The Astral Pilgrim

I have read many works defining what shamanism was, is and can be. I have read many texts on the shamanic experience, how it happens and have read accounts on how it feels, how people work with the energies and spirits and how they work in harmony together to achieve healing, growth and understanding. I have read all these things and yet have never found a direct affinity, never found something to say ‘ah! yes! that is what it is like for me!’. For some time this left me disheartened, left me questioning many things. At that point I turned to the scientific community to try and better understand my own experiences, better understand my schizophrenia. I had resigned myself to being someone symptomatic of my condition and in need of help and resolved to return to medication.

After years living what in hindsight I am now aware of was denial, I started to again question the reality that was being ‘pushed’ on me, began yet again to question the doubts that I had about the reality world I was being told was the norm. My life is full of many things both seen and unseen and since I can remember I have never once sat in a room alone – I was desperate to better understand my lot. With the advent and rise of the internet came a new way of interaction for many people – all of a sudden a whole world of information was being shared and people began to talk all over the globe. For many pagans it was an exciting time and for myself I enjoyed journeying the internet searching for those who may experience the world as I do. Alas my searching always fell short even though for a time I thought I might be getting somewhere as at one stage people where starting to talk more of ancient shamans perhaps having schizophrenia and how there are modern shamans along the same lines but I always found it was a reversed process – these where people who had a variety of experiences and described them as schizophrenic, such as working to contact spirits and power animals and especially working with energy to attempt healing. The ‘norm’ of shamanic experience was being described as schizophrenic – it just wasn’t adding up.

The problem I had with this was that this was an experience that said people sought out, that they aimed to achieve, that was a goal. Can the same be said for those of us who do not seek it out, for those of us who are sought out? There are those of us for whom the shamanic journey is not one we undertake but one that we are thrown upon, that we are dragged into, that is forced upon us. I am no anthropologist and certainly claim no authoritative knowledge of current practices but I always had it in my head (from whichever book I must have read at some point) that shamans where ‘removed’ from society to be taken into the care of other shamans. This concept seems to be something that rings true in the depths of my soul, it has often felt like I am waiting for someone to take me away and say ‘no more of this way of life, it is not for you’. That is not to say I do not enjoy the life I have – my wife and children are the core of my existence without which I would be a wreck. It was when I pondered this for some time that I realized that they had become my guides in the best capacity they could. They have adapted and accommodated to who I am in a way only they know how and for that I owe them eternal gratitude.

This theory left me with a problem though. There are many shamans who experience what they do without having sought it out, it is just a factor of their life that has always been there. At this point we come to what I think the schizo-shamanic experience is. Walking between the worlds I feel best sums it up. I know that almost all shamans would say they do this but the schizo-shaman is someone who does this whether they want to or not, someone who does it constantly much to their torment. I have never sat in a room alone for as long as I can remember, for the two worlds are EVER-present in the most literal sense of the term. The suicide rate of people with schizophrenia is very high and I believe this is for a very specific reason – without the guidance or knowledge of what they truly are they have no idea how to handle the situations they find themselves in. The negative energies, the malign spirits and every other force and factor that would work against them gets their way with them – how many of us could survive in that situation? No many I think the answer would be.

I deem myself a very lucky person – I was raised by a mother who has an extremely open mind. Although not pagan by self definition she is a creature of nature that allowed me to be who I am without question or criticism, she allowed to expand my knowledge into avenues of thought normally shunned for someone so young ( I was deep into occult studies by the ages of 11). Unfortunately most are not this lucky and live a tormented life of medication, in-patient long term care and social exile (for all the wrong reasons). Our society is broken, disconnected from the avenues of spiritual thought and growth that are needed to keep it in harmony with it’s surrounding environment and the worlds beyond the visible.

I have what the medical community term Schizo Affective Disorder. Some of those who know me know this already, the vast majority don’t. The doctors came to this conclusion many years ago during an ongoing period of depression I was going through. After many meetings I talked to them about the things I see, the things I hear and some of the things I do. As a practising pagan this included the use of magick.

The response was interesting and the line of logic used by the psychiatric community is concerning as it is simply linear. In their book this is the occurrence, without question.

