Shamanism & Nature and the Nature of Shamanism

Is there any difference between shamanism and magic? There is a yes and a no in the answer to this question. It depends on how we look at it.

Within the magical realm there are three basic traditions. One is that of the magus, the high priest or priestess. Another is the shaman, and the third is the sorcerer or sorceress. Each of these three traditions is a separate ways into the same world — the expanded realm of consciousness.

The laws that operate in this realm are different from the laws of the physical realm, or at least they seem very different. For instance, in the physical realm we are familiar with and accept the notion of causality, in which one event comes first and then a second event follows and is caused by the first. In what I would term the "magical realm” it is quite different. Events that could be easily seen as following one from the other sometimes happen simultaneously with no causal link, that is, the events are simply coinciding in time. Alternatively, it is possible to view each event as causing the other in such a total way that everything is continually causing everything else. To then separate one notion off as the cause takes us out of the wholeness of things. This separation is very much a tradition both within Western science and our understandings of the physical realm.

With the development of ecology as a science, this way of thinking has started to be reversed. The study of ecology has brought about the understanding that we cannot isolate one cause of an event, that in fact everything is and affecting everything else. Change one factor in the ecology and everything changes. Some things change drastically, other things change subtly, but nevertheless, change one thing and everything else follows as change.

In Mexico, where my first shamanic awakening happened, there is a powerful distinction between the shaman and the sorcerer. The shaman is the curandero (male) or curandera (female) and the sorcerer is the brujo or bruja. They operate in different areas, and the people’s responses to them are very different. Shamans don’t deal in the dark side, or the left-hand path, whereas brujas, the sorcerers, the witches, can be either the daughters of light or the daughters of darkness, following the right-hand path or the left-hand path. If a person wishes to psychically project malevolence onto another, they will visit a sorcerer of the left-hand path, because that is what they specialise in. Using something that has a connection with the person being attacked, the sorcerers concentrate their thoughts and perform a psychic function that brings negative energies towards that person. These energies can manifest as powerful psychic entities. They may seem like beings that have died, become lost and been unable to properly leave the earth plane. Sometimes they can be forces that seem more like animals that have a harmful, malevolent intent towards human beings.

While a strong distinction is drawn between the sorcerer and the shaman, in contemporary Mexican life the role of the magus, or the spiritual priest, has disappeared. However, it was a very powerful tradition in the old Aztec and Zaphotec(?) traditions. Those cultures had people who performed what we might think of as spiritual magic. They worked with their own energies, the energies of individuals or the energies of groups to open themselves and others into certain types of spaces. These were cultures in which human sacrifice occurred. When someone was being sacrificed, the still-beating heart of the victim was taken out and held up, and as the departing consciousness was leaving the body, the spiritual priests would try to hitch a psychic ride up into expanded realms using the powerful energies that were released and fuelled by the dying person’s fear. The Heart of the Christos by Barbara Hand Clow is an excellent book that gives succinct past incarnation accounts of these types of memories. It is an exacting recall of a number of her shamanic and priestly preparatory incarnations. Reading the book can trigger your own memories and knowing, and make you aware of shifts taking place in your nervous system as you respond to those memories.

This is an important point to be aware of. It is possible that something similar may occur while you are reading this book. (It is actually more likely to happen at a "live” event, such as a talk or workshop, but it can also happen through reading.) If your reading triggers something in you, just observe what it is without projection. When I was teaching a course in philosophy for four years at what is now the Institute for Education at Melbourne University, there would be times when what I was teaching would awaken things in some of the students, and sometimes they would go through quite powerful experiences. Because they usually did not understand, they often projected their inner experiences back onto me. There I was in academic life with students actually charging that I was practising black magic while I was teaching philosophy. What was happening was that some of their own darker and unresolved incarnations were actually being brought up into the light. Without a full understanding their fear started coming up, and they projected it onto me, and in doing so cut themselves off from my guidance. It is quite a delicate operation teaching this sort of material. As far as I know, it was the only course in philosophy that has ever been taught that gave a year-long exposition of the nature of magic, comparing it with the nature of religion and the nature of science.

In the Egyptian tradition, the Inca tradition, the mystery traditions of Greece and Rome, there has been the figure of the magus, or religious magician, who worked with spiritual forces and who trained people in the temples to be open to those forces and to incarnate them into their own beings. This knowledge was traditionally called "the mysteries”, and the steps of unfolding in the mysteries were traditionally called "initiations”. Each tradition developed its own way of initiation into the mysteries.

They were known as the mysteries because those who were not part of the temple did not know what was going on — and probably those who were part of the temple often did not know what was going on either! There must have been plenty of mystery in being trained in the way of taking the energy of the gods into your own nervous system, identifying with them and being able to surrender to the whole process. Temples to deities such as the Greek gods Dionysius, Apollo, Diana or Athena were places in which the archetypal energies of the unconscious were expressed. Each temple was an expression of an identifiable psychic cluster. Dionysius, for instance, was the cluster of surrender into those drunken, lustful, ecstatic, sexual, way out, wild states. Apollo expressed the more purifying intellect — a bit like Vipassana compared with primal therapy. Dionysius was the god of the Bacchanalia, and particularly appealed to women in Greek culture. Dionysian temples could be filled with an extraordinary group of women filled with Bacchanalian energy. The men often ran at that time, because the women’s libido was very powerful and wanting fulfilment. Men often think that they want women who are Dionysian — until they are confronted with a hundred of them … or sometimes even if they are confronted with one.

