https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=F9393El2Z1I
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 that’ll keep us on track. I want to tell you a little bit more about this image and what it probably means, and then we’re going to continue with our discussion of shamanic transformation and its relationship to personality transformation. 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 a snake. Now I believe I told you guys about Lin-Esbell’s research and the relationship between predatory snake prevalence and the acuity of human vision. You remember that? Okay, that’s good. So to me, what the image on the right looks like is, first of all, it’s like the ancestral for tens of millions of years, or our ancestors. So that’s the tree with the snake, with the primary human environment maybe 60 million years ago. It’s not human at that level, but it’s part of our evolutionary heritage. And then 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. There’s no light to get to the bottom, and nothing grows down there, so they’re just trees and they’re almost dead trees. So from the perspective of biological diversity, they’re not really that free from an environment. But human beings still have some real kinship with those gigantic trees, and we feel that there’s something natural and sacred about them. So superimposed on that is I think something like the next stage of human evolution. So these representations were made by people who were trying to represent the ultimate reality of mankind. And so superimposed on the tree 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 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. It’s not like we’ve adapted biologically to their presence. So you have the mountain in the middle. And the mountain is sort of sitting in a circumscribed territory. The idea there is that there’s a dominance hierarchy that human beings inhabit, and it always occupies a particular territory. And the dominance hierarchy is like 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 picture on your right. The snake in the middle is an herbivore, it’s 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 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 man, so of human beings. And then I showed you this picture briefly, and that’s a 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 almost staggeringly the same as the Scandinavian perspective, right down to the snake that eats its own tail, which by the way is an extremely common ancient symbol. So it’s quite remarkable. Now what might unite, and then I’ll talk to you about my son’s drawing. I didn’t get to this one though. What might unite these different visions, say 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 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 it sums up Christianity in one picture, and that’s no easy thing to do. The reason I think it’s important to talk about this Christian representation for example, though we’ve already talked about some Taoist representations, is because insofar 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. 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 can’t come to grips with the idea of the ideal or the idea of mental health, 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. 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 sense of life’s meaning has been shattered, 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 they have no idea how to orient themselves, because life always presents 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 that human beings are like that. So let me tell you about this image, because 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 it 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 Asclepius’ rod, for example, Asclepius is the Greek god of healing, and you see the symbol of the Greek god of healing, which is that Asclepius’ rod is still used to represent physicians. And it’s a rod with a snake wrapped around it, too. The snake represents transformation because it can die, it can shed its skin and sort of be reborn, 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? So the idea there is that the fruit that the tree produced is in some manner equivalent to death. Now in the Genesis story what happens is that Eve tempts 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, Men do the hunting, generally speaking, in archaic societies, and women do the gathering. And human beings have also subsisted for large parts of the revolutionary history, before we were human beings, as frugivores. We ate fruit. And the reason we have colour 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 put forward. And so there’s a tight association between sexuality and food, for a variety of reasons. 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 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 sort of the ultimate truth 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 exposed to that than women are in this sort of sexual dance. Because women are sort of, on average, quite successful at seeking out sexual encounters where men are, on average, very unsuccessful at doing the same thing. So they suffer a lot of rejection. It’s a very fundamental form of rejection. It’s like, well, you’re good enough to maybe tolerate being alive and all that, but your genetic material should by no means be allowed to move itself into the future. It’s a really fundamental form of rejection. And the rejection is, well, 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. And 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 the cultural mass. You know, it’s a nightmare for most people. 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. And so when human beings woke up during our evolutionary 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. 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 fruit that’s being eaten is equivalent to death. And that’s why there’s a skull in the tree. Because what happened was when people became self-conscious, like consciously self-conscious, 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. 