With What We Have in Our Hands Ecstasy, Authenticity and Passion

7/30/2019 With What We Have in Our Hands Ecstasy, Authenticity and Passion

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With What We Have in Our Hands

Ecstasy, Authenticity and Passion

By

Steven Nickeson

Stalking Ecstasy, Losing Guides

I had been for the longest time an avowed agnostic on this shamanic

power animal, spirit guide business. In fact I had never been all that enthusiastic

about shamanism per se because the word carried this sweet aroma of tribalism

with it wherever it went. I wasnt tribal and I never wanted to be. Healing through

Sorcery, however, was different matter, or at least the matter of a different noun.

The fact that a healing worked on one particular night, however, forced me,

although indirectly, to reevaluate my previous positions on shamanisms details

and undertake a drawn-out investigation into the source of ones power in these

healing and seeing and magical activities. The following is the meandering report

on the findings from that pursuit.

It started out because the man who had the mushrooms, said to be

wondrous mushrooms, was sick that day. Such was the dreary beginning to years

of hacking back through superstitions, reverse racism, bad translations,

desperate scientism, rumors of a something called spirit, the Mystique of the

Other, and a variety of cheerfully compelling illusions about magic; all that in the

darkness of uncommon experience. It was as if I was trying to find the ultimate

headwater of some dim river that when not dry had too many tributaries to follow


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through the jungles, and I really dont like jungles. It should be noted here, early

on, that I rarely sought evidence in this probe from books, having written a

couple I knew they are not to be trusted; events, though, rarely lie.

The scene: Roberto, a psychologist who was much better versed in

shamanism than I was at the time, had these mushrooms said to be the best of

the breed and hed invited my partner and I to come out to his home in a canyon

in the Sangre de Cristos, northern New Mexico, USA, for a ceremonial tasting, so

to speak. Only when we got there, early afternoon, he was sick, depressed,

distressed and he wanted to postpone the function until another night. But my

partner and I were already prepared for a preeminent journey based on Robertos

advance enthusiasm over this fungus. We countered with a proposal that rather

than being disabused of our expectations, wed just raise the intentions for the

eveningin those days we never undertook an expedition without dedicating it in

ritual to the loftiest intention. We would use the medicine to cure whatever had

beset Roberto. He agreed and crawled back under his covers to sweat until the

chills set in for another cycle through his dis-ease while we spent the afternoon in

preparatory silence to focus the work. I cut a few runes and we meditated into a

medical style of righteousness that we thought now fit the occasion. A journey to

meet a crisis is always preferable to any other.

At sundown, in the light from a huge rock fireplace fueled with split

ponderosa logs the size of watermelons, we made our declarations of intent,

divided and chopped the mushrooms, blessed them and what was about to occur,

ate the medicine and began to drum the life back into the waning energy of the

evening. And straight away we realized our all too pessimistic underestimation of


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the quick and paralytic quality of this particular harvest. The three of us started

losing track. We diverged and effortlessly wandered off on our own ways. All

coherence of purpose and power was shouldered out of my mind and the

intentions refined in the afternoon looked likely to be smothered by a thick,

tiresome, throw-back DMT tapestry and the clatter of the synaptic loom that was

weaving it. I wanted no part of this. Yet my focus seemed nailed to the illusion

and I could not even remember to open my eyes. (1)

This story would be worthless had it not involved a rescue. From a

substrate far more profound than any illusion emerged that element of my mind

that remains casually aloof of all intoxicants. It rose like the voice of an oracle

from a cave to advise me that there was nothing more essential in the known

universe than the immediate healing of Roberto. It was a challenge to my self-

image as a magician. The response was almost automatic; in something like an

ego-driven act of passion my willful consciousness, without delay or

consideration, folded this bright, patch-worked, calico, psychedelic, winding-

sheet back into darkness, I rose, roused my partner and we began the healing. By

early morning it had taken effect. She and I had levered into Robertos soul the

fact that there was no reasonably objective purpose in him being sick...and so he

wasnt any more.

Reflecting on that evening, I devalued mushrooms or any other organic

expedient as elements vital to healing talents. Their role was secondary to the

work. It appeared the medicine did exactly what intoxicants have always done

whether at healing rituals or cocktail parties: it broke up the inhibitions and

superficial habits of the psyche. It gave the three of us uncommon masks to wear


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in the others' presence. It helped close us out of the roles we had assumed for

decades and distilled the connections down to healers/healee, all conveniently

ripped into suspending our disbelief in this novel configuration. This would be

invaluable in a small, close-knit tribal or clan community where histories are

thoroughly known by all and roles and identities are set early and hard to shatter

outside of divine intervention. But living as I did outside such a setting, I began to

think of such medicine as that type of handy expedient that eventually helps

atrophy the innate skills of the user. Mushrooms do not make up the nest from

which the power is sourced.

Until that time I had read minimally about shamanism and was counted

absent from every workshop. What I knew came from casual conversations,

glimpses from my youth back on the rez, happenstance experience and

extrapolations off related subjects like Nordic myth and entheogins and alchemy

from Taoist and European sources. These were the foundation for my notions of

healing; these and what I knew of Christian church going healers like the late

Oral Roberts, or the Snake Handlers of East Tennessee. No one can deny the

passion of these people and superficial appearances at least have them working in

the same media as the shamans of other lands and cultures. I have found however

that it is not p.c. to argue too vehemently a case to include crazy Christian

fundamentalists into the shamanic fold, but one should not gainsay their

successes either. I've lived in Tennessee, I've known 'em kinda good ol' folks and

concluded, with sufficient hubris, that if any head of the holler preacher can

work an effective healing so could I. (Or, more accurately, the healee of that

situation could with a little boost from whatever it was that I was trying to do.)


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In this same light I have to admit that I had never been endowed with an

anthropological curiosity and that was part of the reason that shamanism, an

appurtenance of other cultures, did not provide much interest for me. My own

culture is without a doubt weird enough to justify several lifetimes of exclusive

study. Additionally, I doubted if I would ever aspire to be a shaman in the strict

sense for there seems to be in that calling a suplicatory spiritual if not religious

infrastructure that felt too much like a compelling illusion. Supplication grates on

my nerves. I dislike asking for anything from anything that doesnt have a form

and a behavior that I can watch all the while that our dealings are moving toward

conclusion.

