#3 DRAGON FLYING WITH MERLIN

Detail from cover,  Nine Songs, Chinese Shamanic poems

[This is the third in the series dealing with my entry into the events of my Apprenticeship.] 

In order to deal with the tremendous energies of my Allies (term from Castaneda, referring to spirits who can take you into the ‘Nagual’, the place outside the universe we live in, which is the Universe of Consciousness, or ‘Tonal’, --a place where there is no Consciousness), I have had to use my knowledge of yoga.  Each of my Allies has required different techniques.  Jesus, for example, caused me to squat, as if carrying a heavy weight.  I had to hold my body erect with my breath; a very useful technique.  It took me a while to recognize the spirit who caused me to squinch up my nose in a ‘piggy face’.  Marilyn Monroe had taught me about the ‘Face Chakra’, and how to use the muscles in my face to achieve various results while ‘shaping’ my breath.  It out to be Merlin, the magician, who liked to use my voice to speak, once the face was sufficiently contorted.  My voice sounded very stupid and weird.

On Wednesday, October 23, 2013, I was wakened by a dream where I was kitchen-prepping ‘the last vegetables in NYC’.  I spent the morning doing work with the I Ching, which is controlled by Marilyn Monroe. Since the Full Moon had passed, I set up the altar for Hecate, as the moon began to wane.  I smudged the apartment with sage, and began to get ready to replace the clear plastic sheet which covers the front window during the cold of winter.  The rolled up plastic was not in the utility closet, or anywhere else.  Gone.  I did some kitchen work, then sat in the vortex to see if I could trace the plastic.  Before long, my face contorted, as it usually does, in Merlin’s pose, so that my breath is directed in certain ways throughout my energy system.  Again, I went into a trance.  I was with Merlin.  He is another of my former incarnations, and is almost always present with me.  This time, we were together facing a vast darkness of space.

In a moment, we were flying.  I was learning the flight of the Dragon.  (My Shaman name, Dagaji, means ‘sacred Dragon’.  It was given to me in about 2002 by Gaia, the earth goddess.)   It was hard work!  A woman encouraged me, “Come on, Tony!”, using my childhood nickname.  As I took flight, a dark spirit face appeared right in front of my eyes, looking right into me.  It was Merlin, introducing himself.  As I continued to fly, we came to a place of land, with maybe a seashore (Japan?).  A young woman was coming toward me, perhaps from the sea.  Her shirt was open in front, showing her small breasts with large dark nipples.  I woke up slumped in my meditation pose. 

A few hours later, I posted the first blog in this series, and later composed and posted the second.  The next morning, during my time in the vortex, Jesus was very active in my yoni, causing me to rise in my seat as he growled and shouted with the energies.  I went through the day, and in the afternoon sat to clear my energies with the drums.

I began to sing my song, “Oh, woe is me…”, and after a few moments I lurched from my seat and removed the Allies’ stones from the little altar I had set up for them.  I hid them away in a storage box.  My spirit had again rejected them!  Later I watched a World Series game, and went to bed.

This morning, I used my crow wing to clear the energies from the bed where I had slept.  I did the I Ching, as a courtesy to MM.  I was pissed!  I did the bala asana, into the bow, and by that time it was 7:00, and the corner market was open.  I went out and bought a six pack of Miller.  I drank a beer, made some pancakes, had another beer, did the I Ching, and passed out on the floor.  When I woke up, I sat with the drums, and sang a little song, “They grab you by the eyeball,

and drag you through the knothole!”  Then I drummed for Gaia.  I went to the coffee shop, but couldn’t write a poem, and couldn’t draw.  I went back home and did another I Ching, which came out “Exhaustion”.  My energy body was shot!

