ENTITIES, ORBS, ANGELS AND POWER ANIMALS
Over the years there have been increasing occurrences of entities of one form or another in my partner Robin’s and my reality, especially hanging out with us during our time in the American Southwest desert area and in Hawaii. As written in prior mystical musings, Robin and I have had orbs, Indians, and power animals from time to time impressing our world. So, let’s take a peek at these exotic discarnate intelligences and nonhuman entities which seem to occupy an undefined mysterious place in our human experience.
Throughout history and in all cultures we have stories of all sorts of entities such as fairies, power animals, ghosts, gnomes, angels, and a myriad of strange lights. Now we have orbs showing up everywhere. Taken for granted in all times and places, these entities have appeared in a wide variety of often elaborate forms. This large array of life forms and peculiar creatures tells us of a fundamental belief system that is part of our human experience.
Because of the limited reductionist view of science about these beings, most often designating them as pathological figments of our ego imagination, we are lead to believe the entities are only dependent upon our conception; they are created mentally by us and have no independent existence. These phenomena are creating a lot of trouble for modern reductionist scientific humanism, because the entities are non-physical and have an existence apart from being perceived by humans. This is where science falls apart because it can’t explain what’s going on and simply discounts the great many people who experience these beings as disconnected from reality and nuts.
Having personally spent a good deal of time involved in the shamanic realm, it seems to me most practical to place these entities within the human understanding and practice of shamanism. In this place the spirits are not only identified but are seen as helping, and we are able to give this invisible world a frame of reference that is of higher intent. This allows us the opportunity to hang our societal hats in a place containing whatever insight and wisdom we find represented by these forces. This moves us from the scientific dogma and the repression of organized religion back into the voices of magical nature which have been the dominate path throughout most of human existence.
Eight years ago I flat lined, died for a short time in a hospital, while presenting a conference in Cancun, Mexico (this was a wild shamanic experience I’ll get into in a future musing). But, after I came back to life and was stabilized, and contrary to the doctors at the Merida hospital telling me I would die if I left, I simply needed to get out of the place. Robin hired a car and driver and we headed off back to the Caribbean coast where I planned to rest, recuperate, and if need be pass on over in beautiful surroundings. Instead of the ugly freeway through the Yucatan Peninsula, we decided to take a secondary, but longer road taking us to the ancient Mayan site of Coba along the way. I sat in the back seat and drifted in and out of conscious awareness and in a sort of dream state saw the face of an animal - a cat. Just outside Coba as we drove along this little used road through the jungle, the driver let out a yell and hit the brakes and stopped. Sitting there in the middle of the road was an ocelot, a wild tiger like cat. The driver, even though he had spent his life in the Yucatan, was astonished in that he had never before seen one. It just sat there calmly, so I got my brightly painted cane (baston) bought for me from a Mayan at the Merida open market, donned my panama hat, got out of the car and stood there making eye contact with this beautiful and fearless animal. This went on for about 30 seconds before it disappeared into the jungle. During that short connection, I began to really know, that contrary to the doctor’s beliefs, I was going to live.
Ocelot from David Carson's 2013 Oracle
Some years later, over a cup of coffee at the Downtown Subscription coffee shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I told my pal David Carson about the Yucatan ocelot. David is of Native American Choctaw descent and the co-creator of “Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals”. He works with us on our Great North American Southwest Expeditions and knows his way around mysterious realms. He told me that I had a meeting with my power animal, that this ocelot was a spirit entity messenger and that I could call upon it for guidance any time. And let me tell you, I can use all of the guidance I can get, so since then I take my ocelot spirit entity with me wherever I go. Like me, she doesn’t seem to care much for airport security and airplanes, but she comes along anyway. I call her Spiritwalker from Dr. Hank Wesselman’s book by the same name.
Peter Gorman, who is legendary in the Amazon and leader of our Sacred Medicines, Sacred Ceremonies, Sacred Sites tours to Peru, describes many similar power animal and entity experiences had by participants during their shamanic excursions.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, another of our faculty members, points out:
“Entities exist in many realms. There are the realms of the dead, the realms of dreams, and the realms of the imagination. There are also the spirits of animals, the spirits of the Earth and solar system and stars, and the angelic stellar intelligences. There are spirits of each species of plant or mushroom, each with its own way of being, its own way of seeing and experiencing the world, of participating in the whole.
“All of these things are part of the shamanic fauna: the wolf spirits, crow spirits, other animal spirits, plant spirits, tree spirits, and so on. If you become like a hawk, you fly like a hawk, you see like a hawk, and you take on a hawk-like quality of being. These sort of spirits are biologically grounded. The angelic spirits are rooted in actual stars and planetary systems and galaxies. The whole realm is a system of intelligence that in some sense or another have a bodily aspect or were at one time in bodies, like the departed.”
