Pablo Amaringo is one of the world’s greatest visionary artists, and is renowned for his highly complex, colourful and intricate paintings of his visions from drinking the Ayahuasca brew.

He trained as a curandero in the Amazon, healing himself and others from the age of ten, but gave this up in 1977 to become a full-time painter and art teacher at his Usko-Ayar school. His book, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman, co-authored with Luis Eduardo Luna, brought his work and the rich mythology of the Amazon to a wide audience in the West.

Pablo Amaringo was born Puerto Libertad, in the Peruvian Amazon. He was ten years old when he first took Ayahuasca—a visionary brew used in shamanism, to help him overcome a severe heart disease. The magical cure of this ailment via the healing plants led Pablo toward the life of a vegetalismo in which he worked for many years.

Howard and Peter met with Pablo at the school which he founded (Usko-Ayar school of painting) in Pucullpa where he lives and paints, and interviewed Pablo about his life as a shaman and artist.

What drew you to being a shaman?

It was a spiritual matter for me. I had thought that shamans deceived and lied to people, so I didn’t believe in them. I thought that Ayahuasca healed people because it was medicine, I didn’t believe in magic and spirits. No! Then in 1967 I saw a curandera3 miraculously heal my sister who had been in mortal agony with hepatitis, and could not either eat or speak, but with this single healing from the plants, she was cured in just two hours. That motivated me to start learning the science of vegetalismo

She was given Ayahuasca?

No, the Senora used the knowledge of Ayahuasca and chanted. That was during the day. That same night I drank and received the powers, but I didn’t know what I was being given. I saw many things. I sat like a king and watched! After that I dieted for five days, staying at home, without seeing many people.

After one month I began to feel what everybody else was feeling, it was a very strange thing! And I discovered I could sing the chants without even learning them. They came out beautifully and I wondered how it was possible that I knew them. I realised I had powers in me and I began to be a curandero when I cured a young man with a terrible headache, firstly I felt it and then he was better.

Is it an important part of the cure, to feel what the patient feels?

That was how the powers were given to me, but others say that when they take the Ayahuasca, they can see what the problem is with their patient. I didn’t even have to drink, I felt exactly where their pains were, and their emotions, everything.

What plant did you take on your diet?

Just Ayahuasca, but afterwards I took other plants at the same time as Ayahuasca, to learn more things.

Then you practiced as a curandero in Pucullpa?

Yes, and for many years I travelled to Madre de Dios, Cusco, Lima, Huanuco, Tingo Maria and Alto Ucayali. Wherever I went I cured people.

At that time Pucullpa was much smaller.

Yes, the houses were mostly wooden, with cultivation behind them, there were no high buildings. None of the streets had tarmac, they were of red mud, except for the one central Plaza. The road to Lima was terrible and it took a month or more to get there.

How do you communicate with plant spirits after you take them into you?

When you take any plant other than Ayahuasca, you connect through your dreams. Ajo sacha, Chric Sanango, Bobinsana etc. you learn while you are asleep. But with Ayahuasca no, you are conscious and awake. That is why it is the planta maestra – the eye through which you see the world, the universe. It is miraculous and sacred and you can learn from your studies far more with Ayahuasca than with other plants, but you must obey the ‘statutes’ of this plant, i.e. the rules. If you obey, no knowledge will be withheld from you.

My visions helped me understand the value of human beings, animals, the plants themselves, and many other things. The plants taught me the function they play in life, and the holistic meaning of all life. We all should give special attention and deference to Mother Nature. She deserves our love. And we should also show a healthy respect for her power!

How did you discover your gift of painting?

I used to make portraits and landscapes when I was 20 years old, but mostly using charcoal. But this didn’t earn me any money so I dedicated myself to other things, agriculture, raising animals and hairdressing, all kinds of things. I was working as secretary to the chief of customs here in the port of Pucullpa. One day my boss told me to paint two armchairs, and as I had never painted, I just slapped on the paint any old how, and it looked awful with lumps everywhere. But the boss didn’t reprimand me; he said how come you are good at everything except painting? I was a little hurt because he was always so impressed by everything I did. This made me think that if I was going to learn to paint, I would learn to do it well.

After three years working there I had a heart problem and returned to doing portraits in pencil beginning with my own portrait.

How did you begin painting visions?

Years passed and I used to say to my mother, when I am older I will paint several pictures of myself so that after I am dead people will know there has been a painter in the family! One day I was asked to accompany a foreign gentleman because I spoke a little English but I did not know that he was the biologist Denis McKenna. After some years he recommended me for a job in Sepagua but I was not able to take it up because my mother fell ill. So when he came back in 1985 I asked him if he would show my pictures in an exhibition he was organizing in Switzerland. They were small pictures, but later he returned with Luis Eduardo Luna who said how beautifully you paint Pablo. I can promote your work; do you want to be a world class painter?

I said no, I don’t want any of those things. I don’t know what a ‘world class’ painter is. I just want you to help me sell my pictures to make a little money. I was portraying the daily realities of people in the Amazon, how they sow and harvest, how they fish and celebrate their fiestas and so on. Luna said how is it I haven’t met you before now? Every year I have been coming for the last eight years, travelling up the Amazon through Brazil and Peru to Panama!

I asked him why he came. What was he looking for? We are interested in the magical plants of Peru from the coast, Sierra and Selva. I know what you are after, I said. I used to be a shaman ten years ago, what a shame you didn’t know me before, but now I have put all that behind me. I could have told you so much about what I had seen, I said. Then I started to think that I could paint for him all the things I had seen in my visions and all the things that were explained to me. But I had to do it in secret because even when people saw photos of what I painted, they said I had gone mad, that I was bedevilled and painting things of the demon!

They worried me with these remarks. I could never have had an exhibition here in Pucullpa. So Luna said paint for me then! And I made two pictures of visions for his next visit, and when he saw those pictures – one of which is in the Museum of Washington DC and the other in the University of Stockholm – they took hundreds of pictures of them. But I said he could take them away. And that’s what they did, wrapped up in a huge box. They sold them and sent me the money. After that they said we don’t want any more landscapes, only visions!

They studied them and said they found language and biology in the pictures so later I began to make explanations of them. But I could never show them to people here. That’s how it all started.

Are people still prejudiced here?

Yes, many are still. Once some religious people came and said that if the name of Jesus was spoken the paintings would explode. And they asked me to say Jesus. I said I can’t say that word, what for? They said to each other, he has got the devil in him, if he says Jesus, he will explode!

You have many amazing paintings here in your studio; can you tell us something about them?

The pictures are a means by which people can cross spiritual boundaries. Some people say they can only believe what they see, but there are thing which exist which cannot be seen. The pictures are for reminding people what we are and where we come from and where we are going. They are for people of any culture in the world although there is much that is taken from indigenous Amazonian culture. For example:

‘A Fines Espirituales’ (Spiritual Endeavour)

In this painting there are horses like humans, humans with tiger’s heads and a papagayo with a human body and so on. Looking at this painting, it reminds us of many of the Amazonian legends in which animals adopt human forms, does this painting relate to these stories?

That is correct, spirits cannot materialize easily, if they cannot take human form, they take animal form. They are made from the spirits of animals, but if they appear human, then they can reproduce with women in order that they can be incarnate in us. This is what you can discover through the visions of Ayahuasca and other plants like toé, chric sanango, ajo sacha etc. assuming you do the diet correctly, then the invisible world can become manifest to us. It is part of our mystic evolution. Everyone has a role to play inspiring, creating, evolving their minds to preserve the world. The spirits are working untiringly to protect Mother Nature – everything from the plants and animals to the circles of the planets.

You touch on an important point about protecting nature; there is an increasing amount of damage that people are causing to the natural world, what is your view why humans do so much damage?

It is our lack of ingenuity, and above all imagination. We think we are the only ones here on earth, unique! We should all work like scientists, teachers, composers so that we can fully and creatively engage in the world, so in that way the world continues. If we play a part in the functioning of the universe we will not die. When I am old and about to die and cannot see well enough to paint, I will be talking other things instead, but I can still paint now and I am 68.

The plants in the painting are ishanga, maromara, pinon blanco, pinon colorado and pinon negro, lengua de perro, verbena. The ethnic elements are Shipibo5, Conibo, Shetebo, Amahuaca, and you can see the spells and spaceships.

‘Hondas de la Ayahuasca’ (Ayahuasca waves)

Here is represented the different grades of shaman. A suniruma is the highest expert sitting here, with dominion of the sky, then banco puma or banco sumi who has dominion of the land, finally the muraya who has dominion over the water.

You can see waves just like the effects of Ayahuasca – the mareacion. It comes strongly and it seems as if it is passing and then another one comes, like waves from a stone in the water. This is the sachamama6 which comes in different colours in the mareacion and protects the vegetation. It is a semi-mythological animal because it actually exists, a huge serpent which lives on the land but doesn’t move, so plants grow on top of it. You can be chopping a path with your machete and strike it unknowingly, until blood appears! If it sees you, it draws you into its mouth with its power, you cannot escape. You can see here the seven rays of the rainbow which portray this power.

You can also see angel serpents or sarafs who protect the sachamama.

El Principio de la Vida. (The Principle or beginning of life)

This painting is about the mystical beginning of life which can be accessed through drinking Ayahuasca. The first cell which divided for the first time was with the help of extra-terrestrial beings, spirits, and angels which enlisted sub atomic particles. The cells have taken millions of years to develop and evolve, and after making cells they created marine animals, fish, and large snakes to live amongst the plants.

They made the plants grow and finally terrestrial animals, lions and tigers and large flying animals. These inventions gave them the practice they needed for creating more, four legged animals, and domestic animals.

Wild plants were made for changing the environment while domestic plants, especially flowers, are for altering the heart, mind and spirit of people. In your garden its best to grown domestic plants, to put on your table to make you happy and give you love. We don’t understand plants and we look down on them but they are our fuel, our medicine, they give us health and life. All this has taken many thousands of years of work by the spirits.

Before a person is born, while still in the womb, we recapitulate evolution and pass through a snake-like phase, at another phase you can see horns. At this stage we are like a book in which you can read everything that will happen in your life, how many years you will live and so on. I was very astonished when I saw these things. It is very emotional. There are things you don’t see but it is not because they don’t exist. We just need the potential to see, but if we could see everything we would go mad. So we must be trained to learn and survive the big shock. For this you need to diet7.

Elsewhere they are drinking Ayahuasca in colourful clothes coming from the wisdom they are getting. All this is according to the “book” we spoke about. Much depends of what the mother eats when she is pregnant – she should eat natural food so the child will be strong, otherwise they are weak.

Bottom right corner, is the beginning of the blood, the spark of life, the spirit which enters when the mother is asleep while pregnant. You can see the uterus there and the waves which give the child his emotions and characteristics. That’s why this is called the beginning of life: just like waves which go into a TV to make a picture. With this you can deal with all the problems of life. Tinguna is the first cells of life to be formed. People don’t understand these things yet.

‘Yacaruna Huasi’ (The yacaruna’s house.)

The yacaruna are people that live in under the river in tunnels which are pictured here, and they lead to another world as you see. They play musical instruments to enchant people at midnight when all is silent under the moonlight. You can see dolphins, manatee (sea-cow), electric eel and charapa mama which are marine turtles. Then there are muraya (Shipibo shamans), water dogs, water horses and fish which fly when it rains very hard and fall out of the sky.

Would you like to add anything more about the importance of plants?

For me personally, though, they mean even more than this. Plants—in the great living book of nature—have shown me how to study life as an artist and shaman. They can help all of us to know the art of healing and to discover our own creativity, because the beauty of nature moves people to show reverence, fascination, and respect for the extent to which the forests give shelter to our souls.

The consciousness of plants is a constant source of information for medicine, alimentation, and art, and an example of the intelligence and creative imagination of nature. Much of my education I owe to the intelligence of these great teachers. Thus I consider myself to be the “representative” of plants, and for this reason I assert that if they cut down the trees and burn what’s left of the rainforests, it is the same as burning a whole library of books without ever having read them.

People who are not so dedicated to the study and experience of plants may not think this knowledge is so important to their lives—but even they should be conscious of the nutritional, medicinal, and scientific value of the plants they rely on for life.

My most sublime desire, though, is that every human being should begin to put as much attention as he or she can into the knowledge of plants, because they are the greatest healers of all. And all human beings should also put effort into the preservation and conservation of the rainforest, and care for it and the ecosystem, because damage to these not only prejudices the flora and fauna but humanity itself.

Even in the Amazon these days, many see plants as only a resource for building houses and to finance large families. People who have farms and raise animals also clear the forest to produce foodstuffs. Mestizos8 and native Indians log the largest trees to sell to industrial sawmills for subsistence. They have never heard of the word ecology!

I, Pablo, say to everybody who lives in the Amazon and the other forests of the world, that they must love the plants of their land, and everything that is there!