I am beginning to see how the Apprenticeship is going to work.  I am in deep trouble!  My Allies seem to have no clue that my energy body is a wreck after the heart attacks, and because my truck is in need of repairs which I can’t afford, I can’t get out to the Power Sites to restore my energies.  I love a challenge.  I love to invent ways to deal with the situations the Allies force me into.  I love it when I beat the crap out of them!  It reminds me of Castaneda’s work, but I can’t decide which one of them is ‘The Worthy Opponent’, and who is ‘The Petty Tyrant’.  In any case, they have managed to bring my own personal spirit totally into my physical body.  He is a bit slow to act, but he’s always there, always fighting for my independence.  I’ll never forget the day a few weeks ago when Jesus showed me the pages of an open Bible, and said, “I told you so!”, and my spirit spat on him.

So I put this away for the night, and Saturday came, a lovely sunrise.  I did the I Ching again.  As I was kneeling on the floor tossing the coins, the spirits came to me.  All of them.  I moved to the trance chair to read the hexagram, and they began to work on me.  They were all over me, inside and out, having sex with every part of my body, a huge slathery free-for-all!  I realized this is the ultimate goal of Tantric Brahmacharya, --the total Tantric union with Spirit.  This was the culmination of all my yoga training! 

I understood the reasons for the repeated assaults on my energy body.  Each spirit was making a home there, in preparation for the long journey.

#2 THE DEAD COMPUTER

MEDICINE STONES FOR MAKING GEM ELIXIRS

[This is the second of three blogs regarding the circumstances of my birth, the ending of my Initiation as a Shaman, and the beginning of my Apprenticeship.]

In Ayurveda, the digestion is regarded as the central fire of the human system.  The Ayurvedic diet is geared toward enhancing digestion with six distinct tastes, which stimulate digestion and appetite.  Undigested food in the intestinal tract is seen as one cause of many physical discomforts.  This undigested food is called ‘ama’.

In Shamanic Yoga, we see ama very differently.  As we go through our days, our auras or energy fields absorb many different toxins from the atmosphere, and from human contact.  Humans who do not consciously clean their energy systems carry and project a soot-like substance which will cling to the energies of the people near them.  This ama is present in places which are not cleansed, as well.  Shamans use sage to cleanse their Medicine Areas and living quarters, as well as their physical energy fields.  Spirits also carry ama.

After twenty two – plus years of living with my spirits, I absorbed and cleansed myself of many types of ama.  The blow to my energy body caused by the woman in my trance, in the first blog, left a huge bruise of ama in my physical body.  But not only in my physical body, the ama permeated my Medicine Area and home.  Shamanism is a multi-dimensional reality.  A blow like that can affect many things.  I knew it would take days or weeks to understand the many ways it had affected me.

The next day, I sat to use my drums and my ‘singing in tongues’ to cleanse my energy bodies.  Drumming is more effective than sage, to clear specific areas, or to dispel specific types of ama, such as spells or curses, or the effects of actual blows to the energy bodies.  Many things went through my mind, until, by the time I switched to the larger drum, I was able to clear out a vision of some of the ama I had picked up during my journeys to Hades with different spirits over the years.  As I drummed, I saw thousands of human souls, or spirits, rising up from a hillside and coming down towards me, like a thousand small exclamation points.

A few days later, on the 16^th, I was awakened by a ‘beep’ in my dreams.  It had a particular visual shape, which indicated it had come from Marilyn Monroe.  She likes to wake me with a ‘hypnopompic’ dream.  Since the end of my Initiation as a Shaman, she and the other spirits had been mostly absent from my life.  I was left to wonder just what my life was supposed to be like, after an Initiation.  I did my best to return to just being ‘me’.  But little by little, there were signs that the Allies were returning.  So I braced myself for what might come next.  Since they were still with me, I determined to set myself for simply accepting their presence in my life, and see what happened.  I decided to set up a small altar, where they would be welcome.  I set their personal stones there for them, and did things to honor their presence.  I thought I might get ‘out front’ of whatever it was.  That evening, I sat down to use the computer, but the mouse cursor would not move.  I was stuck.  I tried everything, before I realized it was Marilyn Monroe.  She has a way of getting into electronics.  She frequently screws up my computer, and she used to ‘beep’ the door chime in my truck when I had a thought she agreed with; until the door chime broke!  So the computer was dead.  Full Moon was two days away.

