• AP Magazine

    An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. "Published since 1985, online since 2001."

  • 1
Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2017




Multidimensional Tricksters, Teachers, Shape-shifters, and Astral Shamans:
What is our 3-D reality coming to?

by: Brent Raynes


“The trickster must be testing us big time!” I recently remarked to a serious, academic researcher who has found himself caught up in the mutual struggle of trying to better comprehend a hugely complex, largely indecipherable multifaceted enigma that too simplistically we call “ufology.” By phone and email we had been privately discussing all of the seemingly interrelated aspects we potentially perceived between UFO contact encounters and the paranormal, the NDE, kundalini, and shamanism. I added, “Discernment is certainly not easy....especially when teacher and trickster may be one and the same.”

The role of the archetypal trickster is something my good friend and colleague Dr. Greg Little, a Memphis (TN) psychologist and author of too many books to list here (but The Archetype Experience, People of the Web, Grand Illusions, and The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Mounds & Earthworks should suffice for now) have talked about this many times over the years. Time and again he would explain how from the Native American perspective when one attempts to contact the spirit realm “you'll usually encounter trickster forces first.” Well versed in Jungian psychology and Native American spirituality, Greg once expressed to me the following: “The trickster forces are there to essentially test you, to see how balanced you are, to see how serious you are, to see if your inquiry into the spiritual world is full of good motives or negative motives.” He warns that only if you are able to see through the deceptive antics of the trickster archetype will one be able to “get to some deeper layer of truth.”  

Of course, it may not always be a trickster. A Christian friend confessed to me awhile back how his wife had described how her deceased grandmother had visited her one night, and said the grandmother's appearance seemed very physical, very real. While he initially felt, due to his Christian beliefs and background, that it was likely a hallucination or something demonic, he then pondered it some more whereupon it occurred to him that in the Bible it tells us to “test the spirits”, and he realized why would you have to do that unless perhaps, just maybe, some are indeed perhaps what they profess to be.

Discernment is certainly a crucial and key issue. How much of what is experienced is truly an independent intelligent energetic force separate from our consciousness and how much of the perceived experience may be filtered through one's own consciousness, through ones own personal background of beliefs, memories and expectations, thus bearing some measure of distorted recollection of what transpired precisely?

In “alien abduction” cases there are descriptions of what are called “screen memories” (something Sigmund Freud called “displacement”) of owls, deer, regular people, and other seemingly ordinary scenes and situations reportedly overlaying disturbing memories connected with alien being encounters with more acceptable content, but often bearing certain details that seem a little odd and out of context with everyday reality. For example, a mother reportedly had vague memories of firing a gun at “white-faced children” whom she felt were “trying to steal” from her family. Later when one of the family members underwent hypnosis the story of an abduction by strange dwarfish entities emerged. In another case, a woman had a confusing and disturbing memory of laying in a field next to a car. Under hypnosis the object was found to have been three times taller and perhaps four times longer than a car, and “rounder” too. In yet another instance, a strange meeting occurred when three young “musicians” drove up to a cabin of vacationers in Kentucky, in a mysterious car that “glided along without bouncing” over a very bumpy road. The group clearly remembered the blond-haired man who did all of the talking, but no one could remember what his companions looked like. Just before the meeting one of the group, a young girl, had made contact with the blond “musician” on a CB radio. She described him as someone who could have easily been her brother, or even her masculine twin! She had an intense feeling of already knowing him. Later, under hypnosis, she recalled crouching down in the truck with the CB radio, looking fearfully at strange lights in the sky, just before the visit.

Sometimes hypnosis isn't even needed it seems to discern beyond the so-called “screen memory”. An experiencer in Florida once shared with me how after a low level encounter with a domed disc-shaped object her home erupted with poltergiest activity which, over time, escalated into balls of lights and humanoid beings appearing in her and her teenage son's bedrooms. A being that appeared to her initially had a face that reminded her of a late husband, followed next by an evil looking “cat-like face.”

But then what should we make of what the shaman's of old called “shape-shifters”? Could such a thing have some actual basis in reality? Are we dealing with what are referred to in the East as tulpas (thought-forms) or are energetic, plasmic (ectoplasmic?) creations of spirits and aliens another possibility?

