"The One Who Comes Back" Podcast on Ontology and Anthropology
Written transcript:
Welcome
This is Healing Evolution Podcast. I am your host Ocean Moon.
Today features an autobiographical Monologue about my most significant life-changing event. It is titled:
“The One Who Comes Back”
In the year 2000, as an eager student of anthropology, I set out on my first field study through a program called “students for international training” in Ghana, Africa. I had a lifelong interest in miracles and mystical realms. In studying religion and traditional healing as a cultural anthropology student, I always felt the anthropologists were inconclusive in their work. They generally described spiritual practices, not carrying the study through to the point of explaining results, effects, and the way it was working within the culture-for the well-being of the participants.
I wanted to see for myself. What was actually going on? Is there efficacy in these practices that could ultimately benefit humanity? During this time in Ghana, studying traditional healing throughout the county, my worldview was shifted by endless epiphanies. Strikes of awareness kept radiating through my body, from the things I was experiencing and witnessing and the way my consciousness was expanding. My body became awakened to a reality beyond what I had known before. This was huge!!…And how was it that this reality in Ghana was hidden from the world I came from?! How did the Western culture not know what was really going on? Animism, cross-species communication, traditional knowledge that brings you into different realms of experience, and what Westerners consider “magical practices” WERE REAL-with profound results. I had learned more in the four months of Africa than I had in my entire 15 years of Western education.
I studied with different types of healers throughout the country. When I got to Tamale (in the North), I immediately felt very attracted to the freedom and energy of the Dogumba people. The area was Muslim which supported the traditional healing practices of the Dogumba. It was in Tamale that I met an herbalist named Aziz who communicated with trees and also spoke the English language. I was invited to stay with him. Aziz became my host, my translator, and my guide in conducting a cross-disciplinary study of different types of healers in Tamale.
Aziz took me to a Soothsayer he had heard of however did not know well. When we arrived in the village, a bunch of men greeted us, laughing, and talking with enthusiasm. Apparently, they were told by the spirits that I was going to be arriving several months back. They had heard about me for quite some time. I was a -“long- awaited” visitor, and a very welcomed guest. Imoro, the Soothsayer, asked if I would like to work with him, receive readings, healings, protection, and learn how to do oracles. I felt really at home and comfortable with him. I was happy to say yes.
Imoro gave me a spiritual name, “The One who comes Back.” Although I didn’t judge the name, I kind of wished the name to be a little more spectacular. I was supposed to fulfill the meaning of it later in life. I was also not sure if I could fulfill this social obligation to return, but it was sweet they tied me to them in the future through this name. This is not a name I normally share with people. Yet, I do not talk much about the details of my experiences in Ghana either.
During my training throughout this time, Imoro and Aziz taught me a great deal about spirits, the art of divination, ritualistic abilities, and concepts of mental and physical health-as well as dis-ease. We put together a divination set for my personal use, washed it in an herbal bath and bathed myself in the herbs as well to tie me to the oracle. At night I put a black powder in my eyes before I slept to help me see more clearly. I don’t know what exactly these medicines did for me because the effects were not immediately noticeable.
I remember how at times we struggled to get the systems of ritual to work for me. We had to inquire why I was different from how this worked for them. How could we make this work? They wanted me to join in on the spiritual experiences. They had offered to do a chicken sacrifice for me and asked me to bring a chicken. Aziz had many, so I picked one with a broken leg. I brought the chicken with me. Imoro was going to say prayer to ask the chicken spirit to leave its body and go to another world. As he chanted, the chicken who was in my arms the whole time went into convulsions, – a seizure, -and then came back to normal. Aziz translated to me: Imoro wants to know if the chicken was injured…. I don’t think Aziz knew that I grabbed one with a limping leg. I said yes, I thought it was better to take the injured one. He said that I needed a new one because it needed to be strong. We let the chicken go and they gave me a new one to hold for the ceremony. He tried again, and the same thing happened. This time he said that my energy was too strong and that he needed more people to join in. They had to overpower my own energy. This time a few others joined in the chant, it worked! As people chanted, the chicken went into seizures and-It left its body.
Imoro told me many things about my future. Some came true, and other things are yet to be seen. The spirits guided the healers with information and instructions. The spirits said I would do important things in this world through this study. This has not happened yet despite my efforts. Imoro and Aziz were told by the spirits to introduce me to the best of healers in the town to share knowledge with me. They gave me endless treatments for protection. Their spirits and many spirits will always help and support me. I was informed I could always rely on the spirits throughout my life. My ontology had shifted, and I was at home in Tamale and with the spirits, Aziz and Imoro.
