Читать книгу The Spiritual Nature of Animals - Karlene Stange - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe Hunter-Gatherer: Shamanism
In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animals; for Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell men that he showed himself through the beasts, and that from them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon, man should learn. Tirawa spoke to man through his works.
— CHIEF LETAKOTS-LESA1
Outside the garden, separated from our spirit home, humans had to work for food. Hunter-gatherer societies emerged, yet remaining within these groups were individuals, shamans, who retained paradisal skills, such as crossing over to the spirit world, flying, communicating with animals, and transforming into animals. The average person developed conflicting ideas — about good and evil, right and wrong. Shamans lived outside this duality and retained the ability to “transcend opposites, to abolish the polarity typical of the human condition, in order to attain to ultimate reality,” according to expert Mircea Eliade.2
To manage the presence of death, the shaman was a healer, a magician, and a psychopomp, one who conducts spirits or souls to the other worlds. Thus, the shaman was, and is today, an integral part of tribal communities.
In general, a shaman defends life, health, fertility, and the world of “light” against death, disease, sterility, disaster, and the world of “darkness.”3 He or she is a prominent personage who, symbolically or in reality, moves between the physical and spiritual realms.4
Shamanic affairs are similar throughout the world’s various shamanic cultures. Tribal beliefs describe a spirit reality from which we came and to which we can return. The shaman first learns to reach the spirit realm through an initiation, which involves a ritualistic death, dismemberment, and rebirth in shamanic form. During “death,” the person experiences an ecstatic journey with transformation and transportation to the other world, thus sacrificing the profane physical condition.
The shamanic practice is a “technique in ecstasy,” the ultimate religious experience, according to Mircea Eliade. The shaman masters a state of ecstatic joy, and in this mystical state, he or she attempts to transcend the human condition, to reach the source of spiritual existence. Eliade calls the experience of ecstatic joy “nostalgia for paradise,” a pervasive spiritual/religious technique found across the globe and characteristic of the mystical experiences of many religions, including Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, and tribal.5
The ancient shaman’s activities often involved animals, largely because of the need to hunt. The shaman conversed with the guardians of the game, spirits in animal form, and requested that creatures be provided for food. Primitive hunters believed that nonhuman beings were similar to humans, except that the beasts had supernatural powers. They could change into people and vice versa. Mysterious relationships existed between individuals and certain animals who were guardian spirits. For example, a guardian bear spirit might give protection or guide the person in the use of herbs.
Three characteristics of shamanism pertain to animals — the shaman can fly, communicate with animals, and transform into animals.
FLIGHT
Mircea Eliade explains how shamans retained the ability to fly. “According to many traditions, the power of flight extended to all men in the mythical age. All could reach heaven, whether on the wings of a fabulous bird or on the clouds.”6 The shaman retained the primordial nature of flight and transcendence of the human condition to visit the spirit realm. Others only reached heaven at death. The Egyptian Book of the Dead describes the deceased as a falcon flying away. Flight is an integral part of many theological ideologies, with similar symbolism across religious teachings. For example, the Hindu text Pañcaviśma Brāhmaņa says, “Those who know have wings.”7 As the Judeo-Christian angels have wings, so does one of the most important symbols of the Native American Sioux religion, the great Thunderbird. In The Sacred Pipe, Joseph Epes Brown wrote: “He is the same as the great one-eyed Bird, Garuda, of the Hindu tradition, or the Chinese Dragon (the Logos), who rides on the clouds of the storm, and whose voice is the thunder. As giver of Revelation, he is identical in function to the Archangel Gabriel of Judaism or Christianity — the Jibrail of Islam.”8
Other examples include Odin of Germanic mythology, sometimes called “Eagle.” Greek sorcerers also professed to furnish the souls of the dead with wings to fly to heaven, and Buddhists discuss two forms of flight, mystical flight and magical flight (which is an illusion).
Mystical flight is also demonstrated by the levitation and flights of saints in both Christian and Islamic traditions. The Roman Catholic Church records as many as seventy levitations by saints, including St. Joseph of Cupertino and Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified, who were both seen flying up into trees. Because shamans enjoy the spirit condition, they can fly to the World Tree and retrieve “soul-birds.” A bird perched on a stick is an ancient symbol of shamanism.
