basically, going as far out there as I could and I guess it's like the drunks who say they can drink so much they can drink themselves sober. So I am so insane I've learned to behave myself among the worldly-minded camarilla, undercover.

I realized time is just consciousness, really, or they are deeply deeply intertwined, at any rate, and so "is consciousness the enemy?" is a question every schizophrenia patient ought to ask themselves.
Then I distinguish host and guest, minute by minute. Guest turns on the tv when I come home from work, host turns it off to get some rest, guest eats sugar or caffeine (used to) and reads the paper and schizophrenia web sites (still do), host needs to calm down and get some rest, meditate, it isn't like my parents inferred, that thought is no-cost-to-me so go down in the basement and do it do it do it to compete with that world out there you inferior spawn of my madness (that was pretty much the running message from my parents when I was young, as it was with other people growing up I've heard, though certainly not the majority, the kids sent out to play and get tough and learn to function with others).

And if you think about it the doctors of the body never even FOUND consciousness, all their materialistic theories of brain-mind have fallen amazingly short for the scientists who dream of knowing and controlling all of nature within their test tube. I watched my nieces and nephews grow up, round 2 to 3 years of age, and they were all psychotic, every last one, at that age, in one way or another, and they all learn to integrate, to one degree or another, and most "grow up" into "normality", but us, one hallmark of people with schizophrenia is that when you look back you can tell from the very beginning of the personality that something was off, something that either snaps into place or flies off the hinges in the early twenties.

And after 2 or 3 the parents start enforcing normality, as if for the kids’ own good, and back then I stood there feeling bad for the kid to have to lose the psychotic world that I get to retain, as they do in order to follow their parents into scared simplistic and blind normality. And I said it's like they are pulling the kid down, these genius kids who fly off at two years old to amazing heights of sentence and idea creation and play, only to be fired at with the heavy guns of their parents ' affection so that they come down in to consensual reality, so they can live on their own someday, and drive a car; (I stay out of driving cars and therefore reserve the right to be mad in America, at least on the fringes of the big cities.)

I said humanity, most of them, they have gone down into the rabbit hole, the test tube of human knowledge. And down there they can tell time and manipulate chemical reactions and build impressive machinery and even their silicon computer space age stuff, but they imagined, in the 50's, when my parents were taking it all in, that they could eventually understand everything, in another ten or twenty years, and just solve all the problems and be infinitely magical.
Then I realized they'd hit the wall, when I began the past 27 years' journey, with shamanism and insanity, the visionary mind. Realized science had NO IDEA what was going on, and with the track they were on they never would. Realized I could begin to learn freely but that I'd have to leave humanity, that "normal" part of the herd, behind. I'd have to climb back up out of the test tube of human knowledge that my parents surely tried to pull me down into, and out into the light of the world, to join my brothers the shamans, the spirits, the demons, the schizophrenics, and the two year olds, and all the trees and the other species, and the rocks and stars, out in to the world of mystery and wonder.

I like to say one day humanity will grow up, put away their "toys" of science and reason, in the toy box in the attic to be glanced at wistfully once in a while but left behind as neoteny mostly, (as I suspect the bird species currently deal with the faculty of language), and come up and out and join us, as we pursue our inner nature and our destiny, and search for mystery and wonder.
So I was hanging out in the demon world, growing up there cause I was bored with the human world, and they taught me how they complete the human genome so that it can bring destruction down on itself and on the universe, some master plan of destruction from the leaders of the religion of evil; I dropped out less than a year ago and am being tortured like someone who tries to get out of a gang, but no matter, and fear not, I am squarely on the side of humanity, my own, the host of the consciousness that's getting carried away again in this little essay, cause I have one more thing to say that's quite bizarre and a rather unique psychosis, and I'm definitely having this delusion full time these days, so I can say it quickly and clearly:

Yeah I found consciousness when another guy pointed out he had the same problem I do, infested with demons, and he had "starved the leech" to get it off and get it to behave. He had also gone in to their world, he told me he couldn't shake the idea that there was another world he was living in, and I introduced him to professional shamanism ("core shamanism" in new york city taught by graduates of michael harner, or something like that, you can just google it and read it and get the training it's easy, but it's nice to have professional shamans for guidance, and in nyc they bring in shamans from the jungles and native civilizations from around the world to do hundred dollar an hour sessions, not much different from a psychiatrist visit, it was kinda fun.)

So I learned from experience how to starve the leech, it was give up carbs, sugar, processed food, eat only raw veggies, for the host, and protein and fat in proper proportion. Learned to build the body and the mind while starving the leech, host got stronger, guest leech got weaker, got easier to manage, and so the psychiatrist might say I got more sane.

Or not. I tell the psychiatrist I don't have schizophrenia, but I have an imagination approaching schizophrenia, only I know the difference between my world and consensual reality. I told my boss the sales director I practice irrationality, and in your culture they call that schizophrenia.
And I discovered that the demons, those maniacal completers of my genome, writing from the "junk DNA" and RNA onto the stuff they call DNA, yeah, those demons are real, they're in the world of your scientists, but the scientists’ prejudice in their own superiority made them completely overlook them. It's the fungus inside of you. Inside of me. Oh I'm infested. They think they are far superior to silly mortal man, with their immortal hive mind that spans the minds of most species on the planet, through which we can communicate with everyone everywhere, no cell phone minutes required, and they are waging an inter species war with their religion of evil, maniacal, not for the purpose of their own survival but like a warped damaged kid torturing his pet cat, they consider us "theirs", and oh they farm us.

And we the mad are just the canaries in the coal mine. The whole species is blindly pursuing consciousness expansion.

A trained shaman and a certified psychopomp -really all that means is I signed up for some weekend workshops back in nyc in the old days. Shamanism training. I enjoyed it. And I was very good at it. Some people would pay and sit and try the mediations but not "see" anything. I’d go with the hallucinations behind my eyes, I see everything, and in those weekend workshops when we'd go around the room and report on our experiences, when it would get to be my turn the whole room would stop and be enraptured, hanging on each development in the little demon play I had just come up with. The thing is as they would go around the room, many of the reports would be less detailed versions of the unique motif that I had brought in. The teacher would segment me away from the others to be fair to the others and let them dream their own dreams. When we dream together, others see my dreams. It's actually kind of a natural phenomenon, with infants, which I am surprisingly sensitive like. I'm like an infant in many ways. In the way I think. Emotionally traumatized by a mad mother at an age younger than two, and then smart enough to grow a fake emulation brain over the forever-young brain, and to be clever enough to have hidden it for this long, enough time to develop it into something that is young and connected to the spirit world, parasite world, in ways humanity really isn't , but by now also able to emulate humanity enough with the mathematical brain that I can hold a job and have a family, live in the world of consensual reality where they believe in gravity and in property rights, while of course being completely beyond that in my “heart”. It's through shamanic visions that I take people to see the demon world.

I had a jewish girlfriend, scared of her own shadow, and she wanted to go see the demon world that I had been talking about and which she wished I would stop talking about. So here's how it goes: We unplug the phones one afternoon up in her apartment in flushing queens right across the whitestone expressway from the new york times plant, if you're ever driving toward the whitestone bridge, anyway, we turn off the lights, close the shades in all the rooms, unplug phone, and lay out two towels on the living room floor. And I have the "drum tape", just shamanic drum beat straight for twenty minutes. We lie down, close our eyes, for twenty minutes the drum tape goes, my job is get my spirit guide to pull both of us on the tour wherever I want to go, and I really did go to show her the worst, just to show her the power I was talking about. So after we come out of it, she is freaking out, saw everything I showed her, between our dreams/visions/hallucinations, and was mad at me for infesting her apartment with the demons, for she never stopped seeing them after that moment. The first time I heard of shamanism, I met a girl at a bar, she took me to her friend's attic apartment, I lay down between the two of them, no idea what really was going on, they turn out the lights, do the shamanism drum tape, I want to show them my demon world and I'd never even heard of shamanism before, but I knew reciting things would always rouse the demon world, so while they did what I now know is the ritual with the spirit guide, I recited my stuff in my mind. Well, we all hallucinated the demon world. They moaned and whimpered a little during the 20 minutes. When we all sat up, we just stared at eachother a few moments, breathless. Then I was the first to eventually stir and say something. Obvious they were both terrified by what they'd seen, I said "I told you I was infested with demons", they said that sure was the third world, or the "lower" world, and they wrote the professional shaman's phone number on a piece of paper for me and told me I needed some serious help, that they'd been practicing this stuff for a while but they'd never seen anything like that.

