Author : Tamara Mendels File Size : Invisible landscapes Victoria Ann Jones — in City planning. Invisible Landscapes Marvin Carmony — in Education. Author : Marvin Carmony File Size : Mapping the invisible landscape Kent Clinton Ryden — in Geographical perception.
Landscapes of the Invisible A. Back to when the possibility that the world could be re- made sparkled in the sunshine of what will seem to be, as it recedes into history, a time of perpetual summer—the summer of love, of Woodstock, of massive spring marches through cherry-blossomed Washington to levi- tate the Pentagon. Our appetite for simplicity has caused us to compress the chaos of the '60s into one monolithic Youth Revolt. But there were two philosophies then among the revolutionaries on how the world might be remade.
One path, endorsed by the political activists, advocated a traditional Western strategy: seizing political power and using that vantage to raise conscious- ness and save the world. The other path proposed an attack on con- sciousness itself using a controversial and soon outlawed family of psychochemicals—the psychedelics. Hippies and activists. Could a society heal its social ills without first addressing its own internal flaws? As Tim Leary, perhaps the most cele- brated spokesman of this second option, put it: If all the Negroes and left-wing college students in the world had Cadillacs and full control of society, they would still be involved in an anthill social system unless they opened themselves up.
Opened up. There in a nutshell was the problem vis-a-vis a psychedelic politics: these substances opened up much too much. They were a doorway into a uni- verse of strange and sometimes terrifying information. These were not facile tools; rather, they were an invitation to explorers, and a percentage of the Baby Boom's best and brightest responded by turning into mind wanderers, seeking adventure in the unclaimed real estate of the imagination.
Such was the case with our two authors, who were convinced that the future of the species could best be secured through a transformation of consciousness.
We believed that the widespread use of psychedelic drugs in mod- ern society was somehow rooted to the intuition that exploration and reassimilation of so-called magical dimensions was the next valid step in humanity's collective search for liberation. They focused their work on the psychedelic dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. They were curious about DMT's apparent stimulation of the lan- guage centers of the brain.
Not only was glossolalia speaking in tongues common, but sometimes one encountered dancing molecular forms that seemed to be made out of visible language. Is it any wonder they were entranced? One day, the McKennas came across a description of the shamanic usage of the tryptamine-containing plant ayahuasca in an anthropological monograph about a tribe in the upper Amazon Basin. According to the Jivero shamans, ayahuasca induced a state of consciousness in which a flu- orescent violet substance was generated, and this substance allowed them to work their magic.
From this apercu an expedition grew. It took years for the journey to jell, but in , joined by three friends, the McKennas embarked on a trek up the Amazon to investigate the shamanic usage of such shamanic power plants as ayahuasca.
None of us was yet twenty-five years old. We had been drawn together through the political turmoil that had characterized our years shared in Berkeley We had sorted through the ideological options, and had decided to put all of our chips on the psyche- delic experience as the shortest path to the millennium, which our politics had inflamed us to hope for. I'm giving nothing away by telling you that things didn't work out as planned, that the little expedition never even reached its target village, that it was sidetracked, that they discovered instead a strange mushroom, the ingestion of which provoked the events that The Invisible Landscape attempts to explain.
They embarked upon a serious lark and ended up stumbling across the alien, the mysterious, the other. Deep in the forest. A long, long way from civilization. The complete telling of this story, which strikes me as one of the arche- typal stories of the Baby Boom generation, is contained in Terence McKennas True Hallucinations, a book that was composed in the fullness of time, years after the occurrence of the events it describes.
The McKen- nas' initial response, however, is in the book you now hold in your hands. In his preface to the German edition of The Invisible Landscape, Dennis McKenna says: The book was written in dead earnest by two individuals strug- gling to come to grips with a deluge of ideas triggered by a very personal and idiosyncratic experience.
No one is more aware than myself that certain passages read like the musings of a naive and scientifically untutored student Even though the passage of nearly twenty years since these ideas were first committed to paper have lent a certain perspective, and have made me less willing to insist on the veracity of these concepts as revealed truth, it is still not an admission that is easily made.
