Shamanic initiation

I have an extremely proficient survival instinct that seems to be a function of either my biology or my very early programming. Quite simply, under extreme stress, I am able to shut down all of my emotional functions to function more directly on the basis of survival. Or rather, a switch flicks in my brain, and I'm a different person.

The first time it happened, I remember thinking, "Oh, that's very strange. A moment ago I had so much pent up rage in me that I could barely tell what was happening. And now the heat has turned to frozen cold, and everything is very clear and utterly transparent. Without a doubt, I am on a mission to utterly destroy my enemies, without pity, without words."

Once initiated by experience to this kind of self-knowledge, one does not forget it. It's not that one does in fact kill one's enemies, but that one knows that it is quite within one's capacity to do so. The logic of one's thinking, in frozen calmness, is to facilitate destruction of the other, and to save oneself. One sees, quite suddenly and transparently, in black and white, the political dynamics that are in operation and wonders why they were not evident before.

This was the nature of my own shamanic initiation -- an encounter with some inner resource that took matters into its own hands, and shook off the outer threads of my existing personality as so much superifical posturing. I'm not the same person that I was before that experience, and at times I've had to actively distance myself from certain people when I feel this inner ruthlessness demanding to be released. (It's like a missile, in that it cannot be recalled, but will find the vulnerable aspects of my enemy, it's target.)

The force of this awareness once shattered my previous identity and made me realise not only that I was capable of far more than I had imagined, but that the life I had been living up until then was not based on self-knowledge.

One does not look back regretfully, after a shamanic initiation. One now has power that one didn't know enough about before, and there is the capacity for self-knowedge that enables one to moderate that power to work for good and not for evil. But, one knows that it is dangerous for others with a different base for psychological knowledge to try to manipulate those who have survived shamanic initiation.