In living with Aziz as an herbalist, he taught me a trick to get a tree spirit to communicate with me on a yes or no basis. The first question is if it could work with me?? We placed two leaves back-to-back facing the same way. We folded them and said a series of words in Dogumba. When we unfolded the leaves, nothing happened. Aziz was not sure why it did not work. Instead, he told me the words in English. I repeated words I understood. When I unfolded the leaves, they had flipped to facing each other rather than back-to-back. I have no idea how this could be possible, but it worked. Aziz communicated with the trees in much more sophisticated ways. The spirits of the trees came to him in his dreams and sometimes in real life. The trees came to him when someone needed their medicines and gave Aziz instructions on where and how to get the herbs. All the trees had spirits and had different instructions on how receive and prepare their medicines for different purposes. Every time he prepared a mixture, sure enough the person would arrive. I could not believe how common this was among ALL the healers in the area. It was a regular means of communication. The healers were prepared by spirits before the clients arrived.
I met with some other healers as well. I remember one who healed mental illness. He explained how different types of spirits would take the mind away from people. He used a metal rod from outer space to heal the mind.
Upon returning to the USA after months Ghana and Tamale, the reverse culture shock was intense. The program had warned us that this would happen. However, I had no idea how much I had changed. The USA was the starkest contrast from the heart-centered sing-songy Ghanian world I had been a part of. People in the USA seemed so mean, frantic, desperate, fearful, incoherent, and people said random things that did not even match the context of our physical reality. I literally saw people’s disordered minds and mental illnesses in every encounter. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. From then on, I could never unsee it. It may have dulled in its salience, but I saw the people of the West as full of problems. In shock of all that I could no longer relate to, I faded from my own culture and continued to remain on the edges.
For the past 26 years I have been watching the way evils work through people in standardized forms of false self creations, ego trauma, disordered genetic expressions, and through social and systemic forces. I watch these evils of nothingness in all societies and cultures throughout the world. I watch how it works within, beyond and between people through influences of social psychology. It was not until I had my first intimate encounter with a person who had borderline personality disorder that the entanglement of collective social dynamics surrounded me in group behaviors. I saw how confused people are and unattuned to each other. In my position of connecting with the healthy part of the self in a person I love with the borderline condition, the chaos created many lessons of social psychological dynamics that play out worldwide. I began to understand an organizational means to see and eliminate the evils of disorder from society. I found ways to overpower the problems and strengthen the love and truth within people.
Little did I know I was going to have a lifelong path assisting people-who I love- suffering from the borderline condition. These people are targeted when they were the most beautiful of children at a young age-traumatized, coping for survival. These people are the most charismatic and good hearted, yet their brain will shift-become dysregulated with the pressures of other disorders in the social environment. They are life-long targets and magnets to sociopaths and psychopaths. Strangely I am also mistakenly a magnet attracting sociopaths and psychopaths because of my sensitive empathic nervous system. Unfortunately for the sociopaths and psychopaths, I am not what they expect because I can protect myself and others. I remain immune to them by embodying appropriate narcissistic traits. I become their “end game.”
I also see how problems are mostly enhanced and enabled by narcissists. Narcissists tend to be the representatives that tie healthy people and disordered people together in leading everyone towards “violators” — treating them as leaders. Even trauma victims fall in line with violators and conform to corrupt authority. The Lucifer Effect is always in process, swaying the masses towards the violators, alienating the victims, justifying the victim position. Lucifer Effect also turns the rightful heroic person into the bad person. Yet the heroic protecters still do everything right, in truth and integrity. Still the masses seek superficial status and gain by aligning with violators.
I remember when I was in Ghana Imoro told me great things about my future. However, when I returned to the USA, the ethnography went nowhere. I spoke of psychic abilities -reading oracles and stars, communicating with plants and spirits. People discredited me for using the word psychic, regardless of how many times this word being spoken to me by Aziz, my translator. I had contextualized the information within a comparative study with physics. Although this gave me some standing, it did not justify the legitimacy of my study in the eyes of the West. I was mostly criticized for my participant observation as a humble student of Dog-umba healers in learning through the experiences of traditional medicine. I had broken through the social psychology of the USA and engaged with a different ontology—Yet I was judged, condemned, and ignored by the field of anthropology.
I could make complete sense of how it was possible enter into this co-existing reality, yet the ontology of naturalist colonialism did not want to make this sense. The heart was closed, and the mind was resistant. Discouraged with the field of anthropology, I began writing a book to explain how “to cross” a cultural boundary and enter into a different cultural world. In frustration with the odds stacked against me, I left school and went into the healing arts. Little did I know, at this time, around the year 2000, strides were being made by elite anthropologists in paving the way for people like me.