Revealed truth. What happened to the McKennas up the Amazon was one of those sudden, shattering discontinuities that sever the recipient from normal time, normal experience, and usually force a complete rewriting of one's life. Time is separated into those things that occurred before the reve- lation and those things that have come after—the aftershocks.
The Invisible Landscape is the McKennas' first attempt to wrestle with this revelation using the handholds of Western science and philosophy. They may seem to use these disciplines in an uncharacteristic and perhaps naive way, but what strikes me more is the ingenious and sometimes brilliantly intuitive application of these methods by two kids who were only in their early twenties.
Nowadays, whenever some fossil starts giving me that Allan-Bloom- Closing-of-the-American -Mind-it's-all-the-fault-of-the-sixties'-generation rap, I plan to hand him The Invisible Landscape and suggest he chew through a few chapters before we chat further about declining standards.
What these fossils would find is a book divided into three sections. The first is Dennis McKennas attempt to understand the psychedelic effects of the mushroom revelation in neurobiological terms. Dennis was interested in the cellular and molecular changes that accompanied the altered state, assuming that the dozens of techniques humans used to promote these states were just different ways of triggering the same organic process.
Just different roads to the top of the same mountain. The second part of the book is Terence's attempt both to understand the mushroom revelation and to assess whether it possibly could be true. A taste of the text is in order here. We could feel the presence of some invisible hyperspatial entity, an ally, which seemed to be observing and sometimes exerting influ- ence on the situation to keep us moving gently toward an experi- mental resolution of the ideas we were generating.
Because of the alien nature of the tryptamine trance, its seeming accentuation of themes alien, insectile, and futuristic, and because of previous expe- riences with tryptamine in which insectile hallucinatory transforma- tions of human beings were observed, we were led to speculate that the role of the presence was somehow like that of an anthropologist, come to give humanity the keys to galactarian citizenship.
What they found there maybe I am giving away too much of the mystery now was a pattern, a rhythm, a rhythm moving through time, maybe the key to time itself—a rhythm that danced its way through the millennia toward an omega point that the McKennas calculated to be the year Which brings us to the third part of the book, the computer program that describes the mathematics from which the McKennas derive this conclusion.
In the long years between the first and second editions of The Invisible Landscape, our authors have turned their mathematical model into a computer program that runs on most PCs. The first time Terence demonstrated the Timewave Zero software for me, he said something like, My God, man, what if it's true? And even if it isn't, you've still got a great computer game. Perhaps you're beginning to see what I mean when I call this book dense, technical, fascinating, infuriating. Jay Stevens Weathersfield Bow, Vermont Preface to the edition Someone encountering this book for the first time is certain to find that many, if not most, of the ideas and concepts discussed are extremely pecu- liar.
The speculations in it are so radically outside the mainstream of mod- ern scientific and philosophical thought that you may wonder whether this book is really meant as a sort of parody of serious scientific discourse.
Let me hasten to reassure the baffled: The book you hold in your hands was written in dead earnest by two individuals struggling to come to grips with a deluge of ideas triggered by a very personal and idiosyncratic expe- rience.
No one is more aware than myself that certain passages read like the musings of a scientifically untutored student, while others are perhaps more indicative of the associations of an unhinged mind. Indeed, it must be admitted that both operative modes played a role in the fashioning of the speculations which this work sets forth.
Even though the passage of nearly twenty years since these ideas were first committed to paper have lent a certain perspective, and have made me less willing to in- sist on the veracity of these concepts as revealed truth, it is still not an ad- mission that is easily made. I would like to think that those years have brought with them some small degree of intellectual maturity, and per- haps a certain humility. The writing of a book which purports to explain all and everything, as this one does, is a task best left to the young, for whom such pedestrian considerations as scientific rigor and credibility are mere impediments.
Science, by its very nature, is rendered un- comfortable when faced with such questions, because it is intrinsically suited to the examination of parts rather than wholes. It is in this respect that psychedelic drugs have been a major conun- drum for science, and are likely to remain so for some time.