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, once you wake up like that, there’s no going back to sleep. It’s a qualitative transformation in the nature of experience. And the Genesis story pushes the idea farther. It says the fact that we’ve woken up 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… well, one of the things that happens, for example, in Genesis is quite a funny story. So Eve makes Adam all self-conscious, and then they wander off and cover themselves up, right? It’s sort of the first entry of cultural artifacts into the paradisal state. The first thing you do once you realize you’re naked is cover yourself up. Now that story is often interpreted in a sexual way, and there’s elements of that, but 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 that it’s cold in the future, it’s like the first thing you do is cover yourself up. And people have been wearing clothes for a very long time. We’ve been wearing clothes for so long that body lice 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, 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 separate entity, which animals don’t really seem to have that notion. I mean, they get hungry and all that, but it’s not obvious that they can extend the idea of hunger into the future so that they’re caring about times that are 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, where are you? What are you doing hiding away? And Adam’s cowering behind a bush, which 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 often being read by sort of patriarchal Christian interpreters as a story that implicates Eve in the initial destruction of mankind. But 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, 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 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, you know, they’re afraid for good reason. And so God says, oh well, now you’ve done it, you know, we can’t undo this. 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 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 childbirth. Well, it’s very interesting, because there’s a reason that women suffer in childbirth, and the reason for that is that your 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 that’s very characteristic of archetypal stories. It also helps you see how another manifestation of the kind of tree symbolism, say, that’s characteristic of the Scandinavian stories and the Peruvian Amazonian stories, and the role of snake plays. 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 interesting. So that’s what’s happening with Pieve on the right side of the picture. You see the skeleton at the back there representing death. So that’s good old Eve. And then on the left side here, you have the embodiment of the church and the Christian tradition. Now she’s also handing out things that are from the tree. And so this is, like, 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 mode of 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 there are 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 Catholics eat during the mass. And the host is, hypothetically, part of Christ’s body. And so that’s a derivative of the Last Supper. And there’s an unbelievably archaic idea that lurks underneath that, because it’s basically a cannibalistic ritual. And the idea is essentially that if you can 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 it 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? OK, so the host is part of it. So partly it’s the body of Christ. And partly it’s a wheaten 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 crop that 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 like the dying and resurrecting corn god. And so that’s a pagan idea that’s sort of a symbol of 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’ve studied personality theory for a long time. And the first thing that I’ve discovered in 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 a process of painful transformation. It’s like dissolution of part of your personality, which is painful and chaotic. And then the reconstruction of that into a more fulfilled form. And the reason that’s associated with acceptance of vulnerability is, 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 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, 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 that can turn into cruelty and murderousness and things that are much, much more terrible than mere suffering. So that’s the idea here. It’s a whole story of human redemption in a single image. Mind boggling. Brilliant. And you know, 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 beyond, virtually beyond comprehension. It’s a remarkable image. So here’s 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 beautiful arch that’s echoed in the Gothic cathedrals. The Gothic cathedrals are stone trees, essentially, the palms being the trees. And so in some sense they’re representative of the forest, human beings’ primeval 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, what they’re made of is the interplay between tree-like stone and light. The stained glass windows, of course, are the light. And so there’s this idea that the ultimate structure is some tree-like column that’s invadable by light. And in some ways that’s an analogue of the body and its function. So when you see symbols that are associated with this, well first of all you see, sorry, these are echoes. These are echoes of the tree-like structures that are within, because the tree structure is a structure that many biological forms take. So that’s the nervous system tree. This is really worth meditating on for a bit, because most of us are convinced that our brain is in our head. And really that’s not right. It’s just not that accurate. Let me look at the dissemination of your nervous system throughout your body. Your brain is distributed through your body. Your spinal cord’s pretty damn smart. It can walk by itself. So for example, if you take people who are paraplegic but have only, they’ve managed spinal damage at a point that they’re no longer able to voluntarily control their legs. 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 then some people who are paraplegic have been taught to walk in a controlled fall. It’s quite interesting. So your spine isn’t stupid. It’s part of your brain. It’s just a lower part that’s more associated with movement. But your whole body is full of central nervous system. There’s more neurons in your autonomic nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system that controls your internal organs, than there is in your brain. So you’re stuck right in your body. And the idea that you’re in your brain in some ways is like a hangover of the soul theory, you know, the Cartesian duality that makes mind and body something separate and united. I mean I believe there’s something to that theory, but it definitely underestimates the degree to which you’re an embodied nervous system 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. That isn’t how it works at all. You see the brain and the spinal cord as a tree and you can see the neurons themselves as a tree. So the tree-like structure echoes at different