I read the schizophrenia websites often. For almost a decade I regularly read the one in australia and the one in england where people diagnosed with schizophrenia can "post their delusions" - I go there to post all my own delusions, and to take bits and pieces of others. I’m diagnosed schizotypal, and I know how to escalate it to schizophrenia, and how to reverse it, and there’s a good reason for each way of going.

At least in me - and I can easily acquire a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and certainly have - but it’s really just a matter of poor diet and poor lifestyle. Poor thinking leads to those two.
So now in a relationship, living a very healthy lifestyle and living on a diet i developed over the years to optimize my mental capacity while pairing it with a reading diet that keeps the mental electricity on the straight track, avoiding the usual train wreck, i have myself as "sane" or "normal" as any one.

But all it takes is: isolation, malnutrition, and stress, and i can simulate schizophrenia. for the purpose of inducing psychosis, which is for the purpose of coming up with new ways of seeing the universe around me, and ultimately for the purpose of "utmost spirit pervasion", a taoist ideal. (Some people still think they are located in their human body, but others educate themselves out of that, and become self-aware throughout the universe and across time;. it’s called "zentrallerkentnis", the condition of seeing everything from the inside, looking out.)
Does my theory hold? i have all kind of brain mind theories on how that works; is it your diet/lifestyle? Is it unhealthy? Gettin your omega 3's???

I once asked my psychiatrist what the consequences of schizotypality were, since he wanted me on meds and I always refuse (cause that stuff is trouble) - he said possible side effects of taking no meds for schizotypality are: I might start a lot of things and not finish them (I’m in the middle of a hundred books but I usually finish eventually), I might harm my family by going on a shopping spree (no, I stay within my means, though I don't save anything), and one other thing, can't remember, but just as innocuous.

I don;t even really know what shamanism is? but I do. although I consider myself a esoteric cosmologist as of yesterday I found the term and that incorporates shamanism, yoga, kabbalah all stuff I'm interested in and its about self-transformation and evolution.....so do you have these experiences of self-transformation as part of your practice?.....I'd like to hear more about what your experiences are, you see a psychiatrist, lucky you can describe that you're in control of your experience or does he treat you like a schizophrenic and drug you up? or you have an agreement to allow you to experience what you like as long as you not going to harm yourself through practice. can't believe a pschiatrist would give way to describing someone through spiritual means, I am trying my best to get my insight to outway the illusion of schizophrenia, I have better insight then a psychiatrist that treats mental illness like a figment of their imagination, an illusion heavily driven by drug industry..

I'm on psych drugs and they do my spirituality no good,,,,I had a lapse with daydreaming and sleep deprivation and thought there was some impending astral threat to me and my home and fled and got pulled up by the police by this time I had atleast two beings in my gut and astral attack with an axe, I was at my worst but would have been better to stay at home and maybe get some sleep, as I rejuevenate after rest and it calms down the visualisation and daydreaming, quacks can;t make sense of it really.

tell me about some of your experience, what actually makkes you a shaman, have you learnt methods for tuning your perception to planes of existance to channel deities etc or the godhead of the univers....I sought self-transcendence over my life to reach the full potentials of mankind including powers of telepathy etc and talkedd to arch-angels and had a species take over my home that were vampire like tormenting me for a while, usually at night...wasn;t like hallucination but a projection of my own mind to detect astral form in my space.

Isn;t death a big part of the shaman experience, like death of the ego and ressurection? purification of the personality and soul-retreival? does this make me a shaman too? or shall I stick with being an esoteric cosmologist?

-- Wed Feb 20, 2013 2:07 pm --

What actually distinguishes shamanism from schizophrenia anyway?..... I think maybe absense of paranoia, I daydreamed a lot and that could come up with ideas that were like transient delusions, I could seperate reality from world in my head like you, I also consider myself to be schizotype when it comes to dealing with family that can't comprehend my desires in life and individualisation of my mindset and getting away from the media influence and believing what I want to believe, they just think I need help to be like I was reliant on them growing up, its pretty rediculous the kinds of projections they make over my life in accordance with psychiatric education, quacks say it is a persecutory delusion but they are wrong, mainly because the idea incorporates corruption from psych profession. when my life took on spiritual truths and learning meditation and yoga they freaked out big time and put my under a whole lot of stress just because I had a mind of my own and my own direction in life was gravitating toward spirituality, they remain like an opiate for their concerns that I am stuck with psychiatry infjections for the forseeable future.

Religious and Spiritual problems incorporates shamanism, meditation and mystical states but no reference in psychosis section to that as they appear much the same to an untrained eye

oh you said your not on any drug, you are lucky not to be sectioned on treatment order, or lucky you are treated as schizotypal.....your doc is a quack if you were on drugs you'd never even start anything better to be a bit scattered off the drugs and start a heap of stuff depending on whether you finish is up to you, the drugs make life boring and I used to play music and stuff but I never do....why are quacks so deluded about the medication? It really gets to me

on what distinguishes sz from shamanism, it's training, on how to deal with the spirit world and understand the "hallucinations" and "psychosis" and keep them in a perspective that allows the human being to continue to function, however different that role in society may become.

death? yeah, death of ego a big part of it, sacrificing a place in society with the rest of them, like rudolf the red nosed rheindeer, he couldn;'t play in the normal rheindeer games, but he had a special place at the front of santa's sleigh. Early on in the rudholf story, he tried to be normal, like the pdocs precribing meds he did somthing just as silly, put mud on his nose to try to cover it up, but it sounded so nasal when he tried to talk, so eventually he had to just let his red nose shine, sacrifice his place in normal rhiendeer society, die to that world, to find his proper role.

Yeah, no meds, I learned to just say no thank you. But the pdocs always push them, have put me on everything, but I always come off it, takes away from your magic powers, you know they don't like magic powers around here, you know all shamans eventually are killed by the surrounding society who become distrustful of a creature with those kinds of powers, they crucify the magical guy every time.

I was taught to practice shamanism by a professional shaman - she used to have a web page, may still have one, christina pratt, anyway, you come outside your body, with the drum beat cd going, and you go down a hole to the lower world, past all the demons, find your spirit guide, who takes you where you need to go and tells you what you need to learn. The difference with sz is those people have no training, no spirit guide, walk into the demon world by mistake and get very lost and very confused. But indiginous cultures have mapped the territory of the spirit world for thousands of years, and that training is available to us, if you look past the pdocs and their universities, the Western Educated Indusrialized Rich Democrats (WEIRD), the miltary-academic-industrial complex; such a narrow little world they live in and try to control, nothing they can do about us going free.....

Soul retrieval is something christina pratt offered but said I was not ready for. What I've been practicing all these years was "journeying", as described above, and later in life I came way off the track to do journeying on my own without a spirit guide, just to hear the amazing voices of spirits telling me stories I never could have come up with on my own, very hallucinatory realities that seem revelatory. I think you can google michael harner and shamanic journeying, I know you can download mp3's of the shamanic drumbeat.

In NYC we could go once a month and have a shaman beat an actual drum while dozens of us lay down and journeyed, then we all told of our experiences. I have written up many stories from those days and I will try to dig them up and post in this thread.

When I moved to CA 7 years ago I tried to find that but what I found was not good and I got kicked out right away for being too magical, I know I have that story somewhere and will try to post that here too. I've been to the lower world, and also, much later, have been to the upper world.

I've heard it said that a shaman is just someone who knows the secret of traveling between the two worlds, which also implies they know how to go and then how to come BACK, how to get in and get out and get what they need, as opposed to sz where people get stuck out there and eaten alive.

-onderdonk

onderdonk

hi Onderdonkey!

