High Lights
Of
High Holy Adventure
Shamans, Spirits & Mediums I Know and Love
By
R. Alan Fuller

      My recently published book High Holy Adventure: Shamans, Spirits & Mediums I know and Love is the first of a trilogy in which I report my first hand experiences with spiritual maestros and their luminous demonstrations of spiritual mastery. Through purposeful pursuit and serendipitous encounter I have worked closely with some extraordinary spiritual adepts and “energy healers” of our times and experienced wondrous lessons challenging and changing what I held dear and believed possible.

      Coming from a scholarly background, teaching for a couple of years at California State University, Hayward, I encountered Carlos Castaneda's first book in graduate school in 1971. Having my brain buried in a traditional university education for six years, at the time I did not recognize that it was sheer alchemy to be handed The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by a senior faculty member. Neither the title nor the author meant anything to me at the time. I was told to lecture on its place in modern literature before a multi discipline upper division course. Staying up all night before my lecture to read it twice, I have never been the same since. I arrived to face a packed auditorium and a thunderous ovation when I was done, an experience that led to an actualization of values that would structure my choices for years to come.

      Contrary to what media hype proclaimed about Castaneda's books, I personally found nothing except dire warnings against experimenting with mind altering substances without the guidance of someone authorized to provide such instruction. Otherwise, what would be the point? It was the shaman and his or her training that was the necessary ingredient for acquiring knowledge. Since I did not know any real shamans, for twenty years Nancy Reagan would have been proud of me while I said no to the smorgasbords of psycho-pharmacos associated with the counter culture of the 60's and 70's. Instead I immersed myself in the human consciousness movement with participation and discipline, attempting to bring my life to a state of order as recommended by The Teachings. I decided it was the only option since I privately despaired of ever meeting Carlos Castaneda, let alone his notorious informant. As it turned out I would be wrong about one and perhaps both.

       Through a fortuitous encounter the author found himself invited to visit a shaman in Peru who became his mentor and trainer for the next five years in the botanically induced trance practices of Andean shamans. This shaman is the person many claimed, including the woman who was Castaneda's wife, to be the real nagual sorcerer don Juan Matus or at least the person whose life informed Castaneda's writings. This was not in fact true, but nevertheless a testament to the substantial individual they meant to credit. That shaman was don Eduardo Calderon of Trujillo, Peru, a famous and formidable personage among the ranks of shamans' known throughout the world as The Wizard of The Four Winds.

      I worked closely with don Eduardo on a committed basis to learn his shaman knowledge. I also worked closely with other shamans as well and I will write extensively about those experiences and my association with Carlos Castaneda in my second book. At the time I was a licensed therapist in California while I made many trips to Peru to work with don Eduardo specifically to learn this shaman’s system of practices for acquiring healing, inner guidance and personal direction. It was during this time with great passion that I taught "A Course in Miracles" classes of my own design and created programs based on the practices of don Eduardo’s shamanism, the teachings of the Course, and applied both thought systems to my life and choices. On a number of occasions I arranged for don Eduardo and other shamans to visit California to give presentations in my mind/spiritual learning programs.

The reason for prizing these mind/spiritual-learning systems to inform the other is the uncompromising eternal vision I found in both. Both pursue an uncompromising eternal goal and in so doing offers the clearest mirror for the other’s deepest meaning. At least that has been my experience.

From A Course In Miracles

Swear not to die, you holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot be killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that must be one. What seems eternal all will have an end. The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that change with time and bloom and fade will not return. Where time has set an end is not where the eternal is. God’s Son can never change by what men made of him. He will be not as he was and as he is, for time appointed not his destiny, nor set the hour of his birth and death.

From The Fire Within by Carlos Castaneda

“Would you say, don Juan, that death is the only real enemy we have?” I asked him a moment later.

“No,” he said with conviction. “Death is not an enemy, although it appears to be. Death is not the destroyer, although we think it is.”

“What is it, then, if not our destroyer?” I asked.

