Dimension Bomb Released

I know I haven’t updated this lately. That’s going to change.

I’m sure those of you who have read this blog in the past know the reason why it’s named Dimension Bomb. And if you don’t, I’d strongly suggest checking that link out.

Watching it again for the first time in a year and a half, I get to process more of the hidden symbolism within. Note the frequent presence of the Sun, and the obvious and repetitive examples of being torn apart by supernatural forces–a very classic case of shamanic initiation. The girl in the movie almost seems as if she is leading him through the initiation, though admittedly some of the message is inevitably lost without the aide of a translation for the Japanese, for those of us English speakers.

The movie has been released onto YouTube, and split into two parts.

Part I can be found here.
Part II can be found here

Enjoy. This movie was one inspiration for the creation of this blog, and really does ring true in so many ways.

A Few Notes on Weakness

This is moreso a follow-up to my post Falling Apart, Coming Back Together that I had been meaning to write, plus a supplement to my more recent Past, Patterns, and Keeping Silent.

To help me begin, I’m going to bring up Phil’s comment in the former post, in which he brings up some very good points. In order to help me compile just what I’m trying to say however, I’ll start off by saying that I too have chronic illness–in fact it was the onset of this chronic illness that tipped the scales when it came to my shamanic practice. I had leanings most of my life, but it was in 2005 when this thing hit, that the dam really burst open for me. I still have it. No amount of discipline, praying or “mind over matter” will ever make it go away. It’s here, and here to stay for the rest of my life. This doesn’t make me weak, or inadequate, and certainly not incapable of performing the duties in the path I walk. I walk a more ordeal-oriented path as a result–but this wasn’t my choice. Psychological scars also are present, and there are things, mentally and physically, that I will never “get over”.

Or, to put it this way: Certain things never will be gotten over–and no one should ever expect you to.

Sometimes it is only in the presence of injury, disease and related hardship that true knowledge can fully blossom.

In fact, this is one of the reasons why I always detested and despised the New Age drek The Secret or the Christian Purpose Driven Life, or otherwise related ‘name-it-and-claim-it’ philosophies. No matter how skilled a magician you are, or how hard you pray or how disciplined you are…shit happens. It just happens. It’s what you do with that shit, what you transmute it into, that matters.

Phil’s quote in his one reply was quite handy in this:

This is where the idea of lycanthropy as a disease can be useful. If you let it control you, and it is the master, that’s the bad situation where you have amnesiac werewolves who go on killing sprees. If you can control it, and use it most productively, let the beast out when it needs to get out and so forth, then that’s a position of true power and mastery, and it doesn’t involve squelching it or conquering it, or getting rid of that disease either (which is something one rarely sees in films and such…).

Of course you can apply this to a wide variety of ailments, but the general idea is there. And I think, for the moment, I’ll leave you all to ruminate over that, because my ability to form intelligent words right now is drastically flagging at the moment.

The Past, Patterns, and Keeping Silent

In looking back through my childhood (not an easy thing to do), I realize that I had all of the (stereo)typical behaviors of a magician and shamanist in the making. Traumatic events, both explained and unexplained. My brain was wired differently–so differently that I was consistently medicated for it from the age of seven, and reminded of it for every day of my life. I didn’t start actively trying to make friends until college, and even then, I wasn’t very social. I’m still not. As far as practitioners go, I’m very, well…solo.

Though unlike some, I was very underwhelmed when I began reading about magic, paganism and the occult back in my preteen years. It all seemed to describe to me things I knew already, or was already experimenting with. I somehow didn’t seemed too incredibly surprised to find others doing the same, though I was surprised to be able to connect with like-minded individuals who fit that niche. When it came to the occult and the paranormal, the big thing that really surprised me was that a thing like “otherkin” and “therianthropy” existed outside of my own little island of being. The honeymoon period with that, however, is long since over. I no longer actively seek connection between peoples that fit those two descriptors, simply because most of them are merely trying to escape from themselves and the species or world they were born into. I have no commonality with the false, the damaged, and the confused.

