Movie Review: ‘HIDALGO’ & the Wounded Knee Massacre

The New York Times article I just shared (or at least tried to!) on my Facebook Timeline, “Save
Wounded Knee”, instantly brought back to my heart’s memory one of my
favorite films: “HIDALGO”.

I know, the film shouldn’t have been claimed to be based on real facts,
as on further research it was found not to be, it would seem. That is,
as far as the big, long, deadly endurance race that Frank Hopkins and
his dear Native-American mustang, Hidalgo, are supposed to participate
in through the Saudi Arabian area deserts, is concerned.

But WHY did Frank Hopkins decide to take part in that ‘Race of Fire’ to
start with (if he ever did and if that race ever existed at all) is for
me the main point, the central issue, the central fact burning at the
heart of the story really told in the film, forming its whole actual
background from its beginning to its end: that very real fact, that very
real topic is the slow extermination of the Native Americans by their
White conquerors, and the torn loyalties lived by those who happened to
be half White, half Indian, and to have to witness and endure that
brutal extermination of the Indian half of themselves by the other half,
the White.

To witness and endure it would already be bad enough, but in the case of
Frank Hopkins he happens to be also the very messenger who, on Hidalgo,
is missioned to unknowingly deliver the terrible official orders to the
general in charge of containing what was seen by the White as the
uprising of the Indians in the area of Wounded Knee – the very area of
Frank’s own birth, of his boy’s years among the Sioux tribe of his mom,
married by one of the White men, his father. His name there had been
‘Blue Child’, and in the tribe he was still remembered and saluted
affectionately as such, but his outside appearance didn’t betray his
double origin, so among the White he was working for, he was just seen
as another White man, known as Frank Hopkins, with the reputation of
being the best endurance rider of his time.

Totally shaken by the massacre that happened under his very eyes after
he himself had unwittingly delivered the order for it, Frank has turned
into an alcoholic, saved from complete misery only by compassionate
Buffalo Bill and his Shows of the Wild West, where he and others find
some employment re-enacting for an audience scenes of the now extinct
conflict between the Red and the White.

One fine evening some very special spectators from Saudi Arabia convey
to Hopkins the challenge from their Sheikh, that the cow-boy cannot
claim to be the greatest endurance rider of his time, or he must prove
it by participating in one more race, right against their own Beduin
riders and thoroughbred stallions and mares, through the deadly expanses
of their own Arabic deserts.

Frank could not care less about the challenge, but there is a Prize to
the race; that huge sum of money, if won by him, could buy up all the
wild mustangs, so loved by the Indians, that are being rounded up and
corralled by the White Government, to be all shot if they are not bought
back, each of them for an amount no Indian could afford to pay.

To save those mustangs, his friend the Chief points out, would be to
save at least something very important in the Indians quickly vanishing
culture and way of life; even Buffalo Bill cannot help this time; where
else would the needed enormous amount of money be found? A hesitant
Frank finally accepts the challenge and with Hidalgo he embarks, leaving
the coasts of the US for that new, far away adventure.

If really the story of Frank Hopkins and this ‘Race of Fire’ is largely
fiction, as some critics of the film have so relentlessly done their
best to demonstrate (why??? Does it matter so much after all???), still
as it is told it is undeniably a beautiful story, and the real-life
Frank Hopkins, however a spinner of high tales he may have been in his
memoirs, can at least be proud of having been the basis for a truly
inspiring Myth, as it is told in the movie: even if it is all mostly
invented, still I hail the script-writer(s) for having believed in their
character enough to make of him a convincing and moving Hero, out of
his White cow-boy’s humble straightforwardness and simple dignity, yes,
but also out of his deep love for that secret Indian culture buried in
his roots, which in the end he allows to burst fully out of his White
man’s crust, and which saves him and Hidalgo from impending death, when
he at last claims that other identity so long repressed in himself:

After days and days of impossible situations to be faced and overcome in
a merciless nature and among even more merciless rivals, fallen with
bleeding Hidalgo in the burning sands, out of sheer exhaustion and
despair, only a few miles away from the end of the race, down on his
knees in a last cry of anguish he calls to his Sioux ancestors,
imploring their help through one of those poignant Sioux songs he knows
so well from his childhood; and his ancestors, among whom his mother and
brother, appear to him in the heat waves of the desert, with love in
their eyes and smiles, infusing back in him life-energy and power, and
desire to win; to the fierce, arrogant Beduin Prince with whom he has
particularly struggled all along in the race, and who now passing on his
great horse this fallen rival, mocks him, when the Prince jeeringly
boasts,

“You cannot win! I am of a  People of the Horse! I am of a great Rider Tribe!”,

Blue Child, a new flame in his eyes, quietly answers,

“So am I.”

And leaving behind his usual saddle and reins of the White rider, he
jumps straight upon resurrected Hidalgo and rides him bareback like a
Sioux, irresistibly passing the few remaining competitors, to a victory
hailed by the whole crowd and the Sheikh himself and his daughter, both
grown great admirers and friends of this incredible hero from far away
lands.

The last scenes bring us back to the real purpose all along behind all
that has been attempted and finally achieved: back in the US, the wild
mustangs of the Indians have been all rounded up and imprisoned in vast
corrals; soldiers are now getting ready to shoot them all down in a huge
mass slaughter; but a rider comes on a mustang, who shows them the
receipt he has from just buying back – the full amount paid in cash!- all the
mustangs; his friend the Chief has died, but did get the news of his
victory before dying; with the help of a few other Indian friends, Franck has the joy
of freeing again all the wild horses, who will have now a new,
unthreatened life in that area… where their descendants still live,
still free, to this day.

What I found remarkable also in that story is that the usual expected
love-stories are avoided. with both the two charming feminine presences
in the film: on the one hand, the heartless, ambitious and spoiled
British heiress whose old husband stayed behind on the ship, sipping his
iced gin, while his wife, familiar to the region since childhood and
having also her own thoroughbred mare in the race, will use any
seductive or devious means to win the race; and on the other hand the
thoroughly sympathetic young daughter of the Sheikh, raised on a horse
like his now all dead sons, but not allowed to ride in public and fated
by her culture to become merely one of the obscure wives of some Beduin
Prince who may win the race; so she does her best to help instead the
intriguing cow-boy who is competing too; circumstances bring them
together for some chaste moments, and she points out, quite rightly,
that both of them are hiding their true self: she, as a woman, wearing
the veil her culture compels her to wear whenever men other than her
father or husband are present; and he, as Blue Child hiding himself
under the face of a White man,,, in his case too, because the White
culture he lives in will not allow him to do otherwise. Together at
least they don’t need to hide: he is the only man to whom she will
deliberately show her face, without fear; and with her the ‘Blue Child’
in him will not fear to reveal himself either.

This speaks particularly to me as well, both as a woman still facing so
many prejudices in this contemporary world still so masculine in its
outlook on life; and also as a ‘colored’ person who has in fact all the
existing human colors in her being, but under the appearance of a White
person.

