COVID Initiation
Some people perceived the COVID event differently than the mainstream narrative portrayed. Why is that? I have asked myself that question repeatedly since March 2020. How is it that family and friends, previously skeptical of government, medicine, and a media controlled by pharmaceutical interests, turned 180 degrees to follow advice from those they did not fully trust when COVID appeared on the scene?
Many experts have pointed to fear, co-dependency, and mass formation psychosis to explain the reaction to COVID. But I think something more is missing. Throughout history, humans have embraced ritual and ceremony as a vehicle for transformation. In modern-day society, performing a ritual has lost its sense of purpose. Unconscious acting out replaces it. We rarely celebrate and honor initiation rites linked to individual and community development. We lack an understanding of the power of ritual initiation.
We cannot recognize that which we are uninitiated to see. The peyote shaman knows this. He walks with you in the Sierra Madre through the wild peyote cactus garden, but you can’t see the sacred plants. You must be initiated first by the Huichol medicine man before the cactus reveal themselves and their medicine to you.
Initiation involves death and rebirth. In the early days of COVID, Melissa Dykes of Truthstream Media analyzed the event well in The Characteristics of an Initiation Ritual. To what identity are we dying, and what will be reborn? Suppression of the ego through symbolic death helps to facilitate the dying of an old identity before the identification with and manifestation of a new one. Fear, anxiety, masks, repetitive messages, isolation, disruption, confusion, and uncertainty may all be characteristics of certain initiation rituals as one prepares for symbolic death — a spiritual psychodrama of deliberate actions to facilitate change, a “New Normal,” or “The Great Reset.” Fear and anxiety make us more susceptible to conditioning, especially the fear of death.
Only after death is confronted can the initiate be symbolically resurrected, born anew. Uncertainty and confusion keep the goal posts moving rendering the initiate unable to find solid mental ground from which to make logical sense of anything. This disorientation is key, the uncertain timing generates a general anxiety, further removing the initiate from reality and leaving him or her more susceptible to conditioning. This weakens the defenses just as a virus would, only this has the potential to breakdown the individual much more completely than a virus.
— Melissa Dykes, Truthstream Media
My husband, Chuck, aka the GreenMan, experienced a death and rebirth initiation in late December 2019, a few short months before the official announcement of a novel coronavirus. Emergently transported for respiratory failure in late 2019, and shortly before Christmas, the hospital admitted Chuck to intensive care. On 100% oxygen and facemask CPAP, he landed in the new pulmonary ICU at Mission Hospital with its large picture windows and a sweeping Blue Ridge Mountain view. I stayed by his side in that liminal space watching the monitor for signs of progress, listening to the incessant sound of his scuba regulator-like breathing. He had taken a deep dive. By day five, when they couldn’t reduce the oxygen or pressure, I knew he would have lung damage or worse that he was dying.
Despite four and a half pages of lab tests, they never found the cause of Chuck’s pneumonia in the days before using a faulty PCR test. He did not test positive for the flu and hadn’t experienced the flu in almost two decades. He had no prior history of pneumonia or bronchitis, took no medications, and had been healthy at age sixty.
Upon admission to the hospital, a pulmonologist greeted us in the emergency room. A large, towering Black man from South Africa with a distinct English dialect, he wanted to intubate Chuck and put him on a ventilator, but we refused adamantly. His bedside manner intimidated me. His energy felt dark. With imploring, cold black eyes so that his pupils became lost in a sea of polished ebony, he pulled me aside and spoke in a deep voice.
“It doesn’t matter how healthy your husband was before this. Right now, he is very sick, and we need to put him on a ventilator. It will help him breathe so he can rest.”
I started asking questions which frustrated the doctor. Then he launched in on me. “I had a healthy 30-year-old woman come in here with the flu last week, and three days later, she was dead,” he said, insinuating what could happen to Chuck.
It was the last thing I needed to hear from that man. I felt strangely transported to a dark continent and a past life memory where he and I had hurt each other before in a long-ago, distant time. I felt so many things. Anger at the perceived threat he posed. Fear for my husband’s life. And compassion for a doctor who had lost a patient. But I did not support his aggressive recommendation to ventilate, and he agreed to monitor Chuck on the CPAP.
We now know that during the first wave of the COVID-19 “pandemic,” almost three-quarters of patients admitted to critical care received invasive ventilation. Now the numbers are less than half that driven by data associating invasive ventilation with higher mortality. Had Chuck been transported after the pronouncement of COVID and its protocols put in place, I am convinced that he wouldn’t be alive today. Not only from invasive interventions, but he wouldn’t have had an advocate. I would not have been allowed to accompany him. He would have been alone.
