During this recent bout of 'illness' which included some very dark depressive states and mental anguish, I felt like I was dying. There was no rational explanation for this because I wasn't - I only had a physical injury that was taking longer than expected to heal. I have felt this 'death' before, and when I remembered that, went about putting myself back together as I tend to instinctively do. It has taken me a while to put this psycho-spiritual jigsaw together, which may be evident in the absence of blogs regarding my recovery. To be honest, it was all too ugly to share, but I will share this because it might help others understand something about the role of misery and illness in our lives or at least explain some of my 'aberrant' behaviours.
Death has been with me all of my life - not merely as an arbitrary consequence of being alive. It sits, just here, on my shoulder. It never, ever leaves me - not even for a second. In my early twenties I wrote a short account about a 'boy who fell in love with death'. It was autobiographical of course.
As a child my play things were often dead, I was fascinated by the decomposed body of a rat I found under the house. I loved bones and I wanted to dissect dead things so I could look inside and see what they were made of and where life had gone. For as long as I can remember, I have been on a quest to understand death - I have been obsessed with it.
When I was 15 I wrote a story for my English class. It was chosen for the end of year school magazine, which surprised me because it was a morbid tale without a happy ending. It told of a boy who died in an accident, how he rose out of his body and drifted into his village along the street where he lived. The boy describes in detail what he saw from his hovering view above the houses. He enters his own home to discover that everyone is mourning his lifeless body which is lying there on the kitchen table. He tries to communicate with his family to reassure them that he is not ‘dead’ but they can’t hear him - he doesn’t exist. He gets more agitated but they don’t respond. When he ‘wakes’ he is inside a coffin and hears pebbles bouncing off the lid - they are burying him - alive. He calls out, desperately trying to get their attention but nothing, he descends into the void, screaming ‘I am alive’.
In her paper, Annie Shapiro explains the stages after death as they are related in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This account appears in the Bardo Thodral and ‘describes the journey after death that everyone must invariably make'. It is uncannily similar, in part at least, to the story I wrote for the school magazine 30 years previous to reading the Bardo Thodral.
Many of the ‘stories’ in my head felt like ‘experiences’ but were treated as fantasies from a child, and then an adult, with an over-active imagination. According to most people all of this is just in my head. Sorry, but I think you are wrong, and this is why.
The 'shaman' is initially a 'sick' (this can be mental or physical or both) individual who experiences 'nervousness, extraordinary dreams, trance states' and displays a number of 'aberrant behaviours'. S(he) is 'innately disposed to extreme introversion which effect(s) a radical separation from others'. These people are 'tortured and dismembered by various demons and spirits' but they get help from 'spirits' as well. The shaman's passage through these ordeals and the knowledge s(he) gains from these experiences provide entry into the 'realm of the sacred' and can allow them to develop into a 'healer'.
The illness in the shaman is an 'illness-unto-death'. Illness and death are one and the same and are an initiation into a 'sacred reality'. Healing is only achieved when the initiate accepts death. 'The shamanic illness is nothing short of a recomposition and a restructuring of the entire body and spirit of the initiate. The illness is an entrance and as such is a radical disjunction with the world of ordinary reality'. Well that explains a lot.
In modern terminology a 'psychonaut' is one associated with 'neo-shamanic practices'. There are some however that make a distinction between 'mental/spiritual exploration' in the mystic and 'healing-oriented shamanic practice’.
So healer or mystic, or just plain nuts.....I'll leave it with you.
IMAGE: 'Two heads are Better than One', one of my early anatomical images from my stint at the Anatomy dept of UWA
REFERENCES: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Annie Shapiro (Pdf)
The Sacred Heritage: The Influence of Shamanism on Analytical Psychology, D. Sandner, S.H. Wong
Jung, C.G. 1973 (1942) Transformation Symbolism in the Mass. In Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW XI
Shamanic Reconstruction http://www.ecottage.co.za/page3.htm