For it is in the phenomenon of the psychedelic experience that the irrefutable, self- evident qualities of the mind come up hard against the reductionist models of the molecular neurobiologist. One possible approach to the resolution of this dilemma might be termed the way of the shaman: one dispenses with all attempts at reduc- tionist analysis and simply accepts the experience on its own terms, per- haps as a divine revelation from a source outside the self—a god within a plant, for instance.
Indeed, the psychedelic experience is so profound and overwhelming that even scientifically sophisticated individuals can easily succumb to the misperception that the trip is in the drug. The alterna- tive response, which might be characterized as the way of the alchemist, is to become utterly obsessional in the seeking of reductive explanations, and to construct wildly elaborate models in an attempt to integrate the ir- reducible reality of what is experienced into some scientific or, more often, quasi-scientific paradigm.
This book tries, unsuccessfully perhaps, to steer a middle course between these two approaches. Nevertheless, though there is much within this work that I would no longer attempt to defend as scientifically valid, there is also much food for thought. That original intuition has remained a valid working hypothesis to this day, and in fact has been the stimulus, at least in our lives, for most of our subse- quent intellectual development. In that time we have partially revised our interpretations of the precipitating causes and consequences of our experi- ences, have acquired new information, and have examined alternative hy- potheses ranging from the pharmacological to the mythical; but always driving the searching and questioning has been the desire to understand the nature of the psychedelic experience.
Psychedelic drugs have always been and remain the most useful molec- ular probes available to science for exploring the relationship between the subjective experience of mind and neurobiological processes. Given the validity of this statement—and I suggest that no neuroscientist with per- sonal knowledge of the psychedelic state would contest it—one cannot fail to be puzzled by science's curious neglect of psychedelic research over the last two decades.
Despite its pretensions to objectivity, science, like any other human institution, places a certain vested interest in its own self-preservation; thus it is likely to be less than enthusiastic, if not openly hostile, toward any investigative strategy that could potentially call its most basic assumptions into question.
Is it any wonder that science hesitates to rip that veil aside and illuminate those shadows with the cold light of reason—knowing that reason itself may become the ultimate sacrifice for such audacity?
It may be that the psychedelic experience cannot be understood using only the reductionist models of science, and that only by a conscious unification of the reduc- tionist, analytical methods of science with the holistic, nonanalytical ap- proach of the shaman can we hope to understand, appreciate, and apply the lessons learned from such experiences.
This book is a first, faltering, step in that direction. I am pleased that Terence and I again have the opportunity to make it available for public scrutiny, even though it is a very different work from the one I would write today, given the necessary time and freedom from more immediate and pressing concerns. I urge that it be read with this thought in mind: While there is much within these covers that would have to be rejected in the light of new knowledge, there is also much that is more supported by current scientific knowledge than it was nearly twenty years ago.
Examples that could be cited include the possible holo- graphic nature of neural organization, retrograde axoplasmic transport, the possible role of superconductivity and other quantum mechanical processes in living systems, the intercalation of drug molecules into nu- cleic acids, and the importance of oscillatory processes in regulating the functions of nucleic acids and proteins.
While none of these has actually been incorporated into conventional scientific dogma, they are all active areas of experimental investigation. Scientific progress, and human understanding generally, is a self- refining, exponentially accelerating process.
The past two decades have witnessed advances in scientific understanding that were scarcely imag- ined when this book was written. It seems virtually certain that science and human thinking will experience an even more radical transformation over the next two decades. Ironically, the speculations in this book may re- semble the result of that scientific and noetic r evolution more than the unquestioned paradigms of current scientific knowledge. Dennis J. McKenna December Acknowledgments to the edition The authors wish to express their grateful appreciation to the many friends who aided this project.
In South America we were assisted by Mr. Michael Laski and Ms. Sarah Hartley and by the Naval del Sur de Colombia, whose vessels often were our only means of transportation. The Witoto people of La Chorrera and the Mission of La Chorrera were most hospitable, the for- mer providing invaluable access to local psychoactive plants. Horatio and Isabella Calle of the Universidad Nacional, Bogota, provided valu- able information on the endemic tryptamines of Colombian Amazonas.