My advocacy involved much more than supporting Chuck’s decision not to be ventilated. I confronted every pulmonologist who saw him with the question, “Could this be the result of an airbag inhalation?” It was all I had to go on. Chuck had been in an automobile accident on October 12, 2019, and suffered a crushed wrist. When the airbag deployed, it filled the closed air space with particulates, and he knew he needed to get out. I repeatedly heard him say, “I knew I had to get out of the car because I couldn’t breathe.”
One month after the accident and two wrist surgeries, Chuck got sick. He slowly declined through the month of November and into December with symptoms that confounded me. I recommended herbs for a cold or the flu, but it didn’t respond like either one. Whatever he had did not follow the usual course of a cold or flu. The symptoms didn’t start in his head but in his throat and went straight into his chest. Chuck would get better, and then he would get worse. He wasn’t sleeping due to work-related stress and had a strange hacking cough but couldn’t bring up any phlegm. To make matters worse, he started taking over-the-counter cold medication and NSAIDS to keep working. I feared it would drive things deeper. And it did.
By the time Chuck got to a doctor, he had pneumonia and low oxygen levels. They gave him a breathing treatment and sent him home with antibiotics and an albuterol inhaler. Five days later, he still had not improved. Around 4 am in the morning, I heard him gasping for breath. I got him out of bed, propped him up in the recliner, and gave him some Breathe Easy tea. He took two puffs of the inhaler, and I returned to bed, exhausted. Approximately 45 minutes afterward, I woke from a powerful dream.
Jamie, my herbal medicine apprentice and a good friend and former business associate of myself and Chuck, appeared close to my face and demanded that I wake up.
“Get up! Get up! What are you doing? Go to him now!” she yelled.
I woke with a start and knew it had been more than just a dream. Jamie is someone who loves Chuck.
I went to him and saw that he was grey and still gasping for breath. Chuck was in trouble. I foolishly thought I could take him to the hospital myself. The weather had turned rainy and cold on that December morning, so I went down to start the car and turn on the heater so it could warm up. The gas gauge read close to empty. In a split-second decision, I quickly drove to the gas station only two minutes away and filled the tank halfway. When I got back to the apartment, Chuck was hallucinating. I tried to get him to stand up, but he was too weak. Frantic, I called 911.
The paramedics came quickly. All of Chuck’s vitals were bottoming out. They told me had they arrived five minutes later, he may not have made it. I rode in the ambulance, praying the entire way.
Three pulmonologists discounted my airbag inhalation theory as the cause of Chuck’s pneumonia. They waved it off by stating that too much time had elapsed between his accident and hospitalization.
On day five in the ICU, with Chuck fighting for his life and me out of my mind with fear and worry, I went to sleep on the couch bed in Chuck’s hospital room and prayed for help and divine intervention. That night in a dream, I heard a voice say, “We are sending angels.” Early that morning of the sixth day, when the new shift nurse came on duty, I knew my prayers had been heard.
They don’t make nurses like Linda anymore. A jolly, middle-aged country woman with short, curly white hair, she joked about how happy her husband felt when she came to work.
“It’s the only time the poor guy gets any time to himself!” She laughed.
Looking down at her hands and then back at me with a grin, Linda joked about her fingernails being dirty from gardening and how hard she had tried to clean them. Attentive toward Chuck, she made him feel comfortable and lifted my spirits.
Then, in her Appalachian drawl and with a big bright blue-eyed smile, she announced, “And today, you will be seeing the best pulmonologist in Asheville!”
They had sent angels. I liked Dr. Campbell immediately, a pulmonologist who finally listened to my rant about airbag particulates. I mean really listened. He said the only way he could know for sure would be to intubate and do a bronchoscopy and that we had a short window to make that determination. Everything in my body resounded with an immediate yes. The results revealed that Chuck had eosinophilic pneumonia.
Crush injuries like the one Chuck had to his wrist can cause eosinophilic pneumonia, as can NSAIDS. COVID pneumonia is also eosinophilic pneumonia (see Merck Manual references below). But knowledge of COVID-19 did not yet exist in late December despite deriving its name from the earliest confirmed cases in 2019. It was a perfect storm.
Having diagnosed Chuck with eosinophilic pneumonia, Dr. Campbell prescribed corticosteroids. Like a miracle, it turned him around immediately. Steroids are now standard protocol in treating COVID pneumonia. How many more lives could we have saved in the early days without the damaging and restrictive protocols ordered in place? Those protocols financially incentivized hospitals by paying approximately $40,000 for a respiratory system diagnosis with ventilator support and $13,000 for a COVID death. The CARES Act created a 20% add-on for Medicare patients with COVID-19 and a $100 billion fund to financially assist hospitals. Hopefully, we all know the story by now of how the number of deaths became inflated.
Chuck spent eight days in the ICU and ten days total in the hospital. He had lost a lot of weight and came home a different man on Christmas eve, still hooked up to oxygen. In his words, it had been an initiation that left him no longer fearing death. So when they announced COVID-19 two months later, we did not react out of fear but stayed curious and sought a wide range of information sources.
