2014 Personality Lecture 04: Heroic & Shamanic Initiations (Part 02)

I'm actually supposed to be talking to you about constructivism today but I'm not going to I'm going to continue talking to you about what I was talking to you last time and I'll collapse the constructivism lectures into one lecture so it'll keep us on track um I I want to tell you a little bit about a little bit more about this image and what it probably means and then then we're going we're going to Continue with our discussion of shamanic transformation and it's relationship transformation so the first thing if you look at the picture on

the right the first thing you'll see of course is that it's a tree and the tree is associated with the snake now I believe I told you guys about Lin Bell's research and the relationship between predatory snake prevalence and the Acuity of human vision is that you remember that okay that's good so so to me what the image On the right looks like is first of all it's like the ancestral home of human beings for tens of millions of years or our ancestors and so that the tree with the snake it's like the primary human

environment maybe 60 million years ago it's not human at that level but it's it's it's it's part of our evolutionary Heritage and then and it's also part of why we have a sense especially that large trees are sort of sacred that's one of the senses that drives Environmentalism for example because environmentalists are often very interested in protecting old growth forests which is actually kind of weird because old growth forests are ready to burn down and they're also kind of biologically dead because no light can get to the bottom and nothing grows down there so they're

just trees and they're almost dead trees so you know from a from a from the perspective of biological diversity they're not really That fruit an environment but human beings still have some real kinship with those gigantic trees and we feel that there's something you know natural and sacred about so superimposed on that is I think something like the next stage of human evolution and so you know the these these representations were made by people who were trying to represent sort of the Ultimate Reality of mankind and so superimposed on the tree is a is a

mountain and a mountain is a nice Representation of a pyramid and a pyramid is a nice representation of a dominance hierarchy of course I already mentioned to you that human beings live in dominance hierarchies and that they're a very permanent part of our environment being at least 300 million years old and possibly older than that so when when the human imagination is trying to conceptualize what constitutes Ultimate Reality that's a reality that's often beyond what you can merely see Because the things you see that are directly in front of you are not necessarily the most

real things in that many of the things that you see are transforming fairly rapidly they're not permanent in any real sense I mean automobiles you see all the time but they've only been around for 80 years you know it's not like we've adapted biologically to their presence so you have the mountain in the middle and the mountain is is sort of sitting in a Circumscribed territory and the idea there is that there's a dominance hierarchy that human beings inhabit and it always occupies a particular territory and the dominance hierarch is like the culture the place

of culture that mankind exists within that's surrounded by the chaos outside and the chaos outside is represented by well there's two snakes in the uh in the picture on sorry on the yeah on your right um the the snake in the in the Middle is an ER Rose which is a snake that eats its own tail and it's representative of the chaos that's outside of the familiarity of your culture and so that's it's a very as we've mentioned already it's a very intelligent perspective because it says well mankind always lives in culture and surrounding culture

is the unknown and that's the Eternal habitat of of man so of human beings so and then I I showed you this picture Briefly and that's the picture that was derived by a German researcher who was examining the visions of the Peruvian Amazonian Indians the shaman and you can see that it's it's almost staggeringly the same as the Scandinavian persp facted right down to the snake e its own tail which by the way is an extremely common ancient symbol so it's quite remarkable um now what might unite and then I talk to you about my

my son's drawing I haven't didn't get to this one Though now what what might unite these different Visions say that the Scandinavian vision and the Amazonian shamanic Vision are the methods that the people who had the Visions used to induce them and I'll talk to you a little bit about that but first of all I'm going to tell you about this picture because I think this is one there's a couple of variations of this picture picture that I found I actually don't know its name but I think it's one of The most amazing images I've

ever come across because in some ways sums up Christianity in one picture and that's that's no easy thing to do and the reason I think it's important to uh to to talk about the this Christian representation for example though we've already talked about some DST representations is because if in so far as we're embedded in westernized Civilization the roots of westernized civilization are they push themselves Down into Christianity and then deeper there's deeper substrata under that the religious structures that preceded Christianity but if you want to understand the Western Notions of the person and the

ideal person as well you have to look at the structure of the systems that Western Civilization grew out of because the religious systems for example are the systems in which the idea of the ideal emerged and so you you can't come to grips with the idea of the Ideal or the idea of mental health which is which is an ideal without understanding the ground out of which these ideas emerged you can't come to terms with it in any fundamental sense and the thing is if you're doing Clinical Psychology for example you have to come to

terms with it in a fundamental sense because a lot of the time when people come and see you the reason they come and see you is because their their sense of life's meaning has Been shattered and and they're unable to proceed without the restoration of that meaning so maybe their belief systems fell apart and they faced some sort of tragedy that's just blowing them into pieces and and they have no idea how to orient themselves because life always presents a an existential question and one that we'll deal with later which is life is difficult and

it's characterized by suffering and because of that there has to be a reason to stand up against That and so the reason has to be made coherent so you have to know in some sense that you're the sort of creature that can voluntarily face the tragic conditions of existence and Prevail and that's a religious presupposition fundamentally because it's based on it's a hypothesis in some sense that human beings are like that so let me tell you about this image because it's it's a staggering image it's so brilliant so the first thing you'll notice is that

of Course there's a tree in the middle of it and sort of looks like the tree that you know a little kid would draw they sort of look like lollipops or something like that so it's a schematized tree and you'll see of course that the snake is wrapped around the tree the snake and the tree seem to come along together unbelievably often so Aus is Rod for example aspius is the Greek God of healing and you see the symbol of the Greek God of healing which is the asus's Rod is still used to represent Physicians

and it's a rod with a snake WRA around it too and the snake represents transformation because it can die it can shed its skin and sort of be reborn and and for many other reasons besides but in this representation which is partly derived from Genesis and then partly derived from the development of Christian ideas for thousands of years after that there's a particular idea that's being portrayed now you notice That up in the tree there are little things that look like fruit and one of those things is a skull right now so the idea there

is that the fruit that the tree produced is in somehow is in some manner equivalent to death now in this in the Genesis story what happens is that Eve temps Adam with the fruit from the tree so she offers him this fruit now that's a very interesting thing because women historically speaking have been gatherers like men do the hunting Generally speaking in archaic societies and women do the gather it and human beings have also uh subsisted for large parts of the Revolutionary history before we were human beings as FR jores we ate fruit and we

the reason we have color vision by the way is so that we can detect ripe fruit and ripe fruit is also tightly associated with sexuality so like if you look through the ads in women's magazines the makeup ads the associations between ripeness and fruit And say women's cheeks and women's lips are always very much they're much put forward you know and and so there's a tight association between sexuality and food and for a variety of reasons but so Eve basically tempts Adam in some sense into a conscious relationship with her by offering him food and

in the case of the Genesis story it's it's ripe fruit and so it's an enticement and she also entices him into self-consciousness which is quite interesting because Number one women do make men self-conscious I mean that's like that's sort of an ultimate truth of the of the nature of the relationship between men and women and rejection in particular is something that makes men self-conscious and they're much more what exposed to that than women are in in the sort of sexual dance because women are sort of on average quite s quite successful at uh seeking out

sexual encounters where men are on average very unsuccessful at Doing the same thing so they suffer a lot of rejection that's a very fundamental form of rejection right it's like well you're you know you're good enough to maybe tolerate being alive and all that but your genetic material should by no means be allowed to you know move itself into the future it's a really fundamental form of rejection and the rejection is while you don't measure up and that's certainly the ground of self-consciousness and so there's a lot Of weird things tangled up together in the

