The cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico; by Carlos Castaneda (1998)

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was first published in 1968. On the occasion of its thirtieth year of publication, I would like to make a few clarifications about the work itself, and to state some general conclusions about the subject of the book at which I have arrived, after years of serious and consistent effort. The book came as a result of anthropological field work which I did in the state of Arizona and in the state of Sonora, Mexico. While doing graduate work in the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Los Angeles, I happened to meet an old shaman, a Yaqui Indian from the state of Sonora, Mexico. His name was Juan Matus.

…

The irreducible description of what I did in the field would be to say that the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus, introduced me to the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. By cognition, it is meant the processes responsible for the awareness of everyday life, processes which include memory, experience, perception, and the expert use of any given syntax. The idea of cognition was, at that time, my most powerful stumbling block. It was inconceivable for me, as an educated Western man, that cognition, as it is defined in the philosophical discourse of our day, could be anything besides a homogeneous, all-engulfing affair for the totality of mankind. Western man is willing to consider cultural differences that would account for quaint ways of describing phenomena, but cultural differences could not possibly account for processes of memory, experience, perception and the expert use of language to be anything other than the processes known to us. In other words, for Western man, there is only cognition as a group of general processes.

For the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage, however, there is the cognition of modern man, and there is the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. Don Juan considered these two to be entire worlds of everyday life which were intrinsically different from one another. At a given moment, unbeknownst to me, my task mysteriously shifted from the mere gathering of anthropological data to the internalisation of the new cognitive processes of the shamans' world.

A genuine internalisation of such rationales entails a transformation, a different response to the world of everyday life. Shamans found out that the initial thrust of this transformation always occurs as an intellectual allegiance to something that appears to be merely a concept, but which has unsuspectedly powerful undercurrents. This was best described by don Juan when he said, “The world of everyday life cannot ever be taken as something personal that has power over us, something that could make us, or destroy us, because man's battlefield is not in his strife with the world around him. His battlefield is over the horizon, in an area which is unthinkable for an average man, the area where man ceases to be a man.”

He explained those statements, saying that it was energetically imperative for human beings to realise that the only thing that matters is their encounter with infinity. Don Juan could not reduce the term infinity to a more manageable description. He said that it was energetically irreducible. It was something that could not be personified or even alluded to, except in such vague terms as infinity, “lo infinito”.

Little did I know at that time that don Juan was not giving me just an appealing intellectual description; he was describing something he called an energetic fact. Energetic facts, for him, were the conclusions that he and the other shamans of his lineage arrived at when they engaged in a function which they called seeing: the act of perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe. The capacity to perceive energy in this manner is one of the culminating points of shamanism.

According to don Juan Matus, the task of ushering me into the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico was carried out in a traditional way, meaning that whatever he did to me was what was done to every shaman initiate throughout the ages. The internalisation of the processes of a different cognitive system always began by drawing the shaman initiates' total attention to the realisation that we are beings on our way to dying. Don Juan and the other shamans of his lineage believed that the full realisation of this energetic fact, this irreducible truth, would lead to the acceptance of the new cognition.

The end result which shamans like don Juan Matus sought for their disciples was a realisation which, by its simplicity, is so difficult to attain: that we are indeed beings that are going to die. Therefore, the real struggle of man is not the strife with his fellowmen, but with infinity, and this is not even a struggle; it is, in essence, an acquiescence. We must voluntarily acquiesce to infinity. In the description of sorcerers, our lives originate in infinity, and they end up where they originated: infinity.

Most of the processes which I have described in my published work had to do with the natural give and take of my persona as a socialised being under the impact of new rationales. In my field situation, what was taking place was something more urgent than a mere invitation to internalise the processes of that new shamanistic cognition; it was a demand. After years of struggle to maintain the boundaries of my persona intact, those boundaries gave in. Struggling to keep them was a meaningless act if it is seen in the light of what don Juan and the shamans of his lineage wanted to do. It was, however, a very important act in light of my need, which was the need of every civilised person: to maintain the boundaries of the known world.

Don Juan said that the energetic fact which was the cornerstone of the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico was that every nuance of the cosmos is an expression of energy. From their plateau of seeing energy directly, those shamans arrived at the energetic fact that the entire cosmos is composed of twin forces which are opposite and complimentary to each other at the same time. They called these two forces animate energy and inanimate energy.

They saw that inanimate energy has no awareness. Awareness, for shamans, is a vibratory condition of animate energy. Don Juan said that the shamans of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see that all the organisms on Earth are the possessors of vibratory energy. They called them organic beings, and saw that it is the organism itself which sets up the cohesiveness and the limits of such energy. They also saw that there are conglomerates of vibratory, animate energy which have a cohesion of their own, free from the bindings of an organism. They called them inorganic beings, and described them as clumps of cohesive energy that is invisible to the human eye, energy that is aware of itself, and possesses a unity determined by an agglutinating force other than the agglutinating force or an organism.

The shamans of don Juan's lineage saw that the essential condition of animate energy, organic or inorganic, is to turn energy in the universe at large into sensory data. In the case of organic beings, this sensory data is then turned into a system of interpretation in which energy at large is classified and a given response is allotted to each classification, whatever the classification may be . The assertion of sorcerers is that in the realm of inorganic beings, the sensory data into which energy at large is transformed by the inorganic beings, must be, by definition, interpreted by them by them in whatever incomprehensible from they may do it.

According to the shamans' logic, in the case of human beings, the system of interpreting sensorial data is their cognition.  They maintain that human cognition can be temporarily interrupted, since it is merely a taxonomical system, in which responses have been classified along with the interpretation of sensory data.  When this interruption occurs, sorcerers claim that energy can be perceived directly as it flows in the universe. Sorcerers describe perceiving energy directly as having the effect of seeing it with the eyes, although the eyes are only minimally involved.

To perceive energy directly allowed the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage to see human beings as conglomerates of energy fields that have the appearance of luminous balls. Observing human beings in such a fashion allowed those shamans to draw extraordinary energetic conclusions. They noticed that each of those luminous balls is individually connected to an energetic mass of inconceivable proportions that exists in the universe; a mass which they called the dark sea of awareness. They observed that each individual ball is attached to the dark sea of awareness at a point that is even more brilliant than the luminous ball itself. Those shamans called the point of juncture the assemblage point, because they observed that it is at that spot that perception takes place. The flux of energy at large is turned, on that point, into sensory data, and those data are then interpreted as the world that surrounds us.

When I asked don Juan to explain to me how this process of turning the flux of energy into sensory data occurred, he replied that the only thing shamans know about this is that the immense mass of energy called the dark sea of awareness supplies human beings with whatever is necessary to elicit this transformation of energy into sensory data, and that such a process could not possibly ever be deciphered because of the vastness of the original source.

What the shamans of ancient Mexico found out when they focused their seeing on the dark sea of awareness was that the entire cosmos is made of luminous filamaents that extend themselves infinitely. Shamans describe them as luminous filaments that go every which way without ever touching one another. They saw that they are individual filaments, and yet, they are grouped in inconceivably enormous masses.

Another of such masses of filaments, besides the dark sea of awareness which the shamans observed and liked because of its vibration, was something they called intent, and the act of individual shamans focusing their attention on such a mass, they called intending. They saw that the entire universe was a universe of intent, and intent, for them, was the equivalent of intelligence. The universe, therefore, was, for them, a universe of supreme intelligence. Their conclusion, which became part of their cognitive world, was that vibratory energy, aware of itself, was intelligent in the extreme. They saw that the mass of intent in the cosmos was responsible for all the possible mutations, all the possible variations which happened in the universe, not because of arbitrary, blind circumstances, but because of the intending done by the vibratory energy, at the level of the flux of energy itself.