The ontological turn had become solidified through Edwardo Viveiros de Castro and reinforced by Philippe Descola, along with many others. Now, 26 years later, after mastering healing methods related to both bodies and minds, I return to an academic world where my year 2000 field methods are considered the proper way of ethnography. Ontological respect and taking people seriously are now required for accuracy and ethics. Participant observation and experimentation are now considered a method of inquiry that allows an anthropologist to understand another culture better. The naturalist version of other ontologies is now considered a projection and distortion by the West. It is established—pluralistic realities exist. We must know how to step into what we study. Experiences of ontology expand our knowledge of humanity and reality.
Over the years I have remained true in my role as a healer. I developed a teachable system of accurate mental health diagnosis by watching baseline personality disorders express themselves through nervous systems in observing specific behavioral traits over time. I have no doubt I have turned psychology into a science. Looking back, I was always a natural in working with personality disorders, yet I didn’t know was what I was doing when I was young. With social psychology escalating, Today, I see my role more clearly in the world stage. I can remain resilient to drama and trauma, even among the masses. I create a boundaries. I communicate to souls beyond the disorders presenting. I track and influence evils so that they cannot have direct power over me or people I care about. I understood it as the Law of Similars in homeopathic healing strategies-being applied to behavioral expressions. I give the problem the same problem from a different source in small amount. I am protective of souls. I treat disorder.
In reading an ethnography called Soul Hunters by Rane Willerslev, he describes this phenomena among the Yukaghirs of Siberia calling it Mimesis. On page 9 and 11 he writes:
Mimesis (is) not a theory but a “faculty”…an inherent part of the human condition…the nature that cultures uses to create a second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make model, explore difference yield into and become Other…Yukaghires imitate significant and powerful others not simply to represent them, but also to exercise power over them…They are not “full identification” but “partial ones” It is by means of their “difference” in the impersonation that they can hold power over it.
I watch the shifting behaviors displayed by a disorder, and demonstrate it to a small degree, yet from my own position with my own intention. This gives the disordered person the message that I see them— And I Can Also do what they do—from an ordered place of heath. Unlike them, I am heartful and coherent with the loving order of the universe. I gain my dominance, through demonstrating a greater -broader, deeper “strength” of consciousness and vast authentic connection. Disordered evils try to work through other people in communities to create a “deceptive sense of size” -yet really it is all broken and fragmented with no deep unifying connection. In my witnessing and interaction with those who fall under the spell of disorders in confusion, they too suffer and fall from the clash with universal order and eternal truth. It is said a hero stands against the masses. I often stand alone with very few allies against systems. Yet it always turns in time-every time. Violators never win the community in the long run. Everyone learns their lessons. I am a soul hunter– I kill personality disorders. I move souls back into the realm of this earthly life.
Today the Western culture is in a spiritual crisis with the way they exist in the world and relate to other humans and non-humans. I have been outside the Western culture for many years, focusing my values on what matters-healing – people, communities, and developing new systems for our planet. I am excited to see Indigenous people are now teaching about their worldview and sharing their knowledge to bring lives and souls back to our planetary existence. The West is coming to awareness about the ways the earth is hurting and dying. In seeing the strides made by anthropology, honoring Indigenous people and animism, I am finding a way to return to the West. I look forward to sharing important physical and psychological healing techniques. I have to laugh because I know my friends-and spirits- in Tamale, Ghana-They can see me from afar and are smiling with happy hearts. I finally understand the meaning of my name…I am “the one who comes back.”
Thank you for listening. This Healing Evolution podcast. Until next time…
If you would like more information on Lucifer Effect or Personality disorders- there are only two experts in these fields.
Philip Zimbardo coined the term Lucifer Effect, and besides my work not many people have carried these studies forward.
Gregory Lester is the only expert who understands personality disorders clearly and continues to teach. Besides the FBI and DSM-V committee, not many people have the expertise to work correctively and protectively with extreme disorders. Of these 7 men, only two are still alive, however Gregory Lester is the only person remaining in practice. I too am a specialist, carrying this essential art in mental health forward through my new system of psychotherapy, diagnosis, and anthropological methods called UEA MEDS:
This is an acronym for Unified Evolutionary Anthropology and the Mindful Evolution Diagnostic System…together creating an accurate perceptual system of mental health and treatment for humanity.
You can visit my website www.healingevolution.center I am based in Thailand.