Let me speak for a moment about a current-day trend to experiment in drug-induced shamanic experiences. There are a number of proponents of this approach, starting with Timothy Leary who, I should mention, died of a brain tumor. If people can’t get the symbolic message of that fact, there’s not much hope for them! In any event, among the proponents of this approach are a few authors with high profiles in alternative knowledge circles such as Colin Wilson, Graham Hancock, and others.
I recently read Hancock’s book Supernatural and Mr. Hancock certainly thinks he is talking about the “spirit world” and acknowledging its existence, reality, and so on, but the fact is, so far as I can tell based on research, reason and experience, he has only helped with the process of degrading the perception of it.
Up through page 8, Hancock announces that he is going to take hallucinogenic plants, talks about shamanic use of plants, how widespread it is, and then, on pages 7—8 he tells why he did it:
My primary motive, unabashedly, was research. I had deliberately submitted myself to this ordeal as part of a wider, longer-term investigation into a mysterious “before and after moment” that took place in human prehistory, perhaps as recently as 40,000 years ago. Before it, other than a very few widely-scattered and isolated examples, there is nothing in the archaeological record left by our ancestors that we would instantly recognize as modern human behavior. After it, the signs that creatures exactly like us have arrived are everywhere, most notably in the first definite evidence for beliefs in supernatural realms and beings — evidence, in other words, for the birth of religion. ….
An ingenious explanation for the bizarre appearance of these beings…. has been put forward by a prestigious group of anthropologists and archeologists. The essence of their argument is that the cave art expresses mankind’s first and oldest notions of the supernatural, of the “soul,” and of realms of existence beyond death — notions that took shape in “altered states of consciousness” most likely brought on by the consumption of psychoactive plants. Although not to the liking of some scholars, this has been the most widely-accepted theory of cave art since the mid-1990s. It is therefore an embarrassment that none of the experts currently advocating it have ever actually consumed any psychoactive plants themselves; nor do they have any first-hand ideas of what an “altered state of consciousness” is, or any desire to experience one. To give fair consideration to their arguments, and to the views of their critics, I felt I needed to be able to judge on the basis of personal experience whether plant-induced visions could be made of strong enough stuff to have convinced early humans of the existence of supernatural realms and of the survival after death of some essence of deceased ancestors.
This, in a nutshell, was why I had taken ibogaine — for sound, solid, common-sense research reasons. But I have to acknowledge that there was another, much more personal motive as well. It had to do with my own father’s painful death from bone cancer the previous autumn and my inexcusable failure to be at his bedside during the last few days of his life. Part of the appeal of this slightly risky experiment with ibogaine was undoubtedly its promise of “encounters with the ancestors,” and — however tenuous — the possibility of closure and quietus that it seemed to offer. (Hancock 2007, 7—8)
Now, let me give my perspective on these many assumptions he is making. First of all, I understand his intense curiosity about the alleged shamanic hallucinations. The issue of the very existence and survival of the soul occupied my mind for many years. However, while I had all the shamanic signs and symptoms and experiences — beginning when I was a child — I also had a powerful, logical, skeptical mental apparatus.
I, too, was drawn to experiment in my own way as a consequence of the loss of loved ones. In the case of my grandfather, who died when I was 22, I had a classic contact experience at the time of his death that was actually witnessed and partly experienced by a third party, so there was a certain conviction in my mind that there is more to life than the body. But exactly what it was, what it meant, was still unproven to my very active rational mind. Nevertheless, this was a stimulus to my work and experiments with hypnosis through the years. In that work, I developed shamanic techniques where I both traveled with the subject, and remained guardian of the experience in this reality.
Why didn’t I decide to experiment with drugs? Let me include here an extract from a letter I wrote back in the 1980s to a friend who was advocating a particular meditative technique that was guaranteed to enlighten one where I explain why.
December, 1987 — […]
About the ‘Journey Into the Light’ tape you sent — it was very interesting and not unfamiliar or dissimilar to previous personal experiences of my own. But, I want to comment that, years ago, I interviewed a number of people who had taken mescaline [and LSD]. It seems they had all experienced fantastic “inner voyages”. It is, it seems, a total alteration of perception; they ‘see’ sounds and ‘hear’ colors and movement. Most of them described, laying over the whole experience, ‘waves of reality.’ They traveled into ‘other realms’ and perceived other beings — even very frightening areas of darkness and despair. They describe a disintegration of reality that includes the self. For most of them, this ‘loss of identity’ is terrifying.
In my own experiences with meditation, I have experienced ‘transfer of information,’ most of which is kept buried and which I have never shared with anyone. Until I can find confirmation of it in some other source, I will continue to hold it inside.
The point is: the mescaline experience — including other hallucinogens — is purely chemical — or, at least, chemically induced. Since the brain is capable of such incredible ‘voyages’ as a result of chemicals, how can we assert with absolute certainty that similar self-induced ‘flights’ or even acts of ‘channeling’ are not also merely chemical reactions within the physical brain? How do we know we are not merely manifestations of the imagination of some slumbering Cosmic Being? Or the toys or whatever of a group of celestial adversaries? (For I cannot doubt some foundation for our existence other than mere accident).
