Seeds, The Dead and Planting Our Lineages

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We often think about the Dead as beings who don’t belong here and therefore must be moved on. Indeed, those who haven’t crossed over and who haven’t walked their path toward Compassionate Being status will cause more harm to humans than not, even with the best of intentions.

However, if we stop thinking about them in the negative for a moment (that is, about where they don’t belong), we can meditate instead about what happens when they are situated where they do belong, in right relationship with the Universe.

As Eckhart Tolle said:  life is not the opposite of death; birth is the opposite of death. Life continues through all of these phases, whether in this world or the next. Just as there are lives that we are meant to live here, so are there lives and purposes that await the Dead. So what is a good life for the Dead?

When we depossess a being or otherwise help a deceased person move out of this world (what’s called the Middle World in shamanic-speak), we are bringing them out of their limbo and revivifying them—setting them back onto the course of their own destiny. It’s the life that their natures (as nonphysical beings) are calling for. Just as the physical humans are charged with making Life (capital “L”) live in this world, the Dead have their own part to play in the after-life—either becoming Compassionate Ancestors who help their descendants live well or in another role where their consciousness fits in the larger Cosmos of the Seen or Unseen Worlds.

In a manner of speaking, we are all seeds for one another. The living are the seeds which germinate physical reality, being cooked by our experiences so we can grow into Spiritual Sprouts for the next world. (For more on these ideas and extraordinary languaging, read Martin Prechtel’s books.) The Ancestors cultivate us in this way—exposing us to whatever conditions—whatever extremes of heat and cold, abundance or lack, etc.—we need in order to finally crack open and activate the most precious part of ourselves. The deceased are the seeds of Ancestors-to-be; by helping them cross over and reconnect with the Divine, we are planting a garden of Compassionate Spirits who, when they are ready, may help us live good lives in the Middle World.

The Compassionate Ancestors, in turn, cultivate future generations as they inject our lineages with their accumulated experience and wisdom (the true blessings of the Ancestors) which sprout into life-giving attitudes and understandings that feed our wild and blossoming hearts.

Destiny is not a divine edict imposed upon us by a fierce and fearsome external deity. Destiny is the dictate of our own true natures…what happens when we unleash our True Selves (the Truth of Ourselves), and allow its wriggling, warm and untutored movement in this or another world. It’s Life feeling itself in its myriad forms.

When we release the Dead into THEIR lives, not only are we tending the field of life in this world (becoming being true gardeners and caretakers of the Middle World’s energy field), but we finally release the nutrients that our world has to offer to the next. When we die, we take our accumulated experiences, lessons and matured natures and bring them into the Spirit World. That is, we become the humus of experience and humanity that enriches the world of Spirit. The world of Spirit, in turn, nourishes physical humans through its guidance, unconditional love and wisdom. The more alive we become in this world, the richer our gifts when we return to the Other World. The richer our gifts, the greater the blessings the Other World bestows on our descendants. This is how we partake in the great cosmic cycles of life.

Curses and the Language of Victimhood

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It’s a long-standing tradition in indigenous societies to visit your village shaman if you thought you’ve been cursed or spiritually injured by another. These injuries usually came at the hands of a sorcerer, a paid agent of one’s enemies. We modern folk, who have worked long and hard at civilizing the “savage” in us, dislike such talk because it raises the hackles of ancestral superstitious impulses that we want to think we have long buried (and don’t ever want to see again).

Middle World practitioners know how alive and kicking these impulses are—however much grave dirt we may try to throw on them. It’s not EEE-VIL, really. It’s human. It’s human when you harbor ill-will toward that mean aunt who just took away your favorite toy. Enough 9-to-5-ers have a Voodoo doll of their bosses inside their skulls that they torture in order to relieve the burden of their unjust serfdom. For that matter, how many corporations have cursed their clientele with goods that are intentionally fashioned for profit and not for the benefit of the populace. It’s part and parcel.

Thoughts are things, we’re oft told. If we can heal ourselves or manifest our wishes, then it stands to reason that in the great balance of the Universe, we can also harm ourselves and manifest our nightmares. Pollyanna thinking is ineffective when it denies the actuality of what’s going on. If we stick our fingers in our ears, pinch shut our eyes and start reciting positive mantras, we’re shutting ourselves off from the world of reality and (here’s the kicker) we’re doing it because deep inside we’re scared of what’s REALLY going on…meaning that the root intention of our actions (our rites) is the validation of what we fear. (Yeah, read that last sentence again.)

So again, it behooves all people (but practitioners especially) to closely examine the seeds of their actions—even when it’s wrapped in bright-and-shiny denial.

. . .

The validity of curses need to be handled with level-heads. After all, we can scare more soul out of our clients by filling their minds (not yet hardened by initiatory experiences) with stories about curses and possessing thoughtforms…thereby leaving them more vulnerable than we found them, and to the very things we’re trying to help them with.