This expression of love must be a sincere and altruistic interest in the lasting well-being of others. We are not here simply to exist, but to enjoy life together with plants, animals, and loved ones, and to delight in contemplation of the beauty of nature. A shaman has in his mind and heart the attitude of conserving nature because he knows that life is for enjoying the company of this world’s countless delights.

Authors Bio:

Howard G. Charing: has worked some of the most respected and extraordinary shamans & healers in the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Philippines. With Peter Cloudsley he organises specialist retreats to the Amazon Rainforest at the dedicated centre located in the Mishana nature reserve. He has also co-authored Plant Spirit Shamanism published by Destiny Books (USA)

Peter Cloudsley: Since 1980, Peter has been researching Peruvian fiesta music. He has built up a documented archive of traditional music and interviews, and has collected for the British Museum. Throughout this time he has travelled extensively in Latin America, especially Peru, studying the wealth of music and diversity of popular religions. Peter has taught courses at the City Lit and elsewhere (on music and popular culture in Latin America).

For more information about our Amazon and Andean work, contact Eagle’s Wing Centre for Contemporary Shamanism. www.shamanism.co.uk
Email: eagleswing@shamanism.co.uk

A number of artists have attempted to render the striking visual experiences that occur after ingesting ayahuasca or DMT. In the Upper Amazon, there are both indigenous artists, whose traditional work consists largely of abstract patterns, such as those found on the now well-known pottery, clothing, and other household goods of the Shipibo; and visionary artists, mostly mestizo, whose work is characterized by detailed representations of spirits, trees, animals, objects, and participants in ayahuasca healing ceremonies. These latter works fall almost paradigmatically within what has now come to be called outsider art, sometimes naïve art, and sometimes visionary art — direct, intense, content-laden, narrative, enormously detailed, personal, idiosyncratic, two-dimensional, and brightly colored. While indigenous artists work for the most part in anonymity, their work stigmatized as craft rather than art, the work of mestizo visionary artists has become much better known, largely through the publication, fully annotated and sumptuously reproduced, of the visionary paintings of former shaman Pablo César Amaringo.

Outside the Amazon, artists not born into or raised in indigenous or mestizo ayahuasca-using cultures, including such well-known visionary artists as Alex Grey, Robert Venosa, and Martina Hoffmann, have also rendered visual experiences attributed to the ingestion of ayahuasca or DMT. For want of a better term, I will call this body of work DMT art.

There are some remarkable convergences between DMT art and the abstract representations of the ayahuasca experience in indigenous Amazonian art. The indigenous work on the left, below, by Cashinahua artist Arlindo Daureano Estevão, represents the different worlds of the ayahuasca vision as houses with doors to be entered and paths linking the different contained spaces. This type of design is called nawan kene pua, or stranger’s design, since it is a map that keeps one from getting lost in the ayahuasca world. This abstract representation is strikingly reflected in the work on the right, below, entitled DMT, by photographer Peter Kosinski. It is difficult to say whether such convergences are due to acquaintance with indigenous art or to similarities in the visionary experience.

Arlindo Daureano Estevão, Nawan Kene Pua	Peter Kosinski, DMT

Similarly, on the left below is a traditional Shipibo woven cloth, whose design represents a sacred pattern derived from a cosmic anaconda whose skin embodies all possible designs. Shipibo shamans employ these patterns to reorder the bodies of persons who are sick. Certain diseases are thought to be caused by harmful, messy designs on the wsick body, which the shaman must magically unravel and replace with orderly designs. After drinking ayahuasca, the Shipibo shaman sees a luminous design in the air. When this design floats down and touches the shaman’s lips it becomes transformed into a song the shaman sings. Different elements of the song relate to different elements of the design; for example, the end of each verse is associated with the end-curl of a design motif. When the patient is cured, the design has become clear, neat, and complete. Again, this abstract representation is strikingly reflected in Vibrata Chromodoris’s Emergence, below on the right.

Anonymous, Shipibo Woven Cloth	Vibrata Chromodoris, Emergence

However, most DMT art is representational rather than abstract, and taps into the work of mestizo Amazon visionary artists. The first painting below is by mestizo artist Pablo Amaringo; the remaining pieces are DMT art by artists from outside the Amazon, all working with content recognizably similar to that of Amaringo, although not necessarily in the same naïve outsider style.

Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca and Chacruna (Detail)	Robert Venosa, Ayahuasca Dream (Detail)
Cyril Lanier, Ayahuasca Vision of the Blue Perfume	Michael Jacobs, Ayahuasca Dream

But even more striking, I think, are two motifs that appear with some frequency in DMT art but not in the indigenous or mestizo artistic traditions. The first of these I will call The Face — that is, a recognizably humanoid face with eyes, a nose, and a mouth, often filling the entire frame, and often constructed from smaller units, either geometric figures or dots. These figures are often described as a being, an entity, or a visitation. For example, Robert Essig says of his painting DMT Entity, below on the right, “This image was inspired from my first unnatural encounter with the spirit molecule. An Entity that seemed extremely real and intelligent appeared before me with terrific precision and speed. It dissipated as soon as I imposed my will upon it.”

Alex Grey, Ayahuasca Visitation	Robert Essig, DMT Entity

Indeed, The Face often appears in works that are not conceptually about The Face. In Luke Brown’s Pineal Feline, for example, below on the right, the titular face is that of a cat, at the bottom center of the painting; what then makes up The Face are floral arabesques and ornamentation of the cat’s face, almost entirely buried within — indeed, reduced almost to a decorative adornment of — The Face. Similarly, in Martina Hoffman’s La Chacruna, below on the left, The Face decomposes, upon closer inspection, into arabesques, including snakes and elephant heads, elaborated upon the relatively small face of the goddess, in the upper middle of the painting.

Martina Hoffmann, La Chacruna	Luke Brown, Pineal Feline

Sometimes The Face is deconstructed to simpler, rather than more complex, elements. At that point, we can begin to see the basic patterns from which complex Faces are constructed.

Dennis Konstantin, DMT Entity	Nisvan, Ayahuasca Vision (Detail)

What is interesting here is that underlying The Face is a relatively simple symmetric pattern, not unlike the abstract patterns of indigenous Amazonian ayahuasca art, but here cognitively assembled into a recognizable human face. Perhaps that is why Essig’s Face dissipated as soon as he imposed his will upon it; attempting to control the image distracted the perceiver from its imposed structural coherence.

Another recurring motif we can call the wingspread. This is a pattern very similar to the wings of a moth or dragonfly. Below, for example, is a more or less typical moth — actually, the tobacco hornworm moth (Maduca sexta):

Wingspread Moth

We can see this wingspread motif reproduced with increasing elaboration in the following pictures:

Dennis Konstantin Last night I was Astro Dynamic (Detail)	Carey Thompson, Diosa Madre Tierra
Danny Gomez, DMT (Detail)	Robert Venosa, Yage Guide

Strikingly, this wingspread pattern is often hidden rather than explicit, providing a formal structure rather than any content; look, for example, at the wingspread position of the hands in Alex Grey’s Light Weaver, especially in conjunction with, say, Robert Venosa’s Yagé Guide, above. The wingspread pattern underlies the purely formal similarity between Mariela de la Paz’s Ayahuaska at the Gates of San Pedro and Alejandre Segrégio’s Presente Divino. Indeed, sometimes this structure is so deeply embedded as to be difficult to discern, until the pattern suddenly emerges, as with the darker rock formation in Olga Spiegel’s Rendezvous.

Mariela de la Paz, Ayahuaska at the Gates of San Pedro	Alex Grey, Light Weaver
Alejandre Segrégio, Presente Divino (Detail)	Olga Spiegel, Rendezvous

Flore Singer Aaslid (flore.aaslid@svt.ntnu.no)
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Abstract

The manner in which reality is perceived and conceptualized has profound implications for many levels of human existence. From the methods by which scientific research is conducted, interpreted and applied to the choices we make in everyday life not to mention the circumstances surrounding our death. The widespread mechanistic view of reality, based on a sharp division between subjective experience and objective reality, has had an enormous impact on contemporary civilization on both an individual and collective scale. Although there have been many positive developments, especially in the field of science and technology, the ultimate effect of perpetuating this dualistic ontology is fragmentation on both an individual and collective scale. In many respects, fragmentation can be seen as the root cause of many of the ills afflicting the world today. By drawing on recent scientific developments that seriously challenge the myths of atomic physics combined with empirical examples from different treatment methods for a wide range of pathologies, this paper emphasizes the urgent need for a holistic, integrative approach based on the unity of different levels of mind.

Background

Historically, contemporary western civilization and culture has been powerfully influenced by the dualistic philosophy of Rene´ Descartes. Although this dualism can be traced all the way back to the Greek atomists, it was Descartes who had the greatest impact on the development of classical physics and in many respects Western thought up to this day. His philosophy was developed in the seventeenth century and consisted of a fundamental division of reality into two separate, independent parts – the Cartesian split between mind and matter. An important consequence of this dualism was that science and theology became separated as the realm of the physical, seen as lifeless substance, became a subject of study in itself, segregated from other disciplines (Stumpf 1988). This in turn inspired the Newtonian mechanistic view of reality where the material world was perceived as a Giant Machine made up of an assembly of objects hinged together and operated by rational laws, which the human mind could discover. The foundation for classical physics was thereby established and the result was an unusually swift development of the experimental sciences predominantly in physics where significant scientific and technological discoveries appeared, especially during the industrial revolution.

The subsequent impact of the Cartesian split, however, cannot be isolated to the material world alone. As Fritjoff Capra has pointed out (Capra 1975) it has also had an enormous impact on the Western way of thinking and living in the world. Descartes’ legendary proclamation “cogito ergo sum” – “I think therefore I am”, has affected the very core of our being in equating our identity with our minds, as opposed to the organism as a whole. By separating mind from matter, self-awareness has become reduced to a vague conception of an isolated ego floating within a somewhat uncooperative physical body whose instincts and desires it is presumed to control. This “inner fragmentation” encompasses every facet of our being, as individuals are further compartmentalized into separate categories like feelings, beliefs, drives and motivations. Unfortunately, these many aspects of the self often produce conflict in the secluded thinker, leading to many varieties of “metaphysical confusion”. Furthermore, this inner fragmentation is also reflected in the outside world, as different parts of nature become exploited without taking the welfare of the total environment into account. A similar trend can be observed in society as humanity is divided into separate and frequently conflicting factions between nations and races as well as ethnic, religious and political groups. The consequences are tragic in more ways than one, to cite Capra,

The belief that all these fragments – in ourselves, in our environment and in our society – are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, ecological and cultural crises. It has alienated us from nature and from our fellow human beings. It has brought a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder; an ever rising wave of violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized, and an ugly, polluted environment in which life has often become physically and mentally unhealthy (Capra 1975: 28).

Several authors have also remarked on the link between pathology and feelings of disconnectedness and isolation from the world at large. Bateson (1972), for example, notes that adaptation in both biological worlds and human societies leads to increasing pathology. Since adaptation to our environments in itself demands increasing specialization, this leads to a narrowing of perception, and a restriction on our awareness in terms of seeing the patterns that connect and unify all phenomena. The Cartesian division between science and religion, although necessary and in many ways beneficial at the time, has resulted in a split society and an upsurge of fragmented minds. This is perhaps what Bateson had in mind when he wrote “It is the attempt to separate intellect from emotion that is monstrous, and I suggest that it is equally monstrous – and dangerous – to attempt to separate the external mind from the internal. Or to separate mind from body.” (Ibid: 464).

Curiously, this fragmentation can be observed all the way down to the cellular level in the realm of neurobiology, which in itself has enormous implications for psychodynamic psychology. Fredric Schiffer, a leading Harvard psychiatrist and researcher, suggests in his book Of Two Minds (1998) that major psychiatric illnesses can result from problems with brain laterality. His theory is based on both clinical observations and a review of split-brain literature as well as experimentation with lateral visual field stimulation which has indicated that psychological traumas are associated more with one cerebral hemisphere than the other. The result is a one-sided hemispheric dominance, resulting in “two minds” where each one possesses a different a personality and different level of maturity. For example, the emotional mind, mainly associated with the right hemisphere, might be harmed by previous trauma and abuse leading to sabotage of the critical mind, or left hemisphere. In other words, the interaction between these two minds, whether there is hemispheric harmonization or conflict, ultimately shapes our whole psychological nature in terms of the emotional stagnation or growth we encounter in life. One primary goal of therapy then is to access, isolate and work with encoded memories in the underdeveloped hemisphere thereby facilitating reintegration and allowing for a more harmonious and balanced relationship between our two selves. His approach has produced notable results for a large range of emotional disorders like anxiety, depression, addiction and even stress-induced heart disease (Ibid).