Since I have seen ‘Hidalgo’ a few years ago, I have become more
conscious of that fact. Sometimes I wonder how different my personality
and life would have been, had I been more visibly the metis I actually
am. Am I somehow in hiding?… Have I been all my life?…

What a pity that the critics killed that film even before it got out. It
is not as well known and celebrated as it should be. A movie that conveys
in such an un-preaching and natural manner such deep questions, deserves
to be seen. And it is, on top of it all, a highly entertaining film,
with just the right balance of ‘action’ and quiet moments. A lot of
humour. Stunningly magnificent pictures. Excellent acting all around,
with for example Omar Sharif as the Sheikh, and Viggo Mortensen as Frank
Hopkins (if I had not fallen in love with him already as Aragorn in the
‘Lord of the Rings’ films, I would have now with his Frank Hopkins!)
Viggo, always a most sincere and intense actor, really involved himself
fully in embodying Frank, and even more his “Blue Child’ identity,
learning with total dedication the real language of the song he is
chanting in the end. He loved that underlying theme I too just tried to
reveal in the film; when the critics managed to diminish greatly the
success such a really good film should have met, Viggo was quite
disappointed and saddened by this unjust treatment dealt to it.

I agree with him: this is a really good film. To be enjoyed without reserve by the whole family, again and again!

Cover of Hidalgo (Widescreen Edition)

Les Deux Expériences de 2002 reliées à Celle Maintenant de Gaia

C’est quand même bien utile, cette habitude que j’ai prise depuis très longtemps, d’écrire,  ne fût-ce que sous forme de brèves notes, ce que je vis intérieurement, genre rêve ou expérience ou autre fait important! C’est grâce à cette habitude que je viens de retrouver dans le carnet de 2002, où je me rappelais fort bien l’avoir notée, l’expérience super-puissante à Chartres… et puis en cherchant celle-là, quelques pages avant je suis tombée sur la description première de l’expérience qui lui est maintenant reliée, celle de moi-même en tant que vajra/dorje tibétain étincelant de lumière…!
C’était le jeudi 9 mai 2002, en fin de journée, j’ai noté:
“Séance de massage sacro-cranial chez I., avec sa géode améthyste d’abord aux pieds puis à la tête.
A la fin, image soudaine:
Au niveau du nombril, une sorte de joyau lumineux blanc lançant des sortes d’éclairs très blancs dans tous les sens, et le reste du corps, ou du moins sa forme extérieure ou énergétique, apparaissait tel un dorje tibétain.”
C’était donc il y a déjà dix ans!!! Je n’avais à l’époque aucune attirance spéciale pour le Tibet et ses objets rituels de culte, habituellement en cuivre ou autre matériau opaque, à l’aspect aussi obscur et peu bienveillant que la plupart des divinités qu’ils servaient à adorer; mais là, ce dorje totalement transparent et lumineux, c’était autre chose!…
C’est pendant l’été de la même année que j’ai pu enfin aller à Chartres. Voici ce que j’ai écrit plus tard à ce sujet, dans le même carnet:
“Il est temps maintenant de noter ce qui s’est passé le 12 Juillet, au cours de ma visite à Chartres grâce à la gentille invitation de ce cher F. dans sa petite Clio qui lui va comme un gant, savourant chaque kilomètre de cette Vallée de Chevreuse que nous avons choisi de traverser, délaissant l’autoroute…
Dans la Cathédrale (vitraux incroyables, même pour mon oeil de néophyte), j’ai tout de suite cherché à me rapprocher du fameux Labyrinthe dont j’espérais bien qu’il serait, comme supposément tous les vendredis, débarrassé des chaises qui les autres jours le recouvrent. Il était en effet découvert, ô joie!
Malgré le flot chaotique des gens et enfants le traversant dans tous les sens ou même y courant, visiblement sans se douter du tout de son sens ni de son potentiel initiatiques, j’ai fini par voir où était l’Entrée, et je m’y suis engagée avec un appel intérieur à Mère et Sri Aurobindo. J’avais déjà repéré la Grande Rosace où Notre-Dame et l’Enfant trônent, au centre… du Symbole de la Mère Divine!… On l’a dans son dos quand on se place à l’Entrée du Labyrinthe.
Très vite, une fois dessus, chacun de mes pas s’est accompagné spontanément, tout bas, du mot “Mère”, et ma concentration intérieure s’est approfondie de plus en plus, oubliant le chaos bruyant des gens autout de moi.
Quand je suis finalement arrivée au Centre, je n’attendais rien de spécial; mais dès que je me suis avancée là (après qu’on en ait retiré la poussette avec enfant qui y était, empêchant d’y accéder!…), immédiatement une Energie extraordinaire à commencé à descendre, m’immobilisant de plus en plus fortement, de la tête aux pieds, au fur et à mesure que le temps passait. Je ne pouvais plus bouger, ni ouvrir les yeux. Un grand sentiment de la Présence de la Mère Divine avait envahi mon coeur intérieur, et la gratitude en sortait à flots intenses.
J’étais absolument sidérée.
L’Energie passait surtout verticalement et par les chakras. Le chakra d’en haut n’était plus qu’un très large entonnoir, élargi à en être pratiquement plat, comme un lotus grand ouvert. Pas une pensée, pas une émotion, rien, seulement la sensation de cette Energie qui entrait, entrait, et se déversait dans mon être. Finalement je l’ai perçue, cette Energie, comme une Lumière Dorée qui formait comme un énorme Pilier occupant tout le Centre du Labyrinthe (y compris les huit pétales et les entre-pétales où je m’étais reculée d’un pas pour pouvoir rester aussi longtemps que nécessaire sans pour autant gêner l’accès des autres au Centre proprement dit).
Et ce Pilier continuait vers le bas – loin de s’arrêter au sol, il s’enfonçait aussi dans la Terre, m’y enracinant par la même occasion!…
Ce Pilier de Lumière Dorée reliait le Ciel et la Terre, et me passait à travers au passage. Fabuleux!..
Mon visage baigné de larmes de joie était en extase calme, souvent levé vers la Rosace de la Mère Divine (qui maintenant me faisait face), et vers ses deux occupants à qui mon être se donnait sans réserve – au moins centralement, car ce n’est que plus tard, quand j’ai pu m’asseoir, (non pas sur le Labyrinthe, bien sûr, mais sur le bord du socle d’un des piliers de pierre qui en sont proches), qu’enfin mon corps a pu avoir sa part de l’expérience. Là, mes cellules aussi ont reçu et éprouvé la charge, dans une certaine mesure.
Je n’étais finalement sortie du Centre du Labyrinthe qu’après un temps qui m’apparaissait comme une eternité intense. Mon immobilité pour ainsi dire pétrifiée par cette Descente, n’a été mûe que par le surprenant movement de rotation en vortex, que lui imprimait de temps en temps la Force. Au bout d’un certaine durée de ce temps pétrifié, il m’a été dit intérieurement que ça suffisait, qu’il fallait maintenant quitter le Centre… ce que je n’ai fait pourtant qu’à regret, un regret infini, poignant, d’avoir à me séparer à nouveau de cette Union indicible et de l’intensité presqu’écrasante de Présence que j’éprouvais.
Le parcours du Labyrinthe en sens inverse m’a été une grande aide pour peu à peu revenir au monde extérieur.
Une fois sortie complètement du Labyrinthe, je n’avais qu’une envie, c’était d’y retourner aussitôt, de retrourner vers ce Centre béni. Ce m’était douleur que de résister à cette envie, et de rester dans la vie extérieure suffisamment pour aller m’asseoir sur une chaise proche et, après un long moment, être capable de retrouver F., tout étonné de mon silence et état “bizarre”, et de lui adresser quelques mots anodins et rassurants.
Plus tard, pendant qu’il me ramenait dans la Clio chez ma mère, je me suis rendue compte que j’avais la fièvre. Le lendemain encore, cette fièvre a continué, et je n’ai pas été “dans mon assiette” de toute la journée… “
… mais je savais pourquoi, et ça en valait bien la peine!…
Tout cela était d’autant plus sidérant pour moi qu’ordinairement j’étais parfaitement incapable de sentir toutes ces “énergies” diverses, auras et autres, que tant d’autres personnes perçoivent communément et sans difficultés!… Je me considérais comme complètement bouchée!…

