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The
Psychedelic Shaman Briefings
The Entities of The Imaginal
Realm: Part 1
Sub-Figura vel Liber VIII
Excerptus
Caeruleus:
"The former [native tribal
discarnate] ally now ’speaks English,’ which is to say that it
expresses itself not in terms of plants, animals, etc. (the
everyday artifacts of subsistence agriculture and
hunter-gatherer cultures) but in quasi-scientific terms which
appeal to contemporary Western minds."
"...The point here is not to assume a superior stance by
observing how the [tribal] Mazatec world view is different from
ours, but to show how the mushroom uses the belief systems of
its hosts to push its agendas..."
"...Certainly, the basic exhortation here is to accept a passive
and obedient child’s role in relationship to the inner voice.
This is arrested development; the healthy outcome of any growth
process is maturation, and entities demanding childish,
subservience seem to be hindering our natural processes to
further hidden agendas of their own."
"...The consistently overblown language broadcast through these
channels suggests the existence of incorporeal forces infesting
human awareness which are primarily concerned with impressing us
with their importance. This is hardly "godlike" behavior --
rather the opposite, in fact. What truly supreme being is so
insecure as to need let alone demand human worship and
subservience? Or, more to the point, what mature adult needs
deities like that in his or her life?"
"...The gnostic Archons, then, are intelligences existing in the imaginal realm in
’bodies’ consisting of thought and feeling.
They are able to tune into our awareness through our affinity
with their wavelength, that is, our beliefs. They feed off of
our allocation of energy to their dimension, and compete with
other Archons on other levels in the overall hierarchy for their
nourishment."
"...What may be a belief in the Christian Trinity or
Islamic
Jihad [or flying saucers!] to humans, may be the equivalent of a
T-bone steak to entities of the imaginal realm who depend upon
that belief for their existence. A hungry Archon will apparently
do anything to convince you to feed it. The psychiatric
literature is saturated with examples of ’inner voices’
demanding absurd levels of obedience to highly questionable
belief systems."
"...This book holds to the shamanic model of multiple
dimensions, accessed via human consciousness, in which
dissociated intelligences feed off of human belief systems the
way that we eat hamburger. It is to these entities’ advantage to
keep us ignorant of their agendas; they would forfeit
independent existence if we chose to become gods ourselves by
devouring their energy instead of vice-versa. As it is written
in the Upanishads, and emphasized here for the third time: ’it
is not pleasant to the Devas that men should know this.’"
And so,
my Brethren, let us begin our memetic journey:
Excerpt from:
Psychedelic Shamanism:
The Cultivation, Preparation, and Shamanic Use of Psychotropic
Plants
by Jim DeKorne
ISBN: 1-55950-110-3
If the history of psychic research tells
us anything at all, it is that we are surrounded on all sides by
nonhuman intelligences who habitually lie to us for no discernible
reason other than to amuse themselves. These entities are at least
as old as human consciousness (hence the near-universality of the
Trickster motif in legend and folklore) and seem curiously dependent
on us for their continued existence... John Keel, writing in 1983,
speculated on the possibility that "We are the intelligence which
controls the phenomena." The corollary is obvious: Only when we have
arrived at a fuller and more balanced understanding of ourselves
will we begin to understand the latent forces that seek to
manipulate us. (1)
To understand the entity phenomenon it is Useful to lay aside the
concept of monotheism in general and of universally benevolent,
well-intentioned deities in particular. Popular Christianity has
generally conditioned Westerners to the idea of a single, all-loving
Father-God. Based on empirical facts, it may be more productive to
reexamine the ancient notion of a pantheon of "gods" coming in as
many kinds and dispositions as we do. Indeed, in conformance with
our hypothesis of dimensional progression (i.e., that higher
dimensional entities can perceive lower dimensions more easily than
lower dimensional entities can perceive higher dimensions), it
logically follows that they appear inextricably linked with our own
awareness.
Senses more refined than ours would show us worlds of atoms, of
light, of energy, where now we think we see tables, buildings,
individuals. Subtle beings, whose substance escapes our perception,
can exist around us, penetrate us, play with us, act on our thoughts
and our senses, without our having the least awareness of it. (2)
That human beings hear the paranormal voices of "others" under
certain circumstances has been well established for millennia.
