Arnold Mindell: Psychology and Shamanism

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This book is based on the author's individual experience with native African and American residents, Australian Aboriginals, Hindu healers from India, and spiritual teachers from all over the world, and is based on psychotherapist practice, conflict resolution practice, and shamanism. Exercises and methods here come from a combination of modern psychology and ancient shamanic practices (from the editor's mate).

KOS Wydawnictwo Thank you for sharing a passage for publication. We encourage you to read the full book.

Chapter 14
The Walk of Death

When you defeat a demon, you will find moments of pleasure, freedom and extra energy – whether you win or lose the fight with yourself. possibly the best part is that there are moments erstwhile you feel real and coherent, free from fears and symptoms associated with the spectrum. Now you know you have a double and you feel your shaman body. But sometimes you forget that experience and wonder how much you can live a dreamy body in this life. On the 1 hand, love for the planet draws you to problem others and play with them. But on the another hand, ecstasy from your experiences can tempt you to leave the planet forever.

On the last pages of Don Juan’s Power Tales, he explains to his people that the place where they stand is the last place where their paths cross. fewer warriors survived a gathering with unknownThat's what his students are given to face. The Nagual is so strong that those who go through the final gathering find that nothing calls them back to the Tonala; ‘A planet of order, sound and pain’ [1].

Remember that dramatic sense of fullness that accompanies the discovery of a dreamy body? It's hard to leave this experience and go back to average life. Returning from a wonderful holiday, an crucial relation or intense interior experience is painful due to the fact that you are afraid of losing contact with yourself.

When you get back from the nagua, you face difficulties. It is not easy to go back to average things, to the planet of tonals, where dreams, physical experiences or secondary processes are underestimated. Don Juan warns his student that if he does not decide to return, he will vanish as if he had been swallowed by Earth. But if he comes back, he'll gotta wait and finish his life's mission. erstwhile the task is done, the student will be able to dispose of himself as a whole.

Don Juan explains that erstwhile the student returns, he will face the thought of fulfilling the task. Don Juan warns that this is not an average job, but a mundane venture that may take a long time. The task is assigned to the student by his teacher. Don Juan explains to Castaneda that in the past teachers never sought students. The union established the individual power of the student and teacher, so that strength, lust, or intrigue never constrained them. due to the fact that the power chooses the teacher, you can besides presume that the power chooses the task associated with the peculiar teacher.

In my case, it worked. erstwhile I first came to Zurich, I was going to postgraduate from physics. destiny wanted all that I came across a fellow student who was so fond of his analyst that I besides decided to submit to analysis. destiny came into contact with my first teacher.

One day, while I was sitting in a café garden, watching people pass by, I noticed a charming European gentleman who was doing the same thing I did. erstwhile I looked at him more closely, I saw a mix of old-fashioned kind and alert presence. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, “The same as you.”

We had a good afternoon talking about women and cafes, and then decided to meet next Saturday afternoon. The second time was just as large and we met all Saturday afternoon until I dreamed that this man was my teacher. At the time I had this dream, after weeks of our first meeting, we were so busy talking, drinking and having fun that we forgot to introduce ourselves. What was his name?

When we met again, I was ashamed to tell him a dream and asked if he was curious in dreams and akin matters. He laughed out loud and said yes, in fresh times he is curious in specified matters. He must have noticed the embarrassment he caused me due to the fact that he looked me right in the eye, saying that he was president of the Jung Institute in Zurich and Jung's nephew. That's how the authoritative start of my appointment began.

We've spent quite a few time together, and he's become a real and incomprehensible bare man for me. He was besides a spiritual teacher and a hard - treading man. He said that his work was to teach me how unawareness manifests itself in real life; most of the time spent together was everything but a conventional analysis. We walked, talked, and met in unusual places at different times. Later we met others, I loved watching him behave. He was highly charming, and I felt like an asocial type. present I realize how fortunate I was to meet him.