I started reading your beautiful poetic and lyrical post and wondered if it was you. I read your posts on another forum as well. Happy to see you!

why so much journeying into the demonic world? A while ago before I landed on psych hospital I was invoking angels and they took me places in heaven, with azrael did a bit of stuff with hell and had some ongoing scenarios with pergatory where a lot of people I knew were going therough torture, but it wasn;t real they are still alive but for some reason they appeared to me as in pergatory and tried to get out and blame it all on me, so I imagined.......I met with the creator of another universe like a god somehow from my own journeying creating portals into other universes I manifested he was a weird one a bit sloppy opening the gates of hell and $#%^ thinking he knew what he was doing...This is what I consider daydreaming more then meditation, like I was in a trance that I could still visit this world and they could visit me at home,

something interesting came into my meditation was a spaceship and I sore it on two dimentional page, similar to the journey through parts of heaven with the angels but I was in control of the ship, met with gods of the levels of heaven going up, went higher and went off the page and into darkness where I met extra-terrestrials and could project my vision to them and they were all very interested in me, although some didn;t like that I was a mortal, tried to introduce them to earth and how stuff works....was really interesting, but yeah I got absorbed in this $#%^ but still had the power to switch it off and get back to reality, more I was exploring a different reality of the astral realm.

you would have a pretty good handle on the astral world I guess, what gets me is I think some of it is a projection of my own subconscious, or by daydreaming it takes on a world of its own yet is related to my struggles in life somehow.

-- Wed Feb 20, 2013 4:14 pm --

i like taoism too, although I can;t really remember what it means to me since being drugged up and diagnosed schizophrenic, they said it was delusion unfortunately and that still stands making me out to have a brain chemical imbalance because of my philisophical beliefs, so who is actually deluded anyway.

I like how the philosophy is like a quest for immortality and unionship with devine feminine essence, thats all I can remember,.did chi gong and taoist internal exercise for the quest for immortality too more so it was a tool for healing the mind,body and spirit yet another apparent delusion to suggest my brain is;t wired properly...

have you ever heard of microcosmic orbit? I was interested in inner alchemy too and that opened my third eye and did something weird to my brain...opened me up to seeing buddah's or immortals and first time I sore any forms in my vision, very tranquil since the microcosmic orbit needs grounding in meditation.....since then I had immaginary friend $#%^ going on

"What kind of danger?" is someone in whan they are called to be a shaman by the spirits but they have no shamanism training. See today's New York Times, page A9:



NEVADA: DRIVER SAW 'DEMONS' IN CROWD A man who the police say killed two tourists and injured 12 others on the Las Vegas Strip told investigators that he steered his car into the crowd on the sidewalk because they were staring at him like "demons." The motorist, Stephen M. Ressa, 27, also told the police that he saw people with their hands in their pockets and thought they might be armed with guns, according to an arrest report obtained by The Associated Press. He told the police he had stopped taking his prescribed medication. Mr. Ressa, of Rialto, Calif., remained jailed without bail on suspicion of murder and attempted murder. (AP)



And on the topic of demons, though they don't use the word "demon", they call it "President Ariel Sharon of Israel", but it's a very powerful black magic demon and its blowing up innocent people on the Gaza strip. This is happening today, new york times tomorrow.


I can't find this anymore word for word on the internet site, and I gave away yesterday's paper to a cab driver, 'cause at the time this was nothing. Someone in a "letter to the editor" said - I can't find it, I don't remember what they were writing about, but they made the comment how it was "rare" that a person would consider alternative outlooks on (something), and how most people, (maybe he used the words "vast majority") prefer to pick one alternative and believe they are right. That's not what the article - or letter - was about, but these were the closing lines of the letter, how most choose the comfort of being "sure" rather than the "difficulty" or "discomfort" of entertaining alternatives.



And upon this I built a little schizotypal psychosis: Hegel taught me for years that it is an aspect of the most powerful "strength" to hold multiple, and actually conficting, ideas in the same sphere at the same time. The Philosphy of Right taught that the most powerful nations hold multiple communities with multiple world views and even competing religions, comfortably within themselves; that only "weak" nations seek to exterminate ideas that are different in order to be "comfortable". Hitler studied this book, but he must have either missed that important lesson (and how could he, it's throughout Hegel's very foundation - his "dialectic"), or he considered himself and his Weimar Republic "weak", as must then most of our American leaders consider themselves and those they lead weak, and I could pull a million examples out but enough with the New York Times already.



And then there's that psychiatrist's book that I found in the Fordham University library and photocopied and had someone read back parts to me over the phone in the San Diego Psychiatric hospital so I could put together my presentaion to try to overcome the prevailing doctor's attitude there - the book that explained that a psychotic "break" is really the deep unconscious mind trying to come to terms with a contradiction in his own world. A person has one set of circumstances in his family, his home, a certain worldview, and then a completely different one he discovers in the wider world around him, and then if he travels the planet there are even many more completely different worldviews, each powerful in its own way with something unique to offer, (and this is why if you believe the US is a sweak as all our leaders tell us we are, then they should use attack hellicopter gunships and F-16 fighters to bomb all our libraries to rubble, and also Borders, Barnes& Noble, and amazon.com, because they're full of exposure to other cultures and other ideas)...



(by the way - you may want to eat a cheesburger or eat vanilla ice cream or a stick of butter, because these ideas are coing to continue to "run on " like this...)



Anyway, that was a multi-paragraph way of leading up to saying this: I like contradiction. I like to hold in my head multiple, confilting ideas. I pursue this explicitly, and have been since Hegel taught me to twenty five years ago, as did the entire aztec culture. Duality for the purpose of psychosis, psychosis for the purpose of inventing these schizotypal theories that are unique attempts to grapple with ideas across a divide, and this is a method of strengthening the spirit and the mind, and most people avoid it, so no wonder I have become so much more powerful than most of the others around me.



I got kicked out of the entire Bay Area shamans group. I felt excluded at first. But they're afraid of me, and my demon world, and my abilities to manipulate it. And they don't understand that I also have "Sittlikheit" - the cult of Ethical Life, with which Hegel ended the Philosophy of Right by saying it is the highest possible cult on Earth, the noblest possible way of life. Beginner shamans don't understand, and these little shamansim intro classes do not prepare the students with the proper initiation, slow and difficult, and so they're all weak and frightened. Anyway, I'll be getting to the whole story of what happened, it's deep in there that the central "point" of this entire post is. At the center of this post is a "quasar", and I will point it out when it comes.



So the duality that may cause a new psychosis to build is simply this: the story below could be interpreted as being a creature from either side of my family. I've been sticking with saying it's my mom's side of the family, but on principle I'm now entertaining both sides of the family. (Mom was the granddaughter of an aztec medicine woman, dad was a roman catholic jesuit priest; Christina Pratt said it's a classic case of earth religion and sky religion crashing on the same genome, brings the demons out, said there are lots more like me in brazil where the jesuits mated with the indiginous tribes...)



Also, as one more aside, OLGA KHARITIDI, MD, wrote "Spirits of Trauma". It's her second book, I now have her first and it's in the queue with a medium to high priority. She is a russian psychiatrist who went to siberia to study with a very powerful shaman, and learned and taught something that I've never heard from any other shamanic culture, and I have totally integrated into my "teaching", my "psychosis": she said the demons, the spirits the shaman uses as helper spirits, that he has to first subdue, ar "spirits of trauma", both his own trauma, but also the trauma of his ancestors (I think they gave some number like 10 generations, but that might be kind of arbitary), but then they said a powerful shaman can actually collect the spirits of trauma from other people, the people he ministers to, and make those "demons" his own, and train them and control them. And the tapir is a "demon eater" who does exactly this, as far as I can tell it's the same technology, and this is what I study from him, how to eat, and digest, huge quantities of demons, not just the occasional few that the average community healer does, but to absorb like a black hole at the center of a galaxy cluster, the vast majority of all the demons on the continent, to absorb at the "eddington limit" as they say in astrophysics, as lance lance armstrong our country's most powerful biker absorbs 10,000 calories a day and burns exactly the same amount, absorbing demons and producing a "cooling flow", which in this complex analogy would be a flow of perfection and magic out onto the surrounding community. Not that I claim to be as good at the job as the tapirs, but that is what I'm tring to do here.

(continued....)

