Spiritual Coherence, Trauma, and Shamanism

As we develop in the womb and come into this world as a newborn baby, our timeless spirit and our new physical body become familiar with each other. They bind together, or cohere.

These are two distinct parts of us—our body and spirit—but they integrate to act as one. Our spirit-mind dons our little carnal body and brain like an Earthsuit to navigate this dense physical world… and the suit will evolve (hallelujah for that, eh?) as we grow and develop in the course of our lifetime.

Credit: Alibaba Group

Reincarnation and Coherence

Our spirit has probably been living on the Third level (read more about the spirit levels… ) and has decided or agreed to accept another lifetime on Earth. The decision to reincarnate usually just involves our spirit acceding to its inner voice… sometimes encouraged by counsel with an ethereal guide.

Reincarnation is one of many adventures available to us on the Third level, and we don’t take it lightly. It’s a major decision. We know that life on that noble-savage Earth is going to be an illusory dream that seems all too real… like an amusement park complete with roller coaster, tunnel of love, house of horrors, and other attractions that lift the heart, challenge the intellect, and stir up the hormones. It’s a strange world, after all….

It’s bound to have moments of pleasure and pain… times of beauty and inspiration and excitement and torment.

In fact, we can actually preview that next lifetime from the Third level to a small degree. See who our parents and siblings will be… what sort of major life decisions we may face… under what economic, cultural, and familial conditions we’ll probably live… in what manner we’ll probably die… that sort of thing.

Unraveling of Body and Spirit

So, we come to Earth as a coherent body and spirit with a big terrestrial adventure ahead of us.

Whether our body and spirit remain coherent throughout our lifetime or whether they unravel at different times, for different reasons, and to different degrees… these factors can have a big impact on the quality of our life.

Our spirit might take excursions out of our body for various reasons.

• When our body dies, of course, our spirit knows it’s time to scoot… time to return home to the Third level. We often have a coming-home party by our many spirit friends and family over there, and we’ll probably have to go through a recuperation process that lasts several weeks of Earth time… a sort of compressed PTSD therapy program.
• When our body sleeps at night, our spirit has an opportunity to go home to the Third level for a visit. It’s not always a happy visit, as we can deduce from our dreams. Our spirit has been living on Earth, and it’s picked up a lot of the dramas and peculiarities of this dense world, so when it visits back home, it’s a bit like a soldier entrenched on the front lines of battle who goes home for a two-week leave. The soldier is jumpy and nervous at home and feels out of place. He expects a lot of danger and raw human emotion that’s present on the battlefield but just doesn’t exist at home. Likewise, when our spirit leaves the body at night to visit the Third level, the earthly baggage we bring along will often cause a stir over there. We might search desperately for bathrooms (which, judging by my dreams, just aren’t very prevalent on the Third level). Guy-spirits might bring along a chip on their shoulder or a pup-tent in their pants. Lady-spirits might bring along lots of clothes and cosmetics that are just way too cumbersome over on the Third level. (Regina and I returned from a trip to Florida recently, and she woke up with that dream about clothes and cosmetics just this morning, conveniently enough.) I’m sure there’s a lot of eye-rolling on the Third level as their carnate spirit friends visit on their nightly leaves of absence… lugging their bags of drama.
• When our spirit thinks our body’s going to die—we’re in a bad accident, we’re gravely ill, we’re subjected to torture or sexual abuse, we get heavily intoxicated with alcohol or drugs, we’re struck by lightning, we’re watching Fox News 🙂 … that sort of thing—we may leave the body until the trauma is over, then return to begin the difficult healing process. In these cases, while our spirit is out of the office, it becomes an open-house event for other spirits nearby… usually those from the shadow world, who move in and out of our world routinely. (Read more about that shadow world…) In the case of prolonged torture or abuse, the troubled spirits probably resonate with and are attracted by the troubled emotions present in the situation… the lust or rage or sadistic desires of the perpetrator… the fear or desperation or confusion of the victim. Some of these troubled spirits may develop an attachment with the body of the victim, and others might stay enmeshed in the life of the abuser. When the troubled spirits become enmeshed in the lives of people who are involved in prolonged trauma, the personalities of the people change accordingly.

So, when we undergo severe trauma, our spirit often leaves our body. Later, if the body is salvageable, our spirit may choose to return for the healing process… to resume our lifetime. If our spirit chooses not to return to the body, our lifetime ends and our body dies… as a rule.