Schizophrenia and mystical rapture are probably the most common
catalysts, but the ingestion of psychedelic substances consistently
produces comparable phenomena. Psychedelic shamanism has
traditionally attributed these inner voices to "teachers" residing
within the substances themselves. The obvious question is: do
hallucinogenic plants actually embody "entities," or do they elicit
aspects of the unconscious psyche which present themselves in this
guise? Most importantly, can we believe what they tell us?
Terence
McKenna has said:
"It is no great accomplishment to
hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure
that it is telling you the truth." (3)
These questions may be unanswerable, but
they are fascinating subjects to explore. One recent development
within the shamanic tradition is that often the plant allies no
longer communicate with their indigenous hosts the way they did
previously; that is, a change seems to have taken place in the
relationship between some tribal cultures and their psychedelic
"allies." Here is the now-famous Mazatecan shaman,
Maria Sabina,
observing a change in her relationship with the teachers residing in
the psilocybin mushroom:
Before Wasson, I felt the saint
children [entities in the mushroom] elevated me. I don’t feel
that anymore. The force has diminished, If [the foreigners
hadn’t come] the saint children would have kept their power....
From the moment the foreigners arrived, the saint children lost
their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled
them. From now on they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for
it. (4)
For the moment, let us take this at face
value and interpret it as a shift in the interface between the plant
allies and their aboriginal users, perhaps a mutation in
consciousness analogous to what may have occurred when the Delphic
Oracle stopped speaking to the Greeks. If we can hypothesize
sentient plants, then it’s not much of a step to theorize that their
recent encounter with modern left-brain human consciousness may have
altered their perceptions as much as our own.
One must acknowledge that there is a great difference in the
psychological reality of a traditional Mazatecan Indian from rural
Mexico, and a modem Westerner. Intercourse between humans and
mushrooms was confined for millennia to hunter-gatherer and
subsistence agricultural tribal cultures -- people whose awareness
was of necessity focused on a quite different reality than our own.
Conceivably, because there was no survival value in the
differentiating left brain function evolving the way that it has in
the modern West, these people have arguably developed a form of
awareness more appropriate to their specific surroundings. Since the
mid-fifties, however, the Mazatecs’ mushroom allies have been
exposed to a different kind of consciousness, and have possibly
evolved accordingly:
The author’s interview in 1969 with
old Apolonio Teran, who was considered in the community to be a
powerful Wise Man, documented a series of ideas that parallel
what Maria Sabina has told us:
"...What is terrible, listen, is that the divine mushroom no
longer belongs to us. Its sacred language has been profaned. The
language has been spoiled and it is indecipherable for us..."
"What is this new language like?"
"Now the mushrooms speak English! Yes, it’s the tongue that the
foreigners speak..."
"What is this change of Language due to?"
"The mushrooms have a divine spirit; they always had it for us,
but the foreigner arrived and frightened it away..."
"Where was this divine spirit frightened to?"
"It wanders without direction in the atmosphere, it goes along
in the clouds. And not only was the divine spirit profaned, but
that of ourselves [the Mazatecs] as well." (5)
It is significant to note that the old
shaman identifies his tribe with the spirit of the ally, both are
"wandering without direction," a highly accurate image of what
happens to indigenous cultures when they are exposed to Western
"civilization." This may be simple projection, however, and say more
about the situation of his tribe than that of the mushroom spirit.
The former ally now "speaks English," which is to say that it
expresses itself not in terms of plants, animals, etc. (the everyday
artifacts of subsistence agriculture and hunter-gatherer cultures)
but in quasi-scientific terms which appeal to contemporary Western
minds.
Here’s a message from the mushroom received by
Terence
McKenna, writing under the pseudonym O.T. Oss:
"I am old, older than thought in
your species, which is itself fifty times older than your
history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the
stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered
through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which
allow my spores an opportunity for life... Since it is not easy
for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you,
your most advanced theories of politics and society have
advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond
the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social
organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary
possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these.
Symbiosis is a relation of mutual
dependence and positive benefits for both of the species
involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized
forms of higher animals have been established many times and in
many places throughout the long ages of my development. These
relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the
knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I
will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around
suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal
existence down the long river of cosmic time I again and again
offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread
throughout the galaxy over the long millennia.
