Journey Into the Inner Spirit Worlds

Notes from a drum trance conducted in a controlled setting

Introduction

First, this is something that actually happened and was directly experienced by me. This is true and factual, though I have used some creative language to describe it which I believe is appropriate. It was a very subjective and rather jarring mystical experience, and when we talk about mystic experience and why people even seek it in the first place, we often don’t know exactly what this means. What is a mystic experience? What does it feel like to have a mystic experience? What is it that drives man to seek them out? Fear? Ignorance of the mechanics of weather and gravity? Novelty? There are many theories, but most anthropologists who study such things observe that there seems to be a general tendency for humans to seek these experiences through a vast variety of methods worldwide for all of recorded history and archaeological prehistory.

I studied a lot of subjects in college that I didn’t really have to and changed my major twice so the first few years of college for me were a very eclectic experience, not all of which was a giant waste of time. One of the courses I took was an anthropology course titled “Magic and Folk Religions” taught by Dr Stephen Clarke at UCSD, an amazing gentleman. It was basically a course that was just for him and his specific scholarly interests, namely shamanism and ecstatic trance, witchcraft, animism, demonism, etc (Note: there are no shadowy covens of evil witches or satanists doing horrible things to people. Cheers.).

Shamanism is not a religion itself, shamanism is a religious technique in which practitioners use a variety of methods to achieve a higher consciousness, touching the realm of spirits and gods. Drugs are very often used, with something like 90% of world religions using drugs in some way, shape or form to achieve an altered consciousness for the purpose of worship or communion. The other common method is drumming/percussion used with or without the drugs — it could be a drum the size of an elephant or it could be a skillfully clapped hand. In Drumming at the Edge of Magic by Mickey Hart, percussionist for the Grateful Dead, Hart describes the ecstatic quality of drumming as one in which he at times felt like he had to pull himself back from an edge, in danger of falling into one of these ecstatic trances while grooving with his group The Rhythm Devils. Drugs help, but are not truly necessary.

Dr. Clarke demonstrated this ecstatic state on a mass scale in one of our class sessions, using a recording of a shaman in Siberia on an old cassette tape done at some point in the past. It was a room of about 30 people, all of them in their early-to-mid 20’s, and not all of them achieved the trance state and so were able to witness that we were not being coached by Dr. Clarke while in trance. I was not under the influence of any drugs and have no knowledge of anyone else being under the influence. A very good friend of mine, Rick, was sitting next to me and also achieved the trance state. Everyone’s visions were different with some commonalities, some of which are mentioned/explained below. Following is a narrative of my class notes taken after the experience; setting up the trance, and what was seen, heard and felt during and after the experience.

Setup

It is necessary to have a pathway to the ecstatic state we are trying to reach, and we begin this by establishing some symbols we can use to give us direction:

In the course of our studies we asked the question “does the drummer lead the dancer or does the dancer direct the drum?” An interesting way to look at the relationship between the two parties during the trance encounter in its varied forms. For our purposes we are going to “ride the drum” to where we want to go, the drummer leading the dancer. The sound of the drum is the conscious connection we maintain during the unconscious journey, will at some point change and signal our return, and we will ride the drum back.

We need to know where we’re going so we need to establish some geography. One of the more common motifs are the spirit realms we’ll call the Underworld where the animal spirits are found, and the Overworld where the celestial spirits of the sky and stars dwell — Heaven and Earth. The Overworld is usually reached by travelling through the Underworld. The symbolic entrance to the Underworld is a hole you are familiar with and is arbitrary.

We need a spirit guide that will take us into the Underworld, the form is also arbitrary and should be something you don’t think too much about, the first animal that pops into your head. The guide is suggested to be an animal of some kind but it doesn’t really matter, a companion, something you trust. As the drum starts, visualize the animal spirit beside the hole in your mind, talk to it mentally and let it talk to you. Ride the drum. Remember to ride the drum.

