Filipino Shamanism and soul dualism

As some of you know, my wife is a Balian, or Babaylan, which is an old Filipino word for a healer. Her gift was handed down through her ancestors and her brothers and sisters also have it to varying degrees, as do her children and grandchildren. I am not going to talk so much about her, as to her understanding, to talk about it with many people or publicly, has an impact on her abilities. So I will not speak so much about her, but about this subject in general, and I will relate a story about my stepdaughter.

Normally I do not like to use the term shaman, because it is a Tungusic word, and therefore is properly used to refer to the healers and medicine people of the Tungusic and related Ural-Altaic tribes. However, I do not see a problem in the case of Filipino Balian and similar medicine people, for the following reasons: 1.) The Spanish pretty much wiped out this practice, the traditions, and much of this knowledge of the pre-spanish Filipino people, other than the mountain tribes and others who remained more remote and out of their influence. Traditions and abilities continued under the radar, or under the veneer of the catholic church, and it is no longer so formal, or representative of such a Filipino identity, as to insult the healers by using the word shaman. And, 2.) the methods of the Filipinos and other Austronesian people were very similar to those of the Tungusic shamans, with spirit journeys, and the use of helping, guiding or gaurdian spirits, and various kinds of magic.

In fact, for many years it was very hard for me to get much information on these ways, But in the past few years a fair amount of information has come out.

Austronesian people have a concept of soul dualism, meaning that they believe that people have more than one soul. In the Philippines among the balian, the soul was mostly split into two parts, the ginhawa or hininga, which was the breath of life and stayed with the body. And then there was the kalag, or kaluluwa which was the soul that could leave the body and visit the spirit world and so forth.

When we sleep and especially when we dream, the kalag can leave the body. In spirit journeying, the kalag leaves the body. But if it stays away from the body, then we develop a spiritual illness known as soul loss. Soul loss is characterized by such things as depression, delirium, trauma, fainting spells, and in more serious cases it has been described as the loss of mind and identity. Eventually it can lead to death.

Now this may sound quaint, and superstitious. The idea of a person having two souls seems like a primitive mumbo jumbo. But think about it, you have the ginhawa which stays with the physical body, and as the breath of life represents our living, breathing consciousness. In other words, it is what modern psychology would refer to as the conscious mind, or in Jungian terms, the ego-consciousness. Kalag, on the other hand, as the source of dreams and representing a more hidden reality that could seem at times, alienated from the conscious ego-mind, would obviously represent the subconscious.

Im going to leave it here tonight, and will continue tomorrow...

 

The anthropologist, Michael Harner, became a New Age guru when he introduced shamanism to the New Age people, by teaching them a Tungusic technique of doing a spirit journey, or entering into a Shamanic State of Consciousness, through drumming or other repetitive sounds. If you have ever tried this you might have found how it subtly puts you into a lucid altered state of consciousness. For me it was a surprisingly powerful experience. It is so easy and seemingly mundane that you could write it off as nothing. But if you treat it seriously and put your heart into it, it gives you access to knowledge, wisdom, help, and dare I say, a bit of magic.

I bring this up, because, if you have experienced this, the idea of a 2 part soul probably makes sense to you. In a bona-fide spirit journey, you are physically present in the here and now. You might be there lying in a bed in a darkened room listening to a repetitive drum beat, and your ginhawa is there, breathing and lying there. But there is another part of you, your kalag, that is off somewhere else. As I explored this dynamic of spirit journeying, my assumptions where that the SSC (Shamanic State of Consciousness) literally allows a part your psyche to consciously enter into your subconscious mind and explore. So, I theorized that the spirit helpers that you encounter on a spirit journey are Jungian archetypes within your subconscious. Over the years of doing this and then participating in ceremony with Natives, I came to realize that what is happening in this altered state is much more far-reaching than just in your head. But I did come to the conclusion that it is our subconscious that is the gateway to such a reality. These ancient techniques, whether repetitive drumming at specific beats per minute, sitting in a dark sweat lodge, or an altar of sage and tobacco ties somewhere in a forest on a vision quest, or sitting in a yuwipi or shaking tent ceremony, somehow create a dualistic experience of the psyche, where you are physically present in the physical moment, but that you have also somehow slipped under the veil of physical reality, and are open to experiencing something of another reality.

On my very first vision quest, during the first night about 3 or 4 in the morning, I was laying down, tucked into a sleeping bag, falling in and out of sleep. suddenly two bats, flew in from the west just a foot or so above me, they circled over me, dipped down and flew back out to the West. This was my first vision and it started, as it was supposed to, in connection with the west. As they flew over me, the first word that popped into my head was, stealth. They looked like two stealth bomber/fighters, circling swooping down, the next thing that popped into my head was an understanding that everything in the vision quest would happen in this way--and I had to pay attention or I would miss it. I did not hear the bats speak to me, I think I heard an almost silent swoosh of their flight, but there was this immediate understanding which I could say, they communicated to me. I had to pay attention, but not just from my physical senses and to be 'present.' I had to pay close attention from a deep mental place, to hear and see that which is not really sound, which is not physically there. As Carl Jung would probably have said, I had to be subconsciously aware.

So how would a very intuitive people who did not have the benefit of modern psychology understand such a thing? It would make sense that they would understand this as having two or more souls.

My wife never had an interest to try Harner's technique to spirit journey. I told her about it, and I urged her to try it. But she never wanted to. She never wanted to go to a sweat lodge or a sundance either. I thought she would want to, because she is the person that can always see a ghost, and there are times when she experiences deep spiritual experiences. Being Filipina, she interprets many things from a catholic perspective, but she did have these ancestors, and even her father, who could do things and experience things that the church could obviously argue, were of the devil. Native ways, ceremonies and traditions, were clearly things the church would find fault with. But that was not her. She loves to go to a Buddhist temple, for example, make an offering and sit and pray before the altar. In fact, by the time I started doing these things she had really lost interest in going to Mass, or even going to church, except for a mountain shrine, for example, where she could sit quietly and pray undisturbed. In time I began to realize that a part of her understood that she was being pulled to these ways, and she was afraid of the responsibility and stress that such ways involve. And while she could always see ghosts and spirits, she never liked that. It frightened her. And there are other unpleasant things about it. Such as the fact that she cannot go into places like, Hotel Colorado, an old hotel next to the hot springs in Glenwood Springs Colorado. As soon as she enters this old hotel, she gets a very bad feeling and feels sick. She says she can smell blood, and that there was a lot of death there.

