In honoring the public launching of the Umbandaime project, I want to first give my respect and appreciation to Maria Alice, Julia, the women of Santa Casa, and everyone who has worked for years to make this offering available. It can advance the profound study of mediumship for those of us who recognize its importance and its delicacy. I also want to especially give recognition to Alexandra Bliss and her team who have been the midwives for this special birth. 

I am going to use this occasion to add my bit to the discussion about mediumship as it plays out in the doctrine of the Daime and beyond our circle. I believe I have the right to do this based on, first, my 33 years in the Daime. I was first introduced to mediumship in general and to my own specifically in Mapiá in September of 1989, during the time around the illness and birthday of Padrinho Sebastião. I will be forever grateful and offer my love and support to Maria Alice for the courage and clarity and strength of her teachings, and to Clara and José Rosa who joined me in the opening of my healership. And to Baixinha who recognized me and what was waiting to blossom in me when I was clueless, and to Padrinho Sebastião who called me into this path and allowed me the honor of helping him in a time of crisis. The details of that time in the jungle are a story for another day. Suffice it to say that, for the purposes of what I want to convey here, my primary take-aways from that time were 1) whoa! What is all this and who am I? Not who I thought I was, for sure, and 2) the clear knowledge that I knew nothing, and if I wanted to embrace what was being shown and awakening in me without losing my mind, if I wanted to be able to navigate the realms of spirit and energy that I was being called into, I would be well served to cultivate humility, a state of being I knew almost nothing about. 

My path in the Daime led me eventually to work with and learn at the side of Baixinha, Caboclo Tupinamba, Marcelo Bernardes, Ana Paschoa, the mediumship team of Flor da Montanha, our team of heirs of Baixinha, advanced mediums and healers, my own family, and various mães and pais de santos for these last twenty years. I can say that it has been intense, interesting, transformative, repeatedly life changing and re-directing, and it has put me at my edge over and over.  I believe I have been a good and attentive student. I’m still learning every day. 

None of this is offered to engender praise or to make any comparison with anyone else. By no means do I know all there is to know. Mediumship is a life and lifelong study. I offer these bona fides to say that I know what I know and also what I don’t. But what I know comes from long, guided observation, decades of experience, thousands of Daime and Umbanda works, training at the hands of world-class teachers, practicing mediumship literally every day, and assiduous self-examination. 

What I want to talk about is the existence of the class of being known in Umbanda as “zombeteiros.”  The word zombeteiro comes from the verb “zombar”, which means “to mock”. The spiritual job of the zombeteiro is to teach us discernment, which is the most important quality to cultivate if one wants to be a useful medium instead of a fool. The way that they do this is by fooling us into thinking they are beings of pure Light who are giving us truthful, clear, elevated messages. Then when we play out their agenda, saying and doing the falsities they have inspired us to say and do, they stand next to us pointing and laughing at our making fools of ourselves. They get off on our being their puppets, after they have convinced us that we are masters. 

How do they do this?  

They are very smart, and they have the ability to see our weaknesses; our traumas, our arrogance, our pride, our guilts, our shame, and most especially our fears. They are experts at knowing what ideas, what images, what explanations will appeal to our ego and will manipulate our loneliness, will stroke our vanity and our sense of wanting to be important, extraordinary, and special. And they play on our fundamental, religion-promoted misunderstanding; that we are bad, fatally flawed, hopeless sinners. That we are doomed by simply existing. They then prod us with thoughts, ideas, images, even the sensation of the incorporation of healers and guides. But their agenda is not the same as the beings who are committed to Light. 

(It is also clear that all the zombeteiros are not beings without physical bodies.)

How do we recognize their presence and their imposture? Because the result of their acting out through us is disunity. And by paying attention to what their presence feels like, in our bodies and to our intuition. They provoke an increase in separation, criticism, judgement, arrogant, self-righteous declarations of what is true and what is false, and the divisive categorizing of people. They provoke agitation, anger, and pride.  In contrast, the presence of Light Beings, in our bodies and in our circles, results in increased unity; more love, more understanding, more forgiveness, more patience, more health on every level, and more humility in the medium. In short and most clear and important, the beings committed to Light bring more heart. The zombeteiros can be flashy. They can sound super smart and will convince you that what you thought all along was true, or that now you know the secret, now you know better than anyone else what is true. What becomes true most often is that you do their bidding, thinking you are free. 