A mycelial network has no organs to
move the world, no hands; but higher animals with manipulative
abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me
and if they act in good faith, return both themselves and their
humble [sic] mushroom teacher to the million worlds to which all
citizens of our starswarm are heir." (6)
This kind of language is a far cry from
one of Maria Sabina’s chants, translated from the Mazatec into
Spanish, and from thence into English. In a session recorded in
1956, the mushroom appeared to her in this guise:
Father Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,
Jesus
You Mother, Mother, my Mother who art in the house of heaven
You Mother who art in the house of heaven
In your beautiful world, says
In your fresh world, says
In your world of clarity, says
I am going there, says
I am arriving there, says...
Because I am speaking poorly and humbly says
I speak to you, you are the only one, you my Mother, to whom
I can speak with humility, you my Mother who art in the
house of heaven, says My Father who art in the house of
heaven, says
I am going there, says...[etc.] (7)
Observe that although the language is
very different, the content of the experience seems to be identical:
a promise that the mushroom spirit will transport its host to a
transcendent world. The significant difference is that despite its
rather inflated rhetoric, the Western message is an offer of a kind
of partnership:
Animals with manipulative abilities
can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if
they act in good faith, return both themselves and their humble
[sic] mushroom teacher to the million worlds to which all
citizens of our starswarm are heir.
For modem Westerners however, even a
junior partnership is a better deal than childlike subservience;
notice how Maria Sabina’s message is couched in parental terms:
Father Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,
Jesus
You Mother, Mother, my Mother who art in the house of heaven
You Mother who art in the house of heaven [etc.]
Apparently in the Mazatec view the only
way one can transcend the material plane (get to "the house of
heaven") is not via one’s own mature accomplishments, but through
the intercession of cosmic parent figures. The point here is not to
assume a superior stance by observing how the Mazatec world view is
different from ours, but to show how the mushroom uses the belief
systems of its hosts to push its agendas, and in this instance has
cruelly abandoned its old Mazatecan "allies."
That’s not very
godlike behavior, nor is it the way any responsible parent would
treat his children. These qualities, alas, are utterly typical of
the voices heard by schizophrenics. It is almost a defining
characteristic of these inner voices that they are arrogant,
patriarchal, pompous, and often cruel. Here is a first-person
description of an inner voice taken from the literature of
schizophrenia:
The voice uttered only a sentence or
two on each occasion that it appeared. The voice claimed to
originate from God.... The verbal production of the
thoughts-out-loud (i.e. inner voice) usually takes the form of
monologues attempting to persuade the ego to adopt a belief in
the authority of the agent behind the thoughts-out-loud, and to
accept a messianic fixation.... It is impossible not to be
influenced by the experiencing of such phenomena. Regardless of
their social evidential value, they represent to the person who
experiences them, proof of contact with some agent possessing
sources of information broader than those of any factor of the
human organism.
[Emphasis mine: the author is
referring to paranormal true predictions of future events by the
voice on four separate occasions.]
There has been an intricate
interrelationship between the hallucinatory pains and the
thoughts-out-loud. The hallucinatory pains first appeared at a
time when the ego was developing a doubt of the claim of divine
authority made by the thoughts-out-loud, and their occurrence
was explained by the thoughts-out-loud as a penalty for the
doubt. On several occasions since, pains have occurred following
threat by the thoughts-out-loud that they would take place if
commands made by it were not obeyed. (8)
These voices heard by schizophrenics are
often indistinguishable in tone and content from those evoked by
psychedelic plants. Note the self-aggrandizement in this message
from a "mushroom entity" speaking to another Westerner in 1982.
My magical and mystic powers have
been known by your kind since before Christ. Societies that have
obeyed my rule have lived with nature and realized themselves. I
give laughter, and I can also bring about the mightiest wars
before your eyes. Showing the future to those who understand and
can record, is nothing. I can place you with the Gods. Once you
have stepped aboard hiper [sic] light drive transition, you are
never again the same person. As you learn to reproduce my
growing environment, you will come to love me. Later, as you
learn thy way, you will look upon me with awe and amazement. I
am respected with the highest regards. For I am the flesh of the
Gods. (9)
Whatever may be the source of this
communication, it differs considerably from the sophisticated
rhetoric received by McKenna. This suggests the possibility that at
least some portion of the inner voices may be more artifacts of each
individual’s unconscious psyche than a bona fide communication
between plants and people. If the entities generally use the
vocabularies and syntax of their hosts, the truly important question
is: how many of the host’s personal belief complexes also bleed
through as the "Word of God?"