But she has experienced spirit journeys, in her own way. Without any knowledge of them. And if I press her about it, she doesn't want to know how these things are done, she only wants to know what her ancestors or Spirit tells her. I began to realize that perhaps the purpose of me experiencing such things was for my understanding of what she experiences, and to support her and help her in what ways I can. Perhaps even to give a context or understanding to people she has healed or helped. Though after accepting the fact that she has this gift and she is supposed to use it, she did go to her first Sun Dance and it was a very powerful experience for her. Years ago she stayed away from Native ceremony, but today she understands that it helps her and is a source of power for her.

In fact, her acceptance of this gift is a story in itself. For many years, going back to when we lived in the Philippines, she would sit outside and pray looking to the sky. And then she would tell me that she will probably not be here for long, that she could feel that 'they' were coming to get her. The implication is that she would die. I did not like this kind of talk, and I'd tell her don't be silly. "What about me and the kids?" I'd say. "Don't think that way." But then after a number of years she had her first spirit journey. She was relaxing on the balcony of a gift shop right over the entrance to a cave that you can go on tours through. She was enjoying the sun on a reclining chair while my son and I walked around the gift shop. Suddenly she felt super relaxed, and she spontaneously had a vision, or experience, and she described how a large bird came down, and she could see herself getting on its back, and then flying up to heaven. afterwards it brought her back to where she was relaxed. By this time I already had an understanding, and even experience, of the spirit journey. This experience changed her understanding of her feeling that 'they' were coming to take her to heaven, and it was my knowledge of the spirit journey that helped her understand that it wasn't that she was going to die, but that she was going to have this connection. She still struggled with the idea of being a balian or babaylan for another decade or more. She preferred a more care-free life of having fun and wearing diamonds and Louis Vuitton. She did start healing family members. But it always took a lot out of her to heal them as she would feel the sickness herself and oftentimes it would leave her weak and sick the next day. So she would only heal family members. But more and more she was telling people about an illness that they had that they were unaware of. One time she held a baby, and told the parents that the baby is sick and needs to get to a doctor. They wouldn't believe her. I told them that she has a way of knowing these things, and they should take her advice. The next day they called her and asked her what she thought because the baby was acting sick. She insisted that the baby needed a doctor and while they didn't think it was serious, they agreed to take her that day. It turned out there was something seriously wrong, and had they not taken the baby to the doctor it could have very well died. I don't know what it was, they told my wife, but she doesn't remember because, well, her medical knowledge is not very sophisticated.

Then a few years back, she had been insisting that we go to a waterfall. She claimed that my first wife had cursed me and we need to go to a waterfall to cleanse me and stop this (yes, my first wife would do something like that). Was she right? I don't know because we did eventually go to a waterfall up in the mountains, and it was a very powerful experience for her, and it was then that she accepted that she is supposed to heal. I suspect that is why we were really supposed to go. The Balian typically did not have fancy shrines or temples, rather they were very simplistic, and of course, the Spanish burned down everything they could. Probably what was more important for a shrine or dambana, was a place---a sacred place like a waterfall, cave, mountain or other sacred spot. There a temporary bamboo or rattan altar, the dambana, could be made, basically a stand or even a pole, slit like a tiki torch, to hold offerings. Sometimes a dambana would have a structure on top of it, like a bamboo house with no walls, or in the southern Philipines, it might be a pagoda-like structure. It would hold the offerings and some tribes might put an effigy of the anito (or spirit or god, they are offering or praying to.) Anyway, that is a bit of the story to how she accepted this responibility.

As for me, I cannot see ghosts or spirits and, while I was raised Christian, I always needed a proof and religion posed a lot of problems for me. Especially philosophically. If God is this perfect Being, all-knowing, and all-wise, then a religion that supposedly represents his will and his greatness, should be free of contradiction and it should provide a way of experiencing the divine at a level that goes beyond the limits of physicality. That is not the case with any religion. Long ago I had given up ever finding such a proof, so when I met my wife, back in the late 1980's I was very much an agnostic, and I thought the best chance we had for finding answers about the universe and who we were and what our origins were was through science.

I did know that science could not give true meaning to our lives, because it can give us no more than the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, we are nothing more than infinitesimal blips arising from dust, and ending as dust, on an incredibly inconsequential speck of a planet, in a galaxy that is no different than any of the other thousands of galaxies flying through the universe. The Modern World tells us that life is absurd and this was the existential problem I figured I had to accept. I had spent my whole life till then looking for truth and meaning, and it was the 1980's when money flowed and a meaningless life was cured by sex, drugs and alcohol, rock and roll, and exploiting the system that we had spent the last several decades rebelling against.

She was a TV actress in Tokyo, I was Securities Analyst covering the Japanese stock market. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life, and I am always looking for beautiful women, so I think I should know. Until I met her, I had a bad habit of comparing every girl I was with (including my Japanese wife at the time) to Teresa, who looked to me just like Bridget Bardot, and who was my first true love (but that the defining moment of when I actually understood Teresa to be the perfect woman and the archetypal epitome of the feminine happened under the influence of mushrooms and some other hallucinogen that someone gave us, but that's another story). My wife Minda was the first one to make me forget about Teresa.

But Minda would tell me things about her or she would see a ghost, or something like that. For example, if she smelled incense or a candle burning, and there was no incense or candle around, then she knew that someone in her family was dying or would die soon. Out loud I would say to her, "Wow, that's really something" when she would tell me such things. But in my head I was thinking, "Whatever" or that she was superstitious, or how quaint the Filipino people are in their silly beliefs. Of course, in a day or two, the news would come that a relative of hers had passed on.

But something did happen that put me back on that quest for proof and truth. I have written about it here in the past and I have referred to it many times. And it is a tale of soul loss, and is about this concept of soul dualism. Such old beliefs were suppressed by the church in the Philippines so Minda did not have any knowledge about such things, and it completely blew my mind, and at the time I had no cultural context to put it into to make sense out of it. I knew that the Egyptians and other cultures had this belief of multiple souls. I also thought I was sophisticated and knowledgeable of such things. But I had no way of making sense of what happened until years later.

It happened to one of my stepdaughters. I will tell the story in the next post.

 

To meet my wife, you would never guess that she has children. In fact she has 6 of them. Five of them she had before I met her. The 6th one is mine. This story happened before she became pregnant with our son. It involved her middle daughter who was about 9 years old at the time. There were an awful lot of synchronicities around this story that all came together to give it the meaning it did.

