Portals, What Are They?

Windows, doors, gates, entrances. Openings to something. Openings to other worlds. Worlds of information, worlds of animals, worlds of plants, worlds of science, medicine, art, music, sports, drama.

We choose to enter portals all the time whether they're in the material world or the virtual world. Every time we swim in the ocean, every time we walk into a new building, every time we learn how to do something, we're entering a portal in the material world. Every book is a portal. Whenever we open one, we're entering a portal into a virtual world, whether it's fiction or nonfiction

Portals are real in the sense that they are entrances to other worlds. But are the worlds beyond the portals real? How can we tell? In the realm of books, nonfiction purports to be about material world truths, facts. We still choose to believe it or not based on our experience in the material world. It gets a little dicey when we read about physics, black holes, and the Bermuda Triangle. There's a lot we don't know, and nobody knows.

What happens when we read fiction and we find ourselves weeping, laughing, terrified, elated, hopeful, or desolate? Is this experience real? Where does the experince that evoked our emotions take place? We might say we're employing Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" when we open the book. Does that change anything?

In shamanism the practitioner travels through portals, that open to the spirit worlds. The practitioner learns the ancient methods of "journeying" to the worlds of the spirits for help: information and healing. The shaman brings the information back to the world she/he lives in, the Middle World, and assists in being a bridge for the spirits to come and heal people. Shamans have done healing and divination work for tens of thousands of years. Do we believe this? It doesn't matter because the healing is the evidence.

So what about these worlds of spirits?

There are so many accounts of people having near death experiences who describe finding themselves "on the other side," the place where souls or spirits go when the physical body is dropped at death. It seems the person's spirit or soul has temporarily crossed over into the world of the spirits. Spirits of people who have died. Perhaps there would be vastly divergent accounts of these experiences if they were what we call someone's "imagination." But, the accounts are strikingly similar. That suggests that a spirit world may exist.

This is the same phenomenon exists in accounts of shamans' journeys to the spirit worlds. Shamans all over the world recount strikingly similar experiences. In his book, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy, Mircea Eliade, scholar of history of religion, describes the practice of shamanism over two and a half millenia all over the world. These shamans could not have known what other shamans were doing on the other side of the world.

In the first post I said anyone can access portals to other worlds. Spirit worlds.

In Louise Erdrich's novel, The Birchbark House, the protagonist, Omakayas, a young Ojibwa girl, encountering bear cubs, addresses them as "little brothers." She plays with them until suddenly she is flipped on her back and pinned by the mother bear who is breathing "on her a stale breath of decayed old deer-hides and skunk cabbages and dead mushrooms." The girl knew not to move, but when she closed her scissors, she cut a piece of the sow's fur by mistake. She calls the bear, "Nokomis," grandmother. She apologises and continues to explain why she is playing with the cubs as the mother sniffs her. There is a long passage about their communication. Omakayas has another bear encounter and talk which when her grandmother hears about it, she knows Omakayas is a healer.

In this instance the portal was opened by Omakayas addressing, acknowledging, and talking with the bears. She talks with other animals, their spirits, and receives information from them. It's interesting in her speech she acknowledges the animals and herself as part of the same family.

We can access the spirit worlds by acknowledging them. Accessing the portals. Do I mean talking to animals and plants? Yes. But talking is only a part of the process. We must listen. We must learn to listen. We can talk with spirts of people, animals, and plants that are living, and that have died. This act of acknowledgement opens the way.

Contacting the spirit world is available to everyone. One of the main entrances is through images of the divine.

c Alesia Kunz