Genesis story so Eve gives Adam the fruit and what happens is that wakes him up what the story says is that the scales fall from his eyes and then the first thing that happens is he realizes he's naked and that's a very interesting kind of realization because to be one of the very common nightmares that people have is that they're naked in front of a crowd so you might say well what does it mean to be naked in front of a crowd Well it means to have your vulnerability exposed to the arbitrary Judgment of of

the cultural Mass you know it's a nightmare for most people and human beings are very weird animals because most animals wander around on four legs and of course that means the armored part of their body is what shows right their spine and their ribs along the back which is pretty tough and hard but human beings are standing up so the most vulnerable parts of our body are Broadcast straightforward so and so when human beings woke up during our evolutionary you know progress towards the kind of Consciousness we have when we became self-conscious that was essentially

equivalent to recognizing our naked vulnerability and that's what the Genesis story is trying to relate you know and it also points out that it says snakes women and fruit played an integral role in the development of human self-consciousness and so here the The fruit that's being eaten is equivalent to death and that's why there's a skull in the tree and so because what happened was when people became self-conscious like consciously self-conscious we we started to understand the full nature of our vulnerability and so what does that mean well for human beings in part it meant

that we discovered time like and that's a great thing to discover because then It means you have the future to think about but it's also an absolute bloody catastrophe because you also understand that the future is finite and that your life is bounded and that you will end and as far as we know human beings are the only creatures that have to contend with that knowledge and once you have it like once you wake up like that there's no going back to sleep like it's a qualitative transformation in the nature of experience and you know

the Genesis Story pushes the idea for farther it says the re the fact that we've woken up and are and are aware of our vulnerability is also what makes us Fallen creatures it makes us alienated from existence in a way that animals aren't and so what that also means and this is sort of an existential idea is that the rise of self-consciousness in that manner which is in part the knowledge of death is also what's made people Um well one of the things that happens for example in Genesis is it's quite a funny story so

Eve makes Adam all self-conscious and then they wander off and cover themselves up right which is sort of the the first uh entry into of cultural artifacts into the paradisal state it's right the first thing you do once you realize you're naked is cover yourself up now you know that story is often interpreted in a sexual way and there's elements of that but it's more It's more pragmatic it's like yeah once you figure out that you're naked and that you're going to freeze to death and then it's cold in the future it's like the first

thing you do do is cover yourself up you know and people have been wearing clothes for a very long time we've been wearing clothes for so long that body lights are adapted to clothing and so it's been tens of thousands of years so you know and obviously human beings are also the only Creatures that wear clothes which is you know and it's a human Universal by the way people wear clothes everywhere that virtually everywhere that human beings have been discovered so you cover yourself up and that's the first indication that you're aware of your vulnerability

but you're also aware of the necessity of taking care of yourself as a you know as a separate entity which which animals animals don't really seem to have that notion I mean they get Hungry and all that but it's not obvious that they you know that they can extend the idea of hunger into the future so that you know so so that they're they're caring about times that are not not here yet now what happens after people become self-conscious they cover themselves up and then God comes into the garden which he's always doing to have

a walk with Adam and Adam can't be found and so God says you know well you know where are you we know what are you doing hiding Away and Adam's cowering behind a bush this is really stupid he's there with Eve you know thinking I suppose that God can't see through the bush or whatever it is that he's thinking and you know he makes a case that God asks him what in the world he's doing hiding and he says well I'm naked and God says well you know how do you figure that out and of

course Adam being the heroic figure he is immediately points to Eve and says well it was the woman's fault you made Her for me but you know it was her that tempted me so it's really quite a comical story it's it's often being read being read by sort of patriarchal Christian interpreters as a story that implicates implicates Eve in the initial destruction of mankind but from for my way of reading it it's just as hard on Adam or even worse because he's such a cringing coward when things really start to go wrong I mean the

first thing he does is hide because he's naked and the Second thing he does as soon as he's pushed on it a bit it's like it's your fault it's your fault you know he won't take responsibility for it and that's also an extremely complex story because one of the things it implies it's a brilliant brilliant idea is that like if you can imagine metaphorically that walking with God means something like you know uh staying in close contact with the divine nature of being or something like that and having ultimate Faith in the positive nature of

reality things that might be damaged if you became self-conscious well why would you stop believing in that which would be to stop walking with God and the answer to that is well you become aware of your own vulnerability and your own you know finiteness and that makes you afraid so you hide and that is what people do they do that all the time it's a it's a chronic state of human existence that in many ways you hide from the best parts Of yourself and I mean adolescence is usually like the painful acting out of that

process over a protracted period of time and people often never really recover from that they won't bring their best forward because they're afraid no and and you know and they're afraid for good reason and so God says well now you've done it you know we can't undo this and so now out you go you're not going to be in Paradise anymore which means you're no longer going to be Unconscious like a happy child it's like you've screwed up completely you know you're finite now you're going to have to work because now you're aware of the

future and so you know all these things can go wrong so you're going to have to work because you realize that the future could be dangerous you have to fix things up and he tells the women that they're going to suffer dreadfully in child birth it's very well it's very interesting because there's a reason That women suffer in child birth and the reason for that is that their child's heads are too big I told you about that the last time we met you know and so the story there also Associates cortical expansion with self-consciousness and

with the difficulty of birth it's a bloody brilliant story it's just unbelievable how much information is packed into it and then that's that's very characteristic of archetypal stories it also helps you see how the You know another manifestation of the kind of tree symbolism say that's characteristic of the Scandinavian Stories the provian Amazonian stories and the and and the role of the snake play no trees without snakes no Paradise without snakes no ability of mankind to ever produce a bounded environment that's safe without something chaotic managing to come inside of it there's no way you

can do it it's a very paradoxical element of existence so That's pretty that's pretty interesting so that's what's happening with Eve on the right side of the of the picture you see this the skeleton at the back there representing death you know and so that's good old Eve and then on the on the on the left side here you have the embodiment of the church and and the Christian Tradition now she's also handing out things that are from the tree and so this is like that the the religious stories in general are stories About tragedy

and Redemption that's sort of what makes them religious stories it's like they outline the terrible things that can happen to you like in the most brutal possible way and then they provide a theory about a motive being that might help you address that so that's the Redemptive part and so the Redemptive part here is you see in the tree there's also a crucifix it's sort of the counterpart to the skull and in the tree all these little fruits and Some of them are obviously the Apple skulls that Eve are handing out but what they are

on the left hand side are hosts and the host is the little thing that that Catholics eat during the mass and the host is hypothetically part of Christ's body and so that's a what it's a derivative of the last supper and so and there's an unbelievably archaic idea that that lurks underneath that because it's basically basically a cannibalistic ritual and the idea is essentially that If you could identify something that's an ideal and you can incorporate it and you do that most basically by eating because that's how you incorporate most basically then that can become

part of you so you can take on the attributes of something by incorporating it and so part of the Christian drama is an attempt to inculcate in its followers the idea that you should imitate the ultimate ideal the question is well what's the ultimate ideal different Religions handle that in different ways so Buddha for example is an ultimate ideal for Buddhists Christ is an ultimate ideal for Christians so then you might say well what exactly is this thing that's ideal okay so the host is part of it so partly it's the body of Christ and

partly it's a wheat and wafer and the reason it's made out of wheat is because wheat was regarded as a dying and resurrecting crop because it's a it's a it's a crop that you know Disappears in the fall and then comes back in the spring like most agricultural crops do so it's kind of an eternal Miracle so it's it's like the dying and resurrecting corn God and so that's a pagan idea that's sort of assimilated to the Christian idea and then there's something that's more profound underneath that which is that the idea is that the

part of the human spirit that can accept death and die and resurrect itself which means to Continually transform in the face of tragedy is the thing that's the antidote to the painful catastrophe of self-consciousness it's a staggering idea I I've studied personality theory for a long time and the first thing that I've discovered relationship to this is almost all the personality theories that we have that involve movement towards a state of improved Health are predicated on the idea that people transform Through well through a process of painful transformation it's like disolution a part of your