No uncertainty my opinion active the destiny of this man, and erstwhile he died many years after our first meeting, on the day of his ceremony I dreamed that his double had jumped out of the grave and fell into my lungs in the minute of breath. Sometimes I inactive feel the part of him inside of me that possibly keeps appearing in my dreams and directing me about individual tasks.

Since then, a fewer people have chosen me as their teacher, and I was amazed at how clearly their dreams connected their tasks to me. The individual powers of the teacher and the student make their gathering and the same power chooses the task symbolized by the teacher. In another words, the task is simply a common spirit that in any cases needs generations to come true. It's like a teacher and a student are part of a long lineage, whose beginning and end die in infinity.

In eternity and impersonality, there is something liberating, as well as something wonderful about the participation of those who live and die fulfilling them. At this level, relationships are both close and free. I remember learning this from a man I met for the first time in my life at a lecture in Mumbai. He came up to me and said, “Dr. Mindell, I would like you to be my guru.” I shuddered a small and began to wonder how to deal with his feelings.

Today I am grateful to him for being my guru, showing how to deal with feelings. "Dr. Mindell, don't worry about it. This is not individual – he explained – it has nothing to do with you or me. You'll be my guru, but you don't gotta do anything. I will carry your picture, and if essential I will talk to him.”

Although this may sound like a one-sided attitude to Western mentality, this is the eternal truth. The powers of a teacher and a student form their relation and their task. Everything that involves the story of consciousness has at least 1 common task: developing the second attention and relativizing the unilateralness of our consciousness, allowing ourselves and others to live more fully. For example, Castaneda’s occupation was seemingly to bring night forces into the area of the day utilizing Don Juan’s teachings.

The exact nature of the task depends on your talents and weaknesses, the time in which you live, and the aspect of your teacher's unfinished task. Thus, as Don Juan says: straight or indirectly, with the aid of dreams and love, the spirit of the teacher bestows the task of the disciple.

The Walk of Death

Don Genaro talks about the problems involved. It reminds me of the communicative of what happens in time erstwhile you wait for the task to be completed, in time that I call the walk of death. According to this story, a bunch of warriors lived in the mountains many years ago. erstwhile 1 of the gang members did not comply with the group's rules, he had to stand before others and explain himself. They considered him innocent or guilty. erstwhile they found out that he was guilty, they were ready to fire, standing in line, while the guilty were going to meet them.

But a convicted warrior was given a chance. erstwhile he walked in specified a peculiar way that no 1 could pull the trigger or erstwhile he survived despite the wounds, he was let go. According to the story, any people could experience specified a walk of death. possibly his individual power moved his comrades, preventing them from firing. It is besides possible that the convict was so centered and calm that he was rescued by deficiency of attachment.

According to shamans, this communicative means that if you chose to return to everyday life after finishing your training, you must wait on Earth until the task is accomplished. Your anticipation will be like a warrior walk from this story: all step can be the last. The difference is that in the communicative executioners are your comrades, while in life the spirit itself intends to be on you [2].

In each case, a individual active in specified a situation “flee beyond human time” and the only thing that can save you will be the cognition gained and the integrity of its usage during the task. That means you're on the way of death. Your interest in awareness and individual improvement binds you to others not only through common friendship, but thanks to the request for challenges and provocation.

The warrior's destiny is both interior and external conflict.

The walk of death concerns everyone to the degree that the planet is constantly challenging you to attain fullness. An average individual feels the planet is against her. The difference between the state of head of an average individual and a warrior is that the warrior realizes that the worst conflict occurs in relation to the human nature of the spectrum. As a warrior, you know that the planet is simply a hunting ground, and everyone is an ally that puts your leg in place and causes problem until you capture the power of your ally—the dreamy body.

So your execution squad consists of both interior critics and external friends and enemies – which depends on your state of mind. Friends can be valuable opponents, demons, and allies whose secrets you gotta learn. They seem to be forces other you inside you as well as all over space. These erstwhile friends are your mythical group of warriors, interior and external criticism created by jealousy and unawareness, by your relation with teacher and fellow scholars, and by your ally who violates social principles. This group is dreaming together.