Furthermore, a recent article in Scientific American called “Scars that won’t heal: the neurobiology of child abuse” (Teichner 2002) suggests that these hemispheric imbalances can even be observed anatomically in the brain. According to these studies, people who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by childhood sexual or physical abuse display a number of significant structural differences when compared to “normal” subjects asked to recall painful memories. In those who suffered from PTSD, the right hemisphere dominated and evidence showed that the left hemisphere was actually smaller. Additionally, the corpus callosum, a communicative pathway between both halves of the brain, was also smaller, making it extremely difficult for painful feelings in the right brain to be integrated by the left brain in terms of acquiring some kind of context and meaning. Areas in the brain associated with emotions, specifically the amygdala and hippocampus were also underdeveloped, and among PTSD sufferers, blood flow deficiency towards one area of the brain (the cerebellar vermis) might even account for symptoms of depression and ADHD since this area helps regulate the production and release of nor-epinephrine and dopamine (Ibid).

A cybernetic approach to reality

In effect, what these findings seem to be indicating is that the brain interacts with the social environment in a much more intricate and complex manner than Descarte’s philosophical speculations might suggest. The mind develops from the entire organism as a whole, a major theme also expressed in Antanio Damasio’s book Descartes”” Error (1994). Here the author, a professor of neurology, argues clearly and persuasively for the idea that reason and emotion are closely linked and that the mind reflects two types of interaction: between the body and the brain, and between them and the environment, based on several years of neuroscientific research. The interdependence of mind and matter is a point that I find Bateson also expresses quite clearly in his cybernetic epistemology. Here the mind is portrayed as a cybernetic system, where the division between the “physical world” and the “mental world” is not categorical but based on a contrast in coding and transmission inside and outside the body. Message pathways can also be seen outside the skin, and these as well as the messages they convey must be integrated as part of the mental system whenever relevant. In other words, even if the territory or environment as a physical entity never enters the mind, the mind is not limited by the skin, it’s not in anybody’s head – there is circuitry at all levels of existence (Bateson 1972: 454). It follows then, that where fragmentation on various levels eventually leads to pathology, a cybernetic approach may provide us with the keys to developing a healthier relationship to our environment and ourselves. The challenge lies in discovering a method by which to assist consciousness in recognizing the systemic nature of mind. With this task as a point of departure, I will now attempt to expand on some of the main ideas presented in Bateson’s essay “Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art”, focusing specifically on the integrative potential of dreams and ritual.

According to Bateson, psychic unity can be perceived in a number of ways through the medium of art, ritual and mythology, and through dreams. These processes have an essential function with respect to integration because they allow us to see a communicative message as both itself internally patterned and as part of a larger patterned universe. For example, in connecting dreams to feelings, and feelings as arising out of patterns of relationships between self and other, and self and the environment, he shows how patterns can be expressed symbolically, through metaphor. Here conscious and unconscious elements are expressed through metaphoric coding according to primary processes (where one does not distinguish between fantasy and reality) in the form of dreams, art and ritual. The importance of these functions can hardly be underestimated, as Bateson himself writes “mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life… life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only short arcs of such circuits as human conduct may direct” (Ibid: 146).

The key issue here is that dreams, myths and rituals, as well as art, have an integrative potential because they express deep structures of relationships, through metaphoric coding, between mind and matter. Or put slightly differently, they serve as bridges between the false dualism of inner and outer worlds and act as conceptual mediators between the two. Understood from this perspective, metaphors can express both structural similarity and significant relationships, they function as mediating elements and analogic codes that create a “pattern” by connecting different levels of reality in a given context, from which meaning can then be derived. In this manner, they serve to reveal the interconnections between events, processes, thoughts and actions that make up the realities of our changing world and “present an overall context, a framework, within which the concrete actions of individuals can be placed, understood and judged” (Thaiss 1978: 13). In this regard, metaphors are not only a peculiarity of language but have a concrete role in everyday behavior and experience, as they play an active part through structuring our perceptual and conceptual systems, and in many respects even direct our actions (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). In terms of personal development and growth, it would seem logical that gaining direct access to these metaphoric codification processes could yield exceptionally powerful results. Empirically, this can be substantiated by the ritual use of ibogaine and it’s somewhat controversial role in the treatment of addiction and mental disorders.

Ibogaine as integrative catalyst

The development, application and dynamics of Ibogaine are presented in detail by Goutarel, Gollnhofer and Sillans in a paper entitled “Pharmodynamics and Therapeutic Applications of Iboga and Ibogaine” (1993). The potent and unique properties of ibogaine, an extract from the root of the plant Tabernanthe Iboga, was primarily utilized as an essential component of the Bwiti initiation rituals in Gabon, West Africa. Although there are some ritual variations among various Bwiti cults, some underlying structural similarities can still be observed. The initiation itself is a typical rite of passage, revolving around the principle themes of death, liminality and rebirth where the neophyte arrives at a vast realization of the mysteries of the beyond through the visions induced by the plant itself. Iboga is said to encourage both visual and auditory confirmation of several planes of existence with which the initiate blends. This ritual is closely connected to death, it is said among the Mitsogho Bwiti that the initiate will only see the Bwiti twice in their lives, during this initiation and at the time of their death. It enables one to return to infancy, and to birth – to life in the womb “by returning initiates to the uterine condition, a condition in any case very close to life in the land of the dead” thereby restoring them “to their own integrity – their pristine conditions” (Fernandez 1982 in Goutarel, Gollnhofer and Sillans 1993). There are four main visual phases that can be distinguished during this initiation:

• A period of disorientation and confusion, visual distortions
• The journey to the underworld, seeing animal like entities
• Meeting the ancestors and traveling to “The Village of the Dead”, and
• An onset of “normative ”visions of a highly archetypical nature, meeting primordial entities and gaining access to “ancient memories”.

The second visual phase usually concerns past events and memories, many see their own life pass before their eyes somewhat like a cognitive slide show of their own psyche. The visual phases are followed by a cognitive period of analysis where they are evaluated and interpreted, a job reserved for the elder initiates among the Bwiti. In this manner the initiation ritual is strictly monitored with respect to its progression, ritual significance and import. The final stage is the most crucial, and when attained is celebrated by the whole tribe, the initiate has “seen the Bwiti with his own eyes” and is now considered a Master. Contrary to standard hallucinations, this ordeal in many respects resembles an NDE (near death experience) in terms of the actual content and different stages of visual manifestations as researched and described in detail by psychiatrist Raymond Moody and cardiologist Michael B. Sabom. These visualizations bare a much closer resemblance to a “waking dream” rather than an illusory distortion of reality, since “the subject remains perfectly conscious and can communicate with those around him, being at once an actor and a spectator of his visions”.

The first person in the west to remark on the exceptional psychoactive properties of ibogaine was the Chilean researcher and psychotherapeutic physician Claudio Naranjo, who published a report called “Psychotherapeutic Possibilities of New Fantasy-Enhancing Drugs” in Clinical Toxicology (Naranjo, C. 1969). Here he is concerned with the therapeutic effects of two very similar alkaloids, harmaline (an extract derived from the yage bark) and ibogaine. The term “oneirophrenic” best describes the effects of these drugs and was coined by the yage specialist William Turner to differentiate the states induced by these drugs from other hallucinogenics specifically due to the absence of any psychotic symptom, although they do share “the preeminence of a primary thought process” (in Goutarel, Gollnhofer & Sillans 1993). These involve a dream-like phenomena devoid of the usual visual and/or auditory changes in perception of the environment itself, where the patient can gain access to the underworld, the unconscious, in the form of remarkably consistent archetypical imagery or “ancient memories, generally common to all humans, buried in their collective unconscious. To cite Voltaire: ‘The world, according to Plato, was composed of archetypal ideas that always remained deep in the brain’.” (Ibid.). Since subjects remain conscious throughout the whole ordeal there is obviously an unusual integrative potential here, the type of contact concerned by the unconscious material is symbolic (rather than assuming the form of a free-floating emotion, as with LSD), and may henceforth be assimilated in the form of lasting signs. Such signs generally occur when a fantasy or a hypothesis that had been unconscious becomes conscious with such clarity that the ego of a mature person is compelled to become aware of his or her deep-rooted former error (Ibid).

In other words, ibogaine basically allows patients to gain access to significant memories and emotions, while simultaneously maintaining an extraordinary degree of symbolic objectivity. This objectivity then allows them to integrate important events and feelings during an intensive cognitive process of profound introspection and self-analysis. Although Naranjo did not see Ibogaine and harmaline as a “psychiatric panacea” that could magically cure the mentally ill, he was very impressed with his findings and concluded his report by writing that they may nevertheless act as psychological catalysts making it possible to compress a very lengthy psychotherapeutic process into a shorter time and change its prognosis. Working directly with these processes therefore has a highly beneficial effect, the reason for which many shamanic tribes, including the Mitsogho Bwiti, have been recognized as practicing a form of remarkably advanced therapy, psychosomatic healing and even psychoanalysis (Fromaget 1986 in Goutarel, Gollnhofer & Sillan 1993).

The powerful effects of ibogaine were also noticed by Howard Lotsof in the early 60’s, a 19 year old American heroin addict experimenting with some friends at a drug party with a trial dose of about 500 mg of the extract. Although not intended, the side effect of this initial trial was that five of the seven who had tried ibogaine, in addition to Lotsof himself, simply stopped using drugs. Lotsof, who had permanently recovered, saw the incredible potential and decided to make it available to drug addicts as a method for interrupting narcotic addiction. He has probably invested the most time and effort into making ibogaine known in the west and managed to secure four different U.S. patents, one for opiate addiction in 1985, amphetamine and cocaine addiction in1986, for alleviating alcohol dependence in 1989 and for interrupting nicotine dependence in 1991. An incredible mount of research has also been conducted in both Europe and the United States as to the effectiveness of ibogaine in terms of interrupting dependency in both human and animal subjects. For example, a single treatment with ibogaine hydrochloride taken orally can interrupt severe heroin addiction for up to 6 months. The treatment process is described as follows:

The duration of the treatment is about 30 hours, and ibogaine exerts a stimulant effect during this period. An abreactive process takes place during the treatment but does not become evident until the patient awakens from a natural sleep that occurs after the primary and secondary effects of ibogaine are diminished. The drug addicts no longer desire to take heroin and show no perceptible signs of physical withdrawal. The subjects are relaxed and express themselves coherently. They demonstrate a feeling of self-confidence. Lotsof describes the effects of the oral administration of ibogaine and divides these effects into three stages, comparable to the four stages of the Bwiti of the Mitsogho. (Goutarel, Gollnhofer & Sillans 1993)

Somewhat paradoxically, even though it has been confirmed repeatedly that ibogaine actually suppresses dependency; the 1967-68 resolutions of the World Health Assembly (which still applies today) nevertheless classified ibogaine with hallucinogenics like LSD, guilty of impairing human health and apparently having some other mysterious addictive quality. Although ibogaine can be lethal if the dosage is not carefully regulated, it is still probably the most humane and effective treatment available when administered by professionals. This is because, in addition to enabling addicts to examine and resolve the roots of their addictive behavior during the visionary state, it also has the unique ability to reduce withdrawal and prevent drug-cravings for up to several months while ibogaine metabolites remain in the body. The US government even approved clinical trials all the way into the 90’s to test its treatment potential (in addition to the lesser known successful trials conducted by the CIA way back in the 50’s), but was persuaded by representatives of major pharmaceutical corporations to postpone further development of the drug on the grounds that it was not profit-worthy. Among others, Dr Deborah Mash, professor of pharmacology and State Medical Examiner for Dade County, Florida has successfully treated over 100 people with ibogaine and published a great deal of scientific data confirming the effectiveness of this root.

Dynamics of the waking dream

There is a great deal of speculation as to the mechanisms underlying the powerful effects of ibogaine, especially related to addiction and other pathological disorders. Although it appears that the main reasons for it not being more widely available are political, ibogaine is a highly complex drug and still only partially understood, making it especially unattractive to the pharmaceutical industry. Without delving too deeply into the field of neuroscience, which is beyond the scope of this paper anyhow, there is one area in particular I feel merits further attention since it relates directly to the integrative role of metaphoric coding in dreams as postulated be Bateson. According to Goutarel and Co.(1993) the long waking dream sequence seems to lie at the root of a temporary destructuring of the ego, followed by its restructuring. This hypothesis is connected with both ethnological studies of the Mitsogho Bwiti as well as the neurophysiological findings of Michel Jouvet and Sir Francis Crick, concerning the specific role of dreams in programming and deprogramming basic behavior patterns ensuing in a new individuation of the human brain.

