Well, so long as we are confessing weirdness. . . .
People will write this off as a hallucination, but its ontological status will matter, ultimately, only to a science-minded materialist anyway. What matters to me is the effect it had on me. Once in my now very remote youth, I had a terrible substance-induced experience that involved seeing everything organic decay before my eyes. At the height of this episode, I went and looked in my bedroom mirror. Instantly I saw my head turn inside out via my mouth (my mouth actually split apart "at the seams"), and what emerged was a red demon-like face. Not my idea of the good time I had planned to have that day. Notably, I was also freezing and had every blanket in the house wrapped and my shivering body, even thought it was July, in Florida, and so hot.
My younger sister had this friend at the time who regularly shoplifted and manipulated people and situations. She ended up in prison years later, her life a shattered mess. She dressed with all the trappings of "dark" sort of heavy-metal attire. Despite her bad habits of manipulation, she had this attractive mischief and playfulness about her. She was fun and exciting to be near. She had nearly black sparkling eyes and a constant subtle smile that denoted mischief. Well, she happened to show up at our house at the height of this horror. I was lying on my bed, crying, wailing, and she came over and sat at the end of my bed and placed a hand gently on me. I looked at her, and her eyes were glittering with goodness and golden light. She said to me, "Get up and put your bathing suit on." I asked why, and she said, "Because I know how to stop what you are seeing."
I was freezing, but I put on my bikini and she drove me out to a beautiful, pristine little sinkhole out in the north Florida backwoods. The hole was deep, and standing on the edge was like standing on a 20-foot-high cliff. She stood behind me as I stood on the edge and said to me, "As soon as you plunge beneath the surface of that water, you will be clean, you will be free, you will be wholly just yourself." I jumped deep down into the ice-cold water, and it was exactly as she said. It was over, and when I emerged I was laughing with joy, completely sober and demon-free . . . although a month later, it was not completely over, but I won't go into that here. . . .
A few years later I had this interesting, and this time peaceful, experience. I was driving toward downtown in that same North Florida town, and suddenly I heard a low male voice coming from the back seat. He was murmuring something to me for about 5 minutes. I tilted and looked in my rearview mirror but saw no one in the back seat (just checking!). Anyway, I decided to just go with what was happening since this voice was clearly benevolent. I kept driving and strained to understand the words. I didn't understand the words, but the male voice was clearly imparting instructions to me, in a low-key way. After the voice finished whatever he had to convey to me, it was gone, and I had the feeling that something crucial had been transmitted to me. I was a Christian at the time and seriously wondered if the backseat driver were Jesus.
In the decades since this happening, I've discussed it many times with my husband, who is a science-minded materialist-empiricist skeptic, and he always says, "Oh, yeah, the
Mumbler. I'm visited by him at times." I ask, "Who
is he?" My husband says, "probably
you!" I ask, "When he visits, does he seem to be giving instructions?" My husband says, "Yes, exactly that. It is a teaching session without discernable words." My spouse was a big fan of Carlos Castaneda books back in the 1980s, and sometimes his answer as to who this voice may be is, "Mescalito, of course!"
Have any of you every heard the Mumbler?
Here is a random Google on
Mescalito, which I've never looked up before. I see why my husband identifies our Mumbler as this spirit.
But Mescalito did not have a rule, and for that reason it was not an ally even though it was capable of transporting a man outside the boundaries of ordinary reality. Not having a rule not only barred Mescalito from being used as an ally, for without a rule it could not conceivably be manipulated, but also made it a power remarkably different from an ally.
As a direct consequence of not having a rule, Mescalito was available to any man without the need of a long apprenticeship or the commitment to manipulatory techniques, as with an ally. And because it was available without any training, Mescalito was said to be a protector. To be a protector meant that it was accessible to anyone. Yet Mescalito as a protector was not accessible to every man, and with some individuals it was not compatible. According to don Juan, such incompatibility was caused by the discrepancy between Mescalito's 'unbending morality' and the individual's own questionable character.
Mescalito was also a teacher. It was supposed to exercise didactic functions. It was a director, a guide to proper behaviour. Mescalito taught the right way. Don Juan's idea of the right way seemed to be a sense of propriety, which consisted, not of righteousness in terms of morality, but of a tendency to simplify behavioural patterns in terms of the efficacy promoted by his teachings. Don Juan believed Mescalito taught simplification of behaviour.
Mescalito was believed to be an entity. And as such it was purported to have a definite form that was usually not constant or predictable. This quality implied that Mescalito was perceived differently not only by different men, but also by the same man on different occasions. Don Juan expressed this idea in terms of Mescalito's ability to adopt any conceivable form. For individuals with whom it was compatible, however, it adopted an unchanging form after they had partaken of it over a period of years.
The non-ordinary reality produced by Mescalito was utilizable, and in this respect was identical with that induced by an ally. The only difference was the rationale don Juan used in his teachings for eliciting it: one was supposed to seek ' Mescalito's lessons on the right way'.
The non-ordinary reality produced by Mescalito also had component elements, and here again the states of non-ordinary reality induced by Mescalito and by an ally were identical. In both, the characteristics of the component elements were stability, singularity, and lack of consensus.