The Shamanic Ploy of “Turning The Head” is something I have to use every time I open a conversation. To climb the Shaman’s Ladder is difficult enough in trance consciousness. But ordinary state of consciousness precludes comprehension of the larger-than-life minutiae of the Shamanic Realm. Everything we ‘know’ gets in the way. What we ‘know’ constitutes the Ego, or what the Shaman calls the Tonal. The Tonal is the world we know. Every aspect of the world we know is a function of the Ego, or awareness possessed by the personal self. To enter the realm of Shamanic Reality is to reassess our relationships to the world we know, beginning with language.
Language is how we translate the images we carry, so we can communicate our reality to the world. Everything we know is expressed in language. Our language is constructed to express the world of the Ordinary State of Consciousness. A Shaman lives in the world of Trance Consciousness. Across the planet, Shamans use many devices to enter the realms of Trance Consciousness. Hallucinogens, or ‘entheogens’ are used almost everywhere. These psychedelics may or may not be combined with Drumming, or ‘sonic drive’. These two techniques will take the Shaman to two differing types of reality. I used both of these in the beginning.
To prepare for fully entering the realm of the Shaman, there is much homework. A Shaman Wannabe prepares by practicing Dreaming and Stalking. In my tradition, the Boost From The Earth is essential. This involves utilizing the energies of the living vortexes of the earth itself. These energies augment the consciousness energies available in Dreaming, and the physical energies of Stalking. Consciousness is further aided by using the connectivity of quartz crystals to access the levels of discarnate consciousness entities who come to help the Wannabe.
Each Shaman is a product of his particular culture, and his culture is a product of the particular region of the earth where he lives. Each region has an energy signature from the physical environment of the earth and its many features. All these are spirit energies. The Shaman enters the world of the spirits. All the world is spirit. It is our Ego, or Tonal, aka our perceptive mechanism, which either links us to the world of spirit or separates us from it. In order to unite with the world of spirits, it is necessary to vibrate at a very intense level. A Shaman’s practice is to distance himself from the lower vibrations, and train himself to withstand the higher vibrations. At a certain point, the vibrations of the Wannabe are ‘replaced’ by Spirit. This occurs through a Death Experience of some sort.
Dreaming is one of the most direct connectors to the Death Place and the consciousness which defines it. Our dreams are like a preview of the language which shapes the consciousness in the world of death.
In the culture I grew up in, the core of consciousness exploration was centered in Surrealism. Western Culture could be seen as a journey toward knowledge and expression of the world of Spirit; somehow we knew we needed to reconnect, after centuries of separation due to religion and industrialization. Artists and thinkers sought to represent the human image throughout this history, until in the early Twentieth Century the outward perfection of that representation had to give way to a deeper force of understanding. Abstraction and Surrealism arose to express the outer and inner vision that was forming a new consciousness.
Surrealism, founded by poets, focused on language. The Surrealists sought to force language to reveal its inner secrets of consciousness, through ‘automatic writing’—writing without conscious intent. At the same time, they focused on the Dream.
A few years into my experience as a poet, I became a Surrealist, and began writing dream poems, as well as practicing automatic writing. This change in my writing began as a result of my work in the graduate writing program at the University of California, Irvine, in Southern California. This was in the early 1970s. It was at this time that I had my first meeting with Marilyn Monroe.
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“Turning The Head” is an exercise to help to release the grip of the Tonal on the awareness and the attention system. Constantly confronted with The Rolling Force, --that pressure of reality which compels our attempts at survival and assaults us from all directions throughout the day--, the Ego defends its territory by erecting barriers to perception. We therefore live in a world which is a fabrication composed of edited memories and unchallenged assumptions. Shamanic techniques like hallucinogenic trance or drum-induced journeys are one way to break through this limitation. Fasting and meditation also create conditions in which awareness can be freed from its normal position, called the Assemblage Point.
In normal discussions, people tend to seek agreed-upon realities, and arguments are one means of smoothing out the differences. What we come up with is called the Inventory. It’s like living in a room filled with posters. We have pictures of the Buddha, or Jesus, or Paris, or whatever we’ve ever heard of, all shaped exactly to suit our fancy, by the force of the natural editing of our memory function.
Everyone has such a poster of Marilyn Monroe. When her name comes up in a discussion of Shamanism, a discontinuity is created. She doesn’t belong there! In that moment of discontinuity, a wonderful opportunity presents itself. This is a perfect time to exercise a Stalking ploy called “First Thought”. For a Shaman, it’s very important to understand how the mind works. At the first mention of a word, for example, “sex”, the computer of the brain flashes an image, or a thought, from its original primal depth, the reptile brain. In a flash, that image or thought goes through an editing process in which it is trimmed and cropped and is finally suitable for the conscious mind, and from there it can reach the tongue, all slicked up and politically correct. This is so deep and so habitual that it effectively controls all input into conscious awareness. We usually like to just sleepwalk through our days, assimilating pre-digested realities. We have an automatic defense mechanism to keep things running smoothly.