Quant à ma vision, tout à fait stupéfiante elle aussi, de moi-même sous la forme de ce dorje tibétain lumineux, le souvenir m’en est revenu un dimanche soir, 12 avril 2009, ayant entre-temps découvert les livres d’Olga Kharitidi dont j’ai parlé surtout au début de ce blog, mais qui restent facilement accessibles parce que je leur ai dédié une des Catégories sur lesquelles on peut directement cliquer. Voici mes notes  à propos de cette vision, et de ce qu’elle m’a évoqué ce soir-là:
“Mon passé “shamanique”?!?… Moi qui rejette tellement le Shamanisme!…
Il va falloir que je cherche dans ces cahiers: Quand ai-je rêvé une nuit d’un grand objet sacré tibétain, le Dorjé [et dans mes notes je l'ai dessiné remarquablement bien] tout fait de lumière, et qui était… Moi, mon Moi vrai à ce niveau-là. Le réveil  sur cette expérience m’a laissé un goût de splendeur dans la conscience, très intense.
Maintenant je découvre grâce à un jeune Belge (!) un shamane hongrois (!!!), Joska Soos de Sovar, du Clan de Baksa, à travers qui s’exprimait encore (mort 15.8.08) la filiation ouralo-altaïque du shamanisme hongrois – lien à nouveau avec le premier livre d’Olga Kharitidi, “Entering the Circle”, et les anciens shamanes de l’Altaî.
Tout semble converger vers cette origine pré-sibérienne, altaïque (plus la partie mongole maintenant de l’Altaï), du temps d’un autre climat, comme pour le Désert de Gobi (Mongolie aussi) autrefois fertile, comme l’affirme Edgar Cayce. Mon impression d’exhilaration, très lointaine dans le passé, chevauchant au galop “dans les plaines de l’Asie Centrale”… Mon amour pour les yourtes… LA yourte. Bien plus pratique en fait que la tente amériendienne toute pentue, qui a perdu sa “muraille” circulaire verticale, au-dessus de laquelle la tente était posée.
Bon. Au dodo!….
Vais-je rêver de Belovodia?…”

Altai, Belovodia & the Physics of Time

If there have been people during the last few days visiting this blog in the hope of a new post, I apologize for the unusually long delay in putting up this one: I had no internet connection for all this time… Now that the technical aspect is again working properly, here is the new post at last!  And this long interruption has given me time to start also on the next post, which then should be ready to be posted soon as well.

Having again mentioned young Russian psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi towards the end of my previous post, I felt I had to re-read once again, still with the same keen interest, her first book, ‘Entering the Circle’, looking especially for the moments when she has an unmistakable contact with her soul, something she herself learns to notice because of the specific ‘symptoms’ (my word) she experiences when that happens.
This is very important, so I decided to make of it my next post – this one – for it constitutes a major difference with Castaneda’s description of his training with Don Juan, Don Genaro etc, where no such contact with his soul happens at all, it all concerns only the occult planes and the contact with the powerful but obscure and dangerous beings and forces that, whether we are conscious of it or not, do try to invade us and make puppets out of us.

During Olga’s few days away from her big hospital in Novosibirsk and inside the two remote villages of Siberian Altai where she goes, she too will encounter  those hostile occult realities she has had to face already through some schizophrenic patients; this time, once back in his Altai village, her ex-patient Nikolai, the young man who has guided her and her sick friend Anna there, realizes that he isn’t becoming insane as he feared, but simply being changed into the new ‘kam’ (the real Altai word instead of ‘shaman’) needed for replacing his uncle Mamoush, the old kam who just died; the problem is, Nikolai’s normally friendly consciousness inherits at the same time the devious intentions towards Olga from Mamoush, for perpetuating the kam-lineage he and now also Nikolai belong to; but in the other village, Olga’s own newfound feminine mentor, the healer Umaï, although strange and sometimes scary in her behavior while she quite effectively cures an Altai woman and then also Anna, is actually a wise, warm and often smiling woman-kam from another lineage, dedicated to good; she protects Olga and very soon makes her discover the Spirit Lake within herself and her true Spirit in it, ever to guide her if she calls upon it.

The images, symbols and terminology aren’t the same as the ones from, say, the traditional spirituality of India, but still the inner realities perceived and the characteristic feelings are essentially the same, so I’ll summarize the part leading to the Spirit Lake, and then quote from what is said about it:
As conscious individualized energy, entranced Olga experiences herself at first as the undulating smoke rising from the fire lit in the middle of the isba’s earthen floor on which she lies, then as the fire itself going up, then as a snake struggling to come out of some very deep, resistant waters, desperately swimming up and up to reach the surface:
‘Finally the moment comes when I break out of the water and float on the surface of the ocean. Instantly it becomes a place of peace and calm. I love this ocean and could float like this in it forever. Nothing disturbs me. There are no thoughts other than appreciation for this water that now holds me up. I begin swimming. I swim and swim until I see the coastline. I realize that land meets that mysterious body of water on all sides and that I am swimming in a big round lake. Now I notice what is on the coast. It looks like a city. I can see buildings, cars and people. Panic takes me again. This is my city, my friends and my relatives. I don’t want to go back to them. I want to perceive nothing but the soft, flowing water.
A soft, feminine voice comes through my panic. “Be calm. I will talk to you now.” It is Umaï’s voice. I don’t know what language she speaks, but I know it is Umaï and somehow I understand her words.
“Now you are in your inner space, the place of the Spirit Lake. This is your first conscious time here. Each of us has this inner space, but during the lives of most people, it becomes smaller and smaller. As we go through life the world around us tries to fill up and kill this inner space, your Spirit Lake. Most people lose it entirely. Their space is occupied by legions of foreign soldiers, and it dies.
“Now you have experienced this space within yourself. Now you know it. You will no longer be afraid of the world around you. Your space will never be filled up with anything but yourself, because now that you have experienced it, you recognize its feeling and its pulse. You will continue to explore it. Later you will also learn that there is an important Inner Being who lives there. You will need to meet and learn to understand this Spirit Being. I will help you do this when you are ready.”‘