personality which is painful and chaotic and then the Reconstruction of that into a into a more fulfilled form and the reason that's associated with acceptance of vulnerability it's it's it's again it's brilliant this is why humility is a virtue from the religious perspective is that you cannot change until you admit that you're wrong and that part of you Has to go so you have part of admitting your insufficiency is being willing to sacrifice that insufficiency to let it go so that something new can rise out of the ashes and sometimes that can be your whole

personality you know to the degree that you're pathological in your fundamental structures man there may be things that you have to give up that are huge chunks of your life so the alternative is to be in pain and suffering and misery and and you know That can turn into cruelty and murderousness and and things that are much much more terrible than mere suffering so that's the idea here it's a whole the whole story of human redemption in single image mind blog brilliant and you know it took people like it took people thousands of years to

think up this image or maybe tens of thousands of years so there's so much thought packed into that image that it's it's it's being Beyond virtually Beyond Comprehension remarkable image so here's here are some other representations of trees that I think are quite interesting so the first one here is a sculpture a living sculpture that's a representation of a cathedral you can see obviously how the trees the curvature of the trees makes this you know beautiful Arch that's echoed in the gothic Cathedrals and the gothic Cathedrals are Stone trees essentially the fs being the trees

and so in some Sense they're representative of the forest that's human beings Primal home but they're representative of something more than that too because the gothic Cathedrals are these interesting trees made out of stone that are also places of light because what the gothic Cathedrals are basically they're what they're made of are is the interplay between tree like Stone and light the St glass windows of course are the light and so there's this Idea that the ultimate structure structure is some tree like column that's that's that's invadable by light and in some ways that's an

analog of the body and it's and its function so and you see symbols that are associated with this well first of all you see sorry these are echoes these are echoes of the treel like structures that are within because the tree structure is a structure that many biological forms take and so you know there's the that's The nervous system tree this is really worth meditating on for a bit because most of us are convinced that our brain you know is in our head and really that's not right it's it's just not that accurate I mean

look at the look at the dissemination of your nervous system throughout your body you know your brain is distributed through your body your spinal cord is pretty damn smart you know it can walk by itself so for example if you take people who have who Are paraplegic but have only they've managed spinal damage at a point that doesn't they're no longer able to voluntarily control their leg if you hoist them up and put them on a treadmill and tilt them forward their legs will walk by themselves so because your spinal cord is smart enough to

walk I mean you need your brain to tell it where to go but in some people who are paraplegic have been taught to to walk in a controlled fall and so it's quite Interesting so you know your spine isn't stupid it's part of your brain it's just a lower part that's more associated with movement but you know your whole body is full of central nervous system there's more neurons in your autonomic nervous system which is is the part of your nervous system that controls your internal organs than there is in your brain so like you

know you're s you're stuck right in your body and the idea that you're you're in your brain in some Ways it's like a hangover of the Soul Theory you know The cartisian Duality that makes mind and body something separate and United I mean I believe there's something to that theory but you know it definitely underestimates the the degree to which you're an embodied nervous system and that the and that the structure of your thought is predicated on the fact that you're in a body like you're an embodied cognitive creature and you wouldn't think or be

the way you Are without the body it's not like an appendage to your brain you know that is how it works at all you can see the brain and the and the spinal cord as a tree and you can see the neurons themselves as a tree so the tree likee structure Echoes at different levels of the nervous system these are very interesting representation so the the the the man in the in the uh Lotus position why Lotus position that's another tree metaphor so A Lotus is a very interesting plant so what a Lotus is is

that it grows on water so the water's deep and maybe the top of it's clear but then the bottom of the water is very very murky and deep and dark and so it represents the dark element say of the unconscious mind or the unknown that aren't that we aren't privy to and the Lotus grows way down into that and then into the soil below and so it comes out of the darkness the soil and the Darkness and then Through The Dark Water and then up into the into the clear light and on the surface of

the water it blooms and so it opens up like like a Mandela like the stained glass window on the right it opens up like that and in the middle of that the Buddhist sits in his triangular position in the Lotus position and that represents Enlightenment and what what the whole image represents is the coherent ordering of multiple levels of structure all the way from the Primal Material up to the high level of Consciousness and so the Buddha is like the ultimate flower of the of the lotus tree so to speak just as in Christianity Christ

is the ultimate the ultimate what manifestation of the of the tree of the knowledge of of Good and Evil the very very analogous ideas and and there's reasons for this too and part of it is part of it is something like if you're psychophysiology was properly adjusted so you weren't working across purposes To yourself and so that you were nicely aligned straight up physically healthy and not like the defeated Lobster scuttling around the information flow through your nervous system through your body and your mind would be optimized and that would enable the reality that you're

attached to and part of to flow through you sort of in an untrammeled way you know instead of you're you're all full of cricks and trouble and problems and and places that are badly Aligned and you know you haven't got the opportunity as a consequence to sort of get access to to your own wisdom is you're sort of a bent representation of who you could be and so part of this and also the like the stone and glass that's represent represented in the cathedrals is a representation of the idea that there should be a balance

between structure and light in you it's like it's the metaphorical idea and that you should be properly oriented physically So that so that so that you're in touch with the ground of being in a way that makes you wise and solid and that's one of the things that enables you to take on the tragedy of existence without becoming weak I mean these are these are they brilliant ideas so this is a this is an Eastern Mandela and and to me what what it is is it's a tunnel into this tree like structure it's like a

crosssection of the tree likee structure and it's as if you're looking into the Tree like structure down to the micro elements of being and there's a representation there about how perfectly aligned everything is at every level of of of resolution and every level of manifestation so he's that that or that's inside it that's another way of looking at it it's the same representation on the western side of things it's like that stained glass windows like a crosssection of the trunks that make up the cathedral all These buildings like the medieval people spend a lot of

time building those Cathedrals you know those things were massive works of culture and some of them took hundreds of years to build I mean can you imagine modern people building anything that would take like even a 100 years it's like we want things to be up in 6 months you know at most those medieval people would work away for like 300 years on a cathedral they were really serious about what it Was and what it represented you know they were trying to to produce a uh the embodiment of the highest ideal in architectural form you

know and we've lost a lot of that even on the campus you can see that because if you know if you go over to the sort of classical side of the campus it's all you know Cathedral likee and beautiful and there's there's some there's some attention being paid to the aesthetic element of the wisdom that's embodied There and then you come over on this side it's a bloody like it's hideous it's a factory you know the the aesthetic is so terrible it's it's it's appalling all the buildings that you know they're built to last for

50 years and then they're outdated and they're completely cheap and hideous and you know they are they're cinder block you know and fluorescent lights it's like come on you know and they have you guys sit in these things that are so Uncomfortable that you wouldn't put your dog in them and you know it's it's well it's lost lose this sort of thing you know there's a big difference between a medieval Cathedral a go the cathedral in this bloody place you know but what you're supposed to be in a university is something that's like a medieval

