Guru Viking Podcast
Ep263: My Demon Exorcism - Mattias Daly 3
In this episode I am once again joined by Mattias Daly, Taoist practitioner and translator of ‘Taoist Inner Alchemy’, published by Shambala.
Mattias tells the story of his affliction by a malevolent entity, a demon attached to his ancestral line for generations. Mattias details the progression of his symptoms and his terror as the being began to take deeper hold on his body and mind.
Mattias recounts several attempts at exorcism, working with ritualists from Taoist, Catholic, Tibetan Buddhist, Spiritualist, and Māori traditions in increasingly desperate attempts to rid himself of the entity.
Mattias also explains various theories of demonology, the steps he now takes to avoid contact with such forces, and reveals the surprising reasons why he is sharing his story now, for the first time in public.
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Video version: https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep263-possessed-by-a-demon-mattias-daly-3
Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast’.
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Topics include:
00:00 - Intro 01:02 - Arriving in New Zealand 03:49 - Searching for a mentor 04:23 - Intense and unusual spontaneous meditation experiences 11:48 - Teacher’s advice 13:02 - Extreme experiences reach a crescendo 14:54 - Martial movements and speaking in tongues 17:34 - Self healing powers 20:26 - Meeting a new Qi Gong teacher 26:01 - Lead up to the exorcism 35:06 - Exorcism #1: Taoist 37:33 - Failure of the exorcism 42:06 - Exorcism #2: Catholic 50:18 - Challenge to Mattias’ materialistic world view 55:03 - Return to meditation practice and involvement with Tibetan Buddhism 58:38 - The demon returns 01:02:13 - Teacher advises to stop practice 01:04:37 - Exorcism #3: Tibetan Buddhist 01:09:26 - Demon breaks through and takes possession of Mattias 01:13:33 - A deeper level of possession 01:15:47 - Isolation and worsening symptoms 01:20:20 - Exorcism #4: Spiritualism 01:24:14 - Fear of full possession 01:25:35 - Exorcism #5: Māori 01:38:06 - Māori tohunga’s explanation of the exorcism 01:49:03 - Origin of the demon and ancestral ties 01:50:54 - Why did the demon try to take possession of Mattias? 01:54:11 - Care and safety around malevolent entities 01:59:19 - Contact with other entities 01:59:48 - Should you learn exorcism? 02:02:23 - Sleep schedule and dreams 02:03:16 - Chinese demonology 02:07:15 - Ghost sightings 02:10:38 - Why is Mattias sharing this story now?
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Watch the previous episodes with Mattias Daly:
- https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep244-taoist-adventures-mattias-daly
- https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep251-taoist-inner-alchemy-mattias-daly-2
To find our more about Mattias Daly, visit:
- https://www.shambhala.com/authors/a-f/mattias-daly.html
… For more interviews, videos, and more visit:
- https://www.guruviking.com
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Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James
- Duration:
- 2h 17m
- Broadcast on:
- 19 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
In this episode I am once again joined by Matthias Daley, Taoist practitioner and translator of Taoist Inner Alchemy published by Shambhala. Matthias tells the story of his possession by a malevolent entity, a demon attached to his ancestral line for generations. Matthias details the progression of his symptoms and his terror as the possession began to take deeper hold on his body and mind. Matthias recounts several dramatic attempts at exorcism, working with ritualists from Taoist, Catholic, Tibetan Buddhist, spiritualist and Maori traditions in increasingly desperate attempts to rid himself of the entity. Matthias also explains various theories of demonology, the steps he now takes to avoid contact with such forces and reveals the surprising reasons why he is sharing his story now for the first time in public. So without further ado, Matthias Daley. Matthias Daley, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. I'm so pleased to be talking with you again. The previous two episodes, we recorded about your life and your journey as a practitioner or as a translator, as well as your latest publication, Taoist Inner Alchemy, a fabulous translation that's now available everywhere, and really excellent. Highly recommended. Today we're going to take a turn in an interesting direction. In the first episode, when we went through your biography, we arrived at a period of time you spent in New Zealand and some things happened during that period that we thought best to treat in its own episode. So those who have heard the first episode will know, we sort of said a few things about it and then we sort of moved on and we agreed to come back to it and treat it in its right. And that's what we plan to do here. So you are arriving in New Zealand, perhaps you can say why you've arrived in New Zealand, what brought you there, what age are you, and then continue the narrative. So my mum is a kiwi born in Timoroo raised in Christchurch, South Islander, 100% Pacihath, for those who know what that means. It means we are not of Maori descent or Maoriori descent, we are the, of the European stop, that is Pacihas, the Maori word for that, but everyone in New Zealand knows this term. And so I'm a passport holder citizen of New Zealand and in about 23, I just kind of felt like I should go there for a while. My mum always wanted me to connect with my family on that side more closely and I was kind of to some degree intentionally trying to put space between myself and my location in Chicago, where a lot of the adventures and hijinks we talked about last episode were going on. And I know of course New Zealand is a truly beautiful place on planet earth and hardly needs a reason to go there. And it had been my plan to kind of settle down for a period of time and see about working and making a life for at least a few years there. So that was what had sort of spurred me to move to New Zealand in the first place. So this is the very beginning of 2007 and I was 23 at the time. And I just visited China for the first time as well as Tibet on the way over. That's kind of how I ended up landing there. Now in that time when I showed up I had been, as I described in the last episode, I'd kind of run off the rails in life in a lot of ways and I had gone looking for mentorship and what turned into guidance in a lot of Taoist teachings ranging from the ethical and philosophical to the practical in terms of meditation practice and some Chico standing, sitting meditation, Chico in practice. And the sort of events that really kicked off in New Zealand in a lot of ways they started while I was still in Chicago. Not directly but it's something worth talking about because this is very pertinent to Taoist practice and a lot of people will pass through, have the potential to pass through something similar if one engages with meditation or Chico and not necessarily unique to Taoism. What I am about to describe if you've been to a seven-day Goenka retreat, I remember vividly Goenka talks about one of his students I think was a German metallurgist perhaps in working with making rockets and he described how this German fellow at his meditation center, this was back when Goenka was still alive and teaching in person and his students at his retreats had a personal self, was during the meditation time, you know, occupying all kinds of bizarre postures and making strange facial expressions. This is spontaneous reactions to stillness and in Chinese they tend to be referred to in modern Chinese as tsu fakong which is a combination of three characters, one meaning it can mean self, it can mean sort of like by its own nature, fak is here means emerging and goen kind of means skill so some would even call it spontaneous skill, it's also referred to in its Chinese opinion in some English speaking circles and so while I was training quite intensely with a teacher in Chicago who I mentioned before who prefers not to be referred to by his name anyone could find him with but his name is Shrien Wait, in that time I was regularly at home practicing a mix of qigong standing and seated meditation and one day in the summer of 2006 I was doing standing meditation quite late at night in a sort of classic tree hugging posture and I began to feel this strange feeling like my arms wanted to spin in circles which I'm kind of showing for anybody who's watching the video but just my arms just wanted to spin in small circles and I felt that this was very strange I had really no prior knowledge about the world of qigong and self cultivation I've never heard of anything like tsu fakong and I'd never been to or seen and was barely aware of things like people speaking in tongues and you know catching the Holy Ghost which which is a part of American culture I just never been exposed to it so I've really never seen spontaneous movement in the human body and I thought this is awfully odd because every time I stand in this posture I feel like my arms really want to do this so eventually I went to my teacher shimwe and asked him what's going on and he just I mean he's just like that sifakong and he explained it to me and I said okay so what do you do and he said well you just kind of write out the storm because the general I think the general sort of sober wise consensus in daoist practice about sifakong with of course there being a variety of opinions and some people who take a very different stance but generally speaking a lot of people emphasize this can arise naturally it can also be kind of triggered in the sense that a teacher can intentionally lead a student towards it and some teachers even will open courses where they're trying to teach people how to get into that state I've seen such a course in Taiwan there's even books about it in Chinese but sometimes it arises totally on its own for example as Goenko was talking about with his student and that when this happens it's a process of the chi of the body according to its own innate natural wisdom balancing itself or potentially pushing out chi that is not really healthy for the body and moving from a state of disharmony towards harmony and from poor health towards better health through this this process which can leave a person it can it can it can range from several months to several years but generally I think not having done any formal survey of it but I think it's generally sort of thought you know maybe two to three years would be the upper limit generally speaking although some approaches to practice people attempt to continue to go into this spontaneous Goen state perhaps as their primary practice for a very very long time so it's it's not to say that two three years and it's over but at any rate that process spontaneously began for me in 2006 and my teacher's advice was to just kind of ride it out and it so happened that it started shortly before he began a three-week intensive where we were gathering in a unitarian church six days of the week for three weeks and we would have at least an hour of standing meditation in the morning under his his watchful eye and it it that was great because it allowed me to sort of with a sense of safety and trust to allow things to come out and this church was pretty much empties say for us at these hours and I began to have really intense reactions like hitting myself this is a normal part of if I go for a lot of people it's sort of like tapping but it can be forceful it can be really forceful um a whole thing like just really dramatic coffin like the body's really trying to move something out to the point that I was drooling out of here's coming out of my eyes uh I don't know if I said or not but like screaming like and I'm talking like screaming in a very scary very loud way that you know um it would freak a passer by out uh but I've seen this sort of thing happen in other other contexts in other you know later in my life for example in 2017 uh and 2018 I attended some myofascial release courses taught by John Barnes in the US where uh he was getting people getting you know groups of a hundred people in a hotel in New York City to learn how to go into sort of what he would refer to as spontaneous facial uh reactions which are very similar in terms of what you see people doing like really really letting loose uh and my teacher's young way when I would ask him you know he would say he was aware I had had quite a lot of things happen to me in my life that um I was holding in some very very negative interpersonal relationships that had left me carrying some serious baggage and some serious scars in a you know in addition to things I talked about in the previous podcast um so he was aware of this we talked about it and he also said from what he was able to discern some of the things coming out what he said were very old cheap and so in this three-week period I just kind of got used to witnessing my body go into uh a very strange convulsive, curative state um and allowing that to unfold and my teacher had a very his refrain was a sort of very classical um Taoist teaching but I think other traditions have something very similar to is just what comes you know don't go seeking for it allow it to arise allow it to run its course and then when it has you know when it's time to close the session sort of come back the normality and and don't linger on sort of trying to intellectualize or capture what just happened you know just let it go and I think that was a very good teaching um and I think it's a great teaching you know for meditation practice in general but I perhaps took it a little bit too far uh unknowingly later on so after this three-week period that I think the the the tzivagol maybe reached a crescendo in terms of it's just like extreme sort of screaming and purging and it got so bad that in this room full of 40 students or so they eventually put me in another room in the church so I wouldn't disturb everybody from the volume of it um not that people were scared a lot of them I've been practicing for a long time and it's seen some pretty weird reactions um but it was just it was it was so loud uh and and then it began to sort of calm down a little bit and and so then uh in that was around