Nourishing the Spirit during Times of Demonic Infestation
To die well is to become a warrior-poet of the unknowable - deathpractice2024 part 1
Tablet of Context
preface to deathpractice2024 series
disclaimers
brief introduction
fear
the basic actions 1- yawning
housekeeping
1. Preface to the deathpractice2024 series
concurrently with the series of articles on artmaking and language remixing (Recipes for Breaking Free from The Matrix/artmaking2024), i will be attempting to cut to the root about the basic steps to die well and “heal trauma” according to what i have found and experienced.
the two series are like looking at the same thing via different positions. the other series is tagged #artmaking2024 and this series is tagged #deathpractice2024. they are parts of a whole.
In this series, I view “Healing trauma” as only a diluted colloquialism at this point in time that can mean almost anything to anyone, and so through this i will also expand upon what is probably actually happening during that process.
this combines with the physical, energetic & psycho-emotional requirements to deal with gu syndrome (chronic infections/parasites/fungus/yeast such as lyme and many others) as well as anything that can be considered a mental illness or even demon/ghost possession.
you may think this is a far too sweeping statement but that is partly based on the deficiency of the modern western psycho-medical model and narrative.
my intent is to provide people with at least some of a map that leads from this experience of being controlled or tortured or hollowed out (in a ghostly way) by “nefarious” forces — to an experience of tranquility or at least partial agency in a dance-of-death with whatever afflictive forces are part of their fate or karma. this includes the lived reality that we are in many ways carrying on what our ancestors could not resolve, and that there is very little guarantee that we can finish the job satisfactorily. (i will definitely unpack this statement more)
this sort of acceptance or equanimity in the face of such direct reality might be blocked by feelings of shame, humiliation, betrayal, abandonment, isolation, scapegoating, abuse, addiction, pain and lack of pleasure and more. These emotions and emotional narratives are often “in the way” of truly entering into a sacred* role of ‘Warrior-Poet’. of accepting our job with no guarantee of any “reward” except the capacity to enact integrity.
*sacred means to bless or make holy/whole via sacrifice. this requires us to also unpack what sacrifice means in terms of the ideas of loss, bloodletting, ritual killing and offerings. this pertains to the ongoing animistic relationship of humans-as-nature with other-beings-as-nature, given that we are really on top of each other all the time and have “trampled the roses of our neighbors”.
indeed, “integrity is its own reward”, however in the times when pain, fear and hunger are the most intense, we may find ourselves possessed by the worst aspects of ourselves and our ancestors, which then creates a cascade of afflictive fate such as ruined reputation, gossip, and negative self-talk amongst many other issues, not the least of which are addiction and narcissistic tendences, the hallmarks of ghosthood.
this method in its entirety complete with pedagogical research can be found in my 8-class series on deathpractice, but it is always good for me to find more and more ways to “remix” the methods and try to distill them down to an essence that (almost) anyone could practice.
2. DISCLAIMERS
i cannot guarantee you will “get what you need/want” from my transmission of this information. i cannot guarantee this information will be believed, appreciated or applied correctly. it does not provide a “cure” in the sense of what westerners mean when they use that word. it is not a winning lottery ticket into a heaven of material wealth and prosperity. it does not guarantee more money or finding your “true love”.
What it is, is ultimately mysterious and brings you into more direct contact with reality. What it aims to do is increase the signal strength between the “shen” or heartmind/spirit - the impersonal collection of spirits that make up a person, and the person’s personality or “inner qi character”. It is a way to die with less ignorance and fantasy, a way to transition through the dream of reality with more agency and creativity, and a way to curtail various addictions and possession states including so-called afflictive emotions.
3. Brief Introduction
the origin of my journey into this realm began somewhat when i was having regular visions (waking dreams) many years ago. in some of these visions, relevant to this story, i saw a very young boy, darker skinned in a jungle type area, perhaps the Caribbean or south america. Details to note is that the boy was completely naked and had no tools or belongings of any kind. Truly alone and naked in the jungle.