I have no faith in the invisible, or, to tell the full truth, a significant share

of the visible either. I suspect I am a thoroughgoing infidel. Nonetheless, the

more exotic habits of humanity have always posed as curiosities for me and

shamanism was, from time to brief occasional time, a subject that I infrequently

thought I would study...in the future.

Roberto, however, helped to make the future tense present because he

asked my lover and me, the next morning, to review a selection of shamanic

literature to help him find texts for an undergraduate course he was preparing to

teach. He gave us nearly a dozen to sample. One particular evening we stopped

our review just after reading Michael Harner's chapter on how to find the power

animal spirit guide. "Someday," I thought and maybe even spoke it out loud, "I

might give that another try." My two previous ventures into the field of ethereal

zoology had been failures, due no doubt to my infidelity to Spirit.


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To be honest I was edging to the left of agnostic on this power animal

question. Instead of just being short on fidelity, mine was a distinctly cynical

doubt. I kept mostly silent about it, however, because numbered among my

friends were some fairly serious believers. So, I had concocted a little parable

based on an actual event to explain the lack of spirit animals in my practices. This

legend had it that on a day in 1975 the animals had all gone away. And that my

complicity in their departure was clear; it was as clear as the freezing sky above

the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Osha Peak east of Taos, NM, that afternoon.

It was the day, I would tell the believers, I came to know too much; the day the

animals reached similar conclusions. The event was real and steeped in ecstasy,

but my spin on it was an indulgence. The story goes:

I found the track about sunrise. An elk or a deer had made it. There was

no way to determine which because the thigh-deep snow was pure powder, frozen

airy fluff, slick like old-time soap flakes that filled in all details and covered all the

signs as soon as the animal had grooved through. But it didn't matter. I would,

promiscuously, stay with this trail until its superior showed up. All these trails are

fundamentally the same: the prey is creating the front end of it and somewhere

back is the predator. The two choreograph an energetic dance with one another

that is synchronized by something other than sight or sound. Until that particular

type of relational energy is isolated and a measuring gauge invented to make it

secular, we can call it medicine or magic, predator medicine, prey magic, words

that emphatically ring with more fascination than "predator non-ordinary

reality," a currently popular shamanic weasel-phrase that hopes to avoid

attributions of schizophrenia.


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I stepped into the trough of that track and the dance was joined. It lasted

for hours. The sun rose high and crossed the zenith but the world remained

frozen and the snow stayed deep and secretive. Nothing sounded but the critiques

of gray jays and ravens. As the predator I had to concentrate on keeping as much

of myself as possible behind me. Predators can't advance their presence in time

or geography; they can't grow energy or pretend to be big. Predators can't be

anything except open. And if open enough they don't even have to be fast. Good

prey magic, on the other hand, is much more complex, variable and permitting of

deception. Being fast is good, though faster is better. If predator and prey are well

paired and practiced than it becomes an ecstatic dance worth the price of

admission. Being predatorily open is real ecstasy for it is well outside the

everyday state. It is a condition induced from severely limited dimensions since,

ironically, it takes a tight little trance to be so open. In this state I find my body

seems compact and dense with an electrified serenity that is difficult to contain

but impossible to spill. A rhythm of some easy origin and cadence takes a position

on the margin of consciousness. After a while thoughts stop and the senses

become vacuums. And from holding myself behind me for a time all my progress

seems to halt, but the landscape passes by as if the world were my treadmill.

And then suddenly it comes apart. That's the point of it all.

Suddenly on the edge of a clearing I stopped, stilled without conscious

reason. Nothing objectively had changed except I was instantly washed

throughout with an adrenaline rapture that signaled I had found the prey. And by

and by, or so it seemed, the largest buck mule deer I had ever seen rose from his

noon nap concealed behind a huge downed ponderosa only 25 feet away. He


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paused to account for me then left on a slow, swaggering kind of bound, made

slow motioned by the snow. He held his head gracefully aslant to keep me in

view. I howled my thanksgiving toward heaven. The magic had worked again.

I had discovered predator magic when I was 11. It was of a slightly

dissimilar nature at the time; the perceptions were styled differently. But the

effect was the same because my intention was identical. I found it while hunting

a man, a friend of mine through the thick brush along the river that cut through

my family's ranch in Wyoming. Time was running, but I was running faster in an

intense hurry to see this man do his work. It was almost sundown, a January

evening in the middle of the mid-'50s drought. The ground was frozen; there was

no snow. The man left no discernable track for a mile. Yet I could tell exactly

where he had walked. I could see his footprint on the moss of a rock, although on

close examination that moss looked no different than that on the adjacent rock.

And I could see that the willow and juniper branches he had brushed against had

a just barely noticeable glow, an aura that faded on scrutiny. And the air through

which he had walked felt different than the air I felt when off his trail. I was not

astonished by any of this. I seemed to take it all for granted.

But I was not taking time to think about it. I wanted urgently to find this

man before night fully fell. And I was not surprised when I did. I heard him first,

crept up past a couple of willows and saw him, a little dimly in that dying light.

He was squatting on the river's edge washing his scent from the mink trap he had

just set. But he was surprised when I casually walked up and said "hi." He asked

me how I had found him. I replied that I had followed his trail. He said

impossible, he had left no tracks on the frozen ground, a least none that were


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visible in the gathering dark. But I told him where he had been, where he had set

two other traps. He said that I must have better eyes than his and made me a

partner in his trap line then and there.

I never thought the experience strange, or talked up its details. In the years

that followed I thought that I had been running on instinct and that was not so

out of the ordinary that it was worth examination. I just thought it was what

every one would do, could do. No one had ever told me it was a possibility. Then

again no one had ever told me that it wasn't. It was outside all considerations for

those in my community. Accidentally, I had stumbled across this medicine by

myself, on my own, without a mentoring elder or a tutelary animal spirit. I had no

one to teach anything of it to me, a willful, gangly country kid, blond of hair and

white of culture.