it would have been july of 2006 and then in august or so I moved to kineticate where my parents uh had moved to a pretty rural rural area and were living literally uh on the edge of a large tract of forest that was water tractment I think it's called land uh water catchment I'm sorry land and it was uh therefore undeveloped, unpopulated and it was the first time in my life I lived um next to anything bigger than a park uh like a city park and so I got used to romping around there in my free time and it was perfect because I could go into my tzivagol state and not really worry about getting discovered and freaking people out as would be uh an actual concern in a park in chicago um and so I I just continued to let the process unfold um and again every time when I closed my session I would just sort of say to myself all right just let that go whatever rose let it go let it go and everything that had happened to that point at all from the summer of 2006 going into the autumn and the winter had all been weird and unprecedented and unlike anything that I had context for understanding my life prior to then but something shifted in the period when I was in the woods in Connecticut before I went to New Zealand um and I began to go from just sort of pausing and shouting and tapping meridian sort of things to jumping around doing spontaneous martial arts sort of movements I wouldn't say that they would look exactly like kung fu or anything even even a dancing sort of movements and then what I could only call speaking in tongues like sort of babbling in gibberish but it sounded you know linguistic and and it was oh and pulling very strange facial expressions but it was it was all fairly bizarre it's the sort of thing that anyone caught me on video doing it I would be very unhappy if it ended up on the internet and and I was always alone except for one time when in the winter of that year by brother came uh for Christmas one of my brothers and we went on a hike together and when we were pretty deep in the woods I paused to do some practice and he was like you know that's pretty freaky man that looks pretty weird uh and and I had gotten an habit of just telling myself oh well this is probably some sort of spontaneous physiological reaction slash chi reaction that is triggering various centers in my brain which is making me have these odd movements and voices come out but at this point I really actually even though I was getting into thousand and Buddhism I actually really wasn't open to the idea that there was a realm that we call a spiritual world you know that there was ghosts that there were deities that there were other wandering non-corporeal intelligences of any sort I still was more or less the sort of you know a materialist I believe we die and then we the chemical processes stop the body rots the brain the brain the brain the brain is broken and the mind is therefore over so it never it never crossed my mind to be honest that oh this could be anything other than my own spontaneous uh strange reaction and and um I never contacted by email the teacher I just mentioned Shambu Wei because I just sort of felt like his instruction was very clear it comes let it go it comes let him go in terms of these these phenomena um okay yeah I should stop there let you see if you have any questions or anything was there any emotional or inner visual or auditory content associated with that experience for example thoughts images no voices or emotional content etc not really no no I mean like maybe a bit of emotion would sometimes feel to be stirred up but not really um the more one thing that I remember was I felt extremely powerful when those sort of martial movements came up as though I was full of an unusual amount of strength and energy and I would have this very strong sensation that were I to actually get into a fight that I would be stronger now this could be a total illusion I remember thank god I never tested it uh but that that was a strong sensation and another thing that was very interesting that happened um during this period is I injured my wrist one day at IKEA I was I was working in IKEA at the time and I was just pushing some stuff back onto a warehouse shelf and I hit it with a funny angle and I bent my wrist back and I got this very painful wrist sprain and at my wrist the next day was so weak that my mom I remember she handed me a bag with two bears of jeans that one of us one of the other of us had just bought and I dropped it I couldn't hold it my wrist was in so much pain and I was quite frustrated because I felt oh this is gonna be weeks before this gets better and I guess that night or the next I happened to be in the house alone so I didn't bother to go in the woods I did my um my my standing which then led it very quickly in the zebakon alone and then I ended up doing this circular dance around the living room totally spontaneous with a with a chant um a sort of musical brief chant and and this I guess went on for maybe about 40 minutes or so something like that 30 minutes it could have been an hour and when I was done my wrist was entirely healed like just it I was very surprised because I've sprained stuff a lot I like I'm pretty active person and I was like this is not normal to have a string where this morning or yesterday I couldn't even hold a bag with two pairs of pants and today it's just better and then you know that's uh that was interesting but I I've got to be honest I enjoyed this sort of um you know feeling the well my mind is unclear to what degree I was actually getting some sort of power boost it felt like I was and I liked that and I and I again I never mentioned any of this to anybody the only person who you know my brother saw me once and he's pretty used to me being a weird guy but even with him it's like yo what are you doing in the woods you know um yes that that was about that or implying it seems that you've become so used to compartmentalizing that as part of your practice and then when the practice finishes letting it go moving on that perhaps there was something building that you were not examining or alert exactly that you otherwise exactly exactly that is that is my implication yep and you know on my way to China and then New Zealand so I I saved up some money working at EKEA until January of 2007 um then I visited some family in Ireland and then I visited a close college friend who at that time was working in Paris uh and I have this very vivid memory of sitting on a a metro of some sort in in Paris I can't remember it was a subway some sort of metro train um and I was face to face with an older woman and she had the most gnarled knuckles um and I had this to be honest this spontaneous like insight as though I was seeing into her knuckles and that there was a sort of a grayish goo accumulated on them and using my mind I began to just staring at her knuckles using my mind kind of remove this stuff and in my mind as I was doing this I was just kind of in a way sort of playing a game I guess it's you know in a sense of what I would do if I could help this person and I sat there doing this quite focused for a while and then I looked up and she was staring at me incredibly intently and tears were just streaming down her face which they had not been before and I think we could return to this much later in this conversation but I would say that that was a because I do I did not have that sort of ability prior and I do not now but things began to happen that were a little bit I guess you could say uncanny and unusual uh again leaving the possibility that this woman was just crying for some other reason or she was really staring at me and then you know I visited China one of my very good friends was there for several weeks and then I ended up down in New Zealand this would be you know maybe March of 2007 yeah so you know quite early in my arrival in New Zealand one of the first things I started to do was look for a Qigong class because I had you know in a month almost a year prior to showing up in New Zealand he had had reached so much benefits from having that kind of community in my life that that discipline my health was improving my mental health was improving my tendency to involve myself in self-destructive behaviors and sort of spiraling thinking all of these things had improved so much that it just seemed like okay one of the first things I should do is try to find the Qigong class and and keep up with that because I did feel like it wasn't like I could just I had learned enough to just continue on my own indefinitely so I asked around and I ended up being directed to I think it is called the New Zealand College of acupuncture or oriental medicine something like that is in Auckland people said there was an evening Tai Chi and Qigong class they're taught by a practitioner of Chinese medicine so I figured out what that was and I showed up for a Qigong course and you know the instructor was very welcoming and just sort of like you know pay you it was very inexpensive maybe five New Zealand dollars at the time or ten something like that just you know pay pay a few bucks and sure join us Qigong class and at at some point late in the class on the first session he had us break into Paris and do sort of some sort of a partner Qigong exchange to something very subtle it's not like we were shooting bolts of healing energy out of our hands just a sort of subtle feeling other people's energy fields and feeling the way in which you can very softly interact with that with another person and very quickly my body began to spasm quite a bit often when I was doing standing meditation and zippago would begin I would start to shake and vibrate and that that was coming out but I had a degree of control over it so it's not like I was going into full-on screaming in the church mode that I had been in in the summer of 2006 because these were strangers I didn't need to freak them out right away but I remember the man who I was working with looked a little bit unnerved and kept making eye contact with the teacher and the teacher he walked over and he said you know to the man it's fine don't worry the shaking you know sometimes people have spontaneous reactions to Chi depending on their sensitivity and their physical constitution and so forth don't worry and so that that made me happen because that just sort of aligned with my general understanding yeah yeah I just have a shaky Chi body and so placended and this teacher came up to me and he said you know that shaking actually is not that normal why don't you come to my acupuncture clinic this week sometime and I'll see if I can help you sort it out and so I said thank you and nodded um and immediately my first thought was this guy thinks I'm a sucker he thinks I'm gonna come pay him you know ten bucks but she gone class and now I'm about to shell out 50 bucks for acupuncture no way um I'm fine and but I was really like this is this is over the top you know like this is the hard sell I've been here one day and you're already trying to get me into clinic I see I see how it is um so I I just politely said I'd think about it but I did not go I didn't even look into this clinic and the next week I went back to Chigong class though um and things unfolded much as they had the week before and after class he came up to me the teacher and he said you know why didn't you come to my clinic and I felt a little bit sheepish and I said you know I just moved here to New Zealand and I spent a lot of money before I came here and I haven't found a job yet so I really don't think I have enough money for acupuncture and so forth you know herbs and all that I can't afford it but I'll think about it and he said no no no this isn't something for money I don't I don't want any money for you from you for this this isn't an issue that I put in the category of the kinds of things I would accept money to treat which I thought was a very unusual and surprising comment and I said well what do you mean and he said well that shaking that's happening when you're doing Chigong I don't think it's entirely you and I was like that's an enigmatic statement especially for a guy coming from the kind of background I did where people never ever ever talked about ghosts or even god like I came from a pretty much a close to atheist household with for various reasons a almost sort of anti-religious bent and and I certainly looked down I might have mentioned this before on religious people I thought that was stupid so I was like not me I didn't even know what he meant but I could tell he was very sincere and very serious about treating me for free that he felt that this was important so he gave me I he told me how to find his clinic and he said come I can't remember what day but you know he said come at night and I just thought okay he's just having me come outside of you know normal normal office hours because he's not going to charge me so I thought all right and so that that when the day came I I found this place and it was quite in a like sort of commercial industrial area of Auckland there weren't it wasn't a residential area and there weren't like you know shops around it was pretty industrial I don't cross like a highway overpass to get there and it was sort of like a a row of you know it might have been the sort of place where you could come and buy paint during the day and then his clinic was there and I show up and you know his lights on and I opened the door and it's kind of funny I opened the door and from what I understand I am hit with a massive cloud of marijuana smoke and I'm like I should leave now this guy has just hit like the biggest bong ever and then I thought you don't have a lot of friends in Chicago who like get high before work you know I've worked with guys who smoke a joint before waiting tables for eight hours you know guys go with wait time so I was like it's very possible his Chinese medicine skills improve when he's blazed out of his mind so after a little bit of mental gymnastics I decided I would brave the cloud and go in much later I learned this is mocks of butts gym which you know smells a little bit like some very skunky way but in my mind this man is probably like very high and when he greeted me in his fiance was I was I was quite impressed like they've seen they've got it together about how much they've been smoking so it's