The different stages of sleep can be characterized by different wave frequencies; NREM (slow wave or deep) sleep, PGO (pontogeniculo-occipital) waves, and REM (rapid eye movement or paradoxical) sleep when dreaming takes place. According to Jouvet and Crick, PGO waves are considered to be the principal coding tool by acting on the cortical level in recording the genetic and epigenetic acquisitions necessary for the brains individuation. Furthermore, PGO waves have the ability to “clean out the neuronal circuitry” through random activation mechanisms where an informational overload linked to pathological behavior is eliminated from certain types of neuronal networks. The role of REM sleep is then to sort out and dispose of the “residues” arising out of the PGO wave sleep pattern and thereby contribute substantially to our mental health. Although Jouvet negates the fact that a direct link can be established to the dream mechanism directly due to the oneiric effects of hallucinogens, it has been established that the primary difference between dreams and hallucinations resides specifically in the organization of the stages of wakefulness. In other words, there is a suppression of REM sleep and an intrusion of PGO waves in both waking stages and NREM or slow sleep, therefore it seems highly likely that the visionary manifestations, or waking dream may “eliminate ‘residues’ stirred up by the PGO wave pattern in the absence of REM sleep” (Goutarel, Gollnhofer & Sillans 1993). Thus, there is definitely a link between the waking dream mechanisms activated by ibogaine and the positive behavioral outcome among previously addicted and pathological subjects, however indirect.

This theory is further elaborated upon by Harvard biopsychiatrist C.M. Anderson in a paper entitled “Ibogaine Therapy in Chemical Dependency and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Hypothesis Involving the Fractal Nature of Fetal REM Sleep and Interhemispheric Reintegration” (1998). In short, Anderson maintains that ibogaine basically interacts with multiple neurotransmitter systems and drives amygdaloid-brainstem dynamics into a self-organized critical oneiric state, a state of plasticity similar to that existing during fetal development. This psychotherapeutic condition bears a strong resemblance to complex behavioral states like REM sleep and attentional orienting in that they all “share the signature” of the self-organized critical state, that is to say “1/f patterns of activity” involving many levels of the nervous system from the subcellular to the behavioral. Anderson refers to recent findings showing that drug abuse and traumatic experiences often have a disruptive effect on REM sleep, which is essential for emotion regulation, learning and memory consolidation. Furthermore, abnormal hemispheric functional asymmetries, caused by stress or abuse earlier in life, also disrupt REM sleep and may lead to a predisposition towards addictive and self-defeating behaviors as a direct result of impaired interhemispheric integration (Anderson 1998). Comparing these findings with the ritual function of ibogaine among the Bwiti in Gabon, Anderson writes.

I believe that ibogaine, when used in a proper long-term supportive social and psychotherapeutic context, can end drug addictions and possibly the underlying PTSD, by promoting, especially during the cognitive evaluation phase, balanced hemispheric interactions. Just as The Fang adopted the use of eboga to promote social and religious harmony during colonialism-induced social and cultural fragmentation, our world society which is experiencing a similar deep social fragmentation, accelerated by the soulless march of materialism and concurrent environmental degradation, and marked by escalating drug addiction and suicidal behavior among our youth, may benefit from judicious use of ibogaine or related agents. Ibogaine, possibly in combination with hemispheric reintegration techniques, may potentially free the minds of many individuals (addicts, rape victims, violent criminals, victims of child abuse, war or natural disasters) suffering from the debilitating emotional disregulation resulting form hemispheric disharmony (Ibid).

Miller and Swinney have written an article which is also highly relevant in this context, based largely on Anderson’s hypothesis, entitled “The Fractal Nature of Active Sleep and Waking Dreams: Restructuring Consciousness through Metaphor, Fetal REM, and Neural Plasticity” (2001). Spontaneous fractal patterning can be observed at many levels and often reveal an underlying structure in both living and nonliving matter. Fractals emerge from attractors, which are basically the characteristic behavior of a dynamical system changing over time. Self-organized fractal patterns can be observed in many complex biological systems, in the human brain for example this burst-within-burst pattern can be observed in ion channel current fluctuations. When the system is driven to a critical state, bifurcations or catastrophic state-changes may occur (Ibid). Ibogaine has precisely this effect on the brain when PGO waves are activated and overlap with the usual low alphoid brain state, enabling crucial shifts in instinctual learning patterns. This can be compared to similar mechanisms occurring at the near death state, a state where the “body-mind” takes over. In a chapter on brain/mind dynamics, professor of philosophy Arnold Keyserling mentions the Sufi tradition, where it is quite common to create a situation of mortal danger, or force a man into crisis so as to bring about a shift from the left brain into body awareness (Keyserling 1995). Here also the importance of dreaming is discussed in achieving interhemispheric integration, “The separation of the brains must be overcome: the dreamer and doer must become one” (Ibid).

The essential role of metaphors

As I have previously pointed out, metaphors have a crucial function in terms of connecting inner and outer worlds or the physical and mental realms, in addition to serving as bridges between the conscious and the unconscious in dreams. This can be exemplified in the “waking dream”, which essentially allows for a gating-mechanism to occur, where right brain material is absorbed and integrated by the left brain through the ibogaine induced self-organized critical state. For example, during the oneirophrenic phase, traumatic memories with a high emotional import can be assimilated in the form of metaphor by the right hemisphere and then further absorbed, analyzed and given meaning during the subsequent cognitive or intellectual phase. Also, by stimulating otherwise neglected neural circuitry, new pathways are created thereby improving equilibrium and initiating long-term change. The self-organised critical state leads directly to a cascading restructuring of the pattern, system or structure, it is closely related to primary processes because during this state “we virtually cannot distinguish our inside from outside; in a sense it turns ourselves ‘inside out.’ The imaginal experiences are ‘real’ in that they carry real consequences in the ordinary world” ((Miller & Swinney 2001: 18).

Metaphoric coding is in many respects the tool employed during this critical state to restructure consciousness and achieve integration, because of the mediating role metaphors have in linking inner and outer realites, body and mind and the conscious with the unconscious. As Keyserling has pointed out “The basic patterns of our mind emerge from the structure of our speech” (Keyserling 1995). Metaphors express these patterns because they are in many respects a cognitive schema, “a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground” (Lakoff 1988 in Miller & Swinney 2001). They form cognitive maps, “a web of concepts rooted directly in physical experiences, and our relation to the external world” thereby serving as experiential frameworks so that new information may be absorbed. Therefore metaphoric coding can be seen as a complex dynamic which both structures our language, shapes our thoughts and judgments and serves as a means by which we experience ourselves and our reality (Ibid). As Miller and Swinney have indicated (referring to Lakoff 1988), the connection between mind and body can be observed on many levels,

• Thought is embodied: it arises through bodily experiences and makes sense in terms of it “we are grounded in perception, body movement, and our physical and social character”.
  Thought is imaginative: it unfolds spontaneously through metaphor and images based largely on bodily experience.
  Thought has gestalt properties: a perspective of “radical non-dualism” closely related to self-organization and dynamic processes.
  Thought has an ecological structure: it is a webwork of synergetic interaction

Therefore, in order for the consciousness restructuring process to take place, it makes sense that this must necessarily occur through what Keyserling has termed “body awareness”, or in neurological terms through the sensory motor system. Since thought can be closely connected to orientation-sensitive cells, the sensory motor system is fundamental, as is metaphor which builds our neuronal maps, enabling sensory-motor structures to play a vital role even in abstract reasoning. Miller has in fact developed a form of therapy which shares many similarities with the Ibogaine experience only that this is based on a drug-free shamanic journey where psychophysical restructuring takes place in the context of “dream healing”. Metaphorical perception emerges in sleep, “and demonstrates that imaginal life is fundamental to our existential perspective…the root of our existential self-image lies in the sensorimotor root” (Ibid). In other words, the underlying structure of the mind is both rooted in and ultimately dependent on the structure and facility of the body.

Obviously there are many ways to achieve body-awareness and interhemispheric integration. Some gradual, not so drastic methods that have been employed in the East for centuries are meditation, yoga, tai chi and several forms of martial arts. Fortunately, these techniques are also becoming more and more widespread in the West as individuals search for healthier ways of being in the world. Most Eastern healing traditions are based on an underlying holistic approach to disease and pathology, where the ultimate goal is to create harmony in an unbalanced system, as in acupuncture for example, by stimulating different pathways which somehow block the flow of vital energies. This view is remarkably consistent with recent findings in physics where concrete “objective reality” is in fact now understood as consisting mainly of energy at different vibrations which is filtered through the mind-brain mechanism and, only then, experienced as those sensory objects we call the physical world. Gradually, the computer metaphor of cognition, seen as a series of input and output processes resulting in a “mirror” representation of the world, is being replaced by the model of a complex dynamic system, where internal and external reality is interdependently organized to form an emergent whole.

Towards a science of consciousness and a conscientious science

Paradoxically, despite these findings contemporary science still has no place for the investigation of consciousness. To cite Fenwick & Lorimer in an article written for New Scientist entitled “Can brains be conscious”, “Modern science has no place for the study of our subjective experience, yet science relies on our perceptions of the world” (Fenwick & Lorimer 1989: 54). In actual fact, the “external world” is primarily a subjective mental model formed by our brains, and therefore in itself lacks objective validity. It is a “trick of the brain” that leads us to completely misunderstand the true nature of reality. As physicist Arthur Eddington has commented “Mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference – inference either intuitive or deliberate” (in Fenwick & Lorimer 1989:55). The effect of disregarding this vital insight becomes almost comically absurd, if it wasn’t for all the tragic consequences arising as a result. What it boils down to is that “reductionist science posits an external world that is independent of ourselves, but uses a subjectively contaminated mental model to assess it” (Ibid: 56). Furthermore, in the cognitive sciences, incredibly advanced theories are developed to explain the many transactions occurring between different components of an organism as part of a mechanical process, while the organism itself, as a conscious entity, is completely left out of the picture. In this manner, highly subjective and meaningful emotions like anger or love, somehow become reduced to an endless variety of impulses in the neurological system. Apparently, our “Cartesian anxiety” has evolved to the point where, although “we live in a world where love, beauty, meaning and value are part of our daily lives, indeed are the most important aspects of our world” (Fenwick & Lorimer 1989: 55) science, in the name of objectivity, has banished these fundamental qualities to the realm of irrelevant, inferior and almost embarrassing side effects of human existence.

Fortunately, this state of affairs is gradually beginning to change as an ever-increasing number of enlightened souls from a variety of academic circles slowly begin to venture into this forsaken territory and explore these remote yet omnipresent regions of the mind. This is not yet another new and improved form of idealism, evolving out of an exaggerated reverence to the powers of the psyche and it’s manifold creations. The emphasis here is on an all-encompassing unity between body and mind, concretely and actively involved in the world as opposed to passive receptacles of experience. It is an approach that first and foremost aims at taking seriously both embodiment and subjective experience. In this manner, the mind and body problem becomes irrelevant since, contrary to the Cartesian perspective, they are not seen as two mutually exclusive elements which must be combined, but as aspects of a single unity. “The unity (not union) of body and mind implies the presence of the mental in the bodily and that of the bodily in the mental. The mind is not an entity somewhere in the body, but it is the body”.

This approach is eloquently conveyed in The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991), where the authors argue persuasively for a comprehension of cognition evolving out of a common ground between mind in science and mind in experience, based on a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology. Specifically, there is a strong focus on the method of mindfulness/awareness meditation which in many respects has much to offer in terms of dealing with many of the unpleasant consequences arising out of our “Cartesian anxiety”. As the name itself implies, the aim is to become mindful, to experience what the mind does, when it does it, embodied in everyday life. The techniques here are specifically designed to lead the mind back from the abstract, from its theories and intellectual preoccupations, to the actual lived-in situation itself. In this manner one can directly know and explore what human experience is, thereby it also offers vital insights in terms of how to deal with the mind in personal and interpersonal situations (pp.21-22). This method basically provides a “middle way” approach to the Cartesian dilemma of objectivism versus subjectivism which, according to the Buddhist tradition, is simply the inevitable result of our minds habitual tendency to “grasp” at a firm ground either in external reality or within ourselves.

Within the tradition of mindfulness/awareness meditation the motivation has been to develop a direct and stable insight into absolutism and nihilism as forms of grasping that result from the attempt to find a stable ego-self and so limit our lived world to the experience of suffering and frustration. By progressively learning to let go of these tendencies to grasp, one can begin to appreciate that all phenomena are free of any absolute ground and that such “groundlessness” (sunyata) is the very fabric of dependent coorgination…groundlessness is the very condition for the richly textured and interdependent world of human experience (Ibid: 144).

