"There is currently no brain scan or blood test that can detect the minute injuries, Dr. Perl said; the damage can be seen only under microscopes once a service member has died. So there is no definitive way to tell whether a living person is injured. Even if there were, there is no therapy to fix it . . .
"In 2016, while the U.S. military was exposing gun crews in Iraq and Syria to repeated artillery blasts, a research team was doing something similar to lab mice at the University of Missouri . . . (exposing them to a comparably close-up massive concussive explosion.)
". . . Mice instinctively build nests, and researchers used the quality of their nests as a benchmark of well-being. The blasted mice built only ramshackle nests, often leaving them unfinished.
"In later experiments, blasted mice were put through mazes. They made more wrong turns than healthy mice, and sometimes froze, refusing to explore the mazes at all.
"The team then dissected the animals' brains. At first they found almost no damage.
"'Everything looked fine until we looked at a nano scale,' Dr. Gu said.Under an electron microscope, a ravaged neural landscape came into focus. Sheaths of myelin, vital for insulating the biological wiring of the brain, hung in tatters. In key parts of the brain that control emotion and executive function, large numbers of mitochondria the tiny powerhouses that provide energy for each cell were dead.
"'It was remarkable the damage was very widespread,' Dr. Gu said. 'And that was just from one explosion.' (my italics) . . ."
Going back to Javier Ortiz, if he had consulted a shaman he would have received a different diagnosis. One big difference would be, the word "hallucination" would not have come up. But the word "spirit" would have.
Remote killing (whether by firing massive artillery shells at human beings 15 miles away or guided missiles), could actually affect our emotional health more violently than close-up killing, and it is a wonder to me that that wasn't considered during examination of those distraught, haunted young men. Not everyone was visited by a ghost. Another marine saw a black demon standing by his bed.
". . . In case after case, the military treated the crews' combat injuries as routine psychiatric disorders, if they treated them at all. Troops were told they had attention deficit disorder or depression. Many were given potent psychotropic drugs that made it hard to function and failed to provide much relief . . ."
Who in our military would be qualified to consider that Ortiz was seeing a ghost and who in the military would be qualified to guide him through a healing . . . to see what the ghost / spirit wanted and respond in some fashion that would allow it / her to return to wherever she heralded from - the bardo? Does the Pentagon hire any shamans ? No allopathic doctor in his right mind would tread there. This kind of work is what shamans do!
When I returned from 12 days in the Peruvian rainforest in 2016, from an intensive retreat working with ayahuasca, I was not quite the same person that went down there. For one thing, I knew that my identity, that is to say, the person I identified with, "Gary Lindorff", was only a small part of who I was. And the other thing I learned was, spirits are real.
I am planning on publishing my journal of my time in the rainforest, due for release in the Spring. That field journal tells the whole story of how my understanding of the nature of reality was permanently altered. It was like my brain was rewired. It's a good story. A lot of healing happened for me.
I came back with more / new neuroconnections.
The brain is plastic. (Plastic = originally from the Greek word, "plastikos", meaning to grow or form, was first used as an adjective meaning "formative.)
Up until 10 years ago it was thought that the brain begins to start losing neural connections after around age 25, and we do lose neurons as we age, but now we know that the adult brain can create new neural connections and even new neurons from neuronal stem cells. "In addition to these gray matter (neuronal) changes, there can be change(s) in our white matter, the pathways between neurons and myelin that allows neurons to communicate efficiently."
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