The Making of a Shaman: Part 2

Problems linked to illness, such as psychic crises, but also pains of a physiological nature, (fever, migraines, rheumatic pains) can be assumed to be just so many initiatory trials. Uncovering the religious significance of illness and physical pain constitutes in effect shamanism's essential contribution to the history of the spirit. Mircea Eliade Journals 1956

1976: The Traveller

The traveller had arrived in Mexico. He had taken six months study leave and travelled with his family to study with Ivan Illich, the world’s foremost social critic. Having written books on Deschooling Society, Medical Nemesis, Illich’s ideas of dissolving the hierarchical structures of contemporary Western society had hit a chord with the traveller’s anarchistic ideas.

Illich had an independent academy that scholars from all around the world had visited, and anyone was free to come, to listen, and to teach. One week before the traveller had left Australia he had received a letter saying that the Academy was closing down, but he came anyway to arrive in Cuernavaca just in time for the last seminar.

What confusion. So much planning and so many hopes thrown away.

Within three weeks of arriving he and his wife and three children were invited to visit San Juan de Teotihuacan, which later he was to find was the ancient sacred city of the Toltecs. The ancient city was overpowering. Arising from the surrounding countryside were two extraordinary pyramids, one dedicated to the sun and one to the moon. Between them was a mile long ceremonial avenue which had been lined with temples on both sides. The temples were gradually being rebuilt under the directions of archeologists. Already a tourist drawcard, it was to become more famous over the years.

The pyramid of the sun was actually the largest pyramid on the planet. The West with its ethnocentric history had ignored the historical and obvious reality that it was larger than Cheops. Hugely silhouetted against the sky, it and its partner pyramid, the lunar structure, dominated the consciousness of all who visited the ancient site. Ceremonial parades had been conducted along the avenue. The temples would have been full of priestly celebrants and many thousands would have gathered there in the past.

The traveller moved along the avenue, from time to time he was drawn to a particular temple and either ascended the steps to the plaza on top or entered the priestly realms where some of the original frescos and murals still existed. Red and green dominated as colours on these walls, jaguars and men, ancient symbols, archetypal images, ruins, butterflies, other tourists, his six-year-old son and seven-year-old twin daughters, moved with him.

Up to the top of one temple he walked by himself, soaking in the atmosphere, imagining how it had been in this extraordinary city that had so suddenly collapsed from a thriving metropolis to abandoned crumbling ruin, leaving no written historical records.

Then suddenly it happened. Turning around to walk across the plain, to rejoin his family the traveller was confronted by the image of a Toltec medicine man in full ceremonial dress, who just stayed still and looked at him. The calling from the other world had come.

In the following months, the traveller immersed himself into Mexico. He learnt Spanish, taught at a private college on the similarities between the kundalini symbolism in yoga and the image of Quetzacoatl, the flying serpent.

He studied with Paco, the director of the college who had written his unpresented PhD on the Huicholi shamans with whom he had lived for seven years.

He faced his fears as his marriage began to unravel. Without his usual identity markers and escape routes of job, home, car, books, garden, music, colleagues and friends, unable to find the books he needed for his dissertation, with his very reason for coming to Mexico no longer existing, he visited old pyramids, temples, astronomy sites, read up on the Aztecs, Miztecs, Olmecs and Zapotecs.

Once when he visited an old Zapotec ceremonial city which had been built on the flattened top of a hill surrounded by a ring of mountains he had sat and contemplated the old buildings, especially the astronomical observatory. He was overwhelmed by an unexpectedly intense feeling of sadness, and inexplicably wept very intensely.

Some 25 years later he remembered a past life at that city and how he, as an astronomer and holder of sacred knowledge has been one of the ‘spiritual intelligentsia’ of that culture who had been massacred by invaders from the north. Time, place, consciousness, soul memory and history were somehow all connected. We hold memories of places and they hold memories of us. Put them together and unexpected things can happen.

