POWER STONES

POWER STONES

Psychologist C. G. Jung’s work introduces the concept of “Individuation”, which is similar to “The Totality of the Self”, in Carlos Castaneda’s works, which is very much like the goal of Yoga, to attain to the ‘union’ or ‘yoke’, or ‘yug’, in which the completed Self is joined with the Cosmic, or Divine.  Shamanism is based on this union, which is a union of the individual with the world of Spirit through the death of the imprisoned self so that the spirits might incarnate with the Shaman. 

In the path to becoming a Shaman, there are many types and forms of energy which have to be incorporated into the energy system of the individual.  This process can take many years.  Over the course of the work, there are many things which the Wannabe must do to strengthen the energy fields of the various parts of the self as they are disintegrated and re-formed into a more complete composite.  The energies of the spirits are so powerful that an unprepared person could never survive.

In the beginning, the Wannabe is taught to ‘court Power’.  “Power” is a force in the universe which comes to the wannabe as a guide.  If you enter a place in wild nature with purity of Intent, and open yourself to Power, a sign or omen will appear.  A hawk will fly directly in front of you, and will beckon to you to follow.  You will be guided to a place of Power, where you can meditate or do ceremony, and receive the transforming energies of this place and the Medicine Energies which exist there.  Repeated exposure to these energies and the wisdom of Power will open and strengthen you to withstand the ordeals which await.

One of the exercises of Courting Power is the quest for a Power Stone.

Mountains are formed from vast layers and formations of various types of stone, as they are thrust by the movements of the earth’s crust into union with the atmosphere.  The forces of the atmosphere cause the stone layers to disintegrate, and pieces fall to the slopes below, where they eventually end up in streams, or are buried in the materials which form the soil.  Over the eons, stones which enter the streams are washed to the valleys, and are shaped by the waters and the other stones which they meet (very much like people).  Stones in the earth become eroded by the chemical interactions which form the soil.

If you walk in wild nature, you will meet many stones in various forms of individuation.  Some are broken and jagged; some are rounded and smooth; some are still buried in the soil.  When Power speaks to you, it can lead you to a stone which has completed its journey of Individuation, and is waiting for you to take it into your Power.  It will be clean; it will be sitting alone, free from attachments.  It will beckon to you.  You can welcome it into your energy field and it will become a companion.  When you take it home, it will bring the specific “Medicine” of its journey, and the place where it was found.  This Medicine will stay with it for many years.  This is one part of the Medicine Energies which a Shaman uses to build a Sacred Place in which to do the work.

Each stone is like a person, an individual.  If you hold a stone, you will find that it has a bottom.  When you set it down on its bottom, it will be steady and comfortable.  Each stone has it ‘good side’.  Place the stone in its most favorable position, so that it is comfortable and its best side is front.  The stone will lend its particular Power to whatever is near it, and it will help you in setting Medicine for a particular purpose.  Stones are great sources of energy for the Medicine.  But they also are very absorbent.  So stones have to be cleansed occasionally.

The stones in the photo were together in a tiny sand spit at the confluence of the Tieton River with the Naches River, just west of Yakima in the Cascade Mountains.  They are a greenish conglomerate from the White Pass area.  They are very smooth and polished.  The smaller one has a pleasant feminine face, and weighs 13 pounds.  The larger one is shaped like the head of an animal, perhaps a horse, and weighs 17 pounds.  I use them on either side of my meditation mat against the wall in the yoga/healing room, at the base of the “Buddha Vortex”, where the spirits gather high up on the wall.  The Buddha visited me there for many months, and Bodhidharma came to me there.  At the New Moon just before the Autumnal Equinox this year (2013), Yakima was graced with many dancing lightning storms.  So I set the stones out in the downpour to be cleansed and re-energized.

One interesting thing about stones is how they absorb energy.  Many homes have large stones set out in front as landscaping pieces.  If you observe these stones, you will notice their particular personalities.  Then notice when the home is sold and the owners move to another location.  The stone will lose the particular character you noticed.  With a new owner, the stone will change to reflect the energies of the new owner.