What we saw happening over the following year shocked us: The unprecedented loss of jobs and income, lives disrupted globally, loss of constitutional rights, extreme censorship, numbers that didn’t add up, people afraid of other people, isolation, draconian lockdowns, mandates, suicide, increased child abuse, alcoholism and addiction, coercion, bribing, profiteering from an untested gene therapy masquerading as a vaccine, evidence of a bioweapon, and the list goes on. The goalposts kept changing, causing more uncertainty and confusion. Disorientation causes anxiety when nothing makes sense.
Chuck and I watched our spiritual, musical, and herbal communities fall apart from fear and division. The Mass Formation Psychosis theory of how large groups of people influence an individual’s behavior made sense. One of my herbal mentors confessed to taking the jab out of fear, saying she was too “chicken” not to. At least she was being honest. A music mentor who sang out against “the man” and corporate greed and who stood for freedom and liberation promoted the draconian measures loudly and publicly. She wasn’t alone. And she still requires her audience to be masked.
Spiritual and religious leaders who we thought had been given an opportunity to heal the division and guide people into a greater awareness acquiesced to the fear.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…
— Psalms 23:4
Few asked the difficult questions and became silenced if they did. The press stopped reporting dissenting voices, but you now know that those voices are real. Before questioning the medical cartel orthodoxy became career suicide, some of the world’s most prestigious scientists expressed skepticism. Science, like democracy, flourishes on skepticism toward official orthodoxies. Blind faith in authority is a function of religion, not science.
It’s like dying in outer space. No one can hear your scream.
— Charles Ortleb
We watched co-dependency act out on the world stage on a massive scale. When the cry of “we need to protect others” turned violent and people started policing each other, it looked to us like a global ritual initiation into a Covidian Cult of totalitarianism. We laid low and kept our ears to the ground. We didn’t buy into the fear.
The essential ambition of the totalitarian state is to control not just conduct but self-expression and thought. And for the first time in history, because of the technological revolution, the capacity for totalitarian forces to literally control every aspect of human expression and even human thought is unprecedented. – RFK, Jr.
It would seem that humanity’s biggest fear is the fear of death. Afraid and uninitiated leave us vulnerable to external control that keeps us sick and dependent like a Devouring Mother. COVID has been a collective trauma but also offers us the opportunity for global initiation and collective growth. Past the fear of death lies the question, What kind of future do we want to create?
It is not a question of making something other than it is, most especially yourself, for you are always shape-shifting and becoming something different. It is more a matter of asking, Who and what am I becoming?” Only after death is confronted can the initiate be symbolically resurrected.
Thank you Chuck for allowing me to walk with you through the valley of the shadow of death. And for being the strong and loving GreenMan that you are. There’s a reason we’ve come here…
Light a candle for softness
Light a candle for friends ‘til they come thru
Light a candle for warm, kind love
Light a candle for me and you
‘Cause there’s a reason we’ve come here
Are we holding back or are we willing for connection
While knowing what we hold most dear
Must eventually surrender to its own direction
— Ferron, Impressionistic, Harmless Love
References & Resources:
Mass Formation, Dr. Reiner Fuellmich interviews Prof. Mattia Desment
Mattias Desment & Tucker Carlson discuss Mass Formation
Mass Formation Psychosis: In Brief, Gustave Le Bon to Mattia Desment — An excellent digest of the essential ideas behind the otherwise mystifying behavior of mobs and crowds.
Documentary: Huichol / Wirrarika - Shamanism, featuring Don José Matsuwa and Brant Secunda.
Peyote: Last of The Medicine Men - British adventurer Benedict Allen introduces us to the Huichol people of Mexico, where he has the rare privilege of taking part in a ritual ceremony with peyote to bring him "face-to-face" with the gods.
The Characteristics of an Initiation Ritual, Melissa Dykes of Truthstream Media.
ICNARC report on COVID-19 in critical care: England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 17 February 2023
Covid-19: When to start invasive ventilation is “the million dollar question”, BMJ 2021
Acute eosinophilic pneumonia associated with elevated NKT cell response in COVID-19 patients, April 2020
Eosinophilic Pneumonia (Pulmonary Infiltrates With Eosinophilia Syndrome) By Joyce Lee, MD, MAS, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Jun 2021 | Modified Sep 2022. View Professional Version.
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health
The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 by Danielle Render Turmaud, M.S., NCC, Psychology Today, September 30, 2020
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Shaman I Am, written by Chuck ‘GreenMan’ Willhide. Recorded at Sound Temple and StarPony Studios, mixed at John Keane Studio. Featuring River Guerguerian on percussion and Thea on background vocals. Full length version audio.
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