The essence (and terror/anxiety) i felt during these glimpses would lead me to attempt to create a body of work that could be implemented in exactly the same sort of situation: a person without any assistance, shelter, clothing or tools, completely “alone” and naked in the wild. Since I have no real idea on how to survive in the common sense of that term in such an environment, and this boy also did not seem to exist in the modern age, the seeds of deathpractice were sprouted in me. To go beyond panic and despair into something more immediate and real, a contact without artifice or pretense, without past or future.
what do we have when we have nothing left? this is the fundamental inquiry and the gate we must pass through. this is what Ming might call “the red path”.
what i found is that even when overtaken by insanity, sickness, addiction, demons, parasites and malevolent forces, we do have access to another state of mind that can never be corrupted but whose access seems obstructed due to cultural hypnosis and a lack of practice.
this is not easy, and failure is common, but failure is not a final ending, indeed there may never truly be a “finality”. failure in this sense is more like the strike of a mighty animal that knocks the wind out of us and stuns us momentarily. we may be hit by that force many times and increase our injury. and even in the most bloody of heaps, there is a door. That door, the red door, is available at any time, though we seem to only see it when we are in such perilous moments.
One of my goals here is to help you see it now, so that you can see it always, and be able to commune with that threshold in ways that fundamentally change your perception of self, so that you will always have an ally at the worst of times.
i have found that poetry, poetic language and poetic aesthetics is key to developing this faculty, to increasing its rate of appearance in our perception, like a flicker or glitch that appears in space, like a hidden layer of reality just underneath the normalized dream of society.
poetry stems from the word poiesis, meaning the process of emergence of something that did not previously exist. auto-poiesis is something like “self-becoming” or an emergence from what-is of a form or phenomena that could not be seen or predicted from the surface or from the previous incarnation or perspective.
deathpractice is an auto-poietic process, a process of emergence that cannot be predicted or controlled, but that can be initiated, initialized, catalyzed by a person. we can create the conditions. we can learn how to foster the process.
so, with that, i will begin to introduce the basic actions followed by basic accessory practices and hygiene. when taken as a whole, the methods blend and mix together.
Pain, Fear & Hunger: The Three Wisdom Forces. A partial introduction
4. Fear
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
―Frank Herbert, Dune
“We are very afraid of being powerless. But we have the power to look deeply at our fears, and then fear cannot control us.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
“Invite your fear into consciousness, and smile through it; every time you smile through your fear, it will lose some of its strength.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm
“Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear?”
― Lao-Tzu
“When you have no hope, you have nothing to fear, nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to lose.”
― Dzogchen Ponlop, Rebel Buddha: On the Road to Freedom
“If you talk to the animals they will talk with you
and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them
you will not know them, and what you do not know
you will fear. What one fears one destroys.”
― Chief Dan George
We are Free to Fear
Freedom is our basic nature, yet it appears to be untrue. We claim to have free will at the same time we claim to be imprisoned by fate. Well, which is true? Both, and neither.
Many of us have experienced being put in an intolerable position, one with seemingly no way out, no way to ease the negative feelings. At the end of our rope, thrashing about because we think we have a thing called free will.
well, what good is freedom if we use it to create more harm, more catastrophe?
freedom without a grounded practice of restraint just serves to illuminate the most poisonous aspects of us. in this hyper-privileged and also oppressive society, our sense of freedom and free will actually causes us to harm each other and nature via our entitlement, the entitlement of freedom meaning “i can do whatever i want”. I call this “Whatever-I-wantism” and i believe it is the true religion of the post-modern western worldview.
To exorcise the demon of selfishness, we must learn to de-personalize our process, while cultivating inner energy and inner agency. This agency is a co-agency, the capacity to restrain our impulses and adapt to the changing situation. Wisdom gives us the freedom to adapt. Wisdom helps us to cut through our fear-based perceptions and delusions, our dishonest and inaccurate narratives about the world.
How do we begin again? How do we initiate ourselves into wisdom when our culture won’t help us? How do we live peacefully amongst an infinity of distractions, addictions and propagandas?
The initiatory event is akin to this:
Imagine you are traveling in the wilderness to a secret destination. A cave. You must do all the basic work to travel there. It may take much of your life and resources to do so. You may need to hire guides or learn many skills to even make it to the mouth of the cave. This is the first stage of fear. This stage may always seem impossible, so you never make the attempt. Many people are like this.
The second stage is for the people who make it to the mouth of the cave. In this stage, you may need to build a camp at the edge of the cave and learn to exist there for a long time. You may never actually enter the cave. But you may gain something through sheer proximity. However, this is a place many people stop. They are confused about what the cave is and what might be in the cave. They fear losing all manner of things. The cave represents something, but they do not yet have a willingness to encounter it, to have direct experience or intimacy. This is where many people get stuck.