Don Juan pointed out that in the world of everyday life, human beings make use of intent and intending in the manner in which they interpret the world. Don Juan, for instance, alerted me to the fact that my daily world was not ruled by my perception, but by the interpretation of my perception. He gave as an example the concept of university, which at that time was a concept of supreme importance to me. He said that university was not something that I could perceive with my senses, because neither my sight nor my hearing, nor my sense of taste, nor my tactile or olfactory senses, gave me any clue about university. University happened only in my intending, and in order to construct it there, I had to make use of everything I knew as a civilised person, in a conscious or subliminal way.

The energetic fact of the universe being composed of luminous filaments gave rise to the shamans' conclusion that each of those filaments that extend themselves infinitely is a field of energy. They observed that luminous filaments, or rather fields of energy of such a nature converge on and go through the assemblage point. Since the size of the assemblage point was determined to be equivalent to that of a modern tennis ball, only a finite number of energy fields, numbering, nevertheless, in the zillions, converge on and go through that spot.

When the sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw the assemblage point, they discovered the energetic fact that the impact of the energy fields going through the assemblage point was transformed into sensory data; data which were then interpreted into the cognition of the world of everyday life. Those shamans accounted for the homogeneity of cognition among human beings by the fact that the assemblage point for the entire human race is located at the same place on the energetic luminous spheres that we are: at the height of the shoulder blades, an arm's length behind them, against the boundary of the luminous ball.

Their seeing-observations of the assemblage point led the sorcerers of ancient Mexico to discover that the assemblage point shifted position under conditions of normal sleep, or extreme fatigue, or disease, or the ingestion of psychotropic plants. Those sorcerers saw that when the assemblage point was at a new position, a different bundle of energy fields went through it, forcing the assemblage point to turn those energy fields into sensory data, and interpret them, giving as a result a veritable new world to perceive. Those shamans maintained that each new world that comes about in such a fashion is an all-inclusive world, different from the world of everyday life, but utterly similar to it in the fact that one could live and die in it.

For shamans like don Juan Matus, the most important exercise of intending entails the volitional movement of the assemblage point to reach predetermined spots in the total conglomerate of fields of energy that make up a human being, meaning that through thousands of years of probing, the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage found out that there are key positions within the total luminous ball that a human being is where the assemblage point can be located and where the resulting bombardment of energy fields on it can produce a totally veritable new world. Don Juan assured me that it was an energetic fact that the possibility of journeying to any of those worlds, or to all of them, is the heritage of every human being. He said that those worlds were there for the asking, as questions are sometimes begging to be asked, and that all that a sorcerer or a human being needed to reach them was to intend the movement of the assemblage point.

Another issue related to intent, but transposed to the level of universal intending, was, for the shamans of ancient Mexico, the energetic fact that we are continually pushed and pulled and tested by the universe itself. It was for them an energetic fact that the universe in general is predatorial to the maximum, but not predatorial in the sense in which we understand the term: the act of plundering or stealing, or injuring or exploiting others for one's own gain. For the shamans of ancient Mexico, the predatory condition of the universe meant that the intending of the universe is to be continually testing awareness. They saw that the universe creates zillions of organic beings and zillions of inorganic beings. By exerting pressure on all of them, the universe attempts to become aware of itself. In the cognitive world of shamans, therefore, awareness is the final issue.

Don Juan Matus and the shamans of his lineage regarded awareness as the act of being deliberately conscious of all the perceptual possibilities of man, not merely the perceptual possibilities dictated by any given culture whose role seems to be that of restricting the perceptual capacity of its members. Don Juan maintained that to release, or set free, the total perceiving capacity of human beings would not in any way interfere with their functional behaviour. In fact, functional behaviour would become an extraordinary issue, for it would acquire a new value. Function in these circumstances becomes a most demanding necessity. Free from idealities and pseudo-goals, man has only function as his guiding force. Shamans call this impeccability. For them, to be impeccable means to do one's utmost best, and a bit more. They derived function from seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe. If energy flows in a certain way, to follow the flow of energy is, for them, being functional. Function is, therefore, the common denominator by means of which shamans face the energetic facts of their cognitive world.

The exercise of all the units of the sorcerers' cognition allowed don Juan and all the shamans of his lineage to arrive at odd energetic conclusions which at first sight appear to be pertinent only to them and their personal circumstances, but which, if they are examined with care, may be applicable to any one of us. According to don Juan, the culmination of the shamans' quest is something to be considered to be the ultimate energetic fact, not only for sorcerers, but for every human being on Earth. He called it the definitive journey.

The definitive journey is the possibility that individual awareness, enhanced to the limit by the individual's adherence to the shamans' cognition, could be maintained beyond the point at which the organism is capable of functioning as a cohesive unit, that is to say, beyond death. This transcendental awareness was understood by the shamans of ancient Mexico as the possibility for the awareness of human beings to go beyond everything that is known, and arrive, in this manner, at the level of energy that flows in the universe. Shamans like don Juan Matus defined their quest as the quest of becoming, in the end, an inorganic being, meaning energy aware of itself, acting as a cohesive unit, but without an organism. They called this aspect of their cognition total freedom, a state in which awareness exists, free from the impositions of socialisation and syntax.

These are the general conclusions that have been drawn from my immersion in the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. Years after the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, I realised that what don Juan Matus had offered me was a total cognitive revolution. I have tried, in my subsequent works, to give an idea of the procedures to effectuate this cognitive revolution. In view of the fact that don Juan was acquainting me with a live world, the processes of change in such a live world never cease. Conclusions, therefore, are only mnemonic devices, or operative structures, which serve the function of springboards into new horizons of cognition.

Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Washington Square Press 1998)

Patterns of birth and death

The only memory of our homes found by archeologists will be the fruit stickers in the compost,

all the rest will be looted for resources by the deteriorating many of our descendents.

I know it will all be gone as I know I will die,

because I believe in time.

The illusion is obvious, it's now hip to reject Reality,

the linguistic entity that defines our lives.

Sensitivity draws me towards the details of times' plurality

like the plurality of dreams,

but the extent to which these universes exist

is the extent to which I can talk about them with my friends.

Communication creates my reality, and communication rejects what I do not like.

Time heals everything

                                        that shame does not obscure

                                        that is exposed to the light

                                        that is not breaking into dense carbon beneath the surface of my skin

                                        that is spoken into honest air

                                                    with friends and lovers

                                        that is not subject to censure by The State.

It rises to the surface,

painful as a volcano,

spews its wrath,

releases hate-gas into the atmosphere;

the trees breathe, the earth eats, the waters rise and fall,

themselves cleaned by rain and salt, patterns of birth and death.

Uninformed

There is no need to be informed. I am no longer curious. I do not consume The News on TV, radio, newspaper, nor my Facebook newsfeed. I have well-informed, intelligent, politically-aware friends on Facebook who post what would be some interesting perspectives on world events if I had any interest in exposing myself to that anymore. I am happy to learn if my friends have had a baby or a moment of inspiration, but I simply need not follow the link of posts about radiation pouring into the ocean, war here, there and everywhere, political corruption or violence on small or mass scales. More of this type of information would add nothing to my life.

I used to smoke a lot of marijuana and it used to be inspiring and exciting and social. Now I do not smoke marijuana, because when I do it simply provokes paranoia and is depressing and anti-social. I figure that I smoked too much, hit my threshold and now it will no longer work. I do not regret my time with marijuana, it changed me forever, opened my mind to new modes of perception and was ultimately a positive experience, albeit one that I no longer need to repeat, neither enjoying it nor getting anything out of it.