It leads me to wonder why I deal with the occult or animistic community at times. I can’t really say I deal with it as much as some–I am virtually inactive on most social fronts aside from my writing. But the patterns I seem to pick out most readily is the glorification of the bullshit artists and “internet shamans” that float around out there. The ones that are glorified for their fanciful storytelling, name-dropping, pity-partying and attention-seeking through their traumas (which, they feel, is an automatic badge for the practice of shamanism). Although they claim to be healers and to (desire to) help others, in the end they help no one but themselves–if you can really call it “help”. The people they surround themselves with are nothing more than yes-men, psychophants and enablers. But amongst these people are those who, I was astonished to find, are actually reasonably intelligent people. It stunned me to think that people who were so smart could be duped by such high school grade behavior. It wasn’t until I read Daniel Pinchbeck’s Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age did I find out that Carlos Castaneda had actually duped a fair amount of professors who even had studied the Yaqui culture. Suppose this thing could happen to someone regardless of intelligence, though it leads me to speculate why, and how. The essay within the book, “Shamans and Charlatans: Assessing Castaneda’s Legacy” is well worth the read and relevant to this part of my rant. In fact, Reality Sandwich has some great essays in general on a variety of topics.

But it’s one of a few reasons why I step back, or remain on the periphery of what people there call “community”. I was never much a social being, which is kind of funny you think, coming from someone who claims strong alliance to canine archetypes. But witnessing this sort of thing is a turnoff towards community. The bullshit artists, the spindoctors. Plenty of people can write books and still be completely incompetent, and just because you’re popular doesn’t always make you right. I’m also a private person, and the extreme freedom by which occultists and shamanists share in gross detail their experiences is beyond me. I hold strongly to the clause, “To keep silent”, or as Christian Sedman in Generation Hex puts it:

We could tell other people straight out, but of course the minute you talk about magic–the shit you’ve turned into gold–is the minute it turns back into shit.

But hey, at this point you’re thinking “Well hey Solo, you do write about magic, right? Yes I do. I love doing so. I want to inspire people, or at least shoot out that signal flare out there that yes, there is someone else out there who isn’t doing this for wholly selfish reasons, or to find some sort of crutch for an inadequate life. Sedman goes on to say:

Sometimes you can write about it. That kind of works. The best thing you can do with something you’ve written about magic, I think, is inspire somebody else enough to try it themselves, so that they can see for themselves.

Even within the paradigm of magic and the animistic, there is so much people aren’t seeing, and it can be frustrating. I try not to waste too much time myself though. I am too constantly involved in the magical and animistic world to always pause enough to write about it or network or “do business”. Or, perhaps it’s too involved in me.

The Ponies of Assateague, and Connecting With Totems

On Sunday I had a close encounter with the ponies of Assateague Island National Seashore. In one incident, a palomino pony came very close to the car, and I was able to stroke its mane briefly. The second incident occurred near the island’s visitor center, were my fiancee and I were able to watch a small family unit of a brown male, female and a male foal graze on the lawn outside the parking lot. The foal came up real close to me, and I was able to stroke his forehead briefly. We spent some time sitting on the lawn observing them. They seemed very unconcerned with our presence, at peace with the land and with the naked apes watching them. One could say I’m an ass in that I shouldn’t be touching wild animals–and to be honest, that’s the big rule I keep that I ended up breaking. If it wasn’t for the ponies initiating the contact, I probably would have (and still should have?) kept my hands to myself.

This got me thinking about a couple of things, though. First was the meaning and message behind these ponies. I’ve seen them off and on for most of my life, ever since I started traveling to the coast with my family as a small child and could consciously remember doing so. They seemed to me to be like the mythical hippocampus, a union between land and sea. They were also elusive. Some days you’d visit the island and travel the whole length of it, not seeing a pony in sight. Another time you’d see several, and they would sit on the side of the road, some of them waiting for cars to slow down, habituated by unscrupulous visitors trying to feed them. They were trusting, sometimes to a fault. They also reminded me of endurance, perseverance. They’ve adapted to that island since they came there in the 1600s, most likely from a sunken Spanish vessel off the coast. Marooned on foreign land, they’ve made the best of the situation, and flourished.