My wife and I were living between the Philippines and Japan. She was acting, and I had already left my analyst position at Shearson Lehman and was doing consulting jobs in Tokyo. We had a business in the Philippines as well, so we would spend a few months in Manila and then fly to Tokyo for a few months and then back to Manila. The children would stay in Manila with the maids. She was separated from her first husband who had fooled around with a bar girl, and then lived with her. There was no divorce in the Philippines so this presented a problem for us, as we wanted to get married. (She had remarried in Japan to a Japanese guy, which also turned out to be a mistake, but as far as that marriage, the Japanese were not as thorough in immigration as the US is, so it was a problem for us, especially since we wanted to keep the family together.) Her first husband was a rich kid that did not know how to work. His Chinese grandparents had built a business empire that included a department and some factories, and when they passed away, his parents and aunts and uncles fought over the business, and in the end broke it down. Her husband was also a playboy, which is how he met the bar girl, and when the family money was gone, he thought he could make money by playing Mah Jong. While they were married, he never really was a part of the life of his children. When I came into the family, I became the father they never knew.

One of the first synchronicities to this story is that while we were in the Philippines, the kids brought home a puppy they had found, and asked, Can we keep it? It was a cute dog and seemed very happy to be with us, so it became our dog. It was a great dog too, for several weeks. It was even housebroken as I recall, but it certainly was a puppy. (Then again, we had marble floors and maids, so if it did poop or pee in the house, I certainly didn't have to clean it, and cleaning would have been easy anyway.) The problem is that after several weeks we woke up and the puppy was acting strange, and foaming at the mouth. I thought, Oh no, it must be rabies. But it never did act aggressive or mean, so I thought, well, let's corral it into a corner of the house and see if it gets better. We set up a barricade for it, and I told the kids not to go near it and explained about rabies.

a day passed and the dog did not get better and it wouldn't eat, but it was still foaming at the mouth. So that afternoon I decided we had to get it to a vet. I grabbed a blanket and swooped it up, the plan being that if it did have rabies, and it tried to attack me, that I would use the blanket to protect myself. But it was not aggressive in any way. My wife and I hailed a tricycle and we took it to a vet. You always here stories about taking a pet to the vet and it seems to know that it is going to die. This one was no different. it looked scared, as it knew something was wrong, and it kept looking up to me, with these anxious animal eyes.

It turned out that the dog had distemper, which also causes foaming at the mouth. The vet tried to save it, but he said chances were slim. The next day he said that it was getting worse and we needed to put it out of its misery. The whole family went to the vet, and we watched as he put the dog to sleep.

Shortly after that, Minda and I had to fly to Tokyo to renew our visas. It was a quick trip, but a second synchronicity happened here. The catholic church, which served more foreigners than Japanese, was having a book sale. She wanted to go to mass while we were there, and I saw this table of books and decided to see if there was anything worth buying. One of the books I bought was written by this English scientist who studied paranormal phenomena. He became England's ghost hunter, and would travel to castles and churches and country homes, all over England, study the supposed paranormal phenomena and then declare whether the haunting there was real or not, and do his best to explain it. The book looked very interesting and had an awful lot of English history and a history of the church throughout England and Europe and its connections to all of this, and ended with his scientific theories and educated conjecture on what a haunting is. Within a few days, we headed back to Manila, and on the plane I started reading this fascinating book.

A few weeks, or maybe few months had gone by, and one night the kids and the maids decided to have a pretend slumber party. They put bedding in our living room and were going to all sleep there on the floor. I don't know if slumber parties were common among kids in the Philippines, it seems like they got invited to a neighbors house, but Minda was always overprotective and so, perhaps the maids, who themselves were fairly young, decided they could do a slumber party there.

Around midnight we were getting ready for bed in our bedroom. I was watching the first several hours of trading on the US Market, as we would get 3 or 4 hours of CNBC late at night through our cable. My wife was already laying down, but our door was still open. We heard the girls scream and then the kids came running into our room and said that someone knocked on the window.

It would be impossible for someone to get into our yard. We had a gate that was locked, and a wall around the house, while the wall was lower in the front, it had a metal grill with spikes that would make it impossible to climb over. In the back the wall had broken glass on the top and then barbed wire over that. So no one was getting into our yard to knock on the window.

My first reaction was in response to something I read in the book about the English ghost hunter. In a chapter about banshees and other spirits and angels of death, he talked about the 'Death Knock.' Apparently in parts of Europe, there would be a knock three times by a bony hand on the window or door of a house where someone was going to die that night. So naturally, and what may seem a bit silly, I asked the kids, "Did they knock three times, and did it sound like a bony hand on the window--like this?" And I knocked on our bedroom window three times. "Yes!" they said. Though, I don't know for sure if it really sounded like a bony hand, or they were influenced by my suggestion, but they agreed, and I even asked if they were sure, "...it was three times?" They said yes it was.

Well that's really weird, I said, and proceeded to tell Minda about the bony hand making the knock of death that I had read about in the book. I asked her if there was such a tradition in the Philippines. Maybe from the Spanish? She had never heard of such a thing, and made me go outside to see if anyone was there. How can anyone get in our yard? I insisted but went outside and checked. No one was there.

It was about a day later when someone came by the house and told my wife that her first husband had died, and it was the very same night we heard the knock. He had died, of all things, of rabies. He and his girlfriend were living in a barrio--a slum. Apparently he and his friend were watching TV in the house when a dog came inside, and started growling. The dog jumped at them and had bitten both of them before they killed it. His friend went to the doctor and got a rabies shot. He decided he didn't need one, and instead took the dog's corpse, cooked it, and ate it. He had a full blown case of rabies by the time they got him to the doctor. He was afraid of the light, afraid of water, and had even gotten off the examination table and tried to hide under it. The doctor said there was nothing that could be done and strapped him to the table, and possibly drugged him to make his passing easier.

Then things started to get weird around our house. I will continue tomorrow. By the way, as crazy as all this may sound, I do swear to you that it is all true.

 

By the way, it took many years of searching but eventually I did find on the internet that there is a tradition of a knock of death in the Philippines. I suspect the Spanish brought the tradition over, but I was unable to learn much of its origins. In the Philippine version, a house that is about to experience a death is visited by three spirits or figures, 2 women and a man, as I recall. And they knock on the door or window.

Back to the story: The kids took the death of their father in stride. As I said, he really wasn't a big part of their lives.

But the maids started complaining that when they slept in the corner bedroom next to ours at night, that they felt like someone was there and touching them. I thought it was silly and said, "if I slept in there nothing would happen." My wife dared me to, and I said, sure. She warned me, don't turn off the light, and so I said, "I will, no problem. And still nothing will happen." In fact, I still had to finish the ghost hunting book so I showed her that I was even going to read that before going to bed. Which is exactly what I did. The only thing that happened is the next morning when I woke up, my wife watched as I stepped out of the room, arms extended, zombie-style, which gave her a good laugh.

As I recall, it was almost a week before the funeral. and everyday there would be some kind of supernatural event that my wife or the maids would relate. I didn't see anything or hear anything, so I really didn't know if it was true or not. This was long enough ago that I forget a lot of these things. The maids definitely felt like he was there watching them get dressed or touching them. I have written this story before, and I may have mentioned there some of the paranormal activity of that week. Anyway, it was a very strange and interesting week for me.