For better or worse, or for neutral more reasonably, I am selectively

reconciled to my culture and its artifacts, one of which, I used to testify, was

responsible for all the animals leaving the ethers of my magic that afternoon in

the Sangre de Cristos near Osha Peak. It was what I held in my hands: a

Remington 7-mm magnum rifle. By all standards, it was an awesome little

machine of unspeakable speed and power. I had traded for that rifle out of the

back of a van belonging to a radical Oneida Indian gunrunner in the days ago

when that was a flourishing political occupation. And it has long since plunged

back into the pool from which it rose. I had not used it that afternoon because

the license in my pocket read "Elk" not "Deer." But that is beside the point. So too

was the fact that the medicine had brought me so close to the prey, and so

disarmed the prey of fear, that a spear and atlatl would have worked better. The


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crux of it all was that rifle was a teacher to me and through it I came to know too

much. I knew there wasn't any better predator working on that mountain that

day, or one who held as much physical power. What did any of the animals have

that I might need? Why should I call on the power of an animal, or entrust some

emissary of my soul to its guidance, when that animal requires for its survival

rules and regulations promulgated by lawmakers to protect it from

someonewell, like me? And hence they left. The animals vanished; I would tell

that to my friends. It was true, the animals and their spirits had shown me no

nests that could qualify to be the source of healing or divination or the source for

any other power whatsoever.

Years progressed and accumulated events and the story became self-

fulfilling. I found that I could not even depend on the animals with whom I lived,

intimate companions, raised from infancy, to guide me in discarnate regions. The

story builds:

As a result of long standing circumstances and connections, years ago,

when that sort of craziness was my profession, I was hired to investigate the

suspicious death of a Navajo man in Taos County, NM. He had been an activist

and his family and friends did not trust the regulation non-Indian authorities to

pursue the matter thoroughly or honestly. On the first foray about, I stopped

where his body had been discovered, turned predator, but found no trace of

anything residual, nothing energetic, or spiritual, nothing with a tinge of sadness

or upset. And within days word reached me from the dead man's home

reservation in another state that several Indian priests working on the issue had

all quickly lost his trail, post mortem, themselves. Apparently we had all thought


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it worth a try to see if the departed gentleman could pass us back a few leads from

the other side, but no one was able to connect.

A couple of nights later, in a dream I glimpsed the man's shrouded body

laying a third submerged at the edge of a lake, but it disappeared the instant I

called out to another man nearby. For 35 years dreams have been my drugs,

journeys and workshops of choice when I am looking for an answer. They are

effective. I trust them in the same way I trust the sun to rise because my

conscious will, which tends to be impatient, rebellious and iconoclastic, is not on

the field of their play. Only in a dream are the more footloose daemons of my

soul free to slip the willful governance of my conscious senses that find this color

bound and too, too solid earth so delicious that no other element, conscious or

not, can quit the banquet in order to go Out.

A month of legwork and interviews had ambled past that dream when one

night I had another:

I was in the yard of an ancient, stone walled monastery, digging a hole in

the damp rocky ground. The dog I lived with in daylight reality was with me. His

name was Stutz, a Chow crossed Malamute fellow, an inveterate explorer and a

splendid point man on all our expeditions. But here he was going to bed. Night

was falling, the monks were calling curfew and Stutz was going to bed. He was

crumping out on my project. Dogs in dreams are supposed to be the paragons of

psychopomps. But what did my friend do? Stutz circled three times in a hollow

against a wall and went to sleep and I kept digging.

Suddenly I found myself walking alone up a trail through juniper, willow

and aspen thickets like those that edge rivers in Wyoming. Then I saw a man my


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age with bright red hair coming toward me. He had just woken up; he was

rubbing sleep from his eyes. I wondered if he wasn't hung over. And then I

realized I knew him. I had gone through secondary school with this man. He

thought he recognized me too. He asked me to give him the name of a mutual

friend to help him recall who I was. I did and he did. He told me where he was

living and the name of the woman who was his lover and he even told me the

name of their landlord. He gave the impression that his was a pleasant and

surprisingly easy life. We then went our ways; glad we had met. The ultra-real

details of the middle-aged creases on his freckled face glowed like a ghost image

on the back of my eyelids as I awoke. Then I remembered his name: Norman

Moore, one of the first young men from Wyoming killed in Viet Nam over 30

years before.

I recorded this in my journal and two weeks went by, maybe more. I

studied police accounts and translated the autopsy report into penetrable

English, more legwork, more interviews.

Then one night I was left by myself on the otherwise deserted set of an

unremembered dream. Stutz wasn't with me. It had been an insignificant dream

and I questioned why I was still in it. Then a stranger stepped out of the wings, so

to speak. He asked, "Are you Steven?"

I said I was.

"I'm supposed to give you a message from Norman," he said. "He wants

you to know that he's been working up in Taos County, working around the clock

since the last time he saw you. He says the man you're looking for isn't there. No

one is ever going to find him anywhere. He's gone away."


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"Oh."

"And Norman was wondering if it's alright for him to go now. He's spent a

lot of time up there and he has other things to take care of at home."

"Yeah, its alright," I said. "Tell him 'Thanks a lot.

All of that had happened and Stutz had not been anywhere around. He had

not helped at all. I wondered if he had made common cause with the other

animals and had vanished from my ethers, or was it because he was a white man

dog. He had lived all his life in a culture where these particular types of

expeditions are simply beyond the possible. How would he know where I went or

what his role should be when I had never talked to him about going anywhere

except into the daylight barrancas beyond our house? Would it have been

different if Stutz had been a dog from the rez? Had the help from Norman come

because I was crossing over into a different culture; or because the man, whose

abbreviated life had become the pool of my immersion, practiced himself what

Mercia Eliade called an "archaic religion?"

Stalking Authenticity, Culling the Cultures

There is that possibility that a certain type of culture is the sole, natural

preserve of the shaman, a possibility that culture is the nest where power is

found. I cannot think of any credible non-fiction on the subject that could do

anything more than posit that conclusion by default if not by overt attribution.

But where else can a writer in the field of shamanism go except into the

"primitive," indigenous cultures of Central Asia, or Greenland, or Indonesia, the

South American jungles, North American Reservations? What else can they do


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except write up their findings in a Meet the Shaman format that is either an

anthropological/psychological overview or features a quasi-journalistic

specificity? The first are authored by academics who all seem to be using the

same database. The second type tends toward the Seeker-written and is

characterized by long passages of Socratic dialogue that causes one to speculate

that the author/disciple is blessed with either a build-in tape recorder, or a

superhuman memory, or, more likely, theirs' is a mediocre creativity as seen in

the fact that both master and student speak with the same unremarkable voice,

accent, rhythm or lack thereof, and vocabulary. And this is not to leave out that

genre of self-help offerings that utilize "ancient techniques" to keep us well

adjusted, environmentally conscious, and open minded regarding the theistic

ingestion of hallucinogens as long as it is done in a country where it is legal.