Thanks to the Octavio Luna family, who placed their country home at our disposal for a portion of the time during which the manuscript was writ- ten. Thanks especially to Luis Eduardo Luna, whose support and enthusi- asm for these ideas helped greatly in their clarification. Wolfram Eberhard kindly read and criticized chapter 8. We especially acknowledge the contribution made by Erica Nietfeld. She was a willing listener in the thousands of situations in which these ideas unfolded and gave very generously of her energy in helping type and order these pages.
Last, we wish to thank sincerely our editor, Dr. He has been most kind and patient throughout the preparation of the manuscript. Friends too numerous to mention partic- ipated in the years of conversation out of which these pages were forged.
Acknowledgments to the edition I wish to express thanks and appreciation to all the people who helped to make a new edition of The Invisible Landscape possible. Deep and special thanks to Dan Levy, who pursued this project over several years and through a number of jobs. For mathematics and programming contributions, I owe a great debt to Peter Meyer, who translated my math- ematical intuitions into C and thus defined the core algorithm of the Timewave theory; to Billy Smith for HyperCard implementation of the Timewave on the Macintosh; and to Peter Broadwell, who was the first to implement the Timewave in a PC environment.
Peter Meyer especially has been a devoted explorer of the mathematics and metaphysics behind the Timewave. His company, Dolphin Software of Berkeley, California, has been very helpful by developing and marketing the software that supports my mathematical ideas.
Sincere thanks to my close friend Rupert Sheldrake, a theoretical biolo- gist and scientific heretic, whose ideas concerning morphogenetic fields and formative causation were instrumental in shaping my own concep- tions of the Timewave and of the conservation of novelty as a universal principle. Especially important were the five-day sessions at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, in and For the time I spent at Esalen as a scholar in residence, from until , during which discussion of these ideas was prominent, I'd like to give special thanks to Esalen and to its programming director, Nancy Lunney.
To all those who attended my seminars and lectures over the years I also give my thanks and appreciation. Thanks to Jaime Robles for the new illustrations, which have taken difficult concepts and made them very clear.
The general look and feel of the book is due to de- signer Margery Cantor. And once again, it was my great good fortune to have Leslie Rossman as my publicist. Every author should be so blessed. To all of you and to all the people unknown to me who worked to make this book available once again I offer sincere thanks and appreciation.
Finally I want to thank my brother and coauthor, Dennis McKenna, for his continued devotion to these themes and ideas throughout the many years that have passed since the original experiment at La Chorrera. Terence McKenna Introduction to the edition It has been eighteen years since the original publication of The Invisi- ble Landscape.
We now want to show that significant similarities exist between shamanic election and initiation and the effort at psychic reorganization that characterizes some forms of schizophrenia. If, as we proposed earlier, the mind and its buried unconscious contents have their origin at some submolecular interface, then it is reasonable to suggest that a similar biophysical release mechanism is responsible for the irruption of these contents in both shamanism and schizophrenia.
Comparison of the two syndromes could be useful for what it might reveal, not only about the processes that trigger access to such unconscious material but also about the means of controlling these processes.
Whereas schizophrenia may or may not result in eventual control of the nonordinary experience and psychic reintegration, in shamanism this step is, nevertheless, a sine qua non.
The primary difficulty in formulating any definition of mental aberrance in general and schizophrenia in particular is that any such definition will necessarily reflect the cultural bias out of which it is formed. Behavior considered abnormal or pathological in one culture may be quite congruent with the norms of another. Belief in witchcraft might be indicative of paranoid delusion in one culture but might represent a prevailing view in another. For our purposes, abnormal behavior can be defined as behavior differing from the accepted cultural standard as a result of an inner conflict or crisis in the life of the individual, regardless of the standard of normative behavior in the society in which the life-crisis occurs.
