(NOTE: I wrote most of this blog between July, 2006 and election day, 2008. Some media references, then, may be outdated or unavailable.)
I mentioned previously that Jeremy Narby's book, "The Cosmic Serpent", was the initial impetus for my spiritual journey. In addition, I want to credit Daniel Pinchbeck's wondrous book, "Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism", as the other important influence that set me off on this journey.
You can read a review I wrote for this book here.
I said in the review that I'd recently begun reading Pinchbeck's second book, "2012: The Return of Quetalcoatl", and as I had expected, this book, like his first, is provocative and controversial--some have even said loony--but a joy to read nonetheless.
It describes Pinchbeck's further adventures into the heart of shamanism, which he feels he has been led to learn more about. Pinchbeck, however, takes us further on this trip as it offers a non-rational look at the future of the world, the earth and humanity--which is increasingly the arbiter of the all these futures.
Just as with the questions that propelled me toward my own inquiry, Pinchbeck seeks to explain the irrationality of this rational era.
"From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world--our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path--reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written in the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to expend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistics or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the immanent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants of a planetary ecology."The occult dimension, he says, corresponds to his realization through his own psychedelic experimentation, that all psychedelic trips are not filled with happy Peter Max-type hallucinations. One fact that seems universal when studying shamanism is that the same powers that shamans use for the good of the community, can also be used for malice, aggression and evil. This type of shamanism is known as sorcery.
If there are bad occult dimensions and certain special humans have been accessing them for tens of thousands of years, perhaps the way things are today can be explained as the result of these negative shamanic powers being used by sorcerers throughout history.
While Daniel Pinchbeck, with his excellent multi-pronged research is a father to my quest, the godfather is Terence McKenna, who writer Mark Dery described this way on FrontWheelDrive.com:
I looked forward to interviewing McKenna, whose writings and interviews offered unquestionable evidence of a prodigious intellect, sweeping erudition, and a nimble wit. I was not disappointed. A foe worthy of anyone’s steel, he proved to be as generous of spirit as he was intellectually formidable. Though some of his ideas struck me-still strike me-as so much refried ectoplasm, I was enchanted by his silver-tongued eloquence, equal parts Irish talespinning, scholarly discourse, and Joycean riverrun. And that voice: drawling, nasal, sly with irony, suffering fools graciously if not gladly.I've watched and listened to hours of Terence McKenna's talks (many of which can be found on the site linked above as well as YouTube), and I too am consistently in awe of his remarkable intellect, his incredible memory and his verbal style--which truly was Joycean. Yet while Joyce was fatally abstruse to a mere mortal like me, the poetic, organic, joyous wordplay McKenna employed was challenging, but never undecipherable.
Strangely enough, I haven't yet read any of the many books McKenna wrote; often with his younger brother Dennis, who is an ethnopharmacologist and alternative health entrepreneur. But once you've listened to Terence for any amount of time, you'll never get his high, nasally, slightly effeminate-sounding voice out of your head.
As I continue to read these books on my journey, I have to change a mindset that involves seeing these ideas (crop circles, shamanism, other dimensions, aliens, witchcraft, alchemy, etc.) as more than just archaic ways of thinking and altogether unrelated to our rationalist world view--but instead as possible other ways of seeing non-local realities.
Is this a wrenching experience for me?
Not necessarily--especially because as one delves into the nether reaches of science via quantum mechanics and string theory--as well as Jungian psychological theory--some of these ideas are part and parcel to these concepts.
Perhaps the most important task of man is the pursuit of knowledge. But ask anyone who is stuck in our everyday reality, and he or she will tell you that it is very difficult to sustain this pursuit.
The demands of daily living in this society give us little time to spend doing this. For me personally, over the course of my lifetime I've developed an addiction to the escape provided by the media; movies, television, and to a lesser extent, music and radio.
So while I've thoroughly enjoyed my time spent this past month intellectually exploring the realities that exist beyond time and space, I must begin to re-enter society because of the requirements of a paycheck. My time for this journey will become more limited in the coming weeks as I go to interviews, get back to prior job commitments and fulfill other day-to-day obligations.
But at least I've discovered the signpost marking the beginning of my path. Shamanism and the study of consciousness is truly a most noble pursuit. It is from this that the arts and sciences flow. These are all the children of human consciousness.
Here are some of the fascinating discoveries I've made thus far on my journey:
Perhaps the most stupefying and marvelous is the idea that consciousness works at the quantum level; a realm where existence is only potential until an outside observer (consciousness) collapses the probability wave to create something. And that something is a subatomic particle of matter. In the macro world that we exist in, this is our reality.
What an exciting, somewhat frightening and totally non-intuitive idea. Yet, this is just the concept that has been proposed by philosophers and artists and thinkers throughout the ages. Within consciousness, then, there is a key to all the possibilities in the universe. And that key is The Imagination.
The imagination, the vehicle of artists since the first symbolic thought entered the mind of prehistoric man, is thought by many to be a multi-dimensional pathway to "places" that have no reality in this world, yet are brought into our world as reality by those who are courageous enough to travel there and--hopefully--back.
It is a cultural cliche that artists suffer for their art. We read of those who drink themselves into oblivion; become addicted to any number of numbing agents, or are what is called in clinical terminology schizophrenic.
I've always believed myself to be singularly untouched by creativity, although I've had brief moments where I felt at least that I was on the entrance ramp to creativity. My imagination has always been a somewhat malevolent entity to me. Why?
Perhaps it is because of an incident when I was only six, when I was at one of my first days in school. I recall seeing a mouse skitter past me in our classroom. Later on the school bus, I was absolutely convinced that the mouse had crawled up my pant leg. I could feel it. I could even see it moving in the folds of my pants! Of course it wasn't really there, but I was beside myself with that primitive fear of small creatures that haunts many people's minds.
I remember the bus driver trying to calm me down and when I got home, my mother took off my pants and showed me that there was nothing there. But I still couldn't be convinced that what I had experienced wasn't real.
"It's only your imagination, honey." she said to me with just the slightest smile.
Well if that's the kind of fear that this thing called imagination can create, I wanted none of it!
This idea of imagination is what I've been thinking about most recently.
Other, more disturbing, imagination-based incidents have happened to me throughout my life. There was nothing "magical" or supernatural about them. They were simply my mind creating realities that affected my personality and outlook. Then, ten years ago I began taking an SSRI anti-depressant because of the unique terror created by anxiety attacks I was experiencing at that time.
While this drug has undoubtedly helped me in my day-to-day life, I suspect that it has also closed any possible "doors of perception" I might want to open. It is only now--as I begin my study of occult dimensions--that I am beginning to desire a peak behind those doors.
But only for a moment.