In the comments, Cal Roeker talked about our "worst fears," getting exactly to the point of the Kushtaka from Dennis Waller's book, In Search of the Kutashka - for that, in the end, are what the Kutashka are all about. Fear. Spirits who get inside our heads and bring out the very worst from our depths. It should not be surprising to learn that so many movies we see, from "The Excorcist" to "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," are about our greatest fears, of evil protruding into our lives and even our thoughts. That this idea is featured in myths from around the world show us that this is not only NOT something new, but something timeless. In the past, what brought these fears to the open were called spirits; now, they are called complexes or a variety of mental disease, but whatever we call them, they are there and now and then, something, some power, exploits them.
I say "some power" because who is it that brings our fears to our minds? It has often occurred to me that most of us could easily walk on tiny ledges, or on the edge of tall buildings, were it not for our fears. We do such 'daring' things all the time, often as a game; but put that same ridge that we balance on along a parking lot way up high and we tremble, scream and fall. These fears, fear itself, kill us, and yet they are apparently self-generated. It makes no sense. No wonder they were thought to come from alien spirits.
Waller presents us with another very good real-life story exhibiting this kind of fear. It is of a woman who went on a boating excursion with her husband and some friends in the Alaska panhandle waterway. She explains first that as a child, her older brothers made her terrified of large groups of birds while watching Hitchcock's "The Birds," so much so that she had to go inside the house whenever a flock appeared until high school. She thought that was all over until, on her expedition, she took a walk along a path on a deserted bay. She was in the lead along with a friend, when suddenly she noticed that there was no sound anywhere, and no insects of any kind. Then she heard the cry of a bird. Then many. Soon, to her absolute terror, there was a flock about her so thick that they blocked out the sun. They descended on her and tore her to ribbons, until she left her body, allowing her to see that nothing was left of her except tattered pieces of clothing. Then a bird-man presented himself to her, telling her, "there is no hope for you, nothing will save you. Your only recourse is to come and follow me." At this, she got so angry that she cursed everything, including an apparition of her dead father, who was trying to calm her. With her anger as a shield, eventually the bird-man went away, and there she found herself on the ground, all in one piece, except for several scratches on her arms. She thought that she had been gone for hours, but her friend came from behind on the trail and asked if she had fallen. Only seconds had passed, except on her watch and the timer on her camera, which had accidentally been touched - showing that, in some other world, four hours had passed. She later insisted that she and her husband leave Alaska and never return. Some time later, she found that her little walk had taken place on the legendary Bay of Death, feared and avoided by the Tlingit for the presence of the land otter people, aka, the Kushtaka.
There are fears that are brought to mind, as if by spirits, and then fears that progress in such a fashion that one cannot believe that they are not advanced by the spirits, as in the case of the woman above. We are then brought into an alien space that somehow exists within us - although such an idea of location is not really exact, for we do not really know where such power comes from. In his comment, Call Roeker hopes to encounter aliens or bigfoot or something of the sort. It seems to me that the possibility lies within us all, but most are not happy when the weird - especially our fears - take real shape. Here, our world view is questioned; here, we find that what we take for granted is only a mirage (as the land otters tell us in one Tlingit myth, we humans live in the "dream world," while theirs is the real); here, we lose our footing, as a man often does on a mountain trail when overcome with fears.
We are told again and again by shamans and mystics that this losing of our world is no joke - that it is the ultimate in terror. It might even be that our worst fears are materialized only as a representation of our fear of losing touch with our flimsy reality. My own worse fear is a case in point:
When I was very young - I can't remember when, but it was before kindergarten - I walked into our house from outside and found the living room filled with large balloons. But they were very strange balloons, configured in a variety of three-d geometric shapes, such as triangles, cubes, rhomboids and what have you. I was absolutely terrified. I felt that I was losing my mind, not even knowing what that was. It was as if an evil had descended upon me, and I not only cried then, but was revisited by them for weeks to come in waking "hypnogoguic" (sorry - spelling) dreams. I am still terrified of this - obviously not for the shapes ( I came to love geometry almost to an obsession later in high school), but for that feeling of losing my mind. And that, I feel, is at the bottom of our worst fears - the loss of that which holds the bottom in our little boat of reality on the great sea.
The Tlingit say as much - that one must be mentally strong, or one is killed - which might be the same as losing one's mind; but if one survives, their life is changed forever.
In the case of the woman above, she was confronted some short time later before they left Alaska by an old Tlingit woman at a diner. "They have visited you, haven't they?" She told the terrified woman. Later, the old woman said, "most cannot handle their visit. But for those who do, it means something important. It will come to you some time in your life."