just proved that he's a douse master you know because it couldn't affect him but it was mocks of us so so then he took me in one of the clinical rooms and and it made me feel quite at ease that his fiance was there the whole situation actually seemed like sort of more normal like I'm in this sort of industrial park at night in a random TCM clinic with a person I've met twice who uh yeah it was like all right he's there's somebody else here it's okay and we go into one of the uh the treatment rooms and and I said so I didn't really understand what you said the other day about it not being me and he said all right well when things like this come up I usually tell people there's a I give them a choice I can give you a very simple superficial explanation if you don't want to know too much and you're not interested in these things then we'll just try to get on with the treatment or I can just tell you everything I can tell you it's depends on how much you would like to know and I I'd be the nature of my personality I said well of course I would like to know everything you have to say and he said all right well in addition to my studies of Chinese medicine Tai Chi and Chi Gong I have also since becoming a practitioner of TCM begun to study with two Maori healers he was also he is also Pakeha but he was studying with two Maori healers and they were teaching him about how to remove entities and what he was learning with these two Maori teachers of his was how to sense sometimes even see and then how to remove beings inhabiting a person's body which should not be there and at this point I mean I was just sort of like what the hell am I hearing this is the first time in my life the only other exorcism I had ever heard of in my life prior to that outside of the movies was a gay friend of mine from the south who went back south for summer vacation and he was southern Baptist and his parents and relatives forced him to go through like an attempt to take the gay ghost out of him which also another mutual friend was sort of compelled to witness which they all found it to be a very disturbing and ridiculous ritual and kind of hurtful and it didn't work actually he went from being in the closet to totally like you know what I'm up after that so in my mind exorcism was kind of like a preposterous notion and here I'm having a person tell me that I might have something in me and I'm like what but it is very much an aspect of my personality to like learn by bruising getting bruises learned by jumping into things sometimes you know learned that I'm not interested in something but always if there's an opportunity to do something new I tend towards taking it and I'm like okay so then what do we do next and I was a little bit creeped out and I had a little bit of a goose bump feeling because I felt that the man talking to me by this point I no longer felt like I was talking to a high person like I felt like I was talking to a person who knew what they were talking about and was pretty serious and the fact that he didn't want my money just his presence had sincerity and calm and you know I didn't feel like I was talking to a madman I said well what do we do next and he said oh well don't worry it's actually not that big of a deal this does happen a fair amount and traditional cultures around the world have generally had ways of dealing with with this the modern scientific west is kind of more of an aberration in that we don't acknowledge these things and therefore we have no idea what to do but actually this is just a part of the fabric of human existence and always has been in the Maori population Zealand has kept this knowledge alive and has been so kind to share it with me so I will I'll get rid of it sort of you know this will be easy so he had me take my shoes off and lie down face up on the the treatment table but you know that you'd see in any acupuncture clinic and he placed a chair at the foot of the table and he sat there so he was facing my bare feet and he said okay we're going to begin I'm just going to sort of connect with your body and I will remove this thing and and I said okay sure so he gently put his you know he clasped my two feet so as you know his fingers were on the the tops of my feet and then his thumbs touched the center of the ball of I guess more or less the center of the arch near to the ball of the foot kind of around the yong chuan kidney one point in acupuncture maybe it was that point and much to my shop the moment he made contact my body just went into utterly like instantaneous convulsions spasms I began to ride around not unlike you know a person reenacting scenes from the film The Exorcist yes and then you know like this and immediately I understood oh this is why this man asked me to come here at night because I was screaming I was crying I it was but it was different in character from the tzifagong in that church uh you know eight or nine months earlier because here I did instantly have a sense of like this is very strange I seem to be witnessing my body not that I have lost total control of it but I seem to be witnessing something I don't recognize causing my body to move and react it felt it felt different and and the whole the whole affair lasted quite a long time it could have been an hour uh and at some point I felt as though I was going to attempt to hit this man and I had to use all of my uh force of will to control my body from sitting up and attempting to punch him and I felt that that attempting to punch him was not my own desire or my own intention and then I was fighting against that yeah again I should pause and take a breath but also see if you have any questions for the entire duration of the session he remained in that posture in that position yes or he never moved he never moved did he tell you what he was doing from his side other than making contact not really but um when we finished uh when we finished I in it ended the moment he broke contact with my feet I just sort of I mean I was already lying down but so to speak I collapsed oh I hadn't only been lying down I'd been writhing I'd been hissing coughing crying etc you know then I just lay there in a heap utterly drained and spent out of you know in a very deep way and I said speak put my body movements and all the the the noise stopped the moment he broke contact with my feet and I thought oh we're done and I said so it's finished right and he said no I hate to tell you it's not and I'm just like what and he says I have never encountered one quite as powerful and intelligent as what you have it knows how to hide from me um we've never had a conversation about what exactly that meant um and and I don't know if we ever will it's not somebody I've stayed in close contact with um and it's also not I don't feel it's my path to learn this art so I'm not sure what his experience from his standpoint would have been but I remember very clearly what he his assessment um yeah so what happened next did he offer further treatment did he wish to refer you to his own teachers for example what was the next step yeah so that he said he was clear that this was beyond his can to treat um and but he was also very calm about it uh meanwhile I was going through something you know I don't know if you call it an identity crisis and epistemological crisis like wait a second I may have to reassess my um some of my my notions about what life is and how many eyes there can be in one body like I had a there was a lot for me to process and also just witnessing my own body react like this was very different from Cisco which was already new to me and very different you know people don't tend to they don't teach you that American public schools it's about well um you know and now it's like I'm in a whole nother uh realm of weird has just cracked up in front of me but he was very calm and he said but don't worry there are actually plenty of other exorcists that I know in Auckland uh now he said typically ideally he would immediately just take me to meet his Maori teachers but he said one of them she's just kind of a a very free spirit um and she would just kind of disappear for lengths of time and not leave any contact details and he wouldn't know where she was or how to get in contact and when she was back she was back and when she was gone she was gone and his other Maori teacher was under taboo because her father I believe had passed away and according to tradition as the tradition she observed she was not allowed to do any healing work I believe it was for a year and he said but not to worry I know some other exorcists uh I guess I don't know if this phenomenon replicates in other cities in other countries but it stands to reason maybe in any city around the world that these people kind of end up on a grapevine and potentially establish you know professional relationships um just like you know acupuncturists would or yoga teachers it's just that this is a pretty underground thing at least in uh in a lot of the western world I think maybe not Memphis and other places in the South because I know there's a lot of um exorcism in some Christian communities but anyway we were in New Zealand at the time and he said he knew two Catholics who he would take me to that he considered them very accomplished and very skillful so we uh you know we set a time for that I think it might have been about a two weeks later or something like that and by the time I'd gotten a job and he picked me up in his car in the evening and we drove to meet these two Catholic exorcists who uh are not priests uh they're actually lay people uh at the time late middle-aged um couple um husband and wife and we went to like a very suburban sort of area of Auckland and and it was kind of funny because I'm expecting oh we're going to meet Catholic exorcists I'm expecting frock stained glass windows you know frankincense um and we ended up with this like you know an American call it like a bungalow it's a very suburban house what and then we knock on the door and this couple who honestly looked like what you expect Mr. Rogers and his wife to be in the flesh and their home is just immaculate they had white carpet now who you know I don't even dare to wear white shirts you know white carpet and then you know there's like a but it's very tasteful and um you know like I'm quite a lot of crucifixes and oil paintings around and just just clearly the home of some like solid church going folks um and and very warm welcoming and gentle people and and just so straight laced up like that's your exorcist where's your pentagram man um well you know where's the cloak so but anyway they led me into their sitting room and uh we sat down to sort of you know uh the the the fellow who I've just been describing the TCM practitioner he's asked he's the only person out of this whole story that I've remained in contact with and he's asked to not be named um he says that this kind of service is something that he only provides you know in uh you know in Chinese people say you're infant like uh this just it almost like chats a mix of chats and destiny right like you know that it's not like he's hanging on his shingle out I am an exorcist uh and uh I think for this couple it was quite a similar thing as well um but this fellow who had worked on me the first time he told them everything that had happened and how he came to sense it then they asked me to sort of uh you know say how all this stuff started so everything I've told you so far I told them and I was you know still quite mystified and I said you know I really I'm curious do you all think this is real you you agree that with with him that I have some sort of uh an entity a ghost something and they said oh yeah yeah we can sense it you know we do sometimes get people who it's in their minds maybe they're too into vampire novels and horror movies or they just gotten carried away or maybe they actually have a mental illness but we we had through the grace of god sometime in middle age a spontaneous sort of awakening I guess where we were touched and chosen to provide this service and then we gained through this a set of abilities that were granted to us by god uh and or I don't know if they said god of jesus but granted to them uh in this way and among the abilities is to sense if somebody's carrying such a a uh an attachment and they said no for sure in our minds we can we can tell you have one um so after after you know quite a long conversation they said they they would begin um and it was agreed that the the first fellow that the TCM position would actually be on hand to kind of hold me down because he informed them that this thing was quite strong and violent and he happens to have been a former soldier he's a very strong very large individual very tough person so it was not hard for him to hold me down physically um and they got to laying hands on me the couple uh laying hands on me and praying a lot just praying over and over again and it was very similar the moment I was touched this series of very very extreme reactions exploded out of me um and they also for a very long period of time just sort of melt on the ground next to me um with their hands on me praying and praying and praying and praying uh and you know I'm there hissing and writhing around and pulling these awful grimaces and hacking um and also to be honest having my own sort of psychological uh subtext going on as well because I was kind of like this is very Christian and I am not Christian this is very weird um and uh at some point you know quite a lot of time had passed then I began to speak in a high pitched very creepy voice in English so you know something kind of horror movie like I would say even though I don't watch a lot of horror movies but just kept in this marking high pitched squealing voice as they invoking Jesus over and over and over again just start to say like just sort of like who is your Jesus and then just laughing and laughing that was that was the only time in this entire multi-month ordeal that there was any English that came out of my mouth uh but it sort of conversed with them and they were um going back and forth with them and I remember there's an out dancing spirit because I told them about that dance that healed my wrist and things like that and then they began to uh anoint my forehead with you know crosses that they made with uh some