timboucher

Wrote this as an email response to my friend Garrett who is actively bending the personal paradigm of “urban shaman” to suit his own needs. In his post on the subject, he writes:

have spent a long time wrestling with ways in which to express personal or religious ideas that don’t simultaneously make me wanna puke; and a part of me thinks that if I start messing around in this area and have fun with it I might be able to find something that I feel comfortable with.

Let my mind wander on this subject all day and ended up writing back to him something I wanted to save and build on here:

“was messing around with a technique earlier while driving in the backseat of my friend’s car… “subconscious queries”, i was thinking of it as. basically a mantra hooked into a physical activity, which was a drum pattern on my leg. the mantra was “urban shaman” which i just repeated over and over again silently with the accompanying motion (see: twiddling post) , until it felt like the query “took”. one thing i noticed, is that when you repeat a phrase to yourself fast it tends to morph into other phrases. this is worth exploring: mishearings of things, freudian slips, etc. first level of the query. once it “takes”, i figure its out of your hands. its like you send a librarian off into the universal consciousness, after having properly paged and instructed the little messenger software angel and then you just wait for a response. may happen at any time. and in odd ways. in my case, the response was pretty immediate but totally oblique and very literal:

along the side of the highway was a pelt from what looked like a deer. no deer though. no bones, no meat, no blood. just the pelt. very weird. deer pelt on the highway with no explanation, urban shamanism. the subconscious query returns koans made out of symbolic objects.”

Also during this process, I started doing some internal wexology, a data visualization technique loosely based on the memory palace technique, but I’ll write about that separately.

• [Urban Shaman Exercise] Literal Query Strings
• Eckankar from the Inside
• transcendent [STAR]
• Dream Interpretation
• Throw them bones