One thing I do remember happened on a day my wife had to go to the market. To do this we would walk to the gate of the subdivision and catch a tricycle (or as a lot of people refer to these now by their Thai name, a Tuk Tuk), but usually we would take a shortcut which would cut through one of the properties owned by the Sarao family into the neighboring subdivision, which had a gate right next to the local shops and grocery store. (The Sarao family was the family of Mr. Sarao, who took surplus jeeps after World War II, put a bus-like shell on the back end of them, with a long bench extending the length of the shell on either side, and created the jeepney, which is a very common form of family-run public transportation in the Philippines and people would also buy them to use like a pick up truck. So the Sarao family to the Philippines is similar to the Ford family, and there were a number of them that lived in our subdivision.) On this particular day, she took the longer route to the gate of our subdivision. It was a little after noon. As she got into a tricycle, a large brown butterfly that was sitting on a bush hear the gate, suddenly flew over and landed on my wife's chest. The security guard said, 'Ma'am, that butterfly has been there all morning. It was waiting for you.' She simply answered, "It's my ex-husband, he's come to say goodbye. The butterfly stayed on her blouse for a while, her looking down on it, and then took off.

The funeral was scheduled for Saturday in my wife's home province of Batangas, Batangas is South of Manila and it takes a few hours to get to her hometown of San Jose, which, I assume, is where the funeral was held. They got up early and left, I stayed home, relaxing the whole day.

When they got back late in the afternoon, One of the first things Minda told me was to talk to Gilda, her 9 year old daughter. She's been acting strange since the funeral. She won't talk, she won't eat. See if you can talk to her. So I walked over to her, put my arm around her and said, "Gilda, what's wrong?" She looked up at me and backed away like a scared little animal. And when she looked at me, her eyes were just like the eyes of that puppy. Its hard to say exactly how, but, her eyes did not seem like the eyes of a human, but rather like the eyes of a scared little animal. And I am not talking about an impression that came after the fact, or that, looking back on it she seemed this way. She immediately gave me that impression and the first thought I had was that she looked just like that scared little puppy looking up to me.

We tried to talk to her, we tried to get her to play with her siblings, and so forth, but she wouldn't respond. So we let her be, hoping that she would snap out of it. The next day there was no change. Monday morning came and there was still no change. We were able to feed her, if we put the food in her mouth, but she showed no emotions, and no will. She hadn't said a word since the funeral, and she was like an animal that had given up in trying to escape and just was, there.

We had a neighbor that was a doctora (i.e. a female doctor) so we took Gilda to her house first. She examined her and said that she appears to have suffered some kind of emotional shock. This was not something that she could just give her medicine and she would be fine. She then explained that this kind of thing was very unusual for a child that was so young, but it would take years to heal her, and she may never be healed. This upset Minda, but we had another very good and trusted friend who was a doctora, in fact she was our family doctor. We hailed a taxi and headed across Manila to her clinic.But the diagnosis was no different, she was surprised to see these symptoms in someone so young, because it impacts older patients, not children. She explained that somehow she experienced an emotional shock that triggered this condition, but it is a complete mental breakdown and we cannot expect her to be healed within a short time. This will take many years to heal, and she may never be the same again. She may never actually be healed, and may very well have to be institutionalized. My wife held her daughter and cried, pleading for Gilda to come back to her. Gilda responded with no emotion, just a blank animal-like stare.

We hailed a taxi and started heading through the Manila traffic back home. We were both in a daze trying to figure out what else we could try. Minda suggested taking her to the church and performing a seance. You may be aware that the Catholic church downplays the rite of exorcism, as I understand, even to the point of some saying that they don't really do them, its just a Hollywood made up thing. Well, they are performed in the Philippines. And this may represent another synchronicity to this whole story, but about a year earlier or so, Minda and I were shopping in the Quiapo neighborhood of Manila, and she wanted to step into the cathedral there and pray. As we were sitting there, and while she was praying, and I was looking at the old European architecture, and looking for bats hanging from the ceiling,* several people brought a man, who was obviously having some kind of mental episode, into the church, sitting 10 or 15 pews ahead of us closer to the altar. One of them went and grabbed a priest and an assistant, and we watched as they performed an exorcism right there. It did not go well and the man became more and more agitated as the exorcism progressed. Finally they stopped, and it took all of them to get this man, who was now having a full-fledged psychotic episode, out of the church. I quietly told Minda as she resumed her praying, "He should be taken to a mental hospital."

So when Minda suggested an exorcism, I reminded her of that and said, "I don't want to put her through that." I had another idea that I had been thinking of. When I have told this story before I have often said, "I don't even know why I suggested it." But that is because I do know---it was a self-centered reason of 'how cool would that be to witness.' And there might have even been a passing thought of, 'what if the trauma of the exorcism worked and then we missed out on this cool chance to see an indigenous tribe do some kind of ceremony.' So, let's just say, my thoughts were all about the condition of my poor stepdaughter and how to heal her, and so I don't know why I suggested this, but I said, "Maybe we could try to find an indigenous tribe with a healer and see if they could do something for her." My wife responded, "But where? We don't know anyone like that." Which was true. We didn't know anyway to contact a tribe. After the volcano, Mt. Pinatubo, exploded we got a bunch of food, clothing, and medical supplies, rented a jeepney, and drove up to the Pinatubo area to donate these to the Aeta people. But they were in refugee camps and all we had to do was ask around once we reached the area where the nearest camp was, and we could find them. But at that time we did not know anyone. It was a cool suggestion for me, but we couldn't see anyway to do it. In fact, I didn't even really expect it to help her, unless somehow the ceremony had touched her psychologically or shocked her out of it. But I wanted to see what they would do, ...I mean, for her. ...yes, I was thinking of her well-being...

Much to our surprise, the taxi driver, who had been listening to us since we left Doctora's clinic, suddenly spoke up, "I know someone. And they are in Cavite." This was the province on the South East of Manila, and, in fact, our house was right next to the river that makes the border between Manila and Cavite. He explained that this person is a farmer but he is also an indigenous healer. So we decided that the driver would pick us up around 10:00 the next morning and we would go see this healer.

Truth be told, my wife felt that this peasant farmer could heal her daughter better than I did. I felt guilty that I probably got Gilda into some kind of strange ceremony, by someone who might even be a fake healer who was just going to rip us off, and that I shouldn't have suggested that. The Philippines is famous for such scammers who do things like perform surgery with their bare hands (and chicken blood).

I will continue this in the next post.