All this is already important enough, but even more is told to Olga then:

‘Umaï’s voice is soothing, and I hang onto every word as she continues.”This next thing is the greatest secret I could tell you. We have the task of building two things while we are in our physical lives. Our first task is to construct the physical reality in which we live. The second task is the creation of ourselves – of that very self that lives within this outer reality.
“Both tasks require equal attention. Keeping the balance between them is a very sacred and demanding art. As soon as we forget one task, the other can capture us and make us its slave forever. This is why the place of the Spirit Lake, the home of the Inner Being, becomes empty and dead for so many people. They come to truly believe that the outer world is the only one worth their attention. Sooner or later they will realize their mistake.
“For you, the main danger is not this but only in exploring your inner self. This is why you were already so interested in other people’s minds. You were using that information to try to understand your own psyche. You must learn to accept the importance of creating your own reality. Believe me that your work in the outer world has an absolute and equal power and ability to satisfy. Don’t be afraid of the shore around you now. Everything you see there is your own manifestation, and it is ridiculous to be afraid of your own creation. I will help you.”‘

By revealing this truth to Olga, Umaî helps her already to learn how to protect herself from her own possibly threatening creations:
1/ by remembering that outer situations in her life are only that, her own creations; and
2/ by not accepting the reality of those situations, but on the contrary asserting her own inner power to change them.

I personally appreciated particularly the remark about Olga’s way of being, more turned inward than outward, as I myself have the same tendency; the advice given by Umai has helped me to be less fearful of the threats from the outer reality, and sometimes already I have been successful in transforming them  into a more positive reality. Thank you, Umaï!… And Olga too, for writing this book!

Speaking of threats, we have to remember that all this was happening in Olga’s life while still under the Soviet regime.
One of the book reviews I copied for my first post about ‘Entering the Circle’ contained among other things this summary of the events that follow:

‘The author’s involvement with shamanism is fraught with danger, for in the Soviet Union, interest in the occult can lead to psychiatric commitment. But Kharitidi manages secretly to incorporate her new powers into her practice at the hospital. During her trance voyages, she visits Belovodia, more commonly known in the West by its Tibetan name of Shambhala, where a parallel human race with advanced spiritual knowledge hints at a radical new future for humanity. Others are also discovering Belovodia, Kharitidi learns, particularly a Soviet physicist researching the nature of time.’

What was put there in a nutshell I need now to expand about, for the ‘Conscious Evolution’ purpose of this blog:

One of Olga’s patients had been a sweet, idealistic and naive very young man, Victor, whose only crime at seventeen had been to say openly or even write things like ‘Soviet society is imperfect and could be improved in many ways’.
Interest in metaphysics and ‘anti-soviet’ ideas were always diagnosed as schizophrenia and ‘treated’ in ‘special clinics’. It was after having been sent to such a ‘special clinic’ that young Victor had been brought to Olga, a broken man:
‘(…) all his answers carefully memorized and rehearsed, (…) repeated without change: “I was sick. I understand it now. I want to continue taking my medicines to prevent the disease”.
‘There was only one time that I saw even a trace of remembered animation on his face. He had noticed a forbidden samizdat book that had been secretly reproduced for me on a copying machine by a friend. It was by Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher and mystic, and I normally kept it hidden in my desk. After Victor glimpsed it, our relationship slowly began to change. It was the beginning of his trust for me.’

When reading Olga’s story for the first time, how moved I have myself been to discover the precious help Sri Aurobindo’s books had represented for all those Russian people oppressed also inwardly, by the heavy materialism inherent to the Soviet regime… How glad I have been to learn one of those books had been the silent, secret bridge between Olga and Victor.

He had never been really insane, and didn’t need any medical care except for recovering as much as was possible from the terrible ‘treatment’ he had received. Worried, though, about sending him back home to an egocentric and vain mother who rejected him, all the more now with the stigma of having been in the ‘crazy house’, Olga kept him in the hospital under her own safe wing for as long as she could extend his stay, but in the end, he had to be discharged and sent home.
‘After his release, Victor had written me a short letter telling about his attempts to find a job. He had been rejected at the few places he had tried, but he still hoped to find something. He also mentioned that his mother had sold all his books while he had been gone.’

Six months later, it is this poor Victor’ suicide, when she is informed about it upon returning to hospital duty after her Altai leave, that shakes Olga with deep enough sorrow to bring into her a new determination: she will discretely start making use of the changes that have occurred in herself and in her whole understanding of sanity, insanity and healing, for the sake of her patients, even at the risk of being discovered.

By one of those ‘coincidences’ that start happening in your life when you are aware of your Inner Being, a patient not really sent to her knocks anyway ‘by mistake’ at her office’s door in the hospital, and she gets invited to visit this Dmitriev, a renowned physicist, at his laboratory in the very important and highly respected ‘Academy cum City of Science’, Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk. In spite of her original intention not to go, after Victor’s death Olga finds herself following not that mental decision, but her intuition, and eventually she does go to that laboratory, another turning-point in her life: confirming by direct personal experience the usefulness of the cutting-edge, strange-looking new equipment devised by Dmitriev, Olga’s consciousness shifts frequency and enters for a short while the dimension of this very Belovodia she longed to learn more about.

There she meets at last in person the man in white who had acted as her inner guide already in several major ‘dreams’: this masculine being is actually a part of Belovodia…. and so is Umaï, he reveals to her, so Olga needn’t worry, Nicolai’s claim that Umaï had died was a lie, she cannot die; but it wouldn’t be good to remain too attached to her emotionally, for that would hamper Olga’s own growth. Olga does have a deep inner connection with the tattoed mummies from an ancient unknown culture, and those mummies themselves are linked with Belovodia too: although they are seemingly dead, ‘their intentions are alive’, she is told. The discovery and opening of those tombs is one of the visible signs that a new evolutive step is already started on Earth. For individual human beings as well as for humanity at large, the most important thing is to be in contact with one’s Heart Self, which for humanity is precisely Belovodia/Shamballa, so it will come to be known more and more, also with the help of scientific devices like Dmitriev’s invention and the notes users like Olga are able to write while in a deep trance inside.

A few days later Olga has on her own another ‘dream’, at the end of which Umaï appears again to her, to reveal some more invaluable inner secrets for the true Healer Olga is indeed meant to become.
Following trustfully the advice received from Umaï, she has so much success with even supposedly ‘incurable’ cases that she can see these new approaches do work. Her colleagues and superiors see it too, but she presents her strange methods as taken from innovative experiments elsewhere!…
Every time, calling upon her ‘Spirit Twin’ inside herself makes her behave and speak in just the right, if apparently crazy, way, to help a patient… or, when she is finally suspected of ‘subversion’, to escape being found out by the dangerous interrogator she has to face… This moment turns out to be one of the funniest moments in the whole book!!!