But how do we talk about how curses without freaking our clients out? The very nature of curses implies intention to harm, injury, vulnerability, unjust causality, existential uncertainty and fear of the unknown. A big mosh-pit of human chaos.

The strategy some practitioners enforce is:  Do the work, but don’t talk, think or otherwise mention it ever again. Perhaps this works for some, but I’ve always sensed, as a client, when this sleight-of-hand is operational (and this was even before I ever began practicing shamanism). The subsequent dissatisfaction left an unquenchable thirst to know the truth…a thirst that I also see in many clients. Because not telling them what’s really going down is equivalent to telling them that neither they nor the practitioner (in your best Jack Nicholson voice, now) can handle the truth.

And what does it mean when we can’t handle the truth? If truth isn’t the thing that we’re handling in a shamanic session, then we might as well register in an Actor’s Guild. “Can’t handle the truth” means that, in our shamanic work, there is not a presence, a consciousness, a wisdom, a power that’s present/conscious/wise/powerful enough to handle what’s really happening when someone (intentionally or not) curses another. So. Not. True.

Illustration: When a kid has gashed their shin or broken their arm, and his friends run from the scene screaming bloody murder or lifting their open palms to the heavens at life’s incomprehensibility, it deepens the kid’s sense that something is majorly (perhaps irreparably) wrong. On the other hand if an adult comes along who (while sympathetic to the pain) knows exactly what to do and tells the child, in a knowing way, that everything is going to be okay then the pain can be borne without panic.

Illustration 2: This even works when the child has been the target for intentional misdeeds. An adult can either get hot-under-the-collar and deepen the Mini-Me’s sense of injustice and wounding, or the adult can help bring the child to understand some valuable life-lessons, take appropriate action, and teach her how to effectively deal with such situations–all with the understanding that these things happen…and the quicker we learn to take them in stride, the easier our lives will be and the faster we can get on with more important things like friendships and growing into the people we’re meant to become (instead of meditating on the wrong-doing and possibly perpetuating the victim-pattern throughout life).

Where does such mature, wo/manly attitudes blossom? In our own hearts and minds when we deal with our own pockets of fear and victimhood…those little (un)intention seeds inside the happy-go-lucky ideas of ourselves that we maintain to preserve functional sanity. It means going hammer-and-tongs into our own history (personal and ancestral), peeling back the glossy layers, and realizing that we can fix the unfixable. We can stare into the gullet of our deepest fears, and (while the ride can get wet and wild) we come out of it okay—enough times that we don’t pee our pants each time anymore. In other words, we’ve initiated ourselves (with serious Spirit help) and passed the guardians of No-Can-Do, Too-Big-To-Fix, and Just-Live-With-It.

[Equip yourself properly and take some solid Middle World training before undertaking a meeting with such guardians…Betsy Bergstrom’s classes are excellent.]

To the degree that practitioners don’t take their Hero’s Journey into their fears is the degree to which they will continue to buy into and therefore perpetuate the Language of Victimhood through their clients. At best, such language evokes a commiserating sympathy and at worst sustains the client’s victimhood—and those who come to practitioners to commiserate aren’t interested in actual healing because they’re not done with their victimhood. Serious Gotta-Heal folks want to run to the hands of reassuringly adept, mature practitioners. (I know, this can create an overwhelming Middle World learning curve for newbies, but at the least this Darwinian process ensures that only tenacious, scrappy and effective practitioners make the cut…another guardian to pass.)

Braggadocio and (blind) Positive Thinking doesn’t work. Neither, really, does Fake-it-till-you-make-it. Only the solidity that many pee-free self-honesty sessions impart will give you the aura of knowing, compassionate adult that the vulnerable crave. In a rocking shamanic session, not only is the practitioner’s Truth-O-Meter active, but so is the client’s. So faking it won’t wash (and frankly, I don’t know how any practitioner can get away with it if their Helpers are standing around with a burly Truth stick at the ready), or it will register with the client at an unconscious level and cause anything from irritation to anxiety.

The reality is that many Middle World practitioners (the butt-naked honest ones) will be scared shitless for a bit. So we should all take heart and keep facing the challenges that appear on our path without getting too down on ourselves. After all, if the Spirits choose us, we’re meant for this work. (Read Martin Prechtel’s last chapters of Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, and he will tell you the same thing about his first years as a shaman.)

I’ll continue this discussion next time about some of the implications of rapidly initiating and maturing ourselves

Magical Thinking and Our 360 Senses

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Ancient Egyptians believed that full humans (which may mean people who have run the gamut of initiations) have 360 senses. Mind Scrambling. My marbles roll confusedly on the floor just thinking about it. Okay, so we’ve got five down…more or less. Rupert Sheldrake tells us that sixth sense has been appropriated by scientists to categorize the way that animals use the magnetic, gravitational and electric fields to detect migrate, detect prey, etc. (and there has to be at least a few senses stirred in there). Sheldrake goes on to coin the term “seventh sense” to engulf all the other extra-sensory perceptions like clairvoyance, precognition and telepathy (the three that he focuses on) and describes how difficult it is for researchers to tease these three apart.