Far from being an artifact of mental aberration, the paternalistic
rhetoric of the "gods" is utterly typical of mystical religious
writings worldwide. Here’s one from the gnostic gospels (circa 350
C.E.):
I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me, and you hearers, hear
me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your
guard!
Do not be ignorant of me. For I am the first and the last.
[Etc.] (10)
The effect of these communications is
usually an implicit threat -- "You’d better accept my authority, or
you’ll regret it!" If this strategy doesn’t work, let’s not forget
that the flip side of intimidation is condescension; compare the
above quote with a channeled message of the patronizing type:
Listen!... Put me first in
everything, then shall all be added unto you... Listen!... Be at
peace. Striving gets you nowhere. It simply leaves you exhausted
and frustrated because you never seem to be nearer the goal.
Just learn to be. When you have ceased striving, crawl into my
loving arms like a weary child. Encircled in those arms, feel
the peace, comfort, and complete oneness with me. Feel yourself
melt into me... Listen! Walk my way and do my will. Let me show
you my wonders and glories. If you seek happiness in the wrong
way, it cannot be found. Seek me first and find me. That is the
simple answer. Put first things first, no matter what the cost
or sacrifice. Love me with ail your heart, with all your soul,
and all your mind. (11)
While not overtly threatening, the
essence of this message is insultingly parental. (That prose like
this is typical of much modern channeled writing is an insight that
maybe the real task of the New Age is for human awareness to grow up
and accept adulthood.) Certainly, the basic exhortation here is to
accept a passive and obedient child’s role in relationship to the
inner voice. This is arrested development; the healthy outcome of
any growth process is maturation, and entities demanding childish,
subservience seem to be hindering our natural processes to further
hidden agendas of their own.
Another hint that we may be dealing more with a function of human
awareness than with true "plant teachers" is that one can receive
identical messages from synthetic chemical compounds made in a
laboratory!
Here it’s the DET "spirit":
Quoted in Peter Stafford’s
Psychedelics Encyclopedia (1982), [Temple of the True Inner
Light founder Alan] Bimbaum states, "DET (DiEthyl Tryptamine) is
the first psychedelic which convinced me that the psychedelic is
a Primeval Light Being which is God, the Creator. We smoked it
in a large hookah and it was so clear and bright -- unmistakable
-- it was a Being." ...The Temple of the True Inner Light relies
on "the word" coming from direct -- vocal or heard communication
with spirit forms manifested from [DET] ingestion. (12)
I offer this material to illustrate the
idea that if you accept the hypothesis of plant teachers then you
have to accept the hypothesis of synthetic chemical teachers as
well. This, it seems to me, opens up a can of worms. Wouldn’t it be
more elegant to hypothesize entities emerging from our own
unconscious when stimulated by certain chemical molecules? Why deify
the catalyst?
The consistently overblown language broadcast through these channels
suggests the existence of incorporeal forces infesting human
awareness which are primarily concerned with impressing us with
their importance. This is hardly "godlike" behavior -- rather the
opposite, in fact. What truly supreme being is so insecure as to
need let alone demand human worship and subservience? Or, more to
the point, what mature adult needs deities like that in his or her
life?
Reality presents itself in hierarchies, or at least human
consciousness seems structured to perceive it that way. Hierarchies
can be thought of as a kind of sedimentation of value. Jung’s four
psychological functions -- Intuition, Thought, Feeling and Sensation
(fire, air, water and earth) -- naturally arrange themselves in a
hierarchy of abstraction which reflects their relative "densities."
That is to say, sensation (earth) is "denser" than emotion (water),
just as water is denser than air, and thought (air) "denser" than
intuition (fire). The ancient earth, water, air, fire metaphor
symbolizes a profound psychic hierarchy which Jung clearly
recognized as an archetypal description of human consciousness.
