Pacific Northwest Shamanic Trance

"All including the world seen by you and yourself, the seer of the world, is one only." 

- ch.1, verse 1, All is One, the booklet recommended by Sri Ramana Maharshi

Many mystic traditions describe this state of Oneness as the true or ground state of all being.  While I'd experienced various interesting states of the mind, the experience of Oneness was foreign to me.  I could of course intellectualize and rationalize it, but that is hardly a substitute for the real thing.  

That then was the situation prior my session in the forests of Washington State with my shaman friend, Eduardo.  The shaman helps one shift into an altered state of consciousness through techniques that include rhythmic breathing, drumming and music, whereupon one can viscerally experience mystic truths and insights.  

So, one spectacular summer's morning in the Pacific Northwest, Eduardo and I hiked up to a nice secluded clearing in the forest and settled down for the day.  About an hour in, I felt it - subtle at first, then a big, big shift.  For the next 4-5 hours, I was like Alice in Wonderland, having fallen down a rabbit hole to a place where time and space as I knew it seemingly ceased to exist. 


I was plunged deep into a subjective experience that I can now barely recall and describe.  Physically, my body had turned mostly to jelly; I would lay spread-eagled face upwards on the forest floor, in the shape of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, or mustering all my will-power, roll around into a foetal shape, and then plant my face into the ground below me. 

I have the barest hint of recollection of reliving hundreds or even thousands of lives all at the same time.  I recall a little more clearly reliving every moment of this life all at once.  My self as I knew it had dissolved into near nothingness and in its place there was this vast expanse of consciousness - and in this field of being, I became everyone I'd known in my life, and they became me.  Especially with my family, it was impossible to tell where I ended and they began, or to even think of these personalities as distinct. 

"All that you consider as I, you, he, she and it, is one only."
- ch.1, verse 2, All is One

All separation gone, I felt my true nature as Joy: I repeatedly exploded in gales of ecstatic laughter, before lapsing back into trance where all possibilities - past, present and future - floated like a matrix in consciousness, and any path was seemingly there for the taking (more on this later). 

During the trance, there were extended periods where I was "lost", with interludes where some lucidity and ability to reflect would return.  Upon one such return to the present, I awoke to hear Eduardo singing "Suddhosi bhuddhosi", the lullaby of Jnana or self-knowledge that Queen Madalasa sang soothe to her infant son Vikrant as narrated in the ancient Indian religious text, the Markandeya Purana.   As the words rolled off his lips first in Sanskrit and then in English, I wept uncontrollably like a child, wracked by emotions that I cannot quite describe:

You are forever pure, you are forever true

And the dream of this world can never touch you

So give up your attachment & give up your confusion

And fly to that space that’s beyond all illusion

A question that came to mind was how to think of the various unpleasant and unlikable people I'd encountered in life with this expanded notion of Self without boundaries.  The answer came unbidden "Expand!  Expand to include all, pleasant and unpleasant, in the experience of Self."  Even in the trance state, this psychic expansion and embrace of negatives required enormous effort on my part.  I could discern that this was my homework to take away from the day. 

"He who sees "I am separate," "you are separate," "he is separate" and so on, acts one way to himself and another way to others. He cannot help doing so. The thought "I am separate, others are separate" is the seed from which grows the tree of differing actions in relation to different persons..."
- ch.1, verse 6, All is One

As late afternoon arrived, I emerged from trance to the peace and quiet of the forest.  Eduardo packed up his musical instruments and we walked back to our car in silence to head back home.

That night, as I sat at home reflecting on the day's events, a book in my collection caught my eye "The Book of Ho'oponopono: The Hawaiian Practice of Forgiveness and Healing".  It's message of healing negative relationships by "dissolving the negative patterns in one's field" had never made sense to me, until now.  I could now see that all experiences exist in the unitary field of Consciousness.  I was now open to the possibility that by becoming aware of and accepting even negative experiences from this perspective, a different path might open up moving forward. 

