Earth without sufficient shamans is rather like a big blue melon going bad in the back of God’s refrigerator. I’ll never forget this old cartoon hanging on the wall of my dad’s office. “This has really started to go bad… maybe I should toss it,” God says, poking the rotting fruit.

Years later, I would read these incisive words written by Graham Hancock and the message would be completed: “The rot sets in from the moment that any culture begins to devalue its shamans as madmen.”

And therein lies the rub. We have pathologized our original priests, the expert men and women who provided much of our “second sight,” and the result, ironically, is planetary psychopathology. We have disgraced our godly go-betweens and gone sick in the process.

Without sufficient shamans, there can be no healthy civilization and there can be no healthy planet (at least with humans around). Our institutions become corrupt without the counterbalancing, vitalizing input from select, ordained, highly skilled medicine men and women.

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Metamorphosis isn't pretty. Sorry to break it to you.

You don’t just hop in a chrysalis and sprout wings overnight.

You’ve gotta turn into goo first, just like the caterpillar turns into a soup of amino acids before entering its final form. You’ve gotta dissolve and then be reassembled.

That’s the step our culture largely ignores.

As Maya Angelou once wrote, “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”

We celebrate people once they’re healthy, integrated, and/or successful, their wings fully developed.

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Imagine an unknown 17-year-old woman claiming she heard voices from God and suddenly being launched into the national spotlight, helping our political leaders navigate our deeply troubled times.

Even during a year as “WTF is happening?” as 2020, it sounds highly implausible. Such a person would more likely be whisked away to a psychiatric institution, diagnosed with “schizophrenia,” and injected with a slew of mind-altering chemicals.

But this is precisely the story of Joan of Arc, the visionary, French, teenage peasant who in 1429 was granted control of the French army and led the country to victory in a critical phase of the Hundred Years’ War with England.

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We can’t have a complete discussion about race in America without addressing the disproportionate diagnosis of “schizophrenia” among black people.

This might sound impossible, but I ask you to check your politics at the door for this one. Can you do that? Yes, I’m paying some homage to Black Lives Matter, and yes, the movement has flaws, just as every movement has flaws. But setting aside your political leanings, can you acknowledge it has reinitiated an important conversation in this country?

This post is not intended to further polarize anyone or to “signal virtue.” It’s intended to educate people regarding the long and dark history of mental illness diagnosis in black Americans. As a white man, as a self-proclaimed former “schizophrenic,” as a concerned citizen of a country that appears to be tearing itself apart by the day, I feel a duty to wade into the current culture wars holding a sign that reads….

“DO MORE SHADOW WORK.”

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In 2015, Terence McKenna gave my healing journey new meaning. I knew "schizophrenia" had a major mystical component, but I had never heard someone put words to it quite like this.

In case you aren't familiar with Terence, he was a hugely influential ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, and author, known by some as the "Timothy Leary of the '90's" and by others as one of the leading authorities on shamanism in the West.

Like a true alchemist, Terence had a penchant for upending people’s realities. The man was a walking and talking psychedelic, a bard the world rarely sees. I get the sense he was ahead of his time by, oh, I dunno, a century or so, a gargantuan fish in the relatively small pond of ’70’s, ’80’s, and ’90’s transformation culture.

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Modern psychiatry was largely written by the uninitiated.

One need look no further than the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, to understand what a drought of spiritual thought has haunted the halls of academia for over a hundred years. He famously dismissed all spiritual experience as pathology, railing against religion as a “delusional remolding of reality.”

His successors have mostly followed suit, save for Carl Jung, who I consider a modern shaman, a successful sacredphrenic, and have written about separately. Secularism remains the prevailing ethos of our “mind doctors,” even though 90 percent of Americans believe in God and roughly half of all Americans claim to have had some sort of spiritual experience.

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Starting a health coaching biz for “schizophrenics” during a global meltdown feels an awful lot like trying to land a Boeing 747 during a hurricane.

Seriously, am I in an absurdist novel? Kafka, is that you? Could you cool it with the surrealism? A lot of people are grappling enough with their mental health as is. They don’t need any more rude surprises…

I swear to God, if Kanye becomes president, I’m moving to a parallel universe.

In all honesty, I’ve taken a step back from the business side of Sacredphrenia. The sluggish economy tanked my sales and I had to adapt. Don’t worry, the revolution isn’t going anywhere. It’s only gestating.