* Cathedrals in the Philippines can have bats. Another cathedral in Baclaran, closer to our home, is open air and and so bats and birds can easily fly in from the sides of the chapel. It is certainly cooler inside the chapel, than outside in the tropical heat, and is pretty quiet, especially compared to the very busy Baclaran market outside of the cathedral, it is also not brightly lit, so there are quite a few bats that have taken up residence in the high ceilings with its intricate cathedral-architecture, which to a bat is probably not much different than a cave. I love to watch them whenever we went, while Minda prayed or attended mass. Occaisionally one will fly from one roost to another, and in the evenings they will fly off, bit by bit, to the outside and search for insects or water. There is always some kind of activity, flying, pushing, chattering, moving, as the bats try to sleep, and the worshipers sit, oblivious to the bats and their world, 30 or 40 feet or more on the ceiling above them.

 

At this point there is something I should probably clarify. If you don't want to read about the financial adventures we had, just jump to the last paragraph of this post and then onto the next post.

I talk about maids and marble floors and so forth, so it might sound like we had a fair amount of money at this time. Well, my wife made good money as an actress in Japan, and I had made a huge amount of money in the stock market. But things happen. We lost money. And you don't need much money to have domestic help in the Philippines.

In the 1980's the target was to become a millionaire by the time you reached 27 or 28. I was a millionaire by the time I was 29. As I mentioned earlier, I was an analyst in the Japanese stock market, and I traded quite a bit on my own account. One of my favorite things to do was to track stock manipulators (which in Japanese were called shite (pronounced she-tay)) which were very active in the market at that time. I would even use my access to the stock market to figure out what brokerage firms they were trading through. When it looked like they were selling the stock, I would watch the sell trades come through one house, but then the buy trades through another, so I knew they were trying to push the price down to actually buy bigger positions. In this way, I would trade against them. I also had a knack for using market psychology to identify market tops and bottoms. My plan was to take that wealth, and that knowledge and experience, and open up an investment company, somewhat along the lines of today's hedge funds, where I would be making money for investors, but that would include me as a large investor (so basically I would be working mostly for myself). My Japanese wife had a different plan for my money and she manipulated me and her family in order to do that. Her plan would have had her and I owning a large English school which would have made a lot of money in Japan, but it would not have been even a tiny bit fulfilling for me. I just can't do that. Especially after we looked into reconstructing her parent's house that she was set to inherit, in to a building with a school. I was shocked at the price, and realized that I could have bought a large luxury home with tennis courts and a swimming pool for that amount in America.

Long story short, she started sabotaging my career, by making it look like I had yakuza connections, which is a fascinating story in itself, which had the added dimension of the fact that I was seen all over Roppongi hanging around this very beautiful Filipina and her sisters, and the fact that I traded against shite (many of which were yakuza, or politicians), didn't help, and I could go on, but, another time... Of course, she found out about my affair with Minda, and though we were technically separated, she was in Osaka and I was in Tokyo, she stole money out of my bank account. The bank assured me that they wouldn't let it happen again. We did a Ward Office divorce, which is an amicable divorce. And I went down to the Philippines to look into setting up an investment company. I wasn't planning to start just yet, but she forced my hand. While I was gone, she forged my signature and emptied out my bank account, this time getting away with a huge sum of money. She also stole stock certificates and priceless antiques from my condo. I had additional stock certificates in her father's safe, and though I demanded them, I knew they were a lost cause. The stock certificates she did not get a hold of, she then claimed to be lost, so that they couldn't be traded and new certificates would be issued--that is a story in itself, about how later I was able to recover that money. Overall though she pretty much wiped me out. The most ironic thing, is that I had an application to open up a numbered bank account at the Union Bank of Switzerland (that would have protected everything) sitting on my desk in my Tokyo condo, filled out and ready to submit. I didn't realize till later that Japanese family law prevented the police from taking any action between spouses for most any offense. We could have done anything to each other short of murder, and gotten away with it. She did.

My investors wanted to continue with the the investment company. My heart really wasn't in it. But they said I would make good money. So I set it up, The Rising Dragon Holdings and Investments Co., ltd. which was a British Virgin Island Company, but was located in the Philippines. That is a whole another story, because the day we officially opened, looked very auspicious with President Aquino ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange commemorating the very first day of trading of the first publicly traded Philippine Fund (which was a closed-end fund similar to today's ETF's.) Then the president flew back to Manila. That night, as we were shutting the party down with my investors, some staying at our house, others going to hotels in Makati in downtown Manila. As everyone was getting ready for bed, I went to turn off the TV, and saw an announcement across the bottom of the screen, "Armed faction of military takes over military radio station outside of Manila." Then the TV went off the air for the night. We all woke up to the sound of F-16 fighters flying overhead. There was a full blown coup attempt against the Aquino government. (The US was giving air support to Aquino from Clark Air Force Base, putting an end to the rebel strafing of Malacanang Palace, with what were propellor driven training planes. And there was fighting happening right in Makati, where most of my investors were. The airports were closed, and they were not flying back to Japan that day. I shut it all down--the investment company that is.

So Minda and I would go to and from Tokyo where I did consulting and she sometimes made good money acting. (The problem was she wanted to spend too much time in Manila and she'd lose out on good parts.) We had this shell of a company, and Minda's aunt told us about doing title clearing loans which was a way to make quite a bit of money, at low risk. She told me that it was illegal for banks to make loans on titles when there is an existing loan, so once the loan from the bank or other lender was approved we could put up the money for the other loan, and hold the title, then show up at the new lender the next day and get our money back plus 10%. So we started doing this, made some quick money and I even had an investor want to join in. That is until we were with a borrower and the bank had just approved a loan, and we would have made several thousand dollars overnight, until I asked the banker, :why is it illegal for a bank to pay off the old loan from the new loan?" He said, its not illegal, that's just a popular myth. So I talked to Minda, and we both agreed we could not do that. The borrowers were already struggling. It was a scam to clear these titles and take part of their loans. We explained to that borrower how she could do it herself, and stopped doing that. (There is another story about this borrower and a con artist that we tried to warn her about (he was the reason she was taking out a new loan). It is connected to Philippine Shamanism because it is about the Phillipine little people---a fairy that is----the diwata. Maybe I will tell that story later.)

