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Hey y'all, (Warning: long post...long story.)

M and I looked over Avatar yesterday in this little tiny theater on Aruba. M later tells me that she saw all of it as internal. The superficial, ecological, external, world-bound aspect was just that: superficial. She said that it was about meeting the raw shakti. Neither the sky people nor the groundlings, those blue colored folks who could hiss like cats, were up to doing so. The sky people...the Earth Masters...were too arrogant and the blue colored folk were too superstitious, ignorant, fearful and nicey-nicey and could only recognize the benevolent aspects of the Tree of Souls. A one-sided point of view, in this day and age, can only be considered ignorant. The raw shakti was not in the blue-colored folks, but in the flow within the ground that enraged all those weird animals that crushed the invaders. The blue colored folks were just the same as all the rest...incidental in either the rage or benevolence of the raw shakti. M says it is the only thing that counts.

Somewhere back up this thread I read: "Yes we do have similar one-mind abilities, but they have been stymied by eons of trauma, control, suppression and repression. Raw foodism and regeneration in Nature are perhaps the greatest method of reclaiming our lost receptors and sensitivities. Self-communication is the sensory organ of communication with the All, and this primary intimacy has been undermined by our material collectivism, which overrides truth to preserve the power mechanisms in the group hierarchy. We come into the world relatively sane, and then are made progressively insane by the discombobulated culture. The more superconducting light that flows in the body, the more at One we are with our environment...to the point of global psi. We do not need sensory amplifying trans-humanist technology...we just have to cleanse the doors to our own perception and exercise the abilities that we already have. ORMUS represents a fast route back to our Self and greater communion...but we risk treating it like another drug without remineralization, rawfood, Nature's energies, kundalini initiation and the exercise of our abilities."

In all due respect I have to disagree in the face of the fact that I think raw veggies are too hard to digest and at the time of the stories below I was eating red meat--beef or venison or elk or moose--at least twice a day and no doubt getting all the minerals I needed.

Here's a story and why I disagree that nothing is needed but being open.

The context here is an article on shamanism I wrote several years ago that turned out to be too complicated for publication. I am writing in this excerpt why I don't have any "power animals" in my practices although that never hindered my ability to deliver what was needed in the moment. The point is that belief in this or that or any other thing is merely an entertainment to shorten the time from one meal to the next. Action in the moment is the only thing that counts.

The story:

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 say, 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."
I stepped into the trough of that track and the dance was joined. It lasted for hours. The sun rose high, though 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 (and I too have partaken of that terror), 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 was 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 male mule deer I had ever seen rose from its noon nap concealed behind a huge downed ponderosa 25 feet away. He paused to account for me then left on a 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 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 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 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 someone…well, like me? And hence they left. The animals vanished, I would tell my friends. It was true, they had built no nests…
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, about 10 years ago, I was hired to investigate the suspicious death of an Indian 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 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 26 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 and 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 bed.
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 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.
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."
"Oh."
"And Norman was wondering if it's alright for him to go home 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?"

The story goes on and on but that was all I needed to say here and now. Remember...keep a song in your heart and a smile on your lips as you go forth to smash the state or what ever it is that pleasures.

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