Somebody sent me this a while ago. It’s an excerpt from Path Notes of an American Ninja Master by Glenn Morris. There’s some interesting stuff in it, so I figured I’d post it.

“… This whole thing was stretching to the limit what my first wife, Martha, used to refer to as “your fucking Zen Buddhist calm!” There weren’t any stress management techniques for dealing with these life events. And the dance has only just begun. I was still locked in position, morning had come and gone as a still, small voice began to speak to me. “Oh, your neck hurts; well, look at your eyelids.” I could see a holograph of my skull and neck bones as if it were an X-ray, except when I moved my head the holograph replicated the movement. “See the damage here. That’s highschool football, and this one, that’s karate. Now stickout your arm, turn your hand over and shift your shoulder this way.” The vertebrae slipped into place easily and a residual pain that I’d been ignoring for twenty years went away. “Now isn’t that nice. Why don’t you just let me take over. I know how to take care of this body.”

“Whoah, this was getting a little too strange even for me. I’d seen The Exorcist. What was going on now? Voices in my head! “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Which is one of Jesus’s better puns when you know about the spine. Who do you call, Ghostbusters?

“An interesting debate ensued as to who owned what. The id had now emerged and proceeded to show the learned personality which I still perceived as me what was what. “You think what you see is real, try this.”

“The back porch became a forest, my meditating pillow a rock. I could hear birds singing as the wind moved the branches of the trees. I was naked, the sun was going down. “I’m your body” the voice said, “I process everything that you see, hear, feel, or do. You don’t know wat’s real. I do.” I was taken back on the pillow facing into the kitchen, considerably shaken.

“Look,” I said, “I’m a college professor. For all I know, you’re not even housebroken. You may be able to run this body, but how are your lecture skills? I have to feed my family. Let’s make a deal. I mean we’re both me. How can we merge?”

“What happened next I can only describe as a fist being shoved through another fist, but it was taking place in my skull. My perceptions were going through some very interesting changes and my body began to change. Some of those changes are still going on today, which is about eight years later. As the inner voice quieted, I asked one more question. “What would you have done if I hadn’t opted for a merger?”

“The voice grew large, seemed to come from all around me, and said, “I am a jealous God and will have no other gods before me! Obey me and live according to my custom!” A very interesting support for bicameral brain theory. Then it went, “If you didn’t go for that, thre is always something like this… I’m Xantha, a 10,000-year-old warrior from Atlantis. Allow me to enter through you and share the learning of the ages.” That seemed to take care of channels. If you don’t allow the learned personality (ego and/or superego) to die when you meditate, the id wil try to fool you into letting it run the body. That was the last time “the spirit” spoke as a separate entity.”

Love that veiled jab at Ramtha, although who knows if that’s really what’s going on in that case. Anyway, this brings me back to an interesting question I’ve had for a while. In a lot of classical and gnostic literature, there seems to be a division between spirit and soul. And I’ve never quite grasped what the hell they were talking about. But maybe this is what they mean, at least in terms of spirit.