In many ways, these methods closely resemble what Fenwick & Lorimer (1989) have termed a “science of qualities” (referring to Goodwin in an essay on David Bohm) or a “science of subjective experience” which according to the authors is desperately needed to serve as a complement to our current quantitative approaches. They suggest that an important objective of this new science would be to explain the relationship between different subjective phenomena in much the same way that reductionist science does for the objective world. In this manner, the inquiry also begins with a hypothesis, which is then tested in order to arrive at a possible falsification and reformulation. Only here it is not the external world that is under scrutiny, but consciousness and its contents. This procedure then assures that it meets the standards of a “true science” as defined by Karl Popper. Those more familiar with the Buddhist tradition have already noted the scientific rigor of many of its practices. Professor Marsha Lhineman for example, who has incorporated many aspects of Buddhism into a highly successful psychosocial treatment approach known as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, cites Wilber (1977) on precisely this point. Here it is written that “these Eastern disciplines … are not theories, philosophies, psychologies or religions – rather, they are primarily a set of experiments in the strictly scientific term…which, if carried out properly, will result in the discovery of [awareness]” (in Lhineman & Schmidt 1995: 575). These are traditions that have continued for thousands of years, and are still training initiates in time-tested and verified techniques of enhancing awareness. Therefore “ to refuse to examine the results of such scientific experiments because one dislikes the data so obtained is in itself a most unscientific gesture” (Ibid).

In mindfulness meditation, the technique of “basic element analysis” is in many respects a scientific inquiry of the mind in interaction with it’s environment as it is developed in the Abhidharma and further expanded on by Nagarjuna . Here the issue of dependent coarising is thoroughly examined with respect to the mind of the inquiring subject and the manner in which codependent factors are mistakenly treated as the ultimate founding blocks of a supposed objective and subjective reality (in Varela, Thompson & Rosch 199: 224). Seen purely from a theoretical, or abstract point of view, this may appear to be nothing but a slightly advanced form of aerobics for the mind, with an Eastern twist. In order to understand how these insights can have any practical application in an actual lived-in world, one must consider the subjective effects of these techniques for the practitioner. The essential point is that as one engages in this practice, and truly becomes mindful of one’s own experience, “one realizes the power of the urge to grasp after foundations – to grasp the sense of foundation of a real, separate self, the sense of foundation of a real, separate world, and the sense of foundation of an actual relation between self and world” (Ibid: 225). It is this “power of the urge to grasp” which lies at the root of much of the pain and anxiety troubling people today.

This insight is clearly reflected in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, originally developed to treat suicidal behaviors (Linehan 1987), and then further developed to treat borderline personality disorders and substance abusers (Linehan 1993). Here the term “dialectics” is especially significant, as it not only refers to a therapeutic method of persuasion, but also to a particular view of reality where wholeness, interrelatedness and change are fundamental (Dimeff, Herman & Linehan 1996). In this context, dialectics refer to a coherent dynamic system for exploring and making sense of the world, as an “alternative to the classificatory logic often found in traditional science” (Linhan & Schmidt 1995: 557). Here the primary focus is not directed towards a taxonomical identification of parts, but on the interaction between them, as they move towards resolution. In this respect, “there is no basement”, or fundamental unit – “what is fundamental is the pattern of relationship” (Ibid). Mindfulness training is integrated into the therapy and considered an essential skill for clients to develop as they learn how to observe, describe, and participate in their environments nonjudgmentally while remaining focused in the moment, the here and now. In this manner it is directly concerned with the side of dialectics that teaches them to both “engage more fully and to observe more clearly…in order to act more harmoniously with their environments” (Ibid). Specifically, the interplay between “emotion mind” and “reasonable mind” is essential here, as aspects of both arguments must be included and synthesized in order to enter a state of “wise mind”. Here also, there is a striking similarity to Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology in that “wise mind” integrates both logic and emotion, yet is more than the sum of it’s parts “it relies on the deep interaction of all ways of knowing and is evidenced through wisdom”(Ibid: 576).
The advantages of actively involving “wise mind” in therapy should by now be obvious, but the implications go far deeper than that. Grasping can be observed on many levels of existence, particularly the manner in which we as a species have adapted to our environments. In many respects, even though modern science and Eastern philosophy are converging more and more in terms of negating the existence of an ultimate ground, we still continue to cling to the belief. As Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991) have already pointed out, this is not purely a philosophical dilemma, but also has ethical, religious and political ramifications. The habitual tendency to grasp is not only expressed on an individual level as fixation on ego-self, but also has collective manifestations expressed as fixations on racial or tribal self-identity, not to mention the more concrete version of grasping at an actual ground separating groups of people from each other. This is in itself a highly exclusionary form of “idolatry” which not only falsely implies the actual existence of a ground but then continues to split it up into little pieces where those not entitled to a share then become reduced to the negative potentially threatening “other” upon which one may, and often does, wage war. Therefore, for the sake of mental health, but also for the sake of the planet as a whole it is imperative “that we acknowledge the other with whom we dependently cooriginate” based on the “realization of groundlessness as nonegocentric responsiveness”. Seen in this light, it seems logical that “If our task in the years ahead…is to build and dwell in a planetary world, then we must learn to uproot and release the grasping tendency, especially in its collective manifestations” (Ibid: 254). This task could also be called the collective manifestation of “wise mind”.

Just as the highly scientific nature of certain introspective techniques in the East have been acknowledged by acute and perceptive observers in the West, so too has the parallel between Eastern thought and modern physics been recognized by many scholars in the East.

Professor Dr.Murli Manohar Joshi, former head of the physics department at the University of Allalabad, comments on precisely this point in a speech at an inaugural session for world philosophers in Geneva 1998. Referring to physicist David Bohm, he emphasizes the need for a new order, more compatible with the findings of quantum physics, “instead of starting with parts and showing how they work together, we start with the whole”. There are no separate parts in the universe, “parts are seen to be in immediate connection, in which their dynamical relationship depends, in an irreducible way, on the state of the whole system (and indeed, on that of broader systems in which they are contained, extending ultimately to the entire universe)”. Therefore, the classical idea of the world as analyzable and divisible into separate, independent existing parts becomes replaced with one of unbroken wholeness. Specifically in the realm of seemingly random subatomic phenomena Bohm refers to an “implicate order”, so that even though particles may appear in different places they are still connected by this order, “particles may be discontiguous in space but they are contiguous in the implicate order.” Therefore, matter and everything else are forms of this implicate order. The interesting question here then becomes “what is this ‘implicate order’ the implicate order of”?

At this point in the discussion the limits of Western thought become obvious as our colloquial concepts slowly begin to fail us. Here, in the words of David Bohm, “Description is totally incompatible with what we want to say”. Nevertheless, Professor Joshi continues boldly by citing Gary Zukov in stating that “The ‘implicate order’ is the implicate order of that – which – is. However, ‘that which is’ is the implicate order. This world view is entirely different from what we are using in classical physics.” However, the Western mind has great problems fathoming this new paradigm due to the ingrained Greek notions where it is commonly assumed that Being is and Non-Being is not. Conversely, in the new paradigm, even Non-Being is, that is to say, “both Being and Non-being are ‘that-which-is’. Everything even ‘emptiness’ is that which is. In Bohm’s physics, there is nothing which is not ‘that which is’”. In this respect, Eastern thought has a lot more to offer in terms of providing the conceptual tools needed to convey the full implications of modern physics. The Buddhist concept of “groundlessness” or sunyata, could easily be applied here, and Professor Joshi has also found remarkable parallels with ancient Hindu Philosophy. Here in the Upanishadic statements it is the concept of Brahman which connects every ‘being’ with the rest of the universe,

In the Brahad Aranyak Upanishad the sage informs king Janaka about the true nature of Brahman, “Brahman can be apprehended only as knowledge itself – knowledge which is one with reality, inseparable from it. For he is beyond all proof, beyond all instruments of thought. The eternal Brahman is pure, unborn, subtler than the subtlest, greater than the greatest. By the purified mind alone Brahman is perceived. He who knows Brahman to be the life of life, the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, – he indeed comprehends fully the cause of causes. In Brahman there is no diversity. He who sees diversities goes from death to death.” (Ibid)

In Vedantic Philosophy it is our consciousness which creates the world outside, yet according to quantitative scientific approaches, consciousness is not even relevant nor is anything relating to quality like experience, values or ethics. This can be traced back to Galileo who maintained that only quantifiable data, or “primary qualities” pertaining to the external word should be admitted into scientific discourse. “Secondary qualities”, on the other hand, became excluded into the lesser realm of subjective and unscientific phenomena. Psychologist R.D Laing has also strongly criticized this approach, where according to Galileo’s agenda, we are essentially stuck with a “dead world”, “Out go sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and along with them have since gone esthetic and ethical sensibility, values, quality, soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is thus cast out of the realm of scientific discourse”(in Capra 1988: 139). Laing continues by adding that hardly anything has had a greater impact on our world the past four hundred years than “Galileo’s audacious program”, “We had to destroy the world in theory before we could destroy it in practice” (Ibid).

Conclusion

With the introduction of the Cartesian split between mind and matter and the universal mechanical laws of Newtonian physics, consciousness gradually became squeezed out of the picture and science busied itself exclusively with the task of objectively observing phenomena in an independent external world. Although a necessary and in many ways beneficial evolutionary step, it seems that the time has come to progress even further and take our own scientific findings seriously. Paradoxically, where physics has in many respects contributed to the propagation of this dualistic ontology, it seems as if physics will also be the discipline to converge our split view of reality into an integrated whole where mind and matter can once again meet and merge. I have tried to show throughout this paper that our perceptions and conceptualizations of reality shape the existential foundation upon which our whole lives revolve. Fragmentation ultimately leads to pathology both individually and collectively, whereas integration promotes health. Fortunately, there is integrative potential in many fields of experience; art, myth, dreams and ritual all have this effect, as do many Eastern introspective techniques. The underlying similarity between them lies in the ability to combine “many levels of mind – the unconscious, conscious, and external – to make a statement of their combination. It is not a matter of expressing a single level… The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem.” (Bateson 1972: 464, 461). Thus, it is possible to “recognize and experience a unity and pattern inherent in the organization of the universe” (Linehan & Schmidt 1995: 558).
This is beautifully expressed in a passage by Woodward & McCoy from an article exploring the phenomenology of shamanic practices as they pertain to pathologies in the contemporary world. Here the power of these ceremonies and rituals is directly linked to the potential they have “…to reconnect us to what has become ‘unconscious’ – the natural world and the natural mind” ;

Thus, the experience of wholeness brings about a paradigm in health and living that is fundamentally ecological because we no longer regard nature as ””other””. We feel, to use chaos physicist and evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffmans phrase, ””At Home in the Universe””. We come to feel ””in”” the world rather than on it. We are brought down to our humblest bacterial roots and understand ourselves as channels of the elements in this strange, metacellular, metabolic planetary process. We understand ourselves to be less than we may have thought, yet simultaneously more, through virtue of our fundamental interconnection with everything else. We slowly can come to understand ourselves as focal points or holographic microcosms of the Whole. In the course of gnosis, we may learn more and more to broaden our conception of ”’’self”” to include communities, ecosystems, the planet and galaxy, and beyond. For all these compose the older, more stable and primordial definitions of our body and, on the interior level, our mind.

Although specialization is clearly inevitable, and has many advantages in contemporary society, it does not exclude the possibility of taking “a crude look at the whole” in addition to studying the behaviour of parts of a system in the traditional sense (Gell-Mann 1994: 346). Taking one look at our planet today, it seems as if we are gradually approximating what in complexity theory is aptly called a “critical state”, “We are all in a situation that resembles driving a vehicle at night over unknown terrain that is rough, full of gullies, with precipices not far off. Some kind of headlight, even a feeble and flickering one, may help to avoid some of the worst disasters ”(Ibid: 366). Given that science plays an essential role in our culture, by both shaping and being deeply embedded in culture, it must also take an active part in providing these “headlights”. As Gell-Mann has already suggested, this means supplementing specialization with integrative thinking and incorporating a holistic perspective in a series of “interlinked transitions” which would include both political, military and diplomatic considerations in addition to the social, economic and environmental ones (Ibid: 349). However, in order to arrive at something even remotely resembling this type of conscientious science, somewhere along the line, our brains must become conscious, which means bridging the gap between subjective experience and objective reality or else, “in our enlightenment, proceed to dismember the earth”.

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Shamans from different cultures and traditions have been using psychoactive plants since the dawn of human emergence. These plants have been used traditionally for guidance, divination, healing, maintaining a balance with the spirit or consciousness of the living world.

The use of the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus is ancient and its use has been a continuous tradition in Peru for over 3,000 years. The earliest depiction of the cactus is a carving which shows a mythological being holding the San Pedro. It belongs to the early pre-Colombian civilizations, such as the Chavín culture (c. 1400-400 BC) and was found in an old temple at Chavín de Huantar in the northern highlands of Peru, and dates about 1300 BC, and later to the Mochica, 500AD.

Even in present day mythology, it is told that God hid the keys to heaven in a secret place. San Pedro used the magical powers of a cactus to discover this place, and later the cactus was named after him.

