Just glad that it is over. Alarm is still working and haven’t had any problems. It triggers properly when I goof and open the wrong door while armed.

I think though that my Cameras I had installed (custom job) have really helped. No robberies in my neighborhood since. Even the UPS guy tells me I’m the only house he cant throw a package at because of my cameras

I love being able to see my house from anywhere, even my phone.

I would be a poor man had I set that up through ADT though!

The really scary thing about the FBI raid is that the Gov can pretty much go after any site they want right now, without SOPA.  Good lord I keep expecting to see V on TV, what next…

He warned me to be careful when studying Shamanism and looking for that spiritual experience because there “Might be a guy with a shotgun behind a door somewhere out there waiting for you”. I took his advice! I do not feel it is necessary to go through a traumatic physical experience in order to achieve spiritual sensitivity, nor do I seek it. I prefer to explore the route of the mind. There are many traditions that prove that there are many paths to the same, or similar states. This was one of the reasons I became so interested in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Devotion(Bhakti), Service(Dharma), and Knowledge(Jnana) are all Valid paths toward perfection/enlightenment/liberation.

I do not really recommend looking for a traumatic experience to become a Geilt in the true sense of the word to anyone, but for anyone who has had a traumatic experience I urge them to see the geiltadecht, as you have termed it, that can be practiced and harnessed to increase one’s spiritual awareness instead of leaving the, albeit unfortunate, opportunity, remain completely negative in ones life.

The book sounds like an interesting one, though it’s possible that Conway and Siegelman’s “Snapping” covers much of the same territory. http://books.google.com/books/about/Snapping.html?id=jrkq7s2i12EC

I think that such experiences can result in both positive and negative changes in a person, but I would never recommend trauma as a way to spiritual enlightenment. There’s far too much risk of never coming out of it. As I’ve said to people before, being a professional madwoman is interesting, but I can’t recommend the training program.

Traditionally, the training of the filid, the poets in Gaelic culture, was said to result in one of three things — poetry, madness, or death. Madness, geilt, seems to be one of the results of an only partially-successful assay into the field.

Geilt was actually harder since it is also a topic. Only recently did I hit the top.

There is a book called Battle for the Mind, by William Sargant that correlates religious conversion experiences to the effects of PTSD. It goes in depth about how trauma can change perception and behavior.  And how normally, a true religious convert participates in their religion every day hoping, but not often finding, the same sense they had when they had converted. Enduring the drudgery of everyday religious rite for a glimpse at that initial experience.On the flip side, there is an interesting study in that book that discusses the project of Pavlov’s dogs which salivate when they hear a bell ring due to conditioning. The little known story is that Pavlov’s lab had flooded at one point, causing great Trauma to the dogs. Those dogs no longer salivated when they heard a bell ring, it is as if their conditioning had been erased, or at least the fear and trauma from the environment they were in caused them to focus on that more than the ringing. 

In this way, a traumatic event could “shock” a person out of their own social, spiritual or religious conditioning and open them up to possibilities, however frighting, that they had no considered or repressed / ignored. With this opening there is the opportunity for power and wisdom or weakness and despair, I would assume this is mostly decided by the individual and the rest of their life’s conditioning. 

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

I do think that geilt can be seen metaphorically, though in its cultural origins the phenomenon was definitely indicating some form of mental disturbance or mental illness. Some scholars read this as a shamanic illness of sorts, seeing the flight of the geilt as “shamanic flight” and there are certainly otherworldly resonances to what’s happening in pretty much all of the tales where the geilta make an appearance.
Merlin was definitely regarded as mad in the source materials, though:

Basil Clarke’s translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “The Life of Merlin: Vita Merlini” offers this:

“Merlin called his
companions from the battle-field and instructed them to bury the brothers in a
richly-decorated chapel.

He mourned for his
heroes; his flooding tears had no end. He threw dust upon his hair, tore his
clothes and lay prostrate on the ground, rolling to and fro. Peredur and the
other princes and commanders offered comfort. He would not take the comfort and
rejected their entreaties. So for three long days he wept, refusing food, so
great was the grief that consumed him.

Then, when the air
was filled with these repeated loud complainings, a strange madness came upon
him.

He crept away and
fled to the woods, unwilling that any should see his going. Into the forest he
went, glad to lie hidden beneath the ash trees. He watched the wild creatures
grazing on the pastures of the glades. Sometimes he would follow them,
sometimes pass them on his course. He made use of the roots of plants and of
grasses, of fruit from the trees and of the blackberries in the thicket. He
became a Man of the Woods, as if dedicated to the woods. So for a whole summer
he stayed hidden in the woods, discovered by none, forgetful of himself and his
own, lurking like a wild thing.”

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Basil
Clarke (ed./trans.), The Life of Merlin:
Vita Merlini, University of Wales (Cardiff 1973)    There’s a great deal more to the tradition than just Merlin and Suibhne, though. I’m planning on exploring the material and some of its modern implications in further writing. I hope to do a book on the topic at some point, particularly in regards to the links between geilt and PTSD, and the spiritual possibilities it opens for people who are working on recovering from trauma.