One of the basic distinctions between normal and abnormal behavior lies not in the outward manifestations of the conflict, but in differing cultural attitudes toward the life-crisis and its resolution. The term schizophrenia is used to denote a number of heterogeneous, but related, disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from the environment and preoccupation with interior processes, attended by a resultant disintegration of the personality.
An early term for schizophrenia was Dementia Praecox, meaning an intense pathological state beginning early in life. In the psychologist Kraepelin classified schizophrenia into three subtypes and ascribed organic, endogenous causes to each type. Later, a fourth type, known as simple schizophrenia, was added to this classification and its cause adduced to be a crisis in an individual's life situation.
Boisen lists the following subtypes of schizophrenia in Boisen's terms, dementia praecox , first noting that. This type of schizophrenia is classed as denoting a way of life. This type also represents a way of life. Catatonic disturbances often take on the form of stupor or excitement and may be looked on as more severe forms of the anxiety neurosis. They bear a close relationship to certain types of religious conversion experiences. Speech tends to lose logical sequence, and the individual becomes silly, uninhibited, and indecent and tends to have bizarre ideas.
Silverman lists as clinical symptoms of schizophrenia: 1 an unmistakable change in personality, 2 autism—nonreality-oriented ideation, 3 disturbances of perception, 4 disturbances of thinking, 5 profound emotional upheavals, and 6 bizarre forms of behavior. He makes four classifications of significance for our study under the general heading of schizophrenia,, based on Sullivan's classification Silverman The first is process schizophrenia, in which the personality is poorly integrated; there is continuous and prolonged development of schizophrenic symptoms, and prognosis is poor.
It is Reactive schizophrenia, on the other hand, Under the reactive schizophrenic category, Silverman differentiates between essential schizophrenia, in which.
Silverman goes on to say of essential types that they Both the shamanic initiation and the inwardly directed essential form of schizophrenia reflect an attempt at psychic reorganization as a means of resolving an inner conflict or crisis in the life of the individual.
The non- paranoid type of schizophrenia bears the most favorable prognosis for an eventual working through of the inner conflict, resulting in a reintegrated, healed personality: It is as if the paranoid schizophrenic, unable to comprehend or tolerate the stark terrors of his inner world, prematurely redirects his attention to the outside world.
In this type of abortive crisis solution, the inner chaos is not, so to speak, worked through or is not capable of being worked through. Since the working through of the inner-world experience turns out to be a primary concern. Silverman The onset of essential schizophrenia usually begins with the magnification of some unresolved conflict in the individual's life, perhaps a poor sexual adjustment or deficiencies in social relationships, which is apt to give rise to intense feelings of impotence, failure, or personal incompetence to the extent that self-concern may so overwhelm the personality that the schizophrenic becomes aware of little else.
The schizophrenic syndrome may end at this point if the individual is successful in attaining some sort of personality reorganization and resolution of the precipitating conflict.
The patient may then return to normal, sometimes improved but often with a seriously damaged self-esteem. More often, however, the sense of estrangement and isolation is followed by an ever more marked narrowing of attention to the external environment, increased absorption in interior fantasy, and withdrawal from the outside world.
Sustained constriction of the field of attention under these conditions also results in a state of self-initiated sensory deprivation, with consequent inevitable difficulty in the differentiation of fantasy and nonfantasy, between hallucination and perception Silverman , p. In this and later stages, auditory and tactile hallucinations may manifest themselves; the patient often hears voices or engages in conversation with imaginary companions and also may experience distortions of body-image, the sensation of dying or of the body being cut up, disintegrating, or melting.
Often the patient falls under the compulsion to obey the imperative of the voices and may engage in irrational, sometimes symbolic and ritualistic, actions or gestures Boisen This stage is tantamount to the stage that Silverman terms fusing of higher and lower referential process, in which the already unstable and weakened psychological self is disorganized by this drastically altered environment and is inundated by lower order referential processes such as occur in dreams or revery.
Owing to the depths of the emotional stirring that triggered the whole process, the world comes to be experienced as filled with supernatural forces and profound but unimaginable meaning.