There are exceptions, such as walk-ins and zombies… if you’re into that sort of thing… or vice versa:

• There are said to be “walk-ins,” in which the original spirit leaves the body with the agreement that a substitute spirit will move in and develop a new relationship with the body. (Read more…) I’ve not had any personal experience with walk-ins, other than the barber shop kind, and I suspect that determining whether a person’s spirit is the original or a walk-in would be a difficult task at best… leaving plenty of room for uncertainty. Also, I believe there are some complicated spiritual mechanics involved in the coherence between our body and spirit… such as the proverbial silver cord… and I’m not sure if or how that stuff could be adjusted to accommodate a walk-in spirit with any sort of coherence.
• There are even more bizarre exceptions in which a dead body is inhabited or manipulated temporarily by spirits, causing the lifeless body to lumber around like… well, like the zombie that it is. These rare and unnatural situations involving zombies usually have to be facilitated by a shaman working with a team of clever spirits. It’s probably as hard for those spirits to manipulate a dead human body as it would be for you or me to animate a dead cat with puppet strings… and about as fulfilling. Zombie work is probably low on the list of popular spirit careers. (I tried to find a link to a good, realistic article about zombies as dead bodies inhabited by spirits, but the Internet is rife with zombie nonsense… attributing the zombie phenomenon to viruses, chemicals, magic… or dismissing it altogether as myth and fiction. This is the best I could find… but it raises more zombie questions for me than it answers.)

Incoherence Opens the Veil, for Better or Worse

A person with a coherence of body and spirit is typically insulated from the strange spiritual activity that goes on in the shadow world, while a person who loses that coherence becomes open and vulnerable. (I suspect that is basically a true statement, but oversimplified… as it involves the interactions between body and spirit, and between the carnal and spiritual realms… interactions which are complex beyond modern human comprehension… at least this human’s comprehension. Maybe I’m just not modern enough… I still listen to music from the 60s and 70s… but I digress….)

In any case, whenever the original spirit leaves the body and another spirit moves in, there are always changes in our thought processes, moods, and personality as the new spirit mind begins to work with our brain… like a new software program installed on an old computer.

Incoherence of body and spirit can be a mixed blessing. On one hand it can lead to…

• Mental illness, e.g. multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia and dissociative disorder.

On the other hand, it can open us up to…

• Shamanistic abilities such as mediumship, spiritual healing, and prophecy.

So when our spirit leaves the body and other spirits move in for a while, they can make our lives better or worse, depending largely on their dispositions and on our reactions to their presence in our lives.

… As an Opening to Mental Disorders

When we consider that these invisible visitors are usually from the shadow world, which is home to a vast spectrum of human personality types, many of them troubled and confused, we begin to see a correlation between body-spirit coherence and mental health. The relationship between trauma, spirits, and mental illness is fairly familiar worldwide, but so far not well understood. (Read a researcher’s view here…   and a more scientific view here…. ) It’s largely steeped in fear and ignorance, thanks to both the health and the entertainment industries… and that just makes matters worse for those who have an incoherence of body and spirit.

…As a Path to Shamanism

The shadow world of Earth is inhabited not just by confused and troubled spirits, but also by lots of deceased scientists and doctors and artists and others… even some extraterrestrials (the so-called “Grays” and “Arcturians,” for example).

Arcturian.   (Source: vibrakeys.)    (click link below to see how it was photographed)

(Read about the Arcturian picture… )

Many of these spirits and ETs interact with Earth in all sorts of ways. For example, our ITC spirit friends told us that the crop circles (at least some of those that weren’t engineered by Doug and Dave) were created by entities in the shadow world.

Psychic surgery, energy healing, channeling, and probably all forms of legitimate shamanism are achieved by a sensitive human (or team of humans) working with a team of spirits who have mastered the ability to manipulate things in our world, using the shaman as a carnal vehicle for their spiritual efforts and energies.

It makes sense to me that shamanistic skills are facilitated—maybe even made possible—by a person’s incoherence between body and spirit. The person’s spirit is willing and able to step aside to work with other spirits and give them access to the body of the shaman, so that they can perform their jobs of healing, communication, and so on.

This can be an energy-draining process for a gifted healer or trance channel, as the visiting spirit specialists draw on the shaman’s life energies to manipulate material substances… opening patients’ bodies during psychic surgery, taking over the channel’s vocal cords or forming an etheric voicebox in order to speak in an audible voice.

[Editor’s note: I had intended this to be the final article of the Shaman series, and it was to be about a woman (“Kate”) who has grown gravely ill over the past decade and has worked closely with many shamans. As it turns out, this article (above) contains a lot of basic information that makes it easier to understand Kate’s situation… which I plan to write about next.    — Mark Macy]