Cathedral you know it's a it's a testament to the best that mankind has to offer you don't put it in a box like this it's appalling it's really it's Appalling there's no excuse for it I actually think it's a conscious effort to subvert the values of the University because it's not a factory you're not Factory products you you know the university is here to teach you how to be human beings and that's the highest thing that you can aim for it's and to subvert that to a lower ORD it's the worst thing that can be

done it's a crime against humanity there's no excuse for it and the ugliness that goes along With it is part and parcel of the subversion it's like a hatred of the highest values it's a terrible thing so you know nobody none of you are going to go home and say and feel proud that you were sitting in this room you know all right so now the shaman are very strange people and it's very difficult to know how long archaic people have been practicing Shamanic rituals but we know that it's tens of thousands of years and

we also know that most of the shamanic rituals and the visions that accompany them are induced by some kind of hallucinogenic substance and it depends like it depends on the culture what the hallucinogenic substance is but one of the things that's quite interesting about them is that they all have basically the same chemical structure and I'll show you that in a minute so in the shaman people Who are chosen to be Shaman are basically you might think of them as the repositories of the oral tradition of the culture you know because most cultures have for

it to be a culture first of all if it's a culture and it's living it's been around for a tremendous amount of time you know and non non-literate cultures have to carry the wisdom that they have with them in order oral form or in embodied form so in ritual form or in oral form and somebody Has to be the fundamental repository of that kind of wisdom so the sort of the Storyteller of the tribe and The Keeper of the flame so to speak and that's usually the role that the shaman have and they're the people

who are contacted when something's gone wrong with you if you're a sick or if you know you're having real trouble mediating with another tribe member someone like that or or you know when you're maybe overcome with awe because you're looking At the night sky you know it's the shaman who supposed to be dealing with the realities that are outside of day-to-day reality and so they're like masters of Sacred Space that's one way of thinking about it and sometimes they're that way because their father was a shaman or maybe their mother and sometimes it's because they're

kind of peculiar you know they're people who are Visionary as as part of their temperament and we know that visionar so To speak is an element of temperament It's associated with trait openness and that's associated partly with intelligence but also partly with creativity and those things aren't exactly the same so some people are more imaginative and Visionary than others and in our culture those would be people who tell great stories like JK Rowling is a really good example of that she's been a shamanic intermediary for a you know for an entire generation of young People

with these massive books that she she's written that you know have a mythological core right down to their right down to their Essence and Stan Lee who ran Marvel Comics is another person like that you know who's had an immense cultural influence because because he's brought these ancient stories back up from the depths and put them into modern form you know and the writers of these things are quite consciously aware of what they're doing with regards to the Relationship with the underlying myths they're not stupid people and even if they were their readership rapidly informs

them if they're deviating from the you know proper narrative Arc of the story because those all those superheroes have their you know dedicated Cults of followers and they make bloody sure that the new writers don't mess around with the story and so not only not only is it top down from the writers but it's also bottom up from The readers so they're all participating in the construction of a continuing cultural apparatus so spontaneous vocation while you're sort of designed for hereditary transmission well you know it's a familial issue and then there's the personal Quest issue

too so you know that's sort of associated with spontaneous vocation so and the personal Quest element would be there's always people in every culture who are fundamentally obsessed with the pursuit Of meaning you know that's their essential orientation towards life they're not particularly practical like a conscientious person would be because a conscientious person works you know and their their head isn't in the clouds but there are types of people who are are not like that at all their heads are in the clouds permanently and you know they're extraordinary imaginative and creative and they're they're thought

leaders in many ways for the culture Because a lot of what cultures learn in an articulated sense a lot of what they become conscious of is presented to them by artists in somewhat unconscious form long before the full meaning of the of the of what's being portrayed as articulated just like that you know I just showed you that tree image with Mary and the church you know on either side of it it's not like the person who drew that knew what they were doing they knew more about what they were doing Than the people who

couldn't draw that sort of thing but they were they were existing on the edge of their knowledge making this representation thinking I trying to get at something here I'm trying to get at something here but they didn't really know what it was because the idea is so complex that you know when when people are coming up with it over these thousands of years year periods they don't realize the full import of what it is that they're Revealing I mean just as you don't realize your own full import by whatever this is from meria alad uh

by but by whatever method he may have been designated the shaman is recognized as such only after having received two methods of instruction the first is ecstatic dreams transis Visions the second is traditional shamanic techniques names and functions of the spirits mythology and genealogy of the plan and secret language the two-fold Teaching imparted by the spirits in the old Master Shaman constitutes initiation and so that that's a very interesting uh that's a very interesting representation of the manner in which personal revelation becomes knowledge so you know let's say you know you're beset by like a

very frightful series of nightmares I mean what that's going to do is to drive you to try to understand how to represent what you're having nightmares about in terms of the cultural elements That you have at hand because that that's what makes you sane you know if you're having experiences that are beyond the the norm unless you can incorporate them back into your culture you're alienated from your culture and that's a terrifying thing it means like you might be the only person that's insane like you and you know it's very it's very intolerable for people

it's bad enough to be different but to be so different that you're incomprehensible It's like to you that's the sort of horror you don't want to encounter so the shaman are people who are are possessed by like a rich inner fantasy life but who are simultaneously capable of taking that and weaving it into the cultural mythology that they're part of that's what makes them sane rather than insane right because a schizophrenic is someone who's has Visionary experience although it's often auditory you know they hear voices and they're possessed By Spirits in a sense you see

them wandering down the street you know muttering to their to their own internal voices but they can't integrate any of that with the culture and so they're just they're gone like they're lost souls so the shaman is someone who does both you know who who has the Visions but who incorporate it at the same time so he's someone who's Master of the visions and not victim of them and so there's technologies that allow people To do that and a lot of them are associated as I said before with the use of various sologenic substances in

Siberia the youth who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior for example he seeks Solitude becomes absent minded loves to roam in the woods or unfrequented places has visions and sings in his sleep in some instances this period of incubation is marked by quite serious symptoms among the yakuts the young man sometimes has Fits of Fury and easily loses Consciousness hides in the forest feeds on the bark of trees throws himself into water and fire and cuts himself with knives those are ordeals in a sense you know a future Shaman

among the tongus as they approach maturity go through a hysterical or hyoid crisis but sometimes their vocation manifests itself at an earlier age the boy runs away into the mountains and remains there for a week or more feeding on animals which he Tears to pieces with his teeth he returns to the Village filthy and Blood Stained and it's only after 10 or more days have pass that he begins to babble incoherent words so you think from the perspective of modern human beings that this is something like descent into the unconscious structures that underly normative cognition

just like you descend into that at night when you dream it's a very peculiar process that you're all perfectly capable of engaging In but have most of you have virtually no control over it I mean there are people who dream lucidly you know and who can exert some conscious control over their dreams most people can learn how to do that to some degree but in our culture at least most people dream unconsciously and it's just something that happens to you and not something that you're actively engaged with a strange behavior of future Shaman have not

failed to attract the attention of Scholars and from the middle of the past Century by which he meant the 19th century several attempts have been made to explain the phenomenon of shamanism as a mental disorder but the problem was wrongly put for on the one hand it's not true that shamans always are always have to be neuropathic or neurotics or people who are not well put together mentally on the other hand those among them who had been ill became Shaman precisely because they had succeeded in becoming Cure so what that means is these are people

who've undergone some kind of existential crisis sometimes one that's induced you know as part of the process that turns them into Shaman but they were able to undergo that existential crisis and then put themselves back together and so that's what makes the masters of of the chaotic realm so to speak and so you're starting to fall apart and you don't know what to do well The best thing you can possibly do is find someone who's being there and come back and that idea of going somewhere and coming back is also a very very common ological

story so that's the story that the of of The Hobbit for example right The Hobbit goes off on this Quest and he undergoes all sorts of Trials and he encounters the dragon that lives underneath everything and he gets the gold from the dragon which is the information that the dragon stores and Then he comes back to his community and he's transformed but he's strange like he's gone off on this big adventure now he's like well put together with tough and he's also rich but he's also peculiar you know when when when Bilbo Bilbo goes back

to the Shire you know know everybody no one's exactly sure what to do with him CU now he's contaminated with everything that he's gone through so he's like an agent of chaos himself you know and someone who's Somewhat terrifying but you know useful if you have to have a consultation about how you might deal with the next dragon so now I said that a lot of the shamanic initiatory rituals seem to be associated with the L use of hallucinogenic drugs and so the most common ones that we know about are mushrooms so for example there's