The next morning I set out before sunrise for a short morning walk.  Since the two heart attacks and stroke which signaled the ending of my Initiation as a Shaman, back in March, I’ve not been able to walk far, nor fast.  But that morning my heart was just very, very, heavy.  Just heavy.  I had to cut my walk short.  After a small breakfast, I went to the yoga floor to perform a bala asana, much like a prayer position, but designed to bring intensity to the digestive fires.  I felt the Red Sea rising within me.  (Rest, Digestion, Sexual Energy = RDSE, or Red Sea)  It was so intense I had to perform puja.  I knew the spirits were with me.

The next day, Friday, was the Full Moon.  Early that morning, I opened the front door, which faces west, and could see the last of the gibbous moon just above the horizon before sunrise.  I placed objects on my little porch roof to catch the last rays of the moon.  My computer still didn’t work.  So I sat in my vortex to find out why.

As I sat there, I got a vision of Marilyn Monroe.  She was angry with me.  Years ago, when she first appeared to me, the image of her face shone with Glory.  It was ecstatic with the joy of Illumination.  Over the years, after many, many episodes between us, many battles, many victories for each of us, I was able to send her to Hades as a punishment for her ruination of my life.  When she came back, her face had lost its glow.  She has never forgiven me for that.  So, for the Full Moon, she had shut down my computer.

At 4 am the next morning I was awakened as my left foot poked through a hole ripped in my sheet.  I got out of bed, and noticed my sinus was host to a raging cold.  I took some of my Cold Elixirs (Brown Picture Jasper, Carbon Steel, Moss Agate, Purple Fluorite, Rhyolite, and Rutilated Quartz), some Vitamin C and some aspirin, and went back to bed.  When I got up later, I again went to the vortex, to see if I could get more info on my computer.  This time, I saw Nefertiti.  She was angry with me.  By this time I knew that the computer had been shut down so they could have me to themselves, to do some work in preparation for what was to come next in my Apprenticeship.

Early in my Initiation as a Shaman, she had shown me the story of Ui Tada.  Nefertiti first introduced herself to me as “Ui”.  Later, I learned that Ui Tada had been the concubine of the Samurai Swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi.  Musashi was one of my earlier incarnations.  He came to me early in my Initiation, and we worked together on some poems and drawings.  I learned that the spirit who is now Marilyn Monroe had lived in his body at that time, just as she lives in mine now.  Ui was mad at me because of Musashi.  The story is that during ritual anal intercourse, Musashi had beheaded her with his sword.  I am certain that it had been Marilyn Monroe’s idea.  (She later revealed to me that she had also been Jack the Ripper.)  At any rate, the computer was still out of commission.

I went through the day, and later on, sat again in the vortex to check on the computer.  This time, I was reminded of Valentine’s Day 2005, when Marilyn Monroe had wanted to do a painting for me.  She took me out to a pub, where we had four pints of microbrew, and four shots of tequila, staggered back to the studio and did the painting, and, as I remembered later, just as I was passing out on the floor, I witnessed the Monroe running wildly in her spirit body, round and round the studio, with ‘nothing on but the radio’.  What a priceless memory!

I went to check on the computer, and it worked.

The next day, Sunday, I was up early, did some housework, and again went to sit in the vortex.  Out of nowhere, I found myself suddenly very sad, saying, “I want my mama!” and choking back the words as soon as I saw them.  Where had that come from?  I was remembering the situation of my birth, which I addressed in the previous blog.  It had not been good!  I was not happy to be born of this woman!  I went immediately into Shamanic breathwork, to clear my energy body.  I opened up my ‘yinyang’, that center of yogic gravity at the psoas muscle in the pelvis, and from there used the breath to bring a column of energy up through all the parts of my body which had gotten tightened and twisted at the thought of the curses attendant upon my birth.  The column of energy went right on up through my crown chakra, the Soul Star, and the Stellar Gateway, and as it rose, my vital energy went right up with it, and I saw myself being returned to the womb from which I had been born.  It all happened in less than a wink, although I remember it took me several breath cycles to move that energy up through my body.  But as it happened, the ‘voice of seeing’ (from Castaneda) told me that the curses from my birth had been reversed.