MY DAKINI RETURNS

My journey to the inner realms began in earnest in about 1964, I suppose.  It was about that time that I wandered into some of the bookstores in Seattle’s University District, where I was midway through my undergraduate ‘career’.  I found some books on Tantra.  I had known about and sort of practiced yoga for maybe half a dozen years.  I had decided long ago that Christianity was totally bankrupt and definitely not for me.  The Tantric logic intrigued me.  It seemed unassailable, indicating a depth and a centered approach to understanding the inscrutability of the psyche, which seemed to be the actual center of the world.

It took me years to gain the maturity to develop a real practice, once I had exhausted the indispensable magic of the LSD experience.  My poetry and the arts of Surrealism worked to develop an inner stability which manifested in the outer structuring of my lifestyle, which was centered on ‘get the poem!’.  The Chinese poets had figured out long ago that a simple life away from the ‘world’ was most conducive to the inner journey, and the Zen Masters had proven that many aspects of their practice had definite practical results.

Many years into the journey, I began to discover that the things I was practicing had just that same sort of results.  I did all these things, over the years, and they all actually worked!  I was transformed.  I entered the realm of the Spirits, and the spirits entered into incarnation in my physical body.  It was a psychic circus.

And then it began to fall apart.  I began to notice that twenty years had gone by with these two sharing my life, and I was not making the progress I needed to in order to complete what I began to see was my true mission.  I had been shanghaied into an agenda regarding the return of Jesus in the Second Coming.  It was a program concocted in the times before the Sphinx in Egypt, and was proving to be based on cosmic assumptions that were no longer valid.  I was in revolt.  I began to do whatever I could think of to rid myself of my hitch-hikers.

The Tantric aspect of my Shama, of course is central to the configuration of the energies which must be controlled in order to achieve the results of Mastery in this tradition.  The sexual energies are the core of our being, and of course, our being is the core of the world.  It’s all One, but the Self is the Center… Square Zero.

I must say, in spite of the difficulties I’ve encountered, that this journey I’ve undertaken is a totally fascinating experience.  If you like existential challenges, this is a wonderful path!  And it’s encouraging to know that these techniques, whichever ones you choose, actually work.

With this past New Moon, and the Despacho ‘Kooti’ Ceremony I performed at the Crescent, I seem to have achieved something especially significant.  With Jesus and Marilyn Monroe in my body, my Tantric practice was intimately tied up with them, either or both, at various times.  As their agenda began to prove itself to be bogus, this aspect of the relationship became very irritating.  My Tantric practice became a drag.

Part of what I had hoped to achieve with this cord-cutting ceremony was to ‘free up my sexuality’.  Neither of them was welcome any longer in my Tantra.

One of the delightful aspects of the practice of yoga is the Ayurvedic sequence of RDSE (Rest, Digestion, Sexual Energy).  After the morning meal, when the energies are freshest, it is a good idea to sit or lie down while the agni (digestive fires) do their work.  At a certain point, the Energy Body converts the digestive process into sexual energy, which is then available to me moved throughout the chakras via the Concentration Breath.  This brings a delightful vigor to the whole body, and to the psyche.  The sexual excitement is only a small part of this process, but is especially delicious, under the proper conditions.

Three days ago, the Ceremony had appeared to be a success, but I was wondering how I would actually assess the results.  Today, that question was answered.

As I lay on the yoga floor after breakfast, I went through the rituals of relaxations of the various parts of the body in Savasana (Corpse Pose).  At a certain point, the energies opened into a sort of movie screen, upon which images were being projected.  (I love the various ways of Seeing.  The ‘third eye’ is only one of many ways of perception, and the others are often spectacular.)

One of the things you have to get used to, in the inward journey, is going to places you might not find comfortable.  There are many aspects of the psyche, and its extensions into ‘paranormal space’, which are ‘necessary evils’, so to speak.  As I lay there, I was viewing the fly of a man’s trousers.  Behind the fly, the genitals became visible; then an image of fellatio.  At this image, the energies in my own genitals burst alive.  Soon a fire was flaming in the lower chakras, in all the colors of the inner spectrum.  I had never experienced this before. I caught the fire with my inner breathing, and the energies expanded to fill my abdomen, and expand the entire ‘frontal column’ of the chakras, the area where the Dakini resides when she visits.  The Dakini is the female sexual partner of the Tantrika.  She had been overshadowed by Jesus and Marilyn Monroe for a number of years.  Sex with the Dakini is a delicate, wonderful marvel.