Similarly, I am glad that I have pursued the knowledge of current events to the extent that I have in my life, critically out of any form of mainstream media. The internet, independent documentaries, word-of-mouth, travelling, and especially hitchhiking and therefore speaking to a wide and diverse section of the population, have exposed me to many new perspectives on the world, undermining the belief systems I was taught to not consider alternatives to, taught by television, schooling and an ambient cultural haze. My exposure to critical current events stories have repeatedly transformed me, shocked and inspired me. The perverse facade of culture has been torn off and I would certainly feel exposed and vulnerable if it did not leave me with an entire multi-dimensional universe populated by loving and beautiful entities who I encounter daily. It is certainly habitual to continue to pursue this culturally-critical media, like it can become habitual to suck on a pipe of marijuana every day. It will eventually fail to serve a purpose.

How much more informed can a person be about current events? While people quibble over details, whether global warming is worse than the acidification of the ocean, whether we should not vote at all or at least vote for the least worst party, the trend is rather clear. Industrial Civilisation must come down. There is no other alternative and if you do not agree then perhaps you have not exposed yourself to enough hours of diverse independent current events. The Global Economy must collapse if any positive change is going to occur on any large scale. National governments must fall or be brought down if any type of community organisation is going to occur on any reasonable scale. Simply, when the impediments to making positive changes are removed, we can begin to rebuild a healthy and stable human world.

This is the bad news and the big news. Now, I suppose, it is time for me to focus on the good news, the positive, what is going to rebuild and strengthen what is valuable in this world. This is not an act of denial for me. The spread of what we now call Western Civilisation around the world over the last few thousand years via war and genocide has resulted in the destruction of countless human cultures, extinction of countless species and degradation of so much of our planet. Put simply, nothing justifies that, not even stupormarkets. This will always be in the back of my mind, until I find something larger and more significant, a wider perspective, that will render my person even more equipped to contribute to a positively changing world. I cannot forget. It is, for some reason, not a choice for me. It is not an aspect of my character. So I choose now to place that necessary negativity aside, in my past as it is so undeniably in the past of my culture, leading us inevitably to the present.

The best thing about the present leading into the future is that it is yet undetermined. It will be the decisions of all of us that will determine the future. To create a positive change it is necessary to focus on the creative, not simply the destructive. So now, having reached the reasonable conclusion that massive cultural rebirthing needs to occur before humans can live in healthy relationship with our environment, there is the next step of exploring the beautifully exciting and inspiring possible futures that we each contribute to creating around us.

It might still be necessary for my hitchhiking experiences to focus on the negative, because so many of the people I meet in this way are so relieved to be able to talk to somebody honestly about the global cultural crisis manifest as Industrial Economy. They hesitate to mention to the people in their life that they hope the Global Economy collapses, cos they think they are the only one who feels this way. They don't often get the opportunity to really discuss these things, to air their opinions, to even hear their own voice speaking what they have been thinking for years, to be able to judge their own thoughts in the presence of another intelligent critically-thinking human being. Of course these people have deliberately embedded themselves in the media machine, the same media machine that so many of the people in their lives are also embedded in, so they all repeat the same garbage fed to them by their own decisions. So they think that they are the only one who questions it, they think all their friends and family are stupid and love all that consumerism and hierarchy, never daring to bring the subject up; except with a random hitchhiker.

Having taken these steps over and over again, it is now necessary for me to take the next steps, to re-imagine the world I would like to live in and then make decisions in life that reflect that. I can no longer expose myself to marijuana. Taking gluten and dairy out of my diet have unambiguously alerted me to the extremely detrimental effect they have on my body. Corporate media is equally indigestible by the human body. I cannot look back now. There is no room in my life for toxic exposure to television, and now it is also necessary to cut back progressively and perhaps permanently, on media that makes me feel angry, powerless, hopeless, apathetic and paranoid. In light of my loss of cultural innocence, a bright and inspiring New is necessary to search for amongst the soil and plastic I find myself amongst.

It is widely acknowledged that positivity is often completely inane. It is so widespread for great art to be extremely negative and destructive that some people claim that an artist must suffer great pain and produce work only from this place for it to be worthwhile. I guess this assumes the alternative is denial. It has certainly been necessary to develop this rich and complex language for talking about our cultural problems, to express them through cathartic art and to understand them through scathing analysis. It is surely necessary now to develop a language to express, understand and manifest a great future without inanity and denial. A language to talk about the positive and creative developments in the world. To create art and debate around a positive future, of hope, love and life, without the dichotomy of cynicism or denial that we have accepted in the past.

Babel

To the Babylonian 'bab-il' meant 'Gate of God'.  To the Hebrews the same word meant 'confusion', perhaps 'cacophanous confusion'.  The ziggurats of Mesopotamia were 'Gates of God', painted the seven colours of the rainbow and dedicated to Anu and Enlil, divinities representing Order and Compulsion.

It was surely a marvellous intuition on the part of the ancient Jews - sandwiched between bullying empires - to have conceived the State as Behemouth or Leviathan, as a monster which threatened human life.  They were, perhaps, the first people to understand that the Tower was chaos, that order was chaos, and that language - the gift of tongues which Jahweh breathed into the mouth of Adam - has a rebellious and wayward vitality compared to which the foundations of the Pyramid are as dust.

from The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, 1987

To be spoken for the Mass of Christ, 25 December

On this day of the Mass of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, I offer these words of praise and faith.

Throughout most of the year many of us live a profane life, unconscious of the gifts bestowed upon us by God.  Jesus Christ came to earth 2013 years ago on this day to remind us of the grace and blessings of God on this Earth.  The embodied divinity he brought remains with us in the words that we still possess.

Blessed are the poor, for they shall receive charity.
Blessed are the rich, for they can charge to their credit cards.
Blessed are the hungry, for they will feast.
Blessed are the obese, for their stomachs have expanded and can encompass even more food.  For he that have much, more will be given.
Blessed are ye who spend all your money on gifts until not a cent remains, for great is your reward in Heaven.

When you pray, do not repeat the doctrines of your peculiar denomination, but pray directly to the Economy, using one of its many great names.
In this manner therefore pray ye: Our Santa who art in Lappland, hallowed be thy name.
Thy reindeer come, thy gifts be unwrapped on earth as they are in heaven.
Give us this day our daily chocolate custard plum cake
And forgive us our debts, as we continue to sink deeper into debt.
Lead us not into asceticism, but deliver us with consumption.  For thine is the kingdom, the possession and the convenience, for ever and ever.  Amen.

And when you give gifts, do not just hand them over.  But wrap them in paper that you also purchase, and place them under a pine tree.  Thus, as you surprise the recipient, so shall you be surprised in heaven.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will spend or he will save.  Ye cannot serve the Economy and sustainability.

The peasants came to Jesus and asked him, "How shall we attain the Kingdom of Heaven?"  
And Jesus said unto them, "Wrap objects in coloured paper, tie them with bows and give them to your brethren.  Do not worry about money, how ye will survive into the new year, how ye will pay thy rent.  Go into debt, overdraft thy bank account.  God knows that ye are in need of money and he shall provide.  Only in this way shall ye attain the Kingdom of Heaven."

A rich man approached Jesus and asked him, "Good Master, I have kept all the commandments from my youth.  What more can I do, that I may have eternal life?"
And Jesus said unto him, "Go into town and spend all your money on stuff, wrap that stuff in coloured paper and give it to the poor and your rewards will be great in Heaven."