Eventually Minda had a great business idea, she would sell houses in Manila to Filipinas living and making money in Japan. In the Philippines people thought we were well off whether we were or not, then there were the family connections to Minda. She was the niece of the top military commander and President Aquino's right hand man, General DeVilla. She was also a distant relative to Vice President Laurel who was Aquino's Vice President and a thorn in her side. He was mysteriously out of the country during every coup attempt (i.e. he had something to do with them). We had high ranking friends in the NBI (the Philippine FBI), and we even knew the Director. And so forth. This meant we could buy homes financed with a cheaper preferential rate, by the housing developers at a discounted price. We could sell the houses at regular price, and finance them to the buyer at a normal Philippine rate, making money off both the spread on the loans and the spread on the prices. And it just so happened we had two developers right in our neighborhood---one was the mayor of our town, the other was a Senator of the Philippines. They were brother-in-laws and were looked at as the Philippine version of the Kennedy dynasty. We made them both godfather's to my son when he was born, which, based on Philippine culture created a strong social bond between us. On our trip back to Tokyo one time, she told me about this, and I said, let's not do anything until I run the numbers. The next day, while doing consulting for a customer, she called the office I was at, and told me that she just sold 5 houses and we have to go back to Manila to find them. I had told her to wait. We would have lost money, but I had to run the numbers and renegotiate the prices. But that is the kind of thing Minda would do. And she was excellent at selling things.

There were some significant risks in that business, one was the fact that the Japanese economy was in the process of collapsing, which I had predicted as an analyst. There were things that the government needed to do, namely shore up the banks, and I preached about that constantly. (but I was no longer an analyst, I no longer wrote a column for the Mainichi Daily News (but I probably could of, I never thought of that), so I didn't really have a voice to influence anymore). But bailing out the banks was not popular politically and they chose to let things run the course. By the time they did start bailing out the banks, it was too late. That almost happened here two decades later, and I preached about that then, even here on Hip Forums!

We did build back our worth to somewhere around US$800,000. But the risks played out, the buyers all pulled out, and we ended up owning real estate all around Manila, and no money to even feed the family. We sold all of it at a loss before we came to America.

Anyway, there was a lot of exciting stuff happening through all of this that we were on the edge of. I always believed that when you live in a foreign county, and you place yourself in the right places, meet the right people, use the fact that you are unique as a foreigner, that you can certainly be close enough to watch actual history take place, or even play a direct or indirect part in it. There were so many ways that we did. Japan was a crazy place in the 1980's, so was the Philippines. So many stories, for example, I sponsored Minda's older sister for a visa in Japan. She became the mistress to a company executive who during Japan's boom times, gave her huge amounts of money, and financed her own business pursuits (which ultimately failed), and he spent so much money on her, as other executives were apparently doing the same for their mistresses, that it became a front page scandal, and as the economy collapsed this company did as well. Her name never got into the newspapers, he was one of the key figures in the press about the scandal. The money was never recovered. (In fact, at the time when she had opened up her office in Manila, I told her that my advice would be to close up shop and put all the money into the New York listed Dollar Denominated Philippine Long Distance Telephone bonds that had recently been listed but as junk. They were safe, high yielding and were trading at a discount that would have made a very good return. I even recommended those bonds all the way up until they matured in 2012, as I recall. She would have made quite a bit of money.

Anyway, I apologize for this diversion from the story at hand. What I meant to say is that we did not have a lot of money when this was happening with her daughter. This happened after my Japanese wife had taken all my money, and we started and then shut down the investment company, but I believe it was before she had the idea to sell houses. I would have to look at the death certificate to get the dates of her first husband's death, but I remember that it was before my son was born, and before we had the real estate venture. The main thing to the story of my stepdaughter is that we didn't have much money. I will continue in the next post.

 

Shamanism, despite its Tungistic origins, is the generic term we use for the oldest religion in the world, going back to Paleolithic times.
Shamanism - Anthropology - Oxford Bibliographies.
https://www.gcrr.org/post/shamanism...religious-worldview-and-the-post-modern-world
Religion & Culture | Shamanism: The oldest religion on earth - Dance and movement heals emotional scars
I know you and others balk at calling such practices "religious', but that term is also applied to spiritual traditions that involve spirits, communal belief systems about them, and rituals for dealing with them--rudimentary though they might seem.
Prehistoric religion - Wikipedia
Native American religions | History, Beliefs, Tribes, Culture, & Facts
Some writers dare to suggest that Jesus , the celebrated healer of ancient Palestine, was a shaman.
Jesus the Shaman
Amazon.com
Jesus the Shaman - Christina Sillari

Shaman is an Evenki word from Siberia meaning one who “sees” or “penetrates to the source.” Yes, amazingly, there are similarities between the Siberian version and those practiced in the Philippines, Africa, the Eskimos of the Arctic, and right here in traditional Native America. We Chickasaws call them alikchi. The Chickasaw Medical Center, the largest Native American hospital in the U.S., right here in Oklahoma, offers traditional (shamanic-based) healing approaches as well as western medicine--with mixed reviews.
I Visited a Chickasaw Healer
I Visited a Chickasaw Healer and All I Got Was an Elk Sinew and Buffalo Horn Bracelet
Since a significant portion of the success of modern medicine seems to involve the placebo effect, and some illnesses are hysteric, psychosomatic, or conversion disorders, the success of shamanic approaches is not surprising. For some of us, medicine is aleopathic and "scientific", where healing is associated with stethoscopes, tongue depressors, scalpels, needles--and we like it. For others, these "modern" approaches seem cold, impersonal, and off-putting, and the shamanic approaches--rattles, amulets, drumming and chanting--seem more appealing and dramatic at a lower fee. No "take two eagle feathers and call me in the morning". If it works for you, go for it !

 

Not necessarily "mumbo jumbo" but a pre-scientific stab at explaining the mystery of dreams. Interesting that in explaining it you bring in more recent concepts of the conscious and unconscious or "sub-conscious", rather than the primal notion of the soul taking a mystery trip or being visited by ancestral spirits and chimera. One of the earliest anthropological efforts at explaining the origin of religion, Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) emphasized primitive interpretations of dreams as the source of belief in souls and the spirit world. Later on, as humans became more "civilized", they advanced other theories. In biblical times, dreams were premonitions of things that would happen in the future. (See the story of Joseph in Egypt or Daniel in Babylon.) Besides your two souls, which the Egyptians called the ba (personality)and the ka (life essence), the Egyptians identified the jb, seat of the emotions; the shuyet (shadow), the ren (true name), and the akh (the transfigured spirit that traveled to the afterlife.) The human imagination is amazing!

Then of course came Freud, who thought of dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious", and Jung who thought they were surfacing from the "collective unconscious". More recently, neurobiological theories favor the “activation-synthesis hypothesis,” holding the view that dreams are merely electrical impulses in the brain that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories--and don’t really mean anything more. Science is such a downer!

The God you're having trouble with is One who arrived fairly late in the game, even for Christians--the God of omnis, All this and All that. Omnipotence and omniscience weren't attributes of the gods of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, or Rome. Some theologians argue it wasn't an attribute of the traditional God of Israel, although He did become Almighty. Diogenes Allen, Theology for a Troubled Believer. The omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent God of contemporary Christianity was the creation of Christian theologians pursuing their visions of Divine perfection. There is a school of contemporary theology, process theology, derived from the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, that denies God has these attributes. (See Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes.) By this view, God operates mainly through persuasion rather than coercion, and God changes and grows with changes observed in the universe. I favor this concept of God as more in keeping with Occam's razor in getting around the "contradictions" of the omnis.

