Part One: Shaman's Blues

It was shortly before the turn of the century when I embarked upon an intensive period of shamanic journeying. It was an episode in my life that altered my perception of how the world works in various ways.

Meditation practice, once providing rich succour, had hit a brick wall; in truth, had hit that wall some years back. I was stumbling on the long winding road out of organised Buddhism. I badly needed a break, or a breakthrough; some way to pierce the limiting bubble of consciousness which I felt trapped in. 

I had always felt an affinity with 'shamanism' (whatever that might turn out to be, precisely!). The animistic attitude, connection with the natural world, the multidimensional view of the universe: all of these rang true. Though I had never properly practiced it, Tantra was the corner of the Buddhist world where I felt most at home, and Tantra has its origins in a shamanic worldview, where energy is all.

Independently but synchronistically, an old on-off friendship of mine (with 'Liberty Fox' in the life story sections) was going through an 'on' phase, and Liberty was experiencing a similar upsurge in curiosity for doing some shamanic-based practices. So it was that we undertook the journeying at the same time.

Having researched the topic, we discovered that the basics were gloriously simple. You lay down horizontally, put on a cassette tape of shamanic journeying, adjusted the headphones, and followed guidelines that you had memorised previously.    

The first journey was to find a power animal. The technique worked astonishingly easily - it was as if my mind was fully ripe and ready for the event - and I quickly found myself flying through space to a deserted beach in northern Majorca. I looked around and waited: sand, black rocks, cliffs, but no sign of life. Then, appearing from behind a large rock appeared a gorilla. What was a gorilla doing here, walking through my consciousness? I knew nothing about gorillas, and never gave them a thought. Yet here was one, turning up to become my power animal. 

Gorilla is not at all the typical shamanic power animal: bear, wolf, eagle, crow, even, fit the bill. But gorilla became my constant companion on the many visits to the 'Lowerworld' of shamanic cosmology over the three years to come.

As my friend and I compared notes, we were amazed to find quite a congruence between our experiences. Despite journeying completely independently, we were meeting the same kind of characters - witches, wizards, heroes, princesses, warrior kings and warrior women. What this was all about was a mystery to us, but it arrived convincingly replete with significance and meaning.

One day Liberty Fox turned up brandishing a book. "It's all here" he announced. The volume in question was by Carl Jung - 'Man and his Symbols' most likely, but I don't actually remember. The pages were teeming with figures and adventures straight out of the shamanic journeys, except that they were derived from cultures past and present from all over the world. 

We were, Jung explained, tapping into what he called the collective unconscious and the realm of archetypes: layers of consciousness that were common to humanity across the board of space and time. I was sold immediately, and became an instant student of archetypes, not out of any philosophical speculation, but from direct personal experience.

The shamanic journeys also brought into focus for the first time the element of synchronicity. Journeying was turning out a little like psychedelic exploration: layers of experience that were vastly different to everyday linear reality were just a hair's breadth away. So near, yet so far.

All of a sudden synchronicities began to manifest in relation to the content of the journeys. A typical example. One day an orang utan appeared in one of the shamanic voyages. As with the gorilla, I had no knowledge of or interest in orang utans. Two days later, I boarded the commuter train in Wimbledon on my way home from work, when I was bowled over to see on the empty seat opposite me a newspaper supplement left wide open at a two-page spread detailing the life and plight of the orang utan.

Such events became commonplace. The journeying was especially effective, I believe, because I adopted a 'see what happens' approach, rather than the goal-and-solution attitude which is common in such shamanic practice. Hang loose and see what takes place; relinquish control for once in your life. In this way I felt great resonance with Jung's notion of 'autonomous contents of the unconscious'.    

Journeying introduced a different order of reality to that of 'normal' everyday experience. Linear cause-and-effect was superseded by an overall, unifying connectivity. Things happen because they are related, and it is their time. Jung terms synchronicity 'meaningful acausal relationship'. That's pretty close to the mark.

Part Two: Tough Love 

With this connection to a different order of reality came a feeling of being in contact with something... higher?..... bigger?...... beyond? A force, or forces, were at work in life that were hitherto unrecognised. It was simultaneously inspirational and scary: 'ego' was being taken outside its comfort zone. 

The reality of synchronicity made itself known in a fierce manner. Enter the mountain: 

Beinn Alligin is a mountain on the west coast of Scotland. As one of the 'Torridon Giants', it is one of the more celebrated of the Scottish peaks, in a region of needle-sharp ridges and uniquely rough and rocky contours.  

When I was in my mid-teens our family attempted to climb Beinn Alligin. We failed. We tried to breach its near-vertical ramparts by a direct climb to the first of its two summits. Mission impossible. A few days later, we set out again, this time tracing our way around the base of the mountain, searching for an entry. After hours in the steady rain, we hit the top of a pass, to look out over a rock-and-lochan strewn wilderness, more fitting for the Moon than this planet. Mission aborted again.

I had climbed many mountains by then, and never needed to retreat. Until now, on Beinn Alligin. Twice. It kind-of rankled, but I got on with life. A few years later, I stopped going to the mountains, and forgot. Or didn't. Not deep down, anyway.

Fast forward thirty years, and my wife and I returned to the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and the ascent of Beinn Alligin resurfaced. It felt like unfinished family business, something that had to be achieved. We set off one still, grey summer morning up the path that is now all-too well worn, climbing steeply up the shallow corrie, steadily but without too much difficulty. Into the clouds, and onto the first summit of Beinn Alligin.

Come evening time, I decided to call my mother and tell her the news. For me, it seemed like some unfinished family business had been done, a chapter closed. "Hi mum. Guess what? We climbed Beinn Alligin." "Well I never...."

It was the last time I spoke to my mother. I saw her once more, two weeks later, as my sister and I sat at her bedside while she breathed her last. Unfinished family business....

