Halfway to Solstice

She walks a path of long meandering; gentle rolls; trying chasms; circuitous switchbacks and folds. 

Sloping meadows rustle their dried grasses; a forest edged in budding twigs beckons higher with aspen and birch.

Snowpack exhales, rivulets form; waters fall, pools tremble and listen.

All awakening is swept up in her passing, a sensorium wave, a subtle biotic pulse… begins.

It buoys and energizes her, whets her attention and connection with a vast sense of presence. 

Finally she sits, slowly, on a bald dome of warmed granite, and meditates.

…

Viewing from above, above conventional north, the earth turns counter-clockwise on its axis.

The moon orbits in the same direction, and we go round the sun a-widdershins together.  All the planets in our solar system spin and orbit likewise, and even their moons about them.  Except for Venus, and some of Jupiter’s misfit children.

But the galaxy herself, she burls majestically clockwise, 200 million years at a turn

…

A bright bird begins to sing in a nearby lodgepole, and pins the stillness to a moment.  A singularity of consciousness snaps out across light years. 

For an instant, she sees the stars and the bird.

They walk over crisp snow under a bone moon

The stillness of the cold, the clear, thin air

touches them lightly, stinging

as they walk amongst the peaks.

It draws the heat, the dew of breath, into itself.

Stinging with the touch of a cruel love,

understanding nothing of comfort, only crystalline beauty.

Reaching slow and delicate arms over infinite distance to still it all.

 

Everyone just rest one moment, and be.

Be with me, silent, and I will breathe with you, your dew,

to dust on the grasses, the stones,

to reflect the light in a galaxy of eyes.

How I love to transmit and reflect the light!

Be with me, hold my hand in communion,

bow your heads.

I will move and bow your heads…

And I will bring you the moon of your ancestors, the hunger moon, the bone moon.

Walk beneath it as they once did, share with me your breath as you walk, your glistening eyes.

 

I numb the air, from sound, from pressure, from all uncertain oscillation.

I steel you, I focus you.

See, here, the landscape purified by indigo clarity of night.

See, here, the shape and stretch and turn of these stars.

I am the medium in the void, the conduit, the sweeper, the bringer.

I am one moment in time, and I am always here.

 

Exercise your mind with Mindfulness Mediation

Been getting much deeper into the Buddhism aspect of my amalgamated spiritual path.  A new daily meditation practice is both surprisingly easy and difficult, in different ways.  It’s easier than I thought to commit to (almost) every day.  And it is much, much harder than I thought to actually do it. I mean, I’ve heard of monkey mind but it feels like a troop of gorillas is continually wrestling my focus away.  But after just a few weeks I noticed some differences, and now at two months even some more.

 

First, it does get easier to stay with the breath for more than 1.5 seconds, relatively quickly.

 

“Somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy.  Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and helpless. No problem.  You are not crazier than you were yesterday.  It has always been this way, and you just never noticed.”

 

– Bhante Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English

 

Second, benefits from this start to appear outside of meditation, also pretty quickly.  Just from the short habit of bringing attention back to the breath, I find it easier to hold my attention on individual tasks, and to more easily manage all the distractions of the digital age.

 

It’s become more important to me to really be with someone when we’re talking.  Too many times in the past my mind would wander to what I’d be saying next, or even some unrelated line of thinking.  That’s always felt rude to me, and I hated catching myself in it, but I never had the clarity to try and reform the habit.

 

Now I find that that working to be mindful of experience is much more a feeling of being connected to life, instead of one of the arbitrary fantasies that consume much of our attention.

 

Not bad for two months, and these are some typical observations from others as well.

 

Now, like most paths of improvement, there are advances and retreats.  Sometimes I feel a bit more irritable than I usually get (which is not much really), and that’s irritating.  But mindfulness can be applied to that too. It offers a way to be deeply present for all experiences in life, not to distance one’s self from them.  Yet it also helps relieve suffering when life experiences are “negative.”  We can be aware of the experience but not drowned by it.  And eventually, focused awareness is what dissolves these persistent downers.