levels of the nervous system. These are very interesting representations. So the man in the 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. So it represents the dark elements, say, of the unconscious mind or the unknown that we aren’t privy to. And the lotus grows way down into that and then into the soil below. So it comes out of the darkness, the soil and the darkness, and then through the dark water and then up into the clear light and on the surface of the water it blooms. So it opens up like a Mandela, like a stained glass window on the right. It opens up like that and in the middle of that the Buddha sits in his triangular position, in the lotus position, and that represents enlightenment. And what the whole image represents is the coherent ordering of multiple levels of structure all the way from the primal material up to the highest level of consciousness. And so the Buddha is like the ultimate flower of the lotus tree, so to speak, just as in Christianity. Christ is the ultimate manifestation of the tree, of the knowledge of good and evil. The very, very analogous ideas, and there’s reasons for this too, and part of it is something like if your psychophysiology was properly adjusted so you weren’t working at cross purposes to yourself and so that you were nicely aligned, straight up, physically healthy and not like the defeated lobsters 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 all full of cricks and trouble and problems and places that are badly aligned and you haven’t got the opportunity as a consequence to sort of get access to your own wisdom as you’re sort of a bent representation of who you could be. And so part of this, and also like the stone and glass that’s 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 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 brilliant ideas. So this is an eastern Mandela and to me what it is is it’s a tunnel into this tree-like structure. It’s like a cross section of the tree-like 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 resolution and every level of manifestation. So he’s that, or that’s inside of him, 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 window is like a cross section of the trunks that make up the cathedral. All these buildings, like the medieval people spend a lot of time building those cathedrals. 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 hundred years? It’s like we want things to be up in six months. 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. They were trying to produce the embodiment of the highest ideal in architectural form. We’ve lost a lot of that. Even on the campus you can see that. Because if you go over to the sort of classical side of the campus it’s all cathedral-like and beautiful and 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, it’s hideous, it’s a factory. The aesthetic is so terrible. It’s appalling. All the buildings that are built to last for 50 years and then they’re outdated and completely cheap and hideous and you know. Well then there are. There’s cinderblock and fluorescent lights. It’s like come on. And they have you guys sit in these things that are so uncomfortable that you wouldn’t put your dog in them. Well it’s lost. You lose this sort of thing. There’s a big difference between a medieval cathedral and gothic cathedral in this bloody place. But what you’re supposed to be in a university is something that’s like a medieval cathedral. 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. 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 know the university is here to teach you how to be human beings and that’s the highest thing that you can aim for. And to subvert that to a lower order is 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 feel proud that you were sitting in this room. You know? Alright, 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 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-literate cultures have to carry the wisdom that they have with them in oral form or in embodied form. So in ritual form or in oral form. 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 sick or if you’re having real trouble mediating with another tribe member, someone like that. Or, you know, when you’re maybe overcome with awe because you’re looking at the night sky. It’s the shaman who’s 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 part of their temperament. And we know that visionariness, 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 J.K. Rowling is a really good example of that. She’s been a shamanic intermediary for an entire generation of young people with these massive books that she’s written that have a mythological core right down to their essence. Stan Lee, who ran Marvel Comics, is another person like that, you know, who’s had an immense cultural influence 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 proper narrative arc of the story. Because 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 is it talked down from the writers, but it’s also bought them 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. And so that sort of associated with spontaneous vocation. 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 head isn’t in the clouds, but there are types of people who are not like that at all. Their heads are in the clouds permanently and, you know, they’re extraordinarily imaginative and creative. And 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 what’s being portrayed is 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 existing on the edge of their knowledge, making this representation, thinking, I’m 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 people are coming up with it over these thousands of year periods, they don’t realize the full import of what it is that they’re revealing. Just as you don’t realize your own full import. By whatever method he may have been designated, a shaman is recognized as such only after having received two methods of instruction. The first is ecstatic dreams, trances, visions. The second is traditional shamanic techniques, names and functions of the spirits, mythology and genealogy of the clan, the secret language. The twofold teaching imparted by the spirits and the old master shaman constitutes initiation. So that’s a very interesting representation of the manner in which personal revelation becomes knowledge. So, you know, let’s say you’re beset by 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’s what makes you sane, you know, if you’re having experiences that are beyond 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, that’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 