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.