Seelenheil

Long ago in ancient Greece, people would go to an Asclepeion to  practice a rite known as incubation.  While I have covered incubation in the past, I will briefly explain it again.  Incubation is when a person, usually sick or perhaps inwardly troubled, went to a temple to be healed of a physical ailment or to be put right in some way.  Because it was believed that the kind Asclepius literally inhabited these temples, it was understood that when a person slept or remained in a natural (not drug-induced) altered state, the God could heal a person or give them insight.  Incubation was a rite of divine sleep where the soul of a person mingled with the God in order to be healed. What this really symbolized was ones travel through death and Hades, where the subtle and cthonic dimension of the human individual exists as well as the root causes of his or her ailments.  Seeking out a cure was not done for trivial reasons, these were usually matters of life and death.

Of all the Greek gods Asclepius, the son of Apollo, was probably the most beneficent toward humanity, loving them despite their many faults.  While scholars tell us that these rites of incubation were meant to heal people of physical maladies (and certainly they were) there was usually more to it than that.  While I believe wholeheartedly that these incubation rites did physically heal people at times, what really took place was something far more important.  What likely took place was a healing of a rift within ones own being.  These rifts are the subtle causes of all physical ailments, particularly autoimmune disorders, which affect “seekers” more than any other disease.  In these diseases a persons body tends to be at war with itself, which is really an outward sign of something happening deep within.

It is a given that once you are born into this world that there will be trouble.   All men and women are born with a genetic inheritance and inner familial debt or wyrd.  These debts and inheritances will often decide the outcome of a human life, particularly when a being is a barely conscious observer of their own existence and unable to steer properly or make good decisions. The human condition clearly implies a struggle from start to finish.  However, these inner (and outer) ailments can be healed, at least to the extent that one can find a greater peace with themselves and their circumstances, even in the face of death.  This is a far more meaningful healing than simply making a dis-ease physically disappear.  The type of healing I am talking about delivers one to a knowing–to a certainty that the physical human being is but one piece to a much larger puzzle extending beyond time and space.  As much as people may not believe me, dis-ease often builds divine character by exposing a person to life/death traumas that cut through the illusion of the easy, ordinary life where death’s reality is avoided until the very end, often times when a being has no idea who or where they are.  Through experiencing dis-ease, a being is confronted by the harrowing realities that exist on the border of life and death.  To be exposed to such a thing causes a radical reevaluation of ones existence to take place.  Life in this beautiful world suddenly becomes so very meaningful, even to the point where the most mundane events in life like seeing geese floating peacefully on a pond can lead to joyful tears.  It is at these moments, that the real world emerges from behind the scenes to present itself to our lowly human form.  And then we are never the same again.

It is easy to deny ones mortality when they are healthy.  It is also easy to fail profoundly where it counts the most.  Having suffered from a life-threatening autoimmune disease for 18 years, and having watched people I love die slowly of disease, I have seen a truly beneficent aspect of disease, but to even utter such a thing in a culture that is terrified by death, sounds crazy.  In many cases, disease is a blessing that allows a person to very quickly work out inward matters that never would have been worked out.  Therefore, at all cost, it must be considered an opportunity to be used to its fullest extent. 

When I first began writing under the name “Dan Mitchell” my own ailments were revealed to me, some that I hadn’t even been aware of.  While I have always had high strangeness events occurring, never did they play out as profoundly as they did between March 2010 to about July 2011.  People will remember those posts were haunting and very disturbing, so much so that many people would write to tell me that similar “high strangeness” events were happening to them by merely reading those articles.  Some of the emails I received from readers had bothered me profoundly.  I felt that the right thing to do was to take those posts down forever.  Many people had felt that it was all a hoax, that I was writing to somehow make money or sell my story.  The truth was that those posts managed to get around very fast. Within only a few weeks I was approached by more than one screenwriter that was interested in the story and also by the Syfy Channel.   While I turned down the Syfy channel, I told others to just take the story and do whatever they wanted with it asking nothing in return. I could have cared less about making money or fame off any of it. And I have received neither. I had far more readers two years ago than I do now.  This blog, sadly, has only a few devoted readers.  The subject matter simply doesn’t interest the majority of people because THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE LINK BETWEEN WHAT I WRITE ABOUT AND THE HIGH STRANGENESS PHENOMENON. They are content to remain where they are toying around with possibilities and thrills while making no headway either inwardly or outwardly.

To be sure, most of my writing had to do with “working things out”.  They are about “healing” some very deep wounds and in the process attempting to help those whose inward nature resonated with the things I write about. While I didn’t realize this at first, it is all too clear to me now.  When I first started writing, Mike Clelland sent me an email warning about how this simple process of writing to an audience would bring things to the surface, strange and synchronous things.  At the time I dismissed it somewhat because I didn’t think my writing was really leading anywhere.  I’ve had an online presence under other names online since the 1990s.  But none of those other attempts compared to my output over the last two years.  When Luminosity began I certainly wasn’t about to discuss my knowledge about the things I write about today.  Luminosity was strictly speaking a narrative that put my demons to print.  I truly believe that in order to get to this point, those demons had to be exposed, they had to sent out into the ether and destroyed.

Whether I am any good at it or not, writing is an incubatory rite for me.  Through this online medium I was traveling from the surface to the inward depths–to places I hadn’t truly gone before.  So much so that by July 2011 a new world had literally opened up inside of my mind. I am not putting that lightly because it is the most important discovery of my entire life.  I had stepped into a new world and was seeing it shine through into the physical even during the most mundane moments of my day. Shortly after that even stranger things happened.

By accident I came across Henry Corbin and learned more from him than any other person.  So much so, and it may sound strange to people, that I believe Corbin was communicating his ideas to me personally as a spiritual counsel from far beyond this world.  In Peter Kingsley’s email to me, he had mentioned that it was likely that Henry Corbin found me, in the same manner Empedocles found Kingsley.  I don’t deny this for a second.  Corbin’s writing vindicated everything I had long suspected, but couldn’t quite put together in my mind.  All that I can say is that during my studies of Corbin’s work, I had felt a tangible personality that clearly presented itself to me as something perfectly distinct from myself.  I learned from that personality by simply listening.

For me the totality of the “encounter phenomenon” and all its accompanying high strangeness, was to create a passageway within myself leading into the Pleroma.  It is within this Pleroma that the fullest extent of my memory and humanity reside. Returning to those memories and to the fullness of that humanity with its accompanying dignity has been the most trying work I have ever engaged in. In order to return there, I had to unlearn the way I was trained to think.  I had to unlearn the opinions I was taught from childhood.  I had to stop seeking answers outwardly in books and fallen men.  This long process on its own was a healing that is still not completed, and will not be completed until the very end when the smoke of the sacrifice reaches the Seraph.