“Sorcerers say death is the only worthy opponent we have,” he replied. Death is our challenger. We are born to take that challenge, average men or sorcerers. Sorcerers know about it; average men do not.”

      Interestingly the shaman don Eduardo enjoyed my reading quotes from the Course and we would discuss his agreement or different point of view. Even more curious is a few years later I would discuss the very same material with Castaneda. Over the course of fifteen years, however, I discovered that shamanism, "A Course in Miracles" and the therapy/counseling fields largely ignored the practices, objectives and results of each other's disciplines.

      It was during this period that I met and collaborated with Castaneda. Carlos came to visit me on four occasions in the early 90's before he launched his tensegrity programs. In his own words Carlos came “to talk shop” and this we did. Castaneda was the greatest talker-dream-weaver and writer of all of us but as a hands-on shaman he never demonstrated the practices he reported to the world. Many would say and I believe rightly so, that Carlos demonstrated his shaman lineage by the effect he produced on a generation and beyond? Some of Carlos’ writing towers among the elite literary and spiritual genius of modern literature. Call that his shamanism or an extraordinary literary achievement Castaneda has his place among these maestros par excellence and I will relate those experiences in my second book. First must come a clear presentation of shaman don Eduardo Calderon, and most especially, what it actually looked and felt like in the worldview of an apprentice undergoing his initiations?

      High Holy Adventure closes with a long chapter that addresses some of the deepest spiritual questions we individually face as a sentient being, by capturing vignettes from visits to the most famous and powerful full trance Spiritualist Medium healer in the world, Joao de Deus (“John of God”) of Brazil. Now here is a being that shows you who he is with irrefutable actions before he ever talks about anything. By "full trance," normally called incorporation, is meant the medium, a normal person, willingly and intentionally vacates his entire consciousness and allows another entirely separate and distinct "entity" to take over and use his body and speech. Unlike "B" movies that portray spiritualist mediums as fakes with a crystal-ball and dressed like a gypsy, for forty years this humble man has treated free of charge all who come to his house of God and he has cured countless thousands by the touch of his hand. Most, who uphold or disclaim the reality of Joao's incorporation, focus on his healings while my own investigations focused on who performed them.

      The signatory Spirit or “Entity” in charge of Joao de Deus when he is fully incorporated is a well-known historical figure of considerable spiritual and religious importance to hundreds of millions. This very being whom Joao incorporates will indeed manifest through the medium’s body and provide demonstrations in holiness and healing, and occasionally daily advice! What does that say about our inherent identity, how we exist and who we are in truth, if one can personally speak through the borrowed body of another to someone considered long dead? And most especially when these entities give ample demonstration of the truth of their existence with astonishing demonstrations that cannot be denied?

      For several years during travels to Brazil, I personally witnessed dozens, possibly hundreds of physical on-the-flesh healing and cutting surgeries for numerous types of maladies, performed without much blood or pain or anesthesia. Primarily working solely through the invisible medium of prayer, Joao has healed people of virtually every known ailment. Not only have I personally witnessed the incorporated entity working through medium Joao to affect all of these types of healing, I have myself received them and I write in detail about some of these experiences.

      My paramount purpose throughout thirty years of travels and investigations with shamans and mediums has been to confirm the truth of our existence and to identify and verify means to accomplish that aim. Religions sometimes point at that truth and then for the most part ignore it. Many spiritual systems not only point at it but offer some steps, realizing-it is possible and therefore necessary to arrive at a direct and personally experienced confirmation about our own inherent identity-a confirmation about who and what we are in infinity without requiring a belief system to filter what needs none.

      Since that day lecturing on Carlos’ first book it has been my path with heart to investigate spiritual systems that claim to produce with certainty and undeniable experience an intact recognition of what is before birth and after the grave and still a recognizable self. My tales are my first hand narratives about what I discovered.
      
      Why is such a personal experience of the infinite important to realize and understand? What are the consequences for acquiring and holding such experiences? High Holy Adventure offers one perspective by never urging the reader toward any belief system; instead it offers a rare glimpse through wondrous tales about how shamans, spirits and mediums answer the question of our existence.