A
Apotheosis
Guest
http://bipolarblast.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/spiritual-awakening-journey/
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/artis/we are all shamans.htm
WE ARE ALL SHAMANS-IN-TRAINING
By Paul Levy
In 1981 I spontaneously went into such an ecstatic state that I was hospitalized by what I call the “anti-bliss patrol.” The authorities had become alerted because I was simply unable to restrain my enthusiasm at the “good news” that was beginning to reveal itself to me about the nature of reality. Stepping out of my usual way of trying to control my experience, during that next year I was thrown in mental hospitals a number of times and (mis)diagnosed as having manic-depressive (bi-polar) illness. I was told that I had a chemical imbalance and would have to go on medication and learn to live with my “illness” for the rest of my life. Little did the doctors realize that although my experience looked like a typical nervous breakdown, I had actually gotten “drafted” into a deeper psycho-spiritual process of an entirely different order – a spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation – that was blowing my mind as it was simultaneously revealing it.
My inner process had spilled outside of my skull and just like a dream was synchronistically expressing itself through events in the seemingly outer world. Finding myself in a meaning-filled, meaningful, and enchanted universe, the world had become animated by spirit, as if it was a living oracle, a continually unfolding revelation that was speaking symbolically. It became glaringly apparent to me that there was an intimate correlation and synchronistic correspondence between what was going on in the internal landscape of my psyche and the seemingly outer world. The boundary between inner and outer was dissolving. It was as if something deep inside of me was expressing itself through the medium of the outside world, and was able to extend itself into the outside world and configure events so as to in-form and give shape to itself.
According to consensus reality, I was “certifiable,” and I was in full agreement, in that I had certifiably stepped out of my self-entrancing, self-limiting, and self-binding conceptual, cognitive mind into a much more expansive “space.” As if snapping out of a trance, I found myself not out of my mind, in the sense that I was crazy, but rather, inside of my mind, which was now discovered to be everywhere, in that I was beginning to realize that I was dreaming.
My parents bought into the psychiatrist’s diagnosis that their only child had a mental illness, as in my parents’ world doctors were genuine authority figures who knew what they were talking about. In the words of the late psychiatrist R. D. Laing, “Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.” Tragically, with the support and blessing of the psychiatric community, both of my parents passed away convinced their son was crazy.
When we begin to spiritually awaken, our personality structure and sense of who we are can melt down and dis-integrate, as our inner “constitution” is being rewritten. This process can convincingly appear to others as if we are having a nervous breakdown or a psychotic break.
Stepping out of my normal, conditioned, repressed and domesticated self as if breaking out of a prison, I felt on the cutting edge of the big bang itself. It was as if I was becoming attuned to and a receptive vehicle for a deeper, more authentic, less self-conscious and much more unfettered, creative and ecstatic part of myself to freely in-form my experience and give shape to itself. My experience was so mind-blowing that I had trouble “keeping it together,” particularly because previous to the hospitalizations I wasn’t in a safe container but was unrestrained, out in a world that did not understand the value of such experiences. My situation was actually quite dangerous, as during the beginning stages of my awakening I was not able to mediate and channel the transpersonal energies that were activated within me in a way that was acceptable to the culture at large.
The dissolution and breakdown of the old structures of the psyche can become a breakthrough, however, depending on how it is contained and related to by the surrounding community and unfolded. The dis-integration can be the beginning of a coming together at a more coherent, and unified level of consciousness.
Our species and its civilization are currently in the throes of a collective (nervous) breakdown. If what we, as a species, are doing to ourselves (destroying the biosphere, the very life-support system of the planet, to use one example) isn’t collective madness, then what in the world is? Our underlying institutionalized and incorporated structures that are helping to keep us asleep are breaking down and coming apart. Just as with an individual’s psyche, only writ large en masse on the world stage, we are going through a collective shamanic initiation process, a genuine “death/rebirth” experience. The false, illusory separate self, which experiences ourselves as alien from one another is “dying” as the fundamental framework by which we relate to each other and the world, as we incarnate and give “birth” to a truer sense of who we are, realizing our deep interconnection and interdependence with each other and all living beings.