Trance

Arms resting comfortably on the table in front of me. Eyes closed. The drum begins at a moderately fast pace, not a relaxed beat, faster than a normal heartbeat. The beat remains as regular as a metronome but the tonal quality of the drum is constantly changing in frequency as the drummer strokes the tympanum in different places. Visualizing a hole I dug as a child, trying to make a tunnel in the yard behind the chicken coop. It’s about a foot deep, as far as the tunnel ever got, gray brown dirt in the shade of a mountain ash. Having trouble with the spirit guide, trying to see a chicken or duck for some reason. My mind, hilariously, settles on a talking rabbit a la Bugs Bunny. At first the bunny feels fake, like I know it’s a symbolic construct and because Bugs Bunny guiding me through the Underworld is both funny and insane. I try to communicate with the thing mentally but its responses are childlike and fake, like I know I’m just talking to myself. The drum continues, inescapable, remember to ride the drum. The animal morphs a bit and feels more natural somehow. I think I’m starting to relax. The hole becomes more clear, closer and larger. It swallows my vision and I am thrown into darkness with the drum.

“Come and follow,” says the guide, in a voice that sounds like a mischievous child.

Surroundings become dim, amorphous, never fully solidifying. The impression is that I am travelling through fog. Realization that I have entered the Underworld. I can see but there is no light source. The drum is ever present but not always at the forefront of consciousness. The spirit guide no longer feels like a construct, it is an emancipated spirit figure. It doesn’t talk anymore, just the one phrase. Nothing seems to talk in the Underworld, there is only symbol here. The bunny spirit soon travels into the fog ahead and is not seen again.

A figure emerges from the fog, the Shaman himself, or the symbolic representation of his presence. Man in what looks like heavy furs and headdress, could be from any historical tribal extraction. Horns suggesting the headdress is bull or bison perhaps suggested by my own knowledge of my own racial extraction (grandmother was native American), his face is not visible. He has a large animal hide drum in his hand, a drum stick of wood and leather striking the drum in time as he moves slowly in a counterclockwise circle ahead of me just visible at the edge of the fog. He does not speak. He is looking at me as he slowly turns but I cannot see his eyes. He is leading me further.

The Shaman melts into the fog and I’m riding the drum further into the fog. Another figure emerges from the fog to my right, a large canine spirit figure, wolf/coyote. It turns its head and is looking at me. I cannot see or really perceive my body at all but I can see the entire animal. We are not walking, we are flying or floating and it seems perfectly relaxed. There are other canine spirits seen traveling in the same direction through the foggy surroundings but just the one stays beside me. We start traveling a little faster but I’m not sure the drum beat has changed at all. We are travelling relative down now. Swallowed by fog, can’t see any animals anymore, just the fog all around, gaseous and opaque. Confused but not claustrophobic.

The shaman emerges quite suddenly right next to me, only his head can be seen, maybe 2 feet from my body. I can see his eyes but not his face clearly. He has the same large headdress on, it looks like a large animal head but comically large, like it’s made of fur and feathers in the shape of a large animal head with small curved horns on the top. He is communicating with me but not using any words. He wants me to follow him.

We have emerged from below the Underworld into the Overworld. The canine spirit is beside me along with a few others of its kind beside it, flying in a loose formation through the blue cloudless sky. There appears to be sunlight but the sun is not seen directly. The Shaman has disappeared and does not return. Below me is a vast landscape that looks like lush green forest or jungle as far as can be seen, dotted with structures in miniature amidst the greenery like the view of the ground from a plane making its landing approach, altitude seems like a few miles. I look over at one of the spirits and the one closest to me and another canine spirit beside it are looking at me. They both speak with a single voice in a calm matter-of-fact contralto:

“You have so much potential, but you have to get away from the shit.”

I seem to be almost totally passive here, I have no inclination or sense of having the ability to answer. Looking down again, the scene has stopped moving in a forward direction and is now in a kind of holding pattern, slowly circling. There is what looks like a huge pyramid complex below, a stepped ziggurat with smaller structures arrayed around it. I am in awe of it but don’t know why I am being shown this. This goes on silently for a time, then the drum changes.

The beat is suddenly interrupted with a measure of short hard syncopated beats, followed by a much faster regular pace, not quite twice as fast as before. Still riding the drum, this is unmistakably the call back to Earth. Scenery changes rapidly and I’m sucked into an enormous vertical tunnel of light moving in an upward direction, like I’m in a column of brilliant visible light streaming through a break in heavy cloud cover. There is no one else with me and I don’t necessarily have the feeling of any presences, but I can see wisp-like forms also travelling upward. The drum stops with a simple four beats booong ba-bong bong.

Back in my body, the transition is not gradual but easy, I am simply aware of my body in space again. Eyes open and Dr Clarke is speaking, welcoming us back. Arms are still in the same position. People in the room looking around them, murmuring in hushed excited voices.