-- Wed Feb 20, 2013 6:32 am --

And I don't remember if it was Olga's book or my own ideas while watching the discovery channel or something, but the human genome has been analysed, you know, and they say that a small piece of our dna makes up everything they can see - bones, blood, meat, the entire human being according to "science". They say the vast majority of our genome is "junk dna", bits and peices that are similar to the peices of the main part, just sitting there "for no reason". Scientists are as silly as a snowflake at the center of a cloud who thinks that he is separate from the cloud, the cloud is something to ignore, say doesn't exist, get rid of, and when the evidence appears that he is actually the precipitate at the center of this "enemy" or "unreality", he just says that must be his "junk dna" that has nothing to do with anything.



It may very well have been olga's shaman though that told here that these "spirits of trauma", these demons, that the shaman collects, are the objects on the junk dna. Going on this theory, I am attempting to add to my genome, by eating other people's demons. I have noticed an ability to transmit demons between schizophrenics. I read the book called "into the halflight", and aquired some demons. Suspending disbelief and going with this theory, the patients in the schizophrenia ward who talk to eachother enthusiastically about their demons in the demon world are sharing demons, they are multiplying, more efficiently than if we each just paired off and had kids. Which is why I love talking to schizphrenics, either all over the internet, to transmit and multiply, to collect whatever I can, and I can aquire them reading. I once went to a used bookstore in haight-ashbury, eventually had a long talk with the expansively-minded woman who has run the store for 35 years, and ultimately told her I was here to "eat demons", to collect the spirits in the books, and that what I was looking for was not books on shamanism, because I am a shaman already and can do that on my own, and not exactly books on psychiatry, but the MEMOIRS OF SCHIZOPHRENICS, because in these there is almost always "tapir-food", or demon dreams, and that the other way to get what I am looking for is the mind of the average two year-old, but they don't write books. (The malayan tapir is regarded in Japanese childhood as the "dream eater")



And so much typing already, here's my story:



I wanted to see if there was a shamanic journeying circle I could go to monthly or something, because I know I can harness the dreams of the people around me to make for a louder, brigher, more powerful vision. That's why I like to journey on the greyhound bus at midnight at the center of the bus on the isle seat while everyone's sleeping. Anyway, I looked over the internet and new york is way better than the san francisco bay area for organized and powerful shamanism. All there is is a small group of women who think they're psychotherapists and only want to "be whole" (bunch of humanists) and they offer "depth hypnosis" training and introductory shamanism - journeying classes, and occasional drumming circles on the equinoxes, the last one being the summer equinox, and I went to that one and enjoyed it; they have two houses, each atop a hill with a great view, one in SF on the west bay near the peak of mt davidson in the city, (where last summer equinox I went) and one in Oakland, up on the top of some hill, in the middle of a quiet little neghborhood, super-hilly of course, and that's the "east" bay house. And they get all these young students, mostly, who take classes at the california institute for integral studies to become psychotherapists, and they want to incorporate "depth hypnosis" training into their practice, and Laura Chandler makes them take beginner shamanic journeying first, for two hundred bucks. Whatever with the two hundred bucks, but I wish she were more serious about the magic, and if she were she's also have to be more serious about slowly initialting people into the demon world properly, as Don Juan did with Carlos casteneda over years, not in a two hundred dollar weekend.



And every time I wanted to sign up for a drumming circle or an Advanced class in "psychopomp", she said I had to do this beginner class first, even though I told her I went to Christina Pratt's class in new york years ago, and had been practicing since, and had been reading the stuff for twenty years, but I didn't complain, I know I just like to journey in a group, so I signed up for last weekend's class.



The first day was much the same as the one we went to in new york: journey to the lower world to meet your teacher in animal form, and then go back again in a second journey and ask him a question, everyone write their experience on paper and then turn and share it with your neighbor.



Second day, though, she scared alot of people, by sending them to the upper world. I started in the lower world and it was years of journeying with the boar (my spirit guide) till one day he decided to go to the upper world. One day in a journey at a girlfirend's house, I was going to the lower world to ask the boar to take me to the "shaman at the center", because though I couldn't understand why, I knew that the shaman at the center of the jungle who is all lit up with flashing magical colors not seen on earth had some kind of power I've never seen even anywhere else in the demon world. He's like the source of all the demons. I never understood why the boar, if he's the "universe in animal form talking to me", couldn't do the super powerful things the "shaman at the center" could do, and one day I was headed there and we took a turn and started going up, and I asked why, and he said that the shaman "lives up here now", up some mountain road in a castle. I remember writing a song about the castle and the stuff. I was healing elissa, or atleast trying to, at the time.



And now it all makes sense; as the story of day two progresses, you'll see. We find out who this guy really is and why he's more powerful than the boar.



By the way, same guy, I know him from dreams too. Two dream stand out, both "dream of the year" dreams from the past, things that stand out in my memory more than anything that happens in my waking life. These dreams are significant events, and again, it all leads up to this "day two" of shamanism class so briefly, the dreams....



And I don't know that I've actually documented these anywhere, though I have transmitted these stories before orally.



One was a bad dream: It's a wide street in brooklyn, with my mother, I'm two years old or ssomething, and I have a need to cling to her, but every time I touch her, a big pointy pineapple comes out of her skin on whatever part of her body I touch, and the obvious conflict is I need her, but it is so painful, so I fall away, but then I have to go back, but then the green pointy pineapple again and the stinging, and I take it for a few seconds and fall away again, and this goes on over and over again as we cross the wide street diagonally across the intersection. The dream ends, of course, and what got this thing the "dream of the year" award in my personal psyche was not the pineapple conflict, but the fact that the next thing that happened was that I "woke up" into a second dream. I was in a room, an adult, (this dream is about ten or fifteen years ago), and it's a wooden shack, just a cot, and I wake up and get up and I don't know where I am, but I hear chanting (and I wish I could get these chants out but as good as I am at dream recall, when spirits use magic chants on me I can NEVER get the chant back out into this world), but the chanting at the time IS familiar, I remember it from the previous dream, and seem to know intuitively that this chanting is causing me harm, darkness, fear, fast heartbeats, adrenaline. Disturbed by the continuous chanting that spanned two dreams, I walk across the floor of the room and open a wooden door. There is another room, and it becomes apparent to me that I was in an adjoining room, a wing, and that I had now walked into the CENTER room, and there would be another room after that which was the other adjoining wing. This center room was a little bigger, better lit, had a stone table and dirt floor, no chairs, a large book open on the table with pictures and symbols (sometimes I CAN bring the pictures and symbols out of my dream into this world, but I have no recollection of this overwhelmingly detailed book he had) - HE - was this guy, the guy I had later met as the "shaman at the center" when years later I learned journeying. This was my first meeting ever with this character, this "dream of the year". It was a short meeting, and I was mad. He was doing the chanting, while staring at the book, which was emitting lights that were changing colors rapidly, and he wasn't even stopping, and I intuitively knew that these chants had been playing the whole time the first dream had gone on, and I was angry. I stopped him to ask him: "why did you put these dreams on me?!?" (as I was still in pain from the stings of the pineapples like they were the stings of nettles, in fact that pain I remember was real and lasted into the morning in the real world. When I asked him, he looked at me and told me it was a test. And that's all I remember of the whole thing. When a dream wins "dream of the year", sometimes you can't tell why from the write-up. It wins for the dramatic emotional effect it creates for me, and this was definitely one of those.



Only other time I remember seeing this guy, other than a few healing sessions he gave me in the jungle center when I went journeying to try to heal ghost bugs, was in one other dream, though he's been referred to often as the leader of our commune in the demon world. He's just almost always absent; busy guy I guess. But one day I was dreaming, falling/flying, a common thing in demon dreams for me. I was on a mattress and falling out of a tall apartment building in the demon world, and I'm not good at flying but this particular night I had a bit more than the usual power, and I managed to bring the thing down gently, gliding over several blocks with will power, not able to stay up and not able to land gracefully, but able to save my life as the straight fall would have ended in death, as no matter how many times I die in the demon world, no matter how inconsequential I know it is, I don't like it, and avoid it almost as any human would in the real world, so I was glad I survived. I land, get up, make it back to the commune I live in in the demon world (it's a brownstone in the city, packed with my brothers and sisters and co-warriors, busy buzzing like a nest of bees with all our war projects), and this particular time I found this guy there. And I knew intuitively he was my father, and I proudly told him I survived the fall. He looked at me disappointedly. And ever since that moment, I've wondered if my father in the dream world is trying to kill me.



