The Art of Being Alone (Pt 6): Shamonic Periscopes & Psychedelics
Entheogens, better known as psychedelics, are all the rage now a days. Michael Michael Pollan’s amazing book “How to Change Your Mind”, well changed my mind. I believe they will be a tool of profound impact on society.
But I also believe they risk extreme self-deception and abuse. And Shamanic Periscopes explain it all.
Most know how shared language, technology and culture fueled our development, enabling us accelerated innovation that outpaced the environmental constraints — allowing us to became the Alpha predator on earth. Sorry, woolly mammoth, we will bring you back soon, but T-Rex may eat you Jurassic Park style.
But, what I recently found interesting, much of this early innovation was likely due to Shamanism. I will be damned. 1 point for the woo woo.
Shaman’s were masters of experimenting with psycho-technologies which helped them to discover new patterns in reality. Using sleep deprivation, extended dancing, drumming or plant medicines they could get into altered mental states of consciousness.
This resulted in enhanced cognition, flow states and new ways of looking where insights could arise. It’s like smoking a joint and some creative ideas arise — but time 1000.
The Shaman, tripping balls, would become the deer. Did he really become a deer? Probably not, but he thought so and I don’t blame him. But more importantly, by transcending his “ego self” and his normal day to day cognition (way of looking) he could become the Deer and learn her ways.
Flying high, the Shaman flowing in role play, saw new patterns in animal habits and migration that normal tribe people missed (according to anthropologists).
*Nerd Note: psychedelics create mental states where parts of the brain communicate and share information in completely new ways. It’s less hallucination and more reconfiguration: instead of the normal highways, you start taking scenic never before seen back roads of your mind).
Shamanism resulted in developing new hunting strategies and healthcare treatments for their peeps. Some of this was likely legitimate, and some bullshit rabbit foot medicine (yet ironically the placebo effect is a way of looking at treatment and is a real phenomenon). *NerdNote: 30-40% of all current pharma drugs in the USA are estimated to be placebos.
Tribes with shamans and their ways of looking out competed tribes without them. This includes BS rabbit and legit plant medicine.
Interesting history Alf, but what’s the point?
Once again, it’s not what you say, but how you see. Plant medicines, drugs, or compounds allowed new ways of looking and new patterns that existed in reality to be discovered.
With all their nature mysticism we now shun (or New Age fetishsize), they solved tribal puzzles for survival and cosmic meaning via Shamanic Periscopes.
AND, they also saw a lot of hallucinated bull shit — well that was probably just the bi-product of a Paleolithic religions and culture. Culture and habits shape our Shamanic Periscopes.
For example, they felt and perceived the deep interconnection with mother earth that fostered love, connection and meaning for their struggle of life and thought they became a real deer for 12 hours, eating grass, making deer whoopee and spoke with spirits.
So which is it? Is it all or nothing? Is there a middle-way?
This is why psychedelics are both powerful and dangerous.
Often they jump start people on the “spiritual path”. It blows the lid off our habitual cognition and perception. It’s shatters our day to day ways of looking. Regardless of your lens of looking, with 300 micro-grams of LSD some crazy ass shit will happen.
The direct experience is undoubtedly experientially real and sheds light on alternate ways of dancing in conscious experience. We can taste the monks world without 10,000 hours of training. But we can not stay there without the training.
And maybe it’s just a hallucinated mind rave. But it’s not fake, it’s as real an experience as anything. This “hallucination” can also provide one deeper perspectives and meaning on the dance floor, the music, the band, and the room in this mind rave.
It also provides profound meaning to those that take the journey; often more transcendentally beautiful, loving, mysterious, interconnected and wise that carries on well past the “trip”. ; Whether terminally ill cancer patients, PTSD therapy, and human hearts nearly 75% rank it as a top 5 life experience up there with the birth of their first born child.
But without training in perception that meditation brings, or healthy skepticism (a way of looking), it can be hard to separate those palpable truths that shake your soul — from hallucinated hogwash.
