I would like to start by quoting excerpts from a recent article in the New York Times, “A Secret War, Strange New Wounds, and Silence from the Pentagon.” by Dave Phillips. (November 5, 2023)
“Many U.S. troops who fired vast numbers of artillery rounds against the Islamic State developed mysterious, life-shattering mental and physical problems.. . . (The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all, the brain. . . .)
“(And yet) the military struggled to understand what was wrong.
“When Lance Corporal Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil. . . He backed into another room in his apartment near Camp Pendleton in California and flicked on the lights, certain that he was imagining things. She was still there.
“The 21-year-old Marine . . .knew that his unit’s huge cannons had killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The ghost, he was sure, was their revenge.”
The Enemy Had Hexed Him
Deeply disturbed by the apparition that seemed to have followed him from Syria in 2017, but with no one to help him connect any of the dots, such as to suspect brain injury due to the relentless firing of massive artillery, he drew his own conclusion, that the enemy had “hexed” him. I can only imagine how cornered and frightened he must have felt when he took matters into his own hands, trying to purify himself by building a fire on the beach to which he consigned his combat gloves and deployment journal. But the ghost remained.
By October 2020, in his visions, ghosts were trying to pull him into another dimension.
In this dimension he has two children, is having trouble keeping a job and struggles to pay his bills. He has debilitating headaches and claims to be losing his memory. He still sees the ghost “and other things”.
The New York Times article quotes Dr. Perl, neuropathologist working for the Defense Department: “There is currently no brain scan or blood test that can detect the minute injuries , . . The damage can be seen only under microscopes once a service member has died. So there is no definitive way to tell whether a living person is injured. Even if there were, there is no therapy to fix it . . .”
If Ortiz had consulted a shaman he would have received a different diagnosis. One big difference would be, the word “hallucination” would not have come up. But the word “spirit” would have.
Remote killing (whether by firing massive artillery shells at distant human targets or guided missiles), could actually affect our emotional health more violently than close-up killing, and it is a wonder to me that that wasn’t considered during examination of those distraught, haunted young men. Not everyone was visited by a ghost. Another marine saw a black demon standing by his bed.
Who in our military would be qualified to consider that Ortiz was seeing a ghost and who in the military would be qualified to guide him through a healing . . . to see what the ghost / spirit wanted and respond in some fashion that would allow it / her to return to wherever she heralded from – the bardo? Does the Pentagon hire or consult with any shamans? Most allopathic doctors in their right mind would not tread there. This kind of work is what shamans do!
A “New” Brain?
When I returned from 12 days in the Peruvian rainforest in 2016, from an intensive retreat working with ayahuasca, I was not quite the same person that went down there. For one thing, I knew that my identity, that is to say, the person I identified with, “Gary Lindorff”, was only a small part of who I was. And the other thing I learned was, spirits are real.
I came back with more or new neuro-connections.
Up until 10 years ago it was thought that the brain begins to start losing neural connections after around age 25, and we do lose neurons as we age, but now we know that the adult brain can create new neural connections and even new neurons from neuronal stem cells. In additional to neuronal changes in the gray matter, changes in our white matter (made up of a large network of nerve fibers [axons] that account for the exchange of information and communication) can continue throughout most of life in a healthy brain.
Neuroplasticity is the process by which the brain adapts structurally and functionally as the nervous system responds to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli, but it also reorganizes its structure, functions or connections after injuries. . . such as trauma or brain injury. The brain is plastic. (Plastic, originally from the Greek word, “plastikos”, meaning to grow or form, was first used as an adjective meaning “formative”.)
Not everyone sees ghosts, but those who do may not be crazy, they may be special; their brains may be more plastic or adaptive, than, for example, their doctors’ brains. A shaman might have been able to help Ortiz to find out why the ghost showed up. Perhaps his brain was irreversibly damaged but it is also possible that his sense of reality was augmented by his injury.
Ortiz, Phillips reports, was other-than-honorably discharged. “‘I gave the Marine Corps everything,’ he said. ‘And they spit me out with nothing. Damaged, damaged, very damaged.’”
The wounded healer
I think it is accurate to say that most powerful healers are in some way themselves wounded. The journey from woundedness to wounded-healer can be long and circuitous and full of daunting challenges but, even though it might not seem like it to the one making that journey or that crossing, it is an archetypal metamorphosis for which there is ample precedence.
Does Ortiz have it in him to become a healer? Sadly, the question is rhetorical. All we can do is speculate.
Not knowing anything about Ortiz except what was reported of his battle experience, that he suffers from PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), that he was treated unsatisfactorily by military doctors, discharged with limited benefits and that he was, as of the writing of the article, still being stalked by the ghost of a victim of the massive shelling that he participated in, I can’t presume to prescribe, but I do imagine, what a deep healing program for him might include, considering that an Indigenous healer might characterize someone with a similar history and symptoms as having been separated from his soul.
I will be drawing on my own experience of having worked with two powerful plant-spirit medicines under master shamans. I refer to them as master shamans because they were both veteran-healers (one an ayahuasquero, the other a Roadman of the Native American Church), steeped in ritual-based sacred traditions that have grown up around plant-medicines long-honored by their respective Indigenous cultures – namely peyote and ayahuasca.
My speculation is that Ortiz would likely benefit from one or more sessions or healing ceremonies with either one or both of these plant-spirit medicines. I am limiting myself to one example each of how peyote and ayahuasca benefited me on my healing path by causing a profound shift in my awareness.