Vestiges of shamanic practices remain among the world’s religions today. The ancient, essential features of shamanism include the ascent to heaven, the descent to the underworld, and the evocation of the “spirits,” all common religious concepts.
COMMUNICATION WITH ANIMALS
In the process of initiation among the Eskimo, a future shaman learns a secret language, often the “animal language,” which is needed in order to communicate with the spirits and the animal spirits. Animal language is only a variant of “spirit language.”
African shaman Malidoma Patrice Somé’s grandfather communicated with chickens. Malidoma’s grandfather once explained that a rooster had just told the hen to run into the basket of millet belonging to a one-eyed woman and tip it over. Seconds later, the hen did just that, and the flock rushed over to feast. Malidoma’s grandfather said that if one wished to understand the chicken’s language, one should stop eating chickens.
A spirit may take the form of an animal and appear to humans in normal waking consciousness. A shaman communicates with several types of spirits in animal form: familiars, helpers, and guardian spirits. There are also more powerful spirits that are tutelary spirits. Native people teach that the universe is a mirror. Any animal or anything else one sees is a reflection of themselves. Every animal one sees brings a message. Communication also comes in the form of visions involving animals.
Altered states of consciousness, such as visions, trances, and séances, are the hallmark of shamanism.9 In the trance state, the shaman understands all of nature. Trance states are attained by numerous methods: fasting, meditating, drumming, dancing, singing, and many other rhythmic activities, as well as while using psychotropic drugs or during a state of severe illness. Daydreams, night dreams, and lucid dreaming are other ways a shaman communicates with the spirit worlds. An accomplished shaman does not need an altered state and may connect with many realities at will.
Peruvian shamans claim the hallucinations they have after drinking a beverage made from the ayahuasca plant are the way the plant communicates with humans. One shaman said, “That is how nature talks, because in nature, there is God, and God talks to us in our visions.”10
Nature spoke to Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux shaman, in a vision of “twelve buckskins [horses] all abreast with horns upon their heads and manes that lived and grew like trees and grasses.”11 These images carry important meaning to the shaman as forms of communication from Spirit. In general, the person seeing the vision must interpret it for him- or herself.
However, some prophetic visions have become part of mystical traditions, as is the case with the Merkabah mysticism (or Chariot mysticism) in Judaism (c. 100 BCE to 1000 CE). Merkabah mysticism spawned from the stories of the biblical prophet Ezekiel and his visions. Ezekiel 1:5–10 says: “And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot: and they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus: their wings touched one another; they went every one straight forward, without turning as they went. As for the likeness of their faces, each had the face of a man in front; the four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle at the back.” For these mystics, the visions in Ezekiel describe the angels, chariot, and throne of God.
TRANSFORMATION INTO ANIMALS
When a shaman transforms into an animal, he or she reestablishes the condition that existed in mythical times before the separation of the human, animal, plant, and mineral worlds. Remember, no veil exists between the physical and spirit realms for the shaman, so the act of moving between the forms of beings is as natural as it was for the Australian Aboriginal ancestors.
The Buryat (Siberian/Mongolian) shaman’s tutelary animal enables the shaman to take another form, an animal form. A shaman may put on animal hides or masks to initiate the process. Entering the ceremonial costume facilitates the shaman’s contact with the supersensible world. Sacred costumes persist today, even in the robes of priests, which resemble birds. The magical power of flight is assumed by wearing an eagle feather. In general, the shaman becomes what he or she displays, and the shaman may call like a bird or squeal, grunt, whinny, bellow, growl, and make other animal sounds and movements.
In the scientific model of trance, transformation into an animal is documented by researchers. According to Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams in The Shamans of Prehistory, “A Westerner experiencing an altered state said, ‘I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy tail, and by a sort of introversion felt that my complete anatomy was that of a fox.’ ”12
Shamanic rock art depicting part-human, part-animal beings is found in caves in South Africa, France, Spain, and the United States, of which one can find excellent photographs in The Shamans of Prehistory by Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams.
