Ejecting a Demon: Christ meets Shamanism

A phenomenal thing occurred last night – which I’ve been waiting for, and attempting, for years: I released old programming and negative spiritual attachments.

Those who’ve never experienced such a thing – well, I can remember when I never had either, and the amazement I felt to “see” not this material world, but another reality, and feel the effects so powerfully in my body. I’ll try to describe some of it.

First I'll refer back to some events in my book, RattleSnake Fire: a memoir of extra-dimensional experience, that last night’s healing relates to.

Years ago, living alone, a sort-of hermit, dabbling in shamanic activities, uncertain whether Christ was important for me to consider in these activities, unsure who was important for me to consider as I made my first solo, tentative attempts into these other dimensions, I opened myself unwittingly to extra-dimensional beings who took the opportunity to attach themselves and go for a ride on the physical plane.

Not quite a possession, they weren’t that type, but they affected my spiritual being. Not a positive thing, except for the lesson I learned. (Every lesson we learn from is ultimately good. And anything we don’t see coming is essential to learn about. So it was a good lesson. In this sense, “all is from God,” even daemonic little pests.)

This wasn’t the first thing to attach to me. I had programming installed when I was a little child, long before those shamanic forays, when I was a subject of mind control experimentation.

I believe we live in a spiritual ocean, and are all vulnerable to attachments everyday, and many of us live with these things and don’t know it. So, having an attachment is actually pretty common, and it would behoove us all to recognize it and deal with it.

After years of trying and failing to remove one particular entity, I finally succeeded last night, and a whole cascade of clearing followed. The reason for my success was that I finally had help.

I’d thought of asking for help before, but didn’t because I’m shy about my spiritual practice and relationships on the spirit realm. So it’s ironic that the person I found help with – without asking – it just happened – has a spiritual life that doesn’t correspond much with mine.

While my spiritual world includes about everything I’ve ever heard about – God, angels, Christ, demons, ghosts, spirit animals, weird energy and entities and thought forms of every type, my friend’s spiritual world includes God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, with a nod to the angels and acknowledgement of demons, but no expectation of ever communicating with or experiencing anything but the Holy Spirit. What does he think of my activities, I’ve often wondered? Foolhardy? Soul endangering? Simple imagination?

This is my closest friend, my intimate, so I’ve shared with him all the stories in my book and explained how I believe our worlds are one and the same, only I’ve acknowledged more. I also acknowledge I might have had brushes with spiritual danger, but I’ve also learned more and believe that this sort of learning is essential for our spiritual growth and evolution.

As I’ve returned to read the Bible again and find it relevant, I’ve reinterpreted Christ’s words to support this exploration of mine: When his disciples marveled at his miracles, including casting out of demons, he said, “You’ll do all these things and more,” leading me to think, If we’ll deal with demons, we’ll need to know a little about demons. So these brushes with danger may just be preparation.

Now, I never intended to practice shamanism. It just happened to me. I never sought it. And, despite its exotic, not-very-Christian-sounding name, it may serve former “Christians” like myself, now seeking to follow Christ’s words, as spiritual practice toward the time when his words about us performing miracles come true.

We were discussing, not for the first time, my concern that I’d picked up a spiritual hitchhiker years ago. I’d recognized him powerfully the moment he’d come in. I could feel his sense of accomplishment when he first looked out through my left eye, scanned the room and smirked derisively at the fireplace hearth I loved as though its design was far beneath his taste.

I asked him who he was, and instead of answering me, he said that I needed him, and proceeded to help me end an argument with my boyfriend that he began as I was silently asking the entity his name.

Our arguments had a bad tendency to go on and on, and this one did too. For an hour, the intruder watched and snickered to himself as I politely answered all my boyfriend’s challenges and demands. I recognized we were going in circles and I pointed that out, but nothing stopped the pattern. We kept talking in circles, and I wondered how to break the cycle.

Finally, the hitchhiker asserted himself and his desire to laugh made it hard for me to continue speaking politely. I heard him say that the questions and demands did not deserve my polite responses, and his laughter would be far more appropriate.

Rationally I had to agree, but I’d never in my life laughed at someone who was upset. I didn’t think I could.

But the hitchhiker could. His laughter was right there, rising in my chest, pulling my mouth into a broad smile. It was almost there. All I had to do was allow it. With the next indignant accusation, which I didn’t believe, which habit would have had me politely refute, instead I let myself laugh.