Here’s an example of that defense mechanism. You’re standing in a room with someone you know well. There is good understanding between you. You are not far apart, and your hearing is excellent. You say something. Your companion immediately responds with “What?” Figure that one out….
So when I mention Marilyn Monroe, people respond with “What?” Their brain goes into high gear, because she is an electrifying persona. Image after image flashes into consciousness, until the mechanism breaks down and they become defensive. A dozen psychological defenses can pop up at this point, because she touches some very deep places, by intention of her creators, of course! And yes, her creators have indeed transformed her from the Norma Jean she started out with, into the glamorous, tragic comedienne we all know. People who go through this transformation have absorbed the opened energies of the millions who bare their souls in darkened movie theaters. These energies are very transformative. Rock stars, athletes, politicians and celebrities all absorb these energies and are transformed by them, as well as by the work they do to become good enough for us to recognize. That’s the answer to the most-asked question about spirit guides: “Why is it always some famous person?” Famous people are transformed to a higher energy level. It’s very simple.
Dreams are another source of energy. Dreams come from the higher energy level of the spirits. They occur during periods when the body is at deep rest, and its energies are freed to interact with the higher level of energies of the spirits. In the beginning of Dreaming, the images are often fragmented or disjointed, or seemingly random and erratic. Or they may present a coherent fantasy of some sort. However they present themselves to a particular individual, they are a function of health and awareness. After years of working with dreams, a Dreamer will notice many things about the process.
There are differing levels and types of dreams, over the years. They represent different levels of communication between the world of spirits and the world of the dreamer. For me, the world of the dream was duplicated in the act of writing poems. The exercise of automatic writing opened up my creative mechanism, and formed a different sort of link to the world of the spirits. In the case of a poet it is called the Muse, a spirit from the realm of the Archetypes.
As this link became more established after a number of years of making daily poems, I had also had a number of years to become aware of things that happened while I was asleep. In graduate school, I lived in a little Spanish style hotel on the beach, at the foot of the Balboa Pier, just south of Newport Beach. It was a little ‘Hotel California’, I suppose.
One night while I was sleeping there, I was awakened into a higher level of sleep, in which I wasn’t really awake, but in a different sleep zone. I guess I was awake in my ethereal body. In any case, I became aware that someone was making love to me. This was a very different experience than any dream of making love! It was very physical. So physical that I actually did wake up during the process, and was astonished to find that there was no one else in the room. Even so, the lovemaking continued, and was very pleasant, to say the least! At that time I didn’t know what to think, but I certainly didn’t forget about it. Years later, after the onset of my Initiation as a Shaman, Marilyn Monroe revealed to me that it had been her. But that was after many years of making dream poems, in which I had developed a higher capacity in my Dreaming Body.
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The mention of Marilyn Monroe’s name brings on a variety of Ego defense mechanisms. People are incredulous; they become jealous, or envious; or they throw up images of their own, of famous people or heroes, or Masters they have heard of or admired. Somehow they need to find a way to lower me to their level, or raise themselves to my level. It’s such an automatic response that people are virtually unaware of what they’re doing. But I’ve seen it so many times that I’ve had years to think about it, and to find ways to even the playing field. I’m certainly not in the business of one-ups-manship (except sometimes, of course!). Besides, my relationship with the dead movie star is usually not the point of the conversation.
Over the years, I’ve had many discussions with myself, to find ways to resolve this problem. One of the lines of discourse follows their assertion or assumption that I’m merely fantasizing some adolescent crush on the sex symbol of my youth. Yes, that’s a definite possibility, I tell myself, and search deeply. What I find from my youth is that I was too young when she was a living star, to have her in my fantasies. I saw some of her movies and they were far too adult for me. I didn’t like them at all, and never carried her in my imagination. I remember that by the time I began to fantasize, Brigitte Bardot had come on the scene. Now there’s a chick for me! The sex-kitten!
By the time I had joined my life with The Monroe, I was twice-divorced and in my late forties. I have to say that during my round-the-clock companionship with MM, she was always very accommodating to this ‘preference’ for Bardot. In late 2008, Marilyn Monroe went back to the higher planes and I was on my own as a Shaman. One day, sitting in my uweni, or trance chair, Brigitte Bardo came to visit. She was accompanied by a huge lightning storm just outside the window beside my chair. A lightning bolt danced and danced in the neighbor’s yard, no more than ten yards from me. It thrashed around like an eighty-foot great white shark! Brigitte came into my energy body, and showed me many things. She has stayed with me, but not in the total body-mind-spirit union of my other spirit wives. She calls herself “Gi-gi”, with a hard G. (Jesus calls himself “Ji-ji”, in my ‘speaking in tongues’ or Shaman-talk.)