The third stage of fear is like being in a dream or nightmare. You may feel forced into the cave long before you are ready. You may have been thrust into an initiatory experience through life events, such as a car accident, rape, violence or many other possible phenomena. Even dreams and fate may have flung you into something. But here, people get stuck because they resist and deny their experience. They feel they did not consent, so they never complete the arc of transformation. This leads to a constantly fragmented spirit and psyche. They always narrate their experience in a false, ignorant or dishonest way. They are close to direct encounter, but they always look away and make something up at the last second. Even if they think they are seeing accurately, there is a kind of unconscious fog that masks relationality. Some people can be stuck here their entire lives and even beyond that.
The fourth stage of fear happens when one has crossed the threshold of stage two willingly or least begins to orient while in stage three. This is the loss of sense of sanity and/or control. This is when impulses, reactions, fears, traumas and more begin to take over the body and mind. This is where all the training must be applied, but for some, the intensity is too high, and they never practiced correctly enough at a high enough intensity to weather the storm. This is where a greater plan, context and strategy matter. This is where one must truly become the path itself. If one can learn to play in this stage of fear, and return again and again, then one can perhaps say they have begun initiation into reality.
Due to our reactions to the “big 3”, we must dive into them beyond the culturally coded mythology. We react to fear with anxiety - worry, addiction, depression, neurosis, despair… it appears to come in a myriad of forms. When we can perceive how they all track back upstream to anxiety and fear, we can learn to go back even further, the origin of phenomena. But first we must learn to manage our anxiety moment-to-moment.
For many people it will take a combination of interventions to manage their trained biochemistry away from chronic fear/anxiety. This includes the practices listed below, and generally, targeted herbs, proper nutrition & exercise appropriate to the person’s constitution, and various other conditions such as living in a mold-free house in the right climate for them, having trusted friends/family that actually love them (a real impossibility for many), etc. However impossible some of these may seem, something is always better than nothing in terms of management and harm reduction. The mind is really the first and last line of defense when it comes to possession, obsession and addiction-type issues.
the basic actions:
there are many basic actions and in further editions i will expand on each, however, please note that i cannot proclaim to know your particular afflictive patterns, ghosts, karma and demons. what you might need might be highly specific and require multiple vectors of intervention. I myself have many helpers, which include medical doctors, spiritual mentors, and colleagues with various skills.
5. yawning as the primal poietic act
To engage in mindful yawning & pandiculation is easy, we do it many times a day, however we tend to skip over the full pathway of the moment. We try to “skip over” and “get on with it” instead of yawning and pandiculating as a conscious, full, healing moment.
If you intend to yawn deliberately, ten times, then around yawn 3 or 4 and above, you will begin to feel better and better. The more you need to yawn, the more backed up you are in terms of stress and exhaustion. If someone is very depleted/stressed, a full session of yawning may take 20-30 minutes.
As you yawn, you can move slowly and mindfully, following the sequence of pandiculation, which is:
voluntary contraction
slow, aware, controlled release
complete relaxation
this can and should be done multiple times in a row, aiming for ten. do this multiple times a day. the easiest way to pandiculate is to “add it” to yawning because yawning IS a pandiculation process. We are just adding movement and “postures” to the yawning. Another way to think about it is to go into some kind of “pose” like a squat or down-dog or whatever, and then YAWN in that pose and pandiculate in that position.
As we venture farther into various “concepts” and phenomena that are not generally included in western secular post-modernism, you may perceive how yawning and breathing are basic spiritual phenomena that are not separate from material reality. This does not mean that one should crave or expect “visions” or various other effects that one might fantasize are necessary parts of “healing”.
Extra Resources
these videos are much longer. if you had any idea how much time i’ve spent learning these things in the last 15 years…
Remember, these are the basics, from a dualistic view, a materialist view. Because they are dualistic/materialist, they appear to be “easier” for the western mind to grasp. But after one has integrated and practices these behaviors, doors that were once ignored begin to be perceived.
2019 interview, 1 hr 17 minutes
2024 interview 30 minutes
Housekeeping
thus endeth part one of the giant project. both the deathpractice2024 and artmaking2024 projects will continue as serialized bits for as long as it takes, and eventually be re-organized and compiled into something else. the information herein can be used to create a curriculum, but that is entirely other project. mainly these series are an explanation of the ingredients necessary to create recipes and meals. and that’s to say nothing about the bespoke nature of individual realities. that’s also why i do yijing and polestar, because, one size does not fit all, everything has to be adjusted and adapted to fit the context.
that being said, if you want personalized mentorship, please inquire about sessions. or, if you find what i’m doing valuable, please:
Imagine we teach this to kids in schools… jeeze…. Group yawning and nap time through to adulthood.
thankyou