Akademgorodok

Longing to have another session inside the curved, tubular ‘mirrors’ of Dmitriev, Olga goes again to his laboratory… only to find that in the meantime he himself has been able also to reach Belovodia, following the same wavelength frequency route that she had spontaneously and unwittingly used. Just to curl up again inside the ‘mirrors’, and there to read Dmitriev’s moving notes of his own visit to Belovodia, is enough for Olga to go back home fully satisfied again, as if she had had the experience herself. The story of Belovodia as told to Dmitriev traces the origins of humanity and of its various main religions back to that area of the world, and particularly the Altai region, long ago, when its climate was entirely different and this specific people there very developed spiritually.

It is so moving to realize the long foreseen vision that this people must have had of our times, of this later period of humanity when we would become ready to welcome again this spiritual wisdom that patiently waited for us to grow enough, and these beings who in the meantime, from their secret and protected realm of existence, have helped us at every step through their inner influence – or, as in the case of Umai, also through their physical presence with us here… Even mummies not so dead as they seem to be have helped and are helping still, through their ‘alive intentions’!
How beautiful and encouraging those teachings are, that together with Sri Aurobindo’s teachings, have shown Olga Kharitidi, and all of her readers, and now all of mine too on this blog, the great promised evolutive Future that is joining more and more our far evolutive Past to form in our Present the New Earth and the New Life we need so urgently!…  

Evolutive & Non-Evolutive Spiritual Paths: the Crucial Difference

In Spirituality there are many paths – an infinity, should we say; and so should it be, as actually for each individual there is her/his own path to be gradually traced, as unique as the inner needs of that individual spirit are. So the main known spiritual paths are merely those that are the main avenues, so to say, through which most people must pass to reach their own individual goal, absolutely identical to no other.
The crucial thing to be understood, then, is that not all spiritual paths will lead you to the same result, and certainly not to the full result that is needed if your aim as a soul is to participate in the Divine Plan going on here on this terrestrial plane, through the immense Process of Evolution.
If my personal goal had been only to achieve what the central aim of all spiritual paths is, that is, to realize (= live the Reality of) my Divine, immortal and eternal Essence, with the intention then to withdraw entirely and for ever from this Physical Dimension, that spiritual goal would have been reached already since many years and I would only need to wait until this physical body I have been wearing in this lifetime finally dies and my spirit is free to return to its true realm of existence, away from physicality.
But as you may have read in my previous post on this blog,”What I Really Want’, such is not my full goal at all: the central Fact described above, experienced only briefly at first and then becoming a permanent Realization, is indeed the indispensable beginning, the necessary central starting-point for achieving all the further conquests I want to achieve too; but I cannot stop at that traditional only goal, a lot more inner work remains to be done, that can be addressed only through the few new spiritual paths that have been figured out and traced more recently for this newly discovered purpose of Spirituality: Conscious Evolution. It is only through Conscious Evolution that we can reconquer here, for the Divine in ourselves and in everything else, this realm of Matter.

So for example you may discover the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, the great yogi of Arunachala Hill in Tiruvanamalai, Tamil Nadu, and be attracted to those teachings; but you better know in advance that they talk only of the central awakening needed, and that even after this awakening had happened in Ramana himself years before, his mind didn’t get really transformed, and he remained unable to perceive the divine Meaning and Purpose also of this physical dimension; when in his later years his body was affected by a painful illness, some disciples were telling him,

‘What terrible nuisances those physical diseases are!…’

He answered:

‘But the physical body itself is a disease!!!’

Well, when I read that, I saw at once that the Maharshi’s way towards the Spirit wasn’t the right one for me, as for me this poor body was not at all a disease, but, as Sri Aurobindo explained, the means of existence and expression of ‘me’, individualized divine spirit among innumerable other ones, for the progressive manifestation of the One Spirit in this specific physical dimension of Itself.

For the same reason, the Vipassana Meditation, a traditional form of meditation originating from Buddhism and popular also nowadays in the West, is rather not to be advised for people interested in Conscious Evolution: the very aim of that form of meditation is on the contrary to go back to only the Unchanging Essential Permanence, the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, in Sanskrit ‘Sat-Chit-Ananda’. From that extreme point of view, even our individual souls within that One Existence are considered unreal and unwanted, illusory products of the same ‘Maya’ supposedly responsible for this entire physical dimension as well.
But this theory is incapable of telling you what is this ‘Maya’, and where it originated from, and how it has been able to manifest all this if it is supposed to be extraneous to the Divine Reality and contrary to the Divine Will. Instead of helping us making sense of All That Is, this theory makes it all seem absurd and directs us backwards, back to square one, so to say, not seeing at all the vaster purpose and special delight to be experienced through the whole individualization and growth process that Evolution is. That the Divine Being may indeed have an absolute and permanent way of being, but may want also on the other hand to experience change and the surprise of the unknown and the unexpected, is totally not understood; in this too one-sided outlook, one misses the whole point of this great Game and Adventure that Evolution, on Earth or anywhere else, is for the Spirit.
This outlook has practical consequences of course: for a Vipassana Meditation you are instructed to disregard and reject the signs and feelings you may get from your very soul while your consciousness goes into the depths of your being; the problem is, such instructions are quite contrary to what you need to do for evolving consciously here on earth: the advice of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is to give the first importance to your soul, through what they call the Concentration in the Heart, in order to get back the inner contact with your soul, the only part in each of us still aware always of the Divine and of being a portion of the Divine – which makes it the only part capable of guiding us constantly in the long process of spiritual transformation that our further evolution asks from each of us.