Silverman , p. He assumes therefore that they must come from a superhuman source. This stage constitutes the main difference between essential and paranoid schizophrenia, in that it is conspicuously lacking in the latter. It may be said to represent a cure, not in the sense that the schizophrenic henceforth returns to normal and is no longer bothered by autonomous unconscious contents, but rather in that he manages to integrate these contents into the sphere of consciousness and learns to cope with the expanded reality in which he now must live.
This stage may develop to any point, from a very marginal adjustment accompanied by constant relapses to an extremely pronounced state of mental acuity in which awareness, sensitivity, and creative capacity are likely to be many times greater than in normal individuals, as if entire areas of the brain, previously inaccessible, had been opened up by the transforming experience.
The schizophrenic who has managed successfully to complete this final adjustment is in every sense superior, for he is truly a healed madman, one who not only has crossed over to the other side but has returned and hence possesses access to both spheres of reality. Up to this point we have examined the phenomenon of schizophrenia in its successive stages, from its onset to its resolution.
We must now search for correlations between this most severe of mental aberrances and the motifs encountered in shamanism, the revered and respected archaic techniques of ecstasy that occupy a central position in the religious life of tribal peoples. The criteria that define the vocation of shaman are many and varied throughout the world, and it is certainly untrue that every shaman must be a schizoid personality. We have observed that the shaman is usually considered a healed one and that he gains shamanic status because he has healed himself; but the crisis for which he works out a resolution is not always a mental disorder and, in some cases where it is, it is not always a schizophrenic type of aberrance.
The shaman's call or election may arise from a purely physical malady, the spirits making their desire that he become a shaman known to him during a feverish delirium. Still other forms of shamanic election may arise from an accident in the external world, such as being struck by lightning or being bitten by a snake.
In instances where mental aberrance is a factor in shamanic vocation, a predisposition to epileptic or cataleptic seizures, to hysteria or anxiety, may be the underlying cause rather than schizophrenia. But whatever the underlying cause of the shaman's election, it is important to constantly keep in mind that it is the ability to cure that is the real basis of the shamanic status:.
Whether they still are or are not subject to real attacks of epilepsy or hysteria, shamans, sorcerers, and medicine men in general cannot be regarded as merely sick; their psychopathic experience has a theoretical content, for if they have cured themselves and are able to cure others, it is, among other things, because they know the mechanism, or rather, the theory of illness.
Eliade , p. Now let's return once again to the stages of essential schizophrenic onset, this time to uncover similarities between these stages and those associated with the shamanic election and initiation. The onset of schizophrenia usually arises at the time of some basic lifecrisis, when the individual is likely to experience feelings of guilt, impotence, or incompetence in a life situation culturally acknowledged as crucial.
We find that this is also true in many cases of shamanism; in addition to being introverted and of a nervous constitution since childhood, the future shaman often receives his vocational call through accident, sickness, familial misfortune, or similar mishap. Thus, we may infer that in cultures where the shamanic institution exists, an individual may choose to restructure his life and become a shaman as a means of resolving a life- crisis.
The second stage of schizophrenic withdrawal is manifested by a sense of isolation and estrangement from ordinary cultural concerns, which may be followed or accompanied by a pathological fixation on certain ideas, events, or objects purportedly imbued with some sort of supernatural significance. This is also found in shamanism; initiatory seclusion of the shamanic candidate is common among many tribes, and this is symbolic of the shaman's psychic isolation, for In this and later stages, the schizophrenic or shaman may develop a fixed ideation on a narrow circle of significant ideas, omens, or objects, often becoming so intense as to result in sleep loss or autohypnosis.
The boundaries between sleeping and waking break down, and the novice shaman lives in a twilight world of hypnagogic fantasy and half-waking reverie. The principle behind the induction of autohypnosis is one of perceptual fixation, and some of its behavioral manifestations are present in the pathological staring of schizophrenics or novice shamans or in the total attentiveness of certain shamans to their frenzied, prolonged drum-beating or whistling.
