Magickal, Mystical Initiation Tour
The initiation of humanity is here in the form of spiritually transformative experiences, UFOs and paranormal events to expand spirituality into the material world.
I wasn’t expecting to have a deep conversation with my Korean American friend on that particularly beautiful summer’s day years ago. We were on a fifteen minute break from our corporate America job, taking a walk down our usual path just to get away from the monotony and catch up on our lives. Normally most people are quietly bored to tears when someone else other than themselves relays a dream, however I always find the dreams of others intriguing. That day my friend relayed to me a strange dream she had the night before. She set the scene, which was definitely strange, as she found herself enveloped in a dark, black void. Up ahead she could make out a small, glistening pond. As there was nothing else around she found herself drawn to the pond until suddenly she was standing right beside it. As she stared into the deep, black waters, the surface shimmered as the surface of the pond broke and out emerged the head of a very large koi fish. She was marveling at the size of the fish when all of a sudden the fish opened its mouth and started speaking to her. Frustratingly, here is where she stopped her story, “What did it say?” I asked. She shook her head and I wasn’t sure if it was because she couldn’t remember what the fish said or she didn’t want to tell me.
A few steps went by as I thought about what she told me; I told her that one of the Native American tribes describe a similar type of experience but instead of a koi fish it was a salmon who lived in a small pond. Salmon was the keeper of the Waters of Forgetting and a guardian of the doorway between our world and the world of spirit. Generally when someone has a vision or dream of Salmon he is portending an initiation or new beginning usually for a future shaman, medicine person or leader of the tribe.
When I turned to look at my friend, I swear her face turned white. She then explained to me that in Korea they have a similar initiation to become a shaman. There are two points in a woman’s life when this can happen, when one is a young teenager and then in middle age, there would be some type of sign or calling either a message in a dream or a mystical, unexplainable event that occurred in your life. After running the dream or event by a shaman or a community elder, they would know that the sign is indicating that it was your time to devote your life to becoming a shaman. However, it was a choice and wasn’t forced, you can choose to leave your life and pursue the path of the shaman or you reject that calling and continue to live your life as it was.
My head was on fire with visions of such a powerful calling “What are you going to choose?” I asked. She shook her head and said that the path wasn’t for her as it would take her away from her children and they were still young and needed her. I nodded in understanding but I was secretly disappointed; why wouldn’t you choose to enter that world if it was presented to you? True to her word, she continued her life as a very present and loving mother to her children, the path of a shaman closed to her forever. I never considered that a similar initiation crossed my path, starting with my own secret plea for a magickal life.
If you’ve hung out in spiritual circles or even have a friend who is really into crystals you may have heard something about how the human race are a species with amnesia. The essential idea is that we are spirit and human existence is a challenge of forgetting and then rediscovering spirit. In this we go through an initiation either through dreams or a mystical or unexplainable event occurs. This of course speaks to most modern, Western countries who unfortunately let the major religious institutions dictate “the rules” of spirit and put restrictive and abusive bounding boxes around the infinite. The blessings of our time is having cultures outside of the west that haven’t forgotten our true natures as spiritual beings, living in a spiritual universe. Along with your friend with the crystals, that same friend or a different friend probably tried to talk to you about UFOs and aliens. You maybe didn’t pay attention and thought it was very imaginative and you may even have felt sorry for your friend’s harmless insanity. Unsurprisingly, I am that friend who is into crystals and also an avid follower of ufology. What does ufology and aliens have to do with mystical initiation?
There are three books that talk in depth about all of this and in my mind create the Venn diagram of similarities that overlap: Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, Patrick Harpur’s Daemonic Reality and the recent, comprehensive work by Joshua Cutchin’s An Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & the Paranormal. Vallee was the first to stitch together the tapestry of how similar accounts of fairy abductions sound eerily similar to accounts of modern day alien abductions or experiences of missing time. Harpur expounds on where Vallee left off and theorizes at length how humanity is being initiated by the spirit realm, en masse either by mass sightings of the Our Lady of Fátima and alien abductions. Cutchin’s book is very comprehensive and loops in Near Death Experiences as a no holds bar initiation to the otherworld to glimpse what happens after death. Right now my perspective and experience, spiritually transformative experiences and even UFOs have something to do with an initiation back to the spirit realm with the goal of integrating more spirit back into the physical realm.
