Polarization

Nickmiller:

Exploring the Darkness is IMHO a waste of time.   To me what bears fruit is to acknowledge the Darkness.  Bless it with Love and integrate it by Transmuting the Darkness.  For Darkness is simply the turning away from LightLove. 

Years ago when I was early on my healing path from some very deep trauma, I joined a support group.  What I discovered was the support group model simply creates a pattern of looping.  Eternally looping around the same stuff, coughing it up like a hairball and then redigesting it expecting to find answers from this exploration... but in the end it is still an indigestible hair ball of stuff.

This is when I began to understand the entanglement of trauma and victimhood, how it creates more trauma and victimhood.  Hurt people... hurt people.

So, to move beyond this I discovered I had the ability to look deeply and acknowledge my experience and then transmute it.  Peace Pilgrim helped with this as did learning and using the Tarot, and the Angel Cards.  I prefer the Tarot  of Love and The Medicine Cards.  You will have to determine using your intuition which works best for you.

At first in the beginning, the use of Tarot and other divinition was helpful in assisting me in seeing the higher perspective, which lead to me understanding that nothing happens in this world without an agreement on the Soul level.  Sometimes the agreement is simply complicity, meaning, doing nothing creates the energy of agreement.

So, change the agreement, through Forgiveness or at-one-ment and cultivate now-ness, and by the magic of Quantum Law, integration occurs within.  This is a process of opening the HEART.  Begin with your HEART and as you open, and LOVE, all changes around you.

There is nothing that 1 of us can do to change the collective.  There is much that can be changed by our Beingness.

Wonder is where the HEART opens for those who are more of Masculine Energy.  What fills you with Celestial Wonder-- to the point you feel so connected and expansive... for some it is looking up at the billions of stars and planets, for others it is pondering grains of sand or listening to the sounds of moving water across the land... rivers, ponds, lakes, oceans... and still others it is something else.  The gift of the HEART opened within a man is the Capacity for Wonder.

A tool to help you, would be to create Angel Cards.  I made my own long, long ago when the grips of depression almost consumed me nearly 25 years ago. Angel Cards are words on small cards.  I chose to use only attributes of Universal Love for my Angel Cards.  I found by drawing 1 card a day, and if I focused on the aspects of that attribute, I could shift where I was into a place of integration.  It is an inner process that has to be experienced.  I can not show you or tell you how, I can only point to what worked for me, through sharing our paths, the way toward wholeness is revealed.  Each person's path is unique, although similar to other paths, it is unique unto the person walking that path.

I bless you with Love.

Fairy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqswX9jFFfw

Nickmiller, I trully wish you well!

Years ago I read an interesting article that spoke volumes about the path you are on.   I will see if I can find it and post it here for you.  I bless you with Love.

The best path if you are in psychiatric care is to go along with what they have asked you to do.  Resistence only creates more of what you do not want. 

Rest and get well. 

Fairy

 

WE ARE ALL SHAMANS-IN-TRAINING

By Paul Levy

In 1981 I spontaneously went into such an ecstatic state that I was
hospitalized by what I call the ³anti-bliss patrol.² The authorities
had become alerted because I was simply unable to restrain my enthusiasm at
the good news² that was beginning to reveal itself to me about the
nature of reality. Stepping out of my usual way of trying to control my
experience, during that next year I was thrown in mental hospitals a number of
times and (mis)diagnosed as having manic-depressive (bi-polar) illness. I was
told that I had a chemical imbalance and would have to go on medication and
learn to live with my ³illness² for the rest of my life. Little did the
doctors realize that although my experience looked like a typical nervous
breakdown, I had actually gotten ³drafted² into a deeper psycho-spiritual
process of an entirely different order ­ a spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation -
that was blowing my mind as it was simultaneously revealing it.
My inner process had spilled outside of my skull and just like a dream
was synchronistically expressing itself through events in the seemingly
outer world. Finding myself in a meaning-filled, meaningful, and enchanted
universe, the world had become animated by spirit, as if it was a
living oracle, a continually unfolding revelation that was speaking
symbolically. It became glaringly apparent to me that there was an intimate
correlation and synchronistic correspondence between what was going on in the
internal landscape of my psyche and the seemingly outer world. The boundary
between inner and outer was dissolving. It was as if something deep inside of
me was expressing itself through the medium of the outside world, and was
able to extend itself into the outside world and configure events so as to
in-form and give shape to itself.