All of these manifestations can be found to a marked degree in shamanism. The shaman is said to make a journey, during which he is spoken to by the spirits, who give him curing instructions and make their wishes known for certain kinds of propitiatory sacrifices; they may also appear to him in the form of visions or apparitions. Motifs of death and rebirth, often involving bodily dismemberment and reassimilation, are common in shamanism, as Eliade illustrates:.
In both schizophrenia and shamanism, this is followed by a fusion of lower referential processes with higher, so that the mind is inundated by a flood of archaic imagery that seems to come from outside sources; in shamanism, this stage is typical of the fully manifested trance. The fact that they are entirely different from anything previously experienced lends support to the assumption that they have come from the realm of the supernatural.
One feels oneself to be dwelling among the mysterious and the uncanny. Ideas of world catastrophe, of cosmic importance, and of mission abound. Words, thoughts, and dreams can easily be seen to reside in external objects. Causal relationships are perceived against a background of magic and animism. The altered perception of reality into which this newly opened region of cognition plunges the schizophrenic has, in modern societies, no cultural validity.
The last stage in the progression, that of cognitive reorganization to cope with the altered perception in which the individual now lives, is for the shaman and for the schizophrenic much the same thing—the arduous task of learning to use the altered perception to good advantage, for creative endeavor and increased sensitivity. An important difference, however, is that in our culture the schizophrenic is forced to work out his adjustment without the benefit of culturally sanctioned attitudes of acceptance for the expanded reality that he now inhabits, whereas in primitive society not only is the shaman in possession of an elaborate body of traditional teachings regarding his illness, but his adjustment is made much easier by virtue of his accepted and respected social position.
The shaman must indeed be possessed of a superior flexibility and constitution, for not only must he attend to the needs of his patients in this world but he must also satisfy his spirits in the other. He is the technician of the numinous par excellence, and his vocation is a demanding one, consisting as it does of maintaining a constant equilibrium between ordinary reality and the supernatural realm. The shaman's psychic life is not unlike the unnaturally dexterous dances he performs at the height of his ecstasy; it is a constant balancing act, as though he were a psychic tightrope walker on the razor's edge between the external world and the bizarre, magical, often terrifying world within.
However, one of the major differences between shamans and schizophrenics appears to lie in the cultural attitudes with which they are regarded, and this disparity is perhaps deserving of some comment. Lommel says of shamanism as a possible cure technique: The way out of the situation lies in shamanizing; that is to say, the mental sickness can be healed only if the sufferer accepts the often unwanted and feared office of shaman, which the spirits are forcing upon him.
We gain the impression that early man has found an almost unfailing way of curing mental disease, that a certain psychic constitution makes escape from a pathological state possible. It seems reasonable to suggest that in our culture the schizophrenic provides a necessary pipeline to the collective unconscious, just as the shaman does in tribal societies.
The spiritual atrophying of contemporary culture may be due in large measure to its loss of sensitivity to processes in the collective unconscious. A reinstitution of the shamanic role in modern society might prevent its total estrangement from the collective unconscious, which remains the fountainhead of all human cultures, archaic or modern.
CHAPTER 3 - Organismic Thought The progress of science is, like all other creative activities of human intelligence, a groping toward pattern—toward the accumulation of assigned pattern for the coordination of observed details and toward the uncovering of novel pattern and the consequent introduction of novel details.
This tendency toward synthesis, toward the apprehension of ever more complex and inclusive orders of pattern, appears to be a fundamental quality of human thought. It is characteristic of aesthetics, philosophy, and religion, as well as of science. Understanding consists of the assimilation of patterns encountered in the external world, and insofar as understanding progresses, it is the assimilation of novel forms of pattern and the modification of previously perceived patterns that such novel patterns introduce.
One of the chief resistances to this progressive penetration of understanding is the dogmatic tendency to adhere to orthodox modes of assigned pattern when confronted with novel details that call for a re- ordering of understanding.
In the case of science, one can point to the persistence, in our conceptual models, of the Newtonian doctrine of concrete material entities possessing the properties of simple location; whereas the order of pattern revealed by quantum physics allows for neither concrete endurance nor simple location at its most basic levels. On the opposite end of the scale, one can point to the doctrine of relativity, which has shown that space and time must be regarded as properties of each other, yet one generally continues to characterize space in terms of the relationships of Euclidean geometry on any scale short of the cosmic.
