https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qNjgYuuWjAo
Carl Jung spent years talking to entities of his imagination, documenting that in books like the Red Book. He made that a visionary practice and had illuminating conversations with specters of his own imagination. But of course, he also believed that there was a collective element to those. And so you might say that, well, to the degree, for example, that we’re each inhabited by dark impulses, we might say, well, we’re each prey to the same demonic forces. That’s one way of thinking about it. And they’re the same and they’re transpersonal and they exist to some degree cross-culturally and they span time. And so these creatures of imagination can have histories and can inhabit us in some real sense and they can do that collectively. And then so that complicates things tremendously. But then I would also ask, in your investigations, your long-term investigations of multiple ayahuasca experiences across different people, are there any commonalities of entities that strike you as particularly significant? I know people talk about clown figures, for example, mechanical clowns in the DMT state. Like the elf machines and this sort of thing. Elves. Yeah, exactly. The elf machines. Of course, that’s complicated too, because once one person starts talking about it, that might increase the probability that other people would experience it. But have you seen commonalities of entity experience that would suggest something, the existence of something that is at least transpersonal, even though it might also still be subjective, whatever that means in such a context? Yes. I have and I think this exists in these shamanic traditions. And ayahuasca is a particularly good example of that. You know. Again, I have not seen anything that convinces me. I mean, I’m basically a Jungian, you know, so I believe in the collective unconscious. It’s a good model, this transpersonal realm of shared archetypes and all that. And then there’s the individual unconscious. I haven’t seen anything in the reports of the psychonauts that would not fit into that model that says, oh, well, this doesn’t really fit. This is outside that model. And so that model’s not valid. I haven’t seen that. I think that it is, I think basically these entities, they are experienced as real, but they come from the collective unconscious. And if you look at the ayahuasca traditions, and there is an interesting book here that’s very illustrative of this, which many people know about. It’s the book that, you’re familiar with the artist Pablo Amaringo, the visionary Peruvian artist. He and Luis Eduardo Luna wrote a book. He painted his visions, right? He remembered all his visions in perfect detail, painted these visions. And Eduardo and he collaborated on a book called Ayahuasca Visions, the religious iconography of a Peruvian shaman. It’s still in print. The book is remarkable because it’s its typical coffee table style format with full color illustrations of the visions on one page and Eduardo’s descriptions in English on the facing page, dissecting all the elements of the entities and everything else that you see in these visions. As narrated by Pablo, I mean, Pablo, you know, Eduardo Luna was basically just the transcriber, that Pablo described in great detail, dissected each one of these paintings, and there are about, I guess, 20 or so of these paintings in this book. And it’s basically a course in vegetalismo. It’s talking about vegetalismo, this practice, which is really an amalgam of many indigenous traditions and kind of mushed together into a mestizo tradition. But he describes these entities, you know. They all have names. They have a particular appearance. You know, the plants, the animals, even, you know, there are UFOs. There are all kinds of things in these visions. Pablo describes every one of them. And any ayahuasca in training, you know, in apprenticing under Pablo or any of these traditional ayahuasca girls, they’re going to see these things, you know. I mean, this is a cultural context. They’re going to see these things. And what they see is going to be similar, you know. So it’s sort of like Terence’s, you know, self-transforming elf machines. I mean, Terence says that, you know, he has a huge voice in the meme sphere. Pretty soon everybody’s seeing self-transforming elf machines. You know, that’s what people see. Postmodernism is tearing our world apart. The one thing that may be able to unite us is a mass return to our Judeo-Christian roots. At the individual level, that means developing our prayer life. 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Well, you could imagine, you know, the brain is obviously an organ that can produce personalities because it produces our personalities. And it seems to me that it’s highly probable that the way that we organize information is in the form of personality. So I mean, and I certainly got a fair bit of this from thinking about Jung’s work. I mean, if you’re inhabited by a rage state, which I think is a good way of thinking about it, you might think, well, what form does the anger take? And the answer is, well, it has a personality. You might act like enraged people that you’ve seen in movies. You might act like enraged people that you’ve seen in your life. The rage has a goal, which is the crushing of the opponent, let’s say, and it has perceptions and it has action patterns. It’s a personality. And you could conceptualize the rage spirit as Ares, the god of war. And that would be a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. And it could be that all of our micro perceptions and all of our macro perceptions, for that matter, have the intrinsic form of personality and that that’s partly what we encounter when we dream. And so I was thinking, too, you know, that as as the gods, if the gods are aggregates of micro personalities, that might be one way of thinking about it. They’re micro personalities that are aggregated within societies across time and then and then can be apprehended collectively to some degree. As you move towards a monotheistic vision of the world, what you’re moving toward is the ultimate aggregation of all these socially modified micro personalities into one conceptual scheme. And that would parallel that hierarchy that of cognition and conception that, well, we already discussed that people like Friston are working on. And so it isn’t that surprising, I suppose, if you think about it that way, if the brain is a personality producing machine, so to speak, that there are certain states that you can encounter under the influence of chemical alteration where you encounter those personalities, even those that have some degree of autonomy. I mean, rage has some degree of autonomy, and so does lust and so does thirst and so does hunger. They’re not they’re not exactly you. They’re forces or personalities, which is a more accurate way of thinking about that you can fall prey to. And so why can’t why can’t that occur in a more complex manner? Well, I think it can. I mean, I mean, this this totally fits within the yogi and a model, you know, that that within the collective unconscious, there are these these I forget the exact term that he used, but these these complexes almost like autonomous personalities, you know, and multiple personality disorder is a recognized thing. And I guess in some ways, all of us have it in a certain sense in that we have, you know, we do have these multiple personalities, but they like rage, lust and and so on. But they they don’t take over the controls. You know, most of the time they’re suppressed to a certain degree, but they’re always there. They’re influencing whoever it is in the in the cabin at the bridge that’s running the thing. And in pathology, they can take over, you know, and then you’ve got a problem. Well, they do with Tourette’s syndrome. They do with Tourette’s. They do with obsessive compulsive disorder. And, you know, and you can think about the relationship between these motivational states like rage or anxiety, let’s say that that are transpersonal in that everyone experiences them. We know that with the psychedelic experience, that set is very important and that if someone is in a negative emotional state or situation that elicits fear and let’s say rage, and then they embark upon a psychedelic experience that that particular state can be magnified beyond belief. And so that’s a good way to have a hellish experience. And so, you know, we do have to remember and I know, of course, you do that the psychedelic experiences that we’re talking about are ritualized so that an absolutely dreadful outcome is less probable. But you might say if it was just done randomly, it could easily be the magnification of a state of terror or a state of rage as the magnification as a state of enlightenment or bliss. Right. So this is the importance of the ritual of the ritual context. This is exactly that what these traditions have grown around is the idea that there needs to be an appropriate set and setting. There needs to be an appropriate set, the most important variable, certainly. And, you know, I sometimes say in my talks, I say ayahuasca is a liquid. Ayahuasca will fill any vessel you create for it.