These latter works, more often than not, constitute the curricula for workshops.

Most of the literature is similar in that the authors like to:

A. Beat up on anthropologists in general or other kinds of anthropologists

in particular for sins of omission, commission or ethnocentrism.

B. Broadly condemn the planet plundering, industrialized, desensitized,

mechanized, science-ridden western culture because it forcibly relocated our

entire population so far outside The Garden and spoiled it for all of those who

really, really, really want to believe in magic.

C. Sidestep any implication that they might believe in or have been witness

to actual magic. They write as if they fear nothing more than to be thought of as

crackpots by their all too often academic peers.


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If one wants to read about magic stay out of the shelves marked

"Shamanism. Anything vaguely in the realm of the paranormal is euphemized

away or analyzed beyond recognition. I believe it was Holgar Kalweit who once

wrote that when a western observer is brought face to face with the paranormal

their immediate response is to fall back into elaborate scientistic ratiocinations

over the issue, probably in order to maintain credibility and to keep all

eventualities sanely within the Weltanschauung our culture has condemned them

to serve. Thus positivism makes cowards of them all.)

David Abram is an ecologist and a slight of hand artist who several years

ago authored an addition to the "Shamanism" shelves that meets all the above

criteria: The Spell of the Sensuous. It is a second-generation Shaman-shelf book

that explores the calling not as an object of study for its own sake, but as an

entre into another field altogether. Abram uses a 27-page first chapter of

observations on shamanic magic as the fulcrum over which to lever a Deep

Ecology agenda into a 326-page polemic. It is a splendid treatise on

phenomenology that deftly explicates the writing of Heidegger among others. The

book taught me everything I know today about linguistics and I am grateful for

that. And while it gives the requisite horse whipping to the anthropologists and

the Wannabees, it also, strangely enough, short changes the shamans whose

culture, Abram seems to believe, is the cradle of power. We read:

Psychotherapists and some physicians have begun to specialize in 'shamanic

healing techniques.' 'Shamanism' has thus come to connote an alternative

form of therapy; the emphasis, among these new practitioners of popular

shamanism, in on personal insight and curing. These are noble aims, to be

sure, yet they are secondary to, and derivative from, the primary role of the


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indigenous shaman, a role that cannot be fulfilled without long and sustained

exposure to wild nature, to its patterns and vicissitudes. Mimicking the

indigenous shaman's curative methods without his intimate knowledge of the

wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade

certain symptoms for others or shift the locus of dis-ease from place to place

within the human community. For the source of stress lies in the relation

between the human community and the natural landscape."

If one wants to know what Eliade meant by the term "nostalgia for

paradise" reread the foregoing paragraph. To learn more on the "primary role" of

an indigenous shaman and the nature of magic please continue.

"Hence, the traditional magician or medicine person functions primarily as an

intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds and only secondarily as

a healer. Without a continually adjusted awareness of the relative balance or

imbalance between human group and its nonhuman environ, along with the

skills to modulate that primary relation, any 'healer' is worthless--indeed, not

a healer at all. The medicine person's primary allegiance, then, is not to the

human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that

community is embedded...

"Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of

existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every

form one perceives...is an experiencing form, an entity with its own

predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our

own."

Despite the emphatic quality of his declarations I doubt if Abram will soon

find that he has written the last word on what constitutes the "primary role" of

the shaman. There are probably as many diversified "Primary Roles" as there are

shamans to fill them. And I am sure there are more than just one or two who


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would with somber faces and gleeful hearts gladly set the man straight on the

matter. But that is a digression. The point is that Abram wrote a book, like almost

all others, that defined shamanic power out of any other culture but the

traditional indigenous. White people need not apply.

On the less theoretical and rhetorical end of the spectrum is an example of

the same sort. It is found in Stephen Larsen's The Shamans' Doorway. Larsen

writes of the curious experience of a young man known as J.B who found his way

from New York City to The Great Slave Lake in the Canadian north. There J.B.

convinced Adamie, a Dogrib Indian medicine man, to take him on as an

apprentice. Partway through the training the young man bolted and fled back to

Manhattan. He gave up the calling. Larsen asked why and J.B. replied that to

become a shaman he would have had to become an Indian and he could never be

more than a second-rate Indian. The calling seemed so inextricably bound to the

culture that Larsen did not even ask if J.B. had considered the possibility he

could take his training with him wherever he went. This was, I should point out,

before the dawning of the New Age, a time when old Adamie could have become a

favorite on the workshop circuit. It was before the time when seekers beyond

numbering would have given their left ventricles for J.B.'s experiences. And they

would have even known that it was safe, perhaps even profitable, to bring it all

back home.

J.B.'s first trial toward his apprenticeship was the "extraction" of his soul

that enabled Adamie to see if he was worthy of the training. (The story sounds

like a deja vu of the legendary first encounter between the Taoist master, L

Tung-pin, and the wizard Zhong-li Quwan.) According to J.B.'s account, Adamie


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had put him into a trance with drumming and singing and he remained therein

for a couple of days while the old man vetted his ethereal innards. Larsen was

impressed that Adamie could extract the soul of a "rationally indoctrinated"

westerner of European seed. (2) "(I)f we are to believe the anthropologists"

Larsen continued, Adamie should only have been able to work this medicine on

his own, more primitive, people. It occurs to me here that ethnocentrism is at its

most virulent when we are analyzing the behavior of our own cultural colleagues.

Larsen assumed that J.B. was as indoctrinated as he, himself, appears to be.

Maybe J.B. had passed up the program his rationalizing culture was pushing; and

so he was open to that much more experience. And J. B. had, admittedly, shown

up at Adamie's cabin with a gift in his hand and his soul on his sleeve.

Nevertheless, Larsen helps make the conventional point: Shamanism is for

primitive cultures; it is the curative nest egg for which that culture holds a

monopoly.

The true loss I find in this fascinating tale of J.B. and Adamie is that no

one was able to discover what Adamie thought. He, after all, had seen J.B.'s soul.