What the mockers cannot do is inhabit your heart, because they are committed to keeping you and everyone else away from that simple, sacred place of the unity underlying all opinion, belief, and distinctions.  They can talk a shiny and convincing line, but they cannot generate humility, calmness, compassion, faith, and forgiveness. Those are qualities of the heart, which they literally cannot get to, and don’t want you to get to either. Those qualities are what the beings of Light come to stimulate in us and teach us to embody with their benign, always respectful guidance. 

Mediumship is a very nuanced and subtle study. 

I can’t be clearer than this: If they can’t get to your heart, don’t listen to them. 

By which I mean beings incarnate and not. 

As you and I learn the art of inhabiting our heart, the zombeteiros’ gig is up. 

The trick, of course, is that for me to recognize who can and cannot get to my heart, I have to first authentically inhabit it. Not sort of. Not theoretically or rhetorically. For real.

In 2008, we received Padrinho Valdete and his crew in Ashland. For the two years or so before that we had repeatedly experienced the presence of a strong, disruptive zombeteiro. The more open mediums were sometimes literally thrown around in works, sometimes screaming and dismantling their uniforms.  People, including musicians, occasionally stormed angrily out of the salão and proceeded to spew criticism and judgement to whoever was available to listen.  Personality conflicts were common. That was not all that went on, fortunately, but it was clear that the spiritual atmosphere of our church was not clean. 

I had seen the being doing the disruption. I had done what I could at the time to transform or drive it out, to no avail. Simply, it wouldn’t listen to me. On the occasion of the passage of Mestre Irineu, we were singing the Master’s hinario with Padrinho Valdete and crew. The atmosphere was noticeably different from what I’ve described above. I looked into the astral and I said to that being, “What’s up?”  It said, “With him here, there’s no place for me.” I then made a strong prayer. “Whatever it is that Padrinho Valdete has got, I want it.” Because the Daime is the Daime, and my guides are authentic teachers, that prayer set off a deep study; of myself, of spiritual/energetic reality, and of a deeper level of mediumship.  What was required was not the learning of a technique. What was necessary was a transformation of consciousness. 

Here’s what I’ve learned, so far. What was making our community’s astral vulnerable to the intrusion of the mocking beings was our individual and collective confusion about what the Daime space is for. I had thought that the salão was a place where my opinions, my ideologies, my judgements, my astute and righteous observations about where I fit in the hierarchy of good and bad (and where everyone else did too), and my sparkling ego were supposed to be brought. What I learned in my study of what Padrinho Valdete has that I was missing, was that he had the force of absolute faith and total commitment to unity, and that I was faking it. The mocker was there, waltzing around the salão, poking at our weaknesses that we thought we were hiding so well behind rhetoric and imagining we understood what we were singing, allowed by the guides of the mission, to, as the hymn of José Rosa says, “show us what we got.”   

What was - is ongoingly - the solution? Since the mockers are smarter than me and have access to levels of my subconscious that I haven’t uncovered yet, how am I going to recognize their subtle seduction, and what can I do to clear it from my consciousness and free myself to be available to the beings of Light? In other words, if what I claim to want is freedom, how do I free myself from the mockers? Step one is to recognize that it’s not just “them”, the other people in the salão who are subject to their influence. I have my weaknesses, my traumas, my hurts, my unresolved fears, angers, griefs, my own mental illness that makes me available to the zombeteiros’ influence. And so, I have learned the necessity of engaging in the deep and sometimes difficult process of freeing myself from the unconscious material that they attach to in me. Just that awareness and the perspective it brings is empowering.