In the mid-to-late 1980s, fifteen years after my succubus encounter with Marilyn Monroe in the hotel, I had written hundreds of dream poems. I was an accomplished Dreamer. One night my dream broke open into a vision. I saw Marilyn Monroe’s face. It was black and white, like a film negative, only reversed. She had an archetypal expression on her face; a look of open-mouthed ecstasy; pure joy; enlightenment. She was framed by light which radiated around the dark place which held her image. I knew immediately who it was. In the vision she projected to me a series of images which I turned into a poem the next day.
A VISION:
Marilyn Monroe Shows Me The Stages Of Death
chrysanthemum carnation geranium gone
smiling borders gone
something like a dream is on-going
though obliterated
from Norma Jean
to Marilyn
she had known one form of liberation
now she sees herself
undergoing liberation once more
body gone
only her face new and shining
as if on screen
a moviestar’s face a face of light
white in the blackness
a Cheshire Cat
afraid and in pain
she discovers it is not to be easy
with a final
forceful effort like the climax of sex
she breaks through
uttering the exact same prayer
Oh my God Oh my God
she had uttered in orgasm
she transcends
then the final release the utter abandon
with a two year old’s cuckoo cries
uh-oh uh-oh
she’s gone
In 1988 I began an on-going series of Surrealist-inspired ‘automatic drawings’. Each drawing begins with a mindless, rapid scribble, left hand turning the paper every which way, right hand brandishing the pencil. The intent is to prevent any conscious intervention in the process. When I have gazed at the result, images begin to form in the scribbles, and I trace over the lines on the paper until the images become intelligible, erasing lines that don’t fit. I use only the actual lines on the paper, and add nothing. My spirits supply the images of the content. Marilyn Monroe is the chief contributor to this process, as, it turns out, she also produces the content of the poems. She is my Muse.
In these drawings, her image is most often a variety of the ecstatic expression of that first Vision. As I progressed in this work, I realized that these same sorts of images had been coming into my paintings almost from the beginning. The cartoonish faces were exactly similar to faces I had seen in the leaf patterns of trees and other parts of the landscape when I was taking LSD. During those trips, I learned the origin of the stylistic patterns of native arts. The native peoples lived in a world where they could actually See these same patterns, characteristic of their native environment. I saw patterns that the Northwest Coast Indians had seen and captured in their arts. I also saw the characteristic acid Paisleys, but not often. I was slightly embarrassed at the childish innocence of the patterns which I recognized as my own, in comparison to the sophistication of what the natives had seen. But over the years, my own patterns took on a sophistication of their own. Marilyn Monroe works very hard at what she does!
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1988 was a strong year for me. The culture which spawned me was thriving and filling my life. My Seattle Poetry Workshop was filled with talented happy poets. Every Tuesday my house hummed with the sound of their voices as they read their latest masterpieces in my basement. My paintings were being used on covers of books. My New Age addictions were growing and filling me deeply. Shops around Seattle were filled with crystals and stones and literature, and people all around me were bursting with the augmented vibes of their studies. 1988 was the year of my ‘Primary Vision’.
Nearly everything I have learned can be related to this vision. I was meditating in a vortex in my basement, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and doing my special breathing. In meditation, as in Dreaming, there are various levels of attention and consciousness. These levels are often reflected in the lights behind the eyelids. That darkness is never dark! There is always something happening there. One of my students told me after a session, “I thought I saw something, but was it just me?” “Yes,” I told him. He did see something, and it was just him. Discernment had occurred, but he had still to learn discrimination. What do these things mean?
It took me years to discover the meaning of my Primary Vision.
As I sat, the darkness behind my eyelids became very dark. Suddenly it was sliced by a sort of blade, as if it were a black curtain. The blade slashed once, then again, forming an X. Instantly, I shot through the opening of the X. I entered a realm filled with infinitesimal points of ‘light’. Pink specks and green specks formed a field which seemed infinite. I could see that each speck was a speck of Consciousness. Each was alive. This field of living Consciousness contained an object. The pink and green dots gave way to blocks of golden specks, forming huge bricks, which rose into a pyramid. At the apex of the pyramid, an eye was focused directly at me. Its pupil was black as deep space, but filled with supreme consciousness, penetrating directly into me. All this in an instant, after which I was back in my body.
I knew that the pyramid was ‘The Pyramid of Perfected Consciousness’. Only many years into my Initiation as a Shaman did I discover that the pyramid had been Queen Nefertiti, my Master Teacher.