Did he suspect that J.B. could never be more than a second-rate shaman because

he was white? There is a good chance Adamie might have held such a prejudice. I

have a story on the point:

In the mid-70s I was on the administrative staff of a fairly radical national

Indian organization, teaching techniques of investigation to young Indian

journalists and setting up a political power structure and legal research division.

One of the organization's long-standing projects was assisting grass roots

members of several Eastern Oklahoma tribes reestablish formal recognition of


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their traditional tribal governments. This eventually successful effort was in

opposition to the system of the time whereby the U.S. President appointed a

"Principle Chief" for each tribe from a pool of oil company executives who were

genetically qualified by at least 1/16th blood quantum if nothing else. For about a

week in 1976, three of us; the organization's director who was a North Carolina

Cherokee, a staff attorney who was a white woman, and I, were in and around

Tulsa and Tahlequah meeting with organizers and members of the Traditional

Creek faction. One night one of the organizers, our host for the week, drove us

into the hills about 60 miles out of Tulsa to a neighborhood stomp dance that was

a benefit for someone sick or with other troubles.

It was about 10 at night when we got to the stomp grounds, but the dance

had not started because a couple of the men who were going to be making the

medicine for the dance had yet to arrive. We waited. Then we heard they were all

present. And we waited. Midnight, we waited. One o'clock, the host reported that

the medicine was not working and the dance could not start until it did. The

lawyer, who knew her way around traditions and taboos, asked if the problem

might lie in the fact that she was in the middle of her period. If that were so she

said she would be glad to leave. The host said it was quite likely and went to ask.

But there was no problem. The medicine men told him that her menses had no

effect on their medicine because she was a white woman. I thought it gave her a

legitimate cause to be at least somewhat offended. An Indian woman would

certainly have felt dishonored if white men had so easily dismissed her presence

and power. But the lawyer took no exception. She must have thought that culture

was the nest, as did, evidently, the medicine men.


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I have cut by way of experience into that obscurant and I am not so sure.

Only recently did I do some long neglected research on this matter of soul

fragments and the searches for the same. Eliade wrote that it came out of central

Asia. Where is the surprise in that one? He takes care to delineate tribes and

practices and frets a little over current (1951) trends towards "quasi-trances" and

shortcuts. He didn't call it "soul retrieval" but what he writes of has all the

earmarks of that modality and pure shamanism (i.e. the Central Asian brand by

Eliade's standards) and the cultures that generate it. The first time I heard of

soul retrieval was about 1991 when Sandra Ingerman published her volume by

that name. There was talk of it all around in Santa Fe, but I never read the book.

One fellow there in an advanced training program learned the technique and

began to offer it among his other shamanic services. The first time I assisted on

one of his ceremonies was in fall, 1996. It made sense though I had to wonder

about how quasi- might be the trance. Others had learned it by then from

workshops and apprenticeships. It was but a few years ago, however, that a friend

told me that when she was in the retrieval journey her spirit animal would show

her the soul fragments as brightly colored geometric shapes. That was when I

remembered. I remembered those, the puzzling little pieces, a triangular cartoon

potsherd, bright orange, and one-half of a short piece of cherry red pipe that had

been cut in two, lengthways. They looked like props from Disney animation,

detritus of a dream. Then I knew what I had been doing.

It went back to the first week in December, '89, when Michaela, a friend,

was still in the wake of a sudden illness that had taken her right inside the gates

of death and left her hanging there for at least a few hours. It gave her a rare view


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to an enduring peace and solace that were not ordinarily part of her existence.

She came back with some ambivalence, but managed to keep captive the

revelation of where she had been. A sort of bliss had governed her life for a week

thereafter and then it had fallen apart. Michaela was in the deepest depression

that she could recall. She found nothing positive in anything. All she could see

was falsehood, debasement and mundanity. She felt sundered and knew she had

not fully returned from that transit. Part of her was still hanging out near death.

And it was getting worse. About four or five days into that furious depression I

found her in a dissociated state. She was speaking with an accent that sounded as

if English were her second language and then now and again she sounded as if

she were four. She was hiding in bed, late at night, sliding away. I feared she

might not come back, or come back even more badly fractured. I did not see any

choices but to go into that darkness after her. Where? I had not a clue, new

territory with no maps. I could only go on instinct--a lonely impulse of delight. I

had always had a worshipful respect for instinct. Mine did not always go to all the

right places by every consideration, but they never took me to a dull one. That

night for the longest time I sat hunched in a half-lotus beside her, rocking up an

urgent rhythm to guide me like the headlong footfall sounds of a dervish drum. I

rocked there, forcing my awareness down and down and down, until exhausted,

because this woman was in trouble and I was the willful founder and CEO and

complete staff of Sterling Steven's Rescue Rangers, and by god we could do it all.

Eventually I slept trusting that I would keep going in dream reality. There,

I descended into blackness far more dense than that of the preceding trance. And

finally I found Michaela in a sleek ceramic vessel like a contemporary seed pot,


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not too deep but round and wide with a short, belled neck and the narrowest

passage to the inside. The interior was glazed cobalt. I knew that but I could not

see it. I could not see Michaela or me; I just knew it was us. All I could see was

dark to the power of 10 and a bright orange cartoon potsherd and half of a cherry

red piece of pipe. Detritus.

The next morning, Michaela awoke as fully present as she had ever been, a

little wiser and with no depression. I made note of it in my journal and drew

pictures of the puzzling fragments. It had been a curious evening but nothing so

out of the ordinary that it was worth a lot of examination. I just thought it was

what every mystic would do, could do. No one had ever told me it was a

possibility. Then again no one had ever told me that it wasn't.

I think it had to do with passion. It didn't have to do with culture. Mine

was not a tribal culture at any time in the memorable past. And I have steered

away from the influences of those that are. I spent nearly half my youth on a

reservation and was for a year the only white boy in my junior high class. And

later, for a decade, as a muck raking, trouble making journalist, and teacher, and

author of laymen's legal textbooks, and range detective and private investigator of

trespasses and resource thefts from Indian Territory, I crusaded under the

banners of liberation, Indian civil rights, territorial restoration, and full tribal

sovereignty. But I kept my distance from that culture. It was for the following

reasons: 1) I saw that the Wannabees, white for Indian, Indian for white, never

wound up in the place they longed to be. They always fell well short. 2) I

suspected from observation and had it confirmed by my radical and traditional

Indian colleagues that tribal cultures, even the most functional ones, maybe


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especially the most functional ones, were too often more repressive to their

individual members than the one I had lucked into. I found that women were

greatly chaffed by this, far more so than most of the men. 3) I realized early on

that I could spend a lifetime if not more digging out from under the impositions

of my own culture and I had no desire to tunnel into another.

