McKenna
This summoning of art and order out of the products of the unconscious is a kind of open-ended task. The shaman is the archetype of the artist, the archetype of the creator, the maker, Homo faber, the maker of tools. And I would argue that—in the same way that Eliade, in The Forge and the Crucible, traces the evolution of proto-metallurgic shamanism into early smithing, and hence into the more florid expressions that you get in alchemical literature—in the same way that that was done by Eliade, it’s possible to argue that you can carry that process forward and see, in fact, that the aspirations of the twentieth century in its most Faustian expression—the manipulation of matter, the taking control of the weather, the splitting and releasing of the energy in the atom—that these are all in fact completions of explicitly defined shamanic tasks. It’s just that somehow the price of being able to work the miracle was literally loss of soul by virtue of having to opt into the metaphor that nature herself had no soul.
In other words, it’s like modern man has made the journey into the realm of the golem. And in order to be in the realm of the golem, you must shed your own soul and leave it behind you. Well, this is the cultural situation that we inherit. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his major opus—I think it was Being and Nothingness, which is sort of summed up twentieth century philosophy—said: nature is mute. That is the existential situation.
Well, to me, this is like an apotheosis of wrongheadedness. Nature is not mute, it must be that man is deaf to hold that position, you see? Because nature reinforces the natural set of conclusions which we tend to call feminine: that all things flow, that nothing is permanent, that form comes into being, is sustained, and dissolves, that there is a kind of round of eternal return, that worth is in the moment, that it is depth of felt experience that empowers a life well lived. Well, these are things which are all argued for by this repressed point of view that has survived in modernism as only a thin thread of tradition reaching back beyond the collapse of the Greco-Roman world to a time when these ideas actually dominated and flourished.
But I want to also talk about what I think of as the shaman as model, as personal model. The reason I think that shamanism is so important is because I think what it really boils down to is a revaluing of personal identity, and that when you strip away the feathers and the chance and all the anthropological gimcrackery that goes along with it, what makes it so compelling and so attractive is that it is a more authentic state of being, somehow.
Now, why? It seems to me that the reason why is because theories about the world are based on direct experience. The shaman is a kind of provisional scientist making it up as he or she goes along, constantly willing to revise and keep it open-ended. And information imported from without is extremely suspicious—which is the exact opposite of the way science, for example, does its work. In science, if you have a bizarre result or a peculiar finding, you immediately say: well, go check the literature, see if anyone else ever got this before, then get them on the phone and we’ll see if we can’t duplicate what they were doing.
What this creates is what we have, which is a vast, low-grade, inductively derived image of reality, where only those things which happen with the greatest regularity and the greatest predictability are authenticated by our languages. So we can talk about rain and sunrise and mealtime and obligation because these things are repetitiously before us to the point where they have become known as smooth stones are known. But what is not repetitiously before us is the edge of cognition, the unique part of our own felt experience of reality.
And the reason for this is very deeply rooted in the culture. It’s that we believe in these bizarre notions like consensus, like uniformity of phenomena, predictability, probability. I mean, everyone here believes in probability. Who here could explain it to the satisfaction of anyone? I mean, we are adrift and embedded in a matrix of unexamined linguistic excuses for avoiding looking at how weird it is. And that is what the shaman is not.
The shaman, first of all, basically has no real history, cannot consult vast libraries, is not in touch with the reputations, the overwhelming, stuffy reputations of his antecedents hundreds of years in the past. The shaman can usually ask one guy or one woman older than himself, and that elder represents what for us would be an entire epigenetic cosmos of databanks, libraries, hieroglyphic records, museum drawers crammed with artifactria, so forth and so on. So the shaman’s intellectual horizon in terms of what we call historicity is very foreshortened. Consequently, everything has to be explained out of energy that is unleashed in the psyche, energy of speculation, of mythmaking, of imagination. And this is, in fact, then, what the function becomes, and what the shamans are doing. They are not consuming culture, they are generating it.