Step two, what my guides in material bodies and beyond have taught and are teaching me, is that I need to actively, consciously, ruthlessly cultivate discernment. And to do that requires an inviolable, warrior-level commitment to living in and through my heart, which is the only place in my vehicle that true, accurate discernment lives. That learning to live through my heart is a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute inner work. And it is not accomplished by declaring it, or speaking about it, or singing about it. It is done by doing focused, conscious inner work. Which takes discipline. Which can be hard, especially if the mockers are telling you that it’s not necessary, or it’s a trap, or you’re already there. You know when you’re there by what it feels like; by the felt experience of the activation of qualities that inhabiting your heart make manifest in you, not by what your mind or those tweaking your mind tell you.  

The heart is recognized by the felt vibration in your bodies- physical and energetic- when your awareness is centered in the middle of your chest.  You get to inhabit that space by breathing into it, crying into it, exercising into it, yoga-ing into it, praying into it, and visualizing into it. Then practicing speaking simply and straight from that place. And shutting up when you are not able to be centered there, and refusing to have discussions where the heart is not available as a common space from which to have the discussion. Singing in church literally vibrating each note in your heart is the best heart-vibing exercise. 

Most importantly for the navigation of present circumstances: The embodiment of calmness, compassion, faith, and forgiveness - which are divine, universal qualities for the reception of which we have pre-prepared slots in our heart chakra- requires us to take the step of getting comfortable living in the space of not-knowing. Which in turn is the result of the long-term cultivation of that most difficult of spaces to enter and stay in. Humility. The anxiety, the pathological discomfort of being called to confront the reality that no one on any level knows what is going to happen- which is in fact true- is really hard for some of us.  That discomfort, that anxiety, is an open door for the mockers. The pathological resistance to the understanding that we are at an inflection point, where many forces are in play, with many possibilities, that we are all blind people feeling a morphing elephant, is at the heart of much of the mental, societal, and emotional disturbances that are so prevalent in our world and in our Daime circles. 

Getting comfortable with not knowing allows us to choose to engage in the process of arriving to our hearts. Which I tell you with all the force and clarity of everything I’ve learned in 71 years on earth, 33 years in the Daime, and 45 years of doing healing work- in myself and with thousands of people- is what is required from us and from everyone who is sincere in wanting what is in the highest good of all beings. If this grand transformation we have been vaulted into is going to be something other than a recycling of the old ideologies and opinions and divisions with fancy new rhetoric and social media; if the transformation of consciousness being birthed in humanity is to be accomplished; if the transition from our desperate clinging to the conflictual energies of the third chakra to collectively living through the heart is to result in something other than the end of our species on this planet, it is absolutely necessary that we commit, individually and collectively to living through the heart. Actually, truly. That will not eliminate the need for hard discussion, in our little circles and our society. The space of the heart, with the people in the circle embodying compassion, faith and forgiveness, is from where actual solutions that no one has thought of can appear. But we have got to want it, work it, and stick to it in the face of the mockers trying to play us like a banjo. 

When we can discern what is what and what beings and what collective thoughts are playing through us, we can choose who we’re going to serve. By that aware choosing, we are fulfilling what I understand our teachers, our guides want from us.  It is most valuable and necessary to recognize from that space of our heart what we know by our awakened, grounded, calm, humility-informed intuition what is true to our unified being and evaluate if perhaps what we thought was true before we got to heart might just be mocker-induced delusion. That realization should not be a cause for condemnation or guilt. It is a cause for the celebration of freedom. 

And what we can do is declare, as Padrinho Valdete did without saying anything, that the salão is a sacred space in which what rules is absolute faith, commitment to unity, and within which our fears, traumas, opinions , ideologies, egos, and judgements are to be placed in consciousness on the altar of faith at the foot of the cross so that while we are do our work of joining our hearts in praise of the miracle of creation and the honor of being alive, those mundane, entirely human generated thought-forms can be radiated with the Light of Christ and returned to us transformed according to their alignment with universal reality. 

And the zombeteiros will have to find someplace else to do their work.

Jonathan Goldman

March 29, 2021