CONTINUED FROM ST. LAWRENCE 7 7-30-25
ST. LAWRENCE 8 9-03-25 CONTINUED STUDY OF SHAMANISM.
Traumatic shock can cause the collapse of psychic structures, in the ruins of which paranormal sensitivities can begin to grow. There is difficulty discerning psychosis from experiences of a growing spiritual consciousness.
A master shaman explains that learning to heal is simply learning to see in a mystical sense. And that anyone can culture the ability of psychic seeing. However some are clearly called to become a shaman.
The sickness that besets those called to the path of the shaman lessens when the initiate begins to go into trances, and practice healing.
Horrible sickness comes to those called, and remains until they obey.
Every sickness is an attempt at healing, and every healing an attempt to escape the neuroses of ordinary consciousness. Sickness can be the road to a super human nature. In this way, schizophrenia is a sacred illness. A sacred illness which by its powers makes it possible for mystical and metaphysical insights and powers to arise. But often making a normal life impossible.
There is always, however, a natural human resistance to change. The resistance to leap from three dimensional to multi dimensional perception. Even though celestial wisdom and powers have always been a goal of mankind.
The point is restated, ascending to a higher plane of consciousness is often marked by disease.+.
Disease purifies and prepares, cleansing one from mental, spiritual and emotional baggage, allowing one to transcend limitations. As does vomiting, intense perspiration, fasting, pain, fever, bathing, isolation, exhaustion, and sickness that brings obstacles to the surface to be shed. This creates a sensitivity of being within the shaman that allows him to heal the illnesses of others.
Many shamans have empathically absorbed and thusly shed, and healed the disease of others.
According to the modern view, illness disrupts and destroys life. Whereas the shaman experiences his sickness as a call to destroy the life within, that a new life might be born.
The symptoms of shamanic sickness are confused physical, psychic and social reactions. Behaviors that deride and ridicule accepted customs and standards. Initiates become holy fools indulging in unworthy, shameless or perverse behavior. The initiate, fool, exposes to society it’s limits and artificiality, and demonstrates a dimension that is limitless.
Sickness prepares the person for out of body experiences, O.B.E.’s, in which the subject is sanctified and empowered through contact with sacred entities. “He has been taught by the spirits, and must serve the spirit world.
CHAPTER NINE RITUALS OF DISMEMBERSHIP AND BONE DISPLAYS.
Initiation always signifies death and resurrection.
True transcendence involves a genuine death, and not merely an imaginary death experience.
The death experience of the shaman is a dangerous walk on a tight rope between this world and the beyond. It is not a pseudo death.
The dramatic death experience features several themes. There are guardians at the entrance to the other world. There is hell, a place of torment, and spiritual messengers. There is a purifying fire, restoring purity.
Fasting is another important factor. It strengthens the power of concentration, and weakens the body. It inclines the subject to sensitivity and spiritual encounter.
Simple ritual, chanting, fasting, dance, grinding stones together, unending concentration, evoke an altered state by decimation the ego.
“The polar bear then arises from the sea, and devours the body of the initiate. His ego is wiped out. As the bear devours every shred of flesh from the bones, the soul and spirit of the initiate is cleansed.
Often the initiate seeks the loneliness of the wilderness, where he surrenders to the power of plants, animals, rocks, waters the wind and the sun. The author states that wolves and bears are not today used as spirit animals because so few are left that a mystical encounter is highly improbable.
The experience of dismemberment is a universal transpersonal experience.
In Greenland, the apprentice allows worms to drain his blood, until he becomes unconscious. This method is said to produce highly gifted shamans.
Or the initiate is banished to the tundra, and while facing the elements receives his powers. While becoming aware of his smallness and helplessness in the face of nature, he becomes aware of the mystical unity of nature, and all life.
Returning to society, he is unsure of himself, and behaves in a socially and mentally abnormal manner. This is the way a healer, medicine man, shaman, is born.
Introduction of new internal organs or crystals into the body of the initiate shows rebirth and purification. +.
In an Australian tribe, being swallowed by the rainbow snake symbolizes the path from death to rebirth.
In another tribal cult spirit guides slit open the initiates body, hanging up his entrails on a tree. Then they cook the body over sacred stones. After which they replace his organs and close him up. Magical stone are placed within. He is then able to fly, descend to the lower worlds, and transcend space and time.
The initiate must give up all work, and becomes emaciated. His soul then travels to the ancestral tree on the ancestral mountain. There he swallowed by his animal mother, to be reborn as an animal.
The shaman tree stands on a mountain, so that it’s topmost branches reach the heavens and the roots reach the lower world. The trunk of the tree represents our earthly realm, the middle world. The branches are home to yet unborn clansmen in the form of birds. In the roots live shamanic ancestors, and the animal mother. There is a primordial connection between humans and nature. The World Tree is a universal symbol of the cosmological order.
Many practicing shamans can only cure those diseases they have experienced.
Again the power of the shaman is directly related to the degree he has suffered in his initiatory crises.
Some tribals believe only those with an excess bone, which is found in dismemberment, can become shamans.
Many tribals cannot separate psychic reality from material reality. Therefore description of the mystical realm uses metaphors borrowed from the external world.
Dismemberment equals the extinction of past knowledge and the collapse of the ego.
True health can only be achieved through destruction, followed by reconstitution and reformation. The word resurrection is used.