A Vision in the Bisti Badlands
I was riding my donkey, a little black-and-white pinto, in the Bisti Badlands of northwestern New Mexico, when a strange vision appeared. The Bisti is a barren, eroded, gray-on-gray desert with a few strands of maroon, rust, and tan. Two lady friends rode their mares along with me. One had ridden in the Bisti Badlands previously and mentioned that the last time she was there, she saw a naked man. We headed east along a thin stream of brackish water where my friend’s dogs played in the mud and sand. As the two riders in front of me turned south, I saw before me, in the distance, a man stand up from his seat on a rock and scurry off. He wore a straw hat and a day pack, but no shirt or pants. We were not sure what to make of him. The Bisti is Navajo tribal land, and the terrain is stark and lifeless. It seems otherworldly, perhaps the kind of place a Navajo medicine man or woman might use for ceremony, and we supposed this to be the case with the naked man. We rode by tall steely hoodoos, large round mounds, bluffs with deeply, eroded edges, and large logs of ancient, petrified wood. My donkey seemed disappointed by the lack of green vegetation as she tasted a dry briar and spit it out.
In the hot, midday sun, on this desolate terrain, imagine my awe when above us silently soared a white owl! It flew from behind me about ten feet overhead. The face was not visible, but I could see three sides, and they were mostly white. The fan-shaped tail had faint brown stripes and spots. I know birds. This was no hawk. My two companions also saw the owl, but I was most stunned by its presence. It looked like a snowy owl, which seemed outrageous because they breed in the arctic tundra. We spent some time discussing what it meant to see a white owl in the Bisti Badlands. We understood the belief among the Navajo that an owl is a bad omen, and we agreed not to label the sighting as negative. After all, it was white; it had to be a positive vision.
Shamanism teaches that each animal we see is a reflection, and the observer must interpret each vision they see, but I wrestled with my scientific mind to explain the bird’s presence. Spiritual beliefs from other cultures teach that the owl signifies wisdom, or seeing in all directions without illusion. Since the location seemed like the kind of place a shaman might visit, and with no logical explanation forthcoming, my friends and I concluded that the naked man was a shape-shifting shaman who became the owl.
My scientific mind wanted more concrete answers, although I struggled to find them. The only species of owl that can sometimes be albino and might be found around the Bisti is a barn owl. A Bisti wildlife biologist agreed that even the sighting of a white barn owl would be very unusual. Regardless of any “real” explanation, the sighting presents a mirror for self-reflection. To help me find the answer, I consulted numerous spiritual teachers.
Dana Xavier, my clairvoyant friend, said I had acquired a state of consciousness that allows me to see things in the spirit realm. Two female, nonnative shamans (Stacy Couch, an ornithologist, and another who is a veterinarian) both stressed that the interpretation was mine to determine. The bird might be a glimpse into another realm, and because the owl can see in the dark, it might indicate the ability to see beyond what others might miss. It could be my spirit guide, a benevolent spirit being who has agreed to support a person’s spiritual evolution. The term daemon also applies, as the Latin word for guardian spirit from the ancient Greek, dímōn, means “protective spirit.”
In The Art of Shape-Shifting, Ted Andrews describes the owl as having increased intuition, vision of things not readily seen, and awareness of spirits. White is the color of spirit, and the owl is often referred to as the “night spirit.”13
All these explanations seem fitting, but words are difficult to find that adequately portray what the owl means for me. To aid in understanding, visualize a beautiful country scene with green grass, flowering bushes, and fruit trees humming with squirrels, birds, and bees. Now imagine an eraser that removes all life from the picture. Erase away the frills and fancy of transient beauty, and one finds the Bisti Badlands — the bare-naked bones of existence. There, behind the veil of our illusions, one finds the eternal, pure Spirit. The Bisti is like a crack in the veil of the physical world we create with our minds. With nothing close to normal reality to focus on, the Bisti opens up the possibility to see beyond the mirage of our mundane existence and into what shamans, Hindus, Buddhists, people who have had near-death experiences, mystics, and clairvoyants call “the reflection world,” the spirit reality behind the material world. For me, the Bisti owl was a reminder that Spirit is always with us, everywhere. When we connect with Spirit, we find guidance, wisdom, intuition, and protection. Spirit is omnipresent; we fail to notice it because we are so focused on our problems and projects — the fruits of our creations. I suspect the naked man was there for the purpose of connecting with Spirit. For me, the white owl symbolized and reflected the pervasive presence of pure Spirit.