Many of the hardcore psychedelic users (and lucid dreamers) I meet take what they perceived as 100% literally real. They see Plato’s shadows on the wall, but don’t see the perceptual fire at work.
A movie isn’t really another dimensional universe, but it’s an experience. An experience that can move you. Touch you. Change you. Even transform you. But it’s a movie, and one has to perceive the screen and the projector dancing too.
Also, a good movie should leave you reflecting, pondering, appreciating, not simply longing for the next episode or high (e.g. psychedelic integration challenges).
My hypothesis, is that based on your Shamanic Periscope assumptions, what you expect could reasonably happen — well happens more often. And like the nuns in the scanner, a non-dual state becomes the God of holy books. The elves are real. My chakra is really green. The quantum intention cured my brain cancer. Fueled by their assumptions and worldviews, some can live in the movie and miss the theater.
Some Shamanic Periscope Examples:
Ayahuasca machine elves: Are the elves really real in this dimension or a manifestation of your mind because you already have heard of them? A manifestation that teaches wise life changing lessons.
Dead Gurus/Realms": “I Can fly, but just not in this realm” some say. With strong meditative concentration skills you can see mental images AND alternate worlds in 1080 hd (no drugs apparently). Then Deducing it as literally your dead Guru or a realm in another dimension — well that’s a way of looking. Often framed by belief structures, axial age cosmology, and cultural code.
Dreams to Astral Planes: Maybe your dream to the astral realm with god beings is real, or with a different periscope a lucid dream coupled with powerful concentration skills in a cloud of cognitive memory reshuffling?
Green Chakras: Is your heart chakra really green? Or is it an imaginal tool like mother moon? A shamanic periscope that allows you to tap into real subtle energies in your body while you sharpen and strengthen your perception skills? Could you make it magenta with carebears?
Near Death: People can have out of body experiences or near death experiences of vast light that that is coincidentally the god you believe in. Is it some other plane? Or a state neuroscientist can create by stimulating your temporoparietal cortex ? (I so had to google that)
Growth vs Fixed Mindsets: If you believe in growth and development, with practice you grow with feedback loops reinforcing and compounding your growth and ways of looking (e.g. character development). If you have a fixed mindset, we are who we are, minus some environmental pressures you pretty much flat line.
Quantum Intentional Health: If your intention is strong and with emotional salience you can send healing instructions to the body in the quantum dimensions. The book “You Are the Placebo” is kind of right. Yet the placebo effect of truly believing reinforces the healing process. Concluding quantum intention changing world? That’s a bit trickier.
I could do a 100 of these but you get the point.
In the world of Dharma Dating you’re always clashing with different Shamanic Periscopes. Some point to transcendental wisdom, but are wrapped in dated cultural lenses of nature and animal worship.
Dharma Dating is not about calling one system “it”, but more not holding onto periscopes of bullshit. It’s looking for a middle way between not only science and spirituality, but meaningful experiences and the perception process. Of extracting the beautiful juice and holding on to reason and discernment. Trying to hold onto all of these, I have been lonely at sea.
But I don’t really know shit and will laugh at this post in 5 years.. Maybe it is — maybe it isn’t. But that’s my way of looking at other people’s ways of looking. Shit is getting meta at sea!
The key insight of the Shamanic Periscope is not what is true or false in our own experience, for that is for each of us to decide. Rather to know there are different ways of looking bundled with our assumptions and views that manifest our experience. To not blindly believe everything we perceive. To not self-deceive and inspect them. To play with them. To test our own bundle of assumptions and beliefs and not simply reinforce them.
We need to balance letting our sphincter open up, but also to have faith in healthy doubt, otherwise wisdom and insight starts having sex with self-deception. And that’s a Greek god Eros and I don’t want to have a threesome with.
Eros and I are horny. And now it’s time for some fantasy and naughty role play.
Another aspect of Shamanic Periscopes, one I was blind to, is how you and I are both living in fantasies.
But do you know which one?