Drawing a Wolf from the Pack

Our dinner guests yesterday were a typical Seattle-area couple: she ran a successful health care business, and he worked as a technology executive.   The conversation was mundane, revolving around the merits of various movies we'd seen, before it veered towards our families and childhood experiences.  Mary, it turned out, had grown up on a Native American reservation as a child, and had quite a story to share.

When Mary was about six years old, she would have to walk alone to school through a desolate landscape overgrown with bushes and scrub.  It was a distance of a few hundred yards to the school and there was an aggressive pack of wild dogs in the area that she was terrified of.  To avoid them, Mary would stick close to the brush.  On one such day, her luck seemed to run out - she was cornered by two dogs in the bush.  As the dogs advanced on her menacingly, the seemingly miraculous happened.  A wolf appeared out of nowhere and attacked he dogs, chasing them away.  The wolf then escorted Mary all the way to her school, stopping at the edge of the bush and keeping watch on her until she made it to the school building.  At the end of the school day, it was there waiting to escort her all the way back home.

We thought this was remarkable enough, but Mary added "This was no one time occurrence - the wolf was my companion to and from school for the rest of the school year."  I asked her if she had felt afraid of the wolf, to which she said "How could I be afraid of it, when it had saved me from those stray dogs?"

The Native Americans believe in power or spirit animals, which appear in visions during trance, often carrying a symbolic message relevant to your current situation in the real world.  The spirit animal is ephemeral, and you have to draw inspiration and courage from it to solve for yourself the problem at hand.  Mary isn't Native American and doesn't know if the wolf was her spirit animal; in her case, not only did the wolf appear in this reality, it stayed around for nearly a year to protect her through a difficult and vulnerable time.

The story has a sad ending.  The reservation would periodically cull the population of wild dogs, and that summer, the wolf was among the casualties.

Of Bill Gates and Windows: An Open and Shut Case

I'd joined Microsoft in 1994 with just a few years left on my H1 visa, which was due to expire in April 1997.  The company applied for my green card in July of 1995, and as per the process followed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, my case would be processed when my application date became "current".  On the 10th of each month, the INS would announce which dates they were currently processing, and come January of 1997, it was about five years behind, still processing applications from 1990. 

Bill Gates was at that time actively lobbying Congress to ease up restrictions on H1 visas.  Worried that I was just months away from having to leave the US, I dropped him an email asking if he could do anything to help.  I didn't hear back directly from Bill, but within a week, I got a call from a lawyer at Microsoft, asking to meet.  We discovered that we could extend my H1 visa by 100 days to July 31 1997, which the INS granted.  However, we didn't think this would make a difference, and on June 10, the INS was still processing applications filed in 1990. 


Microsoft began making plans to transfer me to the Vancouver, B.C., office in Canada, just across the border.  On July 10 1997, with 20 days left before I would have to leave the US, the INS released its monthly update, disclosing that it was now processing applications filed in July 1995.  Magically, the so-called "current" date had jumped forward by five years, by just exactly enough for my green card application to now be processed.  Had the "current" date moved by even a month less, this would not have been possible. 

I breathed a huge sigh of relief, secure that my life would now not be turned upside down.  The INS issued me an EAD (Employment Authorization Document), which permitted me to stay in the US indefinitely until my green card was issued. 

If the story ended right there, I might have written it off as a remarkable coincidence and nothing more.  What happened next was strange:  on Aug 10 1997, the INS release its next update and the "current" date had moved back to 1990!  A window had opened, as if only for me, enabling my green card process to move forward by a hair's breadth, and then closed shut just as abruptly.  Whether it was the Universe doing me a personal favor, or just the Blind Watchmaker momentarily losing the plot, it's the reason I am still here in the USA.

Shamanic Trance: Epilogue

Death and Rebirth
The Shamanic journey is a journey of ego death and rebirth - at least, that's the best word for what I experienced.  As I shifted into trance, there was a strong sense of unease and anxiety which manifested as nausea.  Some deep-rooted instinct took over and my breathing automatically took on a chaotic rhythm to work through the nausea.  (Later on, Eduardo would conjecture that this chaotic breathing was a response to deep rooted emotions surfacing in the trance, see this reference on nihdotgov)   I felt myself "squeezed until all that was left was the very essence of existence", and I imagine the closest comparable sensation would be that of being born (!!!)  While the experience was very, very visceral, intense and just a little scary, it also felt completely natural and familiar at another level.  As the nausea wore off, the trance deepened and this where I had the sense of reliving many, many lives before emerging on the other side, reborn.

This article Breathe Like a Baby: The Miracle of Pranayama that I found as I write this post expresses it well:

No one teaches us to breathe. The compression of the fetal chest in the birth canal may cause the urge the breath. We are compressed, we are trapped, we need space—so our innate instinct is to breathe.

We need the space—the expansion—that breathing creates.

It helps us to continue creating space, to become devoid of conditioning to continue unlearning the fear, anxiety, and stress that we have learned, the stories that we’ve held on to for dear life, even though they were no longer serving us

Breath: The Umbilical Cord
The trance state is a state of expanded consciousness.  While the finite, limited sense of everyday self almost completely dissolves into infinity, a shred of individuality remains.  As I lay awash in bliss, the question arose as to what the relationship is between Unitary Awareness and the limited self and physical body of my everyday experience.  The answer that came was that breath is the umbilical cord that connects the finite body and mind to the infinite - stop breathing, and you merge into the infinite.





Gender and Identity
Once I was established in trance, all gender identification seemed meaningless and inconsequential.  Pure awareness or consciousness transcends such limited concepts.   I've already touched upon this in my previous post, but my sense of separate identity vanished.  In turn, I transformed into my wife, children, parents, uncles and aunts - in the sense of completely forgetting I was myself and becoming them.  I experienced what it was like to be each of them, sharing their emotions, hopes and fears - in other words, empathy to the point of complete identification with the other person. This line from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describing the steps to the experience of Samyama or oneness with an object of meditation, best captures the experience:

तद् एवार्थमात्रनिर्भासं स्वरूपशून्यम् इव समाधिः ॥ ३॥
tad evārthamātranirbhāsaṃ svarūpaśūnyam iva samādhiḥ .. 3..
When the object of meditation engulfs the meditator, appearing as the subject, self-awareness is lost. This is samādhi.


Salvation and the Time before Death
Expanded consciousness exists all around us at this very moment.  The effort is in staying in that expanded state instead of contracting into the day to day experience of limited self.  Quoting from The Time before Death by the 15th century mystic and poet Kabir.

What you call "salvation" belongs to the time 
            before death.
.....
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
          City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next 
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.