On this day we celebrate the birth of Christ, who saved us from poverty and ignorance.  He gave us shopping malls, stupormarkets and online shopping.  In his name we can purchase, consume and dispose.

In the name of the Economy, Santa Claus and holy advertising.  Amen.

Nature is the centre of the mandala; by Terence McKenna

The formal title of the lecture is “Nature is the centre of the mandala”.  This is simply a structure to anticipate and discuss where nature lies in the cultural future that is unfolding in front of all of us. 

I have always had a relationship with nature that I pretty much took for granted but perhaps was somewhat unique and more intense than most peoples'.  I grew up in a small town in Colorado.  I was very early into being a rock hound and a butterfly collector.  The attraction of tropical butterflies was the exuberant expanse of colour, the affirmation of the patterned richness of the universe that was seen to be thrown out like a spark by these things.  This search for iridescence thrown off by nature, seen first in the glint of metallic ore crystals and then in the colourful expanse of butterflies and then in tropical fish, reached a kind of apotheosis with the discovery of the psychedelic plant hallucinogens, where suddenly the colour, the flash, the iridescence, is not two or three dimensional, it is multi-dimensional, it is inside the body, it is outside the body.

I came to see that nature, as experienced – meaning as it hits you when you walk around in it and pick at it and carry it with you – has been bred out of the repertoire of images that most people bring to bear on their reality.  Consequently the reality is de-spirited.  The spirit resident in nature is not visible when these mechanistic grids are laid over it.  The lux natura, the salvational radiance that can be found in the organic kingdom, a term of Paracelsus, has slipped from the grip of modern human beings.

It seems to me that nature is psyche, in a way that has been occluded by the perverse development of language.  We take nature to be external to ourselves and sustained by the laws of physics.  It is not that at all.  It is a kind of stratum of expectation that has been laid down by the human journey through time.  There are elements of nature which are not aspects of the human journey through time, but they are occult.  This has been the strategy of science; to use an instrumentality to reveal the occult side of nature.  The problem is that this occult side of nature, once explicated, does not reveal a satisfying reflection of ourselves.

It seems to me that a small miracle is taking place, the thing that we least expected to happen.  It is that our point-of-view is actually gaining ground.  Sitting on the mountainside in Hawaii, you think you're like Lenin in Germany; you have to politically think it all through so that, to the extent to which one's voice can be heard, mistakes are not made.  All this New Age hustle and bustle, though 95% of it is just intellectual noise and efforts to coin the perfect analogy that fail, appears to have become the cutting edge of the guiding image of this mega-culture.  So it becomes important for people who identify with the human potential movement, spiritual development, the rebirth of intuition, to make a place in the plan for the role of nature. 

The Gaia response claims nature as a stabilising feminine force.  That's definitely the image that has to emerge.  The recognition of the presence of control mechanisms that are not coercive, that are Taoistic, is a way of coming to terms with nature that we have resisted. 

It's a simple idea.  Before technology people had to store firewood in the autumn for the winter, in the spring they had to sharpen tools for the late spring planting.  There was an implicit rhythm laid down by nature that entered the human cosmos at every level and was reflected in poetry, culture building and the evolution of language.  There has been a flattening of the human dimension.  Urbanisation and other factors removed the influence of these rhythms, with the final culmination being the modern city, where life under electric light goes on 24 hours a day.  There is no more a sense of being embedded in flux, there is instead the myth of the eternal culture.

I was at a conference recently where someone proposed the notion that our time is not special, that there is nothing unique about this moment.  I think nothing could be further from the truth.  There is no question that there is a deepening ambiguity in the present moment.  There is a something coming over global civilisation.  It registers in all of us as how weird it is, how compressed time is, how complicated the interconnections are.  I think this is a real phenomenon which will eventually be elucidated.  Eventually, there will be a break with the prevailing paradigm of historical process. 

In case you're not aware, the current prevailing paradigm is the one that calls itself the “trendlessly fluctuating theory”.  It says, “We trendlessly fluctuate; and to search for a trend is to be drawn into a cultural hysteria.”  Standing outside of the cultural hysteria, the trend is fairly clear.  It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity. 

Nature anticipates all of this, and anchors it.  Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.  We are getting closer and closer to the end of history and we will not go past it with a moment of blindness.  There will be vouchsafed intuitions about the emerging structure of the Other into which culture is being subsumed.  You're all familiar with the image of the Ouroboros, the snake which takes its tail in its mouth.  The end of history is an archaic revival.  The ground of being in which the original archaic renaissance occurred was nature.  In terms of the expression of design elements, in terms of the expression of human relationships and political agendas, the economies of nature are going to set the guiding images.

I read Edward O. Wilson's book Biophilia in which he describes his work with ants in Suriname and how there are ants who grow fungi in their nests.  They cut leaves off trees and chew them up into a mash which they then store in rooms underground.  They bring the right spores in and grow them there and it produces a sugar which the ants then eat.  They tend the fungal gardens and remove foreign spores.  This is a symbiosis between a social organism, the ant, and a fungal organism, which produces an enzyme, sugar, which drives the ant society to a greater state of activity.  Activity, in an insect economy, defines how well you can survive.  This provides a curious analogy for the situation that exists in human society vis-a-vie hallucinogenic plants. 

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes that stimulate imagination.  Imagination is reconnected to this feedback loop in which we ask ourselves, “How can I make more of this hallucinogenic plant that is giving us all these great ideas?”  So then you get the invention of agriculture, but one can't grow all plants in one place.  So then the feedback loop from the presence of hallucinogenic plants in the diet asks the question, “How can we get the plants that we can't grow?” and the answer is, networks of trade and systems of barter, and behind that lies the need for language.  

These types of symbiotic processes are implicit in the human experience.  Some of you have heard another lecture I give in which I go into this in great detail.  I try to show that mushrooms in the dung of undulate animals on the veldt of Africa 150,000 years ago drove a series of processes which resulted in self-reflecting human beings.  That process didn't end with the invention of language or the domestication of cattle, it continues right up to the present day.  

It is as though, from a planetary point of view, an enzyme system called the human species was deputised into an information-gathering mode.  It was sent out as a kind of prodigal subsystem, a kind of episome of the social environment, to cognise the organisation of the natural world through a process called "human history" or "the historical advance toward understanding and sufficiently complete modelling".  That I think is what is happening. 

The human species was deputised for Gaia into the Fall; the fall into profane time, the time of non-participation in the immediacy of the Tao, through a series of successive linguistic declensions.  This begins to sound almost Biblical, because it says there is a Fall, and the Fall is somehow related to a confusion of languages, not one from another, but from the object of experience.  As the language became less and less natural, the world of the species using this language became less and less natural, because the evolution of symbols moved toward the abstract, it became the realisation of ideals.  In Platonic philosophy we get the enunciation of abstractions, great over-weaning concepts that subsume entire areas of particulars.  This ability to subsume particulars under a class name is the beginning of this process of replacing the particulars with the symbolic structures.  The reason for this process we can only guess at.  It seems as though nature requires this reflection upon itself; that the completion of nature is in the hands of a single target species, which acts as an enzyme within the global organism of Gaia.  

From the point-of-view of an extraterrestrial looking down on the surface of the planet there are not discreet organisms, there is simply a gene swarm.  Through viruses and many non-genetic ways in which genes are transformed, the previously imagined sharp declensions between species are actually somewhat illusory.  Within the confines of my body, the unfolding of gene expression and the molecular assembly of enzyme systems and proteins is simply under a tighter regimen of control than are the same kind of processes which are going on between people.  We are really a loosely regulated organism that has a tendency to ever-tighten the connection between its sub-units. 