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 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 own internal voices. But they can’t integrate any of that with the culture. So they’re just, they’re gone. They’re lost souls. So the shaman is someone who does both, you know, 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. A lot of them are associated, as I said before, with the use of various hallucinogenic substances. In Siberia, the youth who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behaviour. For example, he seeks solitude, becomes absent-minded, loves to roam in the woods or unfrequent 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 Tungus, as they approach maturity, go through a hysterical or a hysteroid 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 ten or more days have passed that he begins to battle incoherent orders. So you would think from the perspective of modern human beings that this is something like descent into the unconscious structures that underlie 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 most of you have virtually no control over it. There are people who dream lucidly, 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. It’s just something that happens to you, and not something that you’re actively engaged with. A strange behaviour 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 is wrongly put, for on the one hand it’s not true that shamans always are or always have to be neuropathics or neurotics or people who are not well put together mentally. On the other hand, those among them who had been ill became shamans, precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cured. So what that means is these are people who have undergone some kind of existential crisis, sometimes one that’s induced as part of the process that turns them into shamans, but they were able to undergo that existential crisis and then put themselves back together. And so that’s what makes them masters of the chaotic realm, so to speak. So if 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 been there and come back. And that idea of going somewhere and coming back is also a very, very common mythological story. So that’s the story 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. He’s gone off on this big adventure and now he’s like well put together and tough and he’s also rich, but he’s also peculiar. When Bilbo goes back to the Shire, you know, no one’s exactly sure what to do with him because now he’s contaminated with everything that he’s gone through. So he’s like an agent of chaos himself, and someone who’s somewhat terrifying. But useful if you have to have a consultation about how you might deal with the next dragon. Now I said that a lot of the shamanic initiatory rituals seem to be associated with the 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 have probably seen in fairy tales, right? That’s on the cover of fairy tales very frequently. And that’s called an aminida muscaria mushroom. It’s generally viewed as extremely toxic. And there’s some reason for that because 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 aminida 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 sort of target was wolves or bears. And the word berserk, 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 pain-free 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 out of the ocean. And the boats, you know, the open boats that they’ve traveled across the North Sea, and they’re all like stoned out of their gourd on aminida 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. And 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. So they were used for martial purposes by the Vikings. But 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 mushrooms, you know, the magic red mushroom with the white dots. And if you look in, you can see these things in drawings everywhere, especially in fairy tales. Very common representation in fairy tales. 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 shamanic religions, have also had 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 E.Y. 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-boggling really, is that the tree that the snake is associated with is a psilocybin mushroom. And that’s a very characteristic representation of the psilocybin mushroom. And the truth that Eve is feeding to Adam is part of the psilocybin mushroom. There is speculation among people who are sort of at the fringes 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 representations over there, some of them are absolutely remarkable, the one on the top right hand corner there, that’s Christ, and he’s standing there like this with his hands up, and then underneath the bottom half of that circle is a psilocybin mushroom with the head, like the main body of the mushroom is in the same position as Christ’s head, and the offshoots of the mushroom are in the same position as his hands. So well, God only knows what that means. So that’s very strange and a remarkable thing. We really don’t know what to make of it. There’s a lot more investigation to be done than that. This is an ayahuasca vine, and it’s part of what the Amazonian shamans used to brew their hallucinogenic mixtures. No, none of the 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 vapours. 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. 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 capable of finding plants in their habitat, they can eat that are emetic or so on, that help them deal with diseases. 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 flowers forth. It’s guided in its development by the serotonin system, the system that uses serotonin as its primary neurochemical transmitter. So it’s not only in 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. This one is psilocybin, for example. They’re all, and DMT is a very weird chemical, very illegal DMT, it produces, it’s part of ayahuasca, although ayahuasca 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 ten-minute hallucinogenic high where people constantly report contact with aliens. And there’s a psychiatrist who spent years documenting DMT experiences, and every single person he walked through the experience with recorded the same thing. They’re shot out of their body, they’re immediately in an alien landscape. So what that seems to indicate is that, 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 some ways that, in some sense, that the contents of the unconscious mind could be made manifest to the conscious mind, at least for brief periods of time. Sometimes that can be clearly horrifying, because sometimes people take these chemicals and have like the worst experience of their life. 