So that's background on this character, which I guess you may realize I'm building up to a meeting with on day two of shamanism class. And to pull together this essay, for a moment, the "duality for the purpose of psychosis" is : who is this guy, my demon father, is he from my aztec sorcery side of the family , or the german jesuit Christianity side?



So on day two at introduction to shamanism class in oakland california, first we twenty students sit and describe any unusual dreams we may have had last night, as a result of our work in non-ordinary reality. I had a demon dream, which is nothing that unusual for me, and at first I left it out, to see what other people would say. They went around the room, and of the twenty there were about five or six who wanted to describe a dream. Most were bits and pieces, and a couple were prefaced by saying they couldn't remember most of it, but not one was free of demons, or the image of devils with horns and hooves. and I wasn't sure if that was normal or not, until it came to one of the proprietors, Ruth, who owns one of the houses, though these girls are not real shamans of significant power, but she described a dream much like my demon dreams, prefaced by "I'm struck by the theme of evil in all these dreams", and she does these classes all the time so this was apparently unusual. Then it came to me, and I spoke for several minutes, trying not to hog up too much time but prefacing my simple little demon dream by the statement that I have probably hundreds of hours of experience battling with demons in dreams, and this is nothing unusual for me, though it is the first in maybe a week or two so it's probably related to our work, and also prefacing it by saying that I do remember vividly everything because I practice dream yoga, and have total recall of all dreams I have ever had, if and when I want access to it, though it is quite a difficult thing to behold.
I then told them that the dream was that I lived in an apartment building in a city, and I had the top floor, and I would regularly use the elevator and just go in to it by myself and be upstairs in my penthouse apartment by myself, but then on one trip back to my home I decided to take the stairs. Oddly, the stairs weren't really public, as the people who lived on each floor lived in a squalor like old attics, and their stuff was all over the stairs and all over everywhere, and I had to kind of climb over it all, and I remember even seeing a woman's pocketbook open on top of a pile of junk that was on the stairs, and I looked into it, but didn't actually touch it or put my hand in it, just felt like I was intruding, and then I continued up, where, a floor or two before I got to my apartment, I encountered a single demon rifling through the stuff, and he looked up and shot me with some kind of rubber - toy gun - something, but it was the beginning of an attack, which became a dull butter knife or something and he's now chasing me and I'm heading back down, maybe to catch the elevator, maybe to just run and escape (this is so typical a dream for me) and he keeps on taking stabs at me, and the chase continues, and then he's joined by another, and I'm avoiding being stabbed, I'm taking weapons out of their hands but they pick up others, as we are after all running around in the ruins of attics full of junk, and I reach down for a pair of scissors that look sharper than most things they've been using on me but I think twice because if they get the scissors out of my hand then this will be a better weapon than they've had so far, and this goes on, and I run down, get to the first floor, press for the elevator to get back to my apartment as a refuge, but the elevator doesn't come fast enough and they're still stabbing at me, and I run down more stairs, there's a tunnel in the basement, it seems like the logical next step in my escape, but I think "oh no, I'm not falling for this 'trap the tiger in a corridor' trick they always play on me, not this time (I think this may be where I point out I have hundreds or even thousands of hours of experience at this), and I run back up to the first floor, I want to get out onto the street, but the door and windows are boarded up with dirty green boards, which I throw my body up against and see that it's not infinitely bolted, it bends and I can see light, but it didn't break and I'm still trapped, and I bang and smash at this one window or door single mindedly, insisting on escaping (a journey on day one ended in a message from the tapir to "escape through the eye" and I was remembering the important message at this point in the dream), and I keep trying for a minute or two and I wake up, and that's the end of the dream, but awake, I'm very disappointed that I did not get out, and then I said to the group that I guess what I should do is journey back into the dream and finish breaking out, and the leader said 'no, there are shamans who do lucid dreaming work like that but I think it's more important that you ask yourself what the meaning of these attacks is' and I phrased a response that rang out in the room with staccato precision, and was followed by a loud hearty laugh from the entire group, probably breaking the tension that had been building, because I had their breathless silence for the duration of the story, and I think this is where they began to become afraid of me) - I said simply something like "no, I used to try to work it out between the demons and the humans and unite them in peace, but I have found that this was the hardest task that I'd ever attempted, I'd kind of given up for now, and would much rather just escape through that door" and that's when I got the big laugh.



Later people came up to me saying "but YOU, you can really dream, you must have been doing this for a while, let's get together and talk at break";


(continued....)

-- Wed Feb 20, 2013 6:33 am --

Anyway, before we get to lunch (we've just showed up for the second day and told our dreams to the community), I am very surprised to hear that our next project will be to go to the upper world to meet our teacher in human form. I remember Christina Pratt saying she'd like to see me do something like that eventually, but for now, she said at the time, I was way too haunted by the vampires of the middle world and that I needed emergency care before I can begin any kind of work like that. And I'd never really directly tried to go to the upper world, though as I said I had noticed it had started to happen on its own a couple of years ago when I started asking the boar to take me to the "shaman".



But I joined in the exercise, of course.



She said that when we go to the upper world, instead of leaving through a hole in the ground or body of water, as we of course do to travel to the lower world, this time we would leave from a mountain top, or the top of a tree, or climb a ladder, again, of course (from the principles of "core shamanism" by michael harner taught by christina pratt and repeated on the drum tape sleeve - which by the way never attempts to send people to the upper world) the place you leave from has to be some place in the real world you've been before.



I'd never heard this part of core shamanism, but I had the perfect place within milliseconds of thought. I was prepared well. I had biked fifteen minutes from the BART (the long island railroad of the bay area) station to the top to this hill, an altitude of probably 1500 feet above the BART and the rest of Oakland, and getting there on my own power I locked the bike to a tree just down the block from the house, greeting the tree, and inviting it in with me, as I was taught by the dolphin shaman from south america who consults for the washington dc zoo by listening to the will of the animals, that whenever I do to some session like this I should pick a tree, hug it, and invite it's spirit to accompany me on my journeys. So I always do that, and I had the tree with me, so right down the block was the top of a beloved tree at the top of a mountain, with my bike chained to it; perfect choice, so off I go.



It's still harder than descending, but not too long up a tunnel I see two red glowing eyes. I bring it into resolution and it's the Darth Vader mask. I'm not big on "star wars" nor even pop culture, but it's pretty standard in our culture that the mask is black, the voice is strained and the breathing heavy, and the line "luke , I am your father", means that luke, the good guy, realizes that the great enemy of his world is his father who has gone to the dark side. I don't know how out of touch with pop culture you are, but you can say "luke I am your father" to anyone under 40 and they know exactly what I just described, it's a foundationally standard part of our current pop culture. I'm no expert, I couldn't tell you a single other thing about star wars. Except this: my father forced us to see it even though we weren't interested. It was all four of us kids, and if was some cheap place we used to go, somewhere north of new york city, across the street from a parking garage, could have been my vernon, could have been more like armonk new york, and we went there all the time for the cheaper movies, on days he'd take all the kids after my parents' divorce.



I see darth vader. I was surprised I was seeing anything, going to the upper world by myself. And I have to ask every thing I encounter on this particular journey, 'Are you my spirit teacher in human form?', so I ask, and the answer: "I am your father" is the reply.



Sometimes in a journey, it's a mistake, but you might drift into rational, philosophical thinking about what's going on; (you're supposed to leave that till after it's over) but I lapsed into a thought pattern for about 45 seconds: maybe I never thought about it, but the message is that my father, the white magic german conservative jesuit priest, has gone to the dark side. Never entertained the possibility, because I never saw the slightest sign of him to betoken any kind of powerful magic, nor did I ever see or hear or discern the slightest black magic tendency. But then maybe he was good at hiding it, or it was deep in there on the genome and came out after death; I also though, during this few seconds when I really shouldn't be thinking, that come to think of it, all the dreams and all the visions and all the ghost bugs did start right after he died.



Then I got a hold of my philosophical reasoning, set it aside, and continued with the journeying.