The Kabbalah goes even further and describes each of Jung’s
functions as an actual dimension; specifically, Assiah (earth),
Yetzirah (water), Briah (air) and Atziluth (fire). Indeed, each
realm is conceived to be spatially at least as infinite as the
physical multiverse. It follows that if Jung’s psychological
functions correspond to four "spatial" dimensions within the
collective unconscious, then the human body can be defined as a
vessel containing the hierarchy. All of this, of course, fully
supports the shamanic world view as previously outlined.
Empirical evidence shows that each dimension within the imaginal
realm is inhabited by monads of sentient energy. Like all living
organisms, these entities seek to preserve, nourish and promote
themselves. The closer the perception of the entity matches our own,
the more appealing will be its arguments to our awareness, and the
more likely we will feed it with our belief. The dynamics of this
exchange are explicitly described in the Upanishads:
Now if a man worships another deity,
thinking the deity is one and he another, he does not know. He
is like a beast for the Devas. For verily, as many beasts
nourish a man, thus does every man nourish the Devas. If only
one beast is taken away, it is not pleasant; how much more when
many are taken! Therefore it is not pleasant to the Devas that
men should know this. (13)
In Hinduism and Theosophy, the Devas are
disembodied spirits which are identical to angelic beings, gnostic
Archons and the like. The clue that they are dependent upon our own
thought processes and belief systems is found in the first sentence:
"Now if a man worships another
deity, thinking the deity is one and he another, he does not
know."
This is a Quintessential gnostic
statement; not to "know" is to be a slave to the Deva-Archons, to be
a slave to our own beliefs. To be a "beast for the Devas" is to feed
them, nourish them, keep them alive. Since such beliefs are sentient
creatures, out for their own welfare, "it is not pleasant to the Devas that men should know this."
The gnostic Archons, then, are intelligences existing in the imaginal realm in "bodies" consisting of thought and feeling. They
are able to tune into our awareness through our affinity with their
wavelength, that is, our beliefs. They feed off of our allocation of
energy to their dimension, and compete with other Archons on other
levels in the overall hierarchy for their nourishment. Like any
differentiated organism, they will instinctively seek to maintain
their identities and to resist any attempts at integration into a
larger whole. In the simplest terms, all organisms strive to
preserve themselves and to avoid death -- to eat to live and to
avoid being eaten -- just like we do. Again, we can look to the
insights of the psychedelic experience for support of this notion:
G.I. Gurdjieff (1950) formulated
[the] interesting idea... that everything in the universe
"reciprocally maintains" every other thing in the universe. In
other words, everything eats and is eaten; physically,
psychologically, and spiritually. Just as one must eat to
maintain oneself at a point far from equilibrium, e.g., as a
dynamic, ongoing life process, so are there structures which eat
oneself for the same purpose. The central question...is what is
one feeding with one’s behavior, thoughts, emotions, or: What’s
eating you? ...The notion of everything eating and being eaten
is a useful metaphor in attempting to understand the relation of
ourselves to higher level structures, including values.
We are what we feed, as well as what
we eat. The relationship which one establishes with the
[psilocybin] mushroom epitomizes this particular quality of the
universe: when one eats the physical body of the mushroom a
strange symbiosis is initiated. Soon after one ingests the
carpophores, the mind of the mushroom begins to ingest your
mind. (14)
The out-of-body experiences of Robert
Monroe provide further insights into this concept. Here he describes
some encounters with typically Archonlike entities, which he refers
to as "intelligence forces":
The same impersonal probing, the
same power, from the same angle. However, this time I received
the firm impression that I was inextricably bound by loyalty to
this intelligence force, always had been, and that I had a job
to perform here on earth. The job was not necessarily to my
liking, but I was assigned to it. The impression was that I was
manning a "pumping station," that it was a dirty, ordinary job
but it was mine and I was stuck with it, and nothing, absolutely
nothing could alter the situations.. I got the impression of huge
pipes, so ancient they were covered with undergrowth and rust.
Something like oil was passing through them, but it was much
higher in energy than oil, and vitally needed and valuable
elsewhere (assumption: not on this material planet).
This has been going on for eons of
time, and there were other force groups here, taking out the
same material on some highly competitive basis, and the material
was convertible at some distant point or civilization for
something very valuable to entities far above my ability to
understand.