My boyfriend stopped short, head jerked back at my affront, and stared at me in amazement.

Immediately I apologized, but explained that his repetitions and our arguing in circles was ridiculous, and I couldn’t help myself. And since I’d stopped him, I told him I wasn’t going to go in these circles any more. We’d had an agreement about these subjects from months ago, and I didn’t want to waste my time, energy or mood going over it again.

“Besides,” I said, “When you interrupted me, you recall I'd said I needed to meditate. And I'd needed to meditate right then, but you wouldn’t allow me. Now I need to get back to it, because I felt a spiritual intrusion happen – very dramatically – and I need to find out what it’s about.”

Of course, he thought I’d been possessed, and that was why I'd been rude to him. I acknowledged that the intruder was the one who’d made me laugh, but I thought it had been for a good purpose: We’d stopped going in circles, and I was glad of it.

I sat and silently conversed with the intruder, and again he failed to answer my request for his name – a bad sign in the shamanic world, I should have recognized more consciously – but he reiterated his assertion that I needed him, and promised to leave whenever I asked. Unfortunately, I didn’t ask him right then and there to leave. I was grateful he’d helped me get control of the arguing, even as I wondered if this was a Trojan Horse sort of gift.

Now I know it was. Even though I didn’t ask him to leave, I never recognized his presence again and thought he might have just left on his own, as he was so quiet.

Years later, though, I detected his presence and told him it was time to leave. To my surprise, he held on, and the struggle between us was frightening. I felt something like claws grip on as I willed him to leave, commanded him to leave in Jesus’ name and called on every other spirit helper who’d ever come to my aid in the past.

The claws were such an unexpected sensation that it scared me, and I gave up. But I told him that I intended for him to leave and would get help to accomplish that, even though I was giving up for the evening.

A year or more went by, during which I knew I should take action, but didn’t know who to ask for help. And then last night, my partner prayed with me, even though he'snot accustomed to sitting with someone having this sort of experience.

I worried it might even be unbelievable to him, but trusted his faith that “where two or more are gathered in His name” we have power. And that was enough.

I can’t recall what happened that moved us from conversation to the series of extra-dimensional perceptions and struggles and healing that followed. Maybe I just closed my eyes.

The energetic sensation I’ve had many times – of someone’s energy pouring into me with power – came on again. As I usually do, I questioned it. Often I have a hard time resisting it because the infusion of power feels very good. This time, though, with my partner there, I whispered urgently, “Pray for me now!” and adding my own prayers, I saw and felt the energy that had poured into me loop out and hover before me.

I identified it as the one who wouldn’t tell me who he is and won’t leave when told to, therefore a liar, unwelcome. A spiritual tussle began.

God’s light and others’ shadows are easy to see. The good and bad vibes (lying, seductive ones) are discernable as well, and those were the energies toward which I directed my attention for the next – how long? I’m not sure - maybe an hour.

After the shadow was replaced by light, another shadow became evident. One after another, I told them to leave in Christ’s name. Some struggled more than others. Sometimes when the struggle was great, I repeated my request for prayer help. Eventually, when the light had replaced another shadow, I opened my eyes and told my partner the mundane fact: I need a break, but there’s more to do. I told him a quick synopsis of what I was experiencing, and then closed my eyes to continue the work. My partner continued to sit before me.

The things removed had different forms – shamanic practice has shown me that there’s a great diversity of forms taken by the spiritual entities. Some are only felt, some appear as shadows, some appeared that night as outlines, some as 3-dimensional outlines (which doesn’t make sense, but it’s the best I can do), and some even looked like cartoons. But each had a will of its own, and I asserted my will over my physical body, and banished one after another.

Then a most amazing vision unfolded. In the midst of these other-dimensional images came a vision from our familiar material world: a man’s hand, with white shirt cuff and black suit cuff, reached toward a small, brick-sized, glossy black safe with a key in his hand to open it. Its location seemed to be inside my torso, and he was reaching inside my torso beneath my neck - all this on the etheric plane, it seemed.

I thought this might be the person – or representative of all those – who installed mind control programming in me when I was a child. And the contents of the safe – the programming – was now being removed – finally, my heart’s prayer come true.

After the hand opened the safe, it didn’t just remove the contents, but removed the entire safe, and I felt the relief of that block removed from my energetic field. Instinctively, I called on God to fill the space with light.