THE VOICE OF SEEING

CARLOS STARTED THE WHOLE THING IN AMERICA

Today is the New Moon.  With the moon conjunct the sun this morning,  I decided to do my STOP THE WORLD meditation.  On my Medicine Wheel mat, I sit crosslegged toward the east,  compose myself, and go into the meditative state.  At a certain point, I rotate to the right, facing the south, reverse the cross of my legs, and go back into the deep place.  I rotate again to the west and north, and then back to the east.  Each direction has its signature spirits, totems and happenings.  At New Moon, this serves to bring the energies of this particular time phase to a close.  I was slightly upset this morning, because it was evident that I had overlooked this practice for many moons.  It's so easy to fall from the Way!

As I was getting up from the mat, I was startled by THE VOICE OF SEEING.  This is from Castaneda's work.  Somewhere in the universe, there is an intelligence that speaks to the Shaman at the moment of Seeing something.  What you See doesn't always make sense, but the Voice of Seeing sets you straight.  It reminded me of a conversation I had had years ago, with one of the entities which visits me.

"HOW OLD ARE YOU?", it asked me.  I forget what I said.  He corrected me and explained.

"We measure your age this way," he said.  "At the moment of your first copulation, you become one year old."  I was 17 the first time I got laid.  "When your child is 17, you will be two years old, and he will be one year old.  His child will be one year old in 17 years, he will be two years old, and you will be three.  That child's child will be one year old in 17 years, and so on."

He explained to me that when you are seventeen, people younger than you look like kids.  When you are 34, seventeen year olds look like kids.  Moreover, you are old enough to see the difference between you and the seventeen year old.  And you can see that you are invisible to him.  At 51, you are still younger than the 68 year old.  At 68, you can See something about the world and your place in it.  You have passed through.

In the growth and development of a Shaman, time slows down.  A Shaman expands the Energy Field toward Infinity.  Within that context, time is no longer linear, but a multidimensional complex of energy systems interacting at random, forming what Castaneda's don Juan calls "the lines of force in the universe".  During this time the Shaman practices THE ART OF STALKING, which allows him to develop the discernment and discrimination to separate out the different streams of consciousness energies which translate into events.  This occurs over many moon cycles.  

Learning to carry the observational awareness gained during the passage of the lunar phases, their nuances and messages, or lines of force, is the daily task of the Shaman.  Visions, as such, are merely reminders that there is an underlying flux of consciousness awareness which forms the matrix of reality.  In youth, these lines of force are compressed into moments, each moment awash in the passions of the life force as it seeks to unfold toward THE TOTALITY OF THE SELF.  The Totality of the Self is the human being unshackled from the bonds of culturally imposed self-identity, existing in a culturally imposed reality.

ART OF STALKING: DAILY LOG BOOK

DAILY LOG BOOK

The Art of Stalking is, of course, the art of Stalking The Self.

Once one enters the realm of Shamanic Consciousness, time becomes a much more expanded situation.  The personal consciousness, or, I should say, Awareness, is naturally limited to the immediate moment.  Memory augments this moment from its film archives, to give us an edited picture of reality.  In Shamanic Reality, the personal consciousness is not enough to register the totality of each moment.  And the concept of Time becomes a moment of opening one’s eyes in the deep end of a swimming pool.

To demonstrate this to me, one year on Valentine’s Day, Marilyn Monroe wanted to do a painting.  We were in the large studio in Ellensburg.  She took me downstairs, and over to the Starlight Café.  But it was closed, so we walked down the street to the Oak Rail Tavern, where we had four pints of ale, and four shots of tequila.  We walked back to the studio, quite tipsy, and we did the painting, throwing paint all over the substrate already positioned on the Painting Floor (otherwise the Yoga Floor).  When we had finished, I passed out on the small carpet in the Healing Area.

It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized what had happened.  The painting turned out ok, and I mounted it for display.  At some point, I remembered.  Just as I was passing out, I had witnessed a miracle!  There was Marilyn Monroe, running around the painting floor in glee, in her Spirit Body, stark naked of course.  What a charming sight.  It showed me the time lag between what happens in Spirit, and how long it takes to reach normal human consciousness.

For that reason, a Shaman lives a more or less isolated life, so that the minutiae of daily living doesn’t block the visions  of Shamanic Reality.

And since much of Shamanic Reality unfolds over the course of many days, weeks, months, or moon cycles, I early on realized I had to keep notes of everything that happened during a day.  So I started keeping a journal.  But I’m not very good at journaling, so it became just a log book.  I note everything I do in a day, and what time it happened.