So you can see that with the evolution of language, the evolution of technology being at the service of media, the rise of cities, oral poetry, we seem to strive for greater and greater cohesion, greater and greater free-flow of thought among ourselves.  What we're looking toward is a moment when the artificial language-structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the realisation that we are a part of nature.  When that happens the childhood of our species will pass away and we will stand tremulously on the brink of the first moments of coherent human civilisation. 

This, I think, is already beginning to happen.  It's a slow process but it's a kind of cascading phenomenon such that once it begins to happen it happens faster and faster.  The mirroring of psyche that was always the glamour that stood behind nature is correctly perceived with greater and greater clarity as this process proceeds.  This correct perceiving of nature's relationship to self and language is the essence of all of these cultural vectors that are converging; feminism, the exploration of space, the perfection of the thinking machine, or of the human-machine interface and the mysterium tremendum at the core of the psychedelic experience.  All of these things are anticipations of the post-historical state which lies beyond the working out of the themes that have been set in motion by materialistic science.  

These forces have been set in motion and sustained by so-called “new thought”, New Age thinking.  It seems that we all noticed early on a trend in society which is now going to have tremendous repercussions and because this seems to be happening, there is a responsibility to clear thinking about what this thing is and how it works.  There seems to be a rush to get in line with the sloppiest metaphor as quickly as possible.  There have been a number of syncretic fates, new myths, that have arisen and competed with each other with greater and lesser degrees of success.  I suppose this is a healthy thing, except that it gives such comfort to the people who think we're all just airheads.  They observe all this and it confirms to them that it's a hopeless lot. 

Everybody has their own version of what is the mistake that is being made.  So here's my version.  There is a confusion between scientific materialism and reason.  Science has set itself up as a kind of new pontificate and brooks no challenge.  It expects to make judgement on any idea emerging from any realm of human endeavor.  It has set itself up as judge and jury.  The fact of the matter is that this is only by virtue of its spectacular acts of technological prestidigitation.  What science is really most successful in telling us about are realms which none of us have ever penetrated nor are ever likely to.  I mean, how much do you wish to know about the rings of Neptune or the quark? 

We are continuously sold the line that somehow, when the metaphors of consciousness are fully mapped onto quantum physics and biology that a great step forward will have been taken.  It seems to me that since the information coming out of quantum physics and molecular biology is so removed from the realm of common experience that if we succeed in mapping mental phenomena onto those realms we will have succeeded in the final act of alienation; because we will have at last totally removed our experience of ourselves from the realm of felt cognition.  

Instead of the idea that there needs to be an erection of an overarching metaphor from the physical sciences into the social and psychiatric sciences, there should be the recognition and celebration of mystery.  

We are an intelligent species caught in a historical process.  No generation which preceded us knew what was going on.  There is no reason to assume that we know what is going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on.  And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?  It's a highly unlikely enterprise.  Look at the data sample.  The data sample is your lifetime, on one planet, in one tiny corner of the universe.  From this, via the fallacy of induction, certain principles of uniformity are extended to the far-flung corners of the cosmos in space and time.  A bunch of fancy metaphors are built up that nobody can check on anyway and then this is called understanding.  You see, it isn't understanding.  Understanding issues into appropriate activity.  A model of the universe which doesn't issue into appropriate activity in the here and now is a curious model indeed.  Appropriate activity in the here and now is the sine qua non.  Everything else is unconfirmed rumour.  

Nature is the visible manifestation of this mystery, it entirely surrounds and completes us.  It is there to be beheld and imbibed in.  It is simply that one must either replace the sterile language of scientific materialism or one must bring no language whatsoever to it, so that it speaks for itself.  

Ayahuasca, the South American visionary vine, unlike the mushroom, does not speak, it shows; its language is visible; a fractal hieroglyphic surface of intermediate dimensions that contains an endless unfolding of phenomena, at level after level into the micro-physical realm.  This is a correct seeing of what is.  The mystery is co-present with its denial.  It is a matter of changing points of view and changing points-of-view is a matter of retooling language.  If nature is psyche, ayahuasca is the auto-poetic self-reflecting cloud of cognition that manifests as language.  It is partly based in the structure of matter, it is partly based in the implicit syntax of the perceiver, it is partly an interference pattern between the two; but it is as close to the ground that one can approach without theory.  

The key to the forward-looking expression of the archaic revival, the key to making the New Age fulfill its best hope and not fall into a crypto-fascism of paradigmatic warfare, is to enunciate two principles.  The primacy of experience and the toxic nature of ideology.  This to me is the core.  If the New Age, the archaic revival, can exemplify these two principles then we can navigate past the dangerous shoal that threatens any idea that attempts to leave its cult status and enter the mainstream.  

I connect the primacy of experience to Heidegger's notion of what he called "care for the project of being".  The primacy of felt experience begins with a notion as simple as "be here now".  We must take ourselves more seriously, more lightly and more seriously.  We are not at the bottom of a pyramid of goods and information production where we pay the sucker's price for everything as it is handed down through pieces of intractable cultural machinery that we have no effect on.  That is the myth that is being promulgated by those very institutions; the myth of the hapless consumer; the myth of the meaning of faddism.  As if there is a meaning to switching from one ideology to another the way hemlines and perfumes and decorator colours come and go.  This is allowing ourselves to be self-victimised.  

The other side of that is the toxicity of ideology.  Ideology itself is poisonous.  In the 15th and 16th centuries there was 120 years of intermittent religious warfare because people were so uptight about whether you were a Catholic or a Hugenaught or a Walloon.  These were life-or-death issues.  Finally people just became sick of it.  I hope, I choose to believe, that we may be approaching such a watershed with the social ideologies that have been dinging themselves into the global population for the past hundred years.  They are extremely bankrupt.  The notion of any kind of serious competition between Marxist-Leninism and capitalist-democratic techno-fascism, or whatever it is, is ludicrous.  Neither system works within the need to wage ideological warfare against the other.  

Ideology has become an anachronism.  It's a kind of lack of good taste.  It's like being a nut.  You come on with some ideology and people just look at their plates; they're embarrassed for you.

The ideology that naturally claims our attention is pretty well understood.  It says in the Old Testament, “You can know the truth, the truth is the still small voice in your heart.”  You don't have to take courses in theology and ethics to get all this down.  The political agenda is fairly clear; you feed people, you cure disease, you anticipate and solve social problems having to do with sewerage disposal, distribution of land and wealth.  None of this stuff is controversial unless you're living inside a locked ward.  

This anti-ideological position has to be articulated by causing language to evolve.  You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.  And then other people say, “Oh so this thing that I've always thought but never felt like saying is actually legitimate and okay and I can say it and I will say it”.  It begins to move like a wave through society.  

You will be told that for me to advocate the poisonous nature of ideology without calling it anarchy is to peddle my own private ideology.  But this is absurd.  It's like saying that if someone tells you not to drive they're advocating a certain style of driving.  That's not it at all.  It's a translation of levels, it's something entirely different. 

We cannot afford the continued existence of the unconscious.  It is a neurotic excuse for not getting our act together as a species.  The way in which the unconscious is eliminated is by turning the language machinery back upon itself and reflecting on the process of attention.  This is what Buddhism is all about; attention to attention.  Awareness of the modality of the cognitive process.  Doing that to oneself has a kind of morphogenic field effect, a kind of chain-reaction which sweeps through society.  It's simply that the act of conscious self-inspection creates more conscious people which creates a more conscious society, which erodes the possibility of the poisonous and toxic effects of ideology. 