Each tradition, each god temple, developed its own pathway and its own focus. Some were male-only temples, some were female-only temples, depending on the nature of the god or goddess being worshipped. Some temples took both men and women. Some temples were very austere and some were Tantric — each temple found a niche within the culture. Because of their respected and powerful roles, the god magicians — the magi, the wise men, the wise women —often controlled their cultures. Sorcerers, on the other hand, were never really in the light, and their place was always around the edges of a culture. Their ways of working were quite different, and they would seldom come together as large identifiable groups because the fear of the culture was projected onto them.

There is actually more truth written about much of this in a lot of children’s literature now, including some very fine work on the training of people as magician priests or as sorcerers. Some of it is much more accessible than material that is written for adults. Our culture has generally scorned this literature and felt that there was nothing in it. I think it is much the poorer for it.

Sorcery, of all the magical traditions, is the one that I have least contact with. It is often associated with ritual, because ritual is a doorway into the unconscious. A powerful ritual will incarnate certain psychic forces into the area where it is being performed, and it will also invite the unconscious power of the participants to join in. In the West most of our traditional or religious rituals are very empty. In the charismatic or Pentecostal church you can find the absolute vibrancy of healing energies coming through the leader or through people who want healing. It is only these newer churches that are still living with the energy. The others have become so formalised now that the living energy doesn’t touch many of the participants any more. If you have ever been to a charismatic healing service, or if you have ever been into those high energy states where spontaneous healings happen, then you will know the sort of energy level that both the magician priests and the sorcerers were trained to work with.

As well as ritual, the sorcerers in each tradition would usually learn specific word processes for calling forth various energies from their psyche or from the collective psyche. One of the reasons that Jung delved so deeply into this area was that he came to see that often much of the psychological distress that people were suffering was actually coming from the collective consciousness realm, that is, that somehow individuals reflected things that were happening in the psyche of the culture. There is a huge range of things that happen in the psyche of a culture. In some you can find the classic sorts of possessive states where various energies seem to be able to inhabit people. Voodoo is an example of this. With stories of the zombies and the living dead, it has received a very bad press. However, Voodoo, as it is largely practised in Haiti, is a very powerful, transformative process. As people dance, they call on the Voodoo gods to inhabit their body. As that is happening, there is a change in the dancing, a difference in movement and feel. There is an observable energetic glow in the body as the dancer allows the gods to dance through them. When the god is entirely descended upon someone, that person may have a whole range of gifts that they normally do not have. The same thing can happen with Pentecostalists — some may prophesy, some may see visions and some may be healed. These things are universal. They emerge across continents, across time and across cultures, because they are attributes of human consciousness. They are part of the broad maps of human experience.

With the rise of excessively rational forms of science, people have become very scared of these attributes of human consciousness. If you are in those expanded states, then you are actually in a totally different domain of consciousness. It is an immensely powerful, healing and vibrant state. However, it is not something that can be studied objectively, in the laboratory sense. If you want to know about them you can’t simply observe them in others. You will need to feel the total experience in your own nervous system to gain the knowledge, because it is an embodied knowing, not just an intellectual knowing.

The preparation of the shaman cannot be understood independently of nature, because nature is the shaman’s realm, and, in a way, the shaman’s god. The very forces of nature — the wind, the sky, the earth, the trees, the animals, the rain, thunder and lightning —are the elements that the shaman learns to commune with, to move with, to converse with, to blend his or her consciousness with to gain personal transformation and purification. Some forms of shamanic preparation are totally wild. One of my favourites is one used by the Inuit, or Eskimos. They ingest a sacred, severely hallucinogenic moss out on the ice. When they need to urinate they keep the urine and recycle the hallucinogen by drinking what the body is expelling. They may spend one or two weeks out on the ice as the ice and animal gods teach them about their environment. (I have found it is useful to have a wild sense of humour when investigating how human beings attain knowledge.) In that culture, this practice is a totally valid form of preparation for shamanic knowing. In our culture, if someone spent two weeks on ice and snow, ingested hallucinogenic moss and drank their piss, they would be arrested and certified! It shows the cultural relativity of much of human behaviour. What is sacred and magical in one culture is often considered psychotic in another.

I have a psychiatrist friend who dabbles on the edges of shamanism in his practice. Occasionally he has talked to me about various symptoms that have presented to him. It is quite plain that he is sometimes dealing with people who are going through a step in their own shamanic awakening. It’s not really psychosis or mental illness. Many symptoms are certainly pretty weird in terms of living in a triple-fronted Balwyn house, having a neat garden and a concrete driveway that you hose down on Sundays, or something like that, but in terms of the opening of a Shaman it is understandable that these sorts of visions, voices or feelings are an indication that certain levels of their being are activating.

