I’ve written before about some of the fantastic things that have happened to me during my time with NextStage Expanded Awareness Society, including entering Shamanic Reality. Since I began about a year ago, one of the most incredible things that has happened is that, on rare occasions, I receive the gift of a direct visit from Spirits and Entities.
These visits are not dreams, although they start while I’m sleeping. They are similar to my experiences with Shamanic Reality in that they are hyper-real – more real and concrete than what most people call waking reality – and the two may be closely related but yet these visits are different. The difference in feeling is hard to describe, but they are distinct particularly in the after-effects. Shamanic Reality feels very much like I’ve passed through the veil and gone somewhere else, then when I return everything is “normal”. Visits from Spirits feel like they’ve come to me (or perhaps I’ve been brought to them directly), and there is always significant evidence in the room once they’ve gone.
Perhaps the Spirit visitors are using Shamanic Reality to reach me, using it as a way to enter my consciousness.
When a Spirit visits, they have a distinct appearance which is always highly unusual. Spirits sometimes present themselves in a form that I’m familiar with already. For example, when Whale visited me, she/he took the form of an Orca, which for me is a comforting symbol of quiet power and safety from my youth. Other times their appearance is wholly unfamiliar, in which case my brain will do it’s best to interpret the information based on my life-experience. The result is that I see a mixture of things I’ve experienced and things I have not, which can be… interesting to say the least.
The Spirit then communicates with me. This communication may use symbolism – like when Orca was watching me from a harbor, while I was on the shore – but it is often a direct conversation such as the one I had with a Spirit that my teachers believe was “Harlequin”, the Primordial Trickster. Others may use more specific terms for the Primordial Trickster – “Raven” and “Loki” are examples.
When these interactions first began, I had no conscious (upper brain) control over these conversations. I responded when spoken to, but I couldn’t “think” about or choose what I wanted to say. The more I’ve continued to Practice though, the more my upper brain has been able to guide my responses.
When the conversation is over, I am always pulled wide awake immediately no matter what time of night it is. At this moment, the veil between realities is thinner and I’m treated to all kinds of interesting sights and sounds which are not normally available to me. The air is incredibly thick, and the entire room is vibrating at a very high frequency. The air and room changes are a clue to me that I’ve had a visit from a powerful Spirit, they are a kind of an aftershock or consequence of their presence.
I also know for a fact that these encounters have happened more times than I can remember. Sometimes the barrier between my conscious and non-conscious mind stays intact and I have no waking memory of them – but I know they’ve occurred because the air and room vibrations are present and obvious.
When it’s over, I always make a point to thank the Spirit. They’ve always had an important lesson to teach me, and I’m always incredibly thankful when they choose to visit.
One of the areas I research extensively is the intersection of hallucination and perception (for a fascinating read, see Journal of Consciousness Studies, v23 #7-8) and often, when people share their experiences, my first concern is to determine if they were genuinely perceiving something or genuinely hallucinating some experience. Traditional psychotherapeutics recognizes hallucinations as something internally generated (there is no outside influence of any kind inducing the hallucination, it’s completely a product of the individual’s mind/brain) and perception as something caused by an external influence (the individual is sensing something veridical that exists in the world and could be perceived by others).
The reason is simple (to me); hallucinating bears watching and perhaps the suggestion of analysis (depending on the nature of the hallucination), perception should be encouraged (my opinion) as much as the individual is willing to be encouraged and explore.
There are lots of types of hallucinations and often a glib or casual description of a genuine perception experience can be categorized as a hallucination.
My personal methodology for determining if I’m hallucinating or perceiving a genuine shamanic experience is really quite old and goes back to some of the first historical records of shamanic practices; the Judeo-Christian bible. In the Old Testament, specifically in the most ancient books, the test of a shamanic experience – they are now called “prophetic experiences” and, as one of my teachers told me, read the bible as an archeological writing (which it actually is) and you’re reading one of the greatest collections of shamanic practice stories ever written – was the accuracy of the experience.
