VISION TEACHINGS WITH SHANTU YA
by Gill Schwartz

My Medicine Guide, Shantu Ya' (Crazy Owl), began appearing to me some years ago as my work with the Medicine Wheel began to deepen. He appeared in my mind's eye in a very clear and detailed form. I saw him as a short, wizened old man with long grey hair hanging loose wearing an old set of Native American ceremonial clothes, bucksking leggings, a woven sarape-like cape and a beaded headband. He looked like an Asiatic Siberian and over the years I've come to associate him with the Northwest Coast tribes, perhaps Kuakiutal.

I feel he's very concerned with my spiritual well being. He usually appears when I call on him through ceremony. His name means Crazy Owl. Usually he is taciturn. But, true to his name, his dealings with me often shock, disturb, even hurt me. He justifies such approaches because he says I have such a stubborn refusal to live out what I already know.
He described himself to me with this poem:

CRAZY OWL

Born with a sliver of new-moon in his beak,
Torn between two worlds
-this one that seems and the one that Is.
Mad bird hangs onto both, entranced by his agony,
lust and illumination blaze with each breath.

Mad man of my soul sings out betwen moans,
"My joy is in the shimmering.
Not the one nor the other
but the in between realm
where neither and both are.
The Shimmering..."

Crazy Owl bathes in the dust,
spins his head round front to back,
strikes in the dead of night, silently,
eyes fixed in cold frenzy.

Crazy Owl is a turn-around man,
star man, ape and angel merged.

It was a time of great turmoil and confusion in my life. Things I'd taken for granted as working and in place were coming apart. What had been easy and nurturing became difficult, bewildering.

Finally, after doing a simple ceremony using fire and sage, I prayerfully called on him to help me understand what was happening with my life, to share his perspective with me so I wouldn't feel so tormented by the circumstances I was in.

I soon felt his presence with a sence of relief, but when he appeared to me he was all in flame. It wasn't that he was burning, his very substance was flame that astonished and frighened me. As he approached, his manner felt sinister, unpredictable. When he drew near, I saw he had a flame thrower in his hand. He took aim and doused me with it from head to toe.

I was so bewildered, I couldn't believe what he was doing or get out of his reach. I screamed at him,"What are you doing to me? I call on you for help and you come and do this to me."

"Don't worry, don't worry," he answered me with sarcastic humor. "This is what your life is doing for you now. Just understand, everything that burns is not you!"

I sat with this teaching for some years, often repeating to myself as life continued to smelt me, "Everything that burns is not you." Again and again, I understood how right his brutal teaching was. Again and again I saw how the views and attitudes I fabricated as defences served only to diminish me. At that, all I could do is give up those pretneds and let the fake me burn to ashes, or make up another pretend to cover and shield me. I strove, rather than getting stuck on the hurts and dissapointments, to listen to what they had to tell me, to teach me about my willfull delusions and distortions of my authentic self. I held a prayerful intention to keep out of the way, to surrender to the natural movement of my life rather than clingings to imagined models of how things should be, to distorted memories of memories.
He continued to join me in the spiritual work I did, often carrying out the inner aspects while I attended to the outer. I remember one time when I was trying to work out some logistic s with a healing ceremony. He appeared when called on, but remained completely engrossed in some work he was doing with crystals and stones relevant to the healing rather than attending to my request.

Finally, not knowing for sure what brought it about, my ongoing inner work, or simply a natural shift through the passage of time, my life circumstances semed to fit me better. I was pleased but weary with the years of effort, and once again called on Shantu Ya' with personal needs. This time I felt sure I wasn't lacking and that he would recognize it and reward me some way.

After the calling ceremony, he appeared to me in his usual form He appraoched me and bowed, not his usual greeting.

"I've come at your bidding," he announced with some sarcasm in his tone. "I'm come to see that you are rewarded, as you wish. I'm come to take you to the River of Life."
I recalled a drawing I'd seen by William Blake by that name. It was a wide, clear stream with cherebim, beautiful humans and swans floating in waters flowing up from the deepest, pure source.

Shantu Ya' picked me up with ease and carried me towards a river I could see across the gently rolling meadow. It looked clear and fast flowing, but empty of angels and swans.
"Here, we are. The River of Life," he assured me, and flung me high in the air towards it.
As I slowly floated through the air, I had the wonderful anticipation of feeling the waters' soothing, renewing touch. But as soon as I broke through it's surface and down into it's depth, my skin began to burn terribly. I watched it decompose, as if by acid, shredding off my body. And I was helpless, swept away, held in it's depths by a strong current. My body was being dissolved down to the bone by the River's corrosive liquid.

"What have you done to me?" I screamed out to him, quickly distancing from the place where he stood on the bank. "Is this my reward for striving to follow your teachings?"
He spread his arms wide, as if in benediction. "The flame was to purge, the waters to purify you," he smugly intoned as he dissolved from my sight.

He gave me another such fiercely transforming teaching a few years later. I was staying in the primitive cabin in the woods I often use, preoccupied with preparing myself to do some work for a group I wanted to impress. Shantu Ya' had been working with me to lay the groundwork for the ceremonial part of it, but got more and more impatient with my personal worries and fears.

"You're as good as dead," he sneered at me with a grimace of disdain at my pleading for his guidance with these matters. "Dead. So none of that can matter to you. Stop pretending at being who you are not, limited rather than divine. Allow your Call and your life to harmonize. Don't particularize, worrying about this and that. Leave everything as it is. Connected and whole."

"I know I choose and separate. I split everything apart with my likes and dislikes", I confessed to him. "I see that I split the comforting wholeness of things. I pull apart what is with my intentions, by my desires and aversions. Wholeness is destroyed. And that's the only thing that lets me feel safe and taken care of. But how can I escape this fragmenting mind of mine?"

"Recognize that the Suchness that you know so well as your true Self. 'Tat Tvam Asti', you were taught for years in India. You are That. Then you will have boundless mercy and forgiveness for all the rest of yourself.

"You know," he confirms what I already know, "you aren't who you pretend to be. That's only the vessel that holds the Presence. Be courageous. Fill your life with It!" he counseled me with a kind, affirming smile.

Copyright Nathaniel Schwartz 2003