Initiation at the End of Time

   I was really appreciating this talk, resonating wordlessly with the palpable force re-emerging within my own experience, feeling the transcendent parallels of reality as magnets between often mistakenly perceived separate human beings. 

   But then, at 13:00, Dr. Villoldo included rap music among the list of destructive forces faced by the healers of the world.

   Now I understand he was being light-hearted, and going for a laugh at the dawn of his pitch, and I do not want to upset anybody, but I have to admit that this comment hit me in the gut and turned my mind to some of the more questionable angles of this presentation and the associated course. 

   I agree that a large portion of rap music is an extension of a relentless and soulless corporate money making machine that most certainly adds to the pollution and confusion in many human minds. But I also believe there are a number of more underground rap artists that add quite measurably to the evolution of consciousness.

   More importantly, it was this beat-bashing blanket statement with undertones of coercive guidance combined with the following motivational-speaker flourish that interrupted my appreciative reverie.

   While I would enjoy participating with other shamanically-minded individuals, I don't always have the 130 dollars to shell out. Now, I certainly understand the need to get some monetary reimbursement for work performed, and I would expect no less than that necessity for people who are healers, speakers, and organizers of such events for their living.

   But again, its a combination of factors that motivates this post: The somewhat prohibitive cost of such events, combined with what seems more and more the same marketing sheen and pizazz that we'd see for a burger and fries or Walmart July 4th special. Its not $129, its $130, ya dig?

   As a serious, spiritually-minded seeker of gnosis, I feel able to access these transformations on my own, but would have to hunker down to write my own best-selling book, or spend a stream of bucks to engage this vector of fellowship, and that's what's disappointing.

   I hope the new age of shaman torch-bearers do not go the way of some dread-locked family on the lot, where if I comb my hair or don't say love and light enough times per minute, I'll most likely not be taken seriously. You guys don't use sparkly wrist bands for re-entry at live events, do you? ;-)

   But seriously, a little bit of love and light, followed by a dark night of the soul and a shot o dis shaman juice and I and I sayz yule bee alight, I mean aright?! Alright in the mourn, ya?!

The story about the trashed tape recorder, being then used by a Shaman as an object for hearing diagnostic words from within cultures associated with the tape recorder, reminds me of an experience I had. I will tell it as my own participation in midwifing the mythology of stewardship. In December 2009, I attended the Parliament of World's Religions in Melbourne Australia.

The degree of participation of the world's religious traditions in the Parliament is impressive. There are even talks being given by a Rastafari.

There was a late issue in organising the Parliament in Australia, about the failure of offers of contributions by indigenous Australians, most of who had not been informed about the Parliament happening, but, the matter got resolved when, a few weeks before the Parliament's sessions, the Parliament organisers agreed to pay an Aboriginal man to find participants and pay their travel and accomodation costs, and so eventually, enough traditional men participated for their presence to be felt. One of the sessions by Aboriginal participants, was by three men who are medicine men, or spirit guides, in their own communities. These days they are paid by the Aboriginal health service in Alice Springs, to use their individual healing methods, for keeping Aboriginal patients at the clinic, out of hospital beds.

Each of the three men told his story, (as much as possible with English words and limited time), of what qualifies him to be a medicine man, and each story began in early childhood. Then the conducted a healing of those people in the room who had been unwell. Then a cultural exchange occurred. I had been sitting at the back with an African medicine man, who I got introduced to by the Aboriginal Australian medicine men, after I introduced myself to them, by exlaining my Kinship relationships with others who come from nearby places to where they are from. One of the Aboriginal Australian medicine men immediately accepted me as his blood relation, (even though I am very white and he very black), and to be within his responsibility since I am alone at the time, and a female. Then while he gave his talk, he effectively handed me over into the African man's care for the duration of the seminar.

When the cultural exchange occurred, the men started to ask the audience if anybody could give to them, something. Something which had been stolen from them, they said. Myself and the African got the plot straight away, that they wanted something which could represent both the energies of health and disease present around us right now. We both gave the man each an object of significant worth to ourselves as medicine people, and so our exchanges have been made. What the objects are, is not as important as the fact of how the objects came to be in the room at the time.

What is significant about such cultural exchanges, is that each individual shaman, or exorcist, or healer, or medicine man, or witch doctor, or whatever it is we get called, has to have our own unique medicine way. Such ways are normally observed in children by family, and so family train a child to work the medicine the child innately recognises in its environment. When the child grows up, it may teach the medicine to other men also, but as individuals, it is when we know our medicine is real as children, that we are able to be recognised interculturally as medicine people. When we meet one another, across cultural boundaries, such as took place at the Parliament of World's religions, we may or may not give one another permission to access the medicine we each know the way of as a birth right. Such birth rights can tend to run in families, but are not allocated only from being our parent's child, and rather are a right which each of us must re-earn throughout our life time, normally by teaching it to others. 

The exchange of objects, or gifting of an object, is a sign of the transmission of knowledge having become comprehended.   So when the shaman uses the tape recorder now hung around his neck, to listen for diagnostic clues, he is claiming the status of having proven his own medicine has enough dominance over the medicine of medical anthropologists that he had conquered enough of western medicine to use the tape recorder, as its instrument.  (my laptop computer here, a gift from my father, can be similar for me, but it all depends . . . upon whether who is reading these words, is whose minds received this dream)

when end be nigh

We'll let out the sigh

But that was for real

And the best of all deals

The end that began with each feel

Into death being over and real