kind of oil that they have and they asked me to ask for help from Jesus which I was not prone to do at first because uh I it felt too much like sort of an initiation to a religion that I'm not a part of uh but things got so freaky that I just at that point was like I am ready for Jesus's help I'm ready for anybody's help and I did uh out loud using my own voice of course ask for Jesus's help and and this is a long long time ago so I don't remember exactly what point it ended but at some point I just sort of fell again utterly exhausted and tired and and uh the ordeal stopped and I was sort of helped back onto the couch and the three of them agreed that it had been removed and that I would be okay uh and so yeah actually quite honestly then we had tea and uh tin-tan biscuits and talk for a while and they just sort of you know advise me to let it go don't linger on these things by no means play around with any sort of black magic or occult stuff just stay away from all that and walk the straight narrow path and they didn't want me to become Catholics uh then they thought that I was doing qigong with this other fellow it was perfectly fine but just stay away from the occult and uh you know after 30 minutes of chatting and Tim Tams and tea that uh we we said goodbye and uh I got to ride home yeah so that's sort of chapter two I guess Tim Tams and Jesus they do love their combination they do love their Tim Tams yes part of the world mm-hmm gosh remarkable I'm curious about your own state of mind at this point as you said it was quite a challenge to your world view materialistic world view and so on and well now they've told you it's over were you able to forget about it and move on or did did you have to continue to reckon this challenged your world view and then of course because there are further chapters I assume it didn't it wasn't successful actually this exorcism so right what happened yeah what happened next I think mentally I mean I was still 23 I still had a lot of neuroplasticity uh I have none left anymore and um what else I mean you know I I had dove into this interest in meditation quite voraciously um when when I started you know and even you know I started to read some spiritual books at least a year and a half before all of this and so by the time this all happened I had read Yogananda's autobiography of Yogi I had read uh this book that my other brother had been assigned in college that was lying around the house called blazing splendor I believe which was an autobiography of a Tibetan llama who grew up in Tibet and there's some very occult things in that I mean that he describes running into a llama when he was young who had the ability supposedly to resurrect corpses as mindless zombies and that he wandered around Tibet with a zombie who was his manservant slash well basically his manservant carried his stuff I mean that book is pretty uh there's a lot out there stuff unless you grew up in the milieu where that's normal and I read all of that stuff took a little Ergin by the way okay yeah as I really enjoyed that book um but I read parts of it like that and I had read opened the dragon gate about uh you know a Chico master and chronicles of Dao I read all of that as sort of like uh interesting but I didn't really look at the time when I was reading it linger on questions of is this real or not but when all this weird stuff started to unfold in my life having read all of those books I had a new attitude towards them which was oh maybe some of the wild stuff they were describing is not just stories that doesn't mean that I went from zero to believing it's possible to have a zombie manservant I mean I still to be honest don't have any reason to believe that's possible you know uh I'm not committed to doubting it and I won't argue with somebody who says they've seen that but you know there's there's a huge spectrum of possibility but the fact that I've been exposed to this kind of literature or I've exposed myself this kind of literature for quite a while already made me have something of a context for what was unfolding and at the same time I had a great respect for my teacher in Chicago and I emailed him about all of this and was kind of half expect me him to say this is all in your head man because he's a pretty sober staid person um and he was in his in his uh you know very even keel wave replied to my emails like oh yeah daoism acknowledges this uh this is certainly something that most traditional cultures are aware of daoism has much to say about it at the time when things were unfolding for you in Chicago I did not sense that you had a ghost or demon active but it's possible I couldn't sense it it's possible that something became active in some way or another later or that it attached to you later I don't know um he's very conservative about you know making proclamations about anything and he said but I'm glad you've run into these people and if their diagnosis is correct and it sounds like uh you know what was done what was what needed to be done was done and again now much as that catholic couple told you what you your responsibility to yourself is is to let it go and don't linger on it and just get on with life um and so I think you know I think I just kind of took it all on board as all right there's more to this universe than I thought um and so I was happy to be able to you know return to doing seated and spent standing meditation and now I would not have spontaneous movements uh they weren't arising and um and I could practice Chigong as well without any trouble so something changed either something was truly removed or I had some sort of a psycho I was psychologically convinced enough that whatever was going on that might have all been my imagination which I offer here to the you know died in the will skeptics who might be listening as uh because I don't I actually don't want to throw their perspective totally in the garbage either um at any rate there was a a major change in my being that allowed these symptoms to stop for quite a while and um in this time because I was quite I didn't know anybody in Auckland really I also began to volunteer at a foundation for the preservation of the Mahayana tradition Gelluk temple which I'm very interested in Buddhist teachings they were offering there's a gashay in residence there was Tibetan raised to grow up in India and had a gashay degree and was the teacher offering a regular series of courses and there were also Puja's that you could attend and I was having a stressful time just being alone in a new country and then a major fiasco erupted at work very shortly into my time there where I was involved in a sort of dispute with the union I was on you know I had the union was on the side of defending me and a couple of other workers uh and I actually had to stop going to work I was still receiving a paycheck which is a a kind of interesting twist of fate because as I was undergoing all this stuff I didn't have to balance this sort of stress of having to have these weird things going on in my life at night and then show up to work the next day and act like everything is normal I was actually receiving a paycheck but I had to stay in Auckland the the union was very strict about that they said don't leave because a big call you in for a meeting at any time and you're off in Queenstown bungee jumping you know that's grounds for them to fire you so you have to be here in case they ever call you in on the drop of a dime but I actually had three whole months of being paid to stay out of work lest I raveled rouse um but it was it was not a it was not a vacation I was you know a little bit actually I will say there was I there was some anxiety for sure at this point already building by what I had uh gone through the weirdness of it the newness of it and also being away from friends away from family away from familiar surroundings uh and having this uh very toxic work environment that blew into a full blew up into a full on you know unionist here taking us to you know the fighting for us sort of thing there's a lot of stress and so I spent a lot of time several days a week at this uh I think it was called the Dorje Chang Center this FPMT temple uh just volunteering and taking classes or attending pushes when they had them available and at some point um I began to have this strange sense especially when I was doing standing meditation that intuitively I felt that the being had returned and that it was upset and that it wanted back in to my body and that it was pissed off that it had been sent away and I began to have this very strong just feeling that it was as though I when I was doing standing meditations is one would be very clear as though I were standing inside of like a circular cage about maybe four to six meters in diameter and pacing around this circular cage unable to get in but wanting to get in was some sort of malevolent being it almost felt like being in a cage and having a shark or a hungry tiger circle around it or you know circling and circling because it's a hungry animal and you're the only thing that looks edible and it's just going to keep pacing until it finds a way in and I found that deeply disturbing and when I began to have that feeling it was the first time that my mental state really began to be negatively influenced because I felt real fear and I went from being a person who had no I was utterly mentally close to the possibility of beings that aren't animals or plants um or fungi uh to they're being formless living things that would get in our forms I mean I just like I my opinion on that had been turned upside down against my landing and my my will very suddenly and now I was like well this thing is back and I really feel it's it's malevolence but then again am I crazy and if so then why have I gone crazy that I am now sensing this sort of thing because I wasn't sold on the ability on the idea that this even having met the Catholic exorcists and then the man the TCM doctor trained in Maori exorcism having despite their confidence in their their skill set and their view of the world I wasn't sure and I was like yeah maybe I'm going nuts now man and now now it's really freaky because in the beginning it was just kind of other people they can kind of feel something and I feel fine but now I feel this darkness uh and so you know I don't remember the order in which all these things happen because this is so long ago but you know I wrote an email the teacher in Chicago and he he was you know he said from my from where I am I can't see what's going on I don't want I can't offer you a remote diagnosis it is possible it's psychological and that you have sort of freaked yourself out it's also possible but this thing is back uh and yeah I remember he added a comment that typically as per his knowledge when malevolent entities were removed from people they would usually come back for revenge on the exorcist not on the original host so he was a little bit surprised about that but he said you know it's up to you to determine if this is your imagination or if this is real and you know you're going to have to solve it in New Zealand with the resources you have there um and at some point I went back and found the um the TCM practitioner slash Qigong teacher and he saw uh he felt that something was off he felt that it was coming back and he felt that the same way this was not a good thing and he felt that this was such a wily and powerful being that it was beyond all it was probably not something that a second trip to the Catholics Catholic Exorcist could solve and he said you know I really need to get in touch with my Maori teachers and he tried to and the one who had gone off the grid was still off of the grid and the other one was still on taboo and still not not taking uh maybe patience is the right word um and he said you know just hold tight and we had determined something by this point which was that most of the time it didn't have access to my mind and body it was when I went into a state of some I guess you would call stillness practicing Qigong or practicing standing or sitting seated meditation that in other just normal day-to-day activities it whatever door or portal it had it had something to do with the way that I was opening up I guess you might say energetically when going into a relaxed meditative state and it was taking advantage of that and so uh the TCM teacher you know he uh a TCM position Qigong teacher advised me strongly just stop all practice this is uh this is the most important thing for you to do until we can find somebody with the power and expertise then you need to stop going into that state because that opens the door and I could feel that this was true and so I did stop um but okay I'm getting things a little bit out of order I didn't stop right away uh I think I had more than one conversation with this teacher at yes that that part I just said that I'm sorry that chronologically is a little bit out of order our first conversation he said he felt that the thing was probably coming back but it hadn't gotten back in me yet um oh and so returning to the Tibetan Buddhist center that I was volunteering at after I became quite familiar with some of the nuns there who were westerners and I've been volunteering for a while and we had built something of a rapport I finally worked up the nerve to ask them about it and it seemed like a good idea because prior to that point my very superficial understanding of Buddhism was that Buddhists believe that everything in the universe is a product of the mind and so I expected what they would tell me is this is all just your mind this is not real and that they might have ways to advise me how to deal with this as a phenomenon of simply my own imagination run wild or neuroses anxiety something in that that spectrum and so when I did raise this with a with a kiwi Tibetan Buddhist nun I was quite surprised this year so oh yeah that happens from time to time and every now and then somebody will come to see the Geshe who's got a problem like this um if you like I could arrange for you to have a meeting with him and I thought that would be a good idea because and I remember quite clearly I was I was honestly hoping he would tell me all those other non Buddhists you met are deluded maniacs and you are developing in mania and you're going to use Buddhism to