Shamans around the world experience the ecstasy of union with Spirit. Two examples of tribal shamanic beliefs about animals include the Oglala Sioux and the native peoples of Central and North Asia.
Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see is like a shadow of that world.
— BLACK ELK
The Oglala Sioux of North America perceive the phenomenal world in a more fluid and transparent way, in which no absolute lines are drawn between animals, people, and spirits. The unifying principal of all things is the Wakan-Tanka, which is analogous to the one supreme God of other religions. All things are aspects of the one, connected by the wind.14 As one shaman is quoted as saying: “The Four Winds is an immaterial god, whose substance is never visible. . . . While he is one god, he is four individuals. . . . The word Wakan-Tanka means all the wakan beings because they are all as if one.”15
Every part of the one is connected in the dimension of the sacred, and each animal characteristic symbolizes the powers it demonstrates. The buffalo is chief of all animals. She represents the feminine, creating earth, which gives rise to all that is. The bear is knowledge, especially of herbs and roots. The moth is the wind contained by the cocoon.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans in North America, the Sioux did not have a sentimental or romantic attitude about animals. Nor did they view them materialistically. They hunted game for survival, and they viewed the hunt as a religious activity that required ritual preparation. The game was a sacred, power-bearing being. They referred to an animal as a spirit. For many Plains tribes, each animal was a crystallized projection of the abstract spirit. One man called Bear with White Paws said, “The bear has a soul like ours, and his soul talks to mine and tells me what to do.”16
Other important aspects of the Great Spirit are embodied in spiders and birds. The spider (Iktomi) holds a special place for the Oglala. He can fly through the air on a strand of web, he can glide across the water, and he can walk on eight legs.17 Since birds are two-legged and can fly, they are considered to be supreme — the most important of all the creatures. To interact with an animal is to communicate with that aspect of the unifying spirit. Black Elk related that “one should pay attention to even the smallest crawling creatures, for these too may have a valuable lesson to teach us, and even the smallest ant may wish to communicate to a man.”18
When an Oglala has a vision or a dream of an animal, that animal becomes significant in a religious sense for the individual; that animal may be a spirit guide. A vision may come during a time of illness, or one may quest for a vision. The ritual vision quest may involve fasting, walking long distances, and participating in the sweat lodge.
Joseph Epes Brown wrote, “It is through the vision quest, participated in with physical sacrifice and the utmost humility, that the individual opens himself in the most direct manner to contact with the spiritual essences underlying the forms of the manifested world. It is in the states achieved at this level that meditation may be surpassed by contemplation. Black Elk has thus said that the greatest power above all in the retreat is contact with silence.‘. . . For is not silence the very voice of the Great Spirit?’ ”19
A vision of an animal spirit guide may come, or people may turn into animals, and animals may turn into people, other animals, or even plants, such as a sacred medicinal plant. The animal spirit guides may provide the human with special powers. For example, the medicine man or woman may learn the uses of medicinal herbs from the bear spirit.
The medicine man or woman who becomes a healer knows that it is not the person who works the cure, nor is it the animal or the medicinal plant. According to Brown, “These are simply the phenomenal channeling intermediaries through which the intangible spirit-power operates. Black Elk made it clear that the power does not come from him, but from the Power above, which is the source of all powers.”20
Each class of animal has a guardian divinity that is the mother archetype, which may appear as a phenomenal animal. The spiritual or immaterial quality of an animal is the important thing. As there is no clear line between the worlds of animals, spirits, and people, outward forms shift. Thus, the Nagiya, or immaterial self, of a bear may possess a person when that person wants to have the nature of a bear.
For hunter-gatherer societies in general, animals are powerful, immortal spirits. The soul or life of the animal is contained in the bones, especially the skull. It is from these bones that the lord of that wild beast causes new flesh to grow. So the hunter has reverence for the beasts. He kills the animal that is provided for him by the guardian spirit, as agreed between that spirit and the shaman. The hunter kills only what is needed and never wastes food.
