more from Breaking Open the Head

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of those writers we study in high school and then forget. When I encountered his essays as an adult, I realized he was speaking to me: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Emerson asked. "Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"

That was what I demanded, "an original relation to the universe." Nothing abstract, secondhand, or second-rate. No history of somebody else's transcendence. Why should not I also enjoy it? Why did it seem such an impossible goal? [Pinchbeck 16-17]

It's comforting to know I'm not the only one who wants this for myself. I want my own experiences. I don't want to be told about it; I want to see for myself.

There is a cultural split between focus on the brain, the material hardware in which consciousness operates, and study of the mind, the incorporeal nexus of all we experience. western science obsessively studies the "objective" workings of the brain, its pathways of neurons and dense forests of synapses, without comprehending the nature of consciousness. Archaic shamanism is a technology for exploring the "subjective" truth of the mind through vision, dream, myth, and interaction with nature. According to current psychiatry, mental disorders have physical causes that can be treated, to a certain extent, with appropriate medication. From the shamanic perspective, not only mental but even physical disorders have nonphysical -- spiritual -- causes that must be addressed if a cure is going to be effective.

The visionary plants are the guiding spirits of archaic cultures. They are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness. they are gateways to a spiritual, or multidimensional, universe. In the modern world, the substances derived from these plants continue to be demonized, ridiculed, and above all suppressed. In the early 1960s, when a reviewer reduced Aldous Huxley's fascination with psychedelics to "fun with fungi," Huxley replied in scathing terms: "Which is better, to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow's Misdeeds out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?"

This cultural split remains a deep divide. As I write this, psychedelic drugs have been dismissed, yet again, as "toys of the hippie generation" in the Science section of the New York Times. It seems that no mainstream newspaper or magazine can publish an article about hallucinogens without stopping to ridicule them in some way. Psychedelics, chemical catalysts that open up inner worlds, remain banished and misunderstood because they occupy the point of direct contradiction and possible synthesis between brain-based materialism and spirit-oriented shamanism. [Pinchbeck, 62]

I would love to see this cultural divide disappear. I would love to see a culture where science can learn from tribal knowledge without perverting, corrupting or ridiculing it. I would love to see more widespread acceptance of the validity of different tribal paradigms and practices.

In all shamanic cultures, landscapes are psychic and spiritual extensions as well as physical ones. Traditional shamanism has always been deeply rooted in place. A Shuar shaman from the Ecuador amazon told me that he believed his powers of healing came to him from the mountains where he lived. The mountains conveyed some of their elemental energy and magnetic force to him, and through the medium of the ayahuasca vine as well as tobacco, one of the most sacred shamanic plants across South America, he could channel this force to his patients.

It is difficult for those of us, like myself, who grew up rootless in modern cities or suburbs to fully comprehend this sense of the sacredness, the supernatural power, of a land that has been inhabited by the same people over innumerable generations. When we read an article about the Uwa Indians -- a tribe in Colombia threatening to commit mass suicide if the oil companies drill on their land -- we may feel profound sympathy. But we can hardly imagine having an identification with a part of the earth, the shape of the land and the particular plants that grow there, which is so strong that we would rather die than abandon it.

The modern person drawn to the shamanic archetype -- the vision of sacred earth, revelatory word and multidimensional cosmos -- finds himself horrified by contemporary society and the accelerating processes of global destruction it has unleashed. yet he is cut off from the archaic traditions he might like to embrace. Our tradition seems to deny us access to spiritual vision, and we have lost the Indians' innate relation with the natural world as sacred being.

And yet, if shamanism is a universal human phenomenon, we possess the innate ability to regain everything we have lost. [Pinchbeck, 76]

Yep. I remember crying, feeling utterly ripped apart, at seeing a massive gash in a hillside on the first campus I fell in love with. The exposed soil bled reddish orange, which I found surprising, since I didn't think it was an area with that much clay around. It felt wrong to be watching this hideousness, as though I was witnessing a violation in process. There's a parking lot there now. A part of me feels sick remembering this.

Modernism caused a profound shift in the way we use our senses. In his book Myth and Meaning, Lévi-Strauss admitted his initial shock when he discovered that Indian tribesmen were able to see the planet Venus in daylight, with the naked eye -- "something that to me would be utterly impossible and incredible." But he learned from astronomers that it was feasible, and he found ancient accounts of Western navigators with the same ability. "Today we use less and we use more of our mental capacity than we did in the past," he realized. We have sacrificed perceptual capabilities for other mental abilities -- to concentrate on a computer screen while sitting in a cubicle for many hours at a stretch (something those Indians would find "utterly impossible and incredible"), or to shut off multiple levels of awareness as we drive a car in heavy traffic.... For the most part, we are not even aware of what we have lost. [Pinchbeck, 61]

Can you imagine living in a world where you can see Venus in the daytime? that strikes me as mind-boggling. And now I understand how the Maya could have been so taken with the movements of Venus -- they could see it MUCH more frequently than we ever could.