Shamanic Sickness In A Society Without Shamans, Part 2.
(In this part of the series we will explore what it means to be harrassed by the ancestors and spirits. We will identify two different processes an initiate goes through to develop their abilities; Perceptual Inclusion and Spirit Induction. As we explore these core components of shamanic sickness, we will look at some of the challenges the initiate will face when in a society without shamans.)
The Harassment of the Spirits and Ancestors: The Process of Spiritual Transformation
The overall experience of shamanic sickness is manifested through the harassment of the spirits and ancestors. Keep in mind that shamanic sickness is the initiation of an individual by the spirits, through which a person is harassed into accepting the role of an intermediary for the spirits and ancestors. He or she is chosen by them not only as their contact but also to be in the service of the tribe. Through this painful process, the chosen initiate learns, through spiritual means, how to “read” nature, coming to understand the healing qualities of plants, energies of crystals, and many other nature-based knowledge and remedies. They also develop spiritual abilities such as subtle energy and distance healing, clairvoyance, communication with the various consciousnesses of the natural world, and communication with their initiators, the ancestors, and the spirits.
The process of shaman sickness is referred to as being harassed by the spirits because of the difficulty of enduring the spiritual transformation that the individual experiences. This is only alleviated through accepting that they have been chosen and called to the shamanic path, and by finding remedies in the explanations and knowledge of other shamans. How could accepting the call and working with other shamans alleviate the harassment and turmoil of such a high spiritual initiation? To understand this, the reader needs to understand what the harassment of ancestors and spirits is and why it is considered harassment. We can then discuss why shamanic sickness experienced in contemporary society is that much harder due to not having a connection to practicing shamans.
When one is called to the path through shamanic sickness, the individual goes through a multitude of changes and alterations leading to spiritual transformation. As we discussed in Part 1, it starts in a way that causes physical pain, heightens their physical senses, and activates perceptions beyond physical sensory feedback (also known as extrasensory perception). We revealed that they become hypersensitive to hearing, vision, and sense of touch. Many experience an alteration in how they perceive the smells and tastes of things, often leading to an aversion to foods they commonly eat, such as meats and processed foods. The sensitivity changes alone to cause an inner disruption so profound that the individual’s day-to-day activities become impossible. This introduces the first type of harassment: being physically adjusted in preparation to communicate with the spirits and to activate these new abilities.
Through this process, those chosen will begin to perceive reality differently, with new perceptions and heightened senses. As this continues, they undergo even more profound and superb alterations that seem to need a more hands-on approach by the spirits, so that the initiate begins to visually and viscerally see and interact with them. This is considered harassment because the individual is bombarded with a barrage of surreal experiences while perceiving much more detail in the world around them. It causes the shattering of their personal ego, destroying their confidence in the reality they have come to know, and they begin to lose their grasp on sanity unless they give in to the process and embrace the experiences. In this manner, the individual goes through their first death to be reborn as a shaman.
Therein lies the necessity of searching out and seeking a remedy from other shamans. Because they are knowledgeable about what the person is going through, what abilities they will develop, and how the process works, other shamans can ease the new initiate into it and assist them as they are spiritually transformed.
Evolving Perceptual Inclusions Vs. Spirit Induction
With the multitude of changes, increased abilities, and varying ways of coming to know, it is very difficult to pin down what is going on in general, let alone what events and experiences initiate other events and experiences via process. Add to the challenge that the symptoms and experiences of shamanic sickness are not guaranteed to happen to each person, nor do they emerge linearly. So, even though we can identify common symptoms and final alterations, we cannot excavate a perfect or concrete identification of the regimen that each budding shaman will go through. This could be due to the necessity of shaping the individual to the needs of both the spirits and ancestors, and for the needs of the community in which the person will be involved.
Being ignorant of the processes of evolving spiritual transformation adds to the difficulty of shamanic sickness, just as much as the end results of those processes: heightened perception of reality, increased sensory feedback, expanded abilities of communication, and knowledge gathering. Though difficult, we are able to identify two processes within which we can loosely categorize the various experiences of the initiated. We know, from the shared experience of shamans who were initiated through shaman sickness, the possible identifiers and experiences to expect. Many alterations happen through the heightening of perceptions and senses, while others — those much harder to integrate for the majority of people — are initiated through both spiritual and physical contact and interactions with actual ancestors and various entities known as spirits. We will identify these processes as perceptual inclusion and spirit induction.
Perceptual Inclusion
We know that while a person is experiencing the physical discomfort that begins with shaman sickness, their senses are being altered to increase the range of perception. The person has sensory feedback and extra-sensory perceptions (perceptions outside of the use of the physical senses) that appear. We are able to identify which sensory increase manifests as new experiences, perceptions, and abilities. We can also determine what extra-sensory abilities emerge. Though confusing and frightening for the individual, these evolving perceptions can be identified as person-centered processes of sensory evolution and seem to happen within the general body or being of the person. We will identify these experiences in the rest of this part of the series.
Spirit Induction
There are several experiences involving contact and interactions with unseen and non-human entities that manifest from heightened perception. These experiences also serve as the beginning of a process towards further transformation, which we refer to as much harder to integrate. That is as far as we will go on this topic for now, as we will address it in much more detail later in the series, after we establish an understanding of evolving perceptual inclusion.
Putting It All Together
Understanding that being harassed by the spirits and ancestors often describes what is experienced as the newly initiated begins to perceive more about his or her environment and starts to have interactions with the ancestors and spirits. Through the process of coming into being, individuals must endure the experiences of perceiving and understanding foreign and naturally unseen energies, consciousness, and beings. They have to be strong enough to weather, first, often callous in nature, contact with the spirits, and suffer through visionary experiences that prime them toward abilities that have laid dormant in the majority of people.
In contemporary societies, this contact is seen as being with things deemed unreal or as leading to psychosis. Possibly worse, in American culture at least, we have been plagued by the conditioning of mainstream media and entertainment to harbor a belief that such things, if real, are evil, from the devil, and dangerously damaging to the soul. How is someone experiencing shamanic sickness supposed to accept the path or the teachings of other shamans in order to move away from the harassment, even if they could?
In the next section of this series, we will take a deep look into the different evolving perceptual inclusions that an initiate experiences. We will identify the difference between a person’s senses and what they perceive in order to understand how it is possible for individuals to perceive a greater amount of information from their environment and begin to reveal the spiritual abilities that these perceptual inclusions develop into or assist with.
Readers will be introduced to synesthesia and learn what role it plays by coming back online from childhood. Once we understand this stage of symptoms, we can move deeper into Spirit Inductions — events and experiences of an individual relating to actual, liminal, and visionary spirit contact — and the long history of such beings leading up to their current mistaken masks and names, such as UFO/UAPs, the Greys, and some of the well-known earthbound cryptids that have also become distorted throughout the development of cultures without shamans.
(Written by, D.J. Rees, May 2023)
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