According to consensus reality, I was ³certifiable,² and I was in
full agreement, in that I had certifiably stepped out of my self-entrancing,
self-limiting, and self-binding conceptual, cognitive mind into a much
more expansive ³space.² As if snapping out of a trance, I found myself not
out of my mind, in the sense that I was crazy, but rather, inside of my mind,
which was now discovered to be everywhere, in that I was beginning to realize
that I was dreaming.

My parents bought into the psychiatrist¹s diagnosis that their only
child had a mental illness, as in my parents¹ world doctors were genuine
authority figures who knew what they were talking about. In the words of the late
psychiatrist R. D. Laing, ³Attempts to wake before our time are often
punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless
them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep,
realizes that what is taken to be real is a Œdream¹ is going crazy.²
Tragically, with the support and blessing of the psychiatric community, both of my
parents passed away convinced their son was crazy.

When we begin to spiritually awaken, our personality structure and
sense of who we are can melt down and dis-integrate, as our inner
³constitution² is being rewritten. This process can convincingly appear to others as if
we are having a nervous breakdown or a psychotic break.

Stepping out of my normal, conditioned, repressed and domesticated self
as if breaking out of a prison, I felt on the cutting edge of the big bang
itself. It was as if I was becoming attuned to and a receptive vehicle
for a deeper, more authentic, less self-conscious and much more unfettered,
creative and ecstatic part of myself to freely in-form my experience
and give shape to itself. My experience was so mind-blowing that I had
trouble ³keeping it together,² particularly because previous to the
hospitalizations
I wasn¹t in a safe container but was unrestrained, out in a world that
did not understand the value of such experiences. My situation was actually
quite dangerous, as during the beginning stages of my awakening I was
not able to mediate and channel the transpersonal energies that were
activated within me in a way that was acceptable to the culture at large.

The dissolution and breakdown of the old structures of the psyche can
become a breakthrough, however, depending on how it is contained and related
to by the surrounding community and unfolded. The dis-integration can be the
beginning of a coming together at a more coherent, and unified level of
consciousness.

Our species and its civilization are currently in the throes of a
collective (nervous) breakdown. If what we, as a species, are doing to ourselves
(destroying the biosphere, the very life-support system of the planet,
to use one example) isn¹t collective madness, then what in the world is?
Our underlying institutionalized and incorporated structures that are
helping to keep us asleep are breaking down and coming apart. Just as with an
individual¹s psyche, only writ large en masse on the world stage, we
are going through a collective shamanic initiation process, a genuine
³death/rebirth² experience. The false, illusory separate self, which
experiences ourselves as alien from one another is ³dying² as the
fundamental framework by which we relate to each other and the world,
as we incarnate and give ³birth² to a truer sense of who we are, realizing
our deep interconnection and interdependence with each other and all living
beings.

The shamanic personality is very sensitive to the unconscious, both in
themselves and in others. The shaman has very permeable boundaries
between their conscious mind and the unconscious, as if they¹ve created a
bridge which allows contents between the two to easily pass through and
intermingle with and reciprocally co-inform each other. The shaman¹s
collaborative, creative interplay between the conscious and unconscious creates a
synthesis, which is a ³third thing,² a new birth, a further evolution
in the incarnation of a more all-embracing, integrated and expansive
consciousness.

The figure of the shaman is related to both the figures of the artist
(see my article ³The Artist as Healer of the World²) and the wounded
healer ­ (see my article ³The Wounded Healer,² Part 1 and Part 2). The
archetypal figure of the shaman is the primordial medicine person and carrier of
healing. The figure of the shaman (arche)typically takes on the illness
that is in the community into themselves and literally becomes sick, as if
they have ³caught² the disease of who they are trying to heal. This
process can become animated through the choice of a seasoned shaman, or it can
happen spontaneously and unintentionally in a budding shaman who is unusually
sensitive to the underlying contradictions and spiritual illness that
pervade the social and cultural fabric which connects us and in which
we are embedded. A fully cooked shaman, in internalizing the illness in the
field, allows the sickness to fluidly move through them without getting stuck
in them, which is the mark that distinguishes an accomplished shaman from
a novice.