deal with it as a purely mental phenomenon I really expected that's what I was going to hear from this man because I hadn't really studied Buddhism much and I knew very little about Tibetan culture despite having rape blazing splendor and the fact that you know that that guy had a zombie pet my I still figured Buddhism was just all about the mind it's very clean it's all in here man um so she you know arranged for me to have a meeting on his sort of office hours day um and I went in and I described uh he has an interpreter he doesn't speak fluent english he had a living interpreter at the baton man who was just an amazing bilingual Buddhist interpreter and he helped interpret and yeah I told him the kind of the the abridged version because he didn't want to listen to this for two hours uh he was nodding and he was like yeah this is real I said what I mean I was I was really surprised that a Buddhist would acknowledge this and I was like yeah this is really you definitely have some sort of I don't remember what word he used of who's ghost or demon and this was through an interpreter but he was like you have something and it's not you uh but don't worry I'm going to do a puja right now and it won't be able to bother you again and so at this point where this is chronologically I was still in the state of feeling the thing malevolently, malevolently pacing around me but not being able to get close um and so he had he was sitting on a raised platform about maybe maybe 50 centimeters off the ground with a cushion he's sitting cross-legged on it and he had me kneel in front of him with my hands in the prayer posture and he began to uh recite um I think it was it was a mix of mantras and maybe also some longer text uh and he had a Vajra bell and a um I guess just a Vajra the double ended so the bell with the Vajra on top and then the double ended uh Vajra and from time to time he would ring the bell and then press the uh the double-edged metal Vajra which is quite small into the crown of my head and I would begin to shake violently and spontaneously in his but not quite as intensely as um the previous events and it was quite a short poutre maybe 15 minutes then he gave me a sort of a small red satchel on a string to wear on my neck and it had uh the Haya Griba which is a wrathful manifestation of Avalu Kateshvara mantras inside and then he transmitted to me that mantra in particular as a protective mantra and told me to recite it uh seven times every night and to wear that um protective talisman all the time and he was uh he was adamant you were fine like this is the power of uh the Buddha's behind this you are totally safe now in fact he advised me to go back to meditating and not to worry about that feeling of having something pace around me because I was under the protection of Haya Gria at this point. I guess the next day or might have even been that afternoon when I got home it was still I remember the sum was up when this happened but it was a gray cold Auckland day um and I was at home and I decided to go into standing meditation and no matter what happened to just probably set an alarm for 40 minutes or something to just do the whole session and um I was you know I said the Haya Griba mantra I was wearing the talisman and I get this feeling this malevolence circling me and I'm just I won't be afraid I won't give in I won't you know not just keep going and at some point I don't remember exactly one um I felt that it burst through whatever was surrounding me and I felt a terrible physical sensation that my entire body became weak and shaky and it felt like my brain was kind of on fire like a an awful heat um and I fell to the ground in a mix of actual physical discomfort um I mean it really felt awful but also terror and kind of anger at myself because it's like I really felt a lot of self-recrimination like why are you letting yourself go crazy what the fuck like this is not this whole sort of side track which now is a very interesting story to look back on but I'm sure anyone who's been through it or is going through something even remotely similar is not enjoying it at the time and is not thinking oh gee I better take notes because one day this is going to be fun to talk about around the campfire um at the time I was um I just I felt like freaked out terrified terrified both this thing was back and it's totally real and it was going to take control of my minded body but also oh Jesus I might be losing my freaking mind and I might be becoming a proper madman um at the same time um I was already developing a stronger affinity for uh Buddhist and Taoist teachings and I've been spending a lot of time in that temple uh and I was specifically tasked by a nun with um cleaning up a large uh shrine room dedicated to you know uh Chen Rezig, Avalo Katashua which was also the home the housed hundreds of small Buddha statues that were um I guess reliquaries for the ashes and a few bone fragments of deceased uh faithful of that community um and so I was spending you know many hours a week in there very close to this Avalo Katashua statue uh I believe that was actually a Guanyan statue is that that it was a Chinese style one that had been donated and there was also a uh um um um um um um Pizangwon Pusa is kick to the garba statue and I and I felt as I'm going through this mix of fear terror actually and discomfort but also like well I'm just gonna pray and I just got myself up out the floor and just repeated Avalo Katashua hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times until my system sort of settled down but uh from that moment on and for the rest of this story I began to live life in the state of fear and anxiety uh and confusion I was freaked out up till then it had all been kind of this is weird uh but all right but it that feeling that this thing was back and had gotten in me it it switched it it's like this is not fun of games at all this is something very freaky is happening and it's beyond my ability to control and my ability to understand and uh so this takes me back to I got chronologically out of order I went back and found uh the the TCM physician Chigong teacher and he advised me and I told him what had happened just now with this Tibetan monk you know this might have been a week later when I finally went and saw him and he asked me to demonstrate he said well let me see what happens if you go into two meditative state and so I stood there in standing meditation clicked over into that that stillness which anybody you know who's been doing meditation for a while knows you develop that sort of knack to be like okay I'm going and the moment I did I leapt onto the ground in all fours and my eyes were bugging out my tongue was out and this man who again like he was a he was a highly trained soldier uh and a big strong guy I remember he took a step back and had a look of fear in his eyes and he's like stop stop stop stop stop and I stood back up because I I still have the ability to turn it off all I had to do was click out of the meditative state and I and I was in control and he said he I remember he said that was pretty psycho um and he looked and he just said you have to stop meditating I'm going to find a way to get in touch get you treated by my Maori teacher but you might have to wait for quite a while because of the taboo that she's under so just don't meditate don't do Chico um try to stay sane I mean he was very sympathetic he felt like I can't speak for him but I think he perhaps felt like this was his responsibility to some extent that he had kind of taken up this case and hadn't been able to resolve it and I was left in a bit of a lurch not that he caused he wasn't the initial cause but he was he definitely wanted to see it through and had reached an impasse where he couldn't do it by the means available to him at that time um and I think he knew or could sense that I was you know this was rough I just had to tough this out on my own um and you know that I was in this period of away from home in that union debacle at work had a hell of a lot of time to myself um and so I basically just every day started to go to the library a lot read a lot of books take long long long walks all over Auckland um volunteer a lot and as you can imagine that some point I began to think maybe I should tell my family about this uh so I called long distance to tell my mother and uh needless to say she is as she is not a witch she did not have any idea what to say about this and having her son call her up to talk about this stuff obviously I did not give her the full rundown of everything but I kind of glossed on to like hey I might be having a spiritual crisis or I might be going insane think I should fill you in I it freaked her out I'm sure and I didn't walk away from that conversation thinking like I should uh further burden my mother with this because a she can't do anything for me and b this just sounds like that's a hell of a weird phone call to get from a kid I would imagine so I felt very alone and I didn't have friends really around the world who I knew how to go to them looking for a shoulder to lean on for the same reason it's just kind of like hey man you sound crazy um so I began a stage of really being very lonely to be honest or very isolated and as this as the weeks went on and eventually turned into months because everything I've just described so far I think took place within the span of a month or so but subsequently things dragged out for a very long time maybe close to three months I began to get physically weaker and weaker at the same time as having a voracious appetite and I began to eat enough for two of me all the time every day and I'll get this enormous cravings um for example for candy and I would like go by these huge king's eyes candy bars but I was losing weight all along it was like I had a parasite um my my skin became very white I had one photo of me taking this period I don't remember my lips were colorless um and I would become very easily exhausted like walking up a single flight of stairs would leave me panting and the amount of time that I could be awake during the day was progressively shortening and I also as time had really worn on maybe two months into this as I was getting feeling weaker and weaker and weaker I began to feel that I no longer necessarily needed to be in a meditative state for this thing to assert itself and try to influence my body and rather that simply being tired seemed to be a potential avenue for it and that I needed to maintain a vigilance at all times which was exhausting and I remember also like in the evenings I would uh I would be alone at home reading because I really I didn't have a TV I hadn't been planning to stay in that apartment for a long time and I was I was I was going through that early spiritual practitioner phase where it's like I will definitely become a Buddha faster if I don't own any TV which might be true actually um but you know so I'd be at home reading and and I began to sense that I could see because you asked a lot a while earlier like was I seeing anything I hadn't prior but I was starting to see sort of floaty uh things in my room out of corner my eye and I was I would always look over and I wonder is it somehow the light catching in my eyelashes or something and whenever I looked directly at whatever I was sensing I wouldn't see anything um but then I'd go back to reading and I would again sense this movement in the middle of my living room area well I was a studio apartment it was also my bedroom um so it just so happened actually that funny enough I lived I was in this neighborhood uh Parnell and I lived walking distance from this church of spiritualism which is this uh American phenomenon that developed after the Civil War when people were looking to communicate with often with families that family members who died in that war of which there's a tremendous amount of death uh and people were experimenting with seances and um maybe uh other other forms of spiritual communication with with the deceased uh mediumship as well uh and it and it turned into some sort of an institution where they had a church of spiritualism there in Auckland and I kept walking by it and one day I googled them to figure out what that was and I thought well these people might have something to offer me so I found out that they had uh maybe like a Thursday evening open sort of event and I went there and I want to scrap the whole spiritual spiritualist service other than to say it's sort of like based on Christianity so they have reworded various traditional hymns which is quite interesting and then later in the evening a woman took to the pulpit I guess you would say the equivalent of a pulpit she was a medium to deliver messages from the spiritual world uh for people in the pews if they were the seats if they wanted to hear them and uh as soon as she got up there she pointed at me and said I have a message from some beings if you would like me to share it with you I will and I said yes please do and she said oh these ghosts come to your house in the evening and they know that you can see them they want to tell you not to be afraid they like you and I got really big goosebumps because uh I thought like that's all I'll be done I am definitely having that experience let's try to remember if there's time to talk about that sort of phenomenon later on anyway uh because Chinese medicine and dalism has something to say about that sort of thing but anyway um I walked out of the spiritualist society's evening event thinking oh they really might be able to help me they seem to have some sort of uh capabilities there so I went back on another couple of times and they said that they were doing a sort of a healing thing after the services where there was a back room and three or four of their more experienced practitioners were going to be in there and do you know I remember the lights were very dim they would do laying of hands to heal people and it could be any kind of affliction so I went and introduced myself outside of that room and said I was having some weird things going on and just you know mentioned the gist of it and would they be able to help and they said oh certainly we could so I booked my name on the list and waited for them to call my name when my turn came I went in there and they had me sit down and told