This is an important element, both for the individual having the shamanic experience and if the shamanic experience is intended for someone other than the individual having the experience. Does the experience help you in some obvious and manifest way?
More bluntly, you’re not experiencing demons coming at you, devils attacking you, voices demanding you harm yourself or others or insisting that you’re an idiot, incompetent or simply “not good enough”. Any of these are (to me) indications of hallucination and not a genuine perceived shamanic experience.
What if the shamanic experience provides you information about someone or something else? How accurate is it? The ancient test was 100% accuracy 100% of the time and that’s an incredibly high – yet easily verifiable – standard.
Regarding that standard, it’s also amazingly easy to achieve, provided the practitioner remembers and follows one amazingly simple rule: State or share only what was perceived. In other words, don’t interpret. The moment we start interpreting we’re “adding value” (to use a marketing concept) and my experience is that the Spirits don’t need me to add value, they need me to communicate exactly what they shared, nothing more or less.
This is where we tell people one of the “rules” of The Practice: Share your experiences as follows –
Practitioners who share/state their experiences along those guidelines are rarely (if ever) in danger of making mistakes.
And just so we’re clear, that’s experience (ahem) talking.
Thank you for this, Joseph. I had an experience this evening with the exercises where I went in with an agenda, to remove some specific via negativa. And I came out with a boat load of information to give to my mother. I will share with you the next time we speak, but using your guidelines for sharing experiences is important in order to truly honor the Spirits.
Thank you Jospeh. Would hallucinations often directly reflect one’s own inner demons and struggles? Could we relate them more to a waking dream than an actual experience?
Jospeh’s not here right now, perhaps I can help.
Hallucinations based on inner demons and struggles are just one type of hallucination and there are several others. I’m not sure if such things would be considered a “waking dream” or a “voluntary image”, something internally generated that has no corresponding object in the environment. A voluntary image is something we have control over although that control might be nonconscious hence not obvious to our rational minds.
Let me share one of Susan‘s experiences (shared with her permission) that demonstrates the difference between hallucination and veridical perception.
After her mother passed, Susan was cleaning out her mother’s house, packaging things up for various charities, putting labels on things to indicate who wanted what, and part of this was finding stuff that belonged to other people.
One of her mother’s friends had given her mother lots of expensive jewelry, asking her mother to hold onto it while she was away.
Now her mother had passed without telling anybody where she placed the jewelry.
Susan had looked everywhere she thought to look with no luck. Finally she calmed herself, centered and called out to her mother, “Okay, mom, where did you put the jewelry?”
She went right over to a piece of furniture, opened a few drawers and there was the jewelry, just as her mother had left it.
Here’s the difference between hallucination and perception; Susan knew the information she was given was correct and accurate before she acted upon it. There was a calmness, a knowing, that instructed or informed her to act without hesitation. That is the nature of veridical perception.
People who hallucinate may also act without hesitation and the accuracy of their actions is at best 50/50.
As a note, accuracy of less than 50/50 is an indication of veridical perception misinterpreted. If someone is accurate only 10% of the time, that means they have a 90% accuracy of error, something also out of statistical bounds. They are accurate “in the wrong direction”, so to speak. Good statistical analysis would indicate this and few researchers seem to acknowledge it.
Hey Brother, great post! While I can’t relate specifically to your experience with Shamanic Realities, I can relate to the experience you feel after your conversations. During my exercises at night, when I become centered and fall into a sort of trance (it feels like falling or dropping), my vision gets foggy and clear in spurts. The air is thick in my nostrils and often warm or even hot, and I can see the walls vibrating and energy lines running through the air. As I continue my practice, I have found that when I fully center myself and become more aware of my surroundings, thoughts that are not my own enter to teach me something, and as Joseph said above, when it feels real it’s never anything guilt inducing or negative. Thanks for sharing!