My wife and I moved to the Scottish Highlands. And in May 2012, during a rare warm sunny spell, I got a phone call from a friend. He was going to climb Beinn Alligin, traverse the whole ridge, both summits, it was needed for his Munro list. I was off to the west coast like a shot.

The weekend was surreal. Partly the weather conditions, the crystal-clear visibility. Partly the magnificence of that walk and scramble along the narrow ridge of Beinn Alligin. And partly because my friend talked incessantly throughout the traverse, much of it on the level of office gossip (I discovered much later that he was traumatised by a knife-edge ascent he had made the previous day on the Isle of Skye).

We added a couple more simpler peaks to his log of mountains the following day, and I arrived home the Sunday afternoon in a state of considerable bliss. I put my key in the door and a funny feeling came over me. Entering the kitchen, I was aware of the sound of pouring water inside the house, and a strong musty odour.

Entering the living room, I found a scene of complete devastation. The ceiling was on the floor, swimming in a newly-formed lake of water, which was expanding rapidly as a waterfall cascaded down from above. On further inspection, I discovered that the bedroom ceiling was also on the living room floor, disintegrated in a soggy mess.

The water tank in the loft had sprung a leak while I was away. Rather, an enormous hole had appeared without warning. It transpired that the neighbours heard a huge 'thunk' on Saturday evening, but decided it was a rubbish bin falling over or something. In reality, it was the ceilings collapsing, at precisely the time that my friend and I were coming off the Beinn Alligin ridge.

Notes on the rest of the story: the most acute trauma of my life; damaged goods filled a medium-sized skip; house uninhabitable for three months, as it was cleared out, dried out, put back together again, redecorated; those three months spent homeless, moving from temporary accommodation to temporary accommodation.

The destruction of your home, your house, all that is 'yours', by water. It doesn't require great knowledge of Jung's psychology to see the meaning.

Such was the dark and tangled synchronicity surrounding the Torridon Giant of Beinn Alligin.

Part Three: Nearly Dead

My conscious experience remained obstinately linear; thus, any other order of reality had to burst through with some force. It would manifest in dramatic, not to say destructive-teaching, mode. 

Around three years later, I fell severely ill. Following a brief respite, I had been back selling outdoor clothing and equipment. I was in a new location, a little further from my house. In the morning I would trudge the 50 minutes to work, endure several tedious hours of under-employment, then trudge back home, or catch the bus if I felt too tired. It was late autumn, getting on winter, so I would often walk back to the house in the dark, which enveloped both outer and inner worlds.

New Year came. A streaming cold, a crunching migraine, and then the coughing started up. If it was today, I would be a classic convid case, one of the serious ones. The coughing would not stop, and I was exhausted. It was as if it was trying to clear something out, but was unable to do so. I had never been ill like this before. It was vicious, relentless, designed to finish me off. For weeks I tried to sleep (I couldn't really sleep) in vertical position, since this helped reduce the coughing a little. I tried to get to the doctor's, twice, but lacked the energy. When I did, the message came: nothing to do. Be patient. It will go away. It didn't. 

One late afternoon I was sitting in a chair and began to sink. Slowly, at ease, no resistance. I entered this underworld, a warm fuzzy place, and Cernunnos, the antlered god of that realm, approached me with a cohort of his followers. "Would you like to come with me? We can go. You can be free of this place." I was invited to death, the seduction of fake oblivion. But I declined the offer.

This seemed to mark a turning point. After making that decision I began to recover; there might be a future after all. Something big had changed during the course of this illness, however, it became transparent. It was as if a channel of communication had opened up. "You are not working like that any longer. That is finished." A voice spoke clearly and unequivocally to me. Still in the long process of recovery, I would walk around the house in a semi-delirium, repeating time and again: "Everything's changed. Everything's different now." I didn't know how, but it was true. All of this was considerably disquieting for my wife...                    

What exactly was different took a while to emerge into consciousness. But it was that 'something' was now in communication with me which previously had not. That 'something' could be termed higher self, or daemon, or soul, or connection with Source even. Giving a name was secondary; the vital realisation was that I was now being informed by another element in my life. I had manoeuvred myself into the position where this communication had taken place, and now I had to learn to live with it.

One thing about this new element was crystal clear. It had no interest in the affairs of everyday life whatsoever. It couldn't care less whether I had money, family, friends; food, security, a roof over my head. It was spirit, and was interested solely in the affairs of spirit. No job, got to live on your savings for a year or  two? Couldn't care less.....

As time has passed, this non-linear, synchronistic aspect, accompanied by connection with some apparent 'other' or 'higher' element, has become ongoing. And as it has become more integrated, or incorporated, into everyday life, it has manifested in more obviously benevolent ways: uncompromising and challenging, yes; fierce and destructive far less so.

Linear cause-and-effect continues, but running parallel is this other order of being. Here, time and space do not exist, at least not in the more conventional way of understanding them. Things are vastly more fluid. As an example, I have the common experience while going about my daily activities that everything has actually already happened. I am simply acting out a part, or a role, in a play that is complete, but needs to be done physically and literally. My life has already taken place, this is simply a necessary re-run.

The misleading view that can be gained from relying too exclusively on Jung is that synchronicity is something 'special', 'extraordinary'. It is not: it appears so only from the vantage point of a life primarily identified with the time-and-space soap drama.

Having incarnated into a world that manifests itself most obviously in a 3D manner, we will always have one foot in the past-present-future, birth-old age-death business. Expanded minds, however, will increasingly experience this as a side show to the main act in town, where time and space become firstly more fluid, before dissolving into the realm of illusion. They can be seen as a game to be played as such, until the choice is made to leave it behind and head for distant realms of consciousness. Or return to this 3D world in full awareness....