Still another example can be cited in the scientific assumption of the sufficiency of purely physicochemical properties to explain the fact of living organisms and, by extension, the fact of mind.
To carry on its empirical investigations, science must embark on this methodological license of abstracting certain sets of facts from the totality of patterned relationships of which those facts are a part. As long as these assumptions are understood for what they are, as a set of ad hoc hypotheses employed for the purpose of characterizing a given phenomenon, that is, purely for the sake of methodological convenience, then science encounters no difficulty.
It is when science proclaims the adequacy of a given order of pattern to characterize all levels of organization that it runs into philosophical difficulties, for then it extends the methodological abstractions used to characterize a phenomenon to sets of phenomena that may in actuality exhibit patterns of a quite different order.
It is to the philosophical consequences of this methodological inconsistency of science that this chapter is addressed.
We intend to examine in some detail the philosophical problems raised by scientific methodology; we will attempt finally to tentatively suggest the fundamentals of a metaphysics that is consistent not only with the pursuit of scientific abstraction but also with the apprehension of the world as it impinges on us as living, sensing, minded organisms. For science this intuitive speculation consists in its assumption of the knowability of the world, in its belief that every event can be correlated with its antecedents in a definite manner exemplifying general principles.
This assumption, that in nature there is a secret, and that that secret can be unveiled, forms the unconscious metaphysical assumption behind all research. This scientific faith was not the creation of science itself but was inherited from the insistence of Greek and Scholastic philosophy on the rational order of nature, on the belief that nature conducts itself according to inexorable, orderly laws.
This view in Greek cosmology is found in the conception that all things in nature tend toward a definite and proper end; while in Scholastic philosophy, it is reflected in the instinctive tone of faith centered upon the rationality and scrutability of God. Every detail of nature was conceived as supervised and ordered; the search into nature could only vindicate the faith of centuries.
Though the tacit philosophical creed of science is embodied in these antecedent rational traditions, the way was paved for the rise of science itself by a turn away from theoretical contemplation toward an interest in nature for its own sake, the observation of concrete, irreducible facts. In this aspect, modern science arose out of a reaction against the abstract rationalism of Scholasticism.
What could not be demonstrated, what was not apparent to observation, was inadmissible as evidence in the scientific worldview. And yet the belief that the diversity of irreducible and stubborn facts was harmonizable into an intelligible, rational order arose not as a result of empirical observation, but out of faith in the order of nature. In the light of these mixed origins of modern science—its instinctive belief in the rationality of nature, coupled with its insistence on the observation of irreducible facts—it is interesting to consider the role of induction in science.
When one observes, one also selects; a pure observation deals only with a particular set of conditions giving rise to a particular phenomenon. When one extrapolates the particular observation to the whole set of phenomena exemplifying similar conditions, this is induction. An entire class of phenomena has been characterized on the basis of a limited sampling of such phenomena.
By this process of induction, science thus arrives at a formulation of general conditions that characterize not only the particular entity or occasion under investigation but also any other real or theorized occasion or entity that satisfies the postulated general conditions.
This process of framing abstract postulates that bear a reference to no particular occasion or entity and, in consequence, enters into the description of all such occasions reaches its height in mathematics.
The characterization of number, for example, five, does not depend on whether you are referring to five apples or five minutes; it can be impartially applied to either, regardless of the intrinsic differences of apples and minutes. Click Download or Read Online button to get exploring the landscape of the mind book now. This site is like a library, Use search box in the widget to get ebook that you want. Click Download or Read Online button to get landscape-with-invisible … This invisible landscape is make visible though stories, and these stories are the focus of this engrossing book.
Traveling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden-himself a most careful listener and reader-asks the following questions. An odyssey of mind, body and spirit, Food of the Gods is one of the most fascinating and surprising histories of consciousness ever written. The local researcher then may have a full view of an
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