Far too soon my fortieth birthday arrived and in female vanity I made an appointment at the local Korean spa, hoping they could scrub my skin hard enough to reveal a vibrant twenty year old underneath. In addition to the underlying promise of eternal youth, I had amused myself that scrubbing away the old skin would give me an opportunity to become someone new and step into a completely new universe. While soaking in the tub prior to my appointment time, I closed my eyes and in my mind asked to step through a door and live in a world of magick. I don’t know who I was making the request to or exactly why I made that request. Upon reflection I was dissatisfied with my life which felt like a perpetual hamster wheel of work, eat, sleep, television, concert and repeat. Mixed in that repetition of my life I was seeking out spirit. One of the practices I was doing was taking Kundalini yoga classes which involved performing kriya, meditation and chanting. It was during these classes that I began to notice the stillness in between my constant brain activity. I also began to notice that the lights behind my eyelids became more intense and dynamic like some trippy light show. After my spa session I didn’t feel any different and I had forgotten about the request I made to walk into a new universe.
A year later was my fortieth birthday and the Covid 19 pandemic shut down just happened. Like everyone else I was making due setting up a home office and doing everything virtually out of the home, including my Kundalini yoga classes. One of those classes, I was in my living room with my teacher Sada Simran, who was leading an hour and half long session with lots of kriya, chanting and meditation. About midway through the class we had paused to do a short meditation of about five minutes. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor when I happened to glance at one of my darkened computer monitors from my makeshift work desk and noticed something strange. I opened and shut my eyes to be sure of what I was seeing, on one of the monitors I saw a shape hovering near the lower edge of the screen. On the screen I saw the faintest golden shape that resembled two coiled snakes that formed a heart shape with their faces touching. An odd thing was that even though I couldn’t see wings on the shape I knew that wings were coming off the snake’s backs. I thought perhaps it was an afterburn image on my eyeball so I searched the laptop monitor that I was watching my Kundalini teacher on, but that shape wasn’t there at all. I looked back at the other monitor on my desk and the shape was still there. I then tore my eyes away and looked around the room I was in to see if there was this shape or something like it, nothing. I looked back at the monitor and the shape was still there. I kept an eye on the shape as the class started up again and it did eventually fade but it stuck around for a good five minutes.
I forgot about it until I was discussing with Jaycee afterwards how the class went. I then told him about the shape I had seen and what it looked like to where he said “You saw a Caduceus.” I had no idea what that was until he showed me a picture of the staff of Hermes with the two winged snakes and I agreed that is what the shape looked like. “Perhaps, the god Hermes is wanting to work with you.” Then I remembered two things, I remembered my request a year earlier about walking into a magickal universe. I had also taken to listening to Mitch Horowitz who discusses a lot about the mind influencing the world around you. One of his suggestions is to build a relationship with a god of old as they would be lonely as no one is worshiping them any more. I wasn’t sure what god to choose so I again turned to the universe and asked for a god to step forward and make themselves known to me. I had forgotten that request until Jaycee suggested working with Hermes and the association with the caduceus, the shape I had just seen. This was the main catalyst that started me on the path to my current working within the Hermetic Qabalah, the Western Mystery tradition and strengthening my psychic and tarot skills.
The realm of spirit is reaching out to all of us, initiating us back into our true natures but understanding our journey here in this realm as individuals with free will. Spirit may contact you via a very strange dream, a vision, a visitation by strange people or beings or synchronistic events that only you would understand the significance of. Sometimes the events are frightening and bizarrely strange, shaking us out of our Materialist world trance. As a species we are releasing ourselves from the dogma that organized religion has had on a large number of us. That iron hold is gripping tighter and tighter which explains the urgency and strangeness of how spirit is trying to grab our attention. Erupting out of this chaos the scales drop from our eyes to where we can see clearly and look inward for guidance on how to explore this new world.
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