1978: The Yoga Student

The yoga student was now firmly established in spiritual practices. Daily meditation, asanas and yoga nidra, along with 5 hours of classes per week, brought a certain stoic stability to an otherwise tumultuous life. His marriage had been unable to sustain the different life directions that each partner had been pursuing, and he had finally left. Immense sadness accompanied this move, as he enjoyed his children’s company so much, and missed them deeply. When he had finally recognised the need to leave, he was heartbroken, and cried deeply. A loved friend comforted him and placed her hands on his feet, praying for him. At that moment, for the first time he heard the "inner voice”. It reassured him that he was blessed. That simple event maintained him through years of subsequent difficulty. At times after returning his children to their matrimonial home, he would lie in bed, clutching a sacred amulet worn around his neck, while he sobbed the pain of separation from his children. He knew that had he not heard "the voice” that one time, he would not have been able to navigate that deep sadness. In subsequent years, at various crisis points in his life, "the voice” would emerge again.

Always unbidden, gentle, reassuring, blessing and self-regarding, it was a sustaining phenomenon that might emerge whilst walking a track, or pausing to look at nature. Its gentleness always surprised him, and it withstood his critical question, "Am I making this up?” to become an accepted part of the way in which Spirit communicated with him. It often addressed him by name, with a soft cadence and inflection. It was not a voice recognisable as any that he had previously heard, neither was it accompanied by delusions or inner panic or substantial disorganisation of the psyche that would have denoted madness – so he came to accept it as a blessing that Spirit would bestow as necessary. During these years images of a rural healing community began to crystallise in his mind. Back to the earth, organics, orchards, mudbricks, solar power, communes, alternative lifestyles, vegetarianism all found a fertile space in his mind. He became an adviser to several community schools - parent run with child-centred curricula – and his educational radicalism pushed the boundaries of the tertiary Institute at which he taught. He inspired and led a community-based post graduate teacher education program, where he and some of his colleagues based their educational activities in a local community.

They abolished lectures, and held meetings at a shop which they rented in the local area, and at staff members homes over dinner in the evenings. The team of staff and students raised money for the rent from Government grants and wine bottlings. The staff agreed to work by consensus and over the four years that the program ran he learnt much about team work and collective decision making and responsibility. In their final year they needed another staff member to improve the program, and when the Institute refused to appoint extra staff they pooled portions of their salaries to employ another member part time. Instead of dissertations, the students had to create an educational activity in the community that fulfilled a need, and record their path through that. Educational conservatives in the Institute and others were concerned by what they saw as the blatant radicalism of the program, while he and his colleagues argued that all educational programs have values, this one simply made its values apparent and conscious in contrast to the unconscious hidden agenda of other university programs. His yoga teacher formed a committee to establish a rural yoga community and he poured his energy into articulating that project. He and others scoured the countryside within 120 kilometres of Melbourne, looking for suitable venues – flat land, some trees but cleared for agriculture, permanent water, pleasing aspect, easy access. Having heard of how you could "visualise” situations, he developed clear criteria of the ideal physical attributes for such a project. He eagerly devoured permaculture – a new concept for planning the interaction of living systems – and finally presented his outline to his teacher. He was crestfallen and taken aback when she confidently pronounced that his concepts would not work, and shortly thereafter lost enthusiasm for the project.

But the fire had been lit and he continued to read, absorb, talk, integrate, dream, and travel into rural areas to find the right place. Often he would take his three children and they would spend time in the country camping by rivers, absorbing the healing powers of nature, sleeping snugly in their Kombi camper, always on the lookout for that ideal piece of land. All the time he was continuing to meditate, attend workshops, absorb material coming from the Findhorn new age community in Scotland and to open the tracks inside himself through which his destiny could enter. Finally he gathered a small group of people and invited them to a meeting to commit to forming the nucleus of a future community. Unknowingly, he chose Wesak, the evening of the highpoint in the esoteric calendar when the energies of the Buddha and the Christ are closest to the earth. As the circle of four meditated to birth the energy that would found the new community, the room was flooded with the energy of Buddha and the Christ, in degrees which amazed the participants.