‘La Mesa Norteña’

Juan Navarro was born in the highland village of Somate, department of Piura. He is a descendant of a long lineage of healers and shamans working with the magical powers of Las Huaringas. These Sacred Lakes stand at 3,500 meters and have been revered since earliest Peruvian civilization.

At the age of eight, Juan made his first pilgrimage to Las Huaringas, and took San Pedro for the first time. Every month or two it is necessary to return here to accumulate energy and protection to heal his people. As well as locals and Limeños (people from Lima) , pilgrims also come from many parts of South America. His two sons work as assistants whenever working with groups, which is common in this tradition. . Maestro Juan, however, apprenticed in the region of the Sacred Lakes of Las Huaringas where the tradition is most authentic.

During the sessions Juan works untiringly with his two sons in an intricate sequence of processes, including invocation, diagnosis, divination, and healing with natural objects, or artes. The artes are initially placed on the maestro’s altar or mesa, and are an astonishing and beautiful array of shells, swords, magnets, quartzes, objects resembling sexual organs, rocks which spark when struck together, and stones from animals’ stomachs, which they have swallowed to aid digestion!

The artes are collected from pre-Colombian tombs, and sacred energetic place, particularly Las Huaringas. They bring magical qualities to the ceremony where, under the visionary influence of San Pedro, their invisible powers may be experienced.

The Mesa (which means table in Spanish, but it also means a high plateau where the shaman comes to encounter the divine) of the maestro is also a representation of the forces of nature and the cosmos. Through the Mesa the shaman is able to work with and influence the forces of nature to diagnose and heal disease.

The traditional Mesa Norteña has three areas, on the left is the ‘campo ganadero’ or ‘field of the dark’, on the right is the ‘campo justiciero’ or the ‘field of the light’ (justiciero means justice), and in the centre is the ‘campo medio’ or ‘neutral field’, which is the place of balance between the forces of light and dark. It is important for us not to look at these forces as ‘positive’ or negative’ it is what we human beings do with these forces which is Important.

Although the contents and form of the artes varies from tradition to tradition, the Mesa rituals serve to remind us that the use and power of symbols extends throughout all cultures on our planet.

San Pedro

San Pedro or Trichocereus Pachanoi, grows on the dry eastern slopes of the Andes, between 2,000 – 3,000 meters above sea level, and commonly reaches six meters or more in height. It is also grown by local shamans in their herb gardens.

From earliest times it has been recognized that knowledge goes beyond sensory awareness or the rational way of understanding the world. San Pedro can take us directly to a telepathic experience and show us that there is no such thing as an inanimate object. Everything in the universe is alive and has a spirit.

As can be imagined the early European missionaries held the native practices in considerable contempt, and indeed were very negative when reporting the use of the San Pedro. Yet a Spanish missionary, cited by Christian Rätsch, grudgingly admitted the cactus medicinal value in the midst of a tirade reviling it:

“it is a plant with whose aid the devil is able to strengthen the Indians in their idolatry; those who drink its juice lose their senses and are as if dead; they are almost carried away by the drink and dream a thousand unusual things and believe that they are true. The juice is good against burning of the kidneys and, in small amounts, is also good against high fever, hepatitis, and burning in the bladder.”

An account of the cactus by a shaman is in radical contrast to this rather contemptuous view:

“it first … produces … drowsiness or a dreamy state and a feeling of lethargy … a slight dizziness … then a great vision , a clearing of all the faculties … it produces a light numbness in the body and afterward a tranquillity. And then comes detachment, a type of visual force … inclusive of all the senses … including the sixth sense, the telepathic sense of transmitting oneself across time and matter … like a kind of removal of one s thought to a distant dimension.”

San Pedro, considered the ‘maestro of the maestros’, enables the shaman to make a bridge between the visible and the invisible world for his people. The Quechua name for it is punku, which means doorway. The doorway connects the patient’s body to his spirit; to heal the body we must heal the spirit. San Pedro can show us the psychic causes of our illness intuitively or in mythical dream language.

The effects of San Pedro work through various stages, beginning with an expanded physical awareness in the body. Soon this is followed by euphoric feelings and then, after several hours, psychic and visionary effects become more noticeable.

The spirit of the cactus is sometimes said to be masculine whereas ayahuasca is feminine, but however this is understood, they are certainly very different or complementary. Frequently people have a clear preference for working with one rather than the other.

Interview with Juan Navarro

What is the relationship of the maestro with San Pedro?

In the North of Peru the power of San Pedro works in combination with tobacco. Also the sacred lakes – Las Huaringas – are very important. This is where we go to find the most powerful healing herbs which we use to energize our people. For example dominio gives strength and protects you from supernatural forces, sorcery etc. It is also put into the seguros, or amulets – bottles filled with perfume, plants and seeds gathered from Las Huaringas. You keep them in your home for protection and to make your life go well.

These plants do not have any secondary effects on the nervous system, nor do they provoke hallucinations. Only San Pedro has strength and is mildly hallucinatory, but you cannot become addicted. It doesn’t do any harm to your body, rather it helps the maestro to see what the problem is with his patient. Of course some people have this gift born in them – as our ancestors used to say, it is in the blood of a shaman.

Is San Pedro a teacher plant?

Of course, but it has a certain mystery. You have to be compatible with it because it doesn’t work for everybody. The shaman has a special relationship with it. It circulates in the body of the patient and where it finds abnormality it enables the shaman to detect it. It lets him know the pain they feel and whereabouts it is. So it is the link between patient and maestro. It also purifies the blood of the person who drinks it. It balances the nervous system so people loose their fears, frights and traumas, and it charges people with positive energy.

Everyone must drink so that the maestro can connect with them. Only the dose may vary from person to person because not everyone is as strong.

What about the singado? (inhalation of tobacco juice through the nostrils)

The tobacco leaf is left for 2-3 months in contact with honey, and when required for the singado it is macerated with aguardiente or alcohol. The function depends on which nostril is used. When taken in by the left side it is for liberating us of negative energy, including psychosomatic ills, pains in the body, bad influences of other people, or envy as we call it here. As you take it in you must concentrate on the situation which is going badly, or the person which is giving out a negative energy.

When taken through the right nostril it is for rehabilitating and energizing so that your projects go well. Its not for getting high on. Afterwards you can spit it out or swallow the tobacco, it doesn’t matter. It has an interrelation with the San Pedro in the body, and intensifies the visionary effects.

Can you smoke in the session?

No, no, no. It may be the same plant but here another element comes into play, which is fire. As the session is carried out in darkness, the fire in the darkness can perturb, create a negative ‘reflection’ (vision). It can cause trauma. As a personal observation, sound and light are interrelated during the San Pedro sessions, as the sound of the maestro’s maraca is experienced as a beam of a light penetrating the darkness.

How does the tobacco work to have these effects?

Tobacco when smoked, has the property of making people tranquil when they are anxious and thinking about their problems or even when they can’t get to sleep. It harmonizes people. This is the property of tobacco.

We have negative associations with tobacco in the West, addiction etc. bad health….

No, no. Here we do it with a healthy end in mind, not to provoke an effect. The next day you get up feeling clear in the head and good psychologically and comforted.

What is the power of the artes – the objects on the mesa?

They come from Las Huaringas, a group of lakes very high up where a special energy is bestowed on everything there, including the healing herbs which grow there and nowhere else. If you bathe in the lakes it takes away all your ills. You bathe with the intention of leaving everything negative behind. People go there to leave their enemies behind so they can’t do them any harm. After bathing, the maestro cleanses you with these artes – swords, bars, chontas, saints, and even huacos from archaeological sites. They ‘flourish’ you – spraying you with agua florida and herb macerations, a giving you sweet things like limas and honey, so your life flourishes.

We maestros also need to go to Las Huaringas regularly because we make enemies from healing people, so we need to protect ourselves.

The reason for this is that two forces exist: the good and the bad. The bad forces are from the pacts which the brujos make with the devil. The brujo is the rival of the curandero. So when the curandero heals, he makes an enemy of the brujo. Its not so much because he sends the bad magic back, as because he does the opposite thing to him, and they want supremacy in the battle.

Not far from Las Huaringas is a place called Sondor which has its own lakes. This is where evil magic is practiced and where they do harm in a variety of ways. I know because as a curandero I must know how sorcery is practiced, in order to defend myself and my patients.

Do people go there secretly?

Of course no one admits to going there, but they pass through Huancabamba just like the others who are going to Las Huaringas. I know various people who practice bad magic at a distance. They do it using physical means, concentrating, summoning up a persons soul, knowing their characteristics etc. and can make them suffer an accident or make an organ ill or whatever, or making their work go badly wrong. They have the power to get to their spirit so it may not even be necessary to have a piece of their clothing.

But don’t people also do harm unconsciously?

Yes – to themselves even, for example if a person has bad intentions towards another and that person is well protected with an encanto, (amulet) then he will do himself harm.

How does the rastreo work? (Diagnosis through psychic means.) Are you in an altered state?

No, I’m completely normal and lucid. What allows the reading of a person’s past, present or future, is the strength of the San Pedro and tobacco. It is an innate capability, not everybody has the gift, you can’t learn it from someone, it is inherited. The perceptions come through any one of the senses – sound, vision, smell or a feeling inside of what the person is feeling, a weakness, a pain or whatever. Sometimes a bad taste in the mouth may indicate a bad liver.

All the things on the mesa are perfectly normal, natural things: chontas, swords, stones etc. They have just received a treatment – like a radio tuned to a certain frequency – so they can heal particular things, weaknesses or whatever, but always it is necessary to concentrate on the sacred lakes, Las Huaringas.

Is it necessary for the maestro to take San Pedro to have vision?

Of course he must take San Pedro and tobacco. But it is to protect himself from the person’s negativity and illness, not because he needs it to have the vision.

Last night many people seemed closed to the things you were saying. They said ‘no’ but their body language seemed to say something else. Later it turned out that it did mean something to them.

Incredibility on their part – they are not accustomed to the method, a minor fault in their thinking.

So a Peruvian would respond differently?

Certainly. Also its different because we speak different languages, I see something in a flash and it has to be translated.

What is going on when flowers are thrown?

Flowers, perfumes, sweets and limas are part of nature and the power of nature. For a flower to grow in the earth from a seed, it needs water, and it needs fire and air – the four elements of nature. The same is needed for a bee, which makes honey, to live. Its very smell, texture, softness and sweet taste, penetrates the body, cleanses us and makes us flourish. It helps us to make a good impression at work and with our friends or partners, and wherever we go. That is making our luck flourish.

What about the shells on the mesa, for the singado and for drinking San Pedro?

This is a tradition. The shell helps to transmit. Our ancestors used the shells for communicating long distances. So when we drink the San Pedro certain frequencies enter our bodies. The very texture and the fact of it coming from water is healing.

It is not symbolic?

No. Everything has a purpose. It is all complementary.

Chonta has strength, it was used by Indians and Incas to make weapons, its strong and can defend us. Some stones come from archaeological sites, saints are great healers like San Jeronimo, San Cipriano, San Ilarion.

The bells, maracas?

They are to invoke the spirits of the dead, whether of family or of great healers. So that they may feel comfortable with us. Chunganas (maracas) are to give us enchantment, (protection and positive energy), it has a relaxing effect when taking San Pedro.

www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=psychedelic-healing

We rest upon an ancestral bedrock,

evolved over uncountable aeons, a tapestry woven from patterns of symbiosis and cooperation, parasitism and predation. The life force received by Gaia from Sol turns over and over, generating complexity, generating crystal life. Hundreds of thousand years of tribal migration, empires that have risen and fallen, and cultural systems that have effloresced then decayed like strange flowers. Great intelligence and powers of creation are our inheritance.

The ancestors vibrant, primordial energy, the energies of the atomic furnace of the birth of the universe, the energies of the momentum of the first waters, flow us onward, the stream of life.

Father Sun rises and Gaian Sophianic life stirs. The sun fills the mist of water from the lake and the air becomes golden. The grass grows. The pine cones still glow in the pure white ashes. The birds hop from one branch of a tree to another like thoughts in a big leafy mind. Have you ever tried to catch what the birds are singing of ? They sing of nested existence, deep in nature, singing the song of bird life, simple and mysterious, ethereal and shattering, the sound of the radiant void.

Deep Ecology by Daniel Mirante

All life is a hyper-sea, a tapestry of Mind. In this corporeal dimension, humans upright, moving sexualized cathedrals of hauntingly transient grace walk within the hollows of the macro cosmic moss garden. Stumbling like children over the natural languages of star fire, engraven in the crabs dancing trails on sand, the lattices and information banks of coral, the cascading prose of tree bark and vines. A secret written across the face of the world.