Another path, actually shamanistic rather than spiritual, that still intrigues many and has attracted a great number of Western followers in the sixties, but will not lead you to Conscious Evolution at all, is the path indicated in the teachings of Don Juan Matus as reported by the famous Carlos Castaneda in his many books.
The weird experiences given by his various mentors to Castaneda, the bizarre incidents and feats attributed to their hard-gained powers can indeed be totally fascinating for ordinary people who have no personal experience of what true spirituality is about, but those who do may throw the books across the room in disgust for this dark travesti of the real thing. When as a researcher years ago I forced myself to read some of those books, starting dutifully from the first, I had many times to stop myself from expressing aloud my anger at the endless histrionics of the shamans who in those books are presented as spiritual masters.
The main thing I found interesting and valuable in the whole series was the Way of the Warrior, for the inner strength and sense of dignity it indeed teaches, that is needed especially for all the people who too easily consider themselves as victims of everything and wallow in self-pity and a degrading sense of both guilt and fear.
But if the Way of the Warrior is a need indeed in the vast, many-faceted approach necessary for Conscious Evolution, the problem in the Castaneda books is that the importance of the Warrior Attitude is greatly exaggerated, to the point of unduly being made the central thing. And the very reason behind that absolute importance given to the Warrior in ourselves, is an appalling belief, the almost totally obscured perception of the Divine that is given as the overall context in which we and everything else live: the belief that all there is, including all human beings, constitutes merely food for the Unknowable that exists supreme – called, for lack of a more precise description, ‘The Eagle’.
Such a horrendous central belief explains why everything in those teachings is viewed and conveyed as a kind of self-defense system, and in such an atmosphere of negativity, fear, terror even, within Carlos Castaneda himself and the other apprentices, when they are not being mocked again and again mercilessly at every mistake. The only goal of all that harsh training, for them as for their trainers, is in fact to escape supposedly for ever from this terrestrial dimension, seen as a realm of inevitable death, into an unknown dimension of supposed Freedom, but where Divine Love is as terribly absent as it seems to be in all other dimensions too. Everything is interpreted at that lower level of understanding, due to a consciousness not really open to the Love of the Divine nor to its utterly sweet and fulfilling Presence in ourselves too.
At every page it is the same reductionism due to this basic ignorance or, even worse, this total misunderstanding of the Supreme Reality underlying and containing all there is: the ordinary reactions of human beings in general in front of the Unknown are seen through the nearly constant demonstration of them by poor Carlos, and are denounced as false and laughable; but the explanations provided as to what things truly are, and how to react to them in the true way, are themselves false and laughable too, seen from a still higher level: granted, they are less ignorant and ridiculous than the ordinary beliefs and habits people usually have, but still all those supposedly shamanistic notions are a far cry from the real Truth they are claimed to be.

In all the three examples given above, we have seen Inner Paths that do not aim at any Conscious Evolution, because Evolution simply isn’t known, or it is deliberately not taken into account at all in the overall interpretation of Life. It is still possible of course to learn something, or even a lot, from such teachings (just as from anything else…), but one has to be very careful to keep only what doesn’t go against one’s real aim, if that aim is the vaster and more complete Truth offered through Conscious Evolution.

To understand this crucial difference is extremely useful for dispelling the utter confusion in which most spiritual seekers find themselves for a long time, wondering why there are so many paths (often contradicting each other on top of it!), and which one is the true one: it all depends what your aim is…

There are, though, forms of ancient shamanism (see my posts about Olga Kharitidi) that are much closer to true spirituality than the example I have had to write about today, so what I have written in this specific case should not be taken at all as a blanket condemnation of all shamanism; but caution and discernment must be there in our being before we entrust our inner life to any path – also those labelled  too easily ‘spiritual’… and even some of those paths which are truly spiritual, but may not be the right ones for reaching the specific inner goal our soul has.

One can always start simply by trying out whatever teachings one is attracted to, but always while observing what effect(s) it has on one’s being and one’s life. If after some time one notices one lives in fear rather than quiet inner joy and obvious progress, something is wrong.

It can be for example like what happened to me in 1971, when as a young adult I was desperately looking for some satisfactory meaning to Life, and found a book, ‘Fragments of an Unknown Teaching’ (my translation of the French title…), by someone named Ouspensky about his Master, Gurdjieff. My mind at once got totally fascinated by the intricate notions presented in that book, it was a mighty and very impressive mental edifice I kind of lost myself into for three months, until suddenly I realized that if indeed our human consciousness could evolve further as was said in that book, that was momentous news, no doubt, but if that further evolution had to happen in the manner and through the means described and practiced by that Gurdjieff, I was not interested at all, thanks: I looked within myself and saw that only my mind had been caught by the prospects, then totally new to me, of a possible Conscious Evolution; the rest of my being in the meantime had been shocked and horrified by the downright dangerous methods used to make it happen, based on the sheer willpower and personal determination of the solitary individual human being, under the watching eye of an indifferent and not helping sort of God in an equally indifferent cosmos.

Nothing in me was actually attracted to such an evolutive possibility, if such was the context and the conditions in which it had to happen. These teachings, I could see, hadn’t sparked in me an interest real enough to translate itself as a will to live, so I simply dropped them then and there.

Once this book was rejected as definitely not what I was looking for, I realized the only two things I had really discovered thanks to it were, the first one, Consciousness, and the other one, Evolution. I could feel somehow that those two discoveries were important: essential keys that were not to be thrown out like the proverbial baby together with the dirty bath-water.

And indeed, a mere few weeks later, another book came to me, brought by a young fellow seeker: ‘The Life Divine’, by a certain Sri Aurobindo, in which Consciousness and Evolution again jumped up out of the pages, but this time as part of a totally different Universe, born of Joy and Love as I had intuitively known it really had been, and evolving further and further under the loving eye and caring guidance of a God who was not exclusively masculine as we believed in the West, but was also our Divine Mother.

There it was, the secret Knowledge I longed for, that finally made Life worth living!… It gave me at last the desire to live, as to go on living in this physical dimension would be to use this lifetime for a Conscious Evolution process in which I would have the constant help of that divine Presence while growing towards a joyful and loving existence, right here on Earth, and in a better body… ‘The Life Divine’ indeed!…

That book propelled me towards the Future my whole being instantly recognized as the one it wanted, when I read the very first lines of its first page, containing already the full splendor of the whole thing, like the Overture contains and announces the full splendor of the entire Symphony.

Not only the Goal, but the Way towards it have to be your own, the ones your whole being rejoices in.. even if you know it is also going to be hard work, and it indeed is!…

‘Entering the Circle’, by Olga Kharitidi

Entering the Circle: The Secrets of Ancient Siberian Wisdom Discovered by a Russian Psychiatrist, Kharitidi, Olga

Various reviews and comments:

From Publishers Weekly
“The term “shaman” is Russian and, until recently, was applied only to members of the indigenous tribes of Siberia and Central Asia by such scholars as Mircea Eliade. This exciting autobiography cum spiritual adventure by a Soviet psychiatrist is the first popular account of initiation into those tribes’ ancient and mysterious traditions. Kharitidi writes (with no translator) in the slightly stilted English of a native Russian-speaker, an effect that highlights the fantastic nature of her encounters. From the grim state hospital where patients are fed only gruel to the isolated Altai Mountains, Kharitidi is inexorably led to Umai, a female shaman who passes her power to Kharitidi on her death and who continues to instruct her from the spirit world. The author’s involvement with shamanism is fraught with danger, for in the Soviet Union, interest in the occult can lead to psychiatric commitment. But Kharitidi manages secretly to incorporate her new powers into her practice at the hospital. During her trance voyages, she visits Belovodia, more commonly known in the West by its Tibetan name of Shambhala, where a parallel human race with advanced spiritual knowledge hints at a radical new future for humanity. Others are also discovering Belovodia, Kharitidi learns, particularly a Soviet physicist researching the nature of time.
(Whether one swallows this whole, with salt or not at all, there’s no doubt that with its classic New Age elements?the skeptical protagonist turned believer, exotic locales and esoteric knowledge, suspense and synchronicity?this is a great read that should sell briskly. Drawings, not seen by PW. $75,000 ad/promo; BOMC, QPB and One Spirit selections; film rights to North Tower Films; translation rights sold in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland; author tour. Copyright 1996)”

Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description:
“When the young Russian psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi set out on an impetuous journey into the snowbound Altai Mountains of Siberia, she never dreamed that her experience there would shatter and rebuild her view of reality. Among the wintry villages and pine forests of Siberia, guided by mysterious native sages, Kharitidi unearthed the wellspring of the worlds mystical traditions, discovered deep secrets of healing and magic, and encountered revolutionary teachings about the true nature of the human soul. Entering the Circle shares her thrilling adventure–and her stunning discoveries–with the world. As a dedicated young psychiatrist at an austere state hospital in the former Soviet Union, Olga Kharitidi battled the difficulties of Soviet life and the constraints of medical science in her fight to save her suffering patients. Joining an ailing friend on a spur-of-the-moment trip into Siberia’s Altai Mountains, Kharitidi was launched on an unexpected journey of revelation when she was taken into apprenticeship by an enigmatic native shaman. The wild adventure that followed would forever change Kharitidi’s view of healing, science, consciousness–and the potential of the human soul itself. Entering the Circle shares Kharitidi’s remarkable true story and the revelatory teachings she received during her sojourn with mysterious sages of Siberia. Guided through bizarre, magical, and often terrifying experiences by her shaman-teacher Umai–and by a radical Soviet physicist whose studies challenged the very nature of reality–Kharitidi unlocked a storehouse of spiritual learning that had lain hidden in inaccessible Siberia for centuries. Deep in Siberia, Kharitidi’s path of knowledge led her ever closer to unlocking the secrets of Belovodia, also known as Shambala, a fabled civilization of highly evolved humans who have for eons spread their sacred knowledge through the world’s great faiths, including Buddhism, Christian mysticism, Sufism, and Vedic Hinduism. She learned, through firsthand experience, that waking reality–the fabric of our daily lives–is only the near shore of our Spirit Lake, the sea of…..(?)”

By: Isle
Postings: 200
Regular Topic Posted: Apr 05, 2004 – 11:25 PM

A MUST READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* * *
Entering the Circle : Ancient Secrets of Siberian Wisdom Discovered by a Russian Psychiatrist
by Olga Kharitidi (Author)
* * *
Allright, I shall admit, the real reason I even opened this book was because I am Russian, and in love with my far away homeland (I live in NY, but don’t get me wrong, I LUV NY).
But by the Lady, the moment you start reading this book, there is no putting it down.
CHOCK FULL OF WISDOM PEOPLE!!!!!
A MUST READ!!! I REPEAT, A MUST READ!!!!!!!!!
And there is also a VERY lovely bonus.
This book will be found in your public library. (Trust me, if my tiny library has it, yours does too.)
That’s right, no dishing out the green for Wisdom, Adventure and Knowledge.
And trust me, by the time you finish this book, not only will you want to write to Olga and tell her she’s the woman! and want to catch the next plane to Russia, then down to Siberia to visit the Altai Mointains, but you will also begin to search for your own Belovodia. If you have not already begun.
FIND THIS BOOK! YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT!!!!!
And I will be willing to stake all I have on that.
Merrys,
Nina
P.S.
My only regret is that she did not write a published copy in Russian so I could get the full sensation…ahh…one cannot have everything. *wink*
By: Isle
Postings: 200
Regular Topic Posted: Apr 05, 2004 – 11:35 PM

Spelling Error:
***Mointains, allright, I wanted to write MOUNTAINS.
Mointains…I’m sorry, but does anyone else find it a bit funny………………..right.

Ohh and here’s the Amazon.com Summary:

Book Description
“Olga Kharitidi’s debut book is a remarkable account of her spiritual adventure in snowbound Siberia.Joining an ailing friend on a spontaneous trip to the Atai Mountains, Dr. Kharitidi is taken into apprenticeship by a native Shaman who guides her through bizarre, magical, and often terrifying experiences that open her eyes to a wellspring of deeper learning. On the road to Belovedia, a fabled civilization of highly evolved beings, she encounters revolutionary mystical teachings while discovering ancient secrets of magic and healing. At once a modern odyssey and a timeless dreamscape, Entering the Circle is an inspiring story of personal growth and an insightful work about the limitless potential of human spirit.”

From Library Journal
“A sort of autobiographical adventure, this book describes Kharitidi’s mystical experiences in the Altai Mountains in Siberia. When a friend asked her to come along and observe a healing ceremony there, the perceptions of the Soviet-trained psychiatrist suddenly and drastically changed. Kharitidi’s whole belief system was shaken with the help of Umai the shaman/teacher, whose wisdom is imparted through dreams. The author set out to broaden the base of this knowledge and met a prestigious physicist who also experiments with time/space studies and filled in some of the gaps in Kharitidi’s knowledge. Now committed to sharing her new-found understanding, Kharitidi has moved to New Mexico and lectures all over the world.”

Los Angeles Times
“[This Book] may prove as revelatory to readers at the end of the millennium as anthropologist Carlos Castaneda’s… in the late `60s.”

Variety
“This exciting autobiography cum spiritual adventure by a soviet psychiatrist is the first popular account of initiation into…”

Michael Harner, Ph.D., author of The Way of the Shaman
“Castaneda a la Russe-a psychiatrist’s account of transformation through encounters with a Siberian shaman.”

—————–
OMG, I cannot express how much this book is just…there are no words. Read it…for yourself.
—————————————————————————–
From http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/4076/gbarchives/qt_2_2000.html

Fransje Bik – 06/01/00 12:59:56
My Email:fransjebik@zonnet.nl
How you found us: http://weten.shamanismweb.org/index.htm

Comments:
Thank you so much for all your work and beautiful sites. i am many times on your pages. I want you to return something. I have made on my trip to Altai in Siberia, Russia, a beautiful picture of the holy Mountain Belucha, the natural Shaman of Siberia. Yo can use this and the other photoos in your articels when you want, I do not use copyright, because it has a healing power and transformation powe in it and that power is not mine!!! I speak about the healing power in the photo of Belucha. In the old Mongolian-sanskriet language it is called: Utsch Sumer, The Three in One. (Holy Trinity)How do you find this fotoos of Altai: you go to the http as I give you in: how did you find us. Thi is the Dutch Sjamanic circle. Than you go to homepage or guestbook. In guestbook you will find Fransje Bik and my e-mail adres. Klik op Fransje Bik and than the front page is coming. When you klik on the foto of belucha, it will be a bigger one. In the frontpage you will see some items: Klik Altai and there is two pages with fotoos. Go to Altai frame again, and klik on info: There you will find the spiritual mountain Yarlu in the vallei from Belucha. Panorama of the smaal Altai village Tyungur, what means: Tambourin of the Shaman. And a foto from the Baba stone, with face. Baba means wise old woman or man and the were the Sha ans of the area. This place is also called: the initiation place of the Shaman. Wonder happens there, there are power-stones too. The Baba stones give anwers on all your questions, coming from your hart. Go up in this tekst again and next to Yarlo foto you see in the text: de zeven chacra meren. Klik there and you will find one of the seven coulored lakes, called too: the seven chacra lakes. Too in the vally of Belucha. And the white horse took met the fi st trip (1994) to Belucha!!! And if you ore someone else are interested to go to Belucha in Altai Siberia, i will give you the e-mail adres of the Russian organisation, who organise those trkkings from Tyungur to belucha. They make a combination of trekking, adventure and spiritualit and they are very trustfull people. When you make contact, say hi from Fransje Bik!!! Just for fun. So, this was my message to you. Thank you again for your beautiful site. My power animal for the past is a ground squirrel and for now and the future a polarbear. I found the meanings on your page. Myself, I give the workshop that Olga Kharitidi gave here in Amsterdam last year: my workshop is called: Dream Healer – war healer and based on healing trauma spirits in us and in the meanwhile for all who is connected with us in the past (seven generations) and for them who will come to earth (seven generations). it is trauma therapy with miracoulus results. Olgha Kharitidi is an psychiater from Novosibirsk. She wrote the book: Entering the circle and now she works in America. Bye bye, Fransje Bik