By embracing, assimilating, and metabolizing what has gotten triggered
in them, however, the shaman is able to heal themselves and in so doing
non-locally sends healing to the whole ³community.² In our current
moment in time, as interdependent members of an ever-more interconnected global
village, our ³community² is the entire planet. The shaman is
operating in the realm of the collective unconscious, a ³no-place² where
information travels in ³no-time,² faster than the speed of light. There is no
part of the universe that is separate from the whole, which is to say that a
change in any part of the universe is resonantly registered in no time
whatsoever throughout the whole universe. Though the healing effects of the
shaman¹s process manifests ³over time,² the shaman¹s self-healing,
transcending the seeming limitations of space and time, instantaneously insinuates its
in-form-ation and informing influence faster than the twinkling of an
eye throughout the entire universe in ways that can only be imagined.

OUR MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM IS CRAZY-MAKING

I tried telling the doctors that I wasn¹t manic-depressive, but rather
was having a shamanic initiation and spiritual awakening (as this couldn¹t
havebeen more obvious to me); but this only confirmed their diagnosis in a
diabolically self-perpetuating feedback loop. In essence, the more I
authentically expressed my experience, the more I was convincing the
doctors that I was crazy. It was like I had stepped through the looking glass
and found myself in a dimension of existence that was truly bewitched, as
if I had entered a domain which felt, qualitatively speaking, under a curse
of black magicians. It felt like I had shamanically journeyed into the
underworld and wound up in some sort of weird, perverse hell realm
where reality was inverted in a way which was get-me-out-of-here crazy.
Little did I realize at the time, however, that this was all part of the deeper
awakening process through which I was going.

What the psychiatrists were doing was truly maddening. By myopically
seeing people¹s behavior as being pathological, the psychiatrists literally
drew out the pathology in the person, which only further confirmed to them
the correctness of their diagnosis in a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if
they were both under a spell and casting one at the same time. To again
quote Laing, ³Anyone in this transitional state is likely to be confused. To
indicate that this confusion is a sign of illness, is a quick way to
create psychosis. ..A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but
who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up and drugs them asleep
againŠhelps to drive them crazy.² To the extent they are projecting
their own madness outside of themselves, the psychiatrists are unknowingly
complicit in evoking the very madness they are hoping to cure, which is
nothing other than an expression of the psychiatrists¹ madness.
Representative authorities of ³the academy,² the doctors¹ madness
was a reflection of the madness which has become normalized,
institutionalized, imprinted, and incorporated throughout our modern world. The doctor¹s
madness was the personalized signature of our collective madness.

TRAUMA AS A PATH TO AWAKENING

I tried to explain to the psychiatrists that I WAS sick, however, but
just not in the way they were imagining. I had a creative, psychological
illness, which is to say that my seeming madness was an expression of my
creative self, alchemically transforming an underlying perturbance in the field
of consciousness so as to heal itself. I wasn¹t manic-depressive; rather,
I was ³perturbed,² in that my ³emotions² were ³disturbed² due to being
the recipient of over-the-top abuse at the hands of a desperately sick,
sociopathic father. I was suffering from a shamanic illness, as I was
in trauma from the malevolent, mind-numbing abuse to which he had
introduced me. My shock was due to the transmission I had received from my father,
who by unwittingly and compulsively acting out his unresolved abuse,
connected me as a link in a chain to an unbroken lineage of violence and abuse
extending far back in time and throughout space. Like countless other
recipients of abuse, I had been directly introduced to the dark side.

Shattered by the experience, it was like I had become broken. Dropping
down into the darkness of the unconscious underworld, a part of me had died.
Imprinted by the trauma, I would never be the same, as from that moment
on the trauma had altered and reconfigured both my psyche and my destiny,
simultaneously severing and initiating a connection to a deeper part of
myself.