1. Visual Hallucination
2. Auditory Hallucination
3. Belief in Magick
4. Differing perception of reality
5. Non-conformist view of day to day living

1+2 = Psychosis in need of diagnosis
3+4+5 = Diagnosis of schizo affective disorder with the presence of 1+2

I have seen various people over many years. CPN’s (Community Psychiatric Nurses), Psychologists, Counsellors and Psychiatrists. With each person I have seen I have always started by asking them the same thing. How do they know that the things I see and the things I hear are not real. More to the point, how do they know that magick is not real and what is so wrong with viewing our world in a different way because you feel that it is wrong how it works now.

Not one of them was able to answer.

They were not trained to think outside the box, they were trained to know exactly what the box is and how to spot those taking a walk outside it.

I will admit to taking great offence to this. Conform to the system or get hit with a diagnosis, get labelled and pre-judged. No thanks!

Only once was there someone who I think understood me to any extent. I lady I saw during a psychological assessment. We talked for many weeks and she pointed out that in regards to social events around me she believes that I am right, but I am what she called “super-sensitive” to these events which causes me to get very worked up about them. Nevertheless she said, I am still right. That was a great boost to have someone acknowledge that I wasn’t just bonkers!

Over the years I have taken a good long look at my life, at myself. Asked those all important questions…

Who am I?
What am I?
Where am I going?
What am I doing?
Where should I be?

For me to understand the answers to my questions I needed to understand what was going on with me. The things I see, the things I hear. To me, they are real. I have reached the point of easily being able to distinguish the difference between what is real (vision) and what is not real (hallucination). With vision I can distinctly tell the difference of separation, that the event is detached from me and an external event, responsive to external stimuli and beyond any control of thought I might try to apply without the use of magick – an entity or event unto itself. With hallucination it is very easily to tell this is a mental event, something occurring within me that is slightly externalising itself. This of course led to questions of wondering how any of it can be real, how can someone be hallucinating, yet also have something real going on at the same time? I found the answers to this from Bobcat, also known as Emma Restall Orr. We corresponded via email for quite some time, sharing aspects of our lives as they seemed so similar. She had been through the same process as me with the medical community. She pointed out that you can’t have one without the other. For the brain to be open to vision, it must also take the hallucination as the processes are linked, almost like a side effect. After many years of working with this now I can very much see this is the case.

I have never been a social creature believe it or not. I can be in a room full of people, I can smile and talk to everyone, but often I am detached. I find it very hard to socialise simply because my mind is often doing a thousand things at once, but I get by. Social detachment seems to be an intrinsic element of people like myself, and Bobcat went on to point this out as the modern shamans. Much like ths shamans of times past social isolation was a factor. Our social life does not comprise just of human interaction and so that human interaction has to play only a part of our social life. I suppose I have never approached this as an affirmation but it seems appropriate.

I am a natural Shaman.

In heart, soul, mind, body and spirit – with all I am. Since I was a child I guess I have walked with a foot in either world and nothing much has changed in 30 years. Some of my earliest memories are filled with the vision of that which the others could not see. As a teenager my mum thought me odd for practically living in the tree in my back garden because I kept saying someone might break into the house. Little did they realise that people I was talking about are not the kind you can call the police about – thankfully the boggarts from my grandparents house who had come with us when we moved where up to the job.

(Just to add, I have read sooo many things and heard so many people say what they think boggarts are, and only ever known two people ever actually get them right – a search on wikipedia for a boaggart will give you a whole load of information on what a boggart is like when you piss them off, but on the other hand they are great to have in the house. We have one in our house at the moment who I believe has come here again from my grandparents house. another common myth of boggarts is that they are tied to a locale, the truth being they are often linked to a family and often move with a family but not always).

My world is one quite different to most, one that at times can be quite hard to cope with. Sometimes people get frustrated thinking that my responses or opinions are bit far out or obscure. One other thing that was pointed out to me by the woman I saw who said I was super-sensitive was that sometimes people can find it hard to follow my point as I link events which to me are clearly linked yet for others it apparently can be difficult to see a link without taking half an hour to explain it. Audio Pixie (my wife) has this problem to cope with on a day to day basis and I sympathise with her a lot on that one. I often used to blurt out what to her was strange comments to things happening with her not realising I was lilnking the phrase to obscure event inthe past, or a quote from a movie relevant to what is going on, or sometimes the link goes two, three or four deep so it becomes a complete “in-joke” between me and me. These days I try to explain how I link things together as I go along, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Thats just me I suppose…