“In this fireplace, there is no illness.”
Ten years ago I participated in an all-night Native American Church ceremony that took place in a large teepee with over twenty individuals attending. This particular ceremony was convened for the purpose of healing a woman with stage four cancer. (The facilitator of the ceremony, referred to as the Roadman, sat in the West quadrant opposite the tent entrance, the fire was tended by the fireman and his assistant and the Roadman’s wife fulfilled certain sacred observances in the early morning.) The host (the one seeking healing), sat in the south quadrant. Peyote was consumed at certain intervals during the 13 hour ceremony as a sacrament.
After we were all in, and everyone was settled the Roadman spoke words I have never forgotten: “In this fireplace”, he said, “there is no illness”. He pronounced this with impeccable authority. Throughout the ceremony I was completely enveloped by the sense that we were in the hands of (under the protection of), Grandfather peyote. As I sat there, basically without changing position the entire time, it was like being held by a superior consciousness in which my self-awareness diffused into a larger more inclusive awareness that was the corollary of the ceremony. And, indeed, no illness was conceivable or stood any chance of surviving the palpably intensifying field of love and community that crescendoed at some point during the passage of the night but never dissipated; It merely softened and diffused as the light of dawn found us.
For this next example of deep healing I would like to set up the context: I was one of a small group at a remote location in the Peruvian rainforest on a 12-day retreat. We were there expressly for healing. At this retreat there was a boiling river passing through the camp. In short order I got into the habit of sitting close to the stream on a secluded shelf of ledge, letting myself be wrapped by the baking steam rising from the rushing water where I would pray, releasing waves of emotion. Now I would like to quote a passage from my field journal: “Today I am doing the diet of rice or oatmeal and boiled plantain in preparation for tonight’s ceremony. When I was steam bathing, thinking about the ceremony with a little apprehension about having a repeat of my last (daunting) experience, of not being able to find my place, I imagined the huge chunk of (rock) I was on, breaking away. I leap up onto the ledge and bedrock and then that begins crumbling. The whole landscape is falling away, including the maloca (ritual longhouse) and other structures, so I flee up into the woods . . . as the land crumbles behind me. Finally I manage to get to a high spot. . . the land (completely) disintegrates. I am standing on the flat top of a giant peak of obsidian that is grounded in the center of the earth and I am perfectly safe. A voice says, “That is your core.”
This was more than a fantasy. It was on the order of a waking dream. It was a couple days after our last ceremony with ayahuasca and ayahuasca was still in my system as the shaman had informed us that ayahuasca keeps working on us for a week or two after taking it into our bodies.
Like the words of the road man, “There is no illness in this fireplace.”, the voice that announced, “This is your core.” has become my personal medicine as a healer. I have often shared this anecdote with my clients as a powerful medicine story.
When someone works with ayahuasca or peyote, in ritual, approaching these ancient plant-medicine-spirits as sacred doctors, under the guidance of a master shaman, the treatment that that person receives will be as unique as that person and whatever happens, it is just part of a great journey. Speaking for myself, I am still wounded, but I can also say that I am a healer. I would, without any hesitation, recommend this journey to Ortiz and anyone else, for that matter, who has been separated from their soul.
……………………………………….
A synchronicity: A few days before I spotted this article in the Times that I extensively quoted as an opening tom article, I posted a poem “For spirit’s children”, the last lines of which I will quote as a last word:
. . . Many children are dead
Many more will die
They are spirit’s children now
No hardened room
In which to shelter
People
Are abandoning the land
Listen That is the sound of grief
They are saying
This very moment
No more wall of hands
Dynamite the dam
Watch the babies cry
First chance
Second chance
Third chance
They’re doing it again
Take this medicine bag
Be a doctor
For spirit’s children
Beyond Anger Grief Fear
They are watching
They are watching
………….
I want to document a brief exchange between me and my brother, Dave Lindorff, after he read the above piece:
Dave: I hope you are correct that a shaman could help a person like Corp. Ortiz, but I doubt it. If his brain was that damaged that the myelin sheaths of his brain’s neurons were hanging off in tatters, he was beyond help, much like the guys who were exposed to the smoke from military burn pits in fhe two Iraq wars who are now suffering from such connective tissue diseases as ALS, Parkinson’s Disease and MS. There are therapies that can stop the progression of these kinds of diseases, but not that can reverse them. The best hope is a study that has developed, with the new mNRA technology for developing targeted vaccines for diseases like Covid. The scientists on this research have developed an mNRA vaccine that can be used to attack the specific proteins that attack the body’s nerve tissues causing those debilitating and ultimately fatal auto-immune diseases. They’ve learned how to tweak the vaccine to attack specific antibodies, fo example for arthritis, or parkinsons and can actually cure them. There is thus hope for cures for neuropathy, sarcoidosis, Graves Disease, MS, ALS etc. It’s working on mammals like mice and rates. Humans can’t be far behind.
My response to my brother: Your point about the damage to the nerves being irreversible is compelling, but working with a shaman and with plant-spirit-medicines like peyote and ayahuasca can and has resulted in some impossible-to explain results. This is where reading the literature helps. and also, (hard for many), you have to trust other’s experience. Every time someone works with a master shaman, in their element, like I did, the results are unique. So you can’t say, “this, this and this worked for this percentage of patients with such and such a condition.” The healing relationship is between the patient, the shaman and the medicine.
Gary Lindorff - Nine Waves 