Principles

The hidden laws of an interior or external group are the rules of your community, the assumptions that someway you agreed to live. These may be the unwritten laws of your household and culture and/or ideals and national rations. In your household of warriors 237 there are rights of groups governing relationships and the roles of women and men. There are besides hidden rules for dealing with apostates. If you belong to a spiritual group, you live by certain principles that govern your beliefs and lifestyle. If you're a scientist, you're bound by conventions of empathy and rationalism. As a teacher, you gotta form academic behaviour and teach people to adapt. In the individual of a rationalist therapist, he should take over shamanism.

As an individual, you must be subject to the definition of average human behaviour and dispel observations beyond that definition. Your racial group curves to see mixed relationships. As a woman, you must fight 3,000 years of domination. As a man, you gotta work tirelessly. If you're gay, gay or bisexual, you gotta hide due to the fact that you might get killed.

If your group attacks you initially in your dreams, then you can undergo therapy and meet your own resistance. This may not work, however, due to the fact that a deficiency of assurance in yourself, or attacking companies, can halt you from seeking help, dreaming or movement. interior attacks scope maximum strength erstwhile you effort to make a change and become a real person. Sometimes only a shaman can aid you find your lost soul.

Outside, the spirit of the court manifests itself as a neighbour, a group, a state, a taxation office, a world. In fact, your very existence on this planet at the beginning of the 21st century means that you are connected with the conventions of the past and with the hopes of the fresh era. At any moment, you are required, both from the inside and from the outside, to do what others want you to do and to identify with the way others want you to live. It's forbidden to change without permission.

The planet of your stalkers is like a giant ghost field where you gotta move. Working and fulfilling your task, you become flexible, changing from minute to moment, abandoning old roles and returning to them, irrevocably changing the basic principle: do not violate your individual history. But of course you gotta do it.

Distorting self-esteem, changing identity and abandoning individual past was hard and exciting. Shocking are the opinions of old friends accusing you of breaking clear or hidden rules established in the past. This conflict is painful enough, but the worst is yet to come. Breaking the rules of the group puts you before an even greater opponent than close household and friends. specified a courageous man must face centuries of human convictions and the insult of those who defend these beliefs.

Fate has outlawed you. As a warrior, you will almost by definition gotta argue any of the cultural rights. You disrupted the belief strategy and became a threat to him. due to the fact that you're a warrior, you must have crossed the threshold and inadvertently disrupted the network you're part of. Your body stops the planet by surviving the energy contained in the symptoms. Consciousness and second remark make relationships more unpredictable. Feeling unknown He's pushing you to support ghosts that others have forgotten. Now you're in trouble.

Kaci

Is it your responsibility you remind others of unwanted dreams? Who in turn can blame the group for resisting or for the deadly struggles caused by your attitude? The members of the group conflict for their lives, for balance, for homeostasis – in fact for the continuity of history. They say, “Do not make more problems than we can handle.”

From a global point of view, you're disrupting the organization's system, and past has to fight for continuity. In this universal and inevitable interaction, warrior friends become the voice of the whole. Their heat turns into ice. Under the authority of the legislature, as part of the eternal drama of history, they accuse you of unjust behavior, egotism and crimes.

The collective in which you live must prosecute you and bring you to justice for what you receive as an act of lawlessness, as you utilized to do with another people breaking the rules. Now you're the 1 starting the mortal conflict with the universe. The destiny of a warrior is to feel accused and face a community court. erstwhile your friends become worthy of you opponents and request work for your actions, the ecstasy of the naguala abruptly turns into a nightmare.

If you're not careful, you'll fall back into the form of a spectrum and attack those who hurt you. However, with adequate happiness and consciousness, you will remember the warrior’s view and admit the meaning of your fight. Your comrades are not just unworthy of the spectrum you erstwhile ignored and their arrows are not the attack that hurts you. Rather, they are the voice of history, asking you to return the culture by incorporating others into a sense of self. Either separate yourself from your actions and see your troubles as the debt you owe tradition, or fight like a hero and die like a ghost.