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 harbouring sort of dark secrets and lies and all the sorts of things that might complicate your life, all sorts of familial pathology and cultural baggage and the horrors that sort of live inside your brain. In psychotherapy, you sort of confront those one by one. In a hallucinogenic experience, you might confront all of those at the same time. For many people, that’s exactly equivalent to a quick trip to hell. It’s not something they’d rather repeat. So why things are set up that way, well, who knows? I mean, we don’t really understand these things. 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. 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 epigenesis, but there are studies of epigenetics now that show that there are certain experiences that alter your genetic structure. And we know that partly because 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. It’s also part of the reason why banging yourself against various obstacles in a kind of systematic way is a good way of expanding your range of capabilities. So we know that experience can turn new genetic processes on 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 that’s Lamarckian evolution. No one ever hypothesized that that was possible. You can look it up. It’s mainstream science now, although 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 we have no idea to what level of being your experiences 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’s associated with your conceptions of time and space, and how that’s related to your ongoing experience. Those things are deeply mysterious to us. And what happens at least in parts of 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 generally, generally, people don’t. 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. 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 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 these shamanic rituals that have been going on for tens of thousands of years, and that human cultures have always used to orient themselves. But there’s so much anathema to our current culture that we punnish people severely for experimenting with them. It’s very, very peculiar behaviour. Although there’s no doubt that this sort of thing is dangerous and very peculiar. So the shaman report relatively 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 talked about the world tree. What that seems to be, if you look at the reports of the shaman, is that their consciousness seems to be able 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 not it’s associated with a dream isn’t exactly clear. So part of it is, for example, that 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 communing with them. I just read a book here recently about the revival of Mongolian shamanism. 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 murderers 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. Partly what they meant by that was that the continuity of the culture had been disrupted and so people were identity-less. It was funny because when Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet Union, he wrote extensively about the Soviet experience, his eventual conclusion was that the best route for the Soviets to take after the collapse of communism would be a return to the sort of 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 otherwise 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. You know, the more I’ve studied the theories that underlie personality theory, the more I’ve become convinced, and for me convinced beyond a doubt, that our connection 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 Yakut informant, the spirits carry the future shaman to hell and shut him in a house for three years. That 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 is also given new blood. So the fundamental structure of the shamanic ritual seems to be the death of the experiencing person, and they seem to experience that as a physiological transformation. So it’s the conscious experience of their own death and their dissolution right to the dust and ashes from which human beings originally arise. One of the specific characteristics of shamanic initiations, aside from the candidate’s dismemberment, is his reduction to the state of the 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. People who undergo these experiences seem to, as I said, they seem to experience their own death in a conscious manner. 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 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 can tell you a story that’s quite interesting. I had a client at one point who was a vegetarian, 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, what, a grocery store where there was a butcher’s 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 everything. You know, remember, how many of you have seen Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty? Yeah, well that’s interesting, eh, that so many of you would have. You remember, when the girl is born, when Sleeping Beauty is born, they don’t invite someone to the christening. Who do they not invite? The witch, right? I think it’s Maleficent in 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 message in there. Do not shield your young people from natural catastrophe because it makes them unconscious and it’ll come back and revisit them when they, especially when they grow up, when they hit puberty, it’ll come back with force. And 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 slut as far as her parents were concerned. It was like, bang, 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 these displays of me, which are of course quite horrifying. It’s kind of remarkable that you can wander through them with maybe a little bit of discomfort, but it’s slaughterhouse stuff. To be normal is to be able to tolerate that and that’s quite strange. She couldn’t tolerate it at all. I took her to butcher shops now and then, because you do that with people. 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 I took her into a butcher shop and jeez, it just about flipped her over. She sat in a 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 dismemberment and constant death. She was also very, very inclined towards identification with little cute animals, which is generally a very solid feminine trait because females are very attracted to things that are cute. Cute things are basically infantile and helpless. That’s sort of what activates the cute detection. It’s part of maternal behaviour and it’s really an important part because if you didn’t find your babies cute, you’d really be in trouble because there are a lot of people who are in a lot of trouble. And they push you because they require so much care. So they bloody well better be cute and smiley and make friends with you. But she was hyper identified with little vulnerable animals. And that’s not good because she wasn’t just a little vulnerable animal. She was also partly a predator and human beings are partly predators and maybe you think that’s terrible but that’s how it is. 