As stated above, about half the class had experienced some kind of vision, all a bit different. When asked, it felt to those in the trance that maybe 5–10 minutes had gone by, but when directed to look at the clock nearly 40 minutes had passed.

Observations

1. Not everyone was able to get to the trance state, but we didn’t delve deeply into any reasons why. Some poor souls just can’t be hypnotized. In retrospect, I can recall numerous occasions in which entering trance myself was impossible for any number of reasons.
2. The initial encounter with the spirit guide was funny but instructive, the figure did not become real until I was able to relax and just kind of go with it. The trance seemed to proceed once the guide was no longer under any kind of conscious control and not before.
3. One naturally sees what are called phosphenes, the weird shapes and whorls you see when your eyes are closed. As the trance began and I began consciously recalling the image of the hole to the Underworld these shapes solidified, becoming the fog in the Underworld as I relaxed and fell into the hole with Spirit World Bugs Bunny.
4. The symbols used are mostly arbitrary, suggesting some universal traits to the experience not necessarily dependent on location or culture.
5. The Shaman seen in the Underworld seems like it is entirely a construction of my mind, the figure I witnessed was not something I am acquainted with, and appeared more like an idealized symbol constructed of stereotypes taken from random movies, books and documentaries. My grandmother was American Indian but I was not and will never be part of any aboriginal group or tradition (grandma married a white tobacco farmer and was a devout Christian) and in any case this figure is not at all representative of what I know about her family.
6. There was not a lot of audio. Other than the spirit guide’s initial independent verbalization the Underworld was silent but for the ever-present drumming. The Overworld did not have any sense of wind passing across the ears while moving, but not as muted as the Underworld, possibly because there was actual scenery, the perception of lighting and more visual detail.
7. The spirits I saw were either the Shaman or the canine spirits, which most would probably call wolf spirits-I don’t know if they were wolves or not but they certainly resembled wolves or large coyotes and seemed generally benevolent. There were no other spirits seen except maybe the mysterious wisps seen around me while travelling back from the Overworld.
8. The phrase “get away from the shit” I am sure referred to where I was living at the time. This was in Southern California in the mid 1990’s and methamphetamine was a huge issue down there, many of my good friends from high school got into it. It was referred to colloquially as “the shit” as in “boy’s on ‘the shit’ and can’t be trusted.” I left Southern California a few years later, finished my degree at another school, and have only been back once in the last 25 years.
9. Some people saw the Shaman, other people didn’t and he wasn’t ever exactly the same form, just stereotypes. Headdresses, masks, lots of feathers. The drumming we listened to was a Siberian ceremony but we had no other background. We didn’t really delve into the belief systems of the drummer’s specific cultural extraction when we studied shamanism and saw no pictures or any other details about the Shaman or his tradition.
10. The structures I saw resembled an aerial view of Teotihuacán emerging from an endless jungle. There were a few scattered around at first then circling around a large one with three or four more clustered with it.
11. “Wolf” spirits were commonly seen. My friend Rick and a few others saw dolphins, some eagles, lions, and a couple saw snakes. Rick’s experience in the Overworld was swimming with them in the waves and according to him not very much else of note. Rick and his twin brother were, in fact, champion swimmers and being normal SoCal boys we spent a lot of time in the ocean, this does not surprise me.

Dolphins are very mysterious

Conclusion

I tried on numerous occasions to replicate this with occasional success but never to the same degree.

Nothing that I have ever seen leads me to unflinchingly believe that I was journeying with actual spirits — the figures and forms I saw were arbitrary and very subjective, mostly resembling stereotypes and personal biases. There was no special insight gained, only friendly advice and the knowledge that this inner world exists or can be constructed/utilized by humans with easily replicated methods.

The experience was a profoundly moving journey through the unconscious — whether that includes communion with the minds of spirits, my own mind, or both is subject to debate. While I was not in any conscious control of the experience, there was no feeling during or afterward that any of the things I saw were supernatural. I think they could be, or could have been influenced by the supernatural as I reached the Underworld, but who knows?

I do not know that anything I saw was supernatural, but the experience was nonetheless awe-inspiring. Riding the drum took me to some really amazing inner spaces that were more clear than any dream — an absolutely unforgettable journey at the edge of magic.

Originally published at https://dissidenttower.substack.com on April 30, 2022.