Today the Dakini returned.  As I was experiencing the psychedelic colors of the male sexual energies throughout my entire body, in wave after wave, suddenly there was an opening, and another energy was visible.  It showed what seemed to be an almond-shaped opening, of lavender and magenta light, which immediately became the inner labia of a delicate vagina.  My entire energy field burst into penetration of this vagina, again something I had never experienced –a full-body Satori!

At this penetration, a number of images came to me.  It appeared that the male energy was an aspect of the God-figure Ganesha, the elephant.  It was his trunk that was curling upward along the frontal column of my energy body.  As I lay there in Corpse Pose, I became the “corpse Shiva”, the dead god, who is pictured with Shakti (the Goddess), or Kali, the dark one.  I also became Osiris, the dismembered God of ancient Egypt, one of my early Shamanic personas. 

As I’ve learned how things unfold in this world of Shamanic Reality, I can more easily understand the vastness of the inner dimensions.  I’m looking forward to the further unfolding of other aspects of the Ceremony, as this moon progresses toward Full Moon on the 29^th, just before Halloween!

MOVING WITH THE MOON

NEW MOON early this morning (10.15.12) was a big relief here in Yakima.  Our high sage climate, shielded from the weather by the Cascades, and far from the major weather systems of the rest of the country, has been very warm and dry much later into the season than is normal.  The UV in this dry climate was hard on my eyes, after cataract surgery two years ago, and my energy field was much more comfortable being indoors most of the time.  So I began to lose my physical conditioning.  The cooler weather lets me walk again, and the UV is down to 4, so I'm mostly comfortable.

But as a Shaman, I'm tuned to more energy systems than regular people, and it's difficult to discern them all, and to bring them into a balance which allows me to perform the tasks of daily life on top of the things I need to do as a Shaman.

I began my practice with techniques from the 'core shamanism' of Michael Harner, whose works spawned the many 'shamanic practitioners' who practice all over the globe these days, nearly 50 years after his work first came to my attention.  My Initiation as a Shaman took me away from his techniques, and transformed my energy field in ways unlike anyone else I'm aware of.  My universe is much more complicated than that of the ordinary practitioner.

One difference that I'm very much aware of is the years of work I did leading up to my contact with the Spirits in late 1990, when I was about 47 years old.  From my early 20s, I dedicated my life to study of transformational techniques.  It seemed practical to me to try to change my perceptual mechanisms by altering my personal consciousness.  LSD was a major influence, as it was with many in my generation.  Plant psychedelics changed my life.  Marijuana is a major asset in expanding the perceptual awareness of the body's energy field.  The marijuana deva unites with human consciousness as it flows throughout the body and auric energy field, and extends this awareness into the world at large.

Other Shamans use a wide variety of entheogenic plant helpers, but I was happy with LSD and marijuana.  One thing that distinguishes my work from others is the Surrealist project of Alchemical Transformation, which focuses on thwarting the natural ordering of awareness which shapes our use of language, and therefore limits us to perceptions easily within the range of the Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) described by Harner.  The Surrealists used automatic writing to actually alter the transmitting mechanisms of the language system, so that newer ways of understanding could develop.

This technique, combined with focus on dreams, helped me come into contact with my Muse, as a young poet.  This muse later manifested to me in the person of Marilyn Monroe, after I had broken through to actual contact with Spirit, using the divining rods.

The divining rods brought the actual energies of the spirits fully into my body.  I became One with my spirits, and they became One with me.  We became simultaneous incarnations, all of them within my own physical body.  This resulted in a level of physical apprehension of the universe not available any other way.  The use of entheogens allows one to enter a world of spirit in a powerful way, but it is very different from sharing the consciousness of Living Spirits in the OSC.

Through this sharing I am hooked up to the various influences I mentioned in the opening paragraphs.  These influences include the Medicine Energies, which are forces of planetary and nature consciousness which exist all around us, but are only brought into a unified field of awareness through the actions of the Shaman.  This is the world I live in, in my little apartment and the bits of land around it.