this mushroom which many of you probably seen in fairy tales right that's on the cover of fairy tales very Frequently and that's called an amonita muscaria mushroom and it's generally viewed as extremely toxic and there's some there's some reason for that because it can it can make the people who eat it very sick and now and then people do die from it but mostly it's extraordinarily hallucinogenic the Vikings for example this is quite a terrifying Story the Vikings used to take amonita muscaria mushrooms before they went on their pillaging trips and They used the mushrooms

to transform themselves into the equivalent of predatory monsters so they usually their their sort of Target was wolves or Bears and the the word berser which is what the Vikings used to go meant bear shirt and so they would train their young men to eat these hallucinogenic mushrooms and turn themselves into painfree predators and then they would take them before they went on a pillaging raid and so you just imagine you know you're Sitting there in northern England and you're in your village and it's all peaceful and these bloody crazy Vikings come all the out

of the ocean and the boats you know the open boats that they've traveled across the North Sea and and they're all like stoned out of their gourd on amonita muscaria mushrooms and all convinced that they're like predatory bears and that's exactly how they're acting and they have no pain whatsoever it's Like that's not a good scene that's not a good scene you know and the Vikings come through and they just destroy everything it's like so that's they're used they were used for Marshall purposes by the Vikings but they're they're they're they're they're a drug that's

used very commonly by people who are inducing shamanic experiences among themselves across the whole northern part of Europe and Asia and they grow almost everywhere so those are the Original magic mushroom you know the magic red mush with the white dots and if you look in you can see these things in in drawings everywhere especially in fairy tales very common representation in Fairy Tales um there is some evidence that religions that are I suppose in some ways more articulated and sophisticated in that they're more articulated like Christianity say compared to the more sha shamanic uh

religions are have also Have their roots in hallucinogenic experience and this may be true to a degree that we really don't understand so for example this is something this is taken from the ID manuscript which is 11th century fundamentally 11th to 13th century because there were copies of it made at different times what you see here it's mind Walling really is that the tree that the snake is associated with is a psilocybon mushroom and that's a Very characteristic representation of the psilocin mushroom and the and the fruit that Eve is feeding to AB is part

of the psilocin mushroom and there is speculation you know among people who are sort of at the fringes of of evolutionary theory that part of the way that human beings levered themselves up into increased Consciousness was by the use of mushrooms and you can see in the in the representations over there some of them are absolutely remarkable like The one on the top right hand corner there that's Christ and he's standing there like like this with his hands up and then underneath the bottom half of that circle is a psilocybon mushroom with the head is

in u the like the main body of the mushroom is in the same position as Christ's head and the like the offshoots of the mushroom are in the same position as his hands so well God only knows what that means so that's that's very strange and and and a Remarkable thing and we really don't know what to make of it and there's a lot more investigation to be done on that this is an iasa Vine and it's the it's part of what the Amazonian Shaman used to brew their hallucinogenic mixtures and no none of the

uh westerners who've gone to study the Amazonian Shaman can figure out how the hell they determined how they were going to make their mixture because it's virtually impossible to make you need to Take the vine and then you need to take another plant that doesn't grow in the same place and you have to mix them together in the right proportions and then you have to cook them together for 72 hours and you have to do that without breathing in any of the vapors and you know there's thousands and thousands of different kinds of plants in

the Amazonian jungle and it isn't obvious in any way how the people who are using these mixtures figured out how to make Them and if you ask them they say well the plants told us how to do it and you know that for modern Western people that's not much of an explanation but it's certainly the explanation that the tribesmen seem to stick to and you know God only knows how people gather their information you know chimpanzees use medicinal plants you know they're they're capable of finding plants in their habitat they can eat that are Tic

or so on that that helped them deal with Diseases and it's not clear at all how they figured that out so there's lots of mysteries about the origin of human knowledge that's for sure so three sources of potential Visionary experience and this is very interesting so here's the biochemical construction of hallucinogenic chemicals so the first thing you see on the bottom right is a serotonin molecule now serotonin is in some ways it's the major brain neurotransmitter the reason I say that Is because during your embryological development your brain grows out you know it sort of

sort of flowers forth and it's guided in its development by the serotonin system the system that uses serotonin as its primary neurochem chemical transmitter so it's it's not only an our very archaic system and it's so old that you share it as I've mentioned before with Crustaceans but it's also the system that sort of puts you together as you emerge out of Nothing and so you see its peculiar chemical structure there and then you see these are all different hallucinogenic substances um this one is psilocin for example and um they're all and DMT is a

very weird chemical it's very illegal EMT it produces it's part of iasa although I is made with a plant that contains DMT and then something called an MAO inhibitor which decreases the rate at which your body breaks it down but pure DMT produces an Instantaneous 10minute uh hallucinogenic high that people where people constantly report contact with aliens there's a psychiatrist who spent years documenting DMT experiences and every single person he he cont he he walked through the experience with reported the same thing they're shot out of their body they're immediately in an alien landscape so

well you know what what that seems to indicate is that you know from a from a more purely rational perspective is that These chemicals produce characteristic experiences that are associated with Visionary experience they put you in something that's like a dream state now oddly the dream state seems to be somewhat similar from person to person but there are ways that in in some sense that the UN the contents of the unconscious mind could be made manifest to the conscious mind at least for for brief periods of time sometimes that can be clearly horrify Ying because

Sometimes people take these these these chemicals and have like the worst experience of their life and part of that seems to be associated with the sort of thing that might happen to you in Psychotherapy so for example if you were convinced that your psyche wasn't very well ordered and you were harboring sort of dark secrets and lies and all the sorts of things that might complicate your life and all sorts of familial pathology and you know cultural Bagage and like the horrors that sort of live inside your brain you know in Psychotherapy you would sort

of confront those on by one in a hallucinogenic experience you might confront all of those at the same time you know and for for many people that's exactly equivalent to a quick trip to hell and it's not something they'd rather repeat so now why that why things are set up that way well who knows you know I mean we don't really understand these things Uh we don't understand the relationship between the parts of the brain that are articulated and conscious and then the lower parts that are sort of the repositories of traumatic information um and

there's deeper Mysteries that we don't understand too so it turns out I don't know if any of you are familiar with the term epig Genesis but there there are studies of epigenetics now that show that there are certain experiences that alter your genetic Structure and well we know that partly because when like if you put yourself in a new situation a radically new situation new genes will turn on inside of you and they'll code for new proteins and they'll build new structures for you so new neurological structures sometimes and that's part of how you can

adapt and it's also part of the reason why banging yourself against various obstacles you know in a in a kind of what systematic way is a good way of expanding your Range of capabilities so we know that experience can turn new new genetic processes on that that are sort of latent prior to that but what we didn't know was that some of those experiences transform your genetic structures in a way that you can transmit to your children so and that you know that's lamaran Evolution no one ever ever hypothesized that that was possible but you

can look it up it's it's mainstream Science Now although you know people are Still not really sure what to do about it how to think about it from a conceptual perspective because that sort of thing wasn't supposed to be possible so you know so we we have no idea to to what level of being your experiences can can be encoded and we really don't know how you encode experience anyways we don't know what the fundamental structures of your memory are how that associated with your conceptions of time and space or and how that's related to