It is really inconceivable to think of the preparation of a shaman outside nature. Sorcerers, however, do not have to be in nature, because they are not dealing so much with nature forms of consciousness as with other elements of the human psyche. Spiritual magicians are much more at home in temples. Much of their training, preparation and initial work is very sequential and ordered, and is often in written form. An example I have come across is a book called The Sacred Magician’s Diary written by a French psychiatrist who came across a 16th-century magical text for conjuring up the devil and then making him subject to your will. Now, that might sound a little bit way out, but consider the fact that a complex part of Jesuit training involves developing within the psyche both the energy and form of Christ and the energies that are working against the Christ impulse on earth. It is the intention that everyone undergoing this training is eventually able to take the Christ energy and overwhelm the other energy that may wish to live inside them. One of the reasons that Jesuit training is not talked about very much is that these sorts of things are really high-level spiritual magic. I do not expect that the intellectual cream of the Catholic church think that they are practising high-level spiritual magic, but basically that is what is happening.

The shamanic tradition is virtually never written down. People such as Lynn Andrews and Carlos Castenada, and a number of other writers on shamanism, have documented some of the outer elements of shamanic training. Real shamanic training has always been passed on in oral tradition, because the training happens in the spontaneity of the moment. The basic training of a shaman involves working with whatever nature forces are around and learning to navigate through them. There is no step-by-step, systematic opening as is found in magical training, such as there was in the Order of the Golden Dawn, which was the group formed by Alistair Crowley that the great poet William Butler Yeats was part of. That training involved a step-by-step set of rituals that gradually unveiled certain parts of the unconscious.

Shamanic training has its similarities, but the rituals are not set out in that same way and there is much more spontaneity in the tests that a shamanic teacher deliberately gives to a shaman in training, or that simply descend from nature upon both the shaman and his band of apprentices. In the latter case everyone has to navigate spontaneously in the moment and draw on whatever capacities they have to move through that state. This is something that is avoided in the formal ritual training of the magician, because it is dangerous. There can be substantial danger in shamanism as well, particularly if you get into spaces or states or into energetic entities that are beyond your knowing and that literally have the power to overwhelm you.

At times there is substantial antipathy between each of the groups. The sorcerers may not have much time for the shamans, the shamans may dismiss the magicians as people who are far too wordy and bumptious and who get all their magic from a book. The three groups spark off one another, and they tend to not cooperate very much, even though, at the highest level of development, they are really dealing with the same thing. It’s a bit like Collingwood barrackers and Melbourne barrackers — everyone is playing the same game, but each group thinks their team plays it better than anyone else.

Many shamanic traditions use the energies of animals for their own knowing. Part of a shaman’s training may involve learning how to inhabit the mass collective consciousness of animals — bison, horses, eagles, honeyants. In Australian Aboriginal culture people belong to a certain dreaming — honeyant dreaming, lizard dreaming, possum dreaming, dingo dreaming. It is the form of consciousness that that clan’s history has been most connected with, and that the medicine man in that clan would is most connected with. The dingo, for instance, brings fleetness and the capacity to sense things through smell and cunning. I learned a little about dingos from Ilyatjara, a Pitjantjatjara nungari, or medicine man, with whom I have spent time. He has a dingo and knows a lot of what goes on for that dingo. Once when he was away in Alice Springs the dingo grabbed some meat in the camp and took off with it. This annoyed a couple of the young men, and they grabbed a rifle and shot at it. They missed, but when Ilyatjara returned a couple of days later he asked, "What happened to my dingo?”

Often you can get a sense of the attributes a shaman is developing in himself by coming to know what his power animal is. One animal that features as a totem, or shamanic identification, across cultures is the eagle. It has the capacity to soar higher than any other bird, it can see far and it is swift. It moves in for the kill when it needs to. You do not think of eagles as showing mercy. They are majestic and remote, and when they need something, they swoop down, take it and leave.

In some Mexican traditions, when a child is about to be born, the family sprinkles powder outside the house. After the birth they look for an animal’s footprints in the powder. If they find some, that will be the child’s sacred animal. The attachment to that animal is such that should that animal be ill, then the child will be ill. If this happens the shaman’s function is to psychically find what is wrong with the animal then either psychically or physically heal it so that the child can recover. If you lived in this type of culture, someone who wished to do you harm without appearing to do so, would attack the animal that is connected to you, and by harming the animal, harm you.

Sorcerers seldom have that animal connection, although it is quite common for witches (who are similar to the sorcerer/sorceress tradition) to use cats as familiars. Cats are useful in this regard because their eyesight processes into a realm of vision that is beyond the limits of the normal spectrum of seeing. Cats can sense and sometimes see various psychic energy forms before human beings see them. Anyone you who lives closely with cats, or even dogs, will sometimes see them respond as if there is an unseen human being around. If you tune into the psychic atmosphere at that time, you can start to learn how to feel it in your own system.

There are times when you do not need an animal’s sensitivity. Your own system can get that slight shiver in it, when the hair comes up at the back of the neck, indicating that something a little unfamiliar, a little strange, a little weird, a little scary is about. You can discover whether you are generating this feeling imaginatively, or whether it is actually some phenomenon that exists independently of you. I remember working once with a woman who was staying at the Centre for Human Transformation who woke up screaming about 4 a.m. saying that she felt that the devil was lurking in her room. I opened to the energy of the place and knew that there was nothing like that around. I was certain because there was no impact on my feeling capacity, there was nothing that felt strange, nothing that felt like I needed to get my act together. I then knew how to work with her through what I realised were her own deep inner fears. If my own neurology had started to say, "Hey, something is going on here”, then a totally different set of processes would have been required.