The Tungusic and Buryat Tribes
The word shaman is Russian, and it derives from the Tungusic language, which is shared by several indigenous tribes in Siberia and Central Asia, and their religious practices. However, the shaman is not a priest. Much of the tribe’s religious life goes on without him or her. The shaman functions as a healer by entering into a trance during which the soul leaves the body to travel to the spirit worlds. The shaman allows healing by capturing the patient’s missing soul and returning it to occupy the body. The shaman also accompanies the souls of the dead to the otherworld. The mystical journey is perilous, but he or she is aided by spirit guides and sanctioned by the initiation experience.
Animal sacrifice occurs in the history of all the major religions and is discussed in detail in the next chapter. Siberian shamans participate in the sacrificial ritual for the purpose of healing. Remember, the shaman retains a paradisal, nondual mentality, an understanding that there is no death, only transformation. The shaman is the master transformer who can shape-shift, like the Australian Aboriginal creators, and guide others, including the sacrificial animal, to spirit realm for the purpose of healing. The physical world is just an illusion we made up with our concept of dualism. The tribal shaman travels between both worlds, guiding the sacrificed animal on the journey. He or she participates in the sacrificial ritual but is not involved in the actual killing of the beast. Rather, the shaman is only concerned with the mystical itinerary of the sacrificed animal. The shaman conducts the soul of a sacrificed animal to the celestial Supreme God.
Mircea Eliade explains the shaman’s powers: “He foresees changes in the atmosphere, enjoys clairvoyance and vision at a distance (hence he can find game); in addition, he has closer relations, of a magico-religious nature, with animals.”21 The Buryat peoples, who are distinct but related to the Tungusic, tell a story that illustrates this.
In the beginning, there were only the gods (tengri) in the west and evil spirits in the east. The gods created man, and he lived happily until the time when the evil spirits spread sickness and death over the earth. The gods decided to give mankind a shaman to combat disease and death, and they sent an eagle. But men did not understand its language; besides, they had no confidence in a mere bird. The eagle returned to the gods and asked them to give him the gift of speech, or else to send a Buryat shaman to men. The gods sent him back with an order to grant the gift of shamanizing to the first person he should meet on earth. Returned to earth, the eagle saw a woman asleep under a tree, and had intercourse with her. Sometime later the woman gave birth to a son, who became the first shaman.22
The father of the first shaman is therefore the eagle; the eagle is the shamanic symbol of the Supreme Being, and they have the same name — Ai Toyon — the creator of light. Legends state that each shaman has a bird-of-prey mother. A Yakut legend states that shamans are born in a giant fir tree in the north. In it, a bird-of-prey mother, with the head of an eagle and iron feathers, lays eggs that hatch into shamans.
The first shamans were “white,” created by the gods, and they wear white costumes.23 The color refers to the types of spirits the shaman is assigned to. The white shaman participates in the horse sacrifice ceremony, where a horse is blessed, then sacrificed, and the shaman takes the horse’s soul through the heavens directly to the Supreme Creator to whom the shaman prays. If the sacrifice is accepted, the shaman receives predictions concerning the weather and harvest. He or she also learns of what other sacrifices are expected.
The “black” shamans are a more recent creation and wear a blue costume. The term black does not indicate evil but signifies the class of shaman. The black shaman may travel to the underworld, where a dog guards the entrance to the realm of the dead. Going to retrieve the souls of sick people, he or she must cross a dangerous bridge that the soul of a sinner cannot cross. The shaman passes the place where sinners are being tortured and succeeds in entering, despite the dog. The shaman may be there to retrieve the soul of a sick child, for which a costly sacrifice may be required. The soul of another consenting victim may be given. In that case, the shaman turns into an eagle, descends on the victim, and tears out the person’s soul. On the return from the underworld, the shaman may come back riding a goose.
Often an ecstatic journey to the otherworld may take place in a vision. The Samoyed shaman sees a helping spirit, a reindeer, taking the adventure as he or she sings about its travels. The shaman’s spirit learns of the cause of the illness, and if the Supreme Being (Num) sent the disease, the shaman will not treat it; instead, he or she lets the helping spirit ask Num for assistance.