me to relax and I can't remember exactly how many individuals it was three maybe four and they laid hands on me and immediately pandemonium and they stopped the right away and they were basically like whoa whoa whoa dude not cool we're done we're not working with you that was interesting they were like nope nope out of the room we don't deal with this stuff and they no explanation they didn't even want to talk about it in fact to be entirely honest I felt that I was not welcome anymore after that and I don't say that in any sort of like a resentful way I say more in a sense that they were like that's some bad mojo with that too and we don't need him around here which only sort of I will be honest increased my despondence because now I was like it seems like everybody who's got an ounce of spirituality in them agrees that something is severely wrong with me and you know as I'm weakening and I'm feeling that this thing is waiting for my energy levels to get so low that it can just pounce and really take the steering wheel so to speak that I may end up doing something horrific this body may end up doing something horrific and what I am likely to experience in the near future is commitment involuntarily involuntary commitment to a mental institution and probably heavy doses of anti-psychotic drugs or even worse I actually go do something horrible and then get that or maybe I should consider taking the first step and maybe maybe I'll have no choice but to end my own life not that I was not strongly suicidal but these dark thoughts were beginning to gather in my mind as a long period of time was going on and I was my health was a mess and then one day I don't think I left anything else I'm not skipping anything I think that's more or less it one day I get a phone call from the TCM doctor and he says I've got great news my Maori teacher has said that she's going to break the taboo to treat you and we're going to do it in the very near future so I'm going to arrange a time with her and we'll do it and I'll come pick you up when the time comes and we're going to go and do it in the ocean and then he said something quite interesting he said you know I don't remember his exact words but he said you know the Maori culture is very close to the sea it's always been very close to the sea if anyone knows much about Maori culture I mean this they actually descended from the same people who were indigenous population in Taiwan and they got to Hawaii to New Zealand and so forth on massive canoes this is of truly an oceanic culture and he said so we will be doing this ritual in the ocean and so you're going to be in the water and I said oh okay well sure you know at this point nothing could weird me out anymore that's one thing I have to say I developed the very thick skin like nothing's weird I was all right yeah sure so yeah the the long and short of it was where I swimsuit and so I don't know maybe a week or two past and he picked me up on I think it was a Saturday morning early-ish and it was another miserable slate grey sky cold rain Auckland winter day and we drove down to a beach not far from downtown but not not a really populous beach especially in that season but there were cars you know in a distance driving by cyclists on a bike path joggers but not a huge number of people it being the morning and it being a rainy day and we got out after parking his car and we waited and eventually a you know within 10 minutes another car pulled up nearby and a middle-aged Maori woman got out who like all these other exorcists except for the Tibetan Buddhist geshae was not wearing any magician clothes and would have wouldn't have caused you to skip a beat in a supermarket just would look like any other mother shopping for groceries totally normal woman wearing a I believe it was a others this thing in New Zealand is Ford and Holden these two car companies and people went to racing like one or the other I think she was a Ford woman and if she ever hears this and I'm wrong I will get an ass beating one day but that was notable she's wearing like a racing jacket she just seemed so normal but there was this utter warmth and love emanating from this woman's eyes um and a confidence and a presence just uh I would say evidence of like a a true spiritual path walked with you know realness for years both on the inside and the outside you know in her mind and in her service in the world um and I felt I don't know I felt the love coming off of her and I felt a calm and a safety in this woman's presence instantaneously and she just walked up and introduced herself in most simple terms and then said she hugged me but then she also said you know in Maori culture we have a greeting where we press the tips of the noses and then the center of our foreheads together and I want to do that with you partly because it's our greeting but also because it's a way of exchanging information and I will get to know you and know more about you by doing this can we and we did and I just felt great trust in this person um so then we walked the short distance to the beach and she had me stripped down to my uh my swim trunks and we put put the clothes I can remember we put the clothes somewhere to keep them dry and she took off her shoes she said it was very important that she be barefoot um and then the uh TCM practitioner he is well he's he stripped down into sort of like a spandex sort of like you know like sort of like surfing shirt you know what I mean like that sort of that was like a rash guard shirt I think it's called um and and his swim trunks and and she said you know they gave me a brief rundown of what was gonna happen um and they said the Maori understanding of these things is that sometimes a being that we might call a demon can inhabit a human body and in order to get rid of it the person has to be brought very close to death and at that time the body becomes energetically inhospitable literally uninhabitable for spirit spirit cannot uh remain living in dying flesh or dead they can live in dead flesh um blazing splendor aside uh and that this will we will use the the drowning process or bringing you close to it to trigger that and then at the moment when spirit begins to leave flesh the unwelcome being will be escorted away and I will be put back and uh again that TCM doctor used to be a soldier he's a very strong guy very big guy much stronger than me so it was his job to do the holding me under the water and and she said you know are you willing to do this I understand this is uh might sound quite scary and um you know and it's a huge thing to come into and there's a term in Chinese which is sumatang huomai which is when you've got a dead horse you can treat it like it's still alive and try to give it some medicine which she's kind of means like you're at wit's end and nothing's working and it's just kind of like well fuck it will try this and that's what my attitude was because I actually didn't feel afraid I was already in so much fear that I was like whatever this is probably gonna be fine and also what I'm more afraid of is ending up in a mental institution uh and I'm willing to do anything that I can to try to avoid that and I don't think western medicine has anything to offer me like I feel like this is the only shot I've got right now otherwise I'm teetering on the brink of insanity of some sort and so I readily acceded to this and we walked out to about chest deep water and which meant we were quite far from the shore it was a shallow grade um so uh the Maori woman that Tohono she was standing quite a distance I mean she's very small like this big in a distance well I couldn't make eye contact with her and and then uh the doctor began to dunk me underwater and he would hold me down until I began to flail about and then he would allow me to come back for air and then he would dunk me back down as soon as I'd taken a breath and this process he repeated and repeated and repeated until I was getting so weak with each return to the surface that I would just collapse on him I couldn't I could barely stand up on my own I would just collapse on him take a few breaths and he pushed me down um honestly they were drowning me I didn't take hopes of water this wasn't waterboarding either but it was uh very intense and um utterly shocking the ritual to be in it put me in a very a state of utter compliance and you know you just have to kind of give up everything and you're with a person who's physically stronger than you and then hold you down and your body begins to flail about because you've held your breath and you just can't anymore and they feel that and they let you back up again um and at some point when I was utterly uh weakened I'm just when I'm up and I'm just limp against his body I noticed that he was sort of making eye contact and uh with with with the woman on the shore with the Maori teacher and it just seemed like something transpired between them and he yet like they and they couldn't talk to each other very very far apart but it seemed like he got an inspiration an inkling of what he had to do and he began to keep pushing me back down again but now he would press a knuckle into the center of my forehead as hard as he could which was extraordinarily painful um he later explained that he got the sense that was where it was most strongly attached to me and finally um I really can't say how long this all went may be 20 something minutes I guess I but I really don't know I began to sense that I was dying and what I mean by that is that you know we all have a certain field of vision that you know it's kind of like you move your hands like that and I had the same field of vision but it began to move further and further away from me uh until I was seeing exactly as much stuff but like in a small hole far away and the rest of everything was black and sound seemed to also be traveling from far away and I wasn't I also felt physically dissociated from my body and he led me back to shore and it also was very cold so I'm like shivering probably borderline like hypothermic and uh they throw a towel over me and then he takes me to uh there was a changing room area for people who wanted to swim so he took me in there and helped me get out of my wet swim clothes and tolled me off and helped me get into my dry clothes um and then brought me by the I well some no I guess that's a little bit later but yes there's there was a funny exchange where when the world was about this far away but I'm back on the shore uh I began to and we he led me back to the the woman and I wish I could say her name but I I'm honestly not in contact with her um and I don't know if she prefers anonymity so I'm just not gonna say her name but they said it's over and I was I was reciting almani padme home which I've learned with this Tibetan Buddhist over and over again and they didn't know this and they're like what are you saying it's like what are you mumbling and I said oh it's this mantra so I have a little attachment and they're like why are you saying that and I hear my voice like very weak and very far away oh because I'm dying and I was convinced I was and I felt no fear everything was just slipping away I felt no pain I felt no attachment or regret it was just like going down this slide and everything's leaving and they started to laugh they're like you're not dying kid you're fine I was like no no no you don't understand I'm dying tell my family I love them and bye bye and they just they thought it was hilarious actually and indeed the tunnel reversed and the world slowly started to get bigger and sound became its normal volume and I could feel my body again that you know that maybe took five minutes all told and then during this that's when I was in the locker room and he was sort of helping me into my dry clothes and we came back out and we found the Maori teacher and she was by her car and you know she said well you just go home and rest first go get some hot food go get some hot soup and then go home and rest and we'll speak again in a week or two and I'll tell you what happens what happened and what happens next so we're almost at the end of this this might be a good time to take another break if you have any questions I have questions but let's leave until the end all right so with the TCM physician yeah he took me out the lunch very I remember we had delicious hot tomato soup I'm funny I still remember that all these years later and I wish there was more of it small small small portions food is very expensive and ultimate if you've ever visited there he took me home and I just basically slept for a long time and I will say I felt to the core of my being the moment that was over like it's done I'm healed that the thing is gone never to return I felt like a confidence maybe in some level I could sense that whatever was in me was gone and again throwing something out for this the other skeptics out there maybe this was just such a psychologically cathartic terrifying ritual that that's what it took to sort of like shock my psychology out of its its rep I am more prone to thinking there was something spiritual involved in this but I as I said in the first podcast I do not have an open third eye I cannot confirm or disconfirm anything but I felt profound relief and as I didn't have to go to work thanks to this union thing I had a restful week after that and however many days it was again the physician came and picked me up one evening and then we drove to a cafe and we met with the Maori healer and she was there and you know we just sat down for some hot chocolate and some some biscuits or whatever and she proceeded to tell me her what she felt that I needed to know and she had very clear ideas about how much information I should get she said that she she told me very little about her own training but she did tell me she was chosen by her family or extended clan I don't know if there's a proper term in Maori culture as I did not live in New Zealand for a long time but her extended clan she was chosen to be trained for this sort of work as a girl maybe around eight years older so and I remember she told me the first training that she had involved being buried in shallow earth with you know just under a very thin layer of earth but totally buried with straws in her nose so that she could breathe and being told to lie there in the soil that