In the first topic I mentioned ways in which people are often called to shamanism. In some cultures an unexplained illness for a child around the years of thirteen to fifteen is recognised can be the mark of a shaman. Entry into magic is often a little different, although in many cultures it is also something that is noticed in childhood. Sometimes a child is seen to have a certain capacity in them — they are born a little fey. In Ireland it is known that the seventh son of a seventh son is always a healer. Even if the child has no awareness of his calling, everyone else around him does. After a while, he starts to act like one. If you are the seventh son of a seventh son, then you have the healing capacity. It is part of the group mind of being Irish. Catholics and Protestants killing each other is another, less healthy, part of the Irish group mind. In Balinese culture children are brought into the temples at an early age and are put through exhaustive training to become temple dancers. I have seen two Balinese nine-year-olds dancing in perfectly together in a state of trance. I am experienced at working in trance, and I know when people are in it. These children were deep in a synchronised spontaneous dance of the moment. When the children are this far in trance they are not relaxed. Before the music starts they are carried in rigid, laid down, and when the music starts they start to dance. The whole trance process is carefully and ritually managed. To bring the children out of deep trance a priest says particular words and splashes water that has been blessed on the children. This is the pre-programmed trigger for the unconscious that it is safe to come out of trance into normal consciousness.

Most shamanism, sorcery and spiritual magic work is done in one or another form of trance. Trance is simply a name that is given to an altered state of consciousness. Everyone has a great facility for trance. Every time that you drive somewhere and, on arrival, realise that you can’t remember anything about the trip, you have actually been in trance. Your awareness has been so focused on one thing that you have excluded everything else. There are various deep trances in which people have allowed quite deep surgical intervention into their body and been unable to remember much of what has happened. When something like this happens sound is consciously blocked from the mind, but unconsciously that sound still enters the body. Rachana and I have worked with a number of people who have had operations during which the mind of the body has actually remembered comments that the surgeons said to each other about that person during the operation. This unconscious sound memory has then come to live in the tissue and sometimes control a person’s actions until we have actually been able to track it back, take them in trance down into that equivalent anaesthetised state, bring the memory back into their awareness, and then bring them out of it again with that new information held in their awareness.

Every deep spiritual tradition and every magical tradition uses trance and hypnosis. Hypnosis was brought into the Western world by a Scottish surgeon who saw surgical procedures being performed in India using yogic altered-state inductions. He learnt this from the yogis and brought it back to Scotland around the 1840s. The West thinks that hypnosis is something unique and new, but it has a tradition of several thousand years in other cultures. Practitioners from other cultures are often much more skilled in it than the people who are using it in the West, because here it is used outside of its context. Its context is magic and deep spiritual transformation. People who worked in the mysteries and in the temples were taken very deeply inside themselves. They learned to navigate these inner spaces and while they were in there, the priest, the shaman or whoever was guiding them, would give them new information that they could draw on only when they were in those states. When they returned to their ordinary, everyday state of consciousness they would not remember the knowledge. This is a sophisticated technique of post-hypnotic suggestion, known as post-hypnotic amnesia. By opening back into the hypnotic state, the full memory of previous hypnotic learning returns. This sort of thing happens in past life regression work. If someone has been through a temple preparation or a shamanic opening in a past incarnation, they can recover the content of the opening and the rituals, but only while they are in that state. When this is happening to someone it is useful to have a tape recorder, so that when they come out, they can actually hear what it was that they uncovered. As they come back up out of that state, unless they have an immense facility for moving through those states and being able to maintain the continuum of their consciousness while returning to everyday reality, the memories are forgotten again. This phenomenon is seen in a lot of trance channelling, where the person who is in deep trance, is not able to remember what it was that they channelled.

(During the original oral presentation of this material, one member of the audience was moved to interrupt and engage with me. The resultant interchange began here, before I reached point where I would have opened the space to audience questions. In the interest of honouring the fact that shamanic learning happens in the moment, I have presented the remainder of this section as it happened, rather than as I imagine it might have gone if I had continued uninterrupted.)

Alice: What if the person doesn’t want to remember?

Daricha: Why would the person not want to remember?

A: Sometimes people don’t want to remember things to do with past lives or present lives.

Dar: There is no point in the person doing the work if they don’t want to remember.

A: You could fool yourself.

Dar: Pardon?

A: You could pretend that you wanted too. Dar: Could you? Could you do that?

A: Oh, I don’t think I could, but I have certainly known people who pretend that they want to come for counselling, but they don’t really want to come.

Dar: We are talking about something that goes a little bit beyond the normal person who comes for counselling. It is true that in some cases, the depth of trauma with an incomplete opening for someone will be so great that they will have made a decision that they just don’t want to back there.