Trauma is a normal, healthy response to an insane and intolerable
situation. If we put too much pressure on a bone and the bone breaks, the bone is
not pathological. Paradoxically, trauma is a form of madness which is an
expression of sanity. ³Shock² is our healthy response to experiencing
an event that is awe-full. The shamanic archetype becomes catalyzed in us
by a severe emotional and spiritual crisis, oftentimes organically growing
out of unresolved abuse issues from childhood ­ this was certainly true for
me.

There is an intimate correlation between being traumatized, abused, and
wounded, and having a shamanic initiation/spiritual awakening. Trauma
is an experience that is overwhelming to the ego, in that it can¹t be
assimilated by the ego in the typical way. The trauma initiates and catalyzes the
deeper process of the archetype of the shaman to begin to form-ulate and
crystallize itself in the unconscious of the future shaman. This
precipitates a deeper part of the psyche to become mobilized, as the
shaman journeys deep inside themselves, flying on the wings of their creative
imagination to address and become acquainted with what has gotten
activated within them.

The shaman¹s descent into the darkness can be agonizing, a veritable
crucifixion. Part of the (arche)typical shamanic experience is to
become dis-membered, which is a cooking and smelting of psychic contents that
have become rigidified, ossified, and have outlived their usefulness. To
quote Jung, ³The shaman¹s experience of sickness, torture, death and
regeneration implies, at a higher level, the idea of being made whole through
sacrifice, of being changed by transubstantiation and exalted to the pneumatic man
­ in a word, apotheosis (elevated from an ordinary person to a ³God²).²
The goal of the shaman¹s death and dismemberment experience is to ³re-member²
themselves, which like true soul retrieval, brings all of their
dissociated parts back together into a more integrated synthesis.

TRAUMA ON STEROIDS

An accomplished shaman, which I certainly am not, allows themselves to
be ³dreamed up² by whatever the situation in the field requires so as to
help the field to get back into balance and harmonize. An accomplished
shaman has developed a ³container,² both within themselves and in the seemingly
outer world around them, in which to process what has become animated within
them. I certainly hadn¹t developed this container when I was committed, as I
was a novice, and quite young (in my mid-twenties). By being so out of
control and over-the-top enthusiastic (³en theos² means to be filled with spirit)
about what was being revealed to me, I had let go of control and was
unwittingly expressing and giving shape to the spirit of madness which was
non-locally enfolded throughout the greater field of consciousness, which is to say
inside of all of us. I had a ways to go, however, to learn how to
integrate, contain and more skillfully and artfully express what I was realizing
so as to not freak people out so much.

Because they allow themselves to be dreamed up by the field, an
accomplished shaman can embody and incarnate in crystallized form the unconscious
madness in the field so that it becomes clarified and brought into
consciousness. A shaman can reflect back the madness to the madness itself by taking
over the madness and allowing themselves to creatively express it such that it
is revealed in a new light. From the point of view of the collective
madness in the field, when the would-be shaman acts out the madness that is in the
field, the would-be shaman themselves are seen by the collective as
being the ones who are mad. This is a potentially dangerous situation when
the collective madness controls the levers of power, whether the
psychiatric system or our current administration (please see the first chapter in
my book, ³The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective
Psychosis²).

Being ³institutionalized,² I had fallen into a situation where the
psychiatric community had power over me. They were in a position to
unconsciously enact the ³will to power² of the archetypal shadow
through their own unconscious, unresolved power issues, with me as one of their
guinea pigs. Being unaccomplished in shamanism and very vulnerable, I
was eaten alive by the darker forces that I had unwittingly evoked in the
psychiatric community. For example, once my lucidity was violently shut
down, I began feeling depressed, which was a ³normal² thing to feel
under such horrible circumstances. My feeling depressed inspired the
psychiatrists, however, to solidify their diagnosis of me as
manic-depressive, and they then prescribed an anti-depressant to
³help² my depression, adding to the anti-psychotic and lithium they already had
me on. It was like I had re-created my family-of-origin trauma, only this time
on steroids. Enacting a timeless, mythical process, I had gotten swallowed
up by the darkness, and my task was to transform the darkness from within
the darkness itself.