 

That’s some of the stuff I’ve learned so far, and it doesn’t always come easy, but it sure is a rewarding path so far.

Well Said

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.  Nobody.  You built a factory out there—good for you.

But I want to be clear.  You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.  You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.  You were safe in your factory because of police forces or fire forces that the rest of us paid for.  You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory….

Now look.  You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea—God bless!  Keep a big hunk of it.  But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

–Elizabeth Warren

African Drum and Dance

I was surprised to find more than a couple of angles to drum & dance camp.

Rhythms and techniques of the West African djembe, sure,

   plus the lesser-known drums that define and drive the song: sangban, kinkene and dundun

      and the beautiful balafone.

Well, that’s what we paid for, to learn how Africans play out

   stories, romances, rivalries, gifts, wishes, prayers

   from simple arrangements of wood and hide.

 

I was surprised by added dimensions, unexpected.

 

Some classes were about song.  Like everything else, the African tradition is oral.

   no handouts, no whiteboard, little English.

   those of us with pen and paper scribbled and whispered.

In a rhythm class we asked: “does this rhythm have a song?”

   “Every rhythm has a song.”

   Every rhythm has a song.

 

The instructors from Guinea were to me intimidating at first.

Hardly smiling in class, serious about the material and focused, almost impatient.

Understandable.  These people have talent enough to win national recognition in Africa

   giving them reason and means to travel and live in other countries,

   teaching people with love of the drum, but maybe not so much ability.

 

We lament and make fun of the traditional teaching

   “Ok, gang-ga-dun-da-dun, ga-da-gung” … “do that”

   “No?  Watch my foot”

 

But there are teachers from our own native soil as well, who’ve spent more years than I can imagine learning the songs here and also in trips to Guinea, Senegal, Ghana…

They break it down for their fellow Americans and it helps.

We take our triumphs to the Africans with smiles, hoping they’ll shed a tiny part of that recognition

and what we learned underneath everything else was respect

  for the music, for the traditions, for the teachers, for their people, their ancestors and ours

  and for ourselves

 

After a few days, respect replaced intimidation.

 

Some classes were about dance, and I was surprise that I danced

   (just as I write this, someone in the bar says to someone else “when were you dancing?”)

But dance we did.  We danced the Dununba, the Strong Man dance.

   the women danced the steps they’d learned with energy and beauty

Happy to learn just a taste, I panicked when Mohamed said we’d all be in Saturday’s performance.

But that panic rended a vision of life as a river, and gratitude to be swept along in its current.

   At the performance, I had nothing but joy.

 

I was surprised how this all came together at Friday night’s folklore

Somehow those Africans brought the whole village with them to a small mountain in North Carolina and made us a part,

   made a village out of us

   and we drummed and danced and sang for hours of astonishing joy

   and it felt like coming home.

 

We even read some poets one quiet night – originals, obscure classics, Bukowski –

   sitting in a circle, like every other night, but this time no drums

   except for the stout beatnik Wally, who punctuated his awkward, beautiful piece with a driving Lengin.

Our western currents of commune resurged, resonating with tribal, rhythmic spirits roused by our teachers.

 

The whole week was pure poetry

When Propaganda from History Echoes Through Today

Recently, I’ve taken to watching early Fritz Lang films.  Lang was a brilliant director from the dawn of cinema, and his career lasted into the 1960s.  His Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) are stunning visual masterpieces of filmwork, standing the test of time for 80 years now.

I saw Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) last week.  Some of the dialog rang out with an eerie prescience…

Doctor Baum: No one has any idea what kind of phenomenal, superhuman mind has come to an end with Dr. Mabuse’s death. This mind would have laid waste to our whole rotten world, which is long overdue for destruction. This godless world, devoid of justice and compassion, consisting only of selfishness, cruelty and hatred. This mind would have destroyed mankind, which itself knows only hatred and destruction, and which could only have been saved in its final hour through terror and horror.

Captain Lohmann: Mabuse the criminal?

Baum: Mabuse the genius! His intellectual legacy would have turned your world, with its police protection, on its head!

