Prince Charles and the Royal Family

Ten days later after our first visit with the shaman, Chris returned for a checkup. Although this second visit wasn’t strictly necessary, I was beginning to appreciate the journey as a way of preparing for the outcome. As expected, Chris’s assemblage point was whole and had remained where the shaman had repositioned it. Nonetheless, Chris got a top-up of diamond and carnelian on his chest only.

I decided that I would like to have my assemblage point put back into shape the old-fashioned way, using the shaman’s blow and crystal wands. Given my age and the strain I had been under, my assemblage point had predictably traveled up the panic and anxiety line to the right side of my chest. The shaman’s assistant asked me to stand with my back to him, tighten my sphincter, and hold my breath. Then he quickly thumped my right shoulder blade. I was caught off guard. Air was forced reflexively out of my lungs and I emitted a little squeak. So that was the famous shaman’s blow! I then hopped onto the table where I was handed a giant quartz crystal wand that I struggled to keep upright over my assemblage point while the transducer pumped emerald crystal vibrations through my wine soaked liver. I stayed in that ludicrous position for twenty minutes.

A couple of days before, Prince Charles had delivered a keynote address at the World Health Organization about his belief that national health systems should take more account of alternative treatments such as homeopathy and acupuncture. I remarked on this to the shaman, who confided that established Harley Street doctors in London were quite concerned these days because members of the Royal Family were now largely seeing homeopathic doctors and other alternative medical practitioners.

I mentally began adding up the alternative treatments Chris had undergone: colonics; acupuncture; vitamins and supplements; energy medicine, including the magnetic mattress and a magnetic bracelet; Emotional Freedom Technique; and assemblage point shift. On a scale of 1 to 10, if Chris was a 10 when he was first hospitalized, then I would have to say he was now about a 5, a 4 at the most. He just was not visibly normal, meaning that he seemed somewhat nervous, was not comfortable around people in large or small groups and was not able to motivate himself. I attributed a lot of this to the effects of the medications, which I believed kept him in an anxious state, but I didn’t attribute all of it to the medications.

I felt that we were on the right track with all the interventions we had done up until that point, but that there was still a missing X factor that had not been addressed. The good that the vitamins had accomplished this far were undermined by the still heavy doses of meds. I believed that the benefits of the assemblage point shift would reveal themselves over the next few months and hopefully lead to a complete cure. We weren’t there yet. I still had not tried to approach Level 4 of the healing pyramid in a formal way.

As the shaman predicted, Chris gradually began to express his thoughts and convictions more. It was subtle, but it became increasingly apparent in the next few months. He more frequently expressed his preferences and sometimes lingered to talk a bit more. What surprised me is that I also felt that I was becoming more real. I became even more direct and focused.

A parallel universe, even in the suburbs

The shaman and I continued to chat while Chris underwent his treatment. I learned all kinds of interesting things. Many of her clients and course trainees live in and around Amsterdam, where there is a high number of young people who have misaligned assemblage points due to drug use.

She has treated a number of epilepsy patients and cited one patient, a male in his late fifties, who had been an epileptic most of his life. He had many seizures during a typical day and, each time, his assemblage point would be jerked out of its central position and drop into the stomach area. He needed many treatments to his assemblage point before it gradually settled. With no change to his medication, he has been free from seizures for two years and was able to drive again.

We chatted further about the healing properties of stones and then Chris’s treatment was finished and it was time to go. “What changes can we expect in the next few weeks?” I asked.

“You may begin to notice that Chris becomes more emotionally expressive,” she suggested. “You may begin to notice that he walks taller and has a better complexion.”

Her last remark was immediately prophetic. As Chris walked along the garden path back to the car, he walked in a way I hadn’t seem him do for years. Taller and with confidence. His face, which was always rather pale and yet much improved with the niacinamide, began to flood with color. I was amazed.

Back at home, I got to thinking about assemblage points splitting around the age of ten. I recalled a recent spooky experience of finding Chris alone and hallucinating in our darkened apartment and I began to reflect on an incident that happened to Chris in the park ten years earlier, when he was eleven. I was at home on a Saturday morning when Chris came running in from the park, clearly panicked. He hardly ever ran, so this itself was unusual. He locked all the doors on the ground floor of the house and pulled all the shades shut. He kept peering out, as if someone was coming to get him. I asked him what was the matter and he replied “some bullies are after me.” I chalked it up at the time to just one of those things that happens to children his age, and let it go at that.

Now, something about Chris being in a darkened apartment and looking spooked, prompted me to ask him about the park incident all those years ago.

Signs of schizophrenia back then? I hadn’t recognized them. Was it significant that it might have started that long ago? Now when I questioned Chris about what had happened in the park with the “bullies” all those years ago, he finally leveled with me.

“Mom, I don’t want to say much about it except that I saw a spaceship land in the park and I saw extraterrestrials get out and they were chasing me!”

The prophet Ezekiel had a similar experience to what we could refer to as an extraterrestrial encounter. He described it instead as “the word of the Lord” coming directly into him. He saw a whirlwind and fire, and four creatures with wings and a wheeled vehicle thundering down from the sky. “The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel . . . This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.”

I could worry about Chris’s revelation, or I could deconstruct my fear, as was beginning to become a habit with me. Did it mean he was sicker than I imagined since this had been going on so long? So he had signs of schizophrenia when he was eleven. It would be odd to think that schizophrenia just pops up all of a sudden at seventeen or eighteen. Did it mean he couldn’t get well? I doubted it. Maybe a more reassuring explanation is that he had experienced God.