To my surprise, the hand returned and removed a second black safe, and I called for God’s light to fill that space as well and for angels to accompany those things away to a proper place for their destruction.

The two safes had only one meaning for me: they represented the two streams of mind control programming I’d glimpsed in the red and blue children (described in my book). Before I could ponder that or share it with my partner, I was aware of a third black safe, only this one was very different: it was ghostlike and larger, about half the size of my torso.

I struggled mentally to move it, and when I finally did, felt myself covered with a greasy shadowy sludge, and then spent time psychically clearing that away, asking again for my partner to help me with his prayers. And they did help.

Mentally, and sometimes with gestures, I gathered the sludge and moved it from our space toward the back door of the house and asked angels to take it from there.

When I felt mostly cleared, I took a break to check in with my partner, who I knew was entirely unused to shamanic-style spiritual battle, and saw his tenuously faithful expression. I tried to explain briefly what had happened, though the words I found sounded almost silly.

There was a little more to do, so I closed my eyes again, asking him to pray with me, and addressed the remaining shadow. It morphed into an outline of my physical self, only it was spirit, conjunct with my physical body. I knew it was my personal “caricature of myself,” the personality I identify with, which keeps me in patterns of behavior. If I could release it, I’d be freer to move and act as God would have me. I wanted to let go of it, knowing it was a collection of limiting patterns, but it was daunting: Who would I be? Without it, I imagined my infinite-soul self filled with light.

Eventually I wrestled the outline form until its front lay against my back, and watched as my form emerged as solid light, a channel, I felt, for God. It was ecstatic. I wanted to always remain clear like this.

The personality, my caricature, began negotiating to stay, arguing she had purpose, which I could see. But I knew she was not to be the driver anymore. My infinite soul self, in touch with God, would be.

My work every day would be to keep the light of God in me, with the personality on hand to do some of the mundane work in our world.

While this was beyond anything my partner had ever experienced, I see our spiritual perceptions not contradictory, but harmonious. And he proved to me the truth of Christ’s words: two or more together, calling on his authority, can work wonders, and heal. I finally freed myself, after years of work alone, of the dark attachments and programming that I couldn’t remove alone. I am grateful.

If David Lynch had directed The Truman Show

“My life felt like The Truman Show, only directed by David Lynch.” -- quoted from my book, RattleSnake Fire: a memoir of extra-dimensional experience.

I used to wonder indignantly why people like David Lynch made such dark movies.

During the height of my paranoia in 2004, I finally understood: Because this stuff happens, and people need to know. At least some people do.

Then for the first time, I was glad Lynch had made Blue Velvet. Because I’d been there, trapped as the woman had been, my mind just becoming aware.

Eventually I remembered the promises of prophets, shamans and teachers worldwide – that we are powerful and have Help in High Places. I remembered the miracles and visions of prophesy that had flowed through me in recent years, and realized this terror is a common or requisite phase in events called "shamanic initiation," an introduction to things not accessible to the average person.

I decided to face my fears and claim the help I was offered, and do what Carlos Castaneda’s teacher, Don Juan, said was the work of the righteous shaman: "to rectify the course of sorcery." I could see that sorcery – evil sorcery – was out of control on this planet. And potentially good magic could be our birthright. This would be righteous work, global work, cosmically historic work. Probably carried out by thousands or millions of people like me on the planet – transcending fear – who I could join with my prayers and intentions.

I gathered around me all the Spirit Helpers who’d presented themselves to me in past years, with Yeshua’s teachings of compassion and devotion as my touchstone. And I prayed to transcend my fear, and to have the power to do the work that my experiences of hurt and survival have enlightened and empowered me to do.

Remaking Our Economy - Our Way

I never thought I’d hear it on mainstream public radio: “The crashing economy can actually be a good thing. The existing one doesn’t represent our values. In creating a new economy, we have the chance to create one based on our collective values.” [Paraphrased from economist-author interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” hosted by Terry Gross, November 2008]

I’ve been waiting for this time for years. Economists the world over have been saying, for years, that we were living in an economic bubble of illusion which had to crash. And now it has.

Before we all panic, let’s think about what that means. Are we going to wait until the powers that be, which created this mess, come up with a plan? Or shall we remember that economies are all about trust… and who do we most trust? Invisible unreachable people in DC? Or - our neighbors, church members, family members, best friends, friends of friends, club members, parents of our children, children of our friends…? You get my point.

