Where Few Minds Have Gone Before

Wherein, my mind, body, spirit, philosophies, and practices are in tune with those unseen forces that some people believe in, others tell themselves they do (but kinda don't), or still yet, outright sceptics who will do anything to debunk, decry, and punk.

My world view has ran the gamut of many beliefs, and I ride the fine line between crackpotocracy and scientific understanding. Not to say I'm sceptic. Steadfast, and unwavering, I hold the belief all realities are complete and separate instances. But they are not simply just parallel, they also intertwine intimately, like the double helix of DNA.

Or the strings foretold by string theory.

I am an innocent observer, thinker, renaissance minded person.

I don't portend to describe myself as an every man, or even a well educated being through conventional means. My means of acquiring knowledge is through trial and error, sight and sound, touching, feeling, knowing--if I am fully in tune, I really can stop my mind from brimming over with images and thoughts, bad ideas for jokes, or postulations on reality.

There is a certain clarity.

I absorb information unlike most, I am an advocate of speed reading. I can run through several hubs quickly, and process the information--identifying key bits that I can file into my mind and add it to the synaptic web called memory.

I am an emotional being, truthfully, but not so much a person who exhibits much. I am emotional, sure, but by in large its reactionary. In the every day I seem to pick up and register emotions, a sixth tag besides perceiving something's color, behaviour, smell, sight, and all the other five senses.

Is it a supernatural phenomenon?

Really, I'd expect it to be badly wired neuropathology, In the realm of, say, synesthesia.

As a child (and even now, in different ways) I was able to walk through my memories, not only replaying them but interacting as if lucid dreaming. Some how, I would be fostering either new false memories or culling together enough information from all sensory input to file it all away as if I had photographic memory.

But you can't say it's in orderly procedure, it can be chaotic. Information decay, if you will. Or perhaps lag time pulling together all that data. (Explains why sometimes you have something on the tip of your tongue, or if you can't remember something but feel your subconscious still trying until it comes back at midnight.)

Now, I am a student of science. But I believe science has problems, too. This isn't to say the scientific method isn't valid, but far too often there is a chain of command in academia..to sway the masses, it can sometimes take years. The Piltdown Man, for example, for years was thought to be the missing link in the human evolution.

Why? Because the person who discovered the artefact did so in England. It just made sense, you know, that the white man would be so much older than the rest of the other savage races it was busy conquering.

It is my belief that science is walled off from each other. It's as if one tribe fiddles with this line of work, while another does this--all the while, they openly share their findings among their peers, but too often boffins over-specialize in one area, leaving their study and ability to apply radical and new research methods due to cross over techniques and teaching most often moot.

Its as if the scientists see the trees, but can't quite get a grasp of the whole forest.

Da Vinci, for example, a well known artist and painter, was also a futurist. He created flying machines, tanks, and many other useful inventions. Such was his weariness for his own work, he usually incorporated flaws into the designs as not to make them work. Or so believers think evidence indicates.

The Greek Philosophers studied a wide range of topics, some mathematical, others subjecting, and still there was always history--sometimes, even mechanics.

The earliest vending machine was a holy water dispenser in ancient Greece.

But often, most often, people are content with sticking to one area and doing it well.

Which proves to be great, especially for repeating experiments to mitigate the chance of mistakes. But if your focus is narrowed, let's face it, you're not ever going to understand everything together at once.

Now that information travels faster everyday, your species has supplied it's self with a ground swell of media, music, writing, studies, statistics, white papers, diagrams, and patents.

In theory, an explosion of culture, of the arts and sciences are at hand.

While I can't say I'm anything more than a social scientist at heart, I am a tinkerer. I do hack, slash, cut, tape, and repair. I'll mix and match, mortar and spackle, polish it off, and call it useful.

My areas of expertise are within culture, technology, medical science, emerging physics, poetry, and music. Within culture, there is an undercurrent of social sciences, subcultures, paranormal studies, mysticism, and drug use.

How does each affect my interpretation of my reality? Good question, let's start with paranormal studies and cutting edge physics.

Everyone with a firm grasp of physics and weight distribution knows it's quite easy to walk on glass, and furthermore, even fire.

It has been said that any technology not adequately explained away by the common scientific knowledge of it's day is considered magic. What do you think it was, to be the person who could summon fire through the use of sticks and stones?

How would you be treated if you studied the heavens and gained a rather accurate knowledge of weather and constellation movement?

Then, there's the alchemists. Many of your species believes their main goal was to turn anything into gold. While some-what true, you miss the finer points: at once they heralded in the age of chemistry and atomic physics. They enhanced your knowledge of the chemical make up of your universe.

Now you've problems, technically. Dark matter, the idea that there's a huge chunk of unregistered matter of the universe hidden because you can't detect it looms overhead. Either someone is wrong, or you're blind to some unseen force. Which one would you prefer to believe?

Either way, it's easy to understand some unseen forces like electromagnetism. That thing in your computer called a hard drive, incidentally, has electromagnetism to thank for it's existence.

Electromagnetic radiation exists in many forms, everywhere. Ghost hunters who study the idea that spirits still roam this plane of reality for eternity after their passing mark electromagnetic frequency activity as part of their analysis of a haunting regularly.