 

Yes, in the West we do apply this term to many different traditions and use it in general terms to refer to these similar traditions around the world. But this is a fairly modern usage, and it is offensive to the healers and medicine people in many cultures, especially those here in the Americas. Their argument, and with good reason, is that using the term shamanism in these ways is a New Age way of lumping everything together. They feel it is a vehicle of cultural appropriation.

The New Age movement, as I am sure you know, has a nasty habit of taking spiritual motifs, traditions, and tools from their own native context and putting them all together. In this way it removes cultural context and meaning from these things. I'm sure there are many medicine men who do not have a problem of someone holding on to something in ceremony that comes from another tradition, but has meaning to that person. I have seen it allowed. In fact my wife did this with the yuwipi man's permission in the first yuwipi she went to. But when a group of people do this as part of a religious social phenomena it is a different story, and it is no longer a question of doing something because it has meaning to that person, but it becomes a matter of doing something because it's cool or because it has significance in this religion so it must add significance to a different tradition, or a new made up tradition.

I have a very cool book that documents certain ceremonies of Siberian shamans and is filled with color photographs. I have shared it with a number of Lakota and they immediately see a resemblance to their own traditions. I can't recall the title off hand. I will have to look for it in my library. But even then, they would be offended if I said they were shamans or called their traditions shamanism. Then there is the derogatory term used in the community: plastic shaman

That is why I am careful in usage of this term.

I certainly believe that there is an ancient connection to all these different traditions that goes back into the paleolithic, and this connection runs through all of religion. The concept of the Axis Mundi is a prime example of this, whether it is a World Tree, a World Mountain, a sun tree or a cross, this concept of a sacred center point that is a portal to the other side or sides is universal and undoubtedly goes way back to mankind's earliest beginnings.

The classic book on shamanism is the one by the anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, titled, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. I would highly recommend this to anyone that is interested in the subject. In fact, this was the very first book that made sense to me of the story of my stepdaughter, and other things that were happening in my wife's family--beginning in the very first chapter. This book which first came out in French in 1951 also makes a distinction between shamanism and the medicine traditions in other cultures. But he does spend quite a bit of time comparing the different traditions.

 

I do have a problem with theories when they get into epiphenomenalist assumptions. There are other theories that do not. It all gets down to how we approach the problem of consciousness. Epiphenomenalist theories bring up a lot of problematic implications which are ignored or avoided.

Process theology is certainly an interesting way of analyzing the problem. If we think of God in terms of the information of the universe, and understand that information can be neither created nor destroyed, we could make an argument that God is the total of all that information, or at least God represents all that information. As humans create knowledge, wisdom, and contexts and chains of information, whether actual or fictional, and even as time passes by and physicality manifests, information is changed. If god represents this information, it makes sense that we would have a changing or evolving god.

The manifestation of the physical requires the information for it to take place. This information can include a vast memory of what happened in the moments, days, centuries, eons, and so forth prior to that one little particle. Its very space-time position is dependent on trends of a massively grand scale. Every particle that exists in each moment of time within my laptop, while I sit and write this, is subject to a position that is determined by the earth's spin, the orbit of the earth around the sun, the orbit of the sun around the Milky Way Galaxy, which itself is spinning, and moving through the universe. There is the information of whether that particle is an electron, or some other quanta or subatomic particle, and then there is spin, charge, and what that particle is supposed to be. Is it part of a plastic key I am pushing to create the next letter, is it an electron that moves from one atom to another as a point of electromagentic charge that runs the computer? And yet somehow all of these particles collectively represent the information that creates this laptop, records the change of information which is my post, and then places it into this world wide web. And this is happening in the face of a push and pull between randomness, and the intentionality of all local and nonlocal information. This is all a combination of information from what has already happened, and what is yet to happen. And in a single present moment, it all collapses into an actuality--a physical actuality.

The past is the record of that actuality. And it is still there. Roughly 79 light years away from earth, photons of the flash from the atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still moving though the universe. Or more correctly, the information of the photons is there, and when I say there, that information is actually superpositioned, so it is everywhere in every time across the universe, but if it were to be physically observed, it is only there, 79 light years from us, where it could collapse into a physical photon.

This creates a problem, because if all this information is superpositioned, we must ask is everything already existing everywhere in this nonphysical reality of information? Is the past still there, and the future already there, everywhere? It is certainly hard to escape the idea that the future represents all possibilities, or that it represents absolute potentiality. Anything can happen and the information for that is there, until only one thing actually happens. (I am unconvinced that there are infinite universes). So is god all-knowing and all-present? Something to put in your pipe and smoke.

That argument you responded to of an all-knowing god was my approach to religion when I was a teenager. It still holds relevance to me, but I would only use it in the case of whether a religion asserts that god is all-knowing and all-good. If you believe that, and then try to tell me that your religion is the only true religion, and is the word of god, then you better not have any inconsistencies and contradictions.

 

Back to the story.

The taxi driver showed up at 10:00 in the morning as promised. We guided Gilda out to the car who was still like a mindless animal, a blank stare, no emotions, and we took off out of the city, into the province of Cavite. After passing coconut and coffee plantations, and rice fields, and corn fields, we eventually pulled up to a small farm house. It couldn't have been more than one or two rooms. As planned, I immediately scooted down into the car seat so that no one would see me. As I said earlier, we did not have much money at this time, and whenever someone knew that my wife was with a foreigner, prices immediately jumped. We had no idea what this was going to cost, but we certainly didn't want it to reflect a foreigner price.

Minda stepped out of the car and guided Gilda to the door, where they knocked and then entered inside. I waited quietly hidden in the back seat of the taxi.

After a short while Minda came out to the car, opened the door, and told me, "He says you are supposed to be a part of this?"

"What? Did you tell him I'm here?"

"No, he just knew," she answered.

"Well how much is this going to cost?"

"He said to just give him a gift of tobacco."

We asked the taxi driver where we could get tobacco and he suggested the sari-sari store across the street. Sari-sari stores are shops that people run out of their garage or from a room on the side of their house. Sari-sari means 'variety' or in this case, sundry things, or assorted goods. They are kind of like a small bodega and sell snacks and food, drinks, tobacco, alcohol, toilet paper, lotion, soap, detergent, and so forth. Every neighborhood in the Philippines has at least one, if not more. We bought two cigarettes, and met Gilda and this balian on the side of his house. He was holding a bucket. His house was at the corner of his field which was probably about a hectare in size. He had us walk to the back side of the field where a small stream gently flowed. And then told us we were all going to get into the stream.