Next, if that’s who we most trust, who do we most value? Same list? Of course. So, let’s work with them.

Economy is all about give and take. What do you need? What do I need? What can we exchange with one another? And what all do we have in our community?

I’d rather buy locally-made furniture any day, rather than something trucked in from a shop somewhere where the workers are having far less fun than the guy working in his garage. That way my money can support fun, creativity, uniqueness, love and satisfaction for one of those people on my list, maybe a neighbor.

We could support an entire cottage industry for people learning those skills, say, in a collaboration between furniture stores and independent woodworkers. We could repair and recycle old furniture, keep it out of the landfill, provide skills to people who need new ones, and provide our community with all the furniture it needs, and in high fashion. Not a grim Depression-era picture, but, arguably, an improvement over what we’ve had, generally, for quite some time in Western culture.

Another example: How many people love to bake? Let’s create more bakeries. How many love to make tortillas? Why in the world ship them from wherever they do? Let’s make them here!

An ideal community, I’ve always thought, would have a bakery and a tortillaria on every block.

How many love to garden? Let’s get at it. And let’s teach one another all we know, and grow food on every bit of spare land. It could be fun, beautiful, and create new bonds between people.

How many carpenters would like to help people make their homes more energy efficient? We could design custom improvements for a series of homes in a teaching environment, to kick-start a community-wide effort to make every single home as energy-efficient as possible, with passive solar designs that can make some of the homes entirely energy-free (free from outside/pay-for energy), which one day might be a goal for every home. There’s nothing stopping us.

Who likes to brew beer? Or would like to learn? I’d love to drink local beer.

Some folks are worried that this economic collapse will trigger depression, anger, drinking and domestic violence, not an uncommon pattern. But I’d like to suggest it’s usuallt common when people feel trapped and frustrated; so if people were doing work they loved, in our newly custom-created, freely-created economy, a lot fewer people would collapse like that.

Doing work one love gives dignity and hope, so we’ll might expect people to step into new behaviors, and enjoy beer in a different way. Since Ben Franklin said that beer was proof God loves us, let’s support our local brewmeisters with their gifts of turning God’s grain into celebratory beverages! There: more artful jobs created and more money kept in our local economy, not going away to corporate headquarters.

Who likes to sew? Let’s give ourselves wardrobes of custom-made items, artwork for the body! And recycle those that lost their design appeal, or more likely were never designed well in the first place…. Right?! Don’t we have “issues” with our clothing? Never sufficient pockets, or too binding, wrong fabric, whatever. How ‘bout a huge clothing and recycling/refabricating local industry? I know that I have lots of good items I don’t wear that still have plenty of value, even if only in the fabric. If my clothes could all be remade to be truly functional, then I’d need fewer of them. And all the excess could be moved into the community, to make sure everyone had what they needed. And everyday, some seamstress/tailor/fabric artist could be creating something entirely unique, maybe for a custom request, or maybe as an art piece some unknown person will fall in love with. That’s what we need: more art, more falling in love with the simple things of life.

We could all be doing the work of our dreams. We only have to do it. It needs no one to oversee it. No bureaucracy. No nothing. We only have to change our minds, and continue changing our minds, making adjustments along the way, refining, expanding, stepping beyond, becoming the artists of our world.

“…The chance to re-create the economy according to our own values.” Quite the moment in history into which we’ve been born, eh?

Jean Eisenhower is a local author, fabric artist, solar designer, and devotee of corn tortillas hot off the stove.

The Day After October 14

So here it is, October 15, the day after the day predicted for a giant spaceship to arrive and end the debate about extraterrestrial contact on Earth forever.

No ship showed, though there was at least one bad video mockery.

What does this mean?

First, it means that a great many people, who hoped there would be a ship, are not as invested in life as it is on Earth as they are in a different sort of future. I understand their ambivalence. There’s so much here that I don’t like: corruption, lies… well, I won’t go on.

Second, it means they’re willing to stick out their necks and risk being a fool, which is something I chose not to do this time.

And I might have. I only told a few close friends that I, too, had an experience, on September 25, that felt like a portal opening, followed by a vibrational “downloading,” followed by a knowing (not words or vision, though I put these words to it) that a “cosmic ship is approaching.”

I was stunned. And I was skeptical.