Repeat from "darth vader" (just his head actually): "I am your father". Fear. And that's unusual for me, you know, thousands of hours experience and everything. I know better than to exhibit or even feel in the slightest way any kind of fear in a situation like this. But there it is, and I am just amazed by my own emotion. Only takes a second or two to set it aside though. Then, again the voice speaks, as he watches me subdue my own fear : "I am near"; fear wells up again, this time easier and more quickly subdued. Again I'm surprised, but then I realize, he didn't actually answer my question. So I repeat, (repetitive focus being the main driver for the shamanic journeying): "Are you my teacher in human form?" no answer. so I'm moving on. "I'm journeying into the upper world to meet my spirit teacher in human form"; I encounter the sun, or a giant curved chunk of it, in front or above me directly, dripping red onto me. I insist to this new presence:"I said HUMAN FORM!"; the sun becomes a cat's eye, then a cat's head; again:"I said HUMAN FORM!" (the dreamer controls the dream, not the dream the dreamer, but the dream does try!) I see a giant eye, and again I think about the "escape through the eye" message from the tapir the day before (a whole other story and I figure this thing is getting complex enough)



here we go..... cue the super dramatic music that tells you this is the climax.....



the sense was that of things not working out here, not that I'm that surprised, the upper world is not beginner shamanism. I have always seen that as a human with a strong will, I have the ability to come outside of my body and see the demons around me, but that is the "middle world", the world of the dead, where the psychopomp can yell sentences out of the Oxford English Dictionary and attract all sorts of confused, morbid, demonically-willed vampire things, and eat them, gather them within himself, take them on a train ride through heat and high pressure, cook them into a nice stew, bottle them up with preserves, store them together deep in the gut, and then digest them gradually with ritualistic irrationality, as the tapir does daily. Or become possessed by them as Emily Rose did, because she had no shamanism training, and I don't mean Laura Chandler's two hundred dollar weekend, I mean twenty years of reading and meditating and forty years of surviving attacks in dreams);But work in the lower world, or the upper world, getting to the shaman "at the center" of the lower or upperworld, is something that as a human I can't do, it's why I need a spirit guide to take me there, a guide who knows the way and has the power to get me past customs, so to speak. Now they're asking me to go on my own to somewhere I have never really been by myself, and lack of success on the first try wouldn't be surprising; happens all the time in the material world, and I just call the first trip the investigatory trip. So now that I have no real expectations, its finally that moment, the moment when I least expect it;



"COME QUICKLY" a voice says in the darkness, from behind me. It's the presence I met earlier with the darth vader mask (you gotta hand it to the spirit world's sense of humor and interconnection) - anyway it's that presence from a few minutes ago, he's still just as "near", he still generates the fear in me, and though he stood firm on refusing to answer my question, it's as if he's just been waiting for me to realize who he is and watching me wallow in the sun or the eye of the cat or whatever other non-sense my visions are, and now he knows there's not going to be much more time. These beginner journeys are only about ten minutes, and though I have no sense of time at the moment, he obviously knows how much time there is left and knows I can't afford to waste any more time wandering around trying to figure out where I am and where I should be.





I'm also getting better at setting aside the huge emotional upwelling that this presence has been causing, so I respond to "come quickly" instantly by turning and giving him my hand, and I know right where he is as if I've always known he's been there.



Almost immediately, we're back in the wooden room with the stone table. The same room from the dream of ten or fifteen years ago. The room is dimly lit, the best lighting we've had for the whole journey so far, it's finally the part of a journey where you've arrived where you were going and you can see everything around you. I of course look at his face. He's the father from the demon dreams, exactly. I know him anywhere, though I've never seen this person in my life in the material world. He has a mustache - brown, very thick and long, a droopy tired look in his eyes, very ancient mexican indian looking, and this is why I'm always thinking aztec side of the family, but today we're entertaining multiple theories for the purpose for generating psychosis (like this email isn't psychotically interconnected enough!)



We have chairs in the room, also made of stone. We both sat down. we stared into each others eyes. Something was building, and I have to say that at this point I will be unable to fully convey what's going on with me. I'm getting chills recalling this.



Only a minute or less of sitting there; he's silent, maybe waiting for me to speak, but I'm frozen - stunned by something. Within a minute comes the change in drumbeats that mean it's time to end the journey and go back down, to the tree, and into the house and into my body. but I also know I don't need the whole minute or two to get back, I'm a very fast commuter, and I know my way, and my bike is locked to the tree and I know that's a twist on a secret trick I learned from arctic shamanism - it works like a bungi cord, and I'll have no problem getting back immediately because of it; so even though it's time to leave, and the drum is now beating fast in staccato bursts of 5 or 6 beats and then followed by double time drumming for a minute, I don't run away, I get up, and, (my own mysterious fear conquered for the first time), I reach out, and shake his hand. That's when something happened. And this is still mysterious to me, but this is the quasar moment:



I stood up to shake his hand. I reached out. He then reached out his hand. Our respective heights were not equal, so I was reaching up at an angle of maybe 20 or 30 degrees, and he was reaching downward at roughly the same angle.



As our hands clasped, a quasar jet of light exploded from our mutual grasp at an angle perpendicular to the angle of our arms - if I could illustrate, I'd be drawing an "X", where the "/" piece of the "X" is our two hands meeting in each other's grasp, me on the left and his on the right, crashing inward, notice, while immediately upon the crash of our two hands, the extremely bright beam of light heads outward, that being the "\" of the "X".



But the vision of the quasar jet beam wasn't the thing, that's just the part I can describe. What happened at that moment I cannot express, I still don't really understand. This is all I can say: I came back into my body in the room, and as the other twenty people began to stir, eventually to sit up and write their own experiences, I wanted to burst out crying. I don't understand, I even feel it now, this is one week later. Just as if I have to cry. So I just breathe deeply, and I get up. My first thought was to go outside and just start crying hard. I did get right up, and I left the group quietly and walked out of the room and then out the front door of this house in Oakland, and I took a deep breath again. I looked over at the tree where I just came back from, and my bike sitting next to it, and the beautiful gardens and the clear blue sunny sky, and it all seemed so strange - but comforting - to be in normal reality again, so small a reality with just a ground and a sky and trees and normal stuff, and no grand spirit world around me.



I came back in after a minute, wrote my notes, and then I had to tell my story to someone, so I prefaced it with "I am in shock, I went outside because I felt I had to cry;" The woman I was speaking with listened to my journey, said she could see that I was in shock, could see the tears in my eyes.


(continued...)

-- Wed Feb 20, 2013 6:34 am --

She was an older woman, also of some previous experience. Her mother had been a schizophrenic, and an alcoholic. She was determined not to take the same path and had been pursuing journeying for her own personal development.



She asked me what kind of work I was doing as a shaman. I explained that we are living in the golden age of astrophysics, that shamans have always been looking at the stars, but now we have access to sub millimeter radio astronomy, infrared astronomy, and X-ray astronomy. Red shift space. It's never been available to shamans in history, until this past twenty years, really the greatest stuff is just flooding this past couple of months, few years, but not many shamans have yet integrated these great gifts, and that is what I am working on as a shaman. And my basic presentation on 'what is the universe doing' is that it does two things, all the time: and I hold one had up and close it as a fist, hold the other up as a fist and open it, and alternate them. Binding and loosing. Expanding and contracting. Binding and loosing.



She said that she can see the connection between what I am saying the universe is doing, and my battle with demons in the dreams (referring to the dream I described that morning) then said also maybe that was the quasar/handshake thing too.



Before lunchtime comes, there's a second journey, back to the upperworld, to clarify something that you didn't understand in the first journey, or to ask a very important question. (Again, poor job of shamanism training, as I was taught that the most important and difficult work in journeying is constructing the question properly, and she threw this stuff out there and we had about a minute to come up with something, while people are getting settled. I'm probably just complaining though because they kicked me out.) Without time to construct something, I used a standard from somewhere in my past classes, "show me how to better integrate spirit into my life"; so I'm getting over my shock and then drinking some more oolong tea and I'm off into the upperworld again to ask that spirit guide - that not only I'm afraid of but apparently most of the students have a fear of their upperworld spirit guides...