The shamanic personality is very sensitive to the unconscious, both in themselves and in others. The shaman has very permeable boundaries between their conscious mind and the unconscious, as if they’ve created a bridge which allows contents between the two to easily pass through and intermingle with and reciprocally co-inform each other. The shaman’s collaborative, creative interplay between the conscious and unconscious creates a synthesis, which is a “third thing,” a new birth, a further evolution in the incarnation of a more all-embracing, integrated and expansive consciousness.
The figure of the shaman is related to both the figures of the artist (see my article “The Artist as Healer of the World”) and the wounded healer – (see my article “The Wounded Healer,” Part 1 and Part 2). The archetypal figure of the shaman is the primordial medicine person and carrier of healing. The figure of the shaman (arche)typically takes on the illness that is in the community into themselves and literally becomes sick, as if they have “caught” the disease of who they are trying to heal. This process can become animated through the choice of a seasoned shaman, or it can happen spontaneously and unintentionally in a budding shaman who is unusually sensitive to the underlying contradictions and spiritual illness that pervade the social and cultural fabric which connects us and in which we are embedded. A fully cooked shaman, in internalizing the illness in the field, allows the sickness to fluidly move through them without getting stuck in them, which is the mark that distinguishes an accomplished shaman from a novice.
By embracing, assimilating, and metabolizing what has gotten triggered in them, however, the shaman is able to heal themselves and in so doing non-locally sends healing to the whole “community.” In our current moment in time, as interdependent members of an ever-more interconnected global village, our “community” is the entire planet. The shaman is operating in the realm of the collective unconscious, a “no-place” where information travels in “no-time,” faster than the speed of light. There is no part of the universe that is separate from the whole, which is to say that a change in any part of the universe is resonantly registered in no time whatsoever throughout the whole universe. Though the healing effects of the shaman’s process manifests “over time,” the shaman’s self-healing, transcending the seeming limitations of space and time, instantaneously insinuates its in-form-ation and informing influence faster than the twinkling of an eye throughout the entire universe in ways that can only be imagined.
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/artis/we are all shamans.htm
WE ARE ALL SHAMANS-IN-TRAINING
By Paul Levy
In 1981 I spontaneously went into such an ecstatic state that I was hospitalized by what I call the “anti-bliss patrol.” The authorities had become alerted because I was simply unable to restrain my enthusiasm at the “good news” that was beginning to reveal itself to me about the nature of reality. Stepping out of my usual way of trying to control my experience, during that next year I was thrown in mental hospitals a number of times and (mis)diagnosed as having manic-depressive (bi-polar) illness. I was told that I had a chemical imbalance and would have to go on medication and learn to live with my “illness” for the rest of my life. Little did the doctors realize that although my experience looked like a typical nervous breakdown, I had actually gotten “drafted” into a deeper psycho-spiritual process of an entirely different order – a spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation – that was blowing my mind as it was simultaneously revealing it.
My inner process had spilled outside of my skull and just like a dream was synchronistically expressing itself through events in the seemingly outer world. Finding myself in a meaning-filled, meaningful, and enchanted universe, the world had become animated by spirit, as if it was a living oracle, a continually unfolding revelation that was speaking symbolically. It became glaringly apparent to me that there was an intimate correlation and synchronistic correspondence between what was going on in the internal landscape of my psyche and the seemingly outer world. The boundary between inner and outer was dissolving. It was as if something deep inside of me was expressing itself through the medium of the outside world, and was able to extend itself into the outside world and configure events so as to in-form and give shape to itself.
According to consensus reality, I was “certifiable,” and I was in full agreement, in that I had certifiably stepped out of my self-entrancing, self-limiting, and self-binding conceptual, cognitive mind into a much more expansive “space.” As if snapping out of a trance, I found myself not out of my mind, in the sense that I was crazy, but rather, inside of my mind, which was now discovered to be everywhere, in that I was beginning to realize that I was dreaming.