Lohmann: His legacy? You speak of Mabuse’s legacy?

Baum: No… Yes… Of course, not a testament in the accepted sense of the word.  Just some of his notes, of interest only to physicians and men of science.

Lohmann: I’m afraid, Professor, that you underestimate the number of subjects in which I take an interest.

Dr. Mabuse’s Notes:

The Reign of Crime

Humanity’s soul must be shaken to it’s very depths, frightened by unfathomable and seemingly senseless crimes. Crimes that benefit no one, whose only objective is to inspire fear and terror.  Because the ultimate purpose of crime is to establish the endless reign of crime. A state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world doomed to annihilation. When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the reign of crime.

A historical note of the film’s censorship clues us to the potential impact of this message:

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was scheduled for release on March 24, 1933.  Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933 and on March 14, Hitler established the new Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels.  Before the film could be released, Goebbels had banned it as a menace to public health and safety, stating that he would not accept the film as it "showed that an extremely dedicated group of people are perfectly capable of overthrowing any state with violence." [Wikipedia]

But frankly, I think Goebbels may have had more of an issue with Lang’s characters acting a metaphor to depict the incoming Nazi regime as a Reign of Crime, along with their means of moving public opinion to go along.  And it makes me wonder if the evil doctor’s manifesto describes a real socio-political dynamic that still persists.

In the 1946 Nuremberg trials, Hermann Goering explains the role of propaganda that reminds me of Goebbel’s decision on the film:

Why, of course people don’t want war. But after all it is the leaders of a country that determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, a facist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Which would have to be my favorite quote from a Nazi war criminal, if such a thing can exist.

And no, I’m not trying to paint anyone as a Nazi, honestly I’m not.  Just trying to understand some things from a historical perspective to see what lessons we can take from them.

 

Finally, we see Kent and Lilli, who precipitate the plot’s climax… shown here not to illustrate the topic at hand, but just because I love the hats!

Oh, the fashion!

Those who cannot learn from history…

It’s just my opinion on this, but… to not know your history is to be amnesic.  I mean, if you met a person who couldn’t tell you where they were from 1970 to 1980, you would define them as a fairly damaged person.  But how many people do you meet who can tell you where western civilization was between 900 and 1600?  People don’t know.  So, since they don’t know, they can be fed any shit that is out there, and they have no idea. 

So the way to gain power is to reclaim a command of history.  Like, for instance, I remember when the Vietnam war was breaking out and I was in school at the University of California at Berkley.  And the professor said we all have to read Thucydides.  We all have to read about the war against Syracuse—which was in Sicily—and how it destroyed Greek democracy, and how it allowed the ascendency of the Dictatorship of the Thirty, and why did this happen: because the Athenian citizenry could not understand the war aims, and because the Athenian leadership clearly didn’t understand what the war aims were.  All the mistakes of the Vietnam war… occurred in this war which was fought well before the year zero. 

But you tell most people to read Thucydides and they just give you a strange look.  Well, it’s not because we want to be obscure or carry on conversations like Cambridge intellectuals, it’s because we want to know what to do with the future.  And the first thing you do with the future is: you don’t’ make the same stupid mistakes that were made in the past. 

Like this new age thing, it amazes me.  I mean, there are people who call themselves spiritual thinkers who think that the spiritual quest began with Madam Blavatsky for cryin’ out loud.  Well, I’ve got news for you, people have been over this ground again and again and again.  It always amazes me that people will give their loyalty to a guru who is obviously a grab-tailer and a tax-skate and a jerk, and you say to them, well, you know, have you read Plato?  Have you studied Nagarjuna?  Do you know what Moses Maimonides has to say about this?  Why do you follow this [other] guy, he probably hasn’t even read these people.  There’ve been some fairly bright people around over the last 6 or 7 thousand years and yeah, they don’t have a white limousine and they won’t invite you up to their place in the Hamptons, but they’re good, and all you have to do is go to the public library and read this stuff.  And people don’t want that, they want flash.