We stepped into the stream which came to about my thigh. I watched Gilda as we guided her into the water to see if she would show any reaction to the cool water in the muggy tropical heat. She seemed oblivious to what was happening, just as she had been to everything else since Saturday afternoon when they came home from the funeral. The balian handed the bucket to Minda and had her scoop up water and pour it on Gilda, as if she was taking a shower. About the second or third time Minda poured water on her, the balian bent down as if he was going to whisper something in her ear.

Suddenly her eyes widened and she looked up with a surprised look on her face. "Mama, where am I?!"

That blew my mind. In fact, it took me a moment to process. He actually healed her! Minda was overjoyed and hugged Gilda--her daughter was back. Gilda asked, "Why are we in a stream?"

The balian explained that it will take three more days till she is completely back to normal. He then went over to a bush growing on the side of the stream, and cut off a bunch of leaves. "Every morning, for the next three days, you have to boil these leaves and then pour it on her like we did here. Then she will be back to normal."

We couldn't thank him enough, and to do this for just two cigarettes. It was unbelievable. I will continue the story tomorrow.

 

Shortly after we left this peasant farmer's house I asked Minda what happened when she went into his house and what he said was wrong with Gilda.

She said that he had two animal spirit helpers. He asked them about Gilda and they told him that her soul was wandering somewhere on the other side.

I thought that, as an amateur anthropologist, I was fairly sophisticated on many indigenous beliefs and traditions as well as those of world religions. But I had no context to understand or make sense of what she said next. He explained to Minda that Gilda had a gift but no one had taught her how to use it, and she is too young to understand it anyway, but her father's spirit recognized this gift and asked her soul to guide him to the other side. She went with him, not knowing what to do, and she did not know how to return, so she was stuck on the other side. So he had to bring her soul back to her body.

I didn't even know what to do with that explanation. I couldn't make any sense of it until years later after I had returned to the states, and brought my family with me, and kept running into the Eliade book (I mentioned in a response to Tishomingo), Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. What this balian was saying is that Gilda was a psychopomp. In other words she was someone who would accompany the spirit to the other side. In the West we have the angel of death, the banshee, the Greek God Hermes. In fact the book I had been reading talked about these. The death knock was exactly the sign of a psychopomp. We think of this in the West as an action of an angel or a god, or whatever you want to call a banshee. But for our most ancient ancestors, this was the function of a healer or a shaman. In many cultures this is still the case.

I would have been a bit embarrassed to say this, but at the time, I had certainly heard the word psychopomp, and even used it. But I used it incorrectly. I thought the word was based on the word, pomp, which means the display of ceremony. Then there is the archaic usage which referred to boastfulness and vanity. So I would have justified, in fact I probably did justify, taking Gilda to an indigenous healer, because the 'psychopomp' of the ritual may shock her into being cured. But, of course, I later learned through Eliade's book that this was entirely an incorrect use of the word. However, it would have been correct to say, As a psychopomp she accompanied or guided her father to the other side.

To add to the synchronicity of the whole event, the answer to understanding what had happened to Gilda may have been right there in that book of the English ghost hunter. I was especially interested in the chapter that dealt with the knock of death, and the banshee, and the angel of death. I don't recall if he used the word, psychopomp, but if he did, I probably misunderstood it. I don't recall that he spoke of shamans and the like as psychopomps, but perhaps if I would have gone back and read that chapter again, maybe he did, and I missed it the first time.

But this experience certainly provided a clue that I understood later that my wife's ancestors, as healers, were among other things, psychopomps. And all her kids have this gift. And it manifests in subtle but obvious ways. Such as the fact that many of them are drawn to work in medicine, and their work tends to have a connection with death. My youngest stepdaughter is a nurse, and is working towards an LPN, and is working in a hospice, with dying patients and she prepares the bodies after death. My oldest stepdaughter was a nurse but wanted a change in career, and studied to be a chef, and has ended up back in an old folk's home leading a kitchen. She understands, and has pointed out, that the meals she prepares are often a patient's last meal before making their journey. She is very conscientious of this and wants the meals to be very good for that reason. Gilda too became a nurse and also works in an old folks home, and is now a Nurse Practitioner.

Years ago, my wife worked at an old folk's home for about 2 months. This was before she accepted her gift as a healer, and as I explained earlier, as I was going to sweat lodges and stuff, which she did not want anything to do with. (I understand that a part of her was trying to fight this responsibility as a healer.) The reason she quit her job so quickly, was that often times we would be sleeping and about 2 or 3 in the morning she would wake me up yelling, "What are you doing here?! Get out! You don't belong here!"

The first few times I'd ask her, "Who's here?"

She'd respond, "Don't you see them?"

"Who? Where?"

"At the door," she'd say pointing at our closed bedroom door. "They are from the rest home!"

Of course, I couldn't see anyone. Then she would show up at work, and learn that the people who visited her the night before had passed away during the night. She did not like that. She told her boss and HR why she was quitting. I went with her and verified it. But I don't know what her manager or the people there thought of that reason.

The Austronesian root of the word balian is to accompany. There are other theories on the source of this word, but this one makes the most sense to me. In fact, one of their techniques of healing could very well be to take the soul of the victim up to heaven temporarily on a spirit journey, just like the shamans of Siberia. Balian is an old word and is not understood by many who speak Tagalog today. But it is still used in Malaysian Malay and I believe Indonesian (I have to find my Indonesian dictionary) to refer to indigenous medicine men. Another word that may be connected to this is balik, which is used in both of those languages and Tagalog, meaning, 'to return.'

I will continue with this tomorrow and talk more about soul loss and the soul dualism.

 

I didn't know any of this? My Filipino side of the family are conservative catholics, so this is interesting to hear.

 

The Spanish did their very best to destroy all these traditions. They had learned from Mexico that if they go too far in mixing the local traditions with Christianity then they risk giving power to the indigenous priests and medicine people. Therefore in Mexico in the Mayan communities, the combination of Mayan traditions with catholicism gave a lot of power to the Mayan priests. Still today, if you go to Mass or deal with catholics in Mayan communities you will see the catholicism has a lot of Mayan influence.

So when they got to the Philippines they destroyed all that they could of the old ways. Santo Nino is based on the old Rice God, but otherwise there is not a whole lot of old ways.

When we lived in the Philippines in the 90's there was no information at all on these old ways, not even information on the spiritual practices and beliefs of existing tribes like the Bontoc. But people have been trying to learn these old ways and more information has come out in the past 4 or 5 years on this than has come out in the previous 100 I believe.

 

That's wonderful to hear that they're trying to revive some of their old traditions.