This is what psychedelics are about in terms of their social and legal position in society.  Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may leap out of a third-storey window.  Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid-down models of behaviour and information processing.  They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.  Government and society spend a lot of money educating you into being a loyal worker, consumer, debt-payer and citizen. 

I think anarchy is the great future for human society.  Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.  To the degree that people are responsible, we will have anarchy.

I want to leave you with the notion that nature, the linguistically expressed topological manifold of the psyche, is indeed a historical object that is pulling us forward.  When we cross over into the eschatology that appears fairly eminent, we will find it to be anticipated by the human relationship with nature, the embedding of psyche in nature, the mysterious relationship mediated by language.  

The key to unfolding a sane society, in my single humble opinion, is an obligation to reason that clearly distinguishes between reason and science, an obligation to self-involvement in immediate experience, which means psychedelics, sexuality and what I call “time”; a deep literary involvement with the felt present.  Psychedelics, sexuality and time.  To empower the individual.  To make the individual naturally responsible.  To create the basis for a caring global society that will transcend the historical cultures as though we were just moving very naturally out of winter and into spring; no apocalypse, no millennium, no rescue by flying saucers, no Mayan return, simply the unfolding of a programme of mutual caring and responsibility.  This is the highest aspiration of the New Age and I feel that it is attainable.

~

An abridged transcription of a Terence McKenna lecture from sometime in the 1980s.  From Psychedelic Salon podcast #197, "McNature" .
Unedited, unimproved audio from Archive.org.  

The Figure of the Shaman; from The Invisible Landscape by Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna

Of all the diverse religious institutions that humans have elaborated since before the beginning of recorded history, that of shamanism is one of the most singular and is probably one of the most archaic as well.  The shaman is something of a maverick among religious practitioners.  While shamanism occurs in almost every culture on the planet, manifesting itself in religious traditions both ancient and modern, both primitive and sophisticated, the shaman remains eminently individualistic, idiosyncratic, and enigmatic, standing ever apart from organised ecclesiastical institutions while still performing important functions for the psychic and religious life of the culture.  Comparable, but not identical, with such similar idiosyncratic practitioners as medicine men and sorcerers, the shaman is the possessor of techniques of proven efficacy and of powers bordering on the paranormal, the complete understanding of which still eludes modern psychology.  It is this complex and fascinating figure of the shaman that we want to analyse from a standpoint at once sympathetic, interpretative, and psychological, with a view to answering the following questions: (1) What are the traditional aspects of shamanism as it is encountered in primitive cultures?  (2) What is the nature of the shamanic personality and abilities, and what is the psychological role of the shaman in the society at large?  And (3) Are there institutions analogous to shamanism in modern society?

The vocation of shaman is found in nearly all archaic cultures, from the Australian aborigines to the Jivaro Indians of central Ecuador and Peru to the Yakut tribes of Siberia.  It is believed to have originated among these Siberian peoples, though its diffusion into other cultures must have taken place very early in prehistory for, along with sorcerers, magicians, and priests, shamanism can be counted among the oldest professions.

The word shaman is derived from the Tungusic term saman, derived in its turn from the Pali samana, indicating a possibly southern (Buddhist) influence among these northern peoples.  Eliade distinguishes the shaman from other types of religious and magical practitioners primarily on the basis of his religious function and techniques:...he is believed to cure, like all doctors, and to perform miracles of the fakir, like all magicians, whether primitive or modern.  But beyond this, he is a psychopomp, and he may also be a priest, mystic, and poet.  He further defines the shaman as a manipulator of the sacred, whose main function is to induce ecstasy in a society where ecstasy is the prime religious experience.  Thus, the shaman is a master of ecstasy, and the art of shamanising is a technique of ecstasy.

In archaic societies, a person (either man or woman) may become a shaman in primarily one of two ways: hereditary transmission or spontaneous election.  In either case, the novice shaman must undergo an initiatory ordeal before he can attain the status of a full shaman.  The initiation generally has two aspects: an ecstatic aspect, which takes place in dreams or trance, and a traditional aspect, in which the shaman is given instruction in certain techniques, such as the use and significance of the shamanic costume and drum, the secret spirit language, the names of the helping spirits, techniques of curing, the uses of medicinal plants, and so on, by an elder master shaman.  These traditional techniques of shamanism are not invariably transmitted by an elder shaman but may be imparted to the neophyte directly through the spirits that come to him during his initiatory ecstasy.  Lack of a public ritual in no way implies that such traditional instruction is neglected.

The ecstatic part of the shaman's initiation is harder to analyse, for it depends on a certain receptivity to states of trance and ecstasy on the part of the novice: He may be moody, somewhat frail and sickly, predisposed to solitude, and may perhaps have fits of epilepsy or catatonia, or some other psychological aberrance (though not always, as some writers on the subject have asserted).  In any case, his psychological predisposition to ecstasy forms only the starting point of his initiation: The novice, after a history of psychosomatic illness or psychological aberration that may be more or less intense, will at last begin to undergo initiatory sickness and trance; he will lie as though dead or in deep sleep for days on end.  During this time, he is approached in dreams by his helping spirits and may receive instructions from them.  Invariably during this prolonged trance the novice will undergo an episode of mystical death and resurrection: He may see himself reduced to a skeleton and then clothed with new flesh; or he may see himself boiled in a cauldron, devoured by the spirits, and then made whole again; or he may imagine himself being operated on by the spirits, his organs removed and replaced with magical stones, and then sewn up again.

Although particular motifs may vary between cultures and even individuals, the general symbolism is clear: The novice shaman undergoes a symbolic death and resurrection, which is understood as a radical transformation into a superhuman condition.  Henceforth, the shaman enjoys access to the supernatural plane; he is a master of ecstasy, can travel in the spirit-realm at will, can cure and divine, can touch red-hot iron with impunity, and so on.  In short, the shaman is transformed from a profane into a sacred state of being.  Not only has he effected his own cure through this mystical transmutation, he is now invested with the power of the sacred, and hence can cure others as well.  It is of the first order of importance to remember this, that the shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself, who is cured, and who must shamanise to remain cured.  Lommel gives the following description of a shamanic initiation in Siberia:

The Tungus say of their shamans: Before a man becomes a shaman he is sick for a long time.  His understanding becomes confused.  The shamanistic ancestors of his clan come, hack him to bits, tear him apart, cut his flesh in pieces, drink his blood.  They cut off his head and throw it in the oven, in which various iron appurtenances of his costume are made red-hot and then forged.  This cutting up is carried out somewhere in the upper world by shaman ancestors.  He alone receives the gift of shamanhood who has shaman ancestors in his clan, who pass it on from generation to generation; and only when these have cut up his body and examined his bones can he begin to shamanise.

We have noted that the function of shamanic initiation in the primitive society is to effect the transformation of the shaman from a profane, human condition to a superhuman, sacred one.  But while the shaman may carry out activities such as divining and prophesying, and occasionally sorcery, these are not his major functions, and often fall within the province of other types of practitioners.  The shaman's primary functions are those of healer and psychopomp.  This is related to the specific nature of the shamanic ecstasy; not all forms of mystical ecstasy are shamanic, for this, like initiation, has its own peculiar nature.  The shamanic ecstasy is one in which the shaman is supposed to leave his physical body and journey to the Centre of the World, which connects the earthly realm with the celestial world above and the infernal regions below.  This axis mundi may be symbolised as a tree, mountain, tent pole, ladder, liana, or something similar; the shaman is able to make the journey and return safely because he is a master of ecstasy and possesses the guidance of helping spirits along the way.  His main functions thus become either guiding the soul of a deceased person to its home in the infernal or celestial realms or journeying to those realms for the purpose of retrieving the soul of a sick person (which has wandered off by itself or been stolen by the spirits while the patient was asleep), returning with it, and restoring it to the patient's body.  The shaman thus fulfills his functions by being able to travel in the supernatural realm, and he is enabled to do this because he is a master of ecstasy.