Very sincere people come to my workshops and I realize that they want me to tell them this stuff, and I guess because this is better than sitting at home on a Saturday afternoon and reading.  But Plato said it a lot better than I’m saying it.  And so did a lot of other people.  Civilization is a vast storehouse of wisdom, but if you don’t avail yourself of it then you have to figure it out based on what’s happened since Nixon or something.  And you’re not going to get very far.  You know, they trap you with that. 

What I saw happen to my own university.  I think that a conscious decision was made by the American establishment at the close of the 1960’s, and what they said to themselves was: this idea of universal education and an educated citizenry?  This, we don’t like.  We see now what happens when you educate your citizens—they figure out the game, and they come to you with their plans for reform and how to make it better.  So I was like, among (at least at the University of California), I was among the last people to go through that university where the goal was to inform you about the nature of the enterprise called Western Civilization.  And after that, what they got into was this MBA, data entry, all this stuff; the universities became trade schools.  And what they give you is video games. 

They give you TV, they give you video games, and they give you a skill.  And they say, well now, you’re a level 3 data enterer, and we’re going to give you $35,000 a year and please shut up about it.  That’s it, you’ve been brought inside and we’re not interested in your opinions.  We’re giving you a life, we’re giving you a trade, and we’ll be giving you some orders downstream, and by God you’d better snap to when the moment comes.  This has nothing to do with democracy.  This is fascism is what it is.

Terence McKenna, “Hermeticism and Alchemy” workshop, 1992.

 

This is great just standing on its own.  But one element of synthesis remains… Most of us first heard the expression “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” decades ago.  George Santayana coined this aphorism in 1906!  But the depth and import of it has never before hit me as powerfully as it did hearing Terence tell it as a story—a history—with irony, characters and examples.  And this reminds me of the power of storytelling as a tool of communication.  Exposing information to people academically often leads to a rather superficial understanding.  But delivering an idea in a story, whatever the media, can have a much more profound impact. 

I keep seeing art more as necessity rather than luxury.

Discovering Terence McKenna

I came across Terence McKenna a few years ago, via podcasts and books.  Terence is a shockingly imaginative thinker, and has that special gift of language to paint vivid, detailed images in his listeners minds from topics across human history, physics, chemistry, religion, sociology, paleontology, art and literature—that are at once beautiful, confounding, controversial and profound.  He juxtaposes histories and probes connections between dimensions, events, kingdoms of flora and fauna, and their genesis, evolution and destination. 

His ideas very convincingly explore themes such as the role of psychoactive plants on the evolution of language and self-awareness in primates, the value of resurrecting shamanic techniques to expand our understanding of mysteries that science may never penetrate, an interpretation of cultural phenomena such as messiah figures and UFOs as artifacts of global human intelligence coming to its own degree of self awareness and coping with the complexities of growth… and even weirder stuff.  He’s also got the most lucid discussion of James Joyce’s impenetrable masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake that I’d ever hope to hear.

Terence can take some getting used to, but for me, listening to or reading McKenna feels like stumbling across a Rosetta Stone for the universe.  The answers are not simple and pat, but many new maps for reaching answers are shared and explored.  Above all, his constant theme is to take responsibility for your own spiritual and intellectual quests, to question culturally delivered messages, and to think in ways that are more like the genre of magic realism than scientifically causal.

Here’s a bit of Terence, from his 1991 book, The Archaic Revival.

What it comes down to is trying to have faith that human beings are capable of doing good, because whatever we are, human beings are taking control of the definition of being human.  Through genetic engineering, through drug design, through probing of the psychedelic dimension, through mind/machine interphasing, we are beginning to become a mirror of our deepest aspirations.  The question then becomes “What are our deepest aspirations?  What will the future be?”  Will it be some kind of Mephistophelian nightmare, the Nietzschean superman, come back to haunt us in a way that could make the Third Reich look like a picnic?  Or will we choose the element of care and control, the aesthetic element, the wish to escape into a universe that is, in fact, art?