"There is nothing but yourself. All good will be yours. Yea, you become the good itself. All that others gain from you will be good only."
- ch.1, verse 10, All is One

Can one eliminate all negative experiences from one's life by "dissolving negative patterns"?  Is the work to unconditionally accept all negative experiences as part of the Self?  As I write this post from the limited perspective of my everyday self, either alternative seems daunting, if not outright impossible.  But that day in the forest, the possibility was dangled tantalizingly in front of me.

"Who is God? He is grace. What is Grace? Awareness without the fragmentary ego....In fact, there are no states besides this. They appear in the state of ignorance. For him who knows, there is one state only. You are that."
- ch.2, verse 10, All is One

Crime and Punishment

For most of us, karma is an abstract concept.  An online search returns this definition, but doesn't edify things:

kar·ma

[ˈkärmə]  destiny or fate, following as effect from cause.

 

Many years ago when I was living in the up in the spectacular Sierra Nevada mountains of California, the uncanny workings of karma showed their unmistakable hand to me.  I was single and my best friend was my landlord Dale's mongrel, Moondog.  Moondog would spend most of the day tied to a 50 ft line on the property, and looked forward eagerly to the evenings, when I would take him long jaunts in the nearby national forest. 

One evening, I returned home from work one evening to find Moondog more restless than usual, having been deprived of a walk for over three days.  As we walked along the brief stretch of Hwy 49 that separated our home from the forest road that led into the mountains, Moondog jumped from the grassy, six foot high shoulder alonside the highway straight into the path of a car traveling at 60 mph.   He was flung over 50 feet by the collision and died an agonizing death.  Dale's brother Joe and I buried him that night on the property.  When Dale returned from an out of town visit a few days later, I could barely muster the courage to narrate the turn of events to him, and I turned away with a mumbled half-apology. 

Highway 49, The Gold Rush Highway; the home I lived in is on the right

One day, a few weeks later, I lost my voice - completely.  I could no longer talk, and had to get by at work by scribbling on pieces of paper that I would hold up for my colleagues. 

After a couple of weeks of this situation, I went and saw a doctor.  Nothing was obviously wrong, and we explored various hypotheses and their related medications, including allergies and vocal cord "strain", all in vain.  The doctor referred me to a specialist in nearby Fresno. 

I underwent a battery of tests culminating in the specialist video taping my vocal chords in action using a fiber optic camera inserted through my nose.  The tests found nothing abnormal - no inflation, no polyps, nada.  Having explored all avenues, we gave up.  I went back to work and continued communicating via paper for about three months in all.  And then one fine day, my voice came back just like that, with no residual soreness, weakness or other lingering symptoms.

At that time, I didn't think about it, but in hindsight I could see the connection.  You can think of it as crime and punishment, trauma and neurosis, or as a psychosomatic affliction, whichever model you are more comfortable with.  The mind punishes not only mentally, but also physically.  The reaction can be immediate or delayed. 

From Wikipedia: The consequence or effects of one's karma can be described in two forms: phalas and samskaras. A phala (literally, fruit or result) is the visible or invisible effect that is typically immediate or within the current life. In contrast, samskaras are invisible effects, produced inside the actor because of the karma, transforming the agent and affecting his or her ability to be happy or unhappy in this life and future ones.

Carl Jung once opined on unresolved emotions and the synchronicity of karma:

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Some interpretations of the scriptures claim that "The law of karma operates independent of any deity or any process of divine judgment."  At least, that is my preferred interpretation, since bringing a punishing God into the equation raises troubling questions.  I prefer to think of guilt, punishment and salvation as creations of the Mind.

In the end, with karma, maybe it is not ours to transform the punishment, so much as to transcend the mind. 