The experience was so traumatic that after my last hospitalization, in
1982, I couldn¹t work for a year and had to go on disability and live with
my parents, the original agents of my traumatization. I was living a
nightmare. After the ³care² of the mental health system, I had become truly
³sick.² My illness was like a particularized, acute ³break-out² of an
underlying, more fundamental systemic illness, which pervaded both my family system as
well as the field of consciousness itself. I had become the ³identified
patient,² the scapegoat who was carrying the family¹s, and now the mental health
community¹s projected, unconscious shadow and madness.

My saving grace was never falling into and ³buying² the viewpoint of
the doctors that was literally being ³sold² to me as it was forced down
my throat. It couldn¹t have been more obvious from my vantage point
inside myself that I was having a spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation;
fortunately I never lost sight of this, even during the darkest of
times, which allowed me to trust the process through which I was going.

I was one of the lucky ones, however, as I was able to extricate myself
from the stone-age horrors of the mental health (sic) community as soon as I
was able. Tragically, many others are not as fortunate, and their potential
spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation process becomes aborted as they
become bound and captive to the psychiatric establishment. The
psychiatric system and the pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) are co-dependently
intertwined with each other in a genuinely pathological, mutually
profitable, and crazy-making relationship. This is not to say that
there aren¹t many good, well-meaning people who work in the psychiatric
system, only to point out that the underlying system has become corrupted. In
essence, the sick part of the psychiatric system/Big Pharma is in the
business of ³making crazies² so as to support its pathology, which is
to be guilty of genuine ³mal-practice.² To people who have fallen into the
black hole and become caught in the double-bind of the psychiatric/Big Pharma
³field-of-force,² it is a very dangerous situation, as if an insect
had gotten too entangled in a spider¹s web to extricate itself. I was
lucky to escape with my sanity intact.

Fortunately, soon after getting out of the last hospital I began
meeting my spiritual teachers, some of the greatest living Buddhist masters from
Tibet and Burma, who, unlike the psychiatrists, helped to evoke the healthy
part of me. When I described to them what I was subjectively experiencing,
instead of being pathologized, they reflected back to me that I was
beginning to remember what in Buddhism is called our ³true nature.²
In finding my teachers, I had dreamed up the part of me that was seeing
and relating to the part of me that WAS awakening. Having someone else bear
witness and reflect back the healthy part of me created a bridge that
helped me to see it, too. It was as if my teachers became engaged with me in
an intimate relationship which helped me to not get stuck in the trauma of
it all, to not get caught in being ³sick.² By simply relating to the
healthy part of me, which was an expression of their own level of health and
wholeness, they helped me to step into and incarnate the part of me
that was well. My teachers and I had instinctively created a supportive,
nourishing container between us which cultivated healing. As if figures in a fairy
tale, they had gotten dreamed up to help me learn how to ³dis-spell²
and transmute the darker forces with which I had been wrestling.

THE PSYCHIATRISTS ARE THE CRAZY PART OF MYSELF

The would-be shaman has to pass through the experience of madness
without getting stuck in it. In the experience of madness the shaman descends
into the underworld of the unconscious, where they have to come to terms
with the darker parts of their being. My confrontation with the psychiatric
community was a projection into real time and space of a darker part of me that
³pathologizes² myself, as if my inner process was playing itself out
in the seemingly outer world. Like ³dream characters,² the ³pathologizing
psychiatrists² were the part of me that I had dreamed up into
materialization who judged me and saw me as ³sick,² who thought
there¹s something wrong with me that needed to be fixed.

Seeing the psychiatrists as characters in my dream, which is to say
embodied reflections of aspects of myself, is to recognize these animated,
living figures existing within myself as aspects of my mind. Recognizing that
the psychiatrists were symbolically re-presenting, in full-bodied form the
part of me that both pathologizes and is pathological helps me to see my own
complicity in my experience with them, and to step out of feeling
victimized by the psychiatrists and blaming them. Recognizing the psychiatrists as
a part of myself enables me to forgive them, as well as myself.

Not only was the boundary dissolving between inner and outer, and
between dreaming and waking, but the boundary was dissolving between self and
other. I became aware that in the most deeply fundamental way I did not exist
separately, in isolation from the psychiatrists, but rather in
co-relation with them. Being each other¹s dream characters, we were both
reciprocally ³dreaming each other up² to pick up and play out roles in each
other¹s unconscious process. We were interconnected parts of one another,
intimately bound together in destiny. We did not exist ³apart² from each other,
but were ³a part² of a greater, unified and unifying being that was
becoming revealed through our interplay.