…

You can live in the social and religious system of Hellenistic Greece and offer sacrifice to Demeter, or you can live in twentieth-century America and watch the evening news, but you should have no faith that you are getting the true story on reality.  These are just historical contexts that can be transcended only by the acquisition of gnosis, knowledge that is experienced as self-evidently true.  It’s hard for people to even realize what I might be talking about because they believe that something like logical consistency or the ability to be reduced to mathematical formalism is how you judge the efficacy of an idea.  Ideas such as that are what led us into this extremely alienated state.  We haven’t demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works.

…

Stop waiting for history and the stream of historical events to make itself clear to you.  You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.  It doesn’t do you any good to know that somewhere in some computer there are equations that perfectly model or perfectly don’t model something that is going on.  We have all tended to give ourselves away to official ideologies and to say, “Well I may not understand, but someone understands.”  The fact of the matter is that only your own understanding is any good to you.  Because it’s you that you’re going to live with and it’s you that you’re going to die with.  As the song says, the last dance you dance, you dance alone.

 

This last bit might sound pessimistic, but I actually take it with great optimism.  It reflects back on my present daily life and pursuits.  It reminds me what focus and clarity can be and must be gained from the here and now.

Many years ago, it suddenly struck me what the purpose of life is.  I mean, this question has been represented in all kinds of media as the ultimate mystery, what we’d someday learn from our God after we pass through his pearly gates.  But suddenly, it all seemed so simple:

The purpose of life is to Create.

And this can be viewed on different levels.  From simple plant/animal reproduction to the changes that organisms make to environments to make them more habitable, to the construction of artifacts, tools, languages, and art.  From creating children, and a home and value system and a place in the community, to creating a legacy of your existence, be it simple memories, works of art, charitable trusts or whatever.  These are common examples of how we fulfill this purpose of life.  By maintaining this perspective, we can both gain more reward for mundane activities, and hone our path toward a greater self-actualization.

 

Many of Terence’s mind-blowing lectures can be enjoyed as podcasts.  Lorenzo Hagarty has a wonderful collection of them, including synopses and notes, here: http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?cat=13.  Yes, many of these are listed with sacred mushrooms as a central theme, but that’s only a small part of what Terence is about.  Pick a podcast, any of these podcasts whose title intrigues you, and give it a listen.

Pale Blue Dot Again

Carl Sagan wrote this in the early 1990’s and it’s even a more powerful statement today than it was then. 

First: notice in the following picture a very tiny, pale blue dot in the middle of the light brown streak towards the right of the image.  That’s the earth, as seen by the Voyager 1 spacecraft around June 1990, when it was over 3 billion miles away.  (The streaks are reflections inside the spacecraft’s camera.)

Now: what does Carl infer from this amazing photograph?

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Copyright © The Estate of Carl Sagan

A Novice Leads a Shamanic Journey

A few months ago, I joined a new, small group forming at our UU church called Mystics and Metaphysics, whose purpose is deliberately somewhat vague, with the intention that we’ll explore various topics of interest on the fringes of spirituality, consciousness, the occult, and so on.  My main goal for joining was to find some other people to discuss these topics with, other than fleeting messages across web sites. 

We’re a pretty laid-back group, and the syllabus is slow in forming.  As we discussed potential topics, I showed a certain passion for esoteric spiritual practices.  Eventually, someone asked if I would lead our first “scheduled” monthly topic on Shamanism.  Normally this would be waaaay outside my comfort zone, but truly I’m learning to savor the excitement of diving into a pool of unknown proportion instead of fearing what types of rejection and self-imposed humiliation might lie under the surface.

So I found myself preparing a session that describes my own discovery of shamanic topics that have grown in popularity over the last decade or so under the umbrella of “archaic revival.”  I just wanted to share those session notes here.

First I introduced people to a categorization of spiritual pursuit that has served me: exoteric versus esoteric.

• Exoteric traditions (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Judaism)
  • Dogma – rules & behaviors
  • Conveyed by a hierarchy of priests, imams and rabbis
  • Centered on myths of divinities from the past
• Esoteric traditions (e.g. Buddhism, Shamanism, Paganism)
  • Techniques – attitudes & actions
  • Conveyed by apprenticeship
  • Contemplative practices to bring you experience of the divine mystery

  Understanding these categories became the foundation of my Bridge to Spirit.