And herein lies the point for us. We must generate culture rather than consume it—to the degree that we take this ideal upon ourselves. What people say, you know: is it enough to just clean up your diet? I mean, how can we react in an ever-more stultifying political environment? And I’m very loath to try and deeply answer that, because I don’t trust myself. I don’t know what I’m talking about. But it does seem to me that the great weapon is art. Because art is confusing. Art hides a multitude of sins and can serve many masters at once. It is subversive. It is cheap to produce. And if we take seriously the notion that society is an environment, an ideological jungle of competing memes, then it’s reasonable to suppose that the most articulately and clearly constructed myths will in fact come to be. That he who can tell the best story, or she who can tell the best story, will see that story come to be. This is what the shamans are doing for their societies. They are exemplars.
And this is a point that I want to make very clearly, because I was published in the LA Press as knocking the venerable habit of using quartz crystals. So I want to talk for a moment about the shaman as prestidigitator, the shaman as showbiz, and point out that, really, what shamans understand is that the world is not as it appears. And this is big news everywhere. No culture is entirely comfortable with the news that it’s living in a fool’s paradise. But in the tribal situation where sometimes living groups number under a hundred, and people are living in, let’s say, an extreme environment like the highland savannas of central Asia or the Amazon jungle, there is a social cohesiveness that brooks no illusions about what people are. I mean, it’s pretty funky.
But out of it comes the exemplar, the exceptional individual—what we call, I believe, intellectuals. And the intellectual is alienated and sees more deeply into things than everybody else, because everybody else is just running around inside the cultural form. And it’s very easy to run around inside the cultural form and never to question it, regardless of what it is. But what in Western society is institutionalized as a vast edifice of edge work—personified originally in the idea of the universities, and then later in the idea of the scientific and avant garde artistic community—this institution that empowers the exploration of the unknown in these tribal societies is boiled down to just one dude or one woman. And that person’s job is to push the envelope, to push the cultural envelope, and to come back and report on strange things, and to confound the political leaders, and to control the weather, and ensure good hunting, and work miraculous cures, and make everyone feel good about themselves, and (through the production of poetry, dance, mask-making, chanting) to give permission for cultural evolution, to empower experiment, to invite people, to journey into the cultural self-image.
So the shamans are really, in a way, micro-vectors from movement into the future. They are the anticipators. At times I’ve talked about shamanism as a going between; that the shaman is a go-between: he or she negotiates between dimensions, negotiates the energy of one dimension and the needs of one dimension with the energies and needs of another dimension. Well, but what exactly is this dimension? What is the source of this supernatural empowerment? How seriously can we take it? As we approach shamanism, if we approach it as anthropologists, as rationalists, then how deeply into it can we penetrate and maintain those conceits? And what is it that forces us to have to abandon them?
Well, I maintain that there is something in our world view that mitigates against us taking seriously the notion that the world is really made of ideas. We have a great clinging need to believe that the world is really made of very solid stuff. This is our anxiety. This is a part of why the message of the feminine is so unwelcome, because it says—as Heraclitus said—Panta rhei: “all flows.” Everything is in motion. The hardest truth there is to learn is that everything is lost, you know? Things come into being and then they leave being. People, children, marriages, empires, continents, species, star systems—they just come into being, and they’re fully there in the poignancy of the moment, that absolute pristine moment, of fully realized being, and then they are replaced. And there is a constipated resistance to this in Western society. And yet, plunging into the depths of the felt experience of the now inevitably brings up this flowing river, the passing of the causal mechanisms, the rising and falling of saṃsāric intent.
And shamanism achieves this through symbiosis with plants. I think that we have not at all taken seriously enough the notion that we are existentially ill at ease if we do not have symbiotic relationships with plants. That, in fact, the thing which distinguishes us from other primates and most other mammals is that we have this apparently innate predilection to addict—to everything: to our mates, to territory, to certain kinds of food, to behavioral patterns of all sorts, to sex, to structures of animosity. And when you get into talking about fixations on food you are moving very close to the shamanic portal of discovery of hyperspace, which is of course the psychoactive properties of plants.
Now, there are two ways to talk about the phenomenon of psychoactivity in plants. Either as a kind of fortuitous piece of good luck—that somehow the brain’s ordinary dynamics are chaotically disrupted by these almost but not quite neurotransmitters, and out of the resulting chaos a still higher level of brain organization creates a wonderful myth of meaning. And this myth of meaning can’t be taken seriously because it’s an interior description of a pharmacologically induced state of chaos.
