The Art of Being Alone (Pt 4): Shamanic Periscopes
Original photo of Mt. Everest hiking Gokyo Ri, Nepal. Shot through an old stone wheel axle — while I was catching my breath :).
Warning: To any any of my dharma compatriots I piss off, that is not my intent. I am sorry, it’s only my way of looking — at looking. And remember, I don’t know what the hell I am talking about. But then again, no one really does. Let’s get onto some fantasies & naughty role play eghh?
SHAMANIC PERISCOPES:
In Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” where he studied the patterns in all myths, the adventurer will explore the dark underworld. As a result of their “triumph” they will be armed with new “knowledge and perception”.
But this non-hero wonders if there’s something more nuanced to the story. Something at the heart of the Buddha’s Dharma. It’s less about new knowledge and perception, and more about discerning the perception process itself.
It’s something the great and recently late meditation teacher, Rob Burbea, called “A Way of Looking”. This way of looking is what I have ripped off (all artists steal right?), and call Shamanic Periscopes.
Shamanic Periscopes are the way in which we peer out and see the world. It isn’t what we see, but how we see. Your lenses of looking at the landscape of conscious experience. Couch potatoes, sages, and Nobel Laureates all have them,
So what make up this way of looking?
Shamanic Periscopes are a constellation of our assumptions, views, conditioned habits of perception, cultural memes, and our data set of life growth that act as our lenses to our world. Shaping our world.
Just as glasses frame what you see, the way you look will always need a partner of views and assumptions.
But this lens of looking is not simply 7.5 billion “unique” perspectives. Nor a cache of cultural memes and heuristics we operate by. It is much more refined than that.
Like glasses many don’t see their own lenses — only the world they see. Non-meditators, meditators or psychonauts alike often don’t see how they shape their experience — of themselves and the world. I sure as hell didn’t and still fully don’t!
Let’s nail this down with some examples. And that brings us to my ex-girlfriend, periscopes, and my sphincter. I warned you that it was going to get messy.
MOTHER MOON & MY SPHINCTER
My ex-girlfriend had a beautiful and massive heart. I never saw someone get so excited and filled with love for stray shit covered dogs in the street.
But (she’s an ex of course there is a but!) my overly rational and argumentative mind clashed with all her nature mysticism and astrological woo woo. One of her favorite meditations beautifully highlights Shamanic Periscopes.
On full moons she used to meditate to the goddess Mother Moon. And like the amazing boyfriend that I am, I reluctantly went along. The mother’s energy radiating to our heart chakras and vice versa.
Now she believed all this as really real, the astrological metaphysics of reality, while my scientific sphincter cringed. But such is the price of love, friendship and getting laid.
However — real, not real or somewhere in-between — this imaginal practice (way of looking) allowed her to have beautiful and deep experiences of love, peace, healing and interconnection.
By believing in Mother Moon it created a positive feedback loop, not only creating but enhancing and deepening the actual embodied felt experience.
That was something my uptight ass couldn’t get into. For I was a mighty Vipassana meditator, dissecting “reality as it really is” (simply another way of looking). But hey — maybe it’s something like to be a mother moon ,a pansychic dance of gravity.
This is not simply the power of believing. Whether it’s Mother Moon, an orbiting rock, or both — it sheds light on a more profound aspect of the perception process. A process that directly shapes meditations or day-to-day life of grilling Impossible burgers.
There is no perception, no phenomenological independent existence in reality — without a way of looking.
Any phenomenological appearance in consciousness (noise), our perception of it (bird chirp), and our resulting experience (beautiful bird song) are all an interwoven dynamic process via our way of looking. Say that three times.
When you’re lonely at sea and an ex IT consultant - yes you make a process flow chart. This is the Shamanic Periscope in action. Notice the feedback loop from our sense making & meaning making of experience that will reinforce the actual experience (in both good/bad ways).
We have different lenses for different purposes. They are the bridge between observer and observed, between making sense of the world and making meaning.
The Shamanic Periscope isn’t some spiritual geek out.
It’s how we psychologically look and frame our entire world. It's not simply a truth, but how we observe and realize truthS and meaning. Lenses of looking don’t just see the world, they create our experiential world
Each way of looking, with its assumptions and views, allows a broad array of experiences to open up — while also closing others.