Now, I suppose that what has happened to me is that my faith — once so strong and impervious to external assault — has succumbed to a sort of ‘devil’s advocate’ mode of thinking. For so long I maintained the ‘proper’ attitudes — performed the proper acts — to ‘create’ a reality more in line with what I felt would provide the environment for creative productivity and simple happiness …
Well, hope springs eternal, as they say. I will continue to do those things which should lead to ‘enlightenment.’ I will water the shriveled plant of my faith and withhold judgment. But I cannot lie and pretend all is at peace in me or that I find my life, up to this point, at all what I would have hoped.
I am now at the age you were when I met you. You are now past 50 — and so little time has passed! I thought we would be young and adventurous and carefree forever, or at least until we died. As Rose said: I expect to be dead someday, but I don’t plan to spend any time dying. Yet, my mortality has never weighed so heavily upon me as now. Maybe I’m going through “the change”. I feel crazy as hell sometimes.
The reason I felt “crazy as hell” sometimes is due to the fact that I had embarked on my own experiment, though it had nothing at all to do with drugs. As I have written elsewhere, my grandmother’s death, ten years after my grandfather’s passing, really knocked the wind out of me. And six months later, I was bedridden after the birth of my fourth child. This was in 1985 and it was during this period of enforced stillness (typical event in the life of the shaman) that I turned to inner journeys in order to cope with the depth of my agony. You could say that what happened to my body was a physical expression of what was going on inside. I could no longer sit up or walk internally or externally. I needed to know with some certainty, what it all meant.
Even in my state of doubt, I continued to meditate. I had the idea that if I could produce the required changes in myself — even if it was only acceptance of my suffering and the sufferings of others — that would enable me to pass through this rough period. Most particularly, I wanted a change in my marriage. I needed my ex-husband’s acceptance of me as a questioning, intelligent human being — not merely a cook, housekeeper, sex object, baby-sitter and doormat. I knew that he had been wounded, that he had insecurities, that perhaps his behavior was simply designed to drive me away, to manifest some self-fulfilling prophecy he had about himself that no woman could love him or stand by him. I knew that, if anybody could do it, I could. And the goal was, of course, to heal myself so that my ex-husband would be healed. Then, if we were both “en rapport,” our children would benefit, and all would be right with the world!
My meditation practice rapidly progressed. After only a few months of practice, I found myself “zoning out” while remaining conscious in another way simultaneously, for up to three hours at a time, coming to myself feeling as though no time at all had passed. The only problem was: I never seemed to bring anything back with me. I had no idea what had been going on, where my mind had been. I did note that I was far more peaceful and able to cope with the difficulties of my life, but it was still frustrating not to obtain something a bit more concrete from all of this endeavor.
As a matter of practicality I generally meditated lying on the bed. Some people cannot do this because they tend to fall asleep, but that was never a problem for me. I could zone out in meditation, come to some time later, and then go to sleep easily at night. I was generally so uncomfortable in any position, that getting to sleep was problematical if I didn’t meditate first.
So, I went to bed one night and began my breathing exercises. This part of the process I had borrowed from my hypnotherapy training and was extremely useful. Of course, I later learned that it had been borrowed for hypnotherapy from certain meditation systems.
At this point, I don’t know what happened. All I remember is starting the breathing phase, which came before the contemplative phase of the exercise. But then I made some kind of big “skip”.
The next thing I knew, I was jerked back into consciousness by a sensation that can only be described as a boiling turbulence in my abdomen. It was so powerful that, at first, it felt actually physical — like there was a boiling agitation in my organs that was going to erupt upward in some way.
I was frantically holding my throat, because I could feel a tightening of the muscles in the throat area, as wave after wave of energy blew upward like the precursors of steam blasts from a volcano before it erupts. I struggled out of the bed, holding the wall with one hand and my throat with the other, clenching my teeth so whatever it was would not come gushing out of me and disturb my family. For all I knew, I was just going to be violently sick!
I rushed outside to the porch where there was a lawn sofa, and collapsed onto it just as the outpouring began.
I wish I could describe this in better words, but there are simply none that apply other than to use ordinary descriptions that don’t come close to the essence and intensity of the event. What erupted from me was a shattering series of sobs and cries that were utterly primeval and coming from some soul-deep place that defies explanation. Accompanying these cries, or actually,
embedded in them, were images — visions — complete scenes with all attendant emotional content and implied context conveyed in an instant. It was like the idea of your life passing before your eyes only it was many lifetimes and many levels of experience. I was experiencing myself at multiple levels of reality, in multiple lifetimes, interacting with multiple beings, in scenario after scenario. There was a whole lot of communication going on in ways that are impossible to describe.