So I try to go up there, but it's hard. Maybe not enough tea. Maybe a residue of fear. After a couple of minutes I ask a lower world spirit guide to help me get there, and then, no problem. And I ask the upperworld spirit guide, "show me how to better integrate spirit into my life?" First image is of a vine, like the morning glory across from my front door, blossoming all over like some time-lapse sped-up movie. Then I repeat the question, and the father figure appears, and again I have the intense fear. Better at setting fear aside now, I embrace him. Then I spontaneously change the question to "how do I integrate YOU into my life?", and he answers, "glad you asked!";



We fall, jumping off a steep cliff, like a 7000 ft altitude Yosemite park cliff, and we fall and slide to the bottom, again I'm setting aside the initial fear impulse, just leaning into it and accepting it, and I disintegrate as I fall, boxes at the bottom containing demons. maybe the boxes are just another attempt to frighten, but I just keep disintegrating. After a minute or so, there's only one thing left of "me" anymore, everything else has fallen away, and I see a door, at the center of what used to be "me". Its sort of oval, I don't know the word for the shape but pointed at both long ends of the oval: () is almost it. And I intuitively know the next step in this "dauntless expatiation into the boundless deep" is to go through this door fearlessly. Just inside this door, which turned out to be a portal into another world, I see the water pouring from a pipe that I had seen in the lower world on the first day in the journey with the tapir, who by the way had said around the time I saw the water flowing out of the pipe "I have a plan" and maybe this was all a part of the tapir's plan, so the water is pouring like the image of New Orleans being drained into the Lake, and he - the "father" or "spirit guide", gives me a glass, and I fill it and drink it, and immediately all kinds of animal forms begin to protrude - or "blossom" out of me, confusing me, honestly, because I was successfully not rationally processing any of this and anyway I don't know what kind of sense this made, but somehow a squirrel's head and plants and crows and other animals blossoming from who I thought I "was" didn't make any sense. Then he showed me the surrounding mountains, and in reality while I was journeying, this house was exquisitely surrounded by the mountains of the east and the west bay, and we are at a little peak at the center, the twenty of us journeying, but in the vision also now I was surrounded by mountains with peaks that were more dramatic than the ones in the material "ordinary reality" world and each peak was distinctive, and my vision spun slowly to see how I was surrounded gracefully, and it was a sense of a protective presence, and the "father" said to me, standing next to me and sort of driving the vision as I was letting him - "they are your brothers, don't give them a hard time".



Later there was one more exercise, journeying through singing while shaking a rattle, it's less deep, less imagery oriented, but clearer in terms of conversation, and I just asked what that whole quasar thing back there in the first journey was about.



"we are together, we are powerful together, you have come through the doorway to me. water falls down on us and breaks as one, we are a doorway together".



In between the drum/visionary journeying and the final chanting journey, there was the lunch break, where a few of the people had gravitated to me and let me "teach", and I have so much to say that I had alot of fun.

At some point I decided to introduce the concept of red magic. I was a little further down the mountain in the backyard, a three story backyard from the house on the peak, sitting with two women, one probably graduate student age preparing to be psychotherapist I think, the other woman maybe in her mid to late twenties, a mother of a kid who talks to a hawk in her backyard and seems to be communicating with it, and she is kind of new to this, they both are, so they just seem to be taking in all the advanced psychotic stuff I'm explaining, and I said: "what's going on upstairs is white magic; I'm red magic"; they barely understood what white magic was, much less red, and I gave them my standard crash course sound bites, and got to how I used to, for a short time a few years ago, practice devout catholicism, and I like to preface any discussion of red or black magic with that, and these are just typical women who think 'oh, that nonsensical, patriarchical stuff that's all corruption and has nothing to offer" (that isn't their comment but I think that sums up the attitude of new-age-ish women to christianity), as when I had a description where I said the pope is magical, extreme shaman, and the young one said 'oh I don't think the pope is magical", and I said, 'oh, I know, my mom says he couldn't possibly have written those intricate encyclicals, the "religion for schizophrenics by schizophrenics" as I like to refer to catholicism, because he's just too busy running a mafia and killing people all day, and the girl said "yeah, that's pretty much what I think", and the mother of the hawk-boy said "I just figure he's an intellectual", and I went on to say that the problem with me practicing white magic too much is that my barometer is set to the middle, red magic, and if you pull it to one side too long, it's gonna snap back, first to black magic, before it re-balances in the middle. So the younger girl asked "would you tell u s what kind of black magic, or what about black magic, and she seemed extremely interested, but followed that immediately with "but I know that's personal, you don't have to answer", but I said, no, no problem, I can answer that, and I just needed a moment to compose an answer because I didn't walk in there preparing to present this. I said, well, yes, the intense Opus-Dei-like Catholicism was fine, liked it, but they are hiding what they know about their enemy and making war on spirits. So after living that life for several months, but being of a true red-magic nature, one day I was walking an hour each way in the hot sun to buy a new bicycle tire, and to my side was a large forest, so I had an impulse to come out of my body while walking down the boring road, and talk to demons in the forest. And I met a very large demon, inside a big tree, and he offered me a sentence that he said would be able to destroy everyone around me. And when he realized I was willing to go back home and use it on my sister and brother in law, he told me to kill the brother in law and the sister, and both of their children, to then cut out and eat the hearts of each one by one, and regurgitate them in the demon world. And I said OK, that shouldn't be hard, I live with them and I could kill them all in their sleep, and I could do the job. He said, 'no, not in their house - you must get out of their house, leave that place, and lure them into the woods, and do it there.'



Then I explained to the horrified girls that I would never do this, that I love my sister, and that I had come up with a clever loophole - I have a one-hundred year to-do list of things the demons want me to do, this is the only murder I've been ordered to perform, and I'm gonna put it at the bottom of the list so that there's no way I could possibly get to it, though on the other hand I've never seen my sister again because it would be inappropriate to interact with her, since I'm supposed to be killing her.



And the mother said "that's good that you're so strong to resist that order", and I said it's not strength, it lawyer-like cleverness, I found a loophole, but they didn't seem to accept or understand.



Then the woman said, "don't you think it's horrible that the beings you consort with would ask you to do something so atrocious?" and I answered "yes, I know, but so is it horrible the things that my sister and brother-in-law asked me to do to demons - abort them, exorcize them, exclude them from being ministered to, and send them to be destroyed" as the catholic religion explicitly teaches. They left it there, people came out and said the drum was beating and it was time to go back inside.



I did think from the look on their faces and the way they went silent that I had disturbed the poor girls, lost their interest anyway, but the younger one ended actually with : "well thank you for being so honest and open about that with us", and I said "well, I figure here the people will be open minded, and you realize I'm not dangerous," or something to that effect, and they just said oh yeah, it's ok, so I thought nothing really was wrong.



And I went to work on Monday at to teach computer networking class with maybe more energy and dynamism than ever before in my stellar 10-year teaching career. But I also have been losing weight dangerously as over the last several weeks, since a few days before hurricane katrina hit, and definitely during the whole two weeks of civil unrest and city destruction in new orleans. I'm a demon eater, and there's been a big buffet going lately, and I've been gorging. And I've figured out that demons eaten but undigested burn calories. I now can't go one hour without food. I eat $20 dollars of groceries a day plus two restaurant meals. And I am starving and shaky hungry all the time, and losing a few pounds a week. It's my metabolism. Partly because of my big 12-hour runs through the canyons to the mountain peaks on the weekends, partly because I commute ten-minutes here, ten-minutes there, every day by bike, probably 5 to 10 miles a day 7 day s a week, and partly because I discovered the pleasure of sitting in a sauna for thirty minutes a day before my shower, and partly because of the high-peak mountain tea, but mostly because when I read I swear I burn calories with my mind, because if I sit quietly after a meal I'm ok for an hour or two, but if I pick up the paper and read, I come up with all these interconnected ideas and in minutes I'm starving. My metabolism is higher than anything I've ever experienced, and I feel more powerful than I've ever been, but it is also almost dangerous as I'm in starvation throughout the night when I sleep, and I'm afraid I'm going to pass out from thought flow. Died from racing thinking. Or turn into a walking set of neurons, with no flesh or bone left.



So I went out with some of the medical students and teachers for their class party at the end of a module, and at the bar I came up with the idea that if I get desperate, I could take an antipsychotic drug, (any psychiatrist in america would be thrilled to give me one) and just use it occasionally, and I know that would slow me down. I had read an article that pointed out that people on those things complain that they gain two pounds a week. That makes sense. The thinking slows, the metabolism slows.