she was buried in until she could hear the grass growing in order to learn stillness and that she and another boy at her own age were chosen at the same time and they went through this training together and I have no idea what if he also was providing a similar service I don't know much more about her background than that but she told me that her she receives help from spirits that she's connected to and they will communicate information to her about the people she needs to heal in dreams and after the TCM doctor had contacted her several times about my condition she had received a dream in which she was clearly instructed to break the taboo and as self-important as it sounds she said that she was told by them that I had important things to do in my life and that it was not it was on some higher level I guess it was decided that it was not to be my fate to succumb to this thing and to be destroyed that I needed to be healed because I had work that I'm supposed to do in my life that would I would not be able to accomplish if I succumbed to this thing so she therefore knew that it was okay for her to break the taboo and this is when she having had this dream and formed the TCM doctor that we would hold the ritual together um and she said that after the two of us walked out into the water I won't remember the exact order of all of these things but she clearly is what we would say as a person with her third eye open she saw a pillar of light descend from the heavens all the way very high up in the sky a pillar of white light and surround myself and the TCM doctor who was holding me under the water the whole time it was it was there um and I remember he interrupted the conversation and he had said this as well at lunch the day of the ritual he just kept thanking me and he said you don't have any idea how grateful I am to have shared this with all of you and have gone through this with you because I felt God's energy in a way that's unbelievable that water was so cold and the whole time I stood out there with you I felt warm and energized and I've never felt so full of such beautiful energy I mean I can't use his exact words as I was that day and he just he couldn't get over it at lunch day he's like how was I not cold it just felt like hot from the inside out and when she described that light I remember he was an enemy it was like I felt that and it was just so beautiful and it was surrounding us and protecting us and she said all the beings nature sprites and ghosts and so on and so forth that live in that vicinity of that beach knew and sensed the energy and knew that something weird was happening they all gathered to see what the hell is going on uh but they could not get any closer than a very very distant like they could only gather at the far edges because the energy was keeping them at bay and then that a sort of a dome formed around us as well not very big not enormous like this pillar that went all up all the way up into the sky and it had different facets and the facets would emanate light that I believe was uh white blue golden red and they would beams of flashes of light would come off of them and that this protected us as well and that persisted for quite a while uh and then after a time she became worried that the ritual would not succeed however a spirit canoe of her Maori lineage her ancestors arrived to observe and to lend their help and she said when that happened she began to have confidence that it would succeed that this was kind of a blessing and a contribution and then Hina Moana the goddess of of the ocean um finally she arrived she was the final being to arrive on the scene and at that point she was like oh well we're all good like the boss is here um and she said that during that moment of eye contact and communication that she had when I was hanging limp against the TCM doctor's body she had the sense intuitively that and it was correct that it this thing was connected to my forehead here and hence his power nuggy uh that broke that connection and it was removed and it came out and it was taken away by these spiritual helpers and I asked what did it look like and where did it go and she said basically I don't remember exact words but it was it did not look pleasant but don't worry about it there's no reason for you to really think about that and don't worry about where it went either and that's not for you to know it's not even your business it was taken to where it belongs and just a very gentle manner of speaking but also very final you just felt like okay that would uh I'm not going to argue with that or go pressing and try to interrogate this just felt like all right I am I am communicating with a person with much more wisdom and experience than me and she is telling me this is not for me to know and I don't feel the least need to question that and I don't do this day either um I'm just grateful that that all happened and it worked um yeah I don't think there was an awful lot more to our conversation other than you know she's basically like I mean at that point I was 24 and she was like go on leave your life um live a good life do what you're figure out what you're supposed to do and do it um the only other thing I remembered was she advised me uh stay away from the marijuana for my constitution it's not a beneficial thing for me um and she did say that uh her daughter had brought some problems on to her herself from smoking weed and kind of the veil is thin for her and that was allowing certain things to pierce the veil and that she had had to help her daughter clean you know get rid of things that had gotten across her her own boundary thanks to the way marijuana was lowering them and she's like you know I've done that enough times I think next time it's gonna happen to my daughter I'm gonna tell her to deal with it herself um but she's just like a berry we're talking about a person who's like kind of a sorcerer but at the same time you're talking to them in a mik cafe at apm having a brownie and so much chocolate and they just feel so normal like it's just a mom you know like a suburban mom um yeah and then uh that was uh 2007 never came back and I think that's that's pretty much the story thank you very much for telling that story remarkable actually listening I have a few questions what are them is you'd mentioned in a previous episode that this was somehow connected to your lineage oh yeah I oh yes she had a dream about that I totally forgot that was a big part of the debriefing um yes she said that her spiritual helpers uh hold her and then this was something I needed to know that I had had relatives in Scandinavia who you will be glad to know were not Vikings so you're in the clear but they were sort of they might have been sort of berserkers I don't know but they were up in Sweden I have Swedish ancestry and I was born in Sweden um and that they would raid villages I might have mentioned all of this before and they would pretty much kill pillage indiscriminately and in order to give themselves uh ferocity and bravery and possibly if this is all real to give themselves actual increased power and combat they perform black magic rituals to invoke summon and bring into themselves strong malevolent life forms I guess we would fairly call them demons really would be a probably a pretty accurate word uh and this was successful for them they they were able to do their black magic ritual successfully but they paid a terrible price because once in the door those beings did not have to leave and they entered the bloodline and resurfaced in many people in their descendants not everybody but I was one of the ones in which they resurfaced we had a conversation about why perhaps might it have why perhaps my things have turned out the way they did in this story I just told and my thought which she said sounded reasonable was that until about two years prior I had been pretty much happy to quite often partake of some very dark behaviors um I wasn't as a boy violent I didn't start to like fight with other people until uh after I was 20 when as I mentioned before a friend of mine took his own life and I really couldn't process that and was very very angry and upset but prior to that I wouldn't fight with people but I had the ability to mercilessly mock people uh and make them cry like I was on malevolence um and I I took pleasure in that um and I took pleasure in being utterly destructive like the amount of property destruction that I've done in my life uh let's just say I'm glad I grew up in the era before video cameras were everywhere otherwise I still be paying off the damages um and maybe karmically I will at some point have to pay every penny back but uh my point being was I I was a little um I was a little demon sometimes a little demon boy and uh then I decided to try to stop being that and maybe I was kind of feeding it and feeding off of it and participating in the kind of you know echoes of the sort of behaviors that this thing was first summoned by my ancestors centuries ago to assist in which is you know I wasn't obviously wielding a mace and raiding any villages but you know I took pleasure in extremely selfish behaviors and sometimes the the making other people feel worse I liked that uh dominating and watching the way a person's face falls as they deflate because you've gotten under their skin and found their weak spot and poked it uh yeah and then I and I really decided I'm not going to keep doing that stuff anymore and I got involved in Buddhism and I you know if this thing was all real maybe every time I did a beat on the mala and said oh many put me home maybe it was like oh god it hurts you know and eventually got to the point where it was like you know what I'm not going to give up this this shell that I'm sharing I want it this is a possibility possible interpretation uh and then a struggle ensued and persisted for quite a while and um it ended at that beach in Auckland so uh when I think of physical injuries or maybe even psychological traumas where illnesses maybe even sometimes you recover from something and um you need to be supposed careful or aware you have a certain kind of knee injury or back injury you may heal it but you need to remain strengthening the back and mobile if my hips get too tight my back starts hurting again you know that kind of thing so I'm wondering do you have any special considerations now or in the aftermath of this that you uh follow in terms of what practices you'll do in terms of what situations you'll be involved in and so on do you have any sense of of care I suppose or particular attention in that regard well I don't I don't even so much as flirt with channeling mediumship letting things into my being like that like I'd mentioned in the other podcast with that fellow in Beijing who wanted me to allow the dragon spirit into my body like no no no no no no um I do not but I don't like marijuana um I mean I don't I didn't need an injunction smoking weed it does it just doesn't really work for me but uh it does it does give me some of what happens to me on marijuana other people need to take a good solid dose of LSD to get there um and I can get off a very low dose of marijuana and um maybe the veil is just too thin for me um what else and and also you know just uh people in China sometimes say shindly waste on just some mental hygiene you know like be careful what you put in that brain and not saying I mean I watch violent movies you know just like everybody else but it's just like yes practice you know you cultivate kindness and compassion and um do the work yeah whatever but I be honest once it was all done and this is also what I felt that the Maori Pohonga was also trying to get across is like don't linger on all this either you know don't don't I don't think I need special considerations that a person who's interested in the spiritual path who doesn't have any of this history wouldn't also have you know and there's a there's a phrase uh I think it's from the yellow emperors in our classic this ancient Chinese medicine text but it's also it's also really full of daoist teachings as well it's just a jong chi-tun-nai shiepukakgan which is when you have call it like righteous chi or upright chi correct proper chi within your energy is right your house is in order chi-epukakgan the pernicious pernicious things evils cannot gun gun raw that disturb you harass you and and it doesn't necessarily differentiate between external chi-ep evils and pernicious influences or external it's kind of the same you know you you've got you're you're staying the course you're walking straight and narrow then just don't need to worry too much and I'm not saying that like this is can be interpreted to such a degree that it's sort of like carte blanche to not ever be careful in the future but I do think you know once you really keep your house in order here and one shouldn't develop the mentality and god forbid someone take away from this conversation we're having the message of it is oh I'm not fearful enough and I'm not worried enough about malevolent spirits and demons because this weird guy on the internet Matthias daily I apparently had a demon in his body and was triggered from meditation so I need to like become sort of a a prepper so to speak spiritually you know some people are afraid the apocalypse is around the corner and they're filling their basement with like meals ready to eat and five thousand bullets like I'm not trying to say that one needs to have a similar pope spiritually just because the army of demons might be after you because you're saying old money put me home I do not think that is how it is I think generally speaking obviously my story is a rare one otherwise it wouldn't be worth telling it it wouldn't even be interesting at all if everybody was going through this so the fact that I am on a podcast now telling this odd and uncommon story the most important thing is that it's an uncommon story and I think people don't need to read too much into it and and just keep on being a good person and you'll probably be all right have you had any contact with other entities or other experiences of that category no not really you know I've seen a couple of ghosts but you know just nothing just in passing just you know I think no I think plenty of people do in their life see a couple of apparitions here and there