Former Australian medical doctor turned channeler (described in my last column) Dr. Maree Batchelor has been impressing quite a number of people with her abilities, including the researcher, whose kundalini/spiritual awakening that occurred in his work with her, is described also in my last column. “Those I have referred to Dr. Maree Batchelor have reported both positive medical healing and psycho-spiritual outcomes,” Dr. Bob Davis, a professor of neuroscience, informs me. “The effects are unique to those receptive to her unique and powerful abilities. While she is indeed the 'real deal,' trying to explain the foundation of this ability remains elusive.”

In addition, as Dr. Batchelor reveals in an interview with me in this issue, many people have been reporting that when doing a session with her, especially in person, but occasionally over Skype as well, she will, as she expresses it, “holographically shape-shift with the frequencies coming in and I'll actually present as a different person in front of them.” Many times she takes on the appearance of a Native American, but also has been described as appearing as a blue alien being, an elderly Indian holy man known as Bhagawan Nityananda, and an enlightened woman named Anandamayi Ma. She adds that she feels that these people's third eye are somehow “picking up the frequencies” and they become “activated,” even though many times they are not particularly familiar or prone to such experiences.

In the world of mediumship (commonly referred to as channeling these days) this kind of reported happening is not unheard of. Frank C. Tribbe, who served a 40 year career as a U.S. Government attorney, a job which afforded him much opportunity for foreign travel, used to take advantage of his visits to other countries to learn more firsthand about paranormal phenomena. One time, while in London, England, he got together with a man who was both a spiritualist minister and a minister for the Church of England. He was taken to have a session with a local medium. “The minister from London was on my right and the medium’s wife was on my left, and we were all practically touching each other, just inches away,” Tribbe told me in an interview back in 2004. “This medium went into trance and the communicator from spirit turned out to be a Chinese person, and apparently it was one of the more common communicators who came through this particular medium and the minister from London had been to this medium before and he recognized the voice and spoke to him and welcomed him, and the thing of it was here was this medium, only a foot or two from me, and his face was as typical a British face as you can imagine, but as soon as that communicator, who was supposedly a Chinese person from two or three centuries past, began speaking through the medium, that face changed into a round, Chinese yellowish face, and for about 45 minutes, as this reading went on, it was like that face right in front of me there, of a Chinese. Then finally when the reading ended and the minister on my right told the communicator thank you and good bye, the yellow round Chinese face vanished and the normal British face of the medium returned.” “Was that face just as clear as a regular face?” I asked. “Oh yeah,”Tribbe replied. “It’s something that the British Society has done over the years. I’ve got a huge library of several thousand books and I have books from the Society there in London where they have photographed these images, and very often there would be two clairvoyants. One was getting a message and the other was getting a face of the communicator. She died only two or three years ago, but I have her book that she published only 15 years ago, and she would sit there and see the same spirit that the clairvoyant that was giving the message was seeing, only the one was hearing the words and speaking to the recipient, whoever it was, and this other one was an artist, and she would be doing a sketch, and several of them are recorded in this book and typically when she got through doing her picture she would pull it off her easel and give it to the person in the audience whom the reading was for, and time after time the person would come back the next day, or the next week, and show them photographs of the deceased person that was communicating and which this artist was copying as the other one was speaking, and they were almost a perfect match.”

Michigan researcher and author Dennis Morrison has delved into the Chippewa tradition of the Mock-wa-mosa, known also as the Bearwalker. However, its practitioners reportedly use their powers for evil, and, tradition states, they must kill at least one person a year or else this dark power turns on them. Allegedly these practitioners have the ability to shape-shift, are able to appear as a bear, an owl, or simply as a mysterious ball of light, often producing temporary states of unconsciousness in their victims. In a phone conversation with Morrison in 2010, he described to me how in an interview he had had with a Chief John Nahgahgwan he was told of the experience the chief and another man had with this phenomenon.

