The Rabbit Hole


Jim saw me coming down the street and I guess if I didn't look like the devil I at least looked like somebody who'd been doing business with him. At that moment the devil was his crazy friend, Dutch. who he'd talked me into working with. "Why do I want to work with some guy? If I want a massage I'll go to woman."
"You don't understand," he'd said. "This is different."
He was right about that. I was trying to hold myself together and pieces kept falling off. I picked up my ears and put them in my pocket. "I'm sorry, I wasn't listening."

"I said you need to talk to Dutch."

"I don't want to talk to him. He's freaking me out."

"I hate to break it to you, but you're freaking him out, too."

That piqued my interest because it suggested I wasn't in a powerless place, which was what had me on the run. I'd signed on for several sessions of postural integration work because I was burned out from coffee, booze, cigarettes, pot, sex, and hours of writing deep into the night. I was at one of those places where you can't go on until you find some meaning, and it seems to drain out of everything that once held it.

I'd had massage before, even deep tissue sports massage, but this was different. This was not a treatment, it was an encounter with Dutch. It was debatable as to whether he was flying apart or full of spirits, but when he was energized and talking his head would never be still. Different faces would jump around and show up and recede, and I could see the multiplicity of personalities packed into his broad, Indian face. There were some things that put me off about him, mainly his affinity for a kind of inflated overemphasis on physical confrontation; one of his military buddies who did "wet work" came to visit and he seemed a little too enthusiastic about it.



"That's no way for a man to die."

"No... you're right, Ed. A parachute not opening... that's a way to die. Getting caught in the gears of a combine... having your nuts bit off by a Laplander, that's the way I wanna go."

What was not in dispute was that he was an extraordinary body worker, because when he focused all that energy, he was channeling a lot of chi.

During the session that happened a couple of days before I ran into Jim, in the Haight District, I had the strangest experience of my life to that time, and maybe since. I was laying on the table in a pair of boxers and Dutch was working on my chest, near my heart. There was a direct bond between us and it had to do with Native blood. It wasn't something we talked about, but there was a feeling of being related, like brothers. When we were in a session I'd begin to feel the amplification of a kind of masculine nobility personified in the relationship I feel to that branch of my ancestral family.

It was something that was the same in him and in me. He mentioned that when he was a kid he'd go out and spend the night in a tent, burning a candle and chanting Indian chants. I mentioned that I"d kept a pottery bowl of bones in my bedroom, one I'd dug up on the desert. I knew I was part Indian but it was not much different from knowing I was part Scottish or Dutch until that time. He called himself part Aztec, and he looked a lot more Indian than I do I guess. He knew how to move into the collective unconscious, Shamanic style. What I didn't realize was that I knew how to do it, too. I just didn't know that yet. He was my guide.

There was a moment when the continuity simply shifted. At one moment I was having my pectoral muscles opened up. I was in a room full of parrots and dogs, where one of the guys who hung around there might drop in at any moment and complain loudly and at length about some personal crisis having to do with baseball or a woman or, most often, some kind of financial problem. It was not your typical business model, not a particularly private space, and there was no expectation that I was going to make a major energetic shift. I just wanted to feel better than I'd been feeling.

At the next moment I was in a different universe.

It wasn't like being in a dream. It was not distinguishable from ordinary sensory experience. I was in a different body. I was aware of myself as a different person, an Indian, and I had a level of physical power in my body I had not experienced before. It was raw, instinctual power. I was laying on a slab of stone, because something had happened to my spirit, and I was trying to wake up. Beside the stone slab an old medicine man was drumming. I knew that this was a Sing.

At that moment I heard a loud, singsong chanting begin, and from somewhere the part of me that was observing the entire scene knew it was Dutch. When I had shifted back to the expected flow of reality what grabbed my thinking was that this guy was a hypnotist and he'd somehow caused this to happen. It was way more control than I wanted to give to somebody else, especially somebody as intense and unpredictable as Dutch.

Jim listened with an appropriate interest and said, "Yea, well, all I can tell you is that he got just as freaked out as you did, and he's up there carving antlers and beating drums, and the two of you need to talk about what happened."