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 she actually had lucid dreams. It was quite remarkable. And sometimes she could even ask her dream characters what they symbolized. Right in the dream, you know, is the only time I’ve ever seen that, although I’ve had some lucid dreamers in my practice. One day she had this dream because she was really having a hard time finishing university. It was like her sixth year or seventh year or something like that and that was partly 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 met, actually I’m mixing two dreams here together but it doesn’t matter because it just sort of collapses the narrative. She dreamt that she met a gypsy that was traveling through the forest and the gypsy told her that unless she would be willing to work in a slaughterhouse she’d never finish her degree. So she came and told me that dream and I thought, well, a slaughterhouse, that seems a little bit difficult to arrange. You know, she wasn’t sure if 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 might serve as a substitute? And she came back to me about a week later and she said, I want to see an embalming. And I thought, wow, that’s rough. That’s 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 so terrified of death that she couldn’t even live. And that I wanted to bring her to the funeral home and walk through it and if it was possible to see an embalming preparation. They were very understanding. It was quite interesting because of course funeral parlour 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 because we’d be knee-deep in bodies otherwise, right? Someone has to do this sort of work. And apparently you can specialize in it. So what that also means, unless you think funeral parlour directors are completely non-human in some fundamental way, clearly indicates that it’s possible for a normal person to become so conversant 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. We can take something like facing death and turn it into an everyday occurrence. It’s kind of horrifying in a sense to think that you could be that harsh in a way, you know? And I think 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 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 them and that means that you have to be able to face these sorts of things. So anyways, we went to the funeral parlour, which is quite a weird thing for me too because I actually have a rather squeamish stomach. I’m kind of disgust sensitive and so it’s hard for me, especially odours, they’re just not good for me at all. But, you know, so I could have never been a surgeon or anything like that. But we went to the funeral parlour and 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 would 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. 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. You know, he said 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 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 a good question for you guys. How many of you waste more than four hours a day? Okay, okay. 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? Yes. We know it’s at least ten bucks, right, because that’s the way. Well, so the minimum value society puts on your labour is ten dollars an hour. Okay, but you know, 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 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 fifty dollars an hour is probably reasonable for what you guys are worth. It’s somewhere between ten and fifty anyways. So you know, let’s assume fifty. Okay, it’s two hundred bucks a day. It’s fourteen hundred bucks a week. It’s fifty, six hundred bucks a month. Sixty-five thousand dollars 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 might think, well, no, because I’m not getting paid. It’s like, wrong. You’re paid for your studies. You just get paid ten 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’s shut. A’s, door’s 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 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. It’s a very strange representation, obviously, because it’s a crucifix and it has a snake on it, but it’s a tree snake thing, you know. It’s actually an echo. There’s a story in the Old Testament about Moses leading his people through the desert. 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 tyranny, 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. So they get all kind of fighty and break into factions, and then they start worshipping false gods like golden calves and so on. It’s fragmentation under pressure. And so God gets irritated at them and he throws a bunch of poisonous snakes into the desert, because he’s such an easy guy to get along with. Throws a bunch of poisonous snakes in there and they go around biting all these people who are not being faithful. So all the people who are 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, you know, call off the poisonous snakes. They’ll be, hey, just call off the poisonous snakes. And God says to Moses to build 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 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 poisoned 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 serpent’s tail sort of stretches down into infinity. That’s what that representation is. It’s sort of the manifestation of the unknown right from the beginning of time and space. That’s what that image represents. That’s sort of the problem of humanity in some sense. There’s an infinite number of troubles stemming from an infinite source. Remarkable representation, I think. You’ve heard about near-death experiences, I imagine. The idea that people see the light at the end of the tunnel, and then when they get through the light, they see all their ancestors there, and something that vaguely resembles God. And that’s conditioned to some degree by their cultural background. It’s a very common experience, and this is actually a representation of that from the 12th to 13th century, maybe by Hieronymus Bosch. And this seems to be the sort of thing also that’s characteristic of the 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 spirit, whatever that means. You can