“I recall him telling me that they were walking down a path in the woods out there by Mikado Reservation and they saw the bright ball of light coming towards them,” Morrison explained. “He told me that the one way to be able to render the Mock-wa-mosa powerless was to double back on it, where it had already come down a path, take a pinch of sand and put it in your cheek, and that renders them powerless. I think he said that they were actually able to put their arms around it and the individual turned from the light back into the person that it was. It was a woman. He wouldn’t tell me her name because she still lives up there, but later I interviewed, for an article that I did, a lady named Mrs. Beaver, and she was a very elderly lady. She couldn’t tell me how old she was but her face was so deeply etched with wrinkles and I remember her talking about the power that she had. She wouldn’t say the word Mock-wa-mosa but the power that she had that she could actually go in and steal people’s souls when they were sleeping. It was an evil power and it was a power that a person had to use and it was a power that was bestowed upon them, that was not necessarily something that they wanted. But a relative who maybe was dying could bestow that power to them.”

Dark practices existed within other groups; practices that were considered to be best avoided. One medicine woman of Cherokee and Choctaw ancestry explained to us how it was best to go with the flow of nature rather than to try and manipulate her for personal and selfish gain, and especially to do no harm to others. Among Cherokee there were believed to be dark practitioners who could transform themselves into a “purplish ball of fire,” as well as a wolf, raven, cat, or, once again, an owl.

In 2007, Hawaiian born UFO researcher Kalani Hanohano helped explain to me about a mysterious UFO type ball of light phenomenon frequently observed in Hawaii, which New Jersey author Timothy Beckley, who wrote Kahuna Power: Authentic Chants, Prayers and Legends of the Mystical Hawaiians (1987, 2007), had also described to me, as he had been to the islands to investigate these occurrences. To Hanohano this mysterious light, called a akualele, which meant “flying god,” was also something dark. “The akualele are devices manufactured by kahuna sorcery whose main function is to harm or kill another human being,” he noted, explaining that it was a “supernaturally generated light phenomenon.” Like regular UFO encounters, a car engine may temporarily conk out while a akualele flies nearby. But otherwise, these are not your typical flying saucers piloted by supposed Greys of Zeta Reticuli or even those Little Green Men from Mars. For more information, here are two links to what I've written previously on the subject:
http://mysterious-america.com/realitycheck1007.html
http://mysterious-america.com/realitycheck1107.html

Accounts of people ingesting shamanic hallucinagen mixtures like ayahuasca can be quite amazing and reportedly very beneficial for some. They also seem to aid some people in entering alternate realms of reality where very strange things may occur and validating evidence may be acquired. Reinerio (Rey) Hernandez, a UFO contact experiencer himself, tried ayahuasca a few years ago and believes it can be “one of the contact modalities” that he and other serious researchers and scientists are trying to understand, strongly suspecting that the theoretical tenants embodying quantum holographic consciousness may be the key. “With my eyes closed, I moved my head in the direction of my friend who was sitting next to me and who did not take this medication,” Mr. Hernandez recalled. “Like ESP, I knew everything about him and his problems. I then verbally told him of what I was 'seeing ''seeing' and what he he needed to work on.”

“I then saw a human figure who I identified as Christ Consciousness who sat only one foot away from me, sitting in a lotus position right in front of me. I then reached out both hands to touch him and I immediately started to shake like I put my hands on one of those major power lines. My entire body was shaking violently for about 15 minutes.” After this electric sensation had left, Hernandez perceived that between himself and this other being he had identified with Christ Consciousness was a glowing urn that was glowing like the sun, floating between them at chest level. He then felt that he had been instructed to somehow remove his friend's “soul” from his body and place it in the urn, at which point again he was hit by what felt to him like a “1,000 volts of electricity”, his body again violently shaking while holding the urn in his hands. “I felt that Christ and I were 'energizing' my friend's soul,” he explained.

Later, he felt that he had become someone else; an “Amazonian shaman”. He saw himself as “a little four foot midget, dark skin type, with full shaman regalia, with skirt and feathers, etc.” “The old Rey felt like an outsider viewing this experience from high above but my consciousness was actually this very powerful shaman,” he wrote.