Here's the imagery I'm working with. Yosemite half dome is a valley surrounded by 7000 ft peaks. my sister and brother in law and I camped on one of the peaks and looked down. To the south is Hetch-hetchy, a similar valley that was flooded in the last century by damning it up, and that's the water supply for SF and LA, and the environmentalists are talking about "draining" hetch hetchy, to restore the natural valley.



The mind is the valley. The demons take up residence in shacks all over the sides of the valley, mostly on the bottom, but as the community grows, the community of demon homes crawls up the sides of the valley. They build telecommunications equipment, and contact the mother ship, more come down, there's a huge festival going on - this is "racing thought"; The human with this mind goes in to the psychiatrist and they give them antipsychotics to flood hetch hetchy, or the client uses drugs or alcohol to flood it themselves.



But if you flood it and then drain it, the demons are still there, in fact while scuba diving they've been digging and building at an even more rapid rate because now the ground is soggy and easier to work. So if you drain it suddenly, or even gradually, it is far less stable than it was in the first place. Exorcism is another way to get them out, but I went through an exorcism and it was like nuking the city of demons - the houses were still there but the demons gone, it was quiet. Thing is the mother ship still knows about a famous location, and they can repopulate, just like bush says he'll repopulate new orleans with no respect for katrina's will.



So I thought maybe, if these demons can't be managed, if they get out of hand, I'd rain on them with a little of the antipsychotic, but a little rain just helps them, that's not really a good answer; I'm already unstable, I can't afford to be too much more unstable.



So I came up with another idea - eat roots. only roots. uncooked roots. I got the idea from when a friend was studying polarity. they said roots are earth food, all the other stuff is air food or water food or fire food, and if I think about it I eat all air and fire food, no earth food, and every shamanic practitioner in the world says I'm ungrounded. Earth foods are supposed to ground you. Somehow I thought maybe that would work, but I was still just throwing meatball sandwiches at myself to try to slow the metabolism, but it wasn't doing anything.

(continued...)

-- Wed Feb 20, 2013 6:35 am --

I asked the head of the nursing program here, who knows me well, about a natural alternative to antipsychotics. I explained that my emotional level is that of a two year old, and so I get excited about attention, and my business is doing so well I get all kinds of attention - people all around the country saying they want me to come out and show them stuff, teach computer networking. Business is booming and I get so excited I can't slow down my metabolism.



She said raw potatoes. And her coworker came up with tea made from hops. I bought the hops but two days and so far that just makes me hungrier. I've been doing the hops tea at night and the pollen from the flowers gives me ghost bugs for hours, so less sleep, and then I'm even less stable, but the potato is a miracle cure. I bought a little golden potato, skinned it, chopped it, and ate it raw, not so bad, just wash it down with a little water, and it's the first thing in weeks that my body calmed down with. At first I thought it could be placebo, but it's been several potatoes now and I think it's real.



Flood hetch hetchy valley with potatoes, and it doesn't soak the soil like the water that represents drugs or alchohol, so no side effect of being less stable after the demons dig their way back out. But the potatoe is anti demon technology for sure. And I'm not out to destroy the demon community. Two hours of calm in the potato valley and I miss my magic powers already. I just need to have a method of managing the valley when it gets out of hand, and a way of putting a limit on my own magic so I can maintain a human body and not burn up in a final flash of fiery metabolism. I could see it in the irish, they get too into it. They learn the magic of potatoes, then throw in a million, and hurt their own demons, and then in the irish potato famine, I always thought "why don't they just eat something else", but now I understand, it's like a bunch of people addicted to antipsychotics and stopped taking their medication. They jumped off their island and swam to the nearest continent to get more potatoes. Potatoes raw are like seroquel.



So now I'm fine.



But on the second day of citrix class, I got an email from Laura, whose class I had taken.




Sent : Tuesday, September 20, 2005 3:01 AM

Subject : RE: Shamanic Journey workshop info and address


Charlie,



I am writing you because we had several complaints this weekend in class about you stating that "demons are trying to get you to kill your family". This is a disturbing statement and it was upsetting to the people you said it to.



Because of the seriousness of this behavior, you are no longer invited to participate in any of our programs, classes, or events. If you show up, I will be forced to call the police.



I URGE you to seek professional help IMMEDIATELY. This is a serious matter, and I sincerely hope that you will get the help that you need. It is out there and available.



Please do not respond to this email unless it is to give me your home address so that I can have the police do a safety check on you for your own welfare.



Laura

--

So I responded: sorry, didn't mean to scare anybody, here's my home address.....(and gave my home address), but I'm not there now, I'm at work, (and gave the work address). Then I printed the email and told the boss the police are coming for me, but I didn't commit any crimes, and I have an opportunity to have some fun and go 5150 but for you, boss, I said, I won't interrupt commerce, I'll just act sane and keep teaching class.



And then I did teach class, and ate more potatoes, and then I typed this email all day Saturday. (what is this, a diary?)



-THE HUMBLE HEGEMON PAFNUTY HERE LAYS HIS HAND TO IT

hey I haven;t read all that, but you mentioned vampire at middle earth--can you tell me more about that, whats the story behind it because I have been to middle earth once when there was no vampire and before that I met the other person there...?.

also have you ever heard of byron metcalf and steve roach for drumming and didge stuff some other stuff meant to be good for trance

that's a lot to read... but it's funny that all our experiences are so different...

like recently i've been talking to a particular celebrity... and used to talk to people on tv telepathically through to the tv... now i just talk to individuals of my choice, i split the things i do into 4 faculties... telepathy, mind reading, mind-control and telekinesis... sort of sci-fi like and might sound a bit silly but is a very convenient way of handling things... i'm on drugs and it doesn't inhibit my so called talents at all...

i've been talking to this particular red-head celebrity recently... she's very adorable... all telepathically...

so i'm all happy with my progress and stuff... i can go around and i read peoples minds on the street everyday... and i'm learning to use it day to day too... my mind travels the universe too... I've never heard of the demon world... but it has to be fascinating...

and right now i have this lowly commonality post in an intergalactic community, i'm not handling the post directly but i resorted to using a physical representative to represent me there, and i'm happy to say he's doing a good job too... right now... he's doing a very very good job... so i'm happy all around... haha... and i'm completely functional... i should have 2 degrees in a few years... considering how functional i am...

but recently I've been erasing peoples memories a little too much, i do feel some guilt...

vampire/middle earth?
No, the "core shamanism" belief structure is there is a lower world, where you first train, then and upper world, for more advanced journeying, and the "middle world" is right here, where I'm typing to you from. They say be very careful choosing a spirit guide in the middle world, I forgot why, they say not to do it, but i did it, it was the tapir at the san francisco zoo.

On "why so much invoking the demon world?", I was taught that we shouldn't be putting judgements on the upper or the lower world, "angels" or "demons" that we meet, just because of waht some silly monotheistic religion and culture tries to push on us, the upper and lower world existed as a part of our universe long before those judgements and relgions came about.

Anyway, as far as vampires, my shaman told me there are all kind of creatures that will cling to you and suck the life from you.

I suffer from ghost bugs, the hallucination of bugs all over me biting and stinging. Maybe that's what she meant by vampires.

On taoism, yes, I read all I can about it and the only thing I don't have because it's 400 bucks is the taoist cannon, but yeah, alot of it is outright psychotic as far as the judgements of psychiatry are concerned. I also read or figured that it is a crystalization in religious format of basic shamanism. I read about many different sects, my favorite was the statutes of mystery metroplolis, they had 300 commandments in stead of just ten, and one big difference I saw from monotheism was that monotheism teaches you to worship god, taoism teaches you to become god. Like I said, very psychotic stuff from the point of view of modern medicine. I also did those taoist exercizes but quit because I found them addictive, they were quite pleasantly psychotic and would cause visions for me, and then when I quit it caused me physical problems, so I stay away from it these days, trying to live a normal human life.

Never heard of those drummers personally but "shamanic journeying" drumbeat is somthing anybody can do, lots of different people produce the cd's or the mp3's, you could do it yourself if you know the beat. It's just a certain beat, for ten to twenty minutes, however you want the journey to last, followed by a much quicker beat which is the call to come back inside your body.



-onderdonk