Those of us who have taken classes from Betsy Bergstrom knows that there are different types of extra-sensory perception like clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, clairolfaction, instant knowing, etc. If we stretch everything out to its extreme, we may come up with almost 20 senses that we know of. The implications of this are immense.

Ancient Egyptians had an understanding that we do not know a concept or thing until we knew all aspects of it. Quick calculations say that the most astoundingly psychic of us would know only about 5.5% of anything. This is where humility and the Great Mystery come in.

Do you remember when you were little and you made something, a picture perhaps, and you showed it to someone who didn’t appreciate it or thought it was just clutter? If this happens on a regular basis, eventually that special something that we had (that we put into the picture) withers and goes dormant for lack of recognition, acknowledgement and feedback from the outer world. It’s like it didn’t exist. Eventually, we ourselves forget about it. This, my friends, is soul loss. Lack of perception can engender soul loss.

What happens when we walk the world, appreciated only for the quantifiables: money, possessions, appearances, career, etc.? What happens to all of those non-goal-oriented parts of us? What happens to the peach-lick toed, mudlicious, creamy nougat, juicy joy parts that could: feel what Christmas Morning was, sniff the change of seasons, eat the sunshine in an orange or allow the undulations of the sea run through our bodies as we stand on the beach?

This is what makes life worth living. Jobs and possessions allow us to live so we can experience the world in our own way, to feel these things and thereby become one of the tongues of God/Goddess/Allah/All-That-Is that’s busily licking our own scoops from the 5-gagillion flavors of the Great Baskin-Robbins of Life.

Such people, each in their own way, contribute to the experience of the greater whole of which we are all a part. So it behooves us to help people find their destined scoop of life and regain their abilities to enjoy it–because at the deepest levels (where our commonality finally trumps our divisions) we are enriched by their experience too.

Sacred Space and the Archeology of Motives

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As with surgery, in shamanism we want to maintain clean workable spaces when we roll up our sleeves and get elbow deep into Soul. We want to create Sacred Space. It’s such a basic principle of most indigenous shamanic practices, and yet not something often talked about in trainings.

For many of us, we have routines—perhaps setting up our altars, honoring our spirits, maintaining power objects, smudging the room, and calling in the Spirits. But even in situations when such elaborate routine is not possible (ICUs, for instance) the one sine qua non for setting space (besides the presence of the Spirits) is our intention. Our intentions provide the “rules” or “guidelines” of the playing field in which energy runs. (The actual mechanics is provided by our cosmologies, but that’s another post.)

A practitioner is the main power object in a healing session. S/He is the power object for the Spirits. We anchor spiritual realities into the physical world. Being a power object is a capacity everyone has to varying degrees, but shamans are born (by agreement) and beaten into serviceable shape for the Spirit by initiatory experiences. They are therefore effective power objects for the Spirits.

Human beings are in a privileged position—we are Spirit but we are also players in this physical realm. While the Spirits affect us, they don’t grease all the squeaky wheels of this world without our help because the human sphere of the Middle World was set up for us to learn through Free Will, Choice and Awareness. This is why, in most cases, only the living can help the dead if they haven’t crossed over after a time…because we are the ones responsible for setting the space in the human portion of the Middle World.

A practitioner is a power object, but a power object with history. Power objects with histories are mixed bags. Some have gathered much healing power over the years, but in most shamanic cultures they often are considered dangerous enough to outsiders that they must be buried with the owner. Those who attempt to use these artifacts usually need to purge enough of the original owner’s energy from the object before they can use it.

In our case what we need to purge are our motives, and our motives are tied to the artifacts of our history and psyche: our wounds and insecurities, our needs and the world’s inability to meet them. We’re matryoshka dolls, and we can’t assume that what’s within us is a mirror to our conscious intentions. Our motives to heal and do right may carry deeper personal needs (feeling power or wanting attention) or ulterior motives (proving that I am a good person or that I’m worthy). And unless we’re aware or have mechanisms to deal with these surprise-centers in our chocolate box, they can end up messing with our space setting in small (or not-so-small) ways. Intention is tied to motive.

Consider the above issues seriously, but don’t freak. The reality is that intentionality is a skill that we all need to hone and re-hone, and we’re always going to find surprise-centers. Being a responsible practitioner doesn’t mean being perfect or “pure,” it means taking responsibility for what you know and don’t know about yourself. Meanwhile you can make an agreement with your Helpers to face and work with your hidden motives, provided that they keep them clear of the space during a shamanic session. Learning this skill can be bitter medicine, but if we’re not afraid of the passing discomfort we can come out much better practitioners.