Again, there was the feeling of
being the pumping station attendant, the approach of the entity
down the beam the search of my mind I mentally (orally also?)
asked who they were, and received an answer that I could not
translate or understand. Then I felt them beginning to leave,
and I asked for some actual indication that they had been there,
but was rewarded only with paternal amusement.
Then they seemed to soar up into the
sky, while I called after them, pleading. Then I was sure that
their mentality and intelligence were far beyond my
understanding. It is an impersonal, cold intelligence, with none
of the emotions of love or compassion which we respect so much,
yet this may be the omnipotence we call God. Visits such as
these in mankind’s past could well have been the basis for all
of our religious beliefs, and our knowledge today could provide
no better answers than we could a thousand years past.
By this time, it was getting light,
and I sat down and cried, great deep sobs as I have never cried
before, because I knew without any qualification or future hope
of change that the God of my childhood, of the churches, of
religion throughout the world was not as we worshipped him to be
-- that for the rest of my life, I would ’suffer’ the loss of
this illusion. (15)
This modern, twentieth century
impression of "something like oil" as a valuable commodity which is
being pumped to ultraterrestrial entities (Archons) was perceived by
the ancient gnostics as "dew":
"What then is the interest of the
Archons in opposing the exodus of the soul from the world? The
gnostic answer is thus recounted by Epiphanius:
They say that the soul is the food of the Archons and Powers
without which they cannot live, because [the soul] is of the dew
from above and gives them strength. (16)
As monads of the imaginal realm, each
Archon seeks to maintain itself, and will conceivably say or do
whatever is necessary to gain our attention and worship. This is the
origin of the "gods," entities demanding worship which they need in
the same way we need food in order to exist. Without worship, a god
starves and is absorbed (eaten) by some other entity. The loveless
paranoia found in many modem fundamentalist sects can be explained
from just this perspective -- any deity that demands worship is
unworthy of it on the face of it.
This cruel and arrogant (from our point of view) attitude of the
Archons is only natural from their point of view if we compare their
behavior with the way that we treat the animals and plants we use
for food in our own dimension. No one I know of considers the
"feeling," or ultimate welfare, of the chickens, steaks or carrots
they eat to stay alive. From a potato’s point of view, even a
peaceful vegetarian is an arbitrary predator on its right to "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
However, from a human point of view, the entelechy of a potato is to
be eaten, digested and ultimately transformed by humans. What was
potato last week is me today. In theory, the potato has attained a
higher level of awareness, though the potato may be forgiven for not
seeing it that way.
The competition for food is arguably the predominant cause of strife
on this planet. Such a system mandates the production of psychic
energy in the form of stress, pain, fear and aggression. If the
physical body can only survive by eating physical food, the subtle
bodies conceivably also require nourishment consisting of the same
stuff they are made of, i.e., thoughts, emotions, drives, etc. This
is presumably the "food" that we produce for the Archons. What may
be a belief in the Christian Trinity or Islamic Jihad to humans, may
be the equivalent of a T-bone steak to entities of the imaginal
realm who depend upon that belief for their existence. A hungry
Archon will apparently do anything to convince you to feed it. The
psychiatric literature is saturated with examples of "inner voices"
demanding absurd levels of obedience to highly questionable belief
systems. These are often qualitatively very little different from
some of the more bizarre forms of dogma in the world’s religions.
Who can say that belief is not a form of energy, is not food or fuel
used in more abstract realms of existence by entities we have always
perceived as gods? Whoever or whatever these entities may be, it is
essential for the shaman to realistically come to terms with them.
If "they" in some strangely dissociated way are "us," then we should
integrate the parent/child polarity within us and embrace our
destiny as adults. If they are truly "others," then we need to learn
how to negotiate with them, if not exactly as equals, then at least
with respect on both sides. Presumably any effective shaman has
learned how to attain this balance.
We know so little about the mysteries of consciousness that it is
premature, if not arrogant, to make definitive pronouncements about
the identities of these inner voices. It is certainly possible that
we are encountering true plant teachers as well as other discarnate
intelligences, in addition to dissociated fragments of our own
personalities! The psyche is nothing if not a multiverse containing
a multiplicity of forces -- all the more reason to skeptically
evaluate each of their messages.