CHAPTER 10. IMAGINARY FRIENDS, PARTIAL PERSONALITIES, AND GENUINE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD
Shamanist powers require the aid of helping and answering spirits. Spirits consciously and willfully obtained, who come of their own accord.
A seer may be observing his inner mind, reflecting exactly the leading of his spirit helpers.
“I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels so long as he lives in the body. And others say that it is all fantasy. Others relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections
. But, by all this I am not deterred, for I have seen, I have heard, I have felt”.
When in solitude, the wilderness, or in decision making, we split our consciousness into partial personalities, and allow them to talk to each other. Normal thought becomes an inner dialogue.+.
In isolation, or in a mountainous environment, a desert, or a vast body of water, psychic energy turns inward, allowing exploration of the soul, and deeper levels of consciousness. The greater the degree of isolation, like a miner buried or a subject in an isolation tank, the more intense the reality of the subjects encountered. Partial personalities can be helpful partners in dangerous times, or in the decision making process.
Some people, children especially, receive spirit helpers, or friends. They appear fully human, although they disappear and reappear at will. The text, here, is afraid to concede spirit helpers as real, and alive. Even though they speak precognitively. It truly takes courage to speak the phrase “I believe in God and in His heavenly hierarchy”.
Chanting is a universal technique in being a shaman, as is dance.
Loneliness, uniform landscapes, monotonous behavior, a meditative state of mind, are all prerequisites for a higher state of consciousness.
Encountering phantom companions does not make one a shaman. Dismemberment, or the exchange of internal organs, death, is required.
The shaman has lifelong allies.
Western science has not yet discovered how to invoke and use spirit allies.
Endless repetition of any type can induce a transpersonal state. Consider factory work. Once the stream of stimuli is reduced, the consciousness opens itself to a new dimension.
Rubbing rocks,
Invoking the polar bear,
Who carries the initiate under the water of a lake,
The initiate looses consciousness,
And awakes on the lake’s shore.
The shaman becomes an important person in his community.
He rubs a small stone on a large stone. Fatigue occurs, and then hunger. But the shaman persists until he is in a trance. In a trance he receives the spirit helpers he needs at that time. The uninterrupted repetition of an activity to the point of total exhaustion is an important triggering mechanism for seeing spirits.
SICKNESS – PREREQUISITE FOR THE GIFT OF HEALING.
The spirit allies can take the form of ancestors, angels, animals, the sun, moon, waterfalls, rainbows, plants or constellations. Tobacco can be used as a protecting spirit.
The novitiate shaman cannot easily attend white schools. A relationship with a spirit ally is often a marriage with all its loves, hates, jealousy, distrust, obedience, fear, longing, and quarrels.
Along the road from psychoanalysis to transpersonal psychology new insights have compelled us to dismantle our arrogance toward those considered primitive.
In Einstein’s universe, space, time, and matter are functions dependant on the observer.
The existence of helping spirits has three possible explanations.
1).Psychological need. Expression of repressed desires. +.
2).A spirit protector or ally is not a manifestation of the imagination, but part of a super conscious reality.
3).Spiritist hypothesis. The shaman believes all life is a dynamic of spiritual forces.
CHAPTER 11.SPIRIT MARRAIGES AND DREAM SEXUALITY
Sexual and erotic contacts should not be seen as extraordinary. Especially for the saint, shaman or psychic priest.
Between the spirit and the shaman there exists a division of labor. The shaman is used by his spirit for healing and teaching. In return the shaman becomes telepathic, clairvoyant, precognizant, and is able to journey in the spirit. The guardian spirit may even kill his shaman partner’s adversaries.
Sexual contact with a being from another dimension can be very gratifying, refreshing. But the spirit partner sometimes literally rapes the shaman.
The spirit partner is not a mere imagination. She instructs the shaman, allows him to use para-psychic gifts, and to communicate with the realm of the dead.
The spirit partner acts to place the shaman in a socially esteemed position.
Even in today’s western society spirit contact enables cultural and artistic achievements. ANY PERSON can achieve a psychic or transpersonal state if he desires, through fasting, chanting, praying,
meditating or dancing.
Psychiatry serves to negate and destroy the extraordinary, spiritual, experience. Where a true psychology would consider visions of heavenly beings and landscapes as desirable and therapeutic. And not, as is today, functions of a pathological mind.
Psychology, as a discipline, must culture an awareness and understanding of the realm of psychic and spiritual phenomena. And this may require searching back into the ethnic structure of ancient cultures.
The person approached by a spirit mate may resist or fear. Sometimes the marriage results in Spirit Children being born in the Beyond.
With the acceptance of a spirit mate, all health problems subside
Competition between earthly and spirit lovers sometimes occurs.
The novitiate is often forced to take a spirit spouse. Refusing the spirit mate causes great suffering. In accepting his or her spiritual lover, the shaman is given extraordinary powers.
The blind are thought to have an advantage over the seeing in becoming a shaman. As well as those with other handicaps, psychological and physical.
The psychic processes of deconditioning in distant cultures are identical. Despite great cultural and geographical distance. For example, the Eskimo grinds stones to enter trance and talk with his spirits. The Japanese initiate accomplishes the same goal grinding rice with a mortar and pestle.
Here the author castigates modern psychology again for not looking deeper into these types of borderline or doorway experiences.+.