As a Shaman Wannabe, I had long practiced techniques from Carlos Castaneda and Michael Harner, and was gaining Power at an accelerating pace. My yoga studies helped me prepare my energy field to accommodate a broader and deeper awareness. By using the asanas to open the cellular structure of the body, and using the breath to augment the physical energies with prana and mindforce energies, the yoga was raising me in the same ways that Dreaming had raised me, and the energies of the techniques from Harner and Castaneda brought the whole thing together.
A Shaman draws heavily on the energies of Nature; in particular, there is an aspect of Nature which we call Power. Power is an intelligence which is attracted to the Shaman. The Wannabe ‘courts Power’, in his expeditions into wild Nature. While driving along a forest road in search of a Power site, a Wannabe will see a hawk swoop directly in front of the truck, and fly off in a definite direction. There will be a Power site at that place. One time at Table Mountain, a Golden Eagle flew up above a single pine on the slope above the Kittitas Valley, and dove directly toward the tree. I went to investigate, and found a spot to sit. As I sat, I noticed a peculiarity of the tree. Right in the center of the foliage was a gap. A perfectly round hole appeared as a black tunnel. Employing the technique of ‘Gazing’, I entered the tunnel in the same way I had shot through the X in my Vision. These kinds of things happen frequently on a Shaman’s Quest. They are an indication of Personal Power. The energy bodies are tuned by this gazing process.
Carlos Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan; A Yaqui Way Of Knowledge, was the first text which brought to my attention the most important feature of my transformation as a Shaman. Don Juan instructed Carlos to ‘find his spot’ on the veranda of the shack in the desert where they would meet. After a night of searching, Carlos found two spots; one was negative and one was positive. They were earth energy vortexes. Later volumes did not give much importance to these vortexes, but by the summer of 1990, after many years of studying his works, I had come to have a serious interest in the subject. Not coincidentally, a local shop was offering a class on Geomancy, the use of divining rods to find ley lines and vortexes. I signed up for the class.
I made myself a pair of divining rods; bamboo garden stakes cut to accept a copper electrical wire, bent to an L shape so that it would turn easily in the hollow of the bamboo. Immediately I was hooked up to a pair of spirits, one in my right hand, and one in my left hand. Through use of a pendulum, I learned their names. On my right was Yuzyu. Yuzyu was a Reindeer Shaman from Arctic Norway, Thirteenth Century. He was a former incarnation of me, as it turned out. On the left hand was Yazzu Kyl Ini Pumu. Yazzu was a Jivaro headhunter Shaman, from the upper Amazon, early Twentieth Century, another of my former incarnations. This was a major breakthrough. None of the other students in the class contacted spirits as I did. But they hadn’t been working for a lifetime at raising their consciousness!
Yazzu and Yuzyu led me around with the divining rods. They showed me ley lines and vortexes in my house and yard, and in the coffee shop where I went to write my poems each morning.
Each spirit had his own crystal, which I would use on alternate days to write a poem. Yazzu took me to the jungle, and Yuzyu took me to the Arctic. Over a period of a couple of months in summer and autumn, they performed what Castaneda called The Splitting. Don Juan would whisper into Carlos’ right ear, and don Genaro would whisper into his left ear. This act opened Carlos to accelerate his energy transformation, and it did the same for me.
After a while we came upon the Winter Solstice in Seattle, and a fierce Arctic Chill froze the city solid; the wild winds knocked over a tree in the back yard of my house. It was a momentous time. The energies were wild and tense.
On Christmas Day, I was alone in the house. We had postponed our family holiday celebration until New Years. I took the opportunity to ask Jesus for his protection, in case there was something to fear from these spirits. I was into something indescribably deep and amazing.
After I had finished my prayer, the divining rods had a different feel to them. They led me to my typewriter and sat me down. The wire tips of the rods moved over the keys of the typewriter, pausing above the Q, then the U, E,E,N…”Queen Nefertiti here.” And my life entered another realm.
The next day, I took the rods again. Again they felt different. This time they guided me to the wall, where they indicated a poster for a film festival. The Moore Theatre was having a Marilyn Monroe festival. The poster was screen printed in red, white and black. I liked it. As I stood there, Marilyn Monroe’s face broke into a smile. She was smiling at me! I felt a huge rush of energy. It was like love! Just then I saw a fog form in front of her face. It was a fog of particles like in my Vision, but in all the colors of the rainbow. It was a wonderful spectacle.
The rods guided me away from the poster to my typewriter. I sat down, and the rods waved over the keys. They indicated the letters, “love begins”. She and Nefertiti took turns guiding me with the rods after that; Nefertiti on my left hand, and Marilyn Monroe on the right. Along with Jesus, Lao Tzu, and Peta Amen Apt, these were the spirits who performed my Initiation as a Shaman.