Theoretically, hypothetically, just possibly then...perhaps people are not witnessing spectres, but embedded information in the form of emotional resonance. They are but receptors, picking up scenes that are played over and over.

Sceptics chock it up to mental disturbance. But studies invoking religious experiences and "Old Hag-like" symptoms utilize electricity to stimulate the brain. Have you seen those recharge pads that work just by sitting the device on it? Okay, so, now you understand the concept of wireless electricity. Something that has been tried for years and years, dating back to Nikkola Tesla and beyond.

It is quite possible, then, that ghosts are real.

But then you've reports of spooks that interact with the living, and even have the ability to move objects or perhaps even invade a body and possess it.

Obviously, false, foolish, and impossible, correct?

Maybe not...

Consider, if you will, the idea of parallel dimensions. If all things being equal, but filled with different variables, somewhere...somebody's going to have a reality wherein demons rule, possessing people at random.

Then again, yes..it could simply be hysteria, a case of religious beliefs taken too far.

How about moving objects, then? Lights turning off? Bumps in the night?

Ouija boards? UFOs? Shadow people?

While many will again chock it up to some internal wiring at the base of your human brains, or perhaps, Neurochemical disorders, I disagree.

That seems just a little too technical, not simple enough for me. And as we all know, part of the rational scientific principle is that quite often the simplest answer is the one that is more often the right one.

And so, I myself can not only believe there is traces of the fact there is an afterlife in everyday life, the mind and body can easily enter this realm and travel through it, wielding it's use like a tool.

How did I come to this conclusion? Well, that too, is quite simple. And it ties into my spiritual underpinnings.

In 2009, a satirical movie came out wherein it seemed to describe military applications of psychic warfare. While the audience was warned that nothing in the script was quite true, it was all, unbelievably, based on more fact than your average person would assume.

In short, numerous military instalments around the world have tried to unlock your species' innate potential. The United States did indeed run a government program, often given different names--perhaps most often known as Sun Streak or Stargate

Overtime they developed a manual and began to recruit military personnel from all over to participate in the fledgling program. Currently, the Coordinate Remote Viewing training course information has been released online to the very unsuspecting tax paying citizens who unknowingly shelled out money for it's creation.

Obviously, there was something to this whole project. Of course, in times of economic duress and political power plays the whole idea became "silly" and was cancelled numerous times in different names and guises. Currently there is no official military branch of psychic spies.

That you're aware of, anyway.

But The Men Who Stare at Goats is by far the only book (and film) out there about these tales of psychic spydom. There is also another good one entitled Psychic Warrior , written by an actual member of a psychic team in Stargate.

You'll find a lot of allusions to the newer book within it, because "Goats..." I'm sure referenced some of the author's material.

So, what does any of this have to do with shamanism?

Quite a lot, actually. Shamans employ many different schools of thought to hone their craft and use their talents, but regardless of backgrounds most shamans have these qualities:

• They believe the spirit world and the living world are both important, each intertwine with the other.
• Shamans have the capacity, either given or learned, to communicate with the spirit realm.
• Spirits can be good or evil.
• Understanding spirits and often being a mediator between the world of the living and dead, shamans are able to treat sickness caused by spirits.
• Shamans employ varying techniques to enter a trance-like state to mount upon vision quests.
• The spirit is able to leave the body and enter the spirit realm to seek out answers and advice.
• An ability to invoke animal images as spirit guides, omens, and message-bearers.
• Shamans are able to foretell the future through guidance, divination, or many other similar ritualistic fashions.

Summing it up, out of the eight pillars of shamanism presented before you, four of these can readily be observed in the movie and literature described above.

Remote viewing, astral projection, and lucid dreaming can all arguably called many things, and may even involve invoking a spirit guide or befriending one in the ether realm to help accomplish the tasks at hand.

While the scientific datum within Lucid Dreaming and CRV are at odds with conventional knowledge, ancient wisdom has explored this topic over and over again.

Da Vinci , again, the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece, and hell--even Edgar Allen Poe was fond of the green demon called absinthe.

Achieving trance-like states and going upon vision quests are all great modern day allusions to active imaginations. But through meditation, concentration, inhalation, and even elaborate ambience, one is able to often leave the here and now and seek out the world of the beyond.

While it may either be reality or fiction, to the observer, it's real. And so, by that fact alone, it's reality enough to be seen as some sort of knowledge to beholden.

As seen in the videos above, there are so many different interpretations themselves in what a shaman is.

So, I propose to you, dear audience, that you yourself determine what you best feel the most apt description is.

In this series of articles, I'll be discussing further in-depth in the "mystical" world, the magical histories of cultures around the globe. And as always, I will try to remain unbiased as much as possible. And light hearted, too.

But I suppose, my ultimate challenge will be to convince you of the ideologies described herein.

I'll gladly accept.

You may be asking why I may wish to carry this line of thought so passionately and deeply, and I'll be honest. Not only do I try to weigh all realities as much as possible, at once...I do, myself, fancy myself some sort of modern shaman.

I've yet to reveal everything to you, but more will come.

You've seen traces of the story through out my work, already.