It was and is about authenticity. And later that authenticity also had

everything to do with staying out of the jungle.

The Mine-Mouth Gorgon Medusa

That was the time when the man came around from Peru with the tea, and

they told me that was where it would take me: to the jungle. That was all I knew

about ayahuasca: it was an ecstatic journey to the jungle. My idea of an ecstatic

journey would be to some 12,000 ft. gale scoured pass in the Wind River Range,

for example, since the jungle holds no charms for the current author. I knew

nothing about the jungle, or the cultures that lived there and worked with the tea

and I saw no real need to learn except that I wanted, seriously, to try the brew.

Given all that, I was willing to surrender to its flight plan. The first two

ceremonies I attended left me bored, wide-awake and stationary. A few months

later I decided to try again.

The shaman that night was young. He spoke no English, gave no guidance.

We were working in a teepee owned by a mixed blood Russian fellow on the east

slope of the Sangre de Cristos. The teepee was cold, the tea very powerful. The

shaman started out kneeling beside the alter and singing his song. Soon he

toppled over beside the alter but managed briefly to keep up with the song,


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though more and more he seemed to have his attention directed elsewhere and

the song dwindled away in fits and starts and increasingly longer bursts of

silence. It was apparently problematic medicine. I waited. The three others stuck

it out for a while, sitting, laying, going out, getting sick, coming back, going to

sleep. I sat there hunched in a half-lotus like a stone and waited. I saw nothing

junglesque. It seemed more like sitting on a barren ledge far above a desert river.

And I waited, cold and stiff and increasingly irritated. Just when I decided to lay

down to sleep the impression of the river dissolved into a very visible entrance to

an abandoned mining tunnel like something one could find at the end of a bad

road out of Telluride, Colorado. And suddenly I was flashing down through this

crooked tunnel like a bottle rocket. I was fast but the tunnel was almost endless. I

slowed briefly to watch a boy swinging by his hands from a shoring timber like it

was a jungle gym. Jungle gym? Was I getting near? (3)

Abruptly the tunnel ended and I dropped to my feet on the ground. I was

still high in a North American mountain mining district. Abandoned machinery

had been broadcast all over, ore cars and ore car rails and miles of rusty cable.

(There are always miles of rusty cable around such digs, threatening tetanus at

every step.) It was a dump. Then just as abruptly as I had hit the place, the cable

and junk and a coil spring three feet across and 15 feet long, pulled itself together.

Its face was a mask made from a badly mangled piece of 1/2" steel plate and

welded atop was a freight wig of razor ribbon. It rose above me like a puppet out

of a Jack-In-The-Box. Of course it was nothing organic because all the animals

had fled my places years before; nevertheless it was sentient enough to want me

dead. Murder was its clear intention. It pulled itself to full stretch, and was poised


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to strike me dead. This was not what I had come for. I stepped up closer to it and

said with contempt, "Fuck off. I'm a god."

The robot liquefied into a slime that looked like rotten lettuce, wilted to

the ground and soaked away through the fissures in the rocks at my feet. Fade to

the black of the frigid teepee.

Sometime later, somewhere I read that in the jungle, ayahuasca bestows a

similar initiatory feature on a person's first journey. Apparently one is supposed

to work things out with a giant, threatening serpent, and make it one's immortal

ally. So I imagine I handled the situation rather badly. But I also think the

experience did not go wanting for authenticity; the formula for the work certainly

was Peruvian; banisteriopsis and psychotria, but the props and script were

Aryan; high carbon steel, Nietzsche and The Rg Veda. (4)

Stalking Power, Finding Guides

I no longer believe that the evening was a waste. The nature of the mine

mouth gorgon helped inform some other journeys and dreams. I began to read

more, study the calling more seriously. Because too much has fallen to me that

has apparently also fallen to those of the shamanic calling, I wanted to discover

the common roots. And so, among other inquiries I again struggled to work out

the spirit guide and power animal problems. A number of writers like to quote

Knud Rasmussen's interviews with Aua, the Eskimo shaman. All the overview

author's pay Aua homage and weigh in with his story of how he learned his song.

He seemed to have been in some sort of extremis one day when he saw a little


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shore bird called an aua, whereupon the man fell into an ecstatic rapture and

spontaneously composed his power song. I could, as they say, relate to that.

Years ago as a teenage hobo I was hitchhiking west after visiting a friend

on the Rosebud rez in South Dakota. The scene was a backwater cross roads in

the middle of Nebraska, in the middle of October, in the middle of an afternoon

when the heat was unseasonable but had no sharp summer edges and it eased the

time by as if were wide and deep. It was a recently harvested landscape with

stubbled ochre horizon hills and yellow cottonwoods mid-distance. There I pulled

myself up into the cab of an 18-wheeler and settled in. I had just scored a ride

almost all the way home. The driver waited for some traffic to pass, dropped in

the gears and bore down on the fuel. The trailer was overloaded so the tractor

dropped back hard on the rear axles, roared and quaked, hammered against the

inertia and surged out onto the blacktop. All that power trying to propel all that

steel vibrated up from the ground through me to the heavens and I went into an

ecstatic trance. It was not the first time, mystic that I was even then. But it had a

memorable feature, for rising with that power came a song that was being

composed down around my root chakra. It had no words but it was full of words I

had never heard. They sounded through my heart and I let them go silent just

short of my tongue. I had just enough presence of mind to keep them to myself

lest I raise some alarm in the driver. That song rolled along with me for 30 or 40

miles and then faded at about 4 o'clock.

Years went past, and then some more, 30 maybe, all in all.

We were reading one night at the behest of Roberto his sampling of

shamanic literature. We had just finished Michael Harner's recipe for locating a


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power animal spirit guide and I said to myself or perhaps even out loud that

someday I might give that option another try. "Or maybe I'll dream about it."

