However, I practiced for several years putting my concerns in context within myself. They are:

a.) Psychology and medicine ARE quite sophisticated in diagnosing and categorizing the various illnesses, but healing techniques are woefully inadequate and ineffective.

b.) Trained in hard sciences and working as an engineer, I had experienced the limits of Newtonian science. I had expected that psychology and healing arts would have developed specific theories that would explain or deal with the complexities and synergy of the human condition. But all I saw was an attempt to make people fit into this mechanistic and reductionistic approach (Newtonian Mechanics) that didn't work all that well even with inert objects.

I even started developing a practice that I called "Relativity Therapy" based on Einstein's implications that all measurements depend on the frame of reference. I knew that this relativity theory was a better model than the Newtonian one and I found this approach more effective. (It basically involved not defining any absolutes of either health or properfunctioning but understanding the client's frame of reference and working within that.) By the mid-seventies I was also re-exposed to Quantum theory through "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" and began to speculate and explore how these theories might also be more applicable to the human condition and healing it.

During this time, I also had my wolf experience which slowly opened me up to spiritual considerations. I found myself returning, in some of my sessions, to the state of consciousness of that experience. I soon discovered that the wolf-state far more helped people to define and solve their issues than all my psychotherapy training accomplished. This was the beginnings of my co-consciousness model in which the therapist, rather than being objective and separate from the client, enters into co-consciousness with them.

c.) Although many of my colleagues and clients considered me to be a brilliant therapist, I didn't feel that we were really getting much fundamental healing done with conventional therapies. Client's would linger on, continuing on long after we had met their therapeutic contracts. "There's still something missing," they would say. I had to agree with them. Most of my most effective therapy interventions happened in the last minutes of a session when I might make some off-hand remark seemingly entirely out of context. The client would return the next week marveling at how that remark had helped them to change dramatically.

d.) That was driving me along with the unanswered questions I had about the placebo effect. I was interested in how it worked and the implications from it; how intimately the mind, consciousness and body are bound in healing and wellness. Psychology and medicine had nothing to offer on this. Another factor was that I was also beginning to explore an emerging sense of my own spirituality through my Graywolf experiences. Although I wouldn't have labeled it as such then, I was feeling a deeper transpersonal self and connection.

e.) I continued my studies of psychology in Graduate school obtaining a Masters degree in it but chose to pursue shaman's studies rather than continue for a Doctorate. The Masters work was quite unsatisfying and Doctoral work looked like just a continuation of the same pap. I had specialized in schizophrenia and wrote my masters thesis on it. I was told by my advisor that it was worthy of being my Doctoral Dissertation with some minor additional work. But I didn't learn anything from that exercise in futility except to confirm how little is understood about the condition.

My own work in the field with schizophrenia taught me much more about it and my notion was that the important elements of it were ignored. The hypersensitivity of schizophrenics, the often extrasensory and psi experiences weren't addressed except to label them as pathology, hallucination or delusion. The very spiritual nature of the condition (religious fascination and fixations). Yet, Psychological Science and Medical Science ignored all this and presented dry mechanistic models of the condition. I also left out these considerations in my thesis on the advice of my advisor.

f.) I was attending two or three psychology conferences a year and many, many workshops. There was nothing new in them, just the same old theories and models warmed up and repeated using different words. That's still happening: codependency is just what we used to work with under the name symbiosis and then enabling; inner child work is a warmed up excerpt from TA, etc. etc.

g.) Humanistic psychology drew my interest because of the fundamental difference of philosophy. If you want to understand health, you must study healthy people. I even became deeply involved with the AHP acting as an unofficial advisor to the Board and helping organize and manage conferences. I lost interest when the AHP began mainstreaming itself and seemed to lose its exploratory bent.

h.) Psychology seemed for the most part to ignore the full range of human experience. It ignored psi experiences, yet from personal experience I knew them to be facts. Its explanation of phenomena such as Deja-vu was trite and didn't really capture the flavor of it. Psychology was unable and seemed unwilling to explore and explain such things as love and intimacy, yet I knew them to be important in healing work, both as a support system and coming from the therapist.

i.) Exposure to fringe theories and practices made me aware of several other problems. For example "Radical Psychiatry" pointed out the inability of psychology to address social change.

j.) But the main issue was that psychology and its science had made no inroads to understanding or exploring the nature of consciousness. That seemed to me the most important element in understanding both the human condition and healing it. It seemed to be the basis of natural healing phenomena such as the placebo effect. It also seemed fundamental to an understanding of the foundations and perception of reality itself. Psychological science seemed for the most part to be withdrawing from exploring and understanding consciousness in favor of drug, behaviorist and emotional cathartic therapies. On the other hand leading edge physics was hot on the trail of consciousness.

I was drawn to Shamanic studies, in part because shamans seemed better versed in using and understanding consciousness. There was a twenty to fifty thousand year background of empirical studies and experience in it. I chose to study this rather than go on for my Doctorate degree. In the process I connected with Dr. Stanley Krippner as a mentor (and now colleague and close friend. I started a doctoral program with him as advisor but soon dropped it, with his full blessings, as irrelevant to my aims.