think about those as, each of you are embodiments of ancestral spirits, right? Because all the ideas you have, for example, are all, they’re all, 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 lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, and your whole head is populated by these things. They’re sort of embodied things because they tell you how to act. They’re not just cold dead ideas. You’re a mixture of all those things, and I don’t know if the ancestral spirits that these visionaries encounter are personified representations of the spirits that live inside their head or what they are, but part of the experience seems to be, what would you call it? It’s like a rescuing of the dying father from the depths. How many of you have seen Pinocchio? Right. So you know the fundamental theme there, right? Pinocchio’s 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, so he can be led astray in 15 different ways. And finally his father disappears to go looking for him, and for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, his father ends up inside a whale at the bottom of the ocean, which is not the first place you’d think of looking for your father. But, especially if you were a puppet, like a cricket was leading you around, which was all absurd stuff. 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. You know the animators picked 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 quest vision, and it’s the cricket that leads the puppet deep underground, actually it’s into the ocean, into 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’re 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’s a dragon. How do you know that? What happens to the whale? He spits fire. Yeah, it’s weird behaviour for a whale, you know, and 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. Pinocchio doesn’t, and he dies in the effort to bring him to shore, but then, you know, the blue fairy comes down and says, well, because you’re such a good puppet, you know, you’re a prick, now you’re awake. You know, it’s a remarkable story, it’s an amazing movie. I mean, it has themes in it. They’re thousands and thousands of years old, like the idea that the hero has to journey to the darkest depths 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, it 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 an alchemical dictum, by the way, that was sort of reanimated by Jung. 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 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 a person a great father? Well, careful, devoted attention would be part of it, right? That’s a transpersonal thing. It’s like 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 pre-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 chaotic monster of the depths has this origin point that’s like the beginning of time. It’s like that’s a symbol 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 see the world through your personality, and the world is given form through your personality, and then when it starts to dissolve and disintegrate, say when you sink into depression, you’re sinking into a state that’s sort of before consciousness. So let me tell you something that William James said about this. So it’s a very difficult thing to communicate. And we’ll touch on it a bit more when we move into constructivism. So part of the idea here is that reality itself is extracted from the unknown and the unknowable, and 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, that you can’t even conceive of. And then you encounter them, especially when you fail, and then you interact with them, and by doing that you make them real and describable and experienceable. 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 like the action of consciousness on reality. That’s why, by the way, in the beginning of Genesis, Genesis is the word of God that produces order from chaos, right? So that’s the initiation 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 nothing mystical about that. You know perfectly well that you can make tomorrow one thing or another. And is that free will? Well, 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. Consciousness is something we don’t have a clue about. And this is William James. William James is the father 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 dentists use, for example, as nanol-jeezing, but that also has quite profound, hallucinatory, mystical, experience-inducing properties. And so William James used to play with this. This is a poem he wrote. I’ll read 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 babes and persons in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows can have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, though ready to be all sorts of what’s, full both of oneness and of manyness but in respects that don’t appear, changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points either of distinction or of identity can be caught. Sorry, I am. Yeah, well, it’s sort of incoherent, but what William James is referring to is this idea that the ground of reality is something like 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 a brilliant idea. And I think, you know, and I expect you to take this with a grain of salt because, you know, this part of what I’m telling you about, well, you may think this about a lot of what I’m telling you, is sort of out on the fringes, but the quantum mechanics believe that 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 a multi-dimensional potential from which many things can emerge. And 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 as if 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 have no idea what sort of glorious future you might be able to bring into existence. You know, 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, it’s a real open question and I think that’s part of what human beings have to bring against the sort of horrors of existence. It’s like you have a lot of potential and if you made the right choices and were, 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. 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 unnameable. You know, and the Muslims have the same sort of idea about Muhammad in many ways. It’s like you 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 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? The opposite’s united. The same me telling you to write and not to write. Extreme, something and other than that thing. Intoxication and otherness than intoxication. Every attempt at betterment, every attempt at otherment, it is. It fades forever and forever as we move. Alright, we’ll stop there, obviously.