Probably a little before sun rise the next morning I found myself at the

wheel of a great blue, road machine. It looked like a state of the art, 62'

Kenworth. The engine was revving only a little higher than idle but we were

passing everything on the road. We stopped on the top of a hill to help out some

folks who were broken down or lost. Then we roared on toward Ethete (-thu-

tee), Wyo., a settlement only 16 miles away that was by all reasonable means of

calculation the Center of the Universe.

I never saw that truck again in a dream or journey or vision. I do not think

I ever needed to. It dropped its one-time word, hopefully on a wise mind and

went away. In brief that dream told me what a power animal was about. That

Kenworth did not expect me to cultivate a relationship with it and I felt likewise.

(I did however paint a stylized KW grill emblem on the head of a hand drum)

It has been an awfully long time since I found a Kenworth rig to be

compelling. I drove one for a while. It was boring work; it made my haunches

ache, pushed out too much noise and it smelled badly. But I know from a truly

visceral apprehension all the power of that truck. I have felt it in my hands,

perceived it through the soles of my feet. It is not a matter of theory or suggestion

or a notion of which I had merely read. It was power that I was able to contain

and direct, no mystery about it. It was a fact out of the everyday.

There are, no doubt, people who have seen more serpents in the daylight

jungle than they have seen Kenworth trucks. They might have dealt directly with

those serpents, held them in their hands and felt those vitalized wires of muscle


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working just below the patterned skin. To them the serpent has no mystique.

They know that power because they have held it. This is a part of those people's

life, the same old same old of every day. For these people the serpent holds no

mystery.

But I have known people who have only seen a serpent in the jungle

when that jungle was a journey and their ticket there was a drug or a drum. And

they found it such a powerful and compelling illusion they made it their tutor and

a guide to which they were willing to subordinate themselves. They are drawn to

this numen like Rumi was compelled to tumble for Shams of Tabriz, or like soul

mated lovers bonded by MDMA. I think the seduction lies in The Mystique of the

Other that compelling deceptive mind obscurant of pure power, love,

enlightenment, instinct, godliness--pick your value--that one believes that one

has not but the Other does. Being held in the magical thrall of the Other is rich

with the irony of being trapped in the thick brilliant dazzle of a bank of backlit

fog; everything is light, nothing can be seen. There is a quality about mystique

that can defraud the faithful into believing they are well versed on something

about which they know progressively less and less, thus the entire relationship

derives more from suggestion, projection and self-fulfilling expectation than the

natural experience that falls out from all that is in a day's work.

The last story is about the Other. It is a cautionary tale concerning a

crocodile I once knew despite my contrary instincts in the Out There.

Stalked by Other, Proving a Rule


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Another end of another inconsequential dream: The action has played out

and I was walking away down a suburban street. That was when I encountered

the crocodile. It raised its head and shoulders tall and said hello. I returned the

greeting and we sidled around one another like any other pair of strangers who

meet in narrow straits. It was a curious sequence and went largely forgotten.

A couple of years later I was invited by an artist-shaman Ross LewAllen, to

help him and a handful of others undertake a set of vision journeys done to

drums. A friend and client of his was prospecting to open some socially

responsible enterprises and needed additional visions, inspirations and advice to

round out the business plan. It was an all day situation. There was a canoe

journey on the agenda early in the afternoon. Because of where I was sitting in

the circle vis-a-vis the shape of the room I was made the prow of the canoe. The

others lined themselves out in an ellipse, the client lay amidships and if memory

serves, Sandra Ingerman drummed.

We left the embarcadero in darkness but soon we were gliding down this

too wide and too deep slow moving river. It was muddy. We passed a wooded

island 25 yards to lee. A man ambled from the trees, down the mud flat to the

water where he turned into a crocodile and swam out. It was the crocodile I knew

from before, the one I'd last seen in the suburbs. If this was a crocodile swimming

out to see me, I suspected I was close to the jungle. Was I in the wrong place?

Would there be crow to eat?

He slipped along side and drifted with us. We exchanged greetings and he

said it was good to see me again. I had to agree. If I was going to be stuck in a


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jungle journey it was better to be with someone I knew, even if it was an animal. I

wondered if he had turned traitor to the others, or was this a trick.

"What are you doing around here?" the crocodile asked.

"We're just working on this shamans canoe thing for the guy back in the

boat," I told him.

"Oh."

The crocodile lifted up out of the water and studied the client. He must

have noticed the man had not missed a meal any time in the long-term memory.

"Hey, why put yourself out for him? Why don't you let me have him for

lunch and then you can go on home." The crocodile was about half serious.

"That would not be courteous," I said. "He is our host today after all."

"Hmm."

We glided in silence for a while. And then we heard the roar of a waterfall,

a mammoth waterfall.

"I think we're coming to the edge of the world," I said, "its part of the

routine."

"Oh. You going to go on over?

"I don't know. It's all up to that woman with the drum." I told him. "If she

starts going fast we turn around. If not, we'll get really wet."

"Hmm."

We glided again in silence. Then I said, "This isn't your show, you know.

You don't have to come along."

"Yeah. But it's something to do."

"It is at that." I was beginning to like this crocodile a lot.


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We didn't say anything after that because we were both psyching up for the

ride. But then the drum sounded fast, and we turned and booked it back up

stream. When we passed the island the crocodile cut away from the canoe.

"See you."

"Take care."

He clambered up onto shore, changed into a man and ambled into the

trees.

All together it was a decent enough standard kind of journey, though it

wasn't much help to the client and I had to wonder: how quasi could have been

the trance? On what level could it have been contrived? I never saw the crocodile

again, but read up on his power in the ethereal zoology texts. Crocodile: little

more than instincts bundled in fashionable skin; the epitome of the reptilian

brain; does all the heavy lifting as regards its food supply underwater. Myth

crocodiles are to rivers what myth snakes are to dry land. Fine, but I never saw

him again.