From the description of the shaman's duties in the community, we can draw some obvious conclusions and make some further hermeneutical speculations as to the shamanic function within the cultural context.  The curing function of shamanism, as well as such secondary functions as divination and prophesy, show clearly that the shaman, like all magical practitioners, helps a primitive culture to come to terms with environmental forces that are both nurturing and threatening.  Thus, through the shamanic propitiation of the spirits, good crops or fruitful hunting can be assured; drought, epidemic, or other natural disasters can be averted.  On the deeper level of collective psychology, we can perceive several functions of the shaman that would not be articulated by the members of a given society, but that, nevertheless, are intrinsic to the shamanic function.  Lommel says of the social role of the shaman:

...primitive man is quite exceptionally susceptible to various forms of mental disorder.  Psychoses, neuroses, hallucinations, mass hysteria and the like are of very frequent occurrence.  The shaman can cure these states - but only when he has overcome them in himself... the shaman is the centre, the brain and the soul of a (primitive) community.  He is, so to speak, the regulator of the soul of a group or tribe, and his function is to adjust, avert, and heal defects, vacillations, disturbances of this soul.  Looked at biologically, the whole life of primitive people is more strongly influenced by the subconscious than seems to be the case among ourselves.  It is clear that in this situation the position of the shaman is one of paramount importance.

The shaman is able to act as an intermediary between the society and the supernatural, or to put it in Jungian terms, he is an intermediary to the collective unconscious.  Through the office of the shaman, the society at large is brought into close and frequent encounter with the numinous archetypal symbols of the collective unconscious.  These symbols retain their numinosity, immediacy, and reality for the society through their constant reaffirmation in shamanic ritual and through the shaman's epic narration of mythical scenarios and his artistic production. The shaman does more, however, than just recite the myths or express the religious symbolism in making ritual artifacts; the shaman lives the myth.  By virtue of his superhuman, transformed state, he enacts the role of the mythical hero: He can fly through the air, talk to the gods, see everywhere, understand the animals, and perform other feats characteristic of a semidivine entity.  Thus, the shaman is the exemplar in the present epoch, which is regarded by primitives as a profane, historical time, of the condition supposed to have been accessible to all humans before the fall.  In his ecstasy the shaman reenters that mythical, paradisaical condition that existed before the fall and thus reasserts, for the entire culture, the reality of that mythical time.  Thus, the validity of the archetypal motifs, which presumably describe the human condition in the paradisaical era, is reaffirmed.

The shamanic function also includes a psychoanalytic capability.  That the shaman can cure illnesses of a psychological or psychosomatic nature is well established.  The shaman is undoubtedly, perhaps essentially, a doctor - but the factual medical knowledge of the primitives is very small; the shaman's medical function seems to be confined to psychological, perhaps psychoanalytical techniques, and his successes fall mainly within the psychological domain.  But with what exact mechanism he is able to do this is not completely understood.  It is as through the shaman, in his capacity of ecstatic psychopomp, practices a participation therapy of the most sophisticated type; by means of his ecstatic capacity, the shaman plunges into the collective unconscious and restores the patient's self-identity (equivalent to finding his soul) by taking onto himself the unconscious contents that have inundated his patient through the principle of transference.  Because this is accomplished in the context of ritual, which is real and numinous to the participants, the shaman's task is doubtless somewhat easier than that of a modern psychoanalyst who is often faced with a demythologised, rationally hardened personality.

The shaman, then, acts as a doctor of the soul, both the individual and the collective soul, and he is also a real and living exemplar of the primordial, mythical human condition, and in being so maintains the reality and immediacy of the sacred.  He is able to carry out these functions because he is master of the techniques of ecstasy, and it is by virtue of this that he maintains his suprahuman state.

It is clear that the practice of shamanism, to a greater extent than other religious offices, depends on the unique personality of the shaman.  This must account in part for the great diversity of preinitiatory traits that constitute a shamanic election as well as the diversity in methods of shamanising, in the means employed to induce ecstasy, and in the motifs of the shaman's journey, not only in different cultures but between individuals as well.  With this in mind, let us lift the shaman out of his cultural context for a moment and focus on the characteristics of his psychological makeup.

An item of the first order in addressing ourselves to this psychological examination of the phenomenon is the question of the psychopathological nature of the shamanic personality.  There are, as we have noted, certain cases where the symptoms leading to shamanic initiation can be traced to a condition of mental illness, epilepsy, or catatonia; however, this is by means true of all such cases, as some have claimed.  Initiation can also be triggered by an encounter with a magical animal, the finding of a magical stone or other object, or an ordeal in the wilderness.

Eliade masterfully points out where such theories have gone astray:

The problem, in our view, has been wrongly stated.  In the first place, it is not correct to say that shamans are, or must always be, neuropaths; on the contrary, a great many of them are perfectly sound in mind.  Moreover, those who had previously been ill have become shamans just because they succeeded in getting well.  Very often, when the vocation reveals itself in the course of an illness or an attack of epilepsy, the initiation is also a cure.  The acquisition of the shamanic gifts indeed presupposes the resolution of the psychic crisis brought on by the first signs of this vocation.  The initiation is manifested by - among other things - a new psychic integration

And, similarly, Nadel states:

And here it is important to stress that neither epilepsy nor insanity, nor yet other minor mental derangements, are in themselves regarded as symptoms of spirit possession.  They are diseases, abnormal disorders, not supernatural qualification.  No shaman is, in everyday life, an abnormal individual, a neurotic or a paranoiac; if he were, he would be classed as a lunatic, not respected as a priest.  Nor finally can shamanism be correlated with incipient or latent abnormality; I recorded no case of a shaman whose professional hysteria deteriorated into serious mental disorders.

From these comments, it is apparent that shamanism is not an institution designed to capitalise on psychological aberrations.

We shall return to the question of the stability of the shamanic personality in the next chapter, where we will consider the similarities between the self-cure of the shaman and the attempt to resolve a life-crisis that characterises essential schizophrenia.

Let us now consider the shamanic trance itself.  All of the shaman's functions, his ability to cure, divine, converse with the spirits, and travel in the supernatural realm, depend on his ecstasy; were he unable to attain ecstasy at will, he could not be a true shaman.  Thus, the human will employ certain means for achieving ecstasy, which may be frenzied and prolonged drumming, dancing, and chanting, sleep deprivation, fasting, and so on.  These techniques are not dissimilar to the self-flagellation and asceticism practiced by certain Christian mystics.  In addition to these techniques and often in conjunction with them, the shaman will employ certain narcotic plants, such as the drinking of tobacco juice or the inhalation of hashish smoke.  While Eliade asserts that the use of narcotic substances as an aid to ecstasy invariably indicates a decadence or vulgarisation of the shamanic tradition, there is reason to doubt this.  On the contrary, the use of narcotic plants as an adjunct to shamanism is widespread and occurs in every region of the globe where the plants occur.  The important role of the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria in Siberian shamanism has been exhaustively documented by Wasson, and the incredibly complete narcotic technology of New World Indians has been examined by Schultes at length.  From this evidence it appears that the narcotic experience and the shamanic experience are, in very numerous cases, one and the same, though the narcotic experience must be molded and directed by the symbolic motifs of ritual to give it is peculiarly shamanic quality.

