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Introduction Greetings loyal readers! Last month I was fortunate enough to participate in two amazing shamanic rituals with noted shaman Wilburt Alix (http://www.trancedance.com). I highly recommend you visit Wilburt's site, and if he is coming to your area I encourage you to participate in one of his classes, particularly the soul hunt. My Soul Hunt Experience I went on a soul hunt with Wilburt where I connected with my power animal, the jaguar. Being a shaman myself I have had many animal guides at different times during my life. Guides tend to come and go as one's soul evolves. Each animal contains unique wisdom, so different animals accompany us along different points on our journeys. I had heard about Wilbert's work from my friend Leonardo Ferraro, who had done a soul hunt with Wilburt and had described to me what happens during one of Wilburt's soul hunts. Thus I knew that I would be meeting a power animal that would take me on a journey. On the subway over to the soul hunt I was told (psychically, of course) that my power animal for the soul hunt would be the jaguar. The jaguar is a very sacred animal in Latin American shamanism. I expected to meet a black jaguar. When the jaguar showed up, I was astonished to discover that he was not a black jaguar, but a yellow jaguar with black spots – the kind that lives all over Latin America. The intensity of his emerald-green eyes took my breath away. For years I have been seeing emerald-green cat's eyes in meditation, but had never met the animal these eyes belonged to until I went on the soul hunt. During the ritual, one becomes one's power animal. At first I was lying on the floor, swiping the way a cat does. I could feel my fangs, whiskers and tail. It was a truly amazing experience. During the ritual, Wilburt plays amazing music that induces a shamanic trance. When I conduct shamanic journeys with my clients, I channel sounds to induce the trance state. Traditional shamanism often involves ritual drumming and other kinds of sounds. All of a sudden, the animal brought me up to my feet to engage in trance dancing. It was as if I was simultaneously a human and a jaguar. Instead of feet and hands, I felt as if I had giant paws. I could feel "my" tail swaying. It was a truly indescribable feeling. The Sacred Plant Ritual The second ritual involved connecting with the plant kingdom through possession trance; that is, taking a sacred plant spirit into one's body and listening to its wisdom. Wilburt says that in modern times we have lost our connection with the plant kingdom, and we need to reconnect with this wisdom the way many indigenous Latin American tribes do. This ritual was an all-night ritual, so I took a nap during the afternoon in preparing. In fact, I spent the entire day fasting and meditating in preparation for the evening ritual. During my nap I had a dream that did not make any sense to me. I saw a cow out on a dead tree limb connected to a large stucco building. It was clear that the limb could not sustain the weight of the cow, so I knew the limb would break. When it broke, the cow fell. At first it looked as if the cow was going to be fine, but then the building collapsed in pieces on the cow. I was very worried about whether the cow was still alive. I went into what was left of the building that belonged to the people who owned the cow. The cow was lying in the living room underneath a black blanket. It was alive and breathing, but it was clear this cow would need a great deal of healing. The people who owned the cow kept saying over and over again, "We thought it was a dog. We thought it was a dog." Naturally I was perplexed as to what this dream could possibly mean. During the sacred plant ritual, I took the spirit of the plant into my body. The plant showed me amazing visions. First I saw amazing colors and patterns that looked like Latin American weaving patterns. I was also shown stone jewelry. The plant spirit told me that these beautiful colored geometric patterns contained massive amounts of encoded information that were being absorbed deep into my physical, mental and emotional bodies. (Our spiritual bodies already contain this wisdom, and it is up to each of us to learn how to connect with it. This is what soul evolution is all about.) I suddenly understood that many traditional Latin American indigenous clothing and other designs are based on information received through sacred plant rituals. Many of these patterns are disappearing from Latin America, because the younger people do not want to take the time to learn the weaving patterns. They do not understand that each color and pattern is highly meaningful, and contains wisdom from the plant kingdom. By wearing these patterns and decorating our homes with pillows, blankets and tapestries decorated with these patterns we are surrounding and nurturing ourselves with ancient plant wisdom. The jaguar's face was periodically superimposed upon these pattern visions I was receiving, so I knew the jaguar was a sacred animal guardian of this sacred plant wisdom. Then the plant spirit showed me how it was reprogramming my DNA. I saw it connecting up a third strand of DNA, and I saw shapes and colors being added to the links of each strand. The only way I can describe the feeling is that Universal Love was being implanted directly into my DNA. Again, the feelings and the visions I received from this experience are thoroughly indescribable. The plant spirit told me that all the people who have hurt me in this life do not need my forgiveness – they need their own. Conversely, I realized that I must forgive myself for all the people I have hurt. I don't need forgiveness from those I have hurt, because karmically it is not about them. The karma incurred from inflicting pain on others redounds to each one of us, and we are the only ones who can heal it through self-forgiveness and unconditional love. But the most amazing insight the plant spirit delivered was an explanation of the cow dream I had had earlier. This is what the plant spirit told me. COW is an acronym for Capitalist Owned World. The Capitalist Owned World has gone out on a limb with the excesses of its greed. The limb can no longer sustain the capitalists' greed, and thus the entire structure of capitalism is about to come crashing down. The Capitalist Owned World will survive, but it will need a great deal of healing in order to transform into something much more functional. It needs to evolve into something that is much closer to the divine wisdom of the sacred plant and animal kingdoms. The people who owned the cow symbolize the elite cabal of capitalists who have been controlling this planet for countless generations through conspiracies and misuse of occult power. "Dog" is God spelled backwards. Thus the dream was telling me that the people who have perpetuated all of the suffering, oppression and misery on this planet through their greed and lust for power and wealth were doing it because they thought these actions were divine. They thought that money, wealth and power were God. They thought the "free" (and by definition "unfair") market was God. As I have noted before in this column, capitalism is very far away from divinity. The capitalists get a bizarre sexual thrill from accumulating and hoarding money and other resources while a billion people on this planet starve. A divine system (such as the one maintained by the ancient Hawaiians and other indigenous cultures) distributes resources equitably so that people do not starve or go without shelter, employment and health care. Yet the Capitalist Owned World is totally brainwashed into believing (and has brainwashed a good many of the people it has been oppressing for so many generations) into thinking that communism is ungodly. Yet it is the communist ideal of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" that is in fact divine. The Creator loves each and every one of us, and does not want to see us suffer. We are here to see that we are all one, and that the harm we do to others redounds to ourselves. His Holiness the Dalai Lama says that world peace will be achieved when each and every person on this planet genuinely cares for the happiness of every other person on this planet. This is the structure that will replace the Capitalist Owned World. In fact, Karl Marx predicted that capitalism will eat itself because greed carried to its logical extreme is totally dysfunctional and cannot sustain itself. This was the meaning of my cow dream, as explained by the plant kingdom. Therefore it is up to all of us who are oppressed by capitalism (which is basically everyone on the planet who is not part of the sick New World Order cabal that has been controlling this planet for hundreds of years) to open our hearts to love and compassion for our oppressors, for they have been misled into thinking that their greed and sexual repression was divine. We who understand the laws of karma and desire to live in a world where each and every person had adequate food, clothing, housing, health care and employment will become the leaders in the aftermath of the collapse of the Capitalist Owned World. What the mind can conceive it can achieve, so fill your hearts with love and compassion, connect with the wisdom of the plant and animal kingdoms, and get ready to re-educate with love and compassion the people who have so injured this planet and humanity, for truly we are the meek who will inherit this Earth. Copyright 2002 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com. In addition, the author wishes to thank those peer reviewers who responded with comments and suggestions for this article. |