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
drwhome@one.net
Copyright 2003 Donald
Walker, all rights reserved