A: But sometimes people will repress or forget things, and they don’t want to remember. Usually what happens in hypnosis is that you ask somebody if they wish to remember it post-hypnotically, or post-trance state, and often they don’t. It can be therapeutic to go through it in the trance state, but it is often not therapeutic for them to be then consciously aware.

Dar: Sure. In the ordinary realm, that’s absolutely fine. In the preparation of the magician or the shaman, to actually have that repressed in your knowing and not want to get to it would be a total point of weakness. If you expand into a certain level of operation this would be like a huge hole into your ether. You would be open to whatever comes around. In the mysteries, initiates were always graded. There were always at least three circles, and some people would spend their whole life in the outer circle, because they were not ready to go further. It is always a person’s choice to enter into this — although sometimes the mark of it is on a person, and if they don’t follow the vision that has been implanted in them, they literally go crazy trying to avoid it. I know, because it is something I have had to wrestle with in my own life.

A: Would they make that choice in their conscious realm or their trance state?

Dar: Which choice is this?

A: Where they wanted to go, in which circle they wanted to stand, at which level they wanted to be?

Dar: Oh, you want to know about how the mysteries operate?

A: How would they choose, what state would they be in when they chose?

Dar: It’s not like that. The people who were the heads of the temple could see into a person, they could see the origins of their holding, they could see that there was something in their past that was incomplete, and they could see that there was a great fear about that. The preparation for that person would involve being led to the point of choice, of saying, "Yes, I want to go in” or "No, I don’t”. Now, when the person says, "No, I don’t” they are choosing to go no further, and often at that point they leave. Within those traditions they are totally sworn to secrecy. Within the Chinese tradition and in some of the Tibetan traditions, should you break the secrecy, you would be killed. The secret societies were the left-hand-path variants of magical preparation. Whether it was the Thugee in India or the Triads in China they were preparing people to go deeper into those sorts of energetic forces. There are many spiritual offshoots that have done that. The inner sanctums of Freemasonry at various times used powerful magic, and yet most people never went past the basic rituals in the outer sanctum. Sometimes a person can want to go further, but it is the guardians of the threshold who decide who goes in and who is ready for initiation. An initiate never decides when they are ready for initiation. If you are a trainee shaman, the universe decides that, in conjunction with your teacher. If you are in the temples, the high priest and priestess decide.

A: Why were they so afraid of these secret practices getting out into the public realm?

Dar: Firstly, the ordinary people did not understand. Secondly, by keeping it mysterious, it made it more special. You can buy profound texts on magical preparation, but if you are not ready for it, you don’t get it. You can take fifteen people through the same ritual, and five might get it and ten will not. You can give a book to people, and some will come back with their lives totally rearranged and a new part of themselves opened. Others will say, "Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about” — and they don’t.

A: Wouldn’t that be a reason for allowing it to be available because only those people who are ready would be able to take advantage of it?

Dar: I guess another factor in some paths choosing secrecy is the weight of responsibility on people when they say "yes” to an initiate, given what can follow. There can be mischief

A: This is very different to a sort of formal qualification, isn’t it?

Dar: Yes, it is.

A: So the procedure is that you qualify by being accepted, and the person has to consider that you are ready to handle that responsibility.

Dar: No, you don’t consider whether a person is ready to handle that responsibility, you consider whether they are ready to have their whole neurology rearranged, and whether they can cope with the level of new energy that is going to start bopping around their cells, reordering their genetic make-up and giving them totally new capacities and powers — that is what you consider! This is a very profound thing, because if someone is put into an energetic opening that they cannot handle they blow apart, and some people go crazy. When LSD was being widely used in an uncontrolled way, it would open people up, bring up all this unconscious material that people did not know how to navigate. They did not know how to separate projection from reality, and some people literally went crazy. Sometimes they wakened their kundalini so powerfully that as it blew the chakras open and caused massive disorientation. People’s circuitry — the whole set of brain interactions with neurons, axons, dendrites, etcetera — couldn’t handle it. If you have a 240-volt wire and you run 50,000 volts through it, it melts. It is the same in these high-energy states. People can die very easily!

A: You make it sound as if LSD can affect people like a stroke.

Dar: Absolutely! The energy that is coming through a person when they have a stroke is intense. In some magical openings, particularly if a person does not have the guidance of a fine teacher, they can get too much energy and literally have a stroke, because they do not know how to turn it off. Even someone as adept in spiritual magic as Robert Masters, who is Jean Huston’s husband, once said, "I want to thank my wife, Jean, who literally saved my life when I got into a magical space that I couldn’t handle”. Hearing something like this is unfamiliar territory for a lot of us, and it is easily seen as a bit far-fetched, but it is absolutely true.

The levels of energies that can come into a human being are totally extraordinary. You see it every now and then when someone is in a deep process or meditation, or is with a guru who gives shaktipat that awakens the kundalini. Sometimes people go off the planet for months. We worked for a year with a woman living at the Centre, because she had opened some years back so profoundly that her consciousness became disembodied. When she first came to train with us, she was fractured inside, as if there had been a split in her being and her consciousness could not inhabit her body anymore. It took us a year to gradually bring it back down — to get it to the point where her consciousness was able to come back into the body and hold that space. A couple of times in that period she went into a too-high energetic space and we saw her disembody. We would just bring her right back.