The other thing that got me thinking was that I had always taken the island for granted, with the easy access I’ve had to it. In fact, I’ve had many experiences in my life were I could have direct interaction with many different types of animals in many settings. My totemic work reflects this strongly, and generally I can’t seem to understand, nor relate with, people who write long and intricate totem dictionaries of animals they’ve had no personal interaction with. There is the issue of globalization, but there is also the issue of old school. The animistic cultures and societies of the past built their totemic view of animals by direct personal experience, interaction, and sharing the environment with these animals. This seems to be a very different tack from many of the totemists of today, who base most of their views on wildlife books and programs, and UPG. Now, there isn’t anything wrong with that in itself, but it really opens up a whole new world when you take that extra effort to see the animal in person, even if it’s just in a zoo (although zoo animals tend to display atypical behavior, you can still learn a lot about an animal by observing even the abnormal behaviors.)

I’m a bit spoiled in that I’ve had the opportunity to work in veterinary clinics, pet retail, wildlife centers, parks, in addition to living close to numerous parks, refuges, zoos, museums and other places were one can seek a more personal connection with the natural world. Not everyone has this sort of access. It’s something I need to remember, and maybe have patience with, when interacting with fellow totemists. The thing I have a problem with is those who write totem dictionaries disseminating information about an animal that is incorrect from a biological standpoint, and from a symbolic standpoint it completely flies in the face of what is otherwise known about the animal. That is something I have a problem with. To spread misinformation, even unintentionally, just isn’t cool. People need to be more mindful.

I think what needs to be done is to call attention to these errors, and encourage people to seek more direct experience with the wilderness around them. Even if you live in the middle of the city, nature survives somewhere.

I guess it’s something I’m still rolling around in my head.

The Rat King

To me, New York means rats.

I first visited New York back in 2001, just a month prior to the events of September 11th. Rats have been visiting me symbolically and most heavily in my dreams many months before. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve experienced both in the same year, or maybe it’s because NYC is considered the rat mecca of the country that I associated the two together in the first place.

The curious thing about it all is that I have never once seen a wild rat, the primary focus of my obsession, before my most recent trip to the Big Apple. Since ‘01 I began keeping domestic specimens of R. Norvegicus, an animal that is as different from the wild rat as a dog is from a wolf, but like the two, still possessing numerous similarities in trait and character. The pitter-patter of little rodent feet traveled from the realm of my dreams into my physical habitat. Somehow it wasn’t quite enough though. Something continued to gnaw incessantly on the periphery of my consciousness.

My most recent trip to NYC happened in mid-February of this year, roughly ten days after the death of my four-year old rat Mina, and roughly a week after the arrival of my fiancee from Germany. Throughout the trip I recounted the long legacy of rats (mostly all female), and the lessons they’ve taught me. I can say with the utmost confidence that any animal, however small, that comes into your life can change it forever. Mina certainly did. But in their own way they all did.

We stood on the subway platform, my fiancee and my parents and younger brother, killing time and waiting for the next train to arrive after a brief delay. I was zoning out, staring into the rails below. It was a long day with lots of walking, and I was exhausted. Suddenly, a portion of the sludgy grayness below jumped to life and began to move, darting suddenly across my vision. I blinked once, then twice, until I realized what I was looking at. It was a wild rat. I took off running down the platform alongside it, snapping pictures on my iPhone, and watching as a second and then a third appeared, prancing along the rails.

The Rat King finally decided to reveal himself.

The mythical Rat King has one of two origins. The first and more folkloric origin of a ‘rat king’ is when a bunch of rats become connected by their tails, and end up growing together. These mostly involve black rats.

There is yet a more contemporary and postmodern take on the rat king, one reported by municipal workers, police officers, exterminators, and many others. The Rat King in the postmodern age is an exceptionally large male rat, one commonly seen leading a pack of other rats.

From a postmodern shamanistic perspective, to me the Rat King represents the all-encompassing rat totem. The Big Rat.

To work with the Rat King is to work with an agent of balance and in-betweenness. In the West, poverty, the slums and misfortune are associated with rats. Poor housing. Disease–the rat was considered the main transmitter of the plague in Europe in the Middle Ages. In the East, when the rice harvest was good and the stores were full, people found rats. They symbolized abundance, wealth and plenty. While visiting the Chinatown district of NYC, my fiancee gifted me with a statue featuring a golden rat, seated upon a bed of coins, and surrounded by baby rats. A very classic and common figure of the rat in Eastern symbolism.

