The Shamanic Odyssey by Robert Tindall;Susana Bustos;

Author:Robert Tindall;Susana Bustos;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Shamanism/Literature
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Having passed through the mental vortex of the intensified trajectory, the subject becomes “part of a strange realm,” where “people sometimes feel themselves to be turning into animals and undergoing other frightening or exalting transformations.”42

Upon immersion into the fathomless depths of the third stage, the subject experiences a profoundly meaningful participation in the vast, strange, and intensely beautiful sentience of the cosmos, as Odysseus does in Hades or as the Tukano tribe of the Colombian Amazon does in their ayahuasca ceremonies, where “they see yajé snakes, the Master of the Animals who withholds animals or releases them to hunters, the Sun-Father, the Daughter of the Anaconda, and other mythical beings.”43

While Lewis-Williams’s cognitive archaeology and anthropology provide a good, workable model for how indigenous peoples and the ancient Greeks could “take hold of the possibilities of the intensified trajectory” and “harness the human brain,”44 it is necessary to part company with him in his interpretation of the workings of the intensified state, for Lewis-Williams claims that ultimately not only shamanic experience, but even dream states are mere exhaust fumes of brain activity. As vestiges of our slow evolution into rationality, visionary experience, much less indigenous perception of a sentient, vital cosmos, have no intrinsic value to waking consciousness for Lewis-Williams.

Other anthropologists and ethnobotanists, of course, have been more open to the inherent worth of indigenous experience and the visionary stage of the intensified trajectory. Richard Evans Schultes, for example, didn’t hesitate to dance with and immerse himself in the practices of his native hosts, and so came to know the power of the plants of his beloved Amazonian peoples from within.

Yet one of the greatest explorers of the intensified trajectory of consciousness, arguably the foremost in restoring the prestige of primal consciousness to the modern world, never visited the Amazon, danced with indigenous tribes, or drank consciousness-altering potions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.