 

Good Vibrations

Back in 2005, I'd been keeping up a regular mantra practice, and you could say that I was in an "energized" state, in so far as I would occassionally feel light vibrations in various spots of the body.   My mantra teacher Ashok explained that these vibrations were various chakras in the body being activated by the mantras, but meditation and spiritual practice had for me always been a mental or intellectual thing.  Despite reading about them in books on yoga, I didn't really believe in chakras,  and didn't give the matter any further thought.

 About this time, I attended a meditation retreat  conducted by the soon to become infamous Swami Nithyananda.   Whatever his moral or other failings, I can attest that Nithyananda was an accomplished yogi.  I experienced a profound shift during the weekend-long retreat, resulting in a heightened sense of mental clarity and focus that lasted for weeks. I was familiar with such shifts from previous experiences meditating on my own, and so wasn't particularly surprised, but what followed soon after was new territory.  On the third day, Nithyananda offered an optional "healer's initiation" to the workshop attendees, which would purportedly qualify one to perform "touch healing" on others to cure various ailments.  I  rolled my eyes in skepticism, but decided that in for a penny, in for a pound.  One by one, the acolytes knelt in front of the Swami with their hands raised, as he pressed his thumb into their forehead for a few seconds.  I'd hesitantly submitted to the process and returned to my seat, when I felt what can best be described as a huge glob of energy between my eyes. 

The Glob descended down my chest and settled into a large grapefruit sized region in my solar plexus.  I went into a trance that lasted about 20 mins, while the Glob throbbed and vibrated spectacularly inside me.  All this time, the rational part of me wondered what this was all about.  What was this Glob, where did it come from, what did it mean?  Anyways - I was sufficiently impressed by this feat of magick that I decided I would practise touch healing using the techniques we'd been taught. 

A few weeks later, the occasion arose.  Bhavna was fighting a sore throat, and as we retired for the night, I sat on a chair next to her with my right hand on the afflicted area, trying to send it "good vibrations". 

My old friend the Glob had long disappeared, and I couldn't muster up a new glob of my own, try as I would.  As befits any hardworking meditator or healer, I soon fell asleep.  I awoke what must have been an hour or so later, my hand still on Bhavna's throat.  I could clearly feel a strong, circular vortex of energy about three inches in diameter churning clockwise under my palm, as if someone had plugged it into a 9V battery.  In the dimly lit room, it was clear as day that I was sensing a chakra - whether Bhavna's throat chakra, or the chakra in my palm (yes, there are chakras in your hands and feet too, and are known to Reiki and other touch healers), I could not tell. 

The word Chakra (चक्र) derives from the Sanskrit word meaning "wheel" or "circle", the etymology of which I'd never paid attention to while reading about it, but now it all made sense.  With renewed faith, I continued the healing session for another 10 mins or so before calling an evening of it.  You must wonder - did Bhavna's sore throat improve, and did I build on this experience and become an accompished touch healer and master of chakra energies?  I don't recall that I affected an instant cure, and sadly, I did not keep up my practice despite this early show of promise.  (Plus, Nithyananda and I had a falling-out of sorts, but more on that later.)   I can say that I am no longer a skeptic on the matter of chakras - they do seem to exist, and can be sensed as circular vortices of energy, as described in yogic texts. 

So, if a friend asks you to send them good vibes, go ahead and do so even if the only thing you feel is a little silly.  To paraphrase the famous British scientist JBS Haldane, "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose", and you might discover your latent talent as a healer.



 

A Brush With Disaster

In my cupboard upstairs sits a poster tube with a rolled-up print of Death on the Ridge Road by the famous American painter Grant Wood (You may be more familiar with his iconic work American Gothic), which I picked up at the Williams College Museum of Art in eastern Massachusetts on a visit with family back in 2009.  In the painting, a red truck hurtles over a hump in a windy two lane country road, on collision course with a black limousine that has chosen to pass a slower car at what is obviously a blind curve.  We are left to guess what happens next.

