Shapeshifting, Transmutation, and Transfiguration… What are these things?  All of them are spiritual techniques of changing one thing into something else.  Transmutation changes substances, shapeshifting changes living forms.  Transfiguration is a state you can achieve through shapeshifting which allows you to perform transmutation.  The belief that you can do these things at all, comes out of what you believe about the nature of reality.

Everything is made of energy.  This could be a scientific statement, or it could be a mystical one.  If you have a chemical there are balls of energy jumping from one level or another, creating connections with other chemicals which then form the greater structures that make up your body.  A shaman would say, that behind reality there is a web of life, that is a network of invisible linkages that interconnect things and people in inexplicable ways.

When I perform a healing I am working on a level of reality that is a little less solid, and more responsive to changes.  The energy is woven into a fabric that then becomes the matter and shape of reality.   I look to the place where the energy first becomes woven and by making changes there hope to effect the structure and nature of the matter that is created by this weave.

At the lowest level, energy is not differentiated, it has no identity.  At the next “level” structure is given to the energy which gives it an identity.  That structure is the building blocks for larger structures which eventually create matter, or your physical body. It is hard to make changes to the physical world, to matter, because the structure of the energy has become so complicated its hard to effect it.  Once you get to the level of matter, you have to bake it, mix it, machine it to make a change.  But what if you could effect the world at the level where it is first woven?

Once you believe this is possible, that there is a level of reality that can be changed easily because it is not yet fully formed, this opens a world of possibilities.  Mystics and shamans for centuries have believed it is possible to change reality through unseen methods, and even Jesus himself might be said to have agreed:

Seeing a fig tree by the road, he (Jesus) went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered.
When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. “How did the fig tree wither so quickly?” they asked.
“I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.” Mathew 21:19-21:21

In essence Jesus is saying that you can cause a mountain to move if you truly believe you can.  Jesus’s statement bears a remarkable similarity to what shamans say about shapeshifting.  If you talk to a shaman who knows how, he or she will tell you they can change themselves into another animal.  Explaining further, the shaman will say that if you believe you are a hawk, then you will become a hawk.

Defining Belief

The words belief or faith can be a little misleading for what I am explaining, because of how we define those words.  Shapeshifting or changing something is not a situation where, if you believe and wish hard enough, it will happen.  It requires a type of belief that has no doubt in it.  It may be better to call it a knowing.  You have to know that you can change the thing in question.

If you have ever had an instance where you knew something was going to happen, you can understand the difference I’m talking about.  Some runners will talk about how they knew they were going to win a race before even claiming the lead.  I had this instance once when I was late catching a train.  The train pulled up to a platform, and I was about a block away.  There was no real way I should have been able to catch the train, but I looked at it and knew that I would.  Somehow, I ran the distance and up the stairs and caught the train easily.  You have to understand the distinction here, I did not think I could make it, I knew that I could without any doubt.

The ideas behind shapeshifting and transmutation are that if you know you are a hawk then you become a hawk – shapeshifting.  If you know that a toxic substance is water it becomes water – transmutation.  In essence you are what you know yourself to be, and knowing something is different changes that thing.

This comes back to how you understand the nature of reality.  For someone who believes in transmutation or shapeshifting, a given item in reality has an identity.  Hawk is an identity in the level of energy, the energy was given a structure which equals the identity of hawk.  If that energy were given another identity, such as squirrel, the hawk would instantly become a squirrel.

This is really hard for people in our society to even grasp.  We don’t really believe its possible for a physical item to simply change forms.  Even if we can open our minds to the possibility, we certainly would have trouble getting to the point where we could believe it absolutely, with the knowing I talked about earlier.  I think the closest we come to in our society to being able to believe such a thing can be found in the “laws of attraction.”

The law of attraction is, in some ways, a very similar belief system to the ones of shapeshifting.  The key difference here is that, for the law of attraction, we believe we can influence events by what we believe, rather than change physical forms.  If I have the right consciousness, if I know and believe I will make money, then I will make money.  If I only kind of believe I will make money, but actually doubt it or still carry the belief that I will not make money, then I will not make money.

In the most extraordinary stories, people will explain that they only had to think of something they wanted and it came into their life almost instantly.  In theory, the same would be true with changing forms.  I would decide I am a hawk and it would happen almost instantly.  I would know that an organ was healed and it would be so.

You might notice that this type of instant manifestation is similar to the way that Jesus healed.  He wouldn’t necessarily touch a person, or even be in the same location as the person, but he would say “he is healed” or “now you can see.”  He would simply state the fact of the new state, and it would be so.  You may know stories of other mystics or healers who worked in this way as well.

Changing Forms

A shapeshift does not always have to involve something as radical as a human becoming a hawk.  A shapeshifter can change their own energy slightly, for instance to blend in to their environment.  In this case, a shapeshifter would not become invisible so much as their energy would so closely match their surroundings.  Anyone looking would fail to notice them.  A shapeshifter could shift the energy of a crowd, from being one that is violent into one that is more peaceful.  A shapeshifter could turn an unhealthy organ into a healthy one.

Transmutation is similar, but involves substances.  In theory you could change something completely, like turning water into wine.  Or you could shift something enough to make it less harmful.  All of these things involve an ability to have the knowing that allows you to induce the item to change.  This knowing is a type of consciousness.

Jesus embodied this consciousness, a type of super human or divine consciousness.   Jesus knew that there was no separation between himself and the divine, and that the interconnection allowed him to perform miracles and to heal.  This consciousness is available to other people, but you have to make a shift if you are to embody or vibrate with this type of consciousness.

Shapeshifting allows for the type of shift that invokes divine energy and puts us into a state of knowing.  I mention before that you don’t always have to change your physical appearance to be shapeshifting.  Whenever you shift the energy your body is emitting, that is a type of shapeshift.  When you shapeshift into a state of divine consciousness, that is called transfiguration.

Sandra Ingerman researched extensively to see how ancient cultures performed miracles.  She found that the common element in spiritual systems such as alchemy and others was this shifting of one’s state of consciousness.  While it was not always referred to as transfiguration it always involved these common elements: You shift into a state of knowing, in that state you see clearly the change you wish to make as if it already exists, if you can do this without doubt the change occurs.

Lauren Torres – Lansing, IL
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