You see this idea keeps saying: no meaning. Important to preserve the concept that there is no meaning in ecstasy. But the fact of the matter is that the experience is almost entirely epistemic and noetic. It is not chaotic. Chaotic is something that it appears to be to the neophyte. And very few of its critics have ever persisted into expertise, because it’s much easier to slip away and write your informed denunciation. So it’s very…
So the other view is that, actually, this constitutes a true mystery. The most unlikely of all things that you might hope or expect to encounter. That, in fact, what is called the ordinary mundane world is not ordinary or mundane at all. This long-sought meaning—the super-expression of the transcendental which we all feel drawn toward—is in fact a realizable goal. That, for whatever reason, we have taken upon ourselves the pose or the stance of seeker, of one who looks for the deeper level of things, of one who really wants to get to the bottom of things.
In the phenomenon of shamanism, and the idea of taking it as a model, you have to confront the possibility that these things can actually be accomplished—that it is not as orthodox traditions of all sorts seem to insist, which is that you can only do it on tippy toes, and with bowed head, and over forty years, and with a lot of discipline and subservience. That, actually, the older model of the chance-taking shaman, God’s fool, the dancer in the waterfall, is more authentic, closer to the truth. That there really is transcendental knowledge to be won, but there is no easy way to it.
Now, I got off on this tack because I was discussing the show business aspect of shamanism. I think it is largely pointing toward something. And the shaman is the trickster, he is the heyókȟa, and so the appurtenances of shamanism are the appurtenances of a stage magician. They do not convey or confer anything, except in the power in the minds of those who observe them.
In the Amazon, what I found that really amazed me was: the more off-river and up-country these guys were—in this case they were ayahuasqueros—the more like pragmatic rationalists they were. They said, like you would say, “So what does this mean when X, Y and Z happens?” And they say: “The people believe that it is zaba-zaba.” They said, “Well, what do you mean the people believe?” They said, “Well, that’s what they believe.” They say, “Well, what is it?” They say, “Well, who knows what it is? Some of our best people are working on it!” So there was this understanding that it is real exploration, that it is on the surface, and that hierarchy and dogma don’t serve.
Well, the reason this is so important in trying to define a new context for being human is because we are mercilessly worked over by informational hierarchies that disempower us, that take away from the power of our immediate experience. A specific and lead pipe example of this is the suppression of psychedelics. Psychedelics are suppressed because they dissolve cultural preconceptions. It’s just that simple. Dissolving cultural preconceptions is not something the establishment is into fostering. Of course not.
But what is so maddening is: if you look at the world as we have inherited it, you see that we have the food to feed everyone, we have the resources to deliver a comfortable life to everyone. What is required is a change of mind. Change of mind. We need to change our mind. And this is something which people hate to do, but I think very few people go through life without having to do it at some point or another. And, you know, it’s actually quite painless and you can really get into it. You just say, you know, “I said I would never do that… so now I’m doing it!”
It’s very clear that we must change our minds. And the beginning of it must come from the high-tech industrial democracies. The average person on this planet is black, young, female, third world, and poor. That’s who’s waiting for the honky world to get its ass together. And we are at the top of a very narrow cultural pyramid that has been tolerated only restlessly to this point. And, as a global informational culture begins to take place, people are finding out what the score is. And so it becomes incumbent upon everyone to change their mind. And this is understood everywhere: in the corporate board rooms, in the military planning centers—everywhere.
The question is: how shall we change our minds? Shall we turn ourselves into a Ken-and-Barbie society of consumeristic robots, unquestioningly following some boiled-down ideology that is essentially one of unquestioned loyalty, unending consumption, unending toleration of stupidity? This is one point of view. It’s a point of view which fears people. It’s an aristocratic, oligarchic point of view; the notion that the mob must be controlled. If not opium, television. If not that, pornography. Always holding human nature at bay, seeing it as something which, if ever unleashed, would roll over the more delicate sensitivities of a master class. Or—can there be a return to partnership? A return to work on what has been spoiled by the father? Which means internal work on the misogyny which is inherent in the most self-congratulatory and enlightened bastions of the new age, you bet your booties! A world where there is a sense of global responsibility.