Later when he realised that they had been flooded by the energies of the Wesak festival, he took it as an omen of great blessing for the project. During this time with a new partner he had joined an inner city community of four households, that shared backyards, appliances and some meals and sought to articulate a common vision. Composed of a Uniting Church minister, a psychiatrist, university lecturers, social workers and a naturopathy student, they presented extraordinarily diverse views and directions as they stumbled along trying to find commonality, asking themselves and each other, "What do we want?”, and "What is our vision?”. The process of agreement continually foundered on the rocks of democracy, as atheists, new agers, Marxists and card-carrying Christians, sought to find common ground and to convince each other of the truth of their own perceptions. From it he learnt how not to build communities, and after two years of seeing how the process didn’t and couldn’t work, moved on.

From time to time the circle of four would make excursions into the country looking for the ideal place. One mid-Spring day they heard of a twenty-acre property in a rural lane in the Yarra Valley. As fate would have it they missed that place and arrived at the end of the lane to meet a couple living in a caravan, while they were building a house and planting a vineyard. Upon hearing of the land they were looking for the local identity announced, "You wouldn’t want that piece of land”, and referred them to the last block beyond them with a track through a rainforest beside a creek. The land, however, was very different to what they had envisaged. It was obviously unsuitable. It had recently been partially cleared, was hilly, there was no permanent water, with bulldozer tracks still on the ground. It was bare, barren, with difficult access, and obviously unsuitable. Still it was the last property on a dead end road and surrounded on three sides by State Forest. And Spirit had delivered them there without them knowing about this place.

So they sat, linked in, meditated and asked the question of Spirit, "Is this the place to build a community?” When they opened their eyes, they were greeted by a resplendent rainbow. Spirit had answered the question. This was the place.

1981 The Academic

The academic was enjoying the workshop. Having studied yoga and esoteric spirituality for seven years, he was enjoying listening to Dr Stan.

He had listened to Stan at an International Conference on Transpersonal Psychology only 10 days ago, and now here he was at an "experiential workshop".

For the last day and a half he and two friends along with 20 or so other eager seekers of spiritual truth had listened as the learned man had outlined his 25 years of research in altered states of consciousness. Initially utilising LSD25, once it became illegal to use for research purposes, the researcher had found ways of using the breath, sound, bodywork and art to enable people to explore the outer/inner reaches of consciousness.

The academic was no stranger to exploring breath. For the last eight years he had done pranayama-yogic exercises designed to clear the subtle energy channels of the body. Initially under the guidance of Margrit Segesman (?) the first yoga teacher in Australia, and then under the tutelage of Christopher Hills. The academic felt privileged to be a student of these teachers, particularly Hills, for not only was Hills a yogi acharya, but he had two PhDs.

The time had come to get down to business - basically he was to hyperventilate for up to one and a half hours with an agreement with his "sitter" that should he stop breathing then the sitter would tap his chest, in order to remind him to breathe.

And so he began.

In, out, in, out. Soon the body began to tremble as energy built up in it. Ripples of sensual energy moved along his spine, his body gave spontaneous jerks, as surface and deeper tensions released.

From time to time images of events from the past filtered through his mind, snatches of conversations, feelings of hurt, anger, need, desire moved from one to the other as the body let go of some of its past. And always the relentless rasping of the breath, the mouth and throat becoming dry, tears from the eyes, snot from the nose, tissues and breath, hands clenched in rage and the breath, remorselessly in and out, pain in the body, the fingers and hands cramping and unable to move and the music, loud, fiery, evocative, intense rocketing into the body, distributing feelings, provoking memories leading higher.

Snatches of memories from other times, images of other places, cultures, religions, art, designs, sounds of other participants, laughing, crying, screaming, raging, breathing, choking and always the music, familiar, foreign, classic, voices, orchestral, solitary, unison, switching into being part of everything that was happening in the room, being in the body, out of the body, the music heading higher and higher, further and further, deeper and deeper, more and more longing, building, extending, reaching, climbing, journeying, then suddenly a change and Pachelbel's Canon in D began to caress his soul, touch his heart, bless him with love and ............................he .............................. exploded ......................................... into .............................................. God.