There are people in the back wards of psychiatric institutions who have opened up too quickly, and their consciousness is right out in the universe in eternal hallelujahs, but their body is inert. I know, because I have encountered their consciousness — I have met these people in consciousness. The process is something like, "Where are you? Let’s track you … Oh, this is your space!” The odd thing is that they are fine, inasmuch as their consciousness is in absolute bliss. However, their body and their brain are an absolute mess. Those people should be revered as saints. They should be fed and washed, and there should be people who are prepared to meditate around them and make that their sadhana, their spiritual path, because they have opened wonderfully and are doing great service to the earth. They are operating like substations for transforming certain energies, as if they got the hit and just couldn’t hold it in their body and out they went. But while they are out there it is as if they are taking in the 50,000 volts and splitting it down to 240 so that a whole pile of people can get it. It is a wonderful gift that they have made, but it is not understood and they are not treated will at all. I am not saying that every apparently disembodied person living in a psychiatric institution is like that, but there are certainly some people who are.

Some people who are in comas are in a similar space. We have worked with a little eleven-year-old boy who was in a coma who was in total bliss in his consciousness. He had hit something inside himself, and walking into his room felt like walking into the presence of a master. His struggle, at another level, was that his parents wanted him to be back here, functioning in the same way as he had preciously with them. He did not know if could bring what he had experienced back into that reality. He was so tortured that eventually his body distorted into spasm as he fought to try to please his parents and to try to hold a very deep spiritual truth. I was immensely touched by that child, and I learnt so much by feeling the inner beauty that he had found.

A: It all sounds a bit unlikely. If his knowing was so deep, why couldn’t he just explain it to his parents?

Dar: If you have half your brain damaged in a car accident, it’s rather hard to have full brain functioning. If you are surrounded by people who don’t understand what it is you are going through, and don’t treat you with intelligence and meditative love, it is very hard to bring that fragile subtlety back and ground it in the here and now. If your opening involves returning to a preincarnational state, where your body has forgotten basically everything that it has learned through incarnation, and you do not have very skilled people with you who can take you through all the steps of intrauterine life, birth, post-birth and infancy, it is difficult to integrate incarnation and disincarnation. I had a teacher, John David, whose specialty was working with comatose people who were totally irretrievable in the opinion of the best neurologists. This man would work step by step, re-educating the body, re-educating the brain through body movement, and gradually bring the consciousness back into the body and lead it through all those developmental states again.

A: You reprogram?

Dar: Yes. Often the body of a person who is comatose no longer remembers many of its functions.

A: But they do have memories in their body. Haven’t they lost them from their brain?

Dar: Often they don’t even have the memories in their body, apart from those totally autonomous ones such as pissing and perspiring. Functions such as movement and speech have to be learned again. In the situations I am referring to, where there is a state of immense shock, the consciousness leaves the body and much of its incarnational programming is wiped clean. This is not necessarily true in all situations, but it does happen. I have seen John David reinstruct the being in those incarnational lessons, in those developmental stages in the psychomotor emotional development.

A: Did he also help them leave their body if that is what they wanted to do? In other words, help them die?

Dar: No, he was only interested in working with people who wanted come back in. That was his particular forté, where he wanted to go. There are other people who choose to work with those who want to die, but that was not his pathway.

A: How would you know which ones wanted to go and which ones didn’t?

Dar: You ask them.

A: Ask who?

Dar: You ask them. You walk into the room, you work out what level the consciousness is at, you go to that level and you start to talk to them — "What’s happening here? Where are you? What do you want?” The answers are in there if you can match the vibration of their consciousness. The information just flows from them into you. If you can’t get it that way, and your cellular resonance is very good, then you touch them. As you touch them, and your cells resonate at the frequency of their cells, the knowing will be relayed to you. It may come as sound, it may come as feeling or it may come as images — it depends which channel you work with most strongly. Being able to work with people at that level is just another step from the shaman talking to the clouds or the trees. I have done a lot of work with brain-damaged people, and with different people I get quite different sensations. With one person I may feel incredibly powerful heat, and the next, absolute cold.

A: So do you think that that would be some kind of indication?

Dar: Sure. You tune in to what impact it is having on you. If you are clear of your own projection, then you will know what that communication is, and that will be the first step towards working with that person.

A: How would your attitude about living with certain injury affect your ability to pick up what the person wanted? You might feel that someone with brain damage shouldn’t live.

Dar: Oh, they would pick it up as soon as you walk in the room. In those states, people are highly psychic; they know everything you are thinking. If you play certain music they are greatly affected by the vibration of the music. A woman recently asked us for a sample tape of some of the deep sound that changes cellular information that we have been using. She played the sample tape to a comatose boy who had been totally non-communicative for three months, and he sat up, spoke her name and kissed her ….

A: You just find the right vibration and tune in.

Dar: Sure, but in that state people are highly alert. I know this because I have been in comatose states myself. In that comatose state I was able to track what it was like, and then work with it to see how I could get out of it. I was able to keep the memory of it alive as I came out of that state, so I now consider that I know what comas are like. In most cases, people in comas are going to be in similar sorts of states, and if I can of vibrationally match where they are, I can start to communicate with them and have some sense of the steps that we need to go through.