Early in my career as a poet, I was influenced by the philosophies of the Eastern religions, and the poets who practiced these philosophies.  Simplicity of life allows the spirit to flow and expand, as opposed to the compression of the spirit resulting from the hectic pace of the consumerist lifestyle.  Without this simplicity, I would be dragged through life unaware of the forces around me.  Without the training of psychedelics, Surrealism and poetry, (and YOGA!) I wouldn't have the perceptive abilities I have now.

Lots of free time, and a trained, expanded awareness are essential to the true spirit lifestyle!

By training the Energy Field Awareness to follow the changes of the moon, it is possible to begin to detach from the pull of daily consciousness and to remove oneself from the grasp of the hands of the clock.  Since I'm not off at work all day, I can follow the moon.

In the I Ching, rain is seen as the coming together of the yin and the yang forces of the atmosphere, which have their own 'moods', just as the moon does.  These moods of the atmosphere are greatly conditioned by the lunar flux, just as the tides are.

In our daily lives, we have moods as well.  Training our awareness to the flux of the moon, cycle after cycle, season after season, year after year, allows for a gradual synchronization of our moods with the moods of the outer world.  (Marijuana is a very great assistant in this process!)

So I've been trying to bring the art of Ceremony into my life, as a means of organizing the various flows which move through the tattwas of my days, and bring the appropriate influences to bear at an exact time, to achieve a certain aim in the spiritual realm or in the physical world.  I'm only a few moon-cycles into this practice, and there are many tools which I'm discovering I need to invent in order to harness various aspects of the energies I'm trying to work with.  All this takes time and work, and I find myself missing the moment, with the performance of the Ceremony itself.  This Moon, I realized something that had come to my attention a few weeks ago, at a Full Moon.  I don't have to tie my Ceremony to the moon phase!  In fact, there is actually too much going on in the various energy aspects of my life at the turn of the moon, to allow for Ceremony of this type.  Other shamans don't have this problem, due to the nature of their practice.

Today, as the moon gradually moved off the exact moment of conjunction with the sun early this morning, and as I went through the work that needed to get done in the day, I watched the bright sunshine of the morning hours gradually give way to a slight overcast.  I was in my normal New Moon droop.  My energies are verrrrrrry low during New Moon; or they can be more active, depending.....  I had my mind on trying to bring the Ceremony to a stage where I could work toward completion, but finally realized that wasn't going to happen.  So I let that go, and returned to focus on my own condition, so that I could get my energies cleared up.

I sat in my vortex, and began my forward bend technique of moving my energies, and noticed a deep feeling of despair, of emptiness, of being unfulfilled, alone, and powerless.  As I moved my energies around in my body, it occurred to me to just let go.  Let everything drop.  Go with it.   What was I clinging to?  As I let it go, I began to sing.  I felt better.  I reached for my little tom-tom.

As I drummed, my energies finally began to focus.  I could pull my energies up from my root chakra, and bring them into my singing and my drumming.  I felt better.  I picked up my larger hoop drum, and began to work it.  Right away, the drum took me to a place of Power.  I had hit on something.  I was able to focus of the issues I had been trying to deal with through Ceremony.  This seemed much more direct.

I drummed and sang myself into a state of Power.  I was able to bring all the aspects of my situation into focus, and issue a Prayer, an Intention, regarding the issues.  It all came out in song and drumbeats, very strongly, in perfect resolution.  It had all come together.

The drumming came to a conclusion, and I got up.  I looked outside.  It had begun to rain, hard.

This is the kind of thing referred to in the I Ching as bringing the rain.  This happens as a result of a certain kind of lifestyle dedicated to Consciousness, Awareness, and Spirit.  By living a life which allows me to be aware of the 'changes' (the I Ching, or Book of Changes), and to move with them, I have, over the years, been able to become a Shaman, and am able to deal with the special horrors which beset one of such a persuasion, as well as perform the duties of my normal life, few though they be.

During which time, I have observed that many of the maladies which beset people who are chained to the OSC (Ordinary State of Consciousness), can be resolved by changes in lifestyle which result in changes in Consciousness, which enables normal people to live lives of health and well-being.