Rey Hernandez


“My personality changed,” Hermandez explained. “I then had a different personality and became more authoritative. I told my friend to keep quiet, that I was in control and not him, and that I was taking over. I told him that 'this experience was for him and not about me as he originally thought' and to be serious and get ready for some difficult work. Once again, I magically knew all of his problems and told him what he needed to work on to cure his ailments.” Hernandez then proceeded to inhale and exhale very deeply, while moving his hands in the air all around his body. “I was massaging his invisible energy field to put the final touches on my spiritual cleansing of my friend,” he noted. Then after awhile he looked over at another person several feet away, “scanned him” and explained what his problems were and what he needed to do.
“I later confirmed that everything I diagnosed was 100% correct,” Hernandez added. In addition, the real icing on the cake, so to speak, came a little later when a lady friend, who had known nothing of what had been transpiring but is known for having psychic gifts, entered the house and said, “Oh my God, you are a bloody shaman. You are really ugly, very short, and very dark skin. You are stern looking. I am now getting information. You are from the Lake Titicaca area, from the location of the ancient ruins. The time is 800 BC. You trained all the shamans from hundreds of miles away from all of the Andes.... You astral traveled wherever you wanted.”

Hernandez confesses that previous to this experience he thought “energy healings” and all was “bullshit”. He had tried the ayahuasca he admits to “fix some of my emotional baggage.” Although he had been helping others, he came away from the experience himself feeling healed too. “All of the issues I was tackling with have tremendously subsided,” he explained. “Ayahuasca is indeed a miraculous drug; especially more so for Experiencers of ET Contact. It seems to bring out even more exotic events for Experiencers.”

Back in August 2011, Dr. Arthur Cushman, a board certified neurosurgeon from the Nashville area of Tennessee, was holding a private meeting with several of us to share some of his personal findings regarding Native American beliefs in an afterlife, something he had been researching in great detail. After his presentation was over, conversation split off into a variety of different directions. Then someone brought up ayahuasca. “Let me warn you about that,” Dr. Cushman told us. “It's called the death vine. Don't take it unless you're prepared for it and you're with a highly spiritual person. You'll usually experience death, either by being eaten by a jaquar or like the experience I had where you're killed by a snake.” At that point, someone who had heard the story before said it was an amazing account and asked Dr. Cushman to tell it again. Cushman agreed to do so. He explained how he had been diagnosed with metastatic cancer and had been told that there was no medical treatment that could help. He said that he was, in essence, told “to just go home and die.” Instead though, Dr. Cushman decided to attend a conference on healing out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he met Alberto Villoldo, a medical anthropologist who has studied shamanic healing, along with his wife who was from Chile who invited him to visit Peru to explore shamanic methods of healing. From a small primitive Peruvian village named Puerto Maldonado, close to the borders of Brazil and Bolivia, located along the Madre de Dios River (which I understand is translated to mean “Mother of God River”) Dr. Cushman and others were taken up river by motorboat on a long trip that took many hours to reach a spiritual learning center located high up on a bluff. There he attended classes and ceremonies dedicated to teaching spiritual ways and engaging in healing modalities. Then one night he and others were taken across the river to sit in a circle on a huge sandy beach. There they were introduced to what he called a “jungle shaman” who played a flute, did unusual whistlings (what are called icaros), smoked up the attendees, as well as drenched each of them by spitting a combination of tobacco, cheap rum, and some herbs on them. “I was wondering if I should pack up and go home at that point,” Dr. Cushman said. “But there were lots of crodiles in the river, and piranha too,” he chuckled. He decided, under the circumstances, to continue with the next phase of the ceremony, which was the ayahausca, which he described as “awful tasting.”


Dr. Arthur Cushman


At first, Dr. Cushman laid on the beach and watched other people as the mixture seemed to introduce them to altered states, while he felt nothing happening to himself. “Then, all of a sudden, all of the stars in heaven formed this beautiful pulsating geometric shape and I saw this huge portal in the heavens. Then these angels came down and stood around me. They disagnosed me and then they put their hands on me and it was just like getting a vibrating sensation or shocked.” Around him he could see “ancient ones, spirits” with their hands on other attendees. In the meantime, he continued to be aware of the jungle shaman whistling and playing music. Dr. Cushman became sick and vomited, but instead of normal vomit he saw what looked like feathers coming out of his mouth, which were collected into a basket by a young beautiful Indian woman. He thought to himself that though he was old and had been feeling sick, he decided “this is really wonderful.”