My first contact with Siberian Shamanism

The tattooed arm of the Altai male mummy

I have never been attracted at all to Shamanism; my Way (at least in this lifetime!) being more the Way of Mysticism, the Way of the Heart and the Beloved. So the story which follows will be all the more extraordinary:
In the early years after 1984 and my creating the ‘Laboratory of Evolution” here in Auroville, someone donated to our Specialized Library his whole ongoing collection of ‘National Geographic’ magazines. One day while exploring the oldest issues, I found an article with some photos of ancient drawings that strangely provoked a deep emotion within me; those drawings were those of the many tattoos found on the just discovered, remarkably well preserved thousands of years old body of a princess, a warrior princess apparently, buried with horses like a warrior prince would have been; she must have been some kind of priestess too, the article said, or anyway been a very special woman to have been honored in such a remarkable way as her tomb showed.
I didn’t care much about the scientific details given, totally fascinated as I inexplicably was by the princess herself, and those tattoo drawings full of what must have been her life, her beliefs, her culture, her times, long, long ago… The attraction was so strong I kept that magazine aside and looked at it again and again, always with the same fascination and deep emotion.
Time passed (or such is the illusion we have while incarnate in an Earth period-play!…), the other preoccupations arising from my work for the Laboratory of Evolution made me gradually forget about that whole article in the National Geographic.
Then, in May 2000, a passing guest in the Auroville place where I live gave me when leaving a book, ‘Entering the circle’, by a Russian young psychiatrist, Olga Kharitidi, whose photo on the back showed an open, pretty, luminous face, that decided me to look inside the book in spite of its darker, slightly weird overall cover. Trying to read Castaneda’s books had been an inner ordeal for me, so I certainly didn’t want to inflict upon myself yet another unpleasant mud bath.
I started hesitantly leafing through the pages… To my utter amazement and downright emotional shock, I recognized over the title of each chapter the tattoos of the ancient Warrior Princess!!!  I had to sit down, my legs all shaky, before I could go on looking, this time avidly, into the contents of that book. For the next four hours I could not put it down. When I finally did after reading the very last page, I remained immobile and silent for a long time, aware that I had just reconnected with a world known intimately long, long ago.
Particularly striking had been the inner experiences lived by the author herself, Olga, that young, modern psychiatrist from Novosibirsk in the Soviet Union, under the powerful but loving guidance of the shaman-woman, Umai, that she is unexpectedly led to meet in a small, remote village up in the Altai Mountains where she has followed a ‘mental patient’, Nikolai… whose so-called disease is that he is actually becoming himself a shaman or ‘kam’, uniting inwardly with the village’s just dead kam Mamoush – that process happens independantly from Olga’s growing relationship with Umai, whom she trusts more and more. Although the vocabulary and the inner images were somewhat different, some of the experiences lived by Olga thanks to Umai were definitely what I call mystical experiences, that is, connecting her to her own soul, the deepest part in herself, and had a most beneficial effect on her and on her understanding of true Healing. But one last experience stood out for me as the reader, it will be easily understantood why:
About to leave that village and go back to Novosibirsk instead of staying on as Nikolai/Mamoush is urging her to, Olga is asked inwardly by Umai to lie down directly on the cold ground, and she is told “Here is something you must know. The kams were supposed to keep only one line of immortality, but instead there are more. You and Mamoush belong to different lines. Olga, you must leave here today. If you stay as Mamoush is requesting, he will try to destroy your line. (…) Time is not as simple as you think it is. You are not only Olga who works as a psychiatrist in a Siberian clinic. There is something else about you, something you have to figure out.”
Lying there she has a ‘dream’, which she describes thus:
“I feel a chill go through my body. Perhaps I have caught a fever. I remember that I have been lying on ice for I don’t know how long. The earth begins swaying under me.
In the distance I hear the sound of a galloping horse. It grows louder and louder. I can feel the pounding of its hooves upon the earth. Then a white horse comes into view. Its entire being emanates a passionate energy.
A voice says to me, ‘Get up on his back and ride away!’, and I notice for the first time the small but powerfully built young woman standing besides the horse’s head, holding his bridle. My attention moves from the horse to the woman’s bare arm, which is entirely covered with tattoos. I have never seen anything like them. Tattoos of unknown animals circle around and around one another from her shoulder to her wrist. As I stare at her, the animals gradually begin to seem more familiar to me, although I don’t actually recognize them or remember where I have seen them. (…) The horse and the dream dissolved, and I was awake.”
After the long bus and train journey back to Novosibirsk, Olga is relieved to find herself again in her little apartment and her ‘normal reality’. But another surprise is awaiting her right there too:
‘I looked through my mail, saving the newspapers for later. Eventually I snuggled into my worn sofa to read them. At first all the news seemed exactly like the same old news of the week before.
Then, as I turned the page of the newspaper, a headline reading “Science in Siberia” caught my eye. Under the headline was a large picture showing the opening of an ancient tomb in the Altai Mountains. The picture looked interesting, so I continued reading.
The article described the discovery the summer before of the tomb of a young woman. She had been about twenty-five years old when she died.  Her tomb had acted as a deep freeze for millennia, keeping its contents in a remarkable state of preservation. (…) The picture and description of the tomb reminded me of the scene where my last encounter with Umai had taken place, and as I read further my heart began to beat faster.
According to the article, one particular discovery in the tomb had created a great archeological sensation. The woman’s arms had been covered with tattoos of strange symbolic animals circling her limbs and merging into one another. (…)
Instinctively I was certain this was the same woman who had come to me in my dream.’
And I, Bhaga, was simply stunned to find myself stumbling again upon that same story that in the National Geographic had so strangely moved me years before!… How was it that precisely this book had been given to me by this unknown guest?!
In that book, there is also the question of Time, and of Belovodia, which I’ll have to present in some other post some other day…