The Yakut and Buryat shamans fly on horseback at great speed. These beliefs, in relation to flight, are figurative expressions for ecstasy, describing the mystical, superhuman journeys into regions inaccessible to humankind.24
Since shamans live today, we have a rich source of information available regarding the ways of paradise, or ecstatic joy, and the spiritual nature of animals. All one need do is ask a shaman. A genuine shaman is elusive, however — they are not always involved in the normal affairs of modern life, nor listed in the yellow pages or on the internet. As Jeremy Narby writes, “In shamanic traditions, it is invariably specified that spiritual knowledge is not marketable.”25 Certainly, the shaman’s work deserves remuneration, but by definition, the sacred is not for sale. The use of this knowledge for personal power defines black magic.
I wanted to talk to a modern shaman, one who does not conduct business with websites and retail stores. I met such a man from my husband, Jean-Luc Boucher, who had been on a vision quest with a shaman named Iron Feathers. Iron Feathers agreed to be interviewed for this book, and we spoke over the phone several times.
When we talked, Iron Feathers described himself as a “nonnative, European mongrel.” Without a tribal society to teach him, he had to find his own path to shamanism, which he did by studying with shamans in the United States, Mexico, and Peru. He acknowledged his struggle with the responsibility of his chosen path, which he takes seriously. I asked him to describe the process of becoming a shaman, and after considering my request, he cautiously agreed to talk about it.
“I will do the best I can to answer your question,” said Iron Feathers. “And know that this is my opinion, and that the spirits are having a mighty laugh at my expense.”
Iron Feathers explained that he had undergone several shamanic initiations, dying and being dismembered three times.
“It wasn’t that pleasant,” he said. “It is hard to describe because you don’t know what’s going on. You have the training that tells you that this is initiation, but part of you is dying, being torn apart. You know that you can, in fact, die. There are two entities — ‘I’ who am going through the process and I who am watching. You leave your body; still, a piece remains in the body. It is nondescriptive, not your soul or astral body. When I have heard people ask about it, we are told that it is not important; it happens.
“After dismemberment, you are rebuilt in shamanic form. You are usually given something, like a crystal, and it’s inserted into you. Crystals are the only things that don’t change between worlds. Everything else changes over there, in nonordinary reality.”
I asked, “When do you see your spirit guides?”
“When a spirit helper comes, it shows itself to you four times. In the otherworld, you may see a bunch of different animals, but only the one you see four times agrees to help you. It shows you how to do things over there, where to go.”
“Do you think this is hallucination,” I asked, “or do you think what you see is real?”
“I have no problem believing it,” said Iron Feathers.
I asked Iron Feathers about the experiences of other shamans, such as Malidoma Somé, who describes seeing spirit beings and communicating with animals in normal waking life, without being in a trance state. Malidoma tells the story of his grandfather, who was pronounced dead in a hospital. Malidoma’s father put a hyena’s tail decorated with cowry shells in the dead man’s hand, and his grandfather got up and walked home, four miles, then he was dead again. They woke him up again later to have a feast before his funeral.
Iron Feathers replied, “Well, depending on who you are, that can happen. A friend of mine spent some time with some yogis in India. They were arguing about something, when their guru returned from the dead to tell them that every one of them was wrong. They all saw him. Of course, Christ appeared to his disciples, but I’m not sure that we’re talking about the same thing. There is nonordinary reality. At some point, you are in both worlds. For Malidoma’s grandfather, the yogi, or Christ, there is no veil anymore. But for us mere mortals, we have to use a trance state.”
I asked Iron Feathers if he had ever transformed into an animal and how that happens.
