***Mystical Development: Illness Accompanies It

The making of American Indian shamans includes illness, sometimes serious illness: It is a common thread in their biographies, and also in the biographies of well-known mystic saints. You don't have to be a shaman or a saint for sickness to be part of your spiritual training; it is a phase in the development of ordinary mortals who are getting onto the path.

One can speculate that the illness really comes first and puts a person in a different frame of mind, such as when one has fevers for months on end, that it is simply therefore part of the destiny.

One can speculate that focusing the body's consciousness 'out there' strains the system and produces symptoms until adjustment happens.

One can even speculate that illnesses in general predispose a person to spiritual consciousness, or even that the reorganization that takes place in the brain when one begins intense spirituality indirectly produces maladies.

Research on this speculation is unlikely. The individuals in the biographies are not sickly people to begin with; most of them go through a phase of malaise and pass out of it eventually.

Plan for life disruptions of various sorts as you turn off the main highway of mass consciousness to go onto the Spiritual Path Expressway. You will be becoming someone else while taking care of your usual business; that is enough to deal with. But plan also for the eventuality of forced downtime as you go through all the rest of it.

After the baby is born, you forget the pain.