Two sides of the same coin. Balance and rhythm. Family, community, survival and persistence. Knowing and appreciating your origins. Where you are and where you are going.

This will be a first in a series of posts on my dealings with the Rat King, as well as rat symbolism and other related totemic and animistic information on things rat.

‘Safe’ Shamanism

Something I’ve been kicking around in my head lately, and was recently reminded of. Kind of rambling, disjointed and off-the-cuff, so bear with me here.

In my experience, the shamanic spiritual worldscapes are much similar to our tangible, physical one. They aren’t safe. You don’t always have control over things. This is a fact of life. No matter how one would like to think otherwise. No matter what world you’re in, there is always someone or something out there bigger, wiser and nastier than you. There are also always going to be places you don’t know how to navigate. Take an average inner city guy out of his apartment and stick him in a yurt in the middle of Mongolia. Chances are, it would at the very least take him some time to figure out his asshole from his shoe-sole.

People approach shamanism and these worlds with their own preconceived notions, their own insecurities, assumptions, attitudes and beliefs. These affect not only how they see the worlds they traverse, but if they access them at all, let alone the entities and beings they interact with. If you lack social skills in the “real world”, chances are, your interactions in other worlds may not go as swimmingly either. There is also certain cultural bounds to consider in this, too. Mileage may vary to a degree–but granted, if you have poor social skills in one country, chances are your behaviors will offend someone else in another country, too.

Just like any other aspect in life, learning is about taking risks. Some people take more risks than others. Some people were subjected to more risks and dangers outside of their control. Some are more sheltered than others. In the end however, dealing with more than the physical world you interact in has its risks, burdens and responsibilities–and isn’t for everybody. But this is my personal opinion on the matter. Not everyone can, or should take, the shamanistic path. But that’s me.

The animistic world of shamanism, and the tangible world of matter should be handled in balance. The verified and the unverified. The subjective and the objective. Too much leaning on any one side, you lose the big picture. You either sit in your own fantasy-world, or you cut yourself off from the bigger picture.

Shamanistic practice, in my experience, is all about balance. And it’s easy to fall flat on your face if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’m by far no expert, merely one that’s taken a few falls in the past myself.

Drive-by Coyote-musings

If Coyote taught me anything in my life, it’s to never be a specialist. Being a jack-of-all trades has its benefits, and it’s much easier to avoid stagnation and being stuck in a rut. Coyotes themselves aren’t specialists, they are immensely flexible creatures both genetically as well as socially and intellectually. They can function in small packs or large, or completely solitary. They can scavenge, they can hunt. They can adapt to almost any environment. The pressures put on them by humans and the ever-changing environment around them only seem to aid in their transformation. They are indeed a very alchemical creature.

There are advantages to being a specialist, just as there are advantages to being a jack-of-all-trades. Just compare a hunting coyote to a hunting jaguar (which, the two do share overlapping territories in South America and formerly states like Arizona and New Mexico) and you can see which one is the more specialized hunter. However, there are also advantages to adapting oneself in multiple areas at once–of the two animals, which one happens to be endangered, and which one thrives despite the pressures put upon it? I’m going to throw the breaks on this metaphor for now though, because it dances dangerously close to lauding one totem over another, which is certainly not my intention nor my focus.

Steering back on track, my focus here is that, as a totem, teacher and even godform, Coyote has taught me that it doesn’t benefit me to stay in ruts. This is especially true of my magical and shamanic practice. Sticking to the tenets of my primary totem, I always make sure to keep myself constantly flexible, so that I’m able to evolve and adapt my practice, and my mind, as often as possible.