“I watched a Peruvian shaman turn into a very beautiful white egret,” he said. “And I have a drawing made by a friend who watched me turn into a bear. So, from this, I know it is a real thing and not just a figment of someone’s imagination. Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel Prize winner in the seventies, put forth the idea that in the motor cortex is an image of the body, and the body tries to conform to that image. Some would call this body mapping.26 What I believe is that the shaman receives the image of the animal in his motor cortex. From the quantum physics point of view, the body, and all matter, re-creates itself every nanosecond. The energy for this change comes from the electromagnetic field of the universe — the Divine, God, or Universal Life Force. Yogis have talked about this kind of transformation for about five thousand years. So the shaman has the image of the bear in the motor cortex, and in nonordinary reality he has the ability to take that image and re-create a new image of a bear. Because he is of strong enough force, he can maintain the form until he has finished doing whatever is required, and then he can revert back to human form. Sometimes one can imagine the same thing happening when he feels like a bear. Inside he is touching the image but not strong enough to bring it into this reality and maintain it.”
“What does it feel like to be in shamanic form?” I asked.
“It’s not like in the movies where your face rips off. One minute you are human; the next you’re an eagle. One minute you’re driving a car; the next you’re flying in the sky.”
“So shamanic form is your transformed animal form.”
“Yes, I assume you feel like the animal feels. So as a bear you feel strong, with a strong sense of smell and poor eyesight.”
I asked Iron Feathers to describe the purposes for visiting nonordinary reality and to describe what it feels like.
He said, “The idea of shamanism is to bring back information from the other side to help people — find plants for medicine, learn where the deer are. You find out what your specialty is once you get to the other side. My intention is to help heal people spiritually by putting the spirit in balance. Everything is different over there. A cat in this world may be a human or a tree over there. The problem with a spiritual discussion is that we do not have the words to explain it. We lack the language to define the indescribable.”
“So if a cat looks like a human in nonordinary reality, how does its spiritual nature differ from that of a human’s?”
“Who says it does? I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t. We used to play a game, ‘hide and seek in nonordinary reality.’ Since everything changes over there, you may not recognize your friend or your cat over there, so we give the friend something to help us recognize him, or we hold onto the cat during transformation.”
In my study of shamanism, I felt confused about the different kinds of animal spirits: divine animals, deities in animal form, and spirits of animals. I asked Iron Feathers if he could explain the difference.
“A divine animal is the divine in animal form, not the divine in an animal,” he said. “Spirit created humans to recognize itself — so they say. The divine in animal form is a projection so that we can recognize it because we can only see what we can recognize.”
Once he said this, I understood my Bisti owl a bit more.
Iron Feathers continued, “Humans in turn created spirit so they could recognize it, like trying to find words to explain spirit. For example, Ben Franklin created his own vocabulary for electricity. Electricity always existed, but we did not discuss it until he made up the words to describe it.”
“Do you find that there is a hierarchy of animal spirits?” I asked.
“There are animal spirits in all three worlds, the upper, middle, and underworlds. They are mainly in the underworld, playing. One teacher said, ‘Go play with them; they want to have fun and be seen.’ Animals differ from one plane to the other. And again, we can only conceive of things being the way they are for us. So it makes sense to us that there is a hierarchy like ‘mid-level management’ because our world is set up that way. What I have experienced is that spirit is spirit, and we’re all part of spirit — so there is no hierarchy. There may be different positions of enlightenment, like for the Hindu. You do not go from board member to CEO, but perhaps become more filled with spirit or more a part of spirit. When I am in nonordinary reality, some things are similar to this world, and there are places that have no relation to here and I don’t know how to describe them.”
In my efforts to better understand the spiritual nature of animals, I wanted more than to just talk about shamanism and the spirit realm. I was eager to hear the silent voice of the Great Spirit and see what animals would teach me, and so in September 2001, I prepared to set out upon my own vision quest. The plan was to live in the high mountain desert of southeastern Utah alone for three days and nights with no food and only a tarp for shelter. In preparation, I participated in sweat lodges, meditated, prayed, took daylong solo hikes, and wrote in a journal about the animals I encountered.
Several days before my departure, as I drove to my first appointment, I heard shocking news on the radio. I called home immediately to tell Jean-Luc to turn on the television — it was the morning of September 11, and a terrorist attack had turned New York’s World Trade Center towers into a pile of rubble. Airports nationwide were closed; terrifying images appeared on the television and the internet; and the radio roared with angry voices. People I spoke with in Durango seemed terrified and left their jobs to be with family.