He was in the living presence of God, light, all knowledge, wisdom, compassion, beauty, longing, fulfillment, all happening simultaneously, although this time not with another but with the All. And there was Christ and angels and healing power was coming into and through his hands and he was to become/is a healer. And knowledge was directly available to him, he could sell his academic books-he didn't need them anymore. He and the All were One and whatever he needed to know could come to him directly. He was loved, blessed, accepted, healed and transformed. This was his path.

Information as energy was cascading into his body, his cells were being reprogrammed, his possible futures were being rewritten, transformation was happening now-he would leave academia-his destiny was calling.

1983 The Consciousness Researcher

The consciousness researcher was lying on a mat on the ground reflecting on some of his experiences. His mind drifted through some of his inner journeys since he had done Dr Stan’s workshop.

His partner had left him to go and live with his best friend, and he was now godfather to their child at whose birth he had been present.

The second session with Dr Stan, utilising hyperventilation, had taken him into another part of the cosmic game — the realm of the cosmic joke. The joke is that eventually nothing matters. All is One and All is an Illusion. His cherished beliefs, struggles, yearnings, philosophical theories had all dissolved into the illusion that they were, and he laughed uproariously, continuously, his whole body in paroxysms of humour, rolling around on the floor, clutching his belly, tears streaming from his eyes, possessed by the insight of the Gods — in the end none of this matters, this realm is Maya, the play of light and energy, the theatre of the Divine, the Thoughts in the mind of God, the dreaming of the Source. We are the One and the Many, we are not separate, this is a mistake of the mind. We are all One — and around he rolled, continuing peals of laughter ripping through him as his body learnt this new truth.

For over an hour this heavenly divine humour of the delicious absurdity of limited human insight rocked his body. Old limitations released, new insights solidified, adjustments were made to the navigational map of his life and all the time laughter, full bodied, total — the great joke of it all had finally been revealed.

* * *

In the intervening years he had set up a breath therapy centre in Melbourne and with a psychologist friend had started taking others through the breath process. Profound healing had occurred as the breath had carried them on journeys through time and space. Past lives, ancestors, replays of mystic dramas, recapitulations and release of birth trauma, journeys to the end of time—all had happened in the lounge room of an inner city terrace.

The consciousness researcher and the psychologist had begun serious mapping of inner space, adding powerful psychedelics into their armamentum. Guided ritual use of sacred initiatry substances became their cartographic tool.

Within a year the researcher was living in a simple abode in the country, alone with the earth, the wind, clouds, trees and stars. As day turned to night he would pour out his loneliness in prayer to the Spirit of Life. He offered his life to be of service, to heal, to bring wholeness. He took a vow of celibacy until and unless a new tantric partner emerged, and he experienced the dropping away of the past — old connections, meaning, places, comforts.

A simple corrugated shed — no water, power or lights, took him to simplicity. His only companions were half a dozen chooks, although two days a week he would go to the city to teach, sleeping on the floor at his office overnight, showering in the gym — a slight glint of the god possessed in his eyes—strung out, changing, not knowing where life was taking him, trusting, exploring, pushing the edges of his psyche.

Sometimes he would go into the forest to cut a fence post with a bow saw. In the silence of the trees and the wind the world would begin to change. He would step out of the flow of linear time into synchronic time where everything was connected and the subtle flow of spirit could be divined in the wind. The rustle of the leaves of trees, in the calls of the birds and the movement of animals. Gradually he started to learn the language of nature and could hear the advice that trees had to give. His questions to Spirit would be answered by the gentle caress of the wind that would blow its inspiration into his brain and form up the answer to his request. He was learning to read the hidden order, that ebb and flow of information that surrounds us when we are quiet and available in nature.

And all the time he was changing.