Rewind a few years further back to about 2002. We then lived in Sahalee, a suburb located on an elevated plateau near Redmond, Washington.  I had finished an early morning meditation session and was driving down Sahalee Way about 300 feet from the traffic signal where I would turn left on to Redmond-Fall City Way, when the thought flashed clearly and insistently in my head "Watch out, someone is going to jump the red light at the intersection!"

Now, the left turn light had turned green when I was still a fair distance from it, there was no one in front of me, and I would have usually taken the turn at about 20-25 mph, but something made me pay attention to the warning, and I slowed to a near standstill as the nose of my car entered the intersection and looked to the right.  As I watched, a large 18 wheeler truck bore down on the intersection and barreled right through the red light, narrowly missing me.  The truck driver had obviously realized his mistake and had hit the brakes, but was able to bring his vehicle to a stop only after crossing the intersection.  Had I ignored the voice in my head, the truck would have ploughed into the side of my car, albeit at a slow speed. 

He looked down sheepishly and apologetically at me as I drove past him, shaking my head.  Of course, he had no idea why I had abruptly slowed down, and was probably thanking his stars, as I was mine.  There was something surreal about it all - it felt as if the whole situation was somehow orchestrated, with the situation never seeming dangerous or out of control.

While we will never know how events unfolded on Ridge Road in Grant Wood's masterpiece, an unknown artist seems to have applied a few whimsical strokes of the brush that morning on the canvas of an otherwise ordinary morning commute.  The purpose of art, after all, is to shake us out of the mundane and to evoke the mysterious or transcendent.  

When Doves Cry

I remember the day well: August 13, 2012.  It had not been a great year for me.  I'd been dealing with a mysterious aggravation of my acid reflux symptoms since March of that year.  It wouldn't respond to medication.  I'd had trouble swallowing food, had lost 20 lbs in weight, and was going through a battery of tests.  At work, and my new manager had replaced most of our team with his henchmen, and I was in the unexpected situation of looking for a new job. I was in a pretty despondent mood that afternoon as I cycled along the Sammamish River Trail towards Marymoor Park, just a half mile from our home in Redmond.

As I neared the turn off to the park, I noticed a white dove sitting on the fence beside the trail.  Now, pigeons and doves are unusual along this trail - I've never seen one on this trail on any other occasion despite having lived here for over 10 years now.  Something struck me about this bird other than its striking appearance, and I hopped off my bike to observe it more closely.  I expected it to fly away at my approach, but interestingly, it just sat there, allowing me to get within a couple of feet of it.  (I didn't attempt to venture any closer.)

As it turned out, I spent a whole 20 minutes admiring it from up close, pausing to take a number of pics and video clips with my phone.  For much of this time, aside from a brief period where it briefly hopped off the fence and walked around near my feet, the dove just sat on the fence, completely unperturbed by my attentions. During this time, a number of people walked past us on the trail, oblivious to our communion. Finally, reluctantly, I bid farewell to my feathered friend and departed on my bike.

On that very downcast day, the silent presence of this gentle creature uplifted me in a way that words and men of wisdom just could not.  The clouds parted, and I felt my optimism return, though exactly why I could not say.

A search on Bing yields this nice tidbit from a site called BeliefNet "In a situation that is frustrating or upsetting to you, a dove may be encouraging you to wipe the slate clean and start again.... Let your sighting of a dove remind you to reconnect with the spiritual aspect of your life; accept it as a blessing.".  

And from this other site:  "The Dove represents peace of the deepest kind. It soothes and quiets our worried and troubled thoughts, and enables us to find renewal in the silence of mind. In these moments of stillness we are able to appreciate the simple things in life."

Believe what you will, and this where it would end but for an interesting postscript.

Fast-forward about a year.  My friend Srivats and I were sitting on my deck at home on a summer afternoon, enjoying a beer.  I was relating to him my encounter with the white dove, and Srivats was understandably reluctant to attribute any meaning to it - after all, if you rule out mere chance as an explanation, you are deep in Carlos Castaneda territory, almost.  There we were, the impassioned pleader on one side, and the disbelieving skeptic on the other, when a pale coral pink dove of a shade I've never seen before alighted on the rain gutter right above our heads.  There it sat for a full minute or so while Srivats and I both stared at it, before flying away.