A: You can’t very well generalise from your own experience that other people have the same experience.

Dar: Absolutely you can — because consciousness is the same in all of us. If you know what it’s like to be angry, then I know what it’s like to be inside you when you’re angry. Anger is the same human experience. Let’s not kid ourselves that we are totally unique and different.

A: But you are saying that because …

Dar: Madam! You don’t know. You are coming from an exclusively left-brain position! I am trying to open you into a different way of understanding, and you are completely resisting me. I am giving you certain sorts of information, and you keep asking me inappropriate questions. I want you to ask me appropriate ones that will help you learn rather than stop you learning. You’re asking questions that show that you can’t get the answers that you need. Are you aware of the negative tone of your questions? You are saying, "Because this wouldn’t work, would it?”, "You can’t presume such and such”. It doesn’t serve you! You need to find what the real question is, and the real question is, "Why am I so scared of this stuff?” You have some knowing about it, and that is what drew you here, but you are fighting yourself instead of saying, "Hey! Here’s a source that I can tap. Maybe he’s not all that much value, but I’ll ask the questions that are going to assist me in my path”. However, you are asking questions that are just going to keep the blocks there. You could be drawing on my experience in a way that might help you go a little bit further.

A: My experience of the comatose state was exactly the same as yours.

Dar: Fine! But then you say, "Well, we can’t presume that everyone in a coma is the same”. No, we can’t presume that every coma is the same, but we can assume that the person is conscious, that by and large, they know what is going on, that they can be communicated with, and that if you can track where they are, you can help bring them back.

A: Yes, that is simple. I’m not fighting it.

Dar: But you are! You might not know that you are, but the very structure of your questions is negative. It is as if you are almost trying to convince yourself that you don’t know any of this. However, you said that tracking with their consciousness is simple. If you can get that, then that is a great gift.

Anyone else with questions?

Bob: Daricha, you were talking about the Jesuit training of experiencing the Christ and experiencing the negative. Could you explain to me how you interpret the fact that it was the Jesuits particularly that persecuted the witches in the Middle Ages.

Dar: I think there were several reasons. Jesuits are men; witches are women. Jesuits are celibate, and as that celibate energy rises it hits their repressed anger. A lot of that anger was going to be towards women. Additionally, the witches were part of the nature, which was scorned and felt to be of the devil. There is also the fact that some of the witches were a bit bent — they were not all white, some were attracted to the dark side. I think that it was all part of the erasing of the feminine, of the Dionysian, of the seduction of feminine power. The Jesuits were a vehicle for this repression because they have both the finest intellectual training in the church and they have the magical training as well.

B: If they could recognise the Christ consciousness, they must have wiped out a lot of white witches as well.

Dar: I imagine they would have. However, they didn’t differentiate, because the assumption was that all witchcraft is of the devil.

There is a difficulty with dividing the world up into darkness and light. Once you really assume that it is like that, then it is like that. A friend of mine who taught me much in this area told me two things. One was, "No-one ever says that their pathway is the dark pathway”. Everybody says that their magic is always white. The second thing he said was, "In the world of magic the only safety is total surrender, because if you move into fight, eventually you will confront something that will overwhelm you”. I still try to embody that. Sometimes the world seems as if it is other than total light, and when those energies are around, I call a lot upon the light to deal with them. People do magic all the time. For instance, the whole art of visualisation is really just another form of ritual magic. You visualise what you are going to get, you create the thought-form and you attract the atoms to bring it — whether it’s the parking space, money or the perfect lover that you want. (OK, I will admit that the perfect lover is usually a lot harder to incarnate. People tell you that you can do it, if you do ten rebirthing sessions. Those of us who have done fifty or sixty know that it usually doesn’t quite work like that. But it sure sells a lot books and gets a lot of people into seminars!)

B: So parking spots are a lot easier!

Dar: Yes. People try all sorts of tricks, like putting a bubble of light over their car so they don’t get a parking ticket or so they don’t get picked up for speeding. There are many popular forms of light magic.

Connie: Can you pick up the flow that you had before you were sidetracked? It seemed as though you were onto something important.

Dar: If you can remind me, I can try.

C: You were talking about being able to take your own consciousness out and communicate with comatose people, and about finding the space in consciousness through touch.

Dar: You can do it through touch, and sometimes you can do it purely psychically. I have mentioned previously that we once worked with an eighty-year-old chap who had Alzheimer’s. Through my training with John David I came across something called a sound dome — a great piece of neo-Atlantean technology! He made modern version of a dome, with speakers that produced sounds that vibrated into your cells. This use of sound frequencies was an ancient technique of genetic engineering. The ancients could also split lasers off crystals and use them to get down to various parts of the body and bring about change. When I used the sound dome it took me to a place of Atlantean memory. It excited me enormously, and I said, "Right! We have to get one of these”. The only problem was that he wanted a hundred thousand dollars for it. We had a brilliant sound engineer come our way who offered to build one, and we used it in working with this man with Alzheimer’s.

