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Guest Article... |
The Haunted Forest: A Spiritwalk:
Part 2
By Donald Walker © 2003
After I'd primed my spiritual pump, it wasn't long until I heard the call of the Otherworld once again. One day I was watching the celebration of the Eucharist and I suddenly experienced the Ashvamedha-the Vedic Horse Sacrifice-superimposed over the Anglican ritual. This wasn't an hallucination-the vestments were not magically transformed to the garb of northern India 6,000 years ago, the priests weren't intoning Sanskrit. But the Christian imagery of the Eucharist was stripped away and the deep structure of the ritual-the ancient cycle of death and renewal was manifest. I don't think the Ashvamedha was significant-I was reading a selection of hymns from the Rig Veda at the time-but it could just as easily have been the Greek tale of Demeter and Kore or the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris.
Nor did it happen at a cognitive level-it was a mystical experience, an experience of emotion and of spirit. Indeed, in choosing to describe my experience as seeing the Ashvamedha, this is only a point of reference, inexact words to describe something that is, at its most basic-indescribable. It was a powerful experience, albeit a confusing one. I ruminated about it for several weeks before I decided that it was a calling-a calling to revive the ecstatic practices I'd abandoned over thirty years before. And furthermore, I knew my first task was to go back into those woods-that birch forest-and find those bones and deal with them.
When I talked with my therapist about this, he was both supportive and a little dismayed. Supportive in that he saw it as something of a breakthrough-a tap into my spiritual and emotional side that he hadn't been able to peer into as yet. And dismayed because I didn't, at least to his mind, seem properly terrified by what I was proposing. But I wasn't terrified, not in the sense that he wanted me to be, certainly. But that isn't to say I didn't have a profound respect for it all. After all, I'd been through it long before. Then, I went blindly, not cautiously. I had no guidance of any sort, just instinct and a couple of brief passages from two books. I had no real sense that I was touching the world of spirit.
But now I had decades of reading myths and sacred texts. There were many books dealing with shamanic technique and practices from around the world. The internet was filled with sites ranging in tone from serious scholarship to making the X-Files seem mundane. I programmed my computer with the beat of a frame drum and started my walks.
I'm not going to take up time describing these initial journeys in detail. The experiences were highly personal, in some cases exhilarating, in others harrowing and painful. But in short order I found myself standing once again in that forest, looking down at the bones.
At this point my therapist and I disagreed pointedly about the next step. He was encouraging me to view these bones as symbolic of a psychological "death" a point where myself at that age shut himself off from the pain and shame of my parents alcoholism. He very much wanted me to attempt to open a dialog with that boy, to get him past the point of "death." What I intended to do was find those bones and give them a decent burial.
I believed then and now, that attempting to "reach" that teenager would have been futile. His death was a true death-not physical of course-I'm here writing this now. Rather it was a spiritual death. I died and my spirit then entered some demon haunted world where it dwelt for a number of years. I didn't know on a conscious level that I was in a demon world. It looked just like the one I'd left. The same people were in it. The sun was a bright, the clouds as gray, but it wasn't the same world. However, at some level, I knew I was in a sort of spiritual afterlife and spent my time alternately working at my art, perhaps as a means of redemption. and seeking oblivion through a gleeful mixing of alcohol and downers.
When I finally realized that I had been, and indeed still was in this otherworld, my therapist and I disagreed about the nature of oblivion. I had to explain at length, again and again, that this was no quest for the "oceanic," the comforting pre-conscious warmth of the womb. Rather I sought a deeper oblivion, the oblivion that existed before creation-before spirit moved and existence came to be. And with equally gleeful illogic I didn't want oblivion permanently. Suicide, at least physical suicide, was never an option. In fact, I insisted on it being a temporary oblivion-I once referred to these times as "chemical vacations."
I actually stopped the downers by the time I'd reached twenty after a particularly scary blackout involving a motorcycle and the states of Wyoming and Arizona. But it was much longer before the booze lost it's glamour. And to this day I remained bemusedly bitter about the fact that quaaludes hit the streets about six months after I'd given up on the downers. My senior year in high school I would have sold my family to white slavers for 'ludes!
So when I found the bones, I erected a small shrine to them, lit a candle to St. Jude on their behalf, and then set about the next phase of my quest-determining what had killed me so long ago.
The revelations of this journey and how it affected my understanding of spirit will be the topic of my third and concluding essay.
Donald R. Walker ');
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Copyright 2003 Donald Walker, all rights reserved
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