I've never seen a dove, white, pale pink or otherwise, around my house other than on that summer afternoon.

Bali Ha'i: Awake within the Dream

Back in 2013, having read about lucid dreams but never having experienced one myself, I ordered a copy of Stephen LaBerge's Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life from Amazon.  If you are not familiar with lucid dreaming, Wikipedia describes it as follows:

1. A lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During lucid dreaming, the dreamer may be able to exert some degree of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment.

I eagerly started reading the book only to be quickly disappointed - it listed a number of techniques to master and exercises to work on to experience a lucid dream, which sounded too much like hard work.  I tossed the book on my bedside table and promptly forgot all about it, or so I thought.  Some program in my mind had obviously not dropped the matter, and a week later, I had my very first (and only) lucid dream!

The dream started off like any other, in that I was not aware I was dreaming.  In the dream, I was in an aircraft taking off from a valley set amidst mountains covered with thick, impenetrable tropical forests.  The sky was ominous and heavy with dark, low clouds.  The setting sun shone from below the clouds near the horizon, casting a golden glow on the scene.  The plane lifted off and climbed to a couple of hundred feet, only to dip and start plummeting towards the ground.  "Oh no, we are going to crash" I thought, staring out the window as the ground below got closer and closer.  Suddenly, I realized that everything was moving in slow motion.  

An aspiring lucid dreamer is supposed to train their mind to watch for anything out of the ordinary while dreaming.  This then cues them to wake up within the dream and continue dreaming, but lucidly.  I'd never comprehended how one might achieve this, but now here I was, seeing everything move in slow motion and having an Aha! moment "I am dreaming!!!"  

I was now fully awake within my dream, and in control of it.  The plane touched down like a feather. I chose to fly out through the roof of the plane, passing through it with ease.  I floated up in the air, exhilarated.  I decided to explore the giant mountain looming in front of me and flew up its slopes.  At about 4,000 feet up, I decided to manifest a tropical village in a jungle setting, complete with quaint little straw huts and a stream flowing through it.  A Balinese village, I decided for no special reason, though I have never been to Bali.  I played around like a child in this idyllic setting, flying and swooping around the village.  After a while, tiring of sustaining the lucid dream, I decided to wake up...and the dream ended.  

Fast forward to 2016.  It was a Sunday afternoon, and my friend Sven and I were sitting in my living room and discussing meditation.  Sven is 6' 5" tall, a practical Dutchman and an MIT engineer, and not really given to esoteric notions.  Our conversation turned to alternate states of consciousness and I casually brought up the topic of lucid dreams.  Sven paused for a moment, and said "My dad was an anthropologist back in Holland, and I recall him mentioning an Indonesian tribe that used to engage in mass, group lucid dreaming".  

Which got me wondering why I picked Bali as the setting of my lucid dreaming adventure versus any other place on earth.  Tickets to Bali, anyone?

P.S.: "Bali Ha'i", also spelled "Bali Hai", is a show tune from the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. The name refers to a mystical island, visible on the horizon but not reachable, and was originally inspired by Espiritu Santo's sighting of Ambae island in Vanuatu, where author James Michener was stationed in World War II.

The 4th State

Non-dualistic Hindu philosophers talk of Turiya, or a 4th state of consciousness.  According to the Shiva Sutras of Vasugupta: Turiya is the fourth state of consciousness beyond the states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep. Turiya strings together those three states. It is the Metaphysical Consciousness distinct from the psychological or empirical self. It is the Saksi or witnessing consciousness. And it is the transcendental Self.

Many years back, while going through a phase of deep meditative experiences, I'd experienced a prolonged state of being vividly and lucidly aware and conscious while in deep sleep, which was so out of the ordinary and yet so real that I felt it must correspond to this state of Turiya.