Two years later I was working up to send out some exorcising energies to

someone over quite a lengthy distance. It was not a spontaneous exercise. I had

planned this one though I felt a little instinctual resistance to making art in this

manner from a cookbook. It was almost nightfall on the mountain where I'd gone

to first begin gathering at a rock outcrop alter. It was a good crew I managed to

recruit, some of the wild hunt and some mountain spirits and local gods. (5) But

there was some gender imbalance; it was too weighty on testosterone. I needed

indefatigable female madness. One of the more raging phases of Kali would fit in

well. So when I headed back down the mountain I kept shouting for her. And


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then I came to one of those strange places in the forest where, one theorizes, the

force of a thunder storm had whipped up a short lived funnel cloud that had torn

out all the trees in an acre or two. Big ponderosas and spruce and aspen, three

feet, four feet in diameter were uprooted and scattered and twisted together. If

Kali, in the aspect I'd like to see, could be found it would be in this patch of utter

destruction. I stopped where the branches of an aspen were so ensnared in the

roots of a pine I could barely tell one from another. Into that tangle I yelled

"Kali!" There was no sundown wind, no motion of anything anywhere except

back in the darkness of those roots and limbs one of them broke and dropped to

the ground. Like years before, I howled raving thanks. One must never forget

passion in the presence of Kali.

Then I strode on down the mountain with the idea I had done as well as I

ever could have that evening. Near the end of this trail I was following, just before

it reaches the road, there is a sharp bend. And just before that bend I suddenly

felt like I was someone's prey. Into the bend I turned quickly around to see who

was behind me. A man was walking down the trail, about 25 yards back. He

grinned and disappeared, but I knew him. It was the second open-eyed

hallucination I've experienced in my life, something I have never even had with

the use of entheogins. The last time I had seen that guy he was ambling up the

mud flats from the river toward the trees. That evening on the mountain I urged

him to go on with the rest of that desperado band I'd conjured. He could class up

their act and it was after all, something to do.

I have never seen him again, but then I have never seen anything in that

strata of reality happen twice the same way. However, I have reason to believe


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that he stayed behind and in fact the whole wild bunch never traveled far if it

managed to make any distance at all. The entire attempt of that evening was a

failure. Nothing happened, nothing was exorcised. There is often in these

practices a sense that can distinguish a hit or a miss at the instant of action,

before the objective results are in, like a good basketball player will often know as

the ball leaves the fingertips whether or not they have scored. I felt nothing either

way; it was all a profound misfire. When that was apparent I realized I had

subverted the essential authenticity because everything I sent out that night had

the image of an Other. And with every such contrivance there was a resultant

dilution of the passion and the will. Just as in the suspicious canoe journey, that

crocodile and his two-legged manifestation had images of Other; something they

were not.

Finally, perhaps 18 months later, it came circling around again in a dream

of a river, again wide, deep and warm. I slipped down off the bank and dove with

no snorkel, no tanks. There was the dream outline of a supermarket on the

bottom, no walls, no windows, just a steel stud framework. I needed to stop by for

some groceries so I slid in through the transom over the doors.

Notes for Infidels:

--Add "Integration" to the list.

1. Passion

2. Authenticity

3. Integration


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--Idea for a tee shirt:

BE THE NEST

THERE IS NO OTHER

* * * * * *

Endnotes

(1) Later all three of us noted the heavy imposition of flash-backed DMT

visuals. This was no surprise because each of us had, months before, been

selected, based on histories and the apparent strength of our psyches, to be part

of the 11-member vanguard test pilot cadre on which was standardized the

dosages and protocols for Dr. Rick Strassmans pioneering and now famous DMT

studies.

(2) I find the writers who bemoan the mechanized cultural influences that

keep us exiles from Eden tend to make everyone a victim of equal degree. When

they write something like We of the rationally indoctrinated West they mean

WE! This is I believe in error and suggest that those who are less likely to be

gulled by their culture do not advance nearly as far as the softer marks through

the cultures indoctrination centers and are thus more likely to be flying casually

disaffected under the cultural radar and less likely than the softer marks to end

up writing cranky, scholarly works indicting the culture that defrauded them.

(3) Early the next morning I saw exactly the same sight; our hosts young

son, a boy of the same size and hair color, swinging at the same cadence and at

the same height from the branch of a tree. What I had learned from many


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precognitive dreams was that such a brief, incongruous glimpse of a small

attraction to come in the daylight quite often was a signal to pay extra attention

to the significance of the dream, or in this case, journey.

(4) Long before my introduction to ayahuasca we had an occasion to

consume a substantial amount of what the mycologist R. Gordon Wasson

theorized to be the Soma of Rg Veda note. As a result my partner and I, being

totally nave as to the nature of the stuff which had come to us with few

instructions as a gift, were in a deadly serious, semi-ambulatory coma and near

death state for the next 12 hours, a state that came complete with the requisite

NDE vision. (Mine was of a modern Vahlhalla, into which the Lord of Death said

that I, having passed a couple of killer ordeals, could now come and go as I

pleased.) After this experience we got around to finding out what we had done

and read where Wasson wrote that Soma was highly prized by shamans in

Central Asia. He quoted one as testifying a shaman only had to do it once.

Another said that if a person survived the initial meal of Soma it meant that

person was a born shaman. I took all of that to be legend at best. But what I

found to be worth a great good laugh was when I read the line that was the first

mention of (the god) Soma in the Rg Veda:

We have drunk the Soma and we are gods.

Ayahuasca just cant stand up to that kind of rhetoric.

(5) Those who are unfamiliar with the latter two are referred to The

Journey West, by Wu Chengen. After finishing all four volumes one will never

have to read another book.


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Bibliography

Abram, David; The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage Books, NY, 1997.

Eliade, Mercia; Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, Translated by Philip Mairet,

Harper Torchbooks, NY, 1975Shamanism, Archair Tecnhiques of Ecstasy, Translated by WillardTrask, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1976.

Kalweit, Holgar; Dreamtime and Inner Space, Translated by Werner Winche,Shambala Publications, Boston, 1988.

Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men, Translated by Michael H.Kohn, Shambala Publications, Boston, 1992.

Larsen, Stephen; The Shamans Doorway, Inner Traditions, Rochester, VT.

Wasson, R. Gordon, Soma, Harcourt Brace Javonovich, Inc. NY, (1971)

Wu Chengen; Journey to the West, (Vols. I IV), Translated and Edited byAnthony C. Yu, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977-1983

Author

Steven Nickeson lives with his wife in Los Teques, Miranda, Venezuela,

where he works as an artist-blacksmith and writer and practices a reasonable

amount of sorcery. Like all other common human beings in the world he can be

found on Face Book.

With What We Have in Our Hands Ecstasy, Authenticity and Passion

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Transcript of With What We Have in Our Hands Ecstasy, Authenticity and Passion