Your ongoing experience like those things are deeply mysterious to us and what happens at least in part with the hallucinogens is that they seem to take all the horrors and Terrors that you haven't dealt with and just put them in your face now and that's part of the shamanic experience and so it's not something for people to take lightly and you know and generally generally people don't so but I've often found that it was very strange that these chemicals Produce experiences that are so strange that our culture instantly deemed them illegal you know for me

it's like looking at what happened back in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church went after Galileo because he had something you know strange to say about the moon it's like these experiences have tapped into something that's a very very primordial element of human existence and Associated say with the shamanic rituals that have been going on For tens of thousands of years and that human cultures have always used to orient themselves and they're so an there there there's so much antha to our current culture that you know we we we punish people severely for experimenting

with them it's very very peculiar Behavior so although there's no doubt that this sort of thing is dangerous and very peculiar but you know so the shaman report relatively um what constant types of experiences when They're undergoing their transformative experiences and here's a couple of them one is climbing the world tree we've already we've already talked about the world tree and what that seems to be if you look at the reports of the shaman is that they they seem their Consciousness seems to be able to to move itself up and down levels of analysis that

aren't necessarily available to you in your normal State of Consciousness now whether or not that's a real phenomenon Or whether or not it's part associated with the dream isn't exactly clear so um part of it is for example that you know the shaman become convinced that they can communicate with things like plants at a very fundamental level but they are also capable of when they climb up the tree for example of entering sort of the realm of their ancestors and and communing with them and I just read a book here recently about the Revival of

Mongolian Shamanism and the Mongolian Situation is kind of interesting because it was a pretty archaic culture and then the Soviets came in there and like communized it you know which was sort of economically useful but socially it was an absolute catastrophe because the Soviets were murderous beyond belief and then in 1989 they just left and so the Mongolians like they were completely up in the air then because their traditional culture had been fragmented and you know the whole communist thing Was a bust and they reverted back to shamanic practices and the shaman told them that

part of the reason that they were all suffering was because they had lost contact with their ancestral spirits and partly what they meant by that was that the continuity of the culture had been disrupted and so people were identityless you know and it was funny because when Alexander Sol niten wrote about the Soviet Union and he wrote volume he wrote extensively about About the the Soviet experience his eventual conclusion was that the the best route for the Soviets to take after the collapse of Communism would be a return to the sort of The evolutionary process

of development that characterized their exploration of Orthodox Christianity because you have to fall back to something you know because people need a meaning structure and you know modern people have a hard time with incomprehensible religious Meaning structures because you know we demand a certain amount of rational Clarity but there's a problem with that because the absolute mysteries of Life cannot be formulated with rational Clarity you have to kind of encapsulate them in a mystery that's partially understandable because because otherwise they they stay completely out of your grasp you know and you have no answer to

the question you know well what's the ultimate purpose of life you know well You're not going to be able to get that answer in a really tight box you know that you could open up and it's just going to provide all the answers it's going to be murky because partly because it has to apply to everyone but the fact that it's murky and symbolic in a sense and sort of multifaceted doesn't mean it's unnecessary or wrong and you know the more I've studied the theories that underly personality theory The more I've become convinced and for

me convinced Beyond a doubt that the connection our connection to the to the archaic structures of the past that defined our cultures like without that you're without roots you know and that makes you weak that's the big problem it makes you weak there's nothing to you every whim can possess you every stupid political idea that comes along is instantly your God you know and you're certainly capable of going crazy with masses of people in all sorts of insane Ways it has direct consequences you have to be grounded in something according to a yakoot informant the

spirits carry the future Shaman to hell and shot him in a house for three years it doesn't sound very pleasant here he undergoes his initiation the spirits cut off his head which they set off to one side for the novice for the novice must watch his own dismemberment with his own eyes and they hack his body to bits which are later Distributed among the spirits of various sicknesses it is only on this condition that the future Shaman will obtain the power of healing his bones are then covered with new flesh and in some cases he

has also given new blood and so the the fundamental structure of the shamanic ritual seems to be the the the death of the of the experiencing person and they seem to experience that as a physiological transformation so it's it's the conscious experience of their Own death and their dissolution right right to you know the the dust and Ashes from which from which human beings originally arise one of the specific characteristics of shamanic initiations aside from the candidates dismemberment is his reduction to the state of a skeleton we are here in the presence of a very

ancient religious idea which belongs to the hunter culture bone symbolizes the final root of animal life the mold from which the flesh Continually Rises it's from the bone that men and animals are reborn for a time they maintain themselves in the existence of the flesh then they die and their life is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton from which they will be born again and then people who undergo these experiences seem to as I said they seem to experience their own death in a conscious Manner and that's a very difficult thing to understand

you know it's not obvious either for People who aren't what would you say who who aren't accustomed to those sorts of extremes of experiences it's not obvious at all how much of this sort of thing you have to become conscious of you know because death is obviously one of the things that terrifies people deeply and it's not obvious how you should accustom yourself to that so I I can tell you a story that's quite quite interesting I had a client at one point Who was a vegetarian um and that actually turns out to be relevant

part of the reason that she was a vegetarian was because she couldn't even go into a like a a um what a grocery store where there was a butcher Department like she couldn't even look at the array of meat it just horrified her and it was associated with something that was like a Sleeping Beauty complex for her because when she was a child her parents treated her like she was a fairy Princess and they really protected her from from everything you know remember how many of you have seen Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty yeah well that's

interesting he that so many of you would have you remember there's a when the girl is born when sleeping beauty is born they don't invite someone to the to the christening who do they not invite the witch right I think it's it Maleficent in in the Sleeping Beauty I think that's her name she's the one that Turns into the dragon of chaos at the end of the story well there's a there's a message in there it's like do not Shield your young people from natural catastrophe because it makes them unconscious and it'll come back and

revisit them when they well especially you know when they grow up when they hit puberty it'll come back with force and if they're uncon like if they're not prepared the horror of that will make them unconscious and that's what Happened to this girl like she was sleeping 20 22 hours a day when she came to see me it's like she was a fairy princess until she hit puberty and then she was like an evil slot as far as her parents were concerned it was like bang things had you know things switched completely of course that

was horrifying to her but it was also tangled up for her with kind of the horror of life in general and that was one of the things that made her so sensitive to say to These displays of these displays of meat which are of course quite horrifying you know it's kind of remarkable that you can wander through them you know with you know maybe a little bit of of discomfort but you know it's slaughterhouse stuff and you know to be normal is to be able to tolerate that and that's quite strange she couldn't tolerate it

at all so you know I took her to butcher shops now and then because you do that with people if if They have an identifiable fear it's actually quite easy to start the psychotherapeutic process because you start to expose them voluntarily to the things that they want to avoid so you know I took her into a butcher shop and jeez you know just flipped her over you know she sat in the car afterwards and cried for 20 minutes and told me about how terrible life was and that she couldn't live in the face of all

this you know dismemberment and constant Death and she was also very very inclined towards identification you know with little cute animals which is generally a fairly solid feminine trait right because females are very attracted to things that are cute and cute things are basically infantile and and helpless right that's sort of what activates the cute detection you know it's part of well it's part of maternal behavior and it's really an important part you know cuz if you didn't find your babies cute You'd really be in trouble CU they're a lot of well they're a lot

of trouble you know and they and they push you because they require so much care so they bloody well better be cute and smiley and you know make friends with you so so but but she like was hyper identified with like little vulnerable animals you know and and that's not good because she wasn't just a little vulnerable animal you know she was also Al partly a predator and human beings are partly predators and You know maybe you think that's terrible but that's how it is and the predatory part of yourself better be incorporated and used

because otherwise first of all you'll be weak without it and second of all if you don't incorporate it believe me that doesn't make it go away it'll just go out and have fun on its own in ways that are unconscious that you don't control so she was a really good dreamer this girl and and she could she actually had lucid dreams quite remarkable and Sometimes she could even ask ask her dream characters what they symbolized right in the dream you know it's the only time I've ever seen that although I've had some lucid dreamers in

