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.