However, the question that continued to bother me was what happens when one is in the state of deep sleep without awareness, which is the normal, day-to-day experience of most of us.  The following explanation offered by Sri Ramana Maharshi, the great mystic, did nothing to answer the question: 

Bhagavan: So there is a continuity in the sleep and the waking states. What is that continuity? It is only the state of pure being.

There is a difference in the two states. What is that difference? The incidents, namely, the body, the world and the objects appear in the waking state but they disappear in sleep.

Question: But I am not aware in my sleep.

Bhagavan: True, there is no awareness of the body or of the world. But you must exist in your sleep in order to say now ‘I was not aware in my sleep’. Who says so now? It is the wakeful person. The sleeper cannot say so. That is to say, the individual who is now identifying the Self with the body says that such awareness did not exist in sleep.

Explanations notwithstanding, it seemed to me that one could equate the mind with the self, and that both cease to exist when one is deep sleep or in a faint.  I'd experienced episodes where I'd passed out due to not having eaten for too long - the experience is clearly one of a machine shutting off, and you have no recollection of anything, existence or otherwise, till sufficient blood flow resumes to the brain and you come to.  (The deep sleep experience is typically preceded and succeeded by the dream state, and is therefore harder to isolate.) This mechanistic explanation seemed to suffice and was at odds with the position taken by Advaita Vedanta. 

Early in 2017, this question about the validity of the Turiya state was nagging me to no small degree.  Was there really a continuity of self across waking, dream and deep sleep, when I'd personally experienced a clear discontinuity of self on the occasion of these fainting spells?   It was in these circumstances that I had a most unusual dream experience during a business trip to India that seemed to provide a clue.

In the dream, I was lying in an operating theater at a hospital about to undergo a medical procedure.  The doctor asked me to hold my breath as long as I could, and with a force of effort and no small amount of pride, I held my breath for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,...seconds, and then suddenly, due to a lack of oxygen, I passed out.  Yes, I passed out in my dream, and as would be the case with a "real" fainting episode, there was a complete absence of awareness.  I was a complete blank.  When I came to, the doctor had apparently completed whatever medical procedure it was while I was unconscious.  And then, I woke up.

Analyzing the entire experience, I could see that the "real" me (who is writing this post) had existed throughout the dream experience, while the "dream" me had transitioned within the dream from waking state to unconsciousness (faint or deep sleep) back to waking state.  The real me was the "continuity that strung together these states" within the dream, and that could say "I was not aware while in deep sleep but was yet there."

Sometimes, it takes a dream to reveal the reality of things.

A Flash of Synchronicity

I lay in bed at night, thinking that it had been a while since I'd experienced any synchronicities.  Well, I was in for a little surprise the next day.  I picked Sanjog up from school and and joked around with him on the drive home.   Quite randomly, I brought up the topic of electric eels, and Sanjog mentioned how they could generate voltages higher than the 110v that comes out of the socket at home.  I recalled to him my reading as a child that "electric eels could stun a horse".   

Images of eels as large as an adult human flashed through my mind from documentaries I'd watched in the past.  Sanjog and I then wondered how electric eels could shock other animals without shocking themselves.  Could they recharge quick enough to deliver a second shock right away?  I made a mental note to get home and research online on how eels generate electricity, and how they protect themselves from the effects thereof.  Of course, by the time we got home, I had forgotten our conversation entirely. 

 

Sanjog went out to play, while I caught up on some work email.  After a while, I decided to take a break and started browsing through the stack of Tintins we'd purchased about a week ago.  I randomly picked out Tintin and the Picaros, a book I hadn't read in at least 20 years.  Here's what I stumbled across about half-way through the book:

 

 

 

"Big electric eels grow up to a couple of meters long and can stun a horse with a single discharge!", said Cuthbert Calculus.  Indeed they can, he took the words right out of my mouth.