In a field of tension, a beginner warrior forgets the large visions and complains to the court that she had no choice but to commit a crime. If you didn't pay attention to the devil's words, expressed in the impulsiveness of the dreaming body, and obeyed the death warrants, you could get sick and lose your orientation. You could not one more time say yes to the demands of adaptation, alternatively than to your interior world. The ‘golden measure’ has ceased to exist.

Although the hearts of the judges may move, the verdict must be "guilty." You must not follow your interior life, thus causing trouble. The court will say, “or follow your ally alone, or follow social principles.” In a community, surviving in harmony with an ally is hindering others.

The court may complain that as long as you're around, things don't work out as usual. Why do you gotta go in the other direction? Would it not be easier to follow the acquainted ways that others follow? How can you laughter at the things that others take so seriously and reflect on the issues that others ignore? The court would be willing to give you another chance – you can yet be an crucial individual – but can not do so due to the fact that your nature does not let it. People gotta shoot you at the edge of a cliff. They request to make certain you realize that your actions were a substance of life and death.

Thus, according to your lesson, following an ally does not supply social approval or longevity. The way of cognition requires effort, you constantly encounter inexplicable forces. The way of the heart is as frightening as it is full of meaning.

It can contribute to early death.

Survive the Walk of Death

According to Don Genaro and Don Juan, any warriors were centered adequate to survive, walking right into the barrels of guns and not getting shot. Their comrades just couldn't pull the trigger. Was the warrior so consistent and so consistent with his actions and crimes that the dreaming body carried him out in an intact state? Or was he so strong that he was cured of his broken heart and from his wounds?

It may not have been the warrior who managed the situation, but the members of the court realized that their friend was going through something crucial to everyone. Eventually, all bunch of warriors, all group of people, connects a certain kind of story of consciousness. Each part of the group is simply a channel of consciousness capable of carrying and expressing news from the unknown.

The enlightened court would gotta realize that if the city kills 1 of its residents, it only results in the demolition of its body. The voice and transmission of this warrior cannot be killed. fresh ideas and fresh ways of life are much larger and much more durable than people who express them. The ideas will haunt the city long after the warrior's death. Thus voices of the past be present as current roles – parts needed for the benefit of the full society. For this reason, witchhood, shamanism and I hope tribal life can never be completely destroyed.

Anyway, erstwhile you break the rules within a group, you're besides her secondary process, her spirit. Killing you is not only inhumane, but ineffective. Dreams live on after you die. No thought was always killed. Besides, you can usage the argument that the principles of your community are besides rigid; otherwise the community would not dream you as a warrior who inadvertently creates a revolution.

If you go to court, you'll feel like you've already been here. The global view that you are anyone who has always broken the rules can enable you to survive. There has always been a court fighting for the preservation of established rules. What's more, you're not the only defendant, you're the full humanity that broke environmental rules.

You live in a planet that participates in the process itself. So remind possible executioners that they have besides exhausted their time. That they are blindly seeking solutions to the ubiquitous and seemingly insoluble, and their created planetary problems, that nature treats the human race just as the court treats the warrior.

Moreover, you cannot wait for your planet to awaken spontaneously due to the fact that you can observe it from the grave. You gotta wake up, and you can no longer effort to see your way as an individual breaking rules simply as a individual conflict over individuality. The results of your walk of death substance to everyone. Your individual attempts to become a full provoke changes around you, even now that you are reading about it. You can say that you are creating a model of planet change, just as the planet is considering how it will last its walk of death in the face of nature.

In order to last the walk of death, you must be both susceptible and invisible. First, you must mourn yourself as a victim of your unconsciousness and others. Then you gotta fight your opponents hard and coherently for your rations. Finally, you gotta quit your individual communicative and smile. If you've come this far, you have the strength to stand even on the side of the court to see his point of view and attack yourself before they can shoot you. If nothing else has happened to you, at least you're on the way of heart and science.