my practice and one day she had this dream because she was really having a hard time finishing University it was like her sixth year seventh year or something like that and that was part because she slept all the time and then she wouldn't get anything done like she was trying to Sleep to avoid Consciousness right to avoid being alive because Consciousness was too painful for her and so she had a dream one day that she meant actually I'm mixing two dreams here together but it doesn't matter because it just sort of it just sort of

collapses The Narrative she she dreamt that she met a gypsy that was traveling through the forest and the Gypsy told her that unless she was able unless she would be willing to work in a slaughterous she'd Never finish her degree so she came and she came and told me that dream and I thought well slaughterous that seems a little bit difficult to arrange you know she wasn't sure she could handle that anyways and I said well is there anything that you can think of if you imagine something is there anything that you can think of

that you know might serve as a substitute and she came back to me about a week later and she says she said I want to see an Inbombing and I thought wow that's that's rough that's no no doubt about that that's rough so I phoned around to a bunch of different funeral homes and I told them that I had a client who was like so terrified of death that she couldn't even live and that you know that I wanted to bring her to the funeral home and walk through it and if it was possible to

see an EMB bombing preparation and um they were very understanding it was quite interesting Because of course Funeral Parlor people are kind of strange people right because they're dealing with death all the time it's like their daily life you know and they get so it's well they're not dying of horror every night you know they're able to deal with it which is a good thing CU like we'd be need deep in bodies otherwise right someone someone has to do this sort of work so and and apparently you can specialize in it and so what that

all also means unless you Think you know funeral part of directors are like completely nonhuman in some fundamental way clearly indicates that it's possible for a normal person to become so conversent with death that it's Daily Business and you know emergency department people are in that sort of situation and people who drive ambulances like human beings are bloody tough you know we can take something like facing death and turn it into a an everyday occurence it's like it's kind Of horrifying in a sense to think that you could be that harsh in a way you

know but by the same token you know you don't want to run away screaming the first time there's an emergency in your life you know what the hell good are you if you know someone close to you gets really sick and all you can do is whine and snivel about it because it's so hard on you it's like it's not your turn for that you should be strong so that you can help then and that means that you Know we have to be able to face these sorts of things so anyways we went to the

funeral part which is quite a weird thing for me too because I actually have rather squeamish stomach I'm kind of disgust sensitive and so it's hard for me especially odors just they're just not good for me at all but um you know so I could have never been a surgeon or anything like that but we went to the funeral parlor and that I found it extremely interesting because First of all you actually need to know how these things operate because at some point you're going to be called upon to deal with them and maybe it'd

be nice if you had a little knowledge beforehand so that you know you didn't only have the grief that was knocking you over but all the novelty that was associated with trying to orient yourself in that space and so we talked to the funeral director and we talked to him about how he sort of managed his day-to-day encounters With death and you know he said he he sort of saw it as his role to Shepherd people through the grieving process and that for him it had made him in some ways more acutely aware of the

finitude of Life obviously but that also made him more conscious of you know of each day of the passing of each day and you know that might be one of the things that's salutary about facing your own mortality it's like waste time like here's here's a good question for you guys how many of You waste more than four hours a day okay okay so so I would say the reason you do that is because you haven't really faced the reality of your own death if you had done that you would stop doing that you would

not waste time you know and we could do a quick economic analysis I like to do this with people so what do you think your time's worth an hour guess we know it's at least 10 bucks right cuz That's well so the minimum value Society puts on your labor is $10 an hour okay but you know you're you're smart and healthy and young and so each hour is an investment in the future so it has to be considered in that matter because your one of your hours is worth more to you than one of my

hours is worth to me because you have so much of your future life still depending on it so that's a big deal so I would say $50 an hour is probably reasonable for what you guys Are worth it's somewhere between 10 and 50 anyways so you know let's assume 50 okay it's 200 bucks a day it's 1,400 bucks a week it's 5600 bucks a month $65,000 a year it's like you want to waste it go right ahead but that's what it's costing you at minimum you know and you know you might think well no because

I'm not getting paid it's like wrong you're paid for your studies you just get paid 10 years from now it's just deferred income and there's a huge Difference between people who have B's and A's you know like B's door shut A's doors open and so you know you waste that time you will bloody pay for it and you don't get it back either so you know if you're if you're awake and you know that this is waiting for you and that there's only so much time you have that can bloody well wake you up and

stop you from wasting your time because you don't have that much of it this is a medieval representation of Of it's a very strange representation obviously because it's a crucifix and has a snake on it it's not but it's a tree snake thing you know and it's actually an echo there's a story in the Old Testament about Moses leading people through the desert and it's sort of a you know they've escaped from tyranny so that's the previous place of order now they're in chaos because they've left tyan so they're all wandering around sort of without

their heads they don't Know which way they're going they're trying to run away from something that's bad and towards something that's good but they don't know where they are and so they get all kind of you know fighty and and break into factions and then they start worshiping false gods like golden Cals and so on it's fragmentation Under Pressure right and so um God gets irritated at them and throws a bunch of poisonous snakes into the desert cuz you know he's such an easy guy to get along With so he throws a bunch of poisonous

snakes in there and they go around biting all these people who are you know not being faithful and so all the people who are who you know doubting Moses are starting to freak out because they keep getting bit by all these poisonous snakes and so they finally call on Moses to ask God to be like you know call off the poisonous snakes they'll behave just call off the poisonous snakes and God says to Moses to build a like a a a Staff with a bronze snake on it and that if people will come and look

at the snake then they'll be immune to the snake's poison or the snakes will stop biting them I don't remember which and it's it's a lovely story because it's another exposure story it sort of means that if you're willing to gaze upon the thing that is most poison to you or that you're most afraid of that that can help you overcome it and that's sort of what this is a representation of except it's More complex because this surface's tail sort of stretches down into Infinity that's what that representation is it's sort of it's sort of

the manifestation of the unknown right from the beginning of time and space that's that's what that image represents and that's sort of the problem of humanity in some sense is that you know there's an infinite number of trouble stemming from an Infinite Source a remarkable representation I think you've heard about near-death Experiences I imagine you know the idea that people see the light at the end of the tunnel and then you know when they get through the light they see all their ancestors there and something that vaguely resembles God and you know and that's conditioned

to some degree by their cultural background but it's a very common experience and this is actually a representation of that from a 12th I think 12th to 13th century ping by herous Bosch and this so it seems to Be the sort of thing also that's characteristic of the Sha shamanic experience post reduction to skeleton so the shaman dies and then as a consequence of that he ends up in a space that's characterized by the presence of the ancestral spirits whatever that means I mean you could think about those as like each of you are embodiments

of ancestral Spirits right because all the ideas you have for example are all they're all there none Of them are your ideas or virtually none of them it's almost impossible to have an original idea all the ideas you have are like the ghostly remnants of brilliant philosophers or theologians who've lived you know hundreds or thousands of years ago and your whole head is populated by these things and they're sort of embodied things because they tell you how to act you know they're not just cold dead ideas and you know you're you're you're a mixture of