The first thing we needed to do was to get a sense of where he was, to ask, "Where is this man?” He was incontinent, and he could not walk. He was totally non-functional. We really wound the sound dome up, and just towards the end of the session, when I was playing some whale sounds, the chap said, "Oh, the spirits, they’re calling me, they’re calling me …”. I thought, "OK, so that’s where he is! He’s in the realm where you hear the spirits calling. Fine!” Once you know where he is, you can lasso him. It’s not all that far away. You can to out, grab him, and say, "OK, we’ve got you, you’re coming back!” I mean this literally. You can imagine that you have a rope so that you can come back in too, and you grab him! You just bring him back in. If you can do that, imaginatively, and if their consciousness cooperates, it comes back.

I have seen this technique work three times. One of the other times was when I saw a woman whose consciousness was very fragile, and who had two people working on her body at once — one guy at her feet and another one who foolishly took her head over the end of the table, which can set up a very powerful process. I saw her consciousness suddenly shoot out. When I looked into her eyes I could see where she was, and I had to use every bit of navigating that I knew to get out there and pull her back in .We talked about it later, and she said, "I didn’t think you were going to get me”. I thought that I was lost again.” When this had happened to her previously it took her six years to get back.

This shows what I mean when I say that the training is about navigating — learning how to get out there, quickly, learning how to get back, learning what to do when you get into difficulty when you are out there. There is a whole tribe of people to help you, and it does not matter who you call upon, as long as they can do the job! It doesn’t matter whether you are into Jesus, Buddha or Guru this or that, as long as they have the energy that you need. It can be White Eagle; it can be anyone who has the vibratory energy that you need to get back down or to shift. Having that capacity to move is like the martial arts of magic. You have to be where the energy is, in that space, where the hits are not coming, because if you are right out there and you get hit, you are history. Star Wars comes to mind — it is one of the great metaphors of our time. "Luke ... Come to the dark side, Luke”. The dark side appeals to everyone, because that is where power is. The light works with love. This is the fundamental difference between the dark side and the light side. Which way you go depends on whether you are after power or whether you are prepared to be a channel for love. Many people spend a lot of time moving backwards and forwards with that, getting clear about what they want. If you tread the source of power I think you are giving yourself quite a bit of incarnational karma that you will have to deal with somewhere along the line. Power does not get you to where you need to go anyway, because surrender is always the last step. You might as well start with that as the beginning on your pathway — but it is a bit scary sometimes.

Ed: Does the good guy always come out best and the bad guy always cops it, like in films?

Dar: In the realm of magic, it’s not the case. There are certainly plenty of shamans who could tell you that. People who work with the dark side have every little bit of unresolved human hatred, anger, greed, jealousy, lust and power-drive that is in the collective human unconscious available to draw on as their energy source.

E: But in the end, they must encompass this karma, somewhere, surely?

Dar: I like to think that, Ed. I like to think that the universe is organised to make me happy in that way. But I can’t guarantee that that’s the truth! I just like to have that fantasy that it is, but I don’t know that it is.

I would like to say a little bit more about that knowledge that comes through cellular resonance. In order to get it, you need to be able to be quiet in yourself. Unless you are quiet, you will not hear what is coming to you. You need to learn to trust what comes to you, and you need to go down three layers. Techniques that I use in a course I teach called Zen Bodywork illustrate these layers. Zen Bodywork is about learning how to do nothing in order to find what our true doing is. When I teach people that, I might say, "I want you to hold this person’s head for forty-five minutes.” People go through heaps. They feel they should be doing something — they want to be a healer! They are paying good money for the course, and they are doing nothing — just sitting there! They feel uneasy about just sitting there when there is a person on the table expecting to be healed. The doubts go on and on. I tell them to wait until they get an intuition about what they are to do. That’s easy enough, everyone teaches you how to be intuitive these days. You close your eyes, you wait for a bit, something flashes into your mind and you have an intuition. And so you do, but it is the first layer, and it is mental. I tell them, "Don’t do that”. So they get the mental intuition and they have to not do that. I tell them to wait for the next one. Now the next one actually gets generated by the subterranean fear and panic that you should be doing something, that you have to find something. This is the emotional intuition, and when it rises I tell them not to do that one either. They just have to wait. The third one that comes is an organic knowing. It does not come from the mind or the emotions — it comes from the body-mind, from a cellular intelligence level. When they feel what this cellular intelligence needs, I say, "Do that”.

The training develops the capacity to drop through those layers, to be with a person without intention, letting go of trying to heal. You need to be able to wait and feel, until the experience of the other person’s space is inside you. You become like a tuning fork and start to resonate with them. That is when the flow can start. Sometimes that will happen through touch. You may get all sorts of other things on the way. For instance, a lot of their personal history may come to you. Bodywork students have sometimes touched me during training and suddenly seen a twelve-year-old kid being beaten. They are just reading the memory out of the tissue. As you learn a little bit more, you go in deeper and see what it was like when the person was born, then what it was like when they were conceived, and then you can start to read out past incarnations. It is a matter of learning to navigate and learning to trust. It is also a matter of clearing out your own neediness to generate profound, important, wonderful, eye-glazing, amazing information. You need to be clear of everything, so that you can be there and simply tune in.

TO CHAPTER 3