This is very helpful in matters of personal health.  I keep track of my daily stool.  What does it look like?  What affects it?  What types of foods, and what Shamanic Events, influence my stool?  It is very interesting to note the effects of Shamanic occurrences on the physical body and the environment.

For this reason, we keep a close watch on the daily manifestations of the phases of the Moon.  We are now dragging the bottom of the Dark Moon phase.  New Moon is in two days.  People are psychotic and withdrawn.  I am hyper and intense.  This Dark Moon is different from most others in that regard.  I feel we are moving into something new.

With the New Moon two days away, I am reminded that the New Moon phase is actually upon us, and that it lasts for a couple of days past the exact opposition of the moon to the sun, until the appearance of the first Crescent Moon low above the horizon in the West, just after the sun disappears behind the Cascade Mountains.  So we have several days of a very delicate energy, in which ceremonies can come to completion, and transitions can be made to a new time.

(The photo shows my log book where I keep it during the day, on my work table, which is directly in front of my Trance Chair, where the light comes in from the window.  In background is my Meditation Vortex, against the wall, and my Yoga Floor [also the Healing Floor].)

THE ART OF STALKING

MEDICINE WHEEL YOGA MAT

In the first chapter of his first book, The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968, Carlos Castaneda makes mention of two things which form a part of the foundation of my Initiation as a Shaman.  Carlos is told to ‘find his spot’ on don Juan’s veranda; and later, he is instructed in the Art of Stalking.  Carlos’s ‘spot’ is a certain type of Earth Energy Vortex; and Stalking is the very complicated process of figuring out what’s going on in the unfathomable world of Shamanic Spirit.

The drawing above shows my first yoga mat.  The Medicine Wheel is a time-honored device of indigenous peoples to help them organize the energies of Spirit.  It is also the basis of Mandala paintings.  By organizing around the four directions, the world of Spirit is brought into easier understanding, and rituals can be more easily organized.  This is an exercise in Stalking developed by peoples around the globe.

In today’s world, we need to develop a deeper and more profound approach to understanding the world around us.  The industrial world has lost the sense of time, ever since we invented clocks.  But Nature provides us with an incomparable teacher:  the Moon.

Since ancient Shamans had no compass or clocks, or artificial light, they used the stars and seasons and arc of the sun to keep track of what was happening around them.  As it turns out, the focus of these ancient peoples on certain aspects of the world created a condensation of the energies of consciousness around these points of focus.  This concentrated consciousness morphed into gods.  And the gods were able to communicate with their creators.  Sounds backwards?  Check it out.  You can do the same thing, when you create the Medicine Energies where you live.

One of the easiest things to focus your attentions upon is the Moon.  We are all familiar with the hackneyed concepts of Full Moon and Dark Moon, but what we see is merely a dot on our calendars.  We do not have the energetic capacities to fully grasp or discern the energy patterns of these very subtle fluxuations coming to us from the Moon.  The phrase ‘many moons’ takes on deeper meaning when we actually use the lunar cycles to organize our sense of the passage of time.

If you follow the weather reports on TV, you may notice that they are often way off just before or just after the New or Full moon.  The energies of these times are an example of  the spiritual psychology of the world we live in.  The Moon has varying moods, and these moods correspond to events occurring on the planet.  A Shaman has the sorts of powers which can cause the Moon to respond in some way.  Often, after a ceremony, a Shaman looks to the mood of the Moon to judge its success. 

The awareness necessary to discern these responses from the Moon can be developed by removing oneself from the standardized responses to the world conditioned by the culture in which we live.

In Shamanic Yoga, simply practicing yoga is one way to remove oneself  from the vibes of the world around us.  And the awareness of the nature of the human energy field which is developed while deep in asana, is one way of discerning the subtleties of these messages from the Moon.  Because it is the Shaman’s Body, which is developed from the Yoga Body, which has the antennae or receptors which can pick up the vibes from the Moon.

The world around us is a vast sea of energies.  These energies are forms of consciousness.  The consciousness which is normally contained in the ‘brain’ is not sufficient to discern the subtleties around us.  So Shamans use entheogens and psychedelics to augment their energy field perceptors.  And Shamanic Yogis develop these perceptors in their own physical energy fields.

The Art of Stalking is the art of developing the attention span (often a span of months or years) to apprehend and decipher the communications from the entities of the natural world.  Shamanic Art is often used as one means of record-keeping, as peoples develop an iconography to describe these impressions from the subtle energies.