I prefer the quiet of nature when turmoil strikes, and so I looked forward to my journey a few days later. On September 16, I traveled far from the noise and fear of the city into the wilderness until eventually I sat surrounded by flowers and the soft sounds of insects, birds, and frogs. Warm air, cool breezes, fluffy clouds, autumn colors, and solitude welcomed me. Far from the news broadcasts, I found peace, while the rest of the nation suffered from sadness, worry, and fury.
My guide was CJ, a petite, older woman, and we made the trip together. We hiked down into a canyon to camp and prepare for my solo trip into the wilds. Bear scat and mangled chokecherry bushes along the trail reminded me of the serious bear problems in Durango, where dumpsters and orchards entice them. Drought conditions had created a wild food shortage. Bears raided people’s trash bins, ravaged fruit trees in yards, and even went into some houses. But we did not talk about that. I made every effort to follow CJ’s instruction to leave the world behind and be fully present in the moment.
As we descended into the ravine, the cathedral-like peaks on the opposite wall came into view. The steep, rocky cliffs with scattered brush looked like the perfect place for a mountain lion to rest and groom as she overlooked her territory. On the valley floor below, we set up base camp under two tall ponderosa pines.
The next morning CJ counseled me. She lit a bundle of white sage and smudged me with its smoke. Then she sent me out alone to find a place to live for my three-day vision quest.
I hiked along a faint trail following the stream as it curved through the canyon. Thick vegetation underfoot indicated that no person had walked on it for some time. The perfect location took some consideration, but I finally found my spot about a mile away from base camp. The home I chose was near the water, with shade. I hiked back to camp to get CJ and take her to see the place, so she would know where I was. Then we went back to camp for our final meal together.
“Get your pad and journal. Before you go out tomorrow morning, it may be helpful for you to choose a power animal to represent each of your chakras,” said CJ. Chakras are vibrational energy centers along the central axis of the body. The word chakra is Hindu, but the centers are common in many religious beliefs. They are perhaps related to the endocrine glands. CJ instructed me, “Lie back and, as I ask the question, choose an animal, the first that comes to your mind.”
I reclined on my pad underneath the two large ponderosas, enjoying the soft pine-needle-covered ground and the scent of vanilla from the tree bark.
“Relax and look into your first chakra, the area at the base of your spine. This is your connection to the earth. What animal do you see? If you wish, give it a name.”
The first chakra animal was “Sheba,” a cat I once had who used to hike with me. With each question CJ asked, I imagined an animal and drew its picture. For the second chakra, the personal power center, I chose a reptile and drew the image of an alligator curled into a circle in my abdomen, representing qi circles, a way of moving energy in the pelvis. A bumble bee playing in the flowers was the third chakra animal. For the heart center chakra, I chose “Horse runs free — Liberty.” For the fifth chakra, the throat, the area of speaking the truth, I chose the owl.
“Take a breath and relax as you look into your sixth chakra,” CJ said. “This is your place of knowing, your clairvoyance. What animal do you see there?”
Just then, a fly landed on my forehead and walked around. I swished him away; he landed again, and then again. “Okay!” I thought. “Fly — Garbage-Head, the fly — clean up my thoughts. Whenever you come, I will notice my negative thinking. Then you can eat the mental garbage and fly away.”
For the seventh chakra at the top of my head, I saw the bat who flies to the sky. For the eighth chakra, I chose two power animals: the giraffe that reaches to the sky and the white spirit buffalo that runs in the heavens.
I slept soundly that night, but I was awakened early the next morning by CJ pounding on a drum. She did everything she could to hurry me, which I resented. As she hastened me to pack my backpack, I gathered a sun cap, sunglasses, sunscreen, and a full water bottle. I laced my hiking boots and was off.
I felt no fear until that moment. So I made up a song to sing as I hiked.
Hey now, everybody
Hey now, sing along with me
Hey now, everybody
Joy and light and harmony
I was determined to have a positive experience.
Hey now, animal kingdom
Hey now, fish of the sea
Hey now, birds of the air
Hey now, humanity
Sing now, everybody
Sing now, in harmony
Sing now, everybody
Joy and light and harmony
Joy and light and harmony