Do you remember the death of your old counselor? vanish at the sight of enemy rifles and erase individual past before they can launch. As a flexible warrior, you are not only yourself, but you besides hold the opinion of the court. Moreover, you are a ghost or a function in the field. Your flexibility should give you compassion for yourself, your stalkers, your friends and your communities. The minute you find your shaman body, you'll be happy to admit it's your time. A court that witnesses specified a final position erstwhile you abandon your past will be a court without a job.

This kind of last dance may not halt death, but it will surely commemorate you forever. Like a spirit freed from all roles, a legendary warrior captures her body and her death into her own hands, and sees her life from perspective. The planet is not just her enemy, but something that awakens her. Something ancient is observing the way it deals with number opinions. Something powerful is delicate to ignorance and brutality.

The worst problem with the walk of death is not the necessity to take it, nor even its universality, but the way in which each of the another people is stiffened in his function at the time, fearing to decision or admit that everyone is simply a defendant. We're all gods who could make pain happen, but we don't usually. So all time 1 of us takes the stand as a witness, the full planet stands trial. all time a rebel checks the rules, the full group passes the test.

History reminds us that there are always a fewer brave people who survive, transforming their communities. There was always Don Juan, who taught about the full of humanity, who passed the way of discovering himself, returned to Ixtlan and participated in the transformation of others. This book was created due to the fact that Don Juan survived his own death walk. He must have been unbearable for those around him, but he survived despite their anger and loved them adequate to pay off his debt.

Until now, the planet has passed through an inexorable cycle of dreaming and killing its most different shaman and teacher, who then returned in another forms to supply help.

There was always Lao-cy returning at the last minute to compose “Tao Te Ching”. Think of the chieftain of the Native American Hiawath and his dream that helped the tribe last through cognition of fresh crops. Or consider the dramatic communicative of Swiss brother Klaus, who, at the age of forty-five, left his household to prosecute his votanic dreams, later paying off his debt to the planet with his political and spiritual leadership [3]. Remember Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Remember Ben Thompson, the man who recorded this chapter on tape and had it played at his funeral.

I callback many unknown local heroes who spent their lives in comparative alienation from the world, suffering from a contrast of their own way in relation to the surrounding world. Their allies appeared in the form of bodily or social disability, homosexuality, racial differences, forbidden love, madness, and poetry. I think of single parents and single artists trying to express the impossible. Many others lived their destiny until they died without receiving support from anyone but their own dream process.

Understanding that it is the planet that dreams of surviving the unconventionalness of these people would be a certain relief of heartache after the finished battle. But what truly honors their memory is the fact that these small changes, which have resulted from their struggles, affect everyone today, due to the fact that in the network of interconnectedness they are ubiquitous and timeless.

Life expectancy

Nation and society find in part the life expectancy of an individual. The average age of a man must relate to the way we destruct or support others. The dimension of your life can be more than a genetic heritage, good nutrition, physical exercise, and good or bad deeds. Just as biologists cannot decently explain the essence of life or the minute of death, no 1 knows why a individual will last eighty years alternatively than 500 years. Nobody knows why so many talented and amazing people die prematurely.

I've never thought about this problem until I read this chapter as if I were Ben Thompson speaking at my funeral. I think Ben was trying to say that his life was a walk of death, ending up just like all of us at the point where it turned out that his message was besides early for his time.

Perhaps you die erstwhile you cannot communicate or erstwhile others cannot realize the message your spirit is carrying. You die all time you neglect to appreciate a stalker forcing you to show your actual nature. alternatively of being annihilated in a fight against evil, you can abandon individual history, become a fluid part of antimatter, halt time and become your own double, your opponent.

So far, besides fewer of us are following the mysteries of nature, information and signals from unknown. work for the ruthlessness of life means the courage needed to focus on the processes left out by others. The same tenacity that overwhelms you could be an ally that, after the transformation, will become vibrant. Then your death walk will not only be your individual difficulties, but your dramatic tale of global awakening.