Only a very small child would uncritically accept the rap of someone
he just met on the street. It is a New Age truism that many are
playing precisely that role; the literature is replete with examples
of would be "shamans" surrendering their will and discrimination to
any strange force pontificating parental guidance. An insight from
the Magickal tradition (Western shamanism) offers directions for
proceeding in these realms of the psyche:
The testing of the spirits is the
most important branch of the whole tree of Magick. Without it,
one is lost in the jungle of delusion. Every spirit, up to God
himself, is ready to deceive you if possible, to make himself
out more important than he is; in short, to lay in wait for your
soul in 333 separate ways.... Let [the Magician] be aware of the
thousand subtle attacks and deceptions that he will experience,
carefully testing the truth of all with whom he speaks. Thus a
hostile being may appear clothed with glory; the appropriate
pentagram will in such case cause him to shrivel or decay.
Practice will make the student infinitely wary in such matters.
(17)
This book holds to the shamanic model of
multiple dimensions, accessed via human consciousness, in which
dissociated intelligences feed off of human belief systems the way
that we eat hamburger. It is to these entities’ advantage to keep us
ignorant of their agendas; they would forfeit independent existence
if we chose to become gods ourselves by devouring their energy
instead of vice-versa. As it is written in the Upanishads, and
emphasized here for the third time:
"it is not pleasant to the Devas
that men should know this"
It follows that the wisely intentional use of any psychedelic drug
is as a self-integrating, self-empowering catalyst. In this way the
gods (Devas, Archons, spirits, belief complexes, etc.) cannot coerce
our worship -- we coerce theirs in the form of enhanced personal
power. Obviously it behooves all psychedelic explorers to prudently
evaluate the kinds of "allies" they choose to integrate into their
psyches in this way. The higher the level of unification the better;
otherwise it is seductively easy to become entrapped within
dimensional [blue] resonances of dubious ultimate value.
Notes:
-
Blake, Ian (1993). "A question
of ethics," Crash Collusion #3, Austin, TX, Spring, p.13.
-
Danielou, A. (1966). "The
influence of sound phenomena on human consciousness,"
Psychedelic Review, No. 7, p.20.
-
McKenna, T. (1991). The Archaic
Revival, Harper, S.F., p.35
-
Maria Sabina, quoted in Estrada,
A. (1981). Maria Sabina: Her Life and Chants, Ross-Erikson
Inc., Santa Barbara, pp.90-91.
-
Ibid., p.205, passim.
-
(Channeled communication from
mushroom spirit to): Oss & Oeric (1976). Psilocybin Magic
Mushroom Grower’s Guide, And/Or Press, Berkeley, pp.8-9.
-
Estrada, op. cit. , P. 110.
-
J. Lang, (Pseudonym) (1938).
"The other side of hallucinations," American Journal of
Psychiatry, 94:1087-97
-
Prefatory quotation (presumably
from the mushroom "Deva") in: Peele, S.L. (1982). Lepiota
Peele -- a newly discovered hallucinogenic mushroom, Xerox
sheet, Florida Mycology Research Center, Pensacola
-
"The Thunder, Perfect Mind," in
Robinson, J.M., ed. (1988). The Nag Hammadi Library, Harper
& Row, S.F., p.297.
-
P. Hawken (1976). The Magic of
Findhom, Bantam, NY, p.138.
-
Thomas Lyttle (circa 1987).
"Drug Based Religions and Contemporary Drug Taking," Journal
of Drug Issues
-
"Brihadaranyaka Upanishad," in
Yutang, L., ed. (1942). The Wisdom of China and India,
Modern Library, NY, p.36.
-
Billings, R.L. (1989). The Way
of the Little Clowns, pp.13-15. (Unpublished monograph; no
further data available.)
-
Monroe, R. (1977). Journeys Out
of The Body, Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City, NJ, p.261.
-
Jonas, H. (1963). The Gnostic
Religion, Beacon Press Boston p.169
-
Crowley, A. (1976). Magick in
Theory and Practice, Dover, NY, pp.147,388.
[The B:.B:. wish to extend a special
thanks at this time to the V.H. Professor Pan for enlightening
us with this damn fine intell.]
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