OR vs NOR - so easy a child can do it

OR and NOR
so easy even a child can do it

I was quite young, about four years old, when i observed reality being manipulated –

of course, really what i’d unwittingly discovered was how to access non-ordinary reality (NOR),

which by virtue implies ordinary reality (OR)–

But there'd be no words for what i knew, or witnessed, until many many years later –

and even when i finally encountered the two shamanistic concepts,

it took a few more years for me to actually own the idea of shifting dimensions…

modern day shamanism (thanks in part to Michael Harner) refers to this as 'journeying'

As would be expected, abandoned ones are often visited by night terrors,
and i was no different.
i often awakened, and most of the time, i would lie in bed quietly,

get my bearings (the hall light helped), and fall back to sleep unaided …

Dreamtime has always been home to me, far more comforting than OR,
so no-one ever knew about the nightmares -

even as a child, Scorpio rising tends to keep its own counsel.

But this night,
even with the hallway light spilling into my room through a crack of the slightly opened door,

this night there was no comfort –

my brain reaching for a voice to cry out to my caretakers
became just open-mouthed, silent emptiness –

terror rose paralyzing my breathing –

my body vibrated with a regular beat, a pounding in my ears actually,

but i was four -
didn’t know what the sound was or what a heart was for that matter -

terror amped again ferociously as something in the light shaft moved,

the corner of my closet door,

curling down on itself,
around an invisible diagonal axis –

i blinked - the hallucination continued uninterrupted –

Totally distracted now from the terror, i watched mesmerized.

The door rolled further down, revealing everything inside the closet –

my clothes hanging, the mess i’d made when told to ‘put your toys away’,

my mary janes that i hardly ever got to wear,
those muddy boots from the other day -

the shelf with all the really interesting stuff that was ‘too old’ for me
i could see it all –

and then suddenly, the door returned to solid, ordinary reality (OR)
in the very same instant i realized that my terror had vanished -

intrigued by wonder at how a regular closet door could vanquish terror,

i did not realize that it was i, driven by terror,
who had pushed the limits of reality –

trauma will do that.

In the face of it, trauma offers only two choices –

either the trauma and its effects beat us down,

or we learn to use the trauma’s energy to manipulate OR

in my lifetime, i’ve met many others on this medicine path

who have suffered severe trauma and/or other mental illnesses -

in fact, it’s somewhat a bit of an inside shaman joke,
that trauma almost seems a requisite …

Nay_ho_tze's Medicine Musings