It is our contention, to be amplified in later chapters, that the presence of psychoactive substances is a primary requirement for all true shamanism, and that where such substances are not exogenously available as plants, they must be endogenously available, either through metabolic predisposition to their synthesis, as may occur in schizophrenia, or through the various techniques of shamanism: dancing, drumming, singing, and the confrontation of situations of stress and isolation.  Where these alkaloids are not present, shamanism becomes ritual alone, and its effectiveness suffers accordingly.  We hope to show that because of the biophysical roles these compounds play at a molecular level, they are the operational and physical keys allowing access to the powers claimed by the shaman.

One of the most interesting, and least understood, aspects of the shamanic personality centres upon the question of paranormal powers; the shaman is supposed to be a master of fire and psychic heat, is thought to be clairvoyant, clairaudiant, and telepathic.  Further instances are given by Eliade:

From among the best-observed cases, let us recall those of clairvoyance and thought-reading among the shamans of Tonga, recorded by Shirokogorov; some strange cases of prophetic clairvoyance in dreams among the Pygmies, as well as cases of the discovery of thieves with the aid of a magic mirror; some very concrete instances concerning the results of the chase, also aided by a mirror; examples of the understanding, among these same Pygmies, of unknown languages; cases of clairvoyance among the Zulus; and lastly - attested by a number of authors, and by documents that guarantee its authenticity - the collective ceremony of firewalking in Fiji.

There is herein a fruitful and untapped subject for parapsychology.  The actual occurrence of such phenomena, in at least some instances, is beyond question and suggests that the radical reorginisation of the psychic faculties, which shamanic initiation is supposed to produce, does have some validity beyond the merely symbolic; the shaman actually is superhuman in some little-understood manner.  Our latest speculations will centre on a possible biophysical mechanism for this transformation.  What is interesting, and also supports the assertion that these phenomena are real, is their essential similarity to paranormal powers encountered in other religious traditions.  Such motifs as magical flight, psychic heat, and immunity to hot coals, for instance, are found in the yogic techniques of Buddhism and Hinduism.  The ability to perform such magical feats, in both the shamanic and the yogic traditions, simply reconfirms the ontological mode associated with such practitioners; they have transcended the human condition and now participate in the condition of the spirits.

Let us now focus our attention on a more speculative question: whether there are, or could be, institutions in modern society that draw their models from shamanism.  There appears to be occurring in modern life a progressive alienation from the numinous archetypal contents of the collective unconscious, which has engendered a gradually encroaching sense of collective despair and anxiety.  The archetypal motifs of the Western religious tradition seem to have lost their effectiveness for the larger portion of civilised humanity or, at best, have been depotentiated to the level of a merely psychological reality.  Western humans have lost their sense of unity with the cosmos and with the transcendent mystery within themselves.  Modern science has given us a picture of human beings as accidental products of random evolutionary processes in a universe that is itself without purpose or meaning.  This alienation of modern humans from the numinous ground of their being has engendered the existentialist ethic and the contemporary preoccupation with the immediate historical situation.  Humans are regarded as leading a wholly profane existence within a wholly profane time, that is, within history; the reality of the sacred is denied or reduced to the level of psychology.

In non-Western cultures, in primitive cultures particularly, humans are not conscious of living in historical time, but regard themselves as inhabiting a numinous sacral time.  If these humans are conscious of history at all, it is of a mythical, paradigmatic history, a paradisaical epoch that lies beyond the attritional influence of profane time.  From the point of view of religious symbolism, this preoccupation of modern humanity with is historical and existential situation springs from an unconscious sense of its impending end.

It is in this unenviable position, then, that we find the modern temper: anguished by the imminence of death, yet trapped in profane, historical time and thus able to regard death only as nothingness; the saving presence of a sacred, transcendent mode of being is absent from the contemporary worldview.  Thus modern humans stand today at the very edge of the abyss of death and nothingness, and it is precisely here than one can perceive a useful role for a modern shamanism.  Again this is a need for a doctor of the soul, a figure who can bring humankind into close and fruitful confrontation with the collective unconscious, the creative matrix or all that we are and have ever been.

Naturally, the modern shaman will have to search for a means of fulfilling his psychopompic functions, which are different from the relatively ritualistic techniques of his predecessor.  One of the most potentially effective of such means lies in his artistic and poetic capacities; the soul of modern humanity is still open to influence by aesthetic means.  Hence one of the first places we should look for signs of a modern shamanism is in the artistic sphere.  The shamanic role of the artist in modern cultures extends not only to his work, but to his very life.  Through manipulation of his physical medium, the artist seeks to express his personal vision of reality - a vision arising from the roots of the unconscious and not dependent upon public consensus, in fact, often actively opposed to it.  More than that, the artist exemplifies in his life a freedom that is similar to the superhuman freedom of the shaman.

Although it is not too difficult to recognise the role of the artist in the modern world as being in some sense shamanic, it is perhaps more difficult to understand our second nomination for a contemporary counterpart to the shamanic practitioner, the scientific researcher.  Eliade has pointed out that scientists are the creators and keepers of a new mythology of matter.  Indeed, the scientist who charts the unexplored levels of organisation to be found in nature, from the bizarre, paradoxical realms of quantum physics to the staggering vastness of the metagalaxy, has much in common with the shaman who journeys through the magical topography of the spirit-world.

One area of modern life that does not appear to be shamanic, but that might profitably model itself after shamanism, is psychoanalysis.  A modern soul doctor might well achieve better results if he or she could model therapy after a psychopompic journey through the collective unconscious.  The exact techniques would, of course, have to be adapted to modern patients, but where the unconscious is concerned, all people are primitive.  One approach to such a shamanic psychoanalysis could be through the controlled and judicious use of psychotropic drugs; knowledge of both the promises and dangers of such agents has increased tremendously in recent years, as has understanding of the role they play in shamanism.  A combination of knowledge and wisdom in applying their properties could very well give an effective and harmless technique of ecstasy that could be usefully employed in psychoanalysis.

With this we conclude our preliminary discussion of shamanism.  The background that we have laid down, our discussion of the shaman's traditional role in archaic societies, our examination of his singular personality, abilities, and techniques have been skeletal at best.  Our speculation on shamanism and modern society is likewise incomplete and intentionally so; we sought only to make the point that the numinous motifs of shamanism can have a relevance to modern humans, and doubtless there are instances of this that have not been mentioned.  If we are to draw a conclusion as to how we can profit from the study of shamanism, it is this: Perhaps, through understanding the fascinating and alien figure of the shaman, we can draw somewhat nearer to that numinous, archetypal, living mystery that dwells within each of us.

[chapter one of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching by Dennis J. McKenna and Terence K. McKenna (1975)]

References:
Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History.  New York: Harper Row, 1959.
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----------, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.
----------, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries.  New York: Harper Row, 1967.
Carl G. Yung, The Practice of Psychotherapy.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1954.
Andreas Lommel, Shamanism: The Beginnings of Art.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
S.F. Nadel, A Study of Shamanism in the Nuba Mountains.  /.Anth. Inst. of Great Britain and Ireland, 1946.
Claudio Naranjo, The Healing Journey.  New York: Random House, 1973.
Richard E. Schultes and A. Hofmann, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens.  Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1973.
R. Gordon Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality.  Italy: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.