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Careful with the conspiracy theories, ladies and gentlemen. Careful that you don’t miss the forest for the trees. Or worse, lose the plot entirely.

I’m all for healthy investigation. And I agree that much of what gets labeled “conspiracy theory” isn’t conspiracy theory at all. But I’m also deeply familiar with the territory, having spent years wearing the tinfoil hat.

There’s a place in conspiracy land that Robert Anton Wilson called Chapel Perilous. And trust me when I say it’s a place you do not want to end up if you can help it.

I know because I lost my sanity in Chapel Perilous.

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I’m not saying all “schizophrenics” are shamans. I’m also not saying all shamans are “schizophrenic.”

I’m saying all “schizophrenics” have shamanic potential. Just as all shamans have “schizophrenic” potential.

I’m saying there’s a zone in the middle where the two non-ordinary states merge, and that some serious magic can happen in that place. Because when a “schizophrenic” becomes a shaman, an unbelievable obstacle has been overcome, and heaven’s forces smile over such an accomplishment.

The opposite is also true. When a shaman regresses to a disturbed, preegoic, “schizophrenic” state, there is great education in that experience and they are made the better for it, assuming they are able to make it out of their psychological chasm.

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What if it was a science fiction movie? Sometimes it feels that way, doesn’t it?

Sometimes it feels like this whole thing was written in advance - in the stars, as they say. Right down to the political stalemate and the palpable sense of “sliding backwards.”

I’ll tell you one thing: the face mask feuds, the economic uncertainty, the breakdown in collective sense-making, I welcome it all.

You know why? Because we’re no longer pretending we’re not in deep water. We’re no longer acting as though everything’s fine on planet Earth.

Things are not fine and they haven’t been fine for a long time. At least we’re starting to acknowledge that our system is a lot more inflexible, and therefore breakable, than we’ve been led to believe.

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Like so many of Jung’s writings, the implications of this quote have only begun revealing themselves to me. I know they are very, very large.

Here was a man who studied directly under the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and was slated to become his successor, a position that would have come with great prestige, but who chose instead to listen to the promptings of his soul, which told him that psychiatry was barking up the wrong tree with its unchecked scientific reductionism and atheism. Jung severed his ties with Freud and launched into an independent analysis of the human psyche.

What followed is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting events in the history of psychology. Jung “went mad.” After striking out on his own, Jung became the laughing stock of his academic peers. Socially isolated and reminded of the intense loneliness he had felt as a child, he started hearing voices and seeing visions.

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There are a handful of people who have affected my healing journey so deeply, I would be reduced to dreadfully little without their influence. These are people who put the “sacred” in what I call sacredphrenia.

In late 2012, I met one of them in the body care section of a small health food store I worked in. Her name was Tammy. She asked me about a certain hemp-based product, whether it contained THC, which she was trying to avoid. Our little interaction planted a seed that would sprout months later when she would work on me like no one has ever worked on me either before or since. ⠀

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was conversing with a bona fide shaman. ⠀

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Today I turn 30.

The life odometer is getting a considerable upgrade. As that left digit flicks from a 2 to a 3, I can already feel my “Self-expectation” kicking into a higher gear. It does something to you psychologically.

So much happened in my 20’s, mostly internally, what felt like decades worth of agonizing, followed by spiritual surrender. I can hardly imagine what the next decade has in store, especially when the fault lines of our civilization are being revealed so dramatically and systems are beginning to collapse.

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This week marks the ten-year anniversary of my breakdown.

And what a decade it’s been.

[This is one of the few photos taken of me in the weeks following my breakdown in late April of 2010].

In the days following the Deep Water Horizon disaster on April 20th, 2010, as millions of barrels of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, I underwent a disaster of my own, a horrific mental breakdown that left no part of my life untouched. At the time, the two events seemed inextricably interlinked, as though I was plugged into the global mind and was energetically absorbing the etheric horrors of that oil spill.

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Are you familiar with the Wim Hof Method? Wim Hof, AKA "The Iceman," is famous for developing a breathing technique that has helped him claim 26 world records, including the Guinness World Record for longest ice bath (1 hour, 52 minutes, and 42 seconds).

Wim Hof believes his method has therapeutic value for those suffering from severe mental health challenges. He once said, “I can bring people back to tranquility. Schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorder draw away people's energy. My method can give them back control.” Part of Wim’s passion to relieve such people's suffering derives from his own’s wife’s suicide, which took place after she began showing signs of “schizophrenia.”

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