Then I talked about Shamanism throughout history, leading up to why such archaic techniques might be useful for us today.

• “Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. This was how people attained access to the sacred.” — Terence McKenna
  • Siberian, Aztec, Toltec (Castaneda), Celtic, African, Arctic
• Techniques of Shamanism seem, to me, to have a significant degree of overlap with Wiccan practices. Both:
  • Have the idea of spirit dimensions that can be entered via ceremony
  • Have the concept of meeting a spirit guide to teach you
  • Prescribe a mental discipline to learn how to connect with other realms
  • Require the practitioner to have an intent such as helping others
• Shamans of different cultures speak of journeying to the three worlds through trance and vision: Upper, Middle and Lower.
  • Explore landscapes, meet beings; talk, interact, develop relationships.
  • One can seek answers, advice or assistance from the spirit beings.
  • Good way to learn about the spirit world: meet a spirit guide that will show you around.
  • Some shamanic techniques talk about finding a power animal.
• Shamans have used many techniques for journeying
  • Dancing
  • Chanting
  • Fasting
  • Eating psychoactive plants
  • Drumming and rattling
• The shaman views the drumbeat as a horse, bison or canoe

Next I mapped some of these obscure-sounding elements into the value systems we’ve been taught to use as bullshit filters.

• In western science, we explore states of consciousness associated with electrical activity in the brain that occurs at different frequencies
  • Alert – Beta
  • Relaxed – Alpha
  • Twilight – Theta
  • Sleep – Delta
• The shamanic drumbeat can induce the brain to begin acting at these frequencies.
• Theta is the stat associated with “ideation” and hypnagogic images.
• Novices at journeying can often have an experience on their first try.
• Guided meditations often follow a similar pattern:
  • walking on a path
  • passing a threshold
  • reaching a destination of sanctuary

Finally I described some of the simple techniques for journeying, and the steps we’d be using during our ceremony.

• Shamans suggest imagining going into
  • a hole in the ground next to a tree root
  • a hole in the tree
  • a cave or a well
  • a canoe on a lake or river
  • …these lead to the lower world
  • Climbing a tree or a mountain or a rainbow
  • …these lead to the upper world
• We’ll journey to the lower world, because it’s easier. You might:
  • Visualize a place
  • Have a quick flash of an image
  • Encounter a being
  • Have no experience that you can recall
  • Just have a relaxing experience with friends

Ceremony

1. SMUDGING
To start, I would like to smudge each of you. This is a ritual of cleansing and it helps to think of the smoke as carrying away negative energy from you.

2. MEDITATION
Has anyone done simple meditation, like breath meditation? We’ll do this for about 5 minutes.

3. BEATS
I will play four pairs of introductory beats, like this: dun-dun… dun-dun… dun-dun… dun-dun… then begin drumming the journeying beat, a low monotonous beat of about 3 to 4 beats per second.

4. Relax with your eyes closed.

5. JOURNEY
Visualize walking on your path toward a welcome cave or canoe. If this takes too much concentration, just return to breathing meditation.

6. Notice things then let them pass.

7. RETURN
After about 15 minutes, I’ll play the four pairs of beats again, then will rattle a bit.

I’ll drum for about 15 minutes, so you have plenty of time to relax and get to a place where you’re not trying to control anything.

When I play the four pairs of beats again, that’s a sign to gently return from wherever your mind is focused.

 

In all, I think it went much better than I had anticipated, or feared.  Several people commented on the trance-like state induced by the drumbeat, accentuated by leading into up to it with the preparatory steps of the ceremony.  Several people mentioned seeing some fleeting images that they felt surprised by.  One person commented that he was pleasantly shocked to have a rather coherent visual journey of walking up a mountain, passing above the treeline, and coming into a sort of small old town of “match-stick” buildings that he explored, even observing other people there.  Neither of us expected that and it was a nice experience to round out our little exploration into this phenomenon.

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