Quantum physicists have another explanation, one which I believe is complementary to the knowledge of the existence of God. They believe that extraterrestrial experiences are hallucinations, or altered states of awareness that are “parallel universes” to our everyday reality. Parallel universes are almost identical to our own but weirdly different in some way, like the comic book planet of Bizarro World. Science fiction writers have relied on this quirky theme for years. Peter K. Chadwick, in a paper delivered to the Scientific and Medical Network, stated that schizophrenia might be understood if you considered that “genuine spiritual and paranormal forces operate on the person at least during and perhaps before and after their schizophrenic illness and that the realization and acceptance of this should form an important part of the treatment and rehabilitation process for such patients.” What many people call “paranormal,” a quantum physicist might say is simply the limits of the current knowledge of the universe.

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Peter K. Chadwick, “Is there an ‘X Factor’ in Schizophrenic Illness?” http://www.scimednet.org/Articles/MHchadwick.htm

The magic age of ten

For Chris’s treatment, a transducer using both diamond and carnelian was placed at the front and back central positions directly in contact with his clothing. The electronic gem transducers in the lamp pulse vibrational energy through the gemstones, each of which have a unique vibration. The energies create a vortex that draws the split assemblage points back into position. Diamond is the strongest of the gems in energy terms and carnelian balances it by being a very soothing gem. Chris’s spleen was also energized at the same time with a diamond and carnelian transducer. People, especially those with a low position back or front, benefit from having the spleen energized, thus raising their energy levels. A depressed patient, for example, would be able to get out and about more.

As Chris settled in for his twenty-minute treatment, I pursued the theory behind the assemblage point. The shaman explained that the assemblage point is with us at birth, in a very low position centered around the navel, and travels up the chakra line as we develop, stabilizing in more or less the correct position slightly right of center at the level of the heart chakra at around the age of six. Children with seriously misaligned assemblage points find it difficult to interact with others. Childhood events can determine the location in which the assemblage point eventually settles.

Around the age of ten, the shaman continued, some assemblage points begin to split. The child may develop an interest in mysticism or begin to experience subtle changes that a trauma or shock in the teen years or thereabouts will tip into what we know as schizophrenia. It was at that moment that I understood why psychiatrists had asked me from time to time what Chris was like at the age of ten. When I told them about Magic cards, they didn’t seem at all interested. This leads me to conclude that there must be something else about the age of ten that interests them.

Chris’s intense interest in Magic cards began at the age of ten. Magic: The Gathering is an extraordinarily complex game played on many levels, with its own game terminology. Choosing a personally designed deck, players or “wizards” cast spells on their opponents through a variety of means. Each player starts with twenty life points and the object of the game is to reduce your opponent’s life points to zero.

Some people consider card games like this evil or satanic and feel that the game itself exerts a negative influence that provokes mental illness. I don’t feel that way. I considered this a fantasy game, reflective of the intense creative urge of the individual. I saw it at the time as a passing phase that Chris would eventually outgrow. We nurture children on fairy tales and Santa Claus but expect them to grow out of their fantasies. Children quickly outgrow their belief in Santa Claus and fairy tales. Chris, however, did not outgrow his liking for Magic. As he got older, he supplemented it with books on mythology and science fiction.

I had never considered the card game as a clue to what was later labelled “schizophrenia” in Chris’s case. Chris has often said he feels like he is existing somewhere between living and being dead. The following is a editor’s note from an ancient Syrian translation of “The Descent of Ishtar to the Nether World”. I can’t help but be reminded of the similarity of this ancient text to fantasy card games and computer games.

Ishtar passes through seven gates of the nether world. At each of them the gatekeeper removes an ornament. At the second gate, he takes the pendants on her ears; at the third, the chains round her neck, then he removes, respectively, the ornaments on her breast, the girdle of birthstones on her hips, the clasps round her hands and feet, and the breechcloth on her body. Each time, she asks the same question; each time she receives the same answer.

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Translation by E. A. Speiser, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, 1950), pp. 106-109, reprinted in Isaac Mendelsohn (ed.), Religions of the Ancient Near East, Library of Religion paperbook series (New York, 1955), pp. 119-25; notes by Mendelsohn

A visit to the shaman

The shaman was a pleasant looking middle-aged woman with long black hair and billowing blouse and skirt of gemstone hue. From a chain around her neck hung a huge moonstone pendant. We entered the converted garden shed, which contained an examining table with an electronic gem lamp, a bunch of old blankets, some huge quartz crystal wands calibrated and cut in India, and a tiny desk. She took a medical history, although not much was needed. There was absolutely no risk to this procedure from a medical point of view. Chris signed a medical release form anyway.

Sometimes a patient with a high left assemblage point can be violent, although more commonly, the person is withdrawn and passive, presenting no risk to the examiner. As a precaution, it is recommended that an assistant be in the room. The shaman has found that two people of the opposite sex working together allow the best healing energies to enter the patient. Hence, her male assistant, who was dressed all in black.

She asked Chris to stand up and face her and she gently passed her hand over his chest to determine the positions of his assemblage points. When she came to a certain position, Chris swayed slightly as if caught off balance, indicating she had located the points where energy entered his body, which were equidistant from the center to the high left and high right. These were the typical two split assemblage point locations indicating a position typical of schizophrenia. She found similar points on his back and an additional third location. Inexplicably, she asked Chris if he spoke more than one language (he does) since the additional back position might indicate that he did.

According to our shaman, off center locations either cause certain conditions or are caused by them, so it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation to determine which came first. She often finds them in patients who have experienced trauma earlier in life.

“We can treat you, Chris, in one of several ways, using either quartz crystal wands and a sharp blow to the shoulder blade, or using electronic equipment.” Chris opted for the gem lamp treatment. The shaman nodded with understanding. “You’ve probably been pushed around quite a bit already because of your illness and don’t want somebody like me doing it, too.”