Sacred Make-Believe

Lately I’ve been reading Patrick Dunn’s Magic, Power, Language, Symbol: A Magician’s Exploration of Linguistics, and it’s by far becoming one of my favorite books (my list of favorite books keeps getting longer, it seems). It’s given me quite a bit to chew over, and this isn’t going to be my last commentary on the book. But something he mentioned really stuck out with me, specifically as it relates to some of my earliest forms of magic-working which I initially referred to as “playing pretend with myself”, which I later augmented to a form of ritual-working or “sacred make-believe”. This technique he talks about is called derive and is mentioned in an article called ‘Beneath the Pavement, The Beast’, written by Stephen Grasso in Generation Hex. To quote Dunn:

Derive (pronounced approximately “duh-REEV”) was originally a way of integrating artistic sensibility with the environment, by deliberate derangement of the senses and drifting from locale to locale as if they were unfamiliar or alien.

Just recently I can recall doing something very similar to this, in my travels to Germany, were everything was unfamiliar to me in a very direct, literal sense as well. But, seeing as some of the specific places in Germany I was visiting had ancestral or symbolic ties, I also saw it as a very magical and very, hm…to take a page out of Patrick Harpur’s book, diamonic quality to it, in which multiple layers of awareness and multiple levels of existence were overlapping. This was especially apparent in my trip to Kassel-Wolfhagen, my ancestral hometown. Even the beginning plane-ride into the country, flying from west to east, and back again a month later from east to west, held for me very deeply symbolic connotations. Dunn goes on to say:

The practice of using derive for magic is not entirely in line with situationist principles, such as they were, but it does provide a means of regarding the world not as an alien piece of art but as an analogue to the astral plane.

This seemed to hit the nail right on the head with some of my previous practices, things that started out simply as pretending with oneself (something I did often, as I was a bit of a loner as a child–something that seemed to bother the adults more than it did me), and which I later became to call “sacred make-believe”, if for nothing else when I realized early on, at least subconsciously at first, that these sorts of “quests” or “missions” had very real impacts on the world around me. And still do. That said, I do like the term derive much better, and I get this funny sort of feeling when I realize how giddy it makes me when I find words to pin to things.

I’ve always enjoyed this more active role to astral-journeying, a way were one can interact on many different planes at once. Then again, I’ve always found myself a threshold-creature, never really keeping both feet in the same place at any one time.

Shamans Pray For Election

From Technoccult:
Peruvian Shamans Pray For US Election

You know, maybe its just me, but somehow this election seems to have the most occult references. Between Palin getting protection from witchcraft, to right-wing dominionist Christians claiming Obama’s African family is performing acts of witchcraft on McCain, let alone these same nutjobs whipping themselves up in a fury of spiritual warfare and fanaticism, it does make me wonder. Like it or not, this election is definitely very spiritually charged. Not that it’s any surprise, given certain trends, but observing various patterns has proven to be quite intriguing.

The Cathedrals of the Dead

The beach I was standing on was dry, sandy and very white.  The sun was high up in the sky and shining brightly, and the ocean was somewhere in the distance, I could hear it sighing softly.  I heard seagulls calling too, and somehow they made me feel melancholy, reminded me of a time I was spending with my partner, probably in Ocean City or thereabouts.  I look all around me and half-buried in the sand are gigantic, dried-out skeletons.  I look down and see a skull laying on its side, half-buried.  It looks almost like the skull of some sort of gigantic seafaring creature, like a prehistoric whale.  I see conical teeth, and molars in the back.  The skull is huge, and I’m thinking I could climb down inside of it, through the eye-socket maybe, and have enough room to spare to make it into a little dwelling in the ground.  As I was peering through the eye-socket, I began to hear a voice.  It was a very loud voice, and it didn’t seem to issue from anywhere in particular–in fact, it seemed to issue from all over, from the huge primal skeletons themselves.  The voice sounded very masculine, and very very old.  It also echoed, as if reverberating from some vast cavern underground.  The voice echoed, simply and yet powerfully: “We are the Cathedrals of the Dead.”

The voice continued to echo and reverberate in my mind as I slowly began to wake up.  I checked the time on the alarm, about 45 minutes before it was supposed to go off.  I switched the timer off and got up to put on a pot of coffee.  The echoing voice gave me chills, and also a profound sense of sheer antiquity that it seemed to carry along, an age that goes beyond my understanding.  This was one of those dreams that aren’t easily forgotten, ones that grip you firmly and stay with you long after you enter the waking world, and continue to haunt you when you least expect it.

I am now left with a profound sense of awe, and in a state of deep contemplation.