I left the dead world many months ago to know the wilderness. I have become one with the elements. I drink rain, I eat soil, I sleep on cold, hard rocks. I wash in the cold mountain rivers… pure ice water on mountain blue rocks and sands. I breathe and eat clear-light void. No boundaries, no resistances. At night, my mind flows into the subtle rhizomes that is my true being.

I feel completely transparent to the lightning as it strikes in the steaming forests. The earth trembles and every leaf quivers. Lightning shines right through my body – in a split second – rendering me transparent in this zen flash, reminding me that I am a walking skeleton of calcium and silica clothed in a vessel of salt water, a man-shaped droplet of sea.

Her form, her lips and teeth remind of the resistance to complete surrender, to this desire for life, the rigor, the pleasure and pain of boundaries, danced by this timeless creation in all of its ornate beauty, being squeezed and ravished by another, reminded of this willingness to be form, to play this game of identity. How bodies have a capacity for infinite interlocking, interpenetration, designed for an infinite series of lovemaking, and I look to the stars and ocean and wonder how this all began.

I have traveled deep into the wombs of the earth, wombs of both life and death, have been to realms of rotting meat and pungent flowers in lurid sexual designs, quickly blooming, then withering away. I have spiraled down the germ-line of evolutionary linear, I have become mezzoic pools of biofeedback processes, salmon leaping upwards, up river, gobbled up by ferocious twisting eels, devoured by multicolored, feathered lizards, who are eaten away by parasitic organisms… and onwards, savage process, cycle of life, ferocious and bizzare, beautiful and delicate, the fractal of the food=energy turnover system.

I have been to solar realms, crystal palaces ringing with the reverberating sound of crystal angels singing. Here I heard music, the choral song of eternal mounting Sapphic ecstasy, that made my heart cry with joy. The tantric crystal angels, gemlike beings, machine gods and goddesses, opal, rubies, glass, vibrate songs, copulate, unfathomable unfolding lovemaking, quartz gestalts of resonating energy.

I clambered in awe the branches of the world-tree, I have seen the jeweled animals of invisible biogenic nature, the weavers on the loom in the womb of psycho spiritual evolution, like emerald insect tigers, like the great beasts of the plain, flitting, chirping and curious, in the hypersea of astral emanations, encoding and transducing higher-glyphics in subtle spheres.

I have wandered endless labyrinths, dazed, in search of the Goddess and trying to comprehend the flaming light placed upon my head by an unknown Lord. Endless perfection tumbles down from perfect majesty, heights so lofty the mind cannot comprehend. Here, in ways unknown, the soul of humanity is perfected.

I have been to the periphery of this universe, and beheld it as a huge, dead, compacted stone, Thanatos, and seen the horrifying, endless craters of the dead and material universe. But in the frantic clanging of thunderous bells, I have seen the fiery petals of the transcendental golden flower of life, of such exquisite majesty and joy, that the heart of stone was shattered by the abundance of energy and love.

This is not ‘the early 21st century’, this is a timeless mystery, an unfolding present, a flame like vortice of consciousness in an unfathomable and primordial universe. This life is a fable, as well as a labyrinth. In the the torrents of golden ice water, in the darting of fish, in the flame-colored transformations of autumn trees, in birdsongs, in innocence, the beloveds face turned toward the setting sun, the crystal azure maze of her eyes, the ecstatic tears and kisses of life and animal mortality, I see the Greatness of YOU, YOU so ancient, yet so timeless, and it is YOU, YOU, who are my foundation, my heart free and singing in love, my path.

- Daniel Mirante 2007

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Introduction

Self-conscious man thinks he thinks. But whether he regards his self-consciousness a blessing or a curse remains a question. This reflective point-of-view allows him to observe pattern in the world and make predictions based on rhythms in the pattern that are of inestimable aid to survival. Endowed with the faculties of memory and foresight, however, man cannot but be aware of his own eventual demise, for the price of being able to control the future is to know that, in the long run, he will not be able to. Powerless to reconcile mortal anxiety with the transient yet untroubled forms of nature, he would not be harangued for coming to the desperate conclusion that his perspective is somehow skewed.

Such an outlook has proved the impetus for salvation-seeking throughout history, from the alchemical pursuit of the elixir of immortality to the growth of world religions. The myriad paths men have followed down the years appear on the surface to be disparate and, at best, comparably vague. However, together they do indeed agree that, for various reasons, something is wrong with ‘ordinary consciousness’.¹

The rise of existentialism was for many the inevitable explosion of this ever-present undercurrent of mortal unease. On the other hand, proponents of scientism argued such reasoning failed to take into account the lofty position humanity enjoys by virtue of self-awareness alone, evidenced by a collective technological progress and the harnessing and potential mastery of natural laws. Whatever the consensus, or lack of it, this debate is extremely pertinent to the present inquiry, whose principal concern is the non-ordinary state of consciousness crucial to understanding two historically pivotal literary pieces, The Doors of Perception (1954) by Aldous Huxley, and The Joyous Cosmology (1962) by Alan Watts. First, a little on the writers themselves.

Aldous was a member of the famous British Huxley family, which produced a number of brilliant scientific minds. Best known for his satirical dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) and for being the possessor of a broadly encyclopaedic intellect, he also published a number of short stories, essays, poetry, travel writing and film scripts. Huxley’s literary energies were often employed in examining and criticising the prevailing social mores of twentieth century Western culture, its ideals and unquestioned assumptions. In the latter part of his life, Huxley became intensely interested in the history of philosophical and religious mysticism. This first became evident in the themes of the semi-autobiographical novel Eyeless in Gaza (1955), in which one of the central characters adopts a Buddhist-centred philosophy, practices meditation, and becomes a pacifist. Huxley’s personal
interest culminated in the writing of an annotated anthology on the various mystical strands of historical religious thought, entitled The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Following this line of enquiry, Huxley eventually pursued a pharmacological path, his experiences and reflections published in the essay The Doors of Perception and, later, Heaven and Hell (1956). These latter works became important texts in the counterculture phenomenon that would eventually emerge out of the 1950s Beat movement and become synonymous with the civil unrest of the 1960s.

Alan Watts was born in Kent the only son of middle class parents. Largely self-educated, Watts eschewed his
Anglican upbringing at an early age and joined the London Buddhist Lodge, where he soon became organisation
secretary. During this time he read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry, and Eastern wisdom.
In 1936, at 21 years old, Watts had his first book published, The Spirit of Zen. Three years later he left
England for America and spent a five year period as an Episcopal minister at an Anglican school in an attempt
to bring his personal philosophy to a larger audience in a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical
Christianity and Asian wisdom traditions.² Watts was awarded a master’s degree in Theology for writing a thesis that he would later publish under the title Behold the Spirit (1947). On leaving the church, Watts established himself as a writer and philosopher with the 1957 publication of one of his best-known books, The Way of Zen. Considered an authority in Eastern religion, Watts was asked by members of the psychiatric establishment to undergo LSD experiences in the hope that he might further an understanding of the drug’s effects.

³ Watts went on to write of his experiences in The Joyous Cosmology, a publication of similar importance for the emerging counterculture.

Now it is important to define the subject matter of this study more narrowly in the context of these two focal texts.
Both fall under the rubric of mysticism, but like religion, truth, and modernity, the word ‘mysticism’ is crucial but murky.⁴ For the purposes of the present inquiry, our attention is on the literary description of the so-called ‘mystical’ change of consciousness induced by a particular set of drugs termed by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond as psychedelic, or ‘mind-manifesting’.⁵ This literary focus does not dwell on the many, often fantastic descriptions of the hallucinatory period of such states, but is concerned specifically with what William Braden has called ‘the central experience,
which corresponds with the apprehension of the Clear Light.’⁶
It has been said that this type of experience is ‘beyond words’ and corresponds to the insights derived from the application of various spiritual practices. In the spirit of criticism, then, the aim of this analysis is to elucidate the characteristic nature of this phenomenon by a form of linguistic deconstruction, but only in so far as it relates to a cogent interpretation of the
descriptive passages located in the texts – our ideas of ’subjective’ experience necessarily draw from such accounts.

This study will refer to a variety of disciplines and schools of thought in an attempt to formulate a new interpretive model that may allow us to comprehend – as far as is linguistically possible – the experiences described by Huxley and Watts. To put the pieces into context, the following chapter will trace the historical emergence of the texts and the discipline of comparative mysticism that they spawned, summarising the main arguments in the field. This is to provide not only a sense of the importance of the texts, but also an insight into the fundamental need to return to the original writings for a fresh interpretation. The second
chapter lays the foundation for the new model by identifying the common characteristics of the texts, with the intention that a basic ‘perceptual-conceptual theory’ will thereby develop spontaneously. Chapter three then moves beyond this theoretical groundwork by viewing the texts from a nonconceptual perspective, using the earlier model to ‘anchor’ the new reading. Chapter four focuses on the epistemological and ontological implications of the findings through a concurrent development of the reading method and logical analysis of the literature. What is desired by this approach is that a new understanding of the texts emerges, one which will then be presented as a call for a reconsideration of the contemporary myths which have long been perpetuated through conceptual formation – better known as language.

1 Forays into the Inconceivable

Whatever the circumstances of its emergence, language ushered into the realm of social interaction previously unknown vistas of possibility. Humans no longer had to rely on frail gestures and body language as the sole means of communication. From that time on, man could as if by telepathy instantly comprehend the mind of fellow man. The survival benefits were immense. Groups of formerly estranged individuals could debate and discuss anything as a collective, whether it concerned the ultimate meaning of life or the source of the next meal. The dialogic method known as philosophy held promise that the final answers to the questions of existence would be one day revealed. In light of the advantages language offered, what could not be resolved? Clearly a great deal. Language came with its own problems. Today conflict erupts across the globe just as it did down the annals of history, and if the average mind is a microcosm of the collective consciousness, the human species appears estranged as ever by the concept of otherness – even moreso if it can be named.

For Aldous Huxley, the 1954 publication of The Doors of Perception heralded the call to a sincere investigation into this intensely personal problem that language left unresolved. ‘By its very nature,’ wrote Huxley, ‘embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.’ Not only is the feeling of individual isolation from the world a seemingly insoluble issue, it presumes a separateness from all other, equally forsaken individuals. Solidarity is to be found in the pooling of information about experiences, but always, Huxley felt, at the expense of the experiences themselves; for ‘this inferential understanding or even mutual empathy between humans is trafficked through symbols and at second-hand only.’ What complicated matters, felt Huxley, was that the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live that, in matters of communication across these cavernous spaces, ‘words are uttered, but fail to enlighten.’ The human mind was on its own. Or was it? By what means could Huxley explore such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature, and the relationship between brain and consciousness?

The origin of his preoccupations can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, a time when scientific politics was experiencing significant upheaval. Darwin’s new evolutionary theory stated that natural selection was aimless and the result of random mutations; as it related to man, he was a mere biological fluke, and any existential suffering was to be considered the by-product of a mistake of nature.⁷ This interpretation competed with a teleological theory known as vitalism, championed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson argued that biological evolution was not aimless but was controlled by an immanent creative life force, an élan vital, which sought ever higher expressions of complexity and competence.⁸ As it related to mammals, homo sapiens best expressed this upward drive. In the view of Bergson, man’s ultimate future lay not in further outward evolution, but inward evolution in the form of human consciousness. In an embrace of emotion over mechanistic intellect, man would be granted a direct intuition of the life force that pervades all becoming and, by this wisdom, would eventually become god-like.⁹

Huxley leaned toward the latter camp. In his view, however, time was running out for the actualisation of this potential. Man was at the precipice of unmitigated disaster. As Jay Stevens writes, a way had to be found to heal the gap between homo faber, man the wielder of increasingly ingenious and dangerous tools, and homo sapiens, man the smart monkey who had mastered the planet but not his own inner flaws – flaws that were now threatening to bring the whole evolutionary game to a precipitous close.¹⁰ Accompanied by the writer-philosopher Gerald Heard, Huxley began an investigation into the esoteric wisdom traditions of the East in the hope of formulating a remedy to these ails. This culminated in 1945 in the publication of The Perennial Philosophy, an annotated compendium of the perceived similarities between widely divergent mystical experiences of centuries passed. Central to Huxley’s philosophy was the theory put forward by Bergson that the brain and the central nervous system operated as an eliminative system that screened much out of consciousness, leaving only that necessary for practical survival. In the twentieth century, however, Huxley felt that a way had to found which would bypass Bergson’s ‘reducing valve’ and tap the unlimited potentials of the brain. The mystical experience, in Huxley’s view, broached this issue squarely. How to achieve the experience was an entirely different matter.