But then Dr. Cushman noticed a huge anaconda coming towards him. The snake and a vine, from different directions, began to wrap around him. Cushman naturally began to struggle, trying to break free. “Then the snake head came right up in front of me and said, 'Arthur, quit fighting me. I'm going to kill you. You knew that. If you fight me it's going to be much more difficult. Just let me kill you and things will be better.” So Cushman decided to relax, feeling his life being squeezed out of him. “Then I floated out of my body and I looked down and saw this dead body lying down on the sand and saw the snake and the vine just slithering off,” Cushman recalled. “I floated there for a minute and then I went into the mouth of the serpent, into the dark. I had a review of my life. Everything from why I was born to what seemed like everything I'd ever done or thought in my life. Then I floated up and there was this beautiful world that I could see. I saw my father and mother and grandparents, people I knew, and Jesus was there and other masters. I kept going and I could see flowers and trees. Oh, it was so beautiful. I wanted to go there, and then all of a sudden the Archangel Michael was there and he had this flaming sword and he lowered it and Mary was standing on the other side. I could see her red heart pulsating and she held out her hand and said, 'No, you're not ready. You can't go there. Your purpose on earth isn't done. We have things for you to do. You must go back.” So Dr. Cushman floated back and re-entered his physical body. He was starting to feel better when he noticed impish beings surrounding and laughing at him. “I thought, 'Oh no, what's going to happen next?'” Cushman stated. He said he was going to come right out and tell what the beings told him. He recalled that they said: “Arthur, you are full of shit. You must let go of your ego.” Moments later, he got up, raised his walking stick in the air (he had polio when he was 9) and began limping back to the boat. He was doing much better than before, when he had to be assisted.

Sometime later, after all this that had happened, Cushman was laying down in his hut relaxing. “There were a couple of other people in with me and then we heard the door open and this jungle shaman walked in with us. He whistled and he said he wanted to check and see how we were. But he wasn't fully embodied. He was maybe three quarters. Enough that we could clearly see who it was. And all night he walked around the place. I could hear him whistling and this and that, and he called us by our names.”

So that we'd all understand, Dr. Cushman added: “In other words, he bi-located, walked around, and apparently visited other people, and then the next day we went back up the river.” In the Sacred Valley area near Cusco, he said he hiked with the group for some six miles. He did very well, as a few days earlier he couldn't have walked a block. He was doing much better and is still alive years later, adding, “I would never want to do it again. It was not a pleasant experience.”

“I have no sign of cancer and my post polio syndrome went away,” Dr. Cushman explained. “This kind of woke me up that there's other possibilities and that the three dimensional world that we live in isn't all that there is. So basically this was a wake up call.”

Dr. Cushman also has an interest in UFOs and as I am putting this feature together, he just described to me some recent photos taken here in Tennessee of an alleged UFO, which a Native American shaman had told him was a visitor from the constellation of Acturus, the 8th dimension no less. This reminded me of how back in October 2014, Dr. Cushman told me of having had a recent sighting of a formation of UFOs. “We had a sweat lodge in Centerville, way out in the middle of nowhere,” he had told me. The same shaman just mentioned had announced on this occasion that the “star brothers and sisters were with us,” and then it happened. “They were pretty low,” he said, describing how they were silent silver “saucer shaped” craft, but had no visible windows. There were five in all, one which he said was huge. “That was an amazing experience,” he added.

Discerning the 'real deal' objective truth and comprehending the overall reality behind it all is certainly a huge, huge challenge for us. How can anyone wrap their mind around such anomalous accounts? I've read that neuroscientists say we have some 100,000 miles of nerve fibers that make up each human brain, which sounds like a lot of miles, but I can't adequately wrap my brain around this high-strangeness. After half a century in this field, I have yet to find anyone else who could either. Maybe a bigger brain and a few thousand more miles of nerve fibers would help?


Tuesday, March 19, 2024