My parents bought into the psychiatrist’s diagnosis that their only child had a mental illness, as in my parents’ world doctors were genuine authority figures who knew what they were talking about. In the words of the late psychiatrist R. D. Laing, “Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.” Tragically, with the support and blessing of the psychiatric community, both of my parents passed away convinced their son was crazy.
When we begin to spiritually awaken, our personality structure and sense of who we are can melt down and dis-integrate, as our inner “constitution” is being rewritten. This process can convincingly appear to others as if we are having a nervous breakdown or a psychotic break.
Stepping out of my normal, conditioned, repressed and domesticated self as if breaking out of a prison, I felt on the cutting edge of the big bang itself. It was as if I was becoming attuned to and a receptive vehicle for a deeper, more authentic, less self-conscious and much more unfettered, creative and ecstatic part of myself to freely in-form my experience and give shape to itself. My experience was so mind-blowing that I had trouble “keeping it together,” particularly because previous to the hospitalizations I wasn’t in a safe container but was unrestrained, out in a world that did not understand the value of such experiences. My situation was actually quite dangerous, as during the beginning stages of my awakening I was not able to mediate and channel the transpersonal energies that were activated within me in a way that was acceptable to the culture at large.
The dissolution and breakdown of the old structures of the psyche can become a breakthrough, however, depending on how it is contained and related to by the surrounding community and unfolded. The dis-integration can be the beginning of a coming together at a more coherent, and unified level of consciousness.
Our species and its civilization are currently in the throes of a collective (nervous) breakdown. If what we, as a species, are doing to ourselves (destroying the biosphere, the very life-support system of the planet, to use one example) isn’t collective madness, then what in the world is? Our underlying institutionalized and incorporated structures that are helping to keep us asleep are breaking down and coming apart. Just as with an individual’s psyche, only writ large en masse on the world stage, we are going through a collective shamanic initiation process, a genuine “death/rebirth” experience. The false, illusory separate self, which experiences ourselves as alien from one another is “dying” as the fundamental framework by which we relate to each other and the world, as we incarnate and give “birth” to a truer sense of who we are, realizing our deep interconnection and interdependence with each other and all living beings.
The shamanic personality is very sensitive to the unconscious, both in themselves and in others. The shaman has very permeable boundaries between their conscious mind and the unconscious, as if they’ve created a bridge which allows contents between the two to easily pass through and intermingle with and reciprocally co-inform each other. The shaman’s collaborative, creative interplay between the conscious and unconscious creates a synthesis, which is a “third thing,” a new birth, a further evolution in the incarnation of a more all-embracing, integrated and expansive consciousness.
The figure of the shaman is related to both the figures of the artist (see my article “The Artist as Healer of the World”) and the wounded healer – (see my article “The Wounded Healer,” Part 1 and Part 2). The archetypal figure of the shaman is the primordial medicine person and carrier of healing. The figure of the shaman (arche)typically takes on the illness that is in the community into themselves and literally becomes sick, as if they have “caught” the disease of who they are trying to heal. This process can become animated through the choice of a seasoned shaman, or it can happen spontaneously and unintentionally in a budding shaman who is unusually sensitive to the underlying contradictions and spiritual illness that pervade the social and cultural fabric which connects us and in which we are embedded. A fully cooked shaman, in internalizing the illness in the field, allows the sickness to fluidly move through them without getting stuck in them, which is the mark that distinguishes an accomplished shaman from a novice.
By embracing, assimilating, and metabolizing what has gotten triggered in them, however, the shaman is able to heal themselves and in so doing non-locally sends healing to the whole “community.” In our current moment in time, as interdependent members of an ever-more interconnected global village, our “community” is the entire planet. The shaman is operating in the realm of the collective unconscious, a “no-place” where information travels in “no-time,” faster than the speed of light. There is no part of the universe that is separate from the whole, which is to say that a change in any part of the universe is resonantly registered in no time whatsoever throughout the whole universe. Though the healing effects of the shaman’s process manifests “over time,” the shaman’s self-healing, transcending the seeming limitations of space and time, instantaneously insinuates its in-form-ation and informing influence faster than the twinkling of an eye throughout the entire universe in ways that can only be imagined.