With the psychiatrists, I had synchronistically dreamed up a novel form
of the very essence of the abuse which precipitated my awakening in the
first place. Something was being revealed to me, however, through the
analogous reiteration of my inner process fractally explicating itself in
multiple arenas of my life, be it with my family or the psychiatric community.
What was this recurring pattern, like a recurring dream, an expression of
inside of me?

The psychiatrists were acting out an unconscious shadow aspect of the
human psyche that projects itself outside of itself to avoid relationship
with itself. Projecting the shadow is a universal, archetypal dynamic that
exists deep within the collective unconscious of humanity. This unconscious
shadow dynamic of projecting the shadow is a pattern which is playing out in
all of our lives, both inwardly and outwardly in relationship with others, in
a multiplicity of guises. To the extent the doctors reflex-ively and
non-negotiably refused to self-reflect and insisted on projecting out
their shadow was the degree to which they were abusing their position of
power and rank simply because they could, which is a morally indefensible act. By
projecting the shadow outside of themselves and then being in denial
about doing this, the psychiatrists became possessed by the very shadow they
were projecting. They then unconsciously and destructively acted out the
shadow in a self-reinforcing, crazy-making ritual ­ a genuine abuse drama -
which created ³dis-ease² for everyone concerned.

To the extent that the psychiatrists were not in conscious relationship
withtheir own madness, it was as though they had entranced themselves into
thinking that the madness they were projecting outside of themselves
was³objectively² true, located in their patients, since in their patients¹
illnesses they had all the evidence they needed to prove the correctness of
their diagnosis. By projecting the shadow, the psychiatrists were
unwittingly creating a self-fulfilling prophecy which perfectly served
to hide from them their role in helping to create the very situation they
imagined was outside of themselves. The insanity of what the
psychiatric system was unconsciously playing out was itself a crystallization of
the more fundamental pathology that pervades the underlying field of human
consciousness. Through my interaction with the mental health
community, the mental health, or lack thereof, of our human community was revealing
itself for all who have eyes to see.

In seeing the deeper, unconscious shadow that was animating the
psychiatrist¹s behavior, I recognized it as a process I know all too
well. Seeing it out there as embodied by the psychiatrists helped me to see
by reflection this same abusive behavior of projecting my own shadow
outside of myself in myself. If this is a dream, I was dreaming up the
psychiatrists to play out this unconscious part of me so that I could see and
potentially integrate this asleep, crazy-making, abusive, and mad part of myself.

WE ARE NATURAL BORN SHAMANS

The shamanic archetype is one of the major processes that is becoming
animated in the collective psyche of our species. We¹d have to be
truly ³disturbed² if our emotions aren¹t disturbed by what is playing out
currently in our world. And yet, the darkness is a ³disturber of the
peace² in order to (potentially) create a higher-order integration of the
psyche and its contents. Just as dreams are the unconscious¹ way of balancing
a one-sidedness in an individual¹s psyche, the shamanic archetype is the
dynamically evolving pattern of healing that is being constellated in
the collective unconscious as a compensatory response to the trauma that is
playing itself out on the world stage.

We are truly a species in trauma. Traumatized, we traumatize each other
as we re-traumatize ourselves, collaboratively re-enacting the repetition
compulsion of the traumatized soul on the world stage. Seized by
something greater than ourselves, we are possessed by our compulsion to re-create
our trauma, as we perform a holy liturgy en masse, structuring and
ritualizing our experience as a way of potentially transforming it. And just like
trauma, where the re-solution is hidden in encoded form in the very
pathology, we are collectively re-creating our trauma in the world
theater as if we are participating in a sacred mass in the holiest of temples,
so as to potentially awaken ourselves. The madness of trauma is its own
revelation, and how it manifests depends upon whether or not we
recognize what is being revealed to us through what we are compulsively and
unconsciously acting out as history.