And the tears! My god! The tears that flowed. I had no idea that the human physiology was capable of producing such copious amounts of liquid so rapidly!
Now, if this had been just an hour-long crying jag or something like that, it would have to pass into history as “just one of those things,” maybe like PMS. But, this activity had a life of its own! It went on, without slowing or stopping, for more than five hours! If I attempted to slow it down, stop it, or “switch” my mind in another direction, the inner sensation of explosive eruption rapidly took over, all the muscles in my body would begin to clench up and I was no longer in control. I could only sit there as a sort of instrument of grief and lamentation and literally sob my heart out for every horror of history in which I had seemingly participated or to which I had possibly been a witness from whatever level of existence I occupied at that “time”. I think that there were even some that I was simply aware of without my direct participation. And some were truly horrible scenes.
Plague and pestilence and death and destruction. Scene after scene. Loved ones standing one moment, crushed or lying in bloody heaps the next. Rapaciousness, pillaging, plundering; rivers of blood and gore; slaughter, carnage and butchery in all its many manifestations passed before my eyes; holocaust and hell. Rage and hot anger, bloodlust and fury, murder and mayhem, all around me, everywhere I looked. Evil heaped on evil like twisted, dismembered bodies. And the grief of centuries, the unshed tears of millennia, the guilt, remorse and penitence, flooded through me; melting, thawing and dissolving the burdensome shell of stone that encased my petrified heart; washing away the pain with my tears; an ocean of tears.
As this release of the worlds of accumulated guilt and grief of many lifetimes went on, the “voice-that-was-not-a-voice” in the background, ever soothing, ever calming, repeated:
“It’s not your fault. There is no blame. It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”
I came to understand something very deep: I understood that there is no “original sin”. I understood that the terrors and suffering mankind experiences here in life on earth is not caused by some sort of “flaw” or “error” or aberration from “within”. It is not punishment. It is not something that one can be “saved” from. I understood that every scene of terrible suffering and heart-rending cruelty was the result of ignorance. And each experience was the gaining of knowledge.
It is easier to see this idea when you consider the Crusades or the Inquisition. You can trace the path of twisted reason, leading from the idea of the Love of God to imposing that view on others “for their own good”, ending in torture and mass murder. Forget for a moment about those who just viciously used such philosophies for their own gain and political maneuvers. Think for a moment only about the sincerity of the philosophies behind such events. But it is based on ignorance.
Many of those who were seemingly out for gain and self-aggrandizement were operating out of ignorance — fear and hunger of the soul that cannot be satisfied. It is only a matter of degrees, but in the end, it is only ignorance.
When the flow of energy, images and tears finally began to subside, I felt a sensation of warm, balmy liquid, almost airy in its lightness, and so sweet that to this day, I can still remember the piercing quickening of the fire of love for all of creation. It was ecstatic, rapturous and exultant all at the same time. I was lost in wonder, amazed and at the same time bewildered at this vision of the world.
The result of this event was a state of prolonged “elevation,” or “loving peace” that persisted for a very long time. You could even say that the effects reverberate to the present. Never again was I able to condemn (act against with intent to destroy what they choose to believe) another, no matter how wicked their deeds. I could see that all so-called “evil” and “wickedness” was a manifestation of ignorance. No person, no matter how holy and elevated they may think they are in this life, has not reveled in the shedding of another’s blood in some other time and place. And no person who chooses ignorance and wickedness and destruction in this life is wrong. Yes, I had the right to avoid them, to defend myself against them, to understand what they were doing. But it was not my place to go on a campaign to forcibly change their mind.
The significant point is: Ignorance is a choice, and one made for a reason: to learn and to grow.
That realization led to another: that one needs knowledge to learn how to truly choose; the point of this existence is to be able to learn, at this level of reality, what is and isn’t of ignorance, what is of truth and beauty and love and cleanliness. I understood the saying of Jesus that some things are bright and shining on the outside, but inside they are filthy and full of decay. And I don’t mean that I was seeing this negativity as something to be judged. I clearly understood its reason and place as modes of learning, but I was deeply inspired to seek out all I could learn about this world to best manifest what was of light.
With this comparison of my non-drug induced shamanic experience to the drug-induced ones that Hancock describes in the book, I think that the attentive reader can see the difference. It seems that drug induced experiences do indeed open the door to other realms, but they are generally lower realms, where one would not wish to remain for any period of time. I should also add that this was only the beginning of the initiatory process. It proceeded by stages for years. I’m not sure it ever ends, either. But with each step of progression, your perception changes and with the change of perception comes the change of the reality you live in. My life now is so vastly different from the life I was leading then that it is literally a Cinderella story. Yes, I have paid a high price for my knowledge and awareness; I am subjected to vicious attacks from those who seek to keep humanity ignorant and in chains. But let me say at this point that,
in my personal life, I experience happiness that few have ever known, and there is a peace that passes all understanding in doing what is right simply because it is right.