are you ever tempted to learn exorcism or no no why I wouldn't even know where to begin um and uh why to be honest the number one thing is yeah it's kind of funny but it's an honest answer I've heard that some people you know they get trained in these things and they start to see them right and then they find out there's ghosts everywhere and I don't want to be having sex and look over and see like some googly-eyed thing looking at me or actually that's the answer like you know what I am happy to have that world this is kind of I think Confucius is famous for having this sort of attitude he's like you know what I'm not saying there's no spiritual world but I keep that at distance and I don't worry about it and I don't get involved in it and uh you know daoists and Confucius don't agree on everything but I'm going with the Confucius on this one um made the Confucius reason was a little bit different than mine but they are a very pro pro creation tradition so he might have been thinking about some other things anyway yeah so that's also though I don't think one should go into this unless like you know the the people I met were all chosen the Catholics they had a spontaneous uh you know mission given to them by god that's their interpretation uh the TCM doctor he he told me the whole story of how he first learned these sensing and removing entities and at first he could see it and he was resistant to it as his two Maori teachers are like we know you see it and he's like no I don't and they said yes you do what do you see and he said all right this sounds crazy but it looks like there's a half of a fish sticking out of that man's side and they said exactly that's there we need to get rid of that fish that's stuck in this guy it's causing him illness um and then you know the the Maori woman herself was chosen at age eight or something like that because her elders saw this potential so personally I don't think that the universe wants me to do this and I I'm sure I could find a youtube teacher or a you know like a course somewhere um but I think I'll be jumping out of my lane and I'll pay price for that and I don't want to I don't want to be in that lane I have a couple of other questions just because a little bit rapid fire depends along it takes time so of course when you were in the midst of all that was what was your sleep schedule like was it affected at all yes I was sleeping a lot and increasingly it went from you know normal wanting to sleep eight hours until it got to the point where it was difficult for me to be awake for more than ten hours a day but I wasn't waking up in the morning feeling rested I was just sort of out uh but I would I felt hugely depleted during the day and did you have any dreams during that period what was your dream like life like oh oh I did have a couple of weird dreams but now I'm nothing I want to talk about here yeah oh yes you you mentioned I will remind you about how daoists explain seeing ghosts oh yeah yeah so you know as I was saying I would be in my studio apartment reading any evenings and I would sense and you know visually I would see these movements and shadowy and sometimes lighter colored shapes and I looked directly and they weren't there um it one of the often one will also often hear in chinese medicine uh and chikong and daoist circles where these are acknowledged because of course if you're in university chinese medicine in china like it's it's illegal to make um films about ghosts in china apparently it's a very anti you know the atheism enforced by the communist party even though there's some room for religion generally speaking uh the spiritual realm is not acknowledged outside of designated areas which includes daoist temples and so TCM university does not teach about any kind of demon demonology whatsoever even though chinese medicine texts throughout the centuries some of them devote quite a lot of uh the I mean these are like herbal texts will have sometimes uh decoctions or that are meant for um this realm of affliction and and sometimes some of the most important famous doctors discuss various uh ghost and demon-influenced afflictions anyway if you do encounter the kind of chinese medicine doctor who has received some of that traditional knowledge the explanation is generally that as a person's energy levels they're jong chi they're they're rightening their right chi the correct chi we can uh due to long-term illness or uh just a person becoming very old which is partly why they say people would see things on their deathbed as this energy level becomes so depleted it's almost like you have a force field that is keeping things that are not of the human realm uh at bay and just the the constitutional weakness means that that force field is not operating as it should and you begin to see things that you really shouldn't be and so it's an interesting it's a it's an interesting thing because in this aspect of chinese culture it is understood and accepted that some people have a mink they have a uh it's kind of like a like a mission or an order that they brought with them into this life that they should be able to see those things so it's not to say that every person has the ability to see beings of another dimension or another wavelength uh that's therefore equates with a diagnosis that this person has a weak chi constitutionally the one could have very strong chi but one's one's being is structured in such a way that one sees those things because that is just the way that one was made um but for most people especially if they're suffering from an illness what when they're starting to see those things that's a reflection of the body needing to be built back up to its ideal level of health in which case those those crossings of the veil will naturally diminish that's an that's a common explanation and so i think it may be that i was beginning to see those beings in my in my house because i was getting so weak like i said i was eating for two people but losing weight and i was sleeping you know 12 14 hours a day but feeling unrefreshed all the time so yeah the only other really couple of times i've seen anything like that have been in very different circumstances i saw a ghost very clearly in Shanghai one day when i was doing standing meditation and for after after a long session of bagua time uh and then i did some closed eye standing meditation and i very spontaneously saw internally i had a pillar of light holy ramrod straight running from baihui the crown of my head down the hui in at the parenium i didn't summon this thing i didn't cultivate it and try to make it happen i don't know why appeared that day but also like wow there's a it almost like a fluorescent tube running down the bottom of the top the bottom of my body closed my practice and i went and walked by a barely lit riverside path and i saw a man shoulder and head half transparent walking down the path and my first thought was i didn't see that somebody exhaled cigarette smoke and it got caught in the light and my brain interpreted that reef flicker of distant street light in a cigarette cloud as as a head and shoulders and i i was like i was happy with that explanation for myself but a moment later i saw it again and this time i looked straight at or quite a few seconds uh and i was like okay that is really there but i just think my energy system that day for some reason reached a certain alignment that opened me up temporarily and uh when i saw that guy i was just happy i just sort of mumbled ami tofu under my head in the walked away um and the other time when it's similar thing happened recently there was also other circumstances involved external circumstances uh that i believe triggered it and um actually i'll just tell the story very quick last summer a woman that i knew was very into this Taiwanese woman into this sort of you know generally speaking spiritualism not talking about the spiritualist church and she had a friend who has uh what in Chinese is called post who teaches you like a special constitution which is often a euphemism for being perhaps a little bit open to the unseen world and this woman had made a candle which she had added various herbs and minerals to the wax that was supposed to open you up to the seventh dimension and this friend of mine said would you like to sit around with me and see what happens if we like this candle and i was like okay nothing better to do and uh that night riding a scooter through dark dark path i just saw you know half transparent person for a moment and and i felt when that candle was burning i could really feel my energy system was buzzing in a way that was noticeable and not particularly pleasant and i just said you know what i'm not going to buy that candle and i'm not going to use it again so i do think these things can be opened up um and you know if one hangs in spiritual circles enough one hears stories or even meets people who first have first-hand experience with that process of learning how to make that a part of one's life if one if that's on one's path in one's destiny not everyone's born with it some people who haven't each or even read a book that elicits this why have you decided to tell the story in this context you told me before that you haven't told the story publicly before so i'm curious what inspired you to do so today um yeah i actually after our last conversation i kind of debated it internally for a while and i even spoke with my friend uh the same guy who i did push hands with who we spoke about jeff chen uh he's heard the story and you know neither of us could find a particularly compelling reason to tell it and i did think of some reasons not to tell it um for example just sort of creating fear in some people's minds potentially uh also in the off chance that this video goes viral it would probably inevitably be fuel for a certain kind of charlatan who might you know get out there and be like oh went to New Zealand they got mowery spiritual teachings and you know it's now and there's so many people like that walking around um but my friend's final comment was just like he said you know i wasn't there but i know you if i and he said he actually he left the voice recording uh he says quite funny he's like you know if i heard this story and i didn't know you i would probably just think it was bs um but i don't think it is because i think you told it and you know as much as a person can you were being truthful and authentic and sincere and you never know what will come out of sharing something but if this sort of circumstances have aligned where this opportunity and this invitation has arisen then perhaps it's just right to participate as honestly and and sincerely as possible and just allow what things next to happen um and another thing on my mind is that this stuff it's true what my thought was teachers and way and many other people said that it is a certain modern certain part of the world certain linguistic groups certain history tracing back a short amount of time that has produced millions if not billions of people who have little or no awareness of this thing that was taken as a given and woven into human life probably everywhere and still is in many many many many places and sometimes even next door if you live in Auckland right you don't even know and maybe a certain small number of people need to know this because they need this type of help or somebody they know who's in their care needs this sort of help and maybe they were doubting them and rejecting them and even ridiculing them on and maybe in a more grandiose way um i don't have you ever heard a podcast called the emerald no so my brother put me onto this uh and and the the producer of it i've only listened a few but he ended last year with two episodes uh i think he called it for the intuitives and in he he makes a very compelling case that reconnecting with the aspect of human reality that i was forcefully brought in touch with which includes our connections to our ancestors which can be both positive and negative um our being integrally connected to an entire web of life that is not just the plants and the animals and the fungi and so forth that we're already not very respectful to to be honest uh but even more than that that this is an essential part of the curriculum that humanity needs to apply itself to in order to dig ourselves out of the death doom and destruction spiral that we seem to be spinning around him possibly with ever-increasing speed as we look around in its 2024 and you know last year was yet again the hottest year ever and were 90 seconds to midnight and we've got a world leader actively throwing around threats of nuclear war yes i mean we don't need the whole list anyone who opens the news and looks at the front page for one in five minutes it's just you know it's not a lot of good news and i think that that podcast the emerald made an interesting case and it's presented by an american native english speaker probably probably educated in the modern education system quite possibly but i'm not sure didn't grow up in a household where people sort of had living we're living lives enmeshed with shamanic knowledge spiritual knowledge that humans possibly need to be enmeshed with because we are enmeshed with that world i mean i don't know if i can express this all eloquently but i am open to the idea that there is some good to be had by people at least opening their minds to the possibility that there's some reality to all of this and and yeah well this has been very fascinating indeed thank you for sharing this story it's such detail before we wrap this up is there anything else on your mind anything that remains to be said that you'd like to say who has talked a lot probably said more than enough um yeah i don't know just you know what a jerry springer said the end of this show was like remember everybody be nice so whatever whatever jerry springer said at the end of his shows after everybody was throwing jerry's around i was like remember to take care of each other that's what i want to say right now jerry was right about that i think that's about it but here's daily thank you very much thank you very much thank you for listening to another guru viking podcast for more interviews like these as well as articles videos and guided meditations visit 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