By gaining “insights” on a retreat or being a first time mom, new ways of looking will feedback into how you look and experience reality. Whether spiritual “wisdom” or maturity of life experience, as you grow the periscope you look out into creates enhanced and different worlds. All the compassion and love the Tibetan’s stress? Wise rose colored glasses that keep feeding and growing compassion. This feedback loop of perception empowers a consciousness cascade and compounding — enhanced ways of looking looping and looping.
But here’s the catch. The nuance that slapped me in the face.
We are not simply a scientist measuring what is, we are also the artist creating what is.
This lens of looking is a dynamic and active way of seeing and perceiving.
We play an active role in constructing experience by choosing what glasses to wear. But with training we can learn to morph perception like Neo and the spoon in the Matrix. All of this can be trained and developed (e.g. meditation or Stoicism).
With advanced training, you can learn to make perception malleable, empowering deeper and more profound mental states of beauty, truth, and mysteriousness.
For example, contemplate how making love, fucking or Tantra are all experiences of “intercourse”. Even “making love” can have deeper and deeper subtlety, if you open up and play with perception (e.g. feeling all the subtle energies and not just your gonads).
An example of cultivating subtlety — one of my Thai forrest monk teachers, sat in the jungles in absorbed meditation for 5 straight days and night, until a nun compassionately threw an ant’s nest on him. He was also hardcore and didn’t lay down, and slept sitting up for 25 years but that’s a story for another time.
These deep states are called Jhanas or Dhyanas (pali/Sanskrit). They aren’t woo woo make believe, but examples of training, cultivating and refining our perception.
Examples such as resting in: bliss, deep equanimity with no sense of your body, infinite awareness of space, infinite consciousness, and pure nothingness etc.
My point for this Jhana tangent, is these aren’t simply “Attaining” some state or going to some realm, they highlight the active and dynamic role of perception. You need to learn to shape and play with perception like clay to be in them (apparently, I still have training wheels). This is why the Buddha called them “Perception Attainments”.
During all of this, is a way of looking that CREATES AND SHAPES the experience and INTERPRETS the resulting experience.
A neuroscience study crystallizes this beautifully.
Studying “religious experiences in the brain”, they put both Tibetan monks and Christian nuns with 10,000+ hours experience into brain scanners. Neurologically they shows similar fingerprints, but what I found interesting was the monks spoke of ‘non-dual emptiness’ while the nuns interpreted their experience as “being one with god”.
Both had very trained Shamanic Periscopes that allowed them to cultivate their experience AND different periscopes that interpreted that experience.
The nuns periscope called that mental state dissolving into God.
The monks periscope viewed all of conscious experience as fabricated, interdependent with things having no essence independent of a way of looking (emptiness oversimplified) and rested in a non-dual empty awareness.
The materialistic neuroscientist periscope viewed experience as one giant hallucination, a simulated model or representation of reality in our brains*. Nerd Note: Cool TedTalk here: Your Brain Hallucinates Reality.
In life, we don’t just see what is like a point and shoot camera snapping photos. Instead seeing, hearing, and feeling is fabricated and constructed via our Shamanic Periscopes.
This is what many of the ancient insight and wisdom traditions have pointed to when they deconstruct the “illusion of the ego self” or a non-dual oneness. With extensive meditation practice one gets a more refined view of the perception machinery of ourselves and the “outside world”. (warning enyy/shame monsters hang out here).
*NerdNote: This opens the door to the classic debate, is their one mountain top with many paths of practice (Shamanic Periscopes) OR one ocean with multiple shores (many bridges to many truths via many periscopes)? But that’s a post for another time and above my pay grade.
Bringing this back to Dharma dating, this isn’t simply believing someone is amazing and they become amazing. That’s delusion. But just like romantic chemistry or those ass enhancing jeans that allow my junk to breathe, there is a trial process of various Shamanic Periscopes.
There is no right and wrong jeans per se, but some fit better for different people. And no — not everyone and everything are perfectly equal — some jeans are of better quality while others implore child labor and crap fabrics.
Some yield profound insights on consciousness, but might be of the axial age fashion trends. New Age ali baba pants feel so loose and nice, yet look ridiculous and are covered in woo woo dust.
All of this has left my spiritual heart and rational mind feeling naked, wondering how can there be so many periscopes that seem to conflict?
Can't science, self exploration and cultivation, and cultural growth come together for an awesome well-being wardrobe in 2020?
But before we explore that dilemma, you may be asking a question about all this Shamanic Periscope jazz.