We know that for the Tlingit, such a manifestation meant that the person was to become a shaman - to come to know the "other lands" beyond our human ones. We might want to go there, like Cal, but we are warned - it is a terrifying road, where one walks on the ledge. It is a path where one must learn to control his ultimate fear. It is, as Castaneda's Don Juan might say, a path of power, but one also of danger. I am not sure anymore, as I was as a teenager, that I would chose it, but according to legends around the world, often it chooses you.
Be careful what you wish for, Cal! FK
I say "some power" because who is it that brings our fears to our minds? It has often occurred to me that most of us could easily walk on tiny ledges, or on the edge of tall buildings, were it not for our fears. We do such 'daring' things all the time, often as a game; but put that same ridge that we balance on along a parking lot way up high and we tremble, scream and fall. These fears, fear itself, kill us, and yet they are apparently self-generated. It makes no sense. No wonder they were thought to come from alien spirits.
Waller presents us with another very good real-life story exhibiting this kind of fear. It is of a woman who went on a boating excursion with her husband and some friends in the Alaska panhandle waterway. She explains first that as a child, her older brothers made her terrified of large groups of birds while watching Hitchcock's "The Birds," so much so that she had to go inside the house whenever a flock appeared until high school. She thought that was all over until, on her expedition, she took a walk along a path on a deserted bay. She was in the lead along with a friend, when suddenly she noticed that there was no sound anywhere, and no insects of any kind. Then she heard the cry of a bird. Then many. Soon, to her absolute terror, there was a flock about her so thick that they blocked out the sun. They descended on her and tore her to ribbons, until she left her body, allowing her to see that nothing was left of her except tattered pieces of clothing. Then a bird-man presented himself to her, telling her, "there is no hope for you, nothing will save you. Your only recourse is to come and follow me." At this, she got so angry that she cursed everything, including an apparition of her dead father, who was trying to calm her. With her anger as a shield, eventually the bird-man went away, and there she found herself on the ground, all in one piece, except for several scratches on her arms. She thought that she had been gone for hours, but her friend came from behind on the trail and asked if she had fallen. Only seconds had passed, except on her watch and the timer on her camera, which had accidentally been touched - showing that, in some other world, four hours had passed. She later insisted that she and her husband leave Alaska and never return. Some time later, she found that her little walk had taken place on the legendary Bay of Death, feared and avoided by the Tlingit for the presence of the land otter people, aka, the Kushtaka.
There are fears that are brought to mind, as if by spirits, and then fears that progress in such a fashion that one cannot believe that they are not advanced by the spirits, as in the case of the woman above. We are then brought into an alien space that somehow exists within us - although such an idea of location is not really exact, for we do not really know where such power comes from. In his comment, Call Roeker hopes to encounter aliens or bigfoot or something of the sort. It seems to me that the possibility lies within us all, but most are not happy when the weird - especially our fears - take real shape. Here, our world view is questioned; here, we find that what we take for granted is only a mirage (as the land otters tell us in one Tlingit myth, we humans live in the "dream world," while theirs is the real); here, we lose our footing, as a man often does on a mountain trail when overcome with fears.
We are told again and again by shamans and mystics that this losing of our world is no joke - that it is the ultimate in terror. It might even be that our worst fears are materialized only as a representation of our fear of losing touch with our flimsy reality. My own worse fear is a case in point:
When I was very young - I can't remember when, but it was before kindergarten - I walked into our house from outside and found the living room filled with large balloons. But they were very strange balloons, configured in a variety of three-d geometric shapes, such as triangles, cubes, rhomboids and what have you. I was absolutely terrified. I felt that I was losing my mind, not even knowing what that was. It was as if an evil had descended upon me, and I not only cried then, but was revisited by them for weeks to come in waking "hypnogoguic" (sorry - spelling) dreams. I am still terrified of this - obviously not for the shapes ( I came to love geometry almost to an obsession later in high school), but for that feeling of losing my mind. And that, I feel, is at the bottom of our worst fears - the loss of that which holds the bottom in our little boat of reality on the great sea.
The Tlingit say as much - that one must be mentally strong, or one is killed - which might be the same as losing one's mind; but if one survives, their life is changed forever.
In the case of the woman above, she was confronted some short time later before they left Alaska by an old Tlingit woman at a diner. "They have visited you, haven't they?" She told the terrified woman. Later, the old woman said, "most cannot handle their visit. But for those who do, it means something important. It will come to you some time in your life."
We know that for the Tlingit, such a manifestation meant that the person was to become a shaman - to come to know the "other lands" beyond our human ones. We might want to go there, like Cal, but we are warned - it is a terrifying road, where one walks on the ledge. It is a path where one must learn to control his ultimate fear. It is, as Castaneda's Don Juan might say, a path of power, but one also of danger. I am not sure anymore, as I was as a teenager, that I would chose it, but according to legends around the world, often it chooses you.
Be careful what you wish for, Cal! FK
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