So I went up to see Dutch and sure enough, he was in a state of high anxiety. I told him what happened to me. It doesn't sound like much to describe it, but the experience was a shock. It was a trip into a center I didn't realize was right there, all the time. "Why'd you start chanting?" I asked. "How'd you know I had flipped into that other reality?"

"I swear to God, Dan, I was working over your heart area and I looked down, and my arms went old and withered. They were an old man's arms. And then that chant just came through. I don't know where it came through from but I remembered it and wrote it down and I found it."

"You found it?"

"Yea. It's a Sioux war chant."

That was my first trip down the rabbit hole, into an alternate universe. It wasn't my last. Another one that was equally magical was shifting into an animal body. What makes this shift interesting is that there is no experience of passivity, or something happening to you. There is a shift, and you wake up somewhere else, doing something else. I wasn't imagining being an animal, I was an animal. I was running through the jungle at high speed. Any perception of the scene was through my eyes. There wasn't the wider and shifting perspective typical of dreams. And the pure physical experience was exhilarating. Dutch was bringing me back and I was pissed.

"Why are you bringing me back?"

"Because your whole body went bright red and I was afraid you were going to die or something."

"I was free, for a moment there."

"Yea. You went down the rabbit hole."

That was twenty-five years ago, I guess. Maybe more. It was the first time that I understood the difference between a religious experience and an experience of religion. What I was raised with was a religion, but it didn't come from my own experience. It came to me because of the culture I was born into. Had I been born into a different culture I'd have a different experience of religion. But for me, and for Dutch, that experience was religious in the sense that it had the miraculous about it. Even if I examine it from the point of view of projection of emotional content into an amorphous field, it's was still miraculous to me.

For the everyday part of me, I went down the rabbit hole, and you never know what you're gonna find when you follow the White Rabbit. That's a way of relating it to a communal understanding. Inside myself it remains a mystery, and a source of wonder, partly because both Dutch and I went to the same place at the same time. I was aware of him as an old medicine man. I saw him in that form and I remember his drumming and I remember the chant that came through.

I remember my body, the feel of the stone, and the power sleeping in my bones. It was a moment that remains timeless, and I won't ever forgot about that. It released an energy which directed my bodywork and hypnosis study, so that it wasn't, for me, like some procedural study. It wasn't anything I could have learned in a school. It is an energy that gives me healing power when it's present. When it's not, I'm still good at what I do. I'm competent at fixing problems. But when it's there I have access to magic.

After that religious experience, I knew that other people could have such experiences, and that what they needed was the same thing I had needed: somebody who can move into the collective unconscious and remain composed. Now there is no Indian separate from my emotional projection. There is an energy field, and it is amorphous. The imposition of form and meaning came from me, and from Dutch. We both longed for some noble masculine identity, something contained in one unifying symbol, or figure. And in concert, as hypnotists, we found it in the unified symbol of the warrior and the healer.

But is that true, or is it a way to file the experience and understand it intellectually?

No matter how much I think about the experience, and the subsequent connections to the Native American energy in my psyche, nothing I think about will ever match the mystery of the moment itself, when I was in two separate places, two separate worlds, connected by a war chant that ran through the vein of the mystery.

It reminds me of the experiences related by William James in, "The Variety of Religious Experience."

James is considered the father of American psychology, and he stands in contrast to the European model, like most things American do. The ground we live on has different bones in it, and different spirits swirl through the air.

Nothing is more American than the pragmatic solution, and James saw truth as pragmatic.

In his study of religious experience, James didn't talk about religion at all. He simply acted as a good scientist, and relayed the varieties of religious experience extant in the population, as the individuals experienced it, and interpreted it for themselves. Meaning, he observed, can't be separated from the person who is having the experience, and it can't be separated from how it serves to unify and make sense of the individual life.

The experience of shifting to the Indian body has a great deal of meaning for me, a practical meaning I use every time I make the shift into the collective unconscious, and hold the energy for somebody else in the same way as Dutch once held it for me, allowing, even if for just a few moments, the doors of perception to be cleansed, and the healing and rebalancing of contact with the infinite.

Posted: Mon - April 2, 2007 at 04:12 PM