One ritual journey in particular stood out in his mind. As his consciousness altered and started to move towards the speed of light he began to relive his life. He went through every event, thought, activity that had composed his life up till then. "My God”, he thought, drawing on his research on the dying process, "I’m dying”, as his consciousness began to speed away from the earth. With his connections to his three children as his only link to others, he checked out with them, sensed that they could continue without him, and so he went. Into the realm of the dying and the dead. He passed a realm of disembodied beings whose bodies are in the back wards of pyschiatric institutes—barely mobile as if there is no-one there. He heard their prayers and songs to spirit—rapturous songs of praise and realised that they had chosen not to go back to their bodies but to continue to shower the earth with praise. He realised that they were modern saints and instead of being incarcerated in wheelchairs they should be surrounded with devotion and veneration.

And on he journeyed. Through the mythic realms — the archetypal images that humans live and finally exploding into light. He was in the place known as eternity. Outside of the flow of time every moment is the eternal present — no past, no future, only the ecstatic moment of now, forever, and always. This was heaven.

As well as the eternal present there was the eternal presence — forever and all ways. The eternal presence of beingness, eternal praise, eternal love. He had died, left his body and he was home. Hallelujah!

Several hours later he had come back into his body, lying on the floor of his simple shed. He was back, he was still alive, and he was pissed off. He wanted to go back home.

* * *

These were the memories of the consciousness researcher as he settled into the current journey.

Easter Sunday, he believed, was filled with a current of spiritual energy that washed the earth as Christians celebrated the resurrected Christ. He was going to rise on those currents as an eagle soars on the wing.

Soon the energetic currents lifted his spirit and he soared into unknown parts of interstellar space. Moving past meteors, comets, stars, constellations, he was drawn to a point which he did not know. Shifting into warp speed his consciousness moved into turbocharged travelling, and he rocketed through space. Luke Skywalker eat your heart out.

After some time out of time, he sensed an enormous energetic presence in the distance, and as he came closer to it was filled with immense feelings of love.

His speed slowed down and he sensed an enormous space flotilla, gigantic, travelling together—a whole civilisation mobile in space—everything that was needed for life was carried on these enormous ships that travelled in the subtle realms of space.

The closer he came the stronger was the energy field which he entered. There was a presence in the centre of the flotilla that he was drawn to. It was the most profound presence of creative love — over and above what could ever be imagined or even talked about. As the body of his consciousness came close, he was filled with this profound presence that reorganised the very nature of his consciousness.

There were force fields emanating from the central presence and each one closer to the centre was stronger. In order to enter the next force field, aspects of identity, the past, plans for the future, all had to be surrendered.

At the same time, each force field was an increase in energy that echoed through all parts of the consciousness researcher’s being, even back to the body lying under an apple tree on the earth. The consciousness researcher’s awareness was able to monitor the increasing energy manifesting in the physical body and see it beginning to undulate as he sought to go closer to this mystery of powerful love.

Every vestige of personal identity, desire, wish, plan, possibility, history, dropped away until finally there was pure being in the presence of the most amazing love that would ever be possible. Surrender, profound, total, forever and always was offered. "Here am I Lord, use me”, was echoed across time and space to the being at the centre of the flotilla that took on the form of a three-foot high robot. With the surrender total, energetic transmission and merging took place.

The body back on earth was now beginning to overheat. The researcher did everything he knew to offload the energetic increase that was happening. Anchoring it onto the earth, sending it to friends didn’t fully cope with the intensity that now was causing energetic paroxysms in the body.

Checking the state of the body systems the researcher could see that the body was rapidly approaching stroke and melt down conditions. He visualised a control panel in the body’s brain and turned the appropriate switches to off.

Immediately everything stopped. The researcher was back on earth in a totally ordinary state of mind, and the body was absolutely fine. As he lay, sombrely reflecting on what had happened, the researcher realised he had surrendered his life to the being that is often identified as the Coming Christ. That gave him great joy and was always an immense source of inspiration in the challenging times of the years that followed.

He had totally surrendered his life to enable that love to come onto earth.