By a series of extremely fortunate circumstances Huxley found himself, in the spring of 1953, directly athwart the trail. A chance reading of an article by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond on the effects of a little-known psychoactive compound called mescaline led Huxley to invite the author to his Los Angeles home for further discussion.¹¹ Over half a century earlier, Havelock Ellis had written of his experiences with the alkaloid and assigned it a position among ‘drugs of unique distinction,’ but experimentation had since been sporadic. In spite of the passing of so many years, little agreement existed on the effect of the substance, which originated from the peyote cactus revered by the Indians of Mexico, and the psychological material at Osmond’s disposal was still inadequate. Tentative speculations associated the drug experience with the schizophrenic state, while others posited it as something altogether different in character. Despite these misgivings, Huxley was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig, and thus it came about that, one bright May morning, and with some trepidation on Osmond’s part, Huxley swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.¹²

Reflecting on the experience, Huxley could hardly contain his excitement; mescaline had proved itself to him ‘the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the Beatific Vision,’ as he described it to his New York editor, and in response to his visionary encounter he would begin a long essay that would raise ‘all manner of questions in the fields of aesthetics, religion, theory of knowledge.’¹³ The Doors of Perception was published in the spring of 1954 – to generally perplexed reviews. Had anyone else written a book recommending mescaline as ‘an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual,’ declared The Reporter’s Marvin Barrett, it would have been dismissed ‘as the woolgathering of a misguided crackpot. But coming…from one of the current masters of English prose, a man of immense erudition and intellect who usually demonstrates a high moral seriousness, they deserve more careful scrutiny.’¹⁴

Yet this opinion did not convince Huxley’s critics. Self-respecting rationalists saw fresh evidence of quackery and intellectual abdication, while the serious and religious were troubled by the offer of a shortcut.¹⁵ The critical response to The Doors of Perception was almost an echo of the British Medical Journal’s condemnation of Ellis for his enthusiastic endorsement of peyote.¹⁶ Huxley, however, received these negative reactions with incongruence: ‘How odd it is that writers like Belloc and Chesterton may sing the praises of alcohol (which is responsible for about two thirds of the car accidents and three quarters of the crimes of violence) and be regarded as good Christians and noble fellows,’ Huxley complained, ‘whereas anyone who ventures to suggest that there may be other and less harmful short cuts to self transcendence is treated as a dangerous drug fiend and wicked perverter of weak minded humanity.’¹⁷

As interest in his discovery slowly gained momentum on both sides of the Atlantic, a good friend of Huxley’s entered the fray: the writer-philosopher Alan Watts. Watts initially became aware of the drug by reading Huxley’s published account, and in 1958 spoke personally to him, noting that the great writer, in contrast with his prior brand of ascetic mysticism, had ‘ceased to be Manichean,’ in that his vision of the divine now included nature, to which such a shift had left him ‘more relaxed and humane.’ Watts’s interest naturally piqued, yet he felt compelled to reserve his opinion that any such experience could only amount, at best, to ‘a taste of the mystical, like swimming with waterwings, perhaps.’¹⁸

Watts would eventually have the opportunity to undertake the experiment himself later the same year, when a member of the psychiatric community approached him. Dr. Keith Deitman of UCLA was studying the effect of LSD on alcoholic patients, but since so many of his subjects had reported states of consciousness that read like accounts of mystical experience, he quickly became interested in trying it out on ‘experts’ in this field. Watts would take the drug soon after, and concluded that his experience was best described as ‘aesthetic’ and thereupon made a tape for radio broadcast, saying that he had ‘looked into this phenomenon and found it most interesting,’ but, alas, in contrast with Huxley’s vision, Watts concluded it was ‘hardly what I would call mystical.’¹⁹

A year later, the tape was heard by two psychiatrists at the Langley-Porter Clinic in San Fransisco – Sterling Bunnell and Michael Agron – who were soon in touch with Watts, urging him to reconsider his views and attempt the experiment a second time, for ‘there was something of an art to getting it really working.’ Watts accepted the invitation and, shortly after ingesting the substance, found himself ‘reluctantly compelled to admit that – at least in my own case – LSD had brought me into an undeniably mystical state of consciousness.’²⁰ Watts repeated the experiment five times, and these occasions would come to form the basis of his writings on the subject.²¹ Watts noted his initial reluctance to publish, fearing the prospect of these chemicals, uncontrolled in dosage and content, being bootlegged for use in inappropriate settings without any competent supervision. However, since Huxley had ‘already let the cat out of the bag’ and the subject was under discussion both in psychiatric journals and in the public press, Watts decided that more needed to be said, ‘mainly to soothe public alarm and to do what I could to forestall the disasters that would follow from legal repression.’²² In 1962, The Joyous Cosmology was published.

During the period between the two publications, a stir developed in the academic community owing to some of the tentative conclusions of Huxley’s narrative; conclusions that would be corroborated in Watts’s own account of the mind drugs. In 1957 a direct response to Huxley’s Doors of Perception was published in the form of R.C. Zaehner’s Mysticism Sacred and Profane.²³ As this is to date the only existing published criticism specifically concerned with Huxley’s account, examining it briefly serves as a useful introduction to the literary context.

There are two fundamental aspects of Zaehner’s response to Huxley. First, Zaehner’s work can be seen as a critique of Huxley’s claim that drug-induced mystical experiences bear some resemblance to the mystical experiences of the major world religions.²⁴ Second, Mysticism Sacred and Profane involves an explicit repudiation of Huxley’s perennialist claim that ‘mysticism’ represents a ‘common core’ at the centre of all religions.²⁵ Instead, Zaehner argued, there are three fundamentally different types of ‘mysti-cism’: theistic (absorptive communion with a personal Lord or Creator), monistic (an individual’s identification with an impersonal Absolute) and panenhenic (the experience of oneness with Nature).²⁶ Following these distinctions, the terminology used by Huxley would be particularly maligned by Zaehner. In his visionary apprehension of an incidental vase of flowers, ‘The Beatific Vision’ is the briefest summation of Huxley’s descriptive set: ‘for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.’ In response to this, Zaehner wrote, ‘I am afraid I cannot discern any likeness between what he experienced and what is generally understood as the Beatific Vision.’ According to Zaehner, the term corresponds to ‘a direct apperception of God, not through a glass, darkly,’ but with ‘all the veils of sense stripped aside.’ Therefore, ‘Why should we be asked to believe that a vision of nature transfigured in any way corresponds to a vision of God Himself?’²⁷

The basis of Zaehner’s argument lies in his distinguishing between Zen Buddhist terminology and that of the Christian mystics. While Buddhists may describe everyday worldly objects as tantamount to a metaphysical ultimate, such as, in Huxley’s associated example, ‘the hedge at the bottom of the garden’, Zaehner contended that Christian mystics use no such terminology. Indeed, in his eagerness to dismiss Huxley’s case, he would equate it to ‘that of a maniac’ in so far as ‘the personality seems to be dissipated into the objective world,’ while in the case of theistic mystics, ‘the human personality is wholly absorbed in the Deity Who is felt and experienced as being something totally distinct and other than the objective world.’ This, he went on, is a state in which both the subject, ‘I’, and the object, ‘the world’, are momentarily excluded from consciousness and in which the soul is literally ‘filled’ through and through ‘with the Holy Ghost.’²⁸ Here the distinction is made between the normal subjective sense of self, and the soul. This is particularly evident in Zaehner’s distinction between the central experience of theistic mysticism and Huxley’s claim of being that which he perceives: ‘In the first case we have the ‘deification’ of a human soul in God, the loss of consciousness of all things except God; in the second we have the identification of the self…with the external world to the exclusion, it would appear, of God.’²⁹ As we will later observe, these conclusions bear much importance to the present analysis.

Zaehner’s distinction between theistic and monistic mysticism was later challenged by Walter Stace in his book, Mysticism and Philosophy (1960). First, Stace criticized Zaehner for his obvious Catholic bias, which could be seen as a motivation to rescue theism from the more general category of mysticism.³⁰ Furthermore, he instead distinguished between two classes of mystical experience: introvertive and extrovertive, thereby replacing Zaehner’s threefold typology. For Stace, the introvertive mystical experience was a complete merging of everything and constituted not only the superior of the two types of experience but also the mystical core of all religions.³¹ The extrovertive experience, on the other hand, was only a partial realization of introvertive union that amounted to a sense of harmony between two things.³² According to Stace, mystical experiences were also characterized by paradox and were alleged to be ineffable by mystics.³³ As to what was common amongst Stace’s typology, both extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences were described as the awareness of an underlying unity: a unifying vision of all things in the case of extrovertive cases, and a transcendent unitary consciousness beyond space and time in the case of introvertive mysticism.³⁴

Future critics would distance themselves from this so-called perennial philosophy school attributed largely to Huxley and Watts, with a ‘plea for the recognition of differences’ in the form of constructivism – a counter-position that would arise with the 1978 publication of a number of articles under the general title Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. Steven Katz, the leading proponent of constructivism, sums up the position with the view that mystical experience is significantly shaped and formed by the subject’s beliefs, concepts and expectations. According to the constructivist paradigm, all experiences are in significant ways mediated and constructed by the terms, categories, beliefs and linguistic backgrounds which the subject brings to them.³⁵ Following this paradigm, the claim is that mystics are so deeply imbued with the canonical literature in their religious tradition that there is a demonstrable intimate interconnection of the religious and canonical literature they have studied and their subsequent mystical experience.³⁶ In this way, Katz argues, both mystical texts and the experiences they help to form all reflect and are dependent upon diverse ontological schemata which shape the configuration of the quest and its goal.³⁷ Subsequently, there is no such thing as an experience that is free from interpretation, experience free from any recognisable content – such a ‘pure’ consciousness cannot exist.³⁸

Other scholars have since directly opposed the constructivist argument. In The Problem of Pure Consciousness (1990), Robert Forman argues that constructivism has difficulty in explaining the feeling of novelty commonly experienced by mystical adepts. The person may well be surprised by her experience, not only the timing but also the nature of the experience itself: indeed, ‘The history of mysticism is rife with cases in which expectations, models, previously acquired concepts, and so on, were deeply and radically disconfirmed.’³⁹ In addition, there is the peculiar character of so-called ‘Pure Consciousness Events’, in that they are content-less, a form of wakeful content-less consciousness; for while expectations may supply content to visionary experiences, according to Forman this is not so plausible with pure consciousness experiences, in so far as the latter have no content.⁴⁰

We have traced this comparative discipline to its present state as far as is relevant to this inquiry. The arguments are cited for their worth with respect to the following extended textual analysis, for in a reinterpretation of the primary sources it is hoped that a fresh engagement with these debates can occur. The tentative prediction is that the distinctions made within the phenomenon of ‘mystical experience’ may yet be resolved in the formulation of a new experiential model. Let us now move on to substantiate this hypothesis.

2 The Purpose of Language

Rarely does the strictly rational thinker spend time attempting to fathom a seemingly illogical idea. Anything that is a direct affront to reason is likely to be dismissed as simple nonsense. Even in allowing a poetic contradiction-in-terms employed for rhetorical effect, the thinker is often comforted by the knowledge that the contradiction is only apparent and the combination of terms serves only as a novel expression of some perfectly sensible underlying concept.⁴¹

With this in mind, it is no great surprise that Aldous Huxley found detractors in ample supply following the 1954 publication of The Doors of Perception, in which he claims ‘the divine source of all existence’ to be a bunch of flowers, and describes not merely gazing at the bamboo legs of a chair, but ‘actually being them.’ As Oxford Professor R.C. Zaehner noted, to the normal, rational mind Huxley’s remarks make no sense whatsoever, and might therefore be dismissed as the illusions of a lunatic.⁴² By contrast, Huxley stoutly believed his experience to be an ‘unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox.’ This is the first of many apparent contradictions. Huxley writes that this ’self-evident paradox’ is unspeakable; nevertheless, he goes on to speak about it. This resonates with Arthur Koestler’s commentary on his own self-proclaimed mystical experience: ‘it was meaningful though not in verbal terms’ – and of his own attempts to describe it – ‘to communicate what is incommunicable by its nature one must somehow put it into words, and so one moves in a vicious circle.’⁴³

By virtue of this crux, in describing the experience as unspeakable Huxley indicates that it is not properly intelligible when interpreted linguistically. His understanding is ‘not on the verbal level’ yet it allows ‘a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things’ which is ‘as clear as day, as evident as Euclid.’ This is not a favourable premise for a committed writer! Huxley claims he is faced with an experience that is perfectly obvious to him, yet he cannot communicate it truthfully without rendering himself unintelligible. Granting for the purposes of this study that Huxley’s experience was not merely an illusion but in fact a valid mode of experiencing, might the problem of its communication lie in the verbal categories of language itself? Do they have a conditioning activity on consciousness, and is there a binding set of underlying assumptions governing that conditioning?

Following his experiment with mescaline, Huxley cast a critical eye over language and saw it as the primary antagonist in the pursuit of a holistic awareness. If nothing else came about in writing The Doors of Perception (hereafter The Doors), Huxley hoped at least for the common recognition that