Having the shamanic archetype activated in the collective unconscious
meansthat we can re-contextualize our problems, our trauma, and our own
madness. It¹s been very helpful for me as I continually deepen my own healing
to remember that my experience of trauma in myself is simultaneously a
microcosmic, personalized fractal reflecting the greater trauma
resonating throughout the collective field. This realization allows me to not
personalize the moment of feeling the trauma, or concretize myself as
being traumatized, but allows me to give myself over to and embrace my
experience.

We all have a part of us that is mad to the extent that we are not
fully, totally awake, and who among us can truly claim this degree of
enlightenment? Thinking that we are not mad is an expression of our
madness. How can we not have a mad part of us, as we are not separate from the
world, which has clearly gone mad? (see my article ³Diagnosis: Psychic
Epidemic²). The world¹s madness is a reflection of our own; we have all
collaboratively dreamed up the world¹s madness. Instead of pathologizing ourselves
because of our madness, which is a mad thing to do, we can embrace and own it
but not identify with it nor judge it. In a truly radical act, we can
interpret our madness in a way that is sane.

Recognizing that we are picking up the madness that is in the field
which resonates with, is an expression of, and constellates the madness
within ourselves, is to step out of personalizing our experience, and step
into the point of view of identifying ourselves as would-be shamans. We then can
envision ourselves from this more expansive point of view to have, like
a shaman, the intention to take into ourselves the madness in the field,
which ultimately is our own madness, so as to creatively assimilate it into
our wholeness in our own unique manner as a way to help serve the field.
Recognizing the part of us that is a natural-born shaman is the very
act that calls forth and manifests, as if by magic, the part of us that
truly IS a shaman.

Recognizing that the madness within us is both ours while
simultaneously being an expression of the field is to snap out of our self-limiting
and self-alienating identity of being separate from the universe. Instead,
we can recognize our deep intimacy with the universe, which is to say
ourselves. This very recognition allows us to embrace our mad part as
an aspect of our vast wholeness, our monstrous totality, thereby snapping
us out of the infinite regression and self-generating feedback loop of
acting out our madness as an unconscious reaction against looking at our
madness. Crazy as it seems, embracing our madness is the very act which helps to
actualize and make real our basic sanity. Compassion spontaneously
arises as both a cause and effect of this realization.

We are being invited by the universe to step into our shamanic
³garments² and consciously participate in our own evolution. Instead of our ritual
implements being drums and rattles, however, as ³modern-day shamans²
our accessories might be something like the keyboard of a computer or the
tools of multi-media, as we work to inspire change in the underlying
consciousness of the field by a simple keystroke or the creative use of a video
camera or website.

The formless bodhisattvic archetype of shaman/healer is thirsting for
instruments to express and actualize itself in embodied form.
Recognizing, and assenting, saying ³Yes,² to the deeper shamanic calling that is
pulsating through our veins inspires us to breathe life into and
incarnate the living figure of the shaman within us.

 Following our calling with religious devotion, we sacrifice ourselves as we offer ourselves in
service to a power greater than ourselves. Co-operating with our deeper
shamanic calling constellates the universe to support us in our endeavor, as the
universe itself is the sponsor of our calling. Like shamans in training, we are each being called to connect with the spirit which animates our being, a process that can only take place within the psyche, mediated by the human heart and fueled by the power of love.

Paul Levy is an artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. A
pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, he is a healer in private
practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dream-like
nature
of reality. He is the author of ³The Madness of George Bush: A
Reflection of
Our Collective Psychosis,² which is available on his website
www.awakeninthedream.com. Please feel free to pass this article along
to a
friend if you feel so inspired. You can contact Paul at
[email protected]; he looks forward to your reflections. ©
Copyright
2008

........................................

Paul Levy is an artist and a spiritually-informed political activist.
A pioneer in the field of spiritual awakening, he is a healer in
private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the
dream-like nature of reality. He is the author of, 'The Madness of
George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis,' which is
available on his website http://www.awakeninthedream.com
(to read the
first chapter, visit this URL:
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/georgew.html ). Please feel free to
pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. You can
contact Paul at [email protected]
; he looks forward to your reflections

I bless you with Love, Nickmiller.  Peace On in your HEART. 

--Fairy