A main point of my book, RattleSnake Fire (www.rattlesnakefire.net), is that there seems to be some high-tech chicanery going on, and we can’t always tell what is reality, or what is a message to be trusted.

At Disneyland twenty years ago with my children, I saw a fantastic image cast into the sky – lights shown against a tremendous spray of water in the sky. I’m sure the same thing could be accomplished with lights on clouds or mist. I’ve read references to holograms projected into space. And I’ve experienced emotion-laden vibrations that might have been contact by aliens, or by rogue government high-technicians, or some other cause. And I’ve received predictions that just did not pan out, and later seemed to have been a lesson not to trust every message delivered paranormally.

So I kept my mouth shut, except for those few friends who would understand – and waited.

My experience leads me to conclude that skepticism is not only healthy, but may be a survival requirement. We live in a world, both natural and created, where deceit is ubiquitous. We have insects with fake eyes on their wings, and predators hiding in tall grass. We have banking laws that allow those in the know to invent money legally, while other laws prohibit the common person from doing the same. And every day, strangers in Nigeria ask, via email, for my banking information on the pretext of depositing a half-million dollars in it. Deceit is rampant. I won’t even talk about the bail-out.

My New Age friends say not to focus on the Dark, so we don’t become attached to it. And I agree.

But my story is one of coming full circle, of finding the Third Way, going beyond the polarity of thesis and antithesis, to discover the third unknown, the synthesis: Just as it’s dangerous to focus on the Dark, so is it dangerous to ignore the Dark. Somehow, we must learn a subtle trick – I think of it as the defense dance of aikido – in which we acknowledge the opponent, but focus our energy on where we want to be, and then dance there.

If we never acknowledge the Dark in the first place, we can’t position ourselves in safe relation to it, and it can bite us.

That, I believe, is the message of the cosmic ship no-show. Those who believed too whole-heartedly were unwilling to consider the possibility of a prank. A huge, cosmic-sized prank, which goosed them. And thank goodness for that. I’d rather be goosed and laughed at by humans in denial and maybe even by “the gods” themselves, than whatever worse cosmic tricksters might do.

There are scores of stories throughout history, in which the gods play tricks on humans. The Native American Trickster or Heyoka, the Celtic Loki, and various Greek and Roman gods were now and again engaged in trickery, usually to teach some arrogant – or even humble – human a lesson. Probably not because they’re mean (though they do sometimes seem just too gleeful in their appreciation of their own humor), but because they’ve taken on the responsibility of guiding humans in their evolution.

If “as above so below” applies to the cosmos, for all we know these lessons might save us from climbing happily onto a cosmic slave ship one day.

In the end of my book, I tell the story of a time when seemingly “spiritual” entities gave me a profoundly wonderful and false message. Because of it, I made a fool of myself. When I got over my humiliation, I asked myself what was my lesson and decided it was this: every apparently “spiritual” transmission is not necessarily god-sent.

Some are tricksters. Some just might be not-very-highly-evolved disembodied people between lives with too much time on their hands and who eluded their own helpers and are out causing trouble – cosmic delinquents, if you will.

So, if we’re reading things, or if we’re receiving channeled information, how do we know what to believe? That might be the number one question of our age, and the one we should all be focusing on to answer before we die, or maybe before this next week goes by: How do we know?

Just before I got the transmission that I thought meant a cosmic ship was on the way, I’d begun an essay in which I stated quite simplistically that fraudulent transmissions would probably be characterized by straightforward pictures or words or combinations, which could be beamed into one with technological gimmickry, whereas “true” transmissions would be sensed as whole-body experiences or more subtle sensations – a reasonable theory, I felt ready to share with the world.

And that’s probably why my cosmic helpers included me in the charade, so I’d understand it’s not that simple and I have to keep on working to learn to discern.

It allowed me to imagine a world tremendously changed, in which everyone would finally realize that other beings do exist outside our realm, and they would begin to grapple responsibly with this reality. It made me hopeful. But hope and excitement aren’t enough.

We may need to look again at our assumptions about how our cosmic help communicates with us. Are we receiving clearly?
Are our transmissions jammed or intercepted? Is there something new we’re supposed to learn about discerning true and false transmissions?

As for the masses that might have laughed when the cosmic ship didn’t appear, their cynicism does not make them the wiser ones. They just aren’t on the schedule for this training yet. Everything in its time.