All those things and I don't know if the ancestral spirits that these Visionaries encounter are like personified representations of the spirits that live inside their head or what they are but but part of the experience seems to be um what would you call it it's like a rescuing of the dying father from the from the depths how many of you have seen Pinocchio right so you know the fundamental theme there right Pinocchio Was a marionette so anyone can manipulate him and he's a wooden head he's not awake he's not conscious he's not alive and so

he can be led astray in 15 different ways and you know finally his father disappears to go looking for him and for for reasons that aren't exactly clear his father ends up inside a whale at the bottom of the ocean which is you know not the first place you'd think of looking for your father but especially if you were a puppet and you Like a cricket was leading you around which is all absurd stuff you know um although one thing I could tell you is what's the cricket's name yeah yeah what's the initials right so

fake right yeah Jiminy Cricket is Southern us slang for Jesus Christ and you know the animators pick that up as a joke but it's not a joke because of course the cricket serves as the conscience and the spiritual guide on this on this Quest vision and it's The cricket that leads the puppet deep underground actually it's into the ocean to the deepest depths of Despair right and death like a shamanic disintegration to find the spirit of his father and why does he need that well it's because without incorporating the spirit of his father or his

forefathers he can't be real and that's because human beings and puppets apparently you know we cultural creatures it's not like there's you and there's your culture it's like you are Your culture and so you're either the embodiment of your culture fleshed out and made whole or you're just a fragmentary thing and you're only half alive and worse than that you can't cope with tragedy I mean the way that Pinocchio becomes real is he rescues his father from the whale which is also a dragon right the whale is a dragon how do you know that what

happens to the whale he spits fire that's weird behavior for a whale you know it's Because Pinocchio lights A Fire Inside him but of course you know that's how human beings have always escaped from chaos is by using fire so he's the master of fire and that brings him up from the depths and he has to rescue his father and it actually kills him right his father says no no Let Me Drown save yourself but Tokyo doesn't and he dies in the effort to bring him to shore but then the you know the Blue Fairy

comes down and says well because you're such a Good puppet you quick now you're away you know it's a it's a it's a remarkable story it's an amazing movie I mean it's uh it has themes in it they're thousands and thousands of years old like the idea that the hero has to Journey to the to the darkest depths to to reclaim a treasure the treasure can be lots of things it can be the dead father it can be a princess it can be gold doesn't really matter there's this idea that you know the Thing you

want most is to be found where you least want to look which is a lovely little that's a that's an alchemical dictum by the way that was sort of reanimated by y so anyways the idea in the shamanic Visions is that past death there's this opening up into the ancestral landscape and that's the place where you can commune with well the ancestor gods or maybe the spirit of the ancestors themselves which is something like God you know if you look at the Christian representations for for example one of the elements of God is God the

father and so God the father is sort of like an amalgam of all the great fathers of the past you know because you might say well what makes person a person a great father well careful devoted attention would be part of it right that's a transpersonal thing it's like if if you're a great father and you are too there's something about both of your actions as a great father that are The same and you can think of that as the spirit of the great father and you know that sort of shines through individuals so that's

a way of communing with God through the ancestors and that's part of what these rituals are about I would like even now to stress the fact that the Psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane it does not belong to ordinary symptomatology it has an initiatory structure and signification in short it reproduces a Traditional mystical pattern the total crisis of the future Shaman sometimes leading to complete disintegration of the personality and to Madness can be evaluated not only as an initiatory death but also as a symbolic return to the prec cosmogonic chaos to the amorphous

and Indescribable state that precedes any cosmogony well that's a mouthful so one of the things I mentioned about this picture was that there's some inference suggestion on the Part of the artist that this this chaotic monster of the depths has this origin point it's like the beginning of time it's it's it's like that's a symbol of of the infinity that stretches on before us and it emerges from that so part of the initiatory process is the dissolution of the personality the question is well what state of existence exists at the level where your personality dissolves

because you're you see the world through your personality And the world is given form through your personality and then when it it starts to dissolve and disintegrate say when you sink into depression it's so you're you're sinking into a state that sort of before Consciousness so so let me tell you something that William James said about this so it's a very difficult thing to get to to to communicate it's like and we'll we'll touch on it a bit more when we move into constructivism so part of the idea here is that you that Reality itself

is extracted from the unknown and the unknowable and you know you do that as individuals because there's all the parts of the world that you understand and then there's the parts of the world that you don't understand you can't even conceive of but now and then you encounter them especially when you fail and then you interact with them and by doing that you make them like real and describable and experienceable and so it's like there's This latent possibility that surrounds existence that you can interact with and pull up into actuality and that's sort of the

that's like the action of Consciousness on reality that's why by the way in the beginning of Genesis like in Genesis it's the word of God that produces order from chaos right and so that's the initi that's the the initiation of of reality and then later in Genesis God makes human beings and he says you're made both of you in the Image of God and the question is well what does that mean well it might mean that God has two arms and two legs but what it seems to mean more accurately is that whatever it is

that makes you conscious has this Divine quality and it's capable of extracting order continually from chaos and by doing that by being conscious actors in the world you're bringing about the creation of reality and that's a remarkable thing and you know there's there's nothing There's nothing mystical about that you know perfectly well that you can make tomorrow one thing or another you know and is that free will well who who knows that question will never be solved but it certainly seems phenomenologically like there's an option here for you and there's an option here for you

and there's an option here for you those are all potential and you can just choose which one of those you want to head towards And make actual and that's Consciousness doing that and Consciousness is something we don't have a clue and this is William James William James is the father of of pragmatic philosophy but also of modern psychology he did a fair bit of experimentation with nitrous oxide which is this sort of inert gas that that that dentists use for example as an analgesic but that also has quite profound hallucinatory and mystical experience inducing properties

and so William James used to play with this and this is a poem he he wrote um I'll read the description the description first from William James and then the poem he said pure experience is the name which I give to the original flux of life before reflection has categorized it only newborn babies and persons in semicom from sleep drugs illnesses or blows can have an experience pure in the literal sense of that which is not yet any definite what though ready to be all Sorts of whats full both of Oneness and of many but

in respects that don't appear changing throughout yet so confusedly that phases interpenetrate and no points either of Distinction or of identity can be caught sorry yeah well it's sort of in incoherent but what William James is referring to is is this idea that what the ground of reality is something like a potential from you know a potential Full of many possible actualities from which single actualities can be drawn and that that's what Consciousness is doing when it makes decisions and it's it's a brilliant idea and I think you know and I expect you to take

this with a grain of salt because I you know this part of what I'm telling you about you may think this about a lot of what I'm telling you is you know sort of out on the fringes but the quantum mechanics believe that the the most accurate way To portray the ground of reality is as something that's striving to manifest itself it's not there yet it has to be interacted with something that's a conscious Observer before it takes on tangible reality and so the ground of being seems to be something like like a multi-dimensional potential

from which many things can emerge and I think I actually think that is what we see when we look at the future you know because what the hell is the future what is it You know we certainly treat it it's real the future is a place of potential well right well what does that mean well it means whatever it means is real enough so that you Orient Yourself by it you take the future seriously you believe that your choices bring future a or future B into being you don't really know the limits of that you

know like if you really got your act together right down to the core you know you you have no idea what sort of Glorious future you Might be able to bring into ex existence you know it's an it's an unresolved question if you diligently work with all of your effort you know to perfecting the things around you you have no idea how far you might be able to go you know and it's it's a real open question and I think that's that's part of what human beings have to bring against the sort of Horrors of

existence is like you have a lot of potential and if you made the Right choices and we you know awake and careful God only knows what you might be able to manage so here's his poem he sounds like a 60s hippie from Greenwich Village really it's written in like 1890 no verbiage can give it because the verbiage is other by which he means that whatever this potential is exists in a place before articulation right once it's articulated it's not potential it's all of a sudden something actual that's actually why the ancient Jews didn't Want to

use the name of God you weren't allowed to name God because as soon as you named God he was no longer God God was the unnamable you know and the and the and the uh and the Muslims have the same sort of idea about Muhammad in anyways it's like you don't don't want to make a concrete representation because then you take the ideal out of the ideal space and you start to make it something that you can like a human construction so you know it's it's an Idea that's got its Merit no verbiage can give

it because the verbiage is other incoherent coherent the same and it fades and it's infinite and it's infinite don't you see the difference don't you see the identity constantly opposites United the same me telling you to right and not to write extreme something and other than that thing intoxication and other this than intoxication every attempt at betterment Every attempt at otherman it is it fades forever and forever as we move all right we'll stop there obviously [Applause]