The Politics of Consciousness
We are all prisoners of our minds.
This realization is the first step on the journey to freedom.
—Ram Dass 293
CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Anthropologists divide cultures into monophasic and polyphasic.208 Most of the world’s cultures, including shamanic ones, are polyphasic, meaning that they recognize and utilize multiple states of consciousness, such as dreams and meditative and contemplative states. Polyphasic societies value and cultivate these states, honor those who master them, and derive much of their understanding from them of the mind, humankind, and the cosmos.
By contrast, monophasic cultures—of which the modern Western world is the prime example—recognize very few healthy ASCs and derive their view of reality almost exclusively from the usual waking condition. These societies give little credence to alternate states and may denigrate those who explore them, especially if they involve drug use. People reared within monophasic blinders can have great difficulty recognizing unfamiliar states, let alone their healing or spiritual potentials.
For example, hypnosis was long dismissed as a sham. During the nineteenth century, the British physician James Esdaile went to India, learned hypnosis, and used it for surgery. At a time when there was no anesthesia and even the most devastating operations were performed without pain relief, this was obviously a momentous discovery. Yet Esdaile’s reports were dismissed as impossible, and medical journals refused to publish them. After returning to England, he arranged a demonstration for the British College of Physicians and Surgeons. As Charles Tart describes:
After hypnotizing a man with a gangrenous leg, he amputated it in front of them while the man lay there calmly smiling. The conclusion of his skeptical colleagues? Esdaile was fooling them. He had hired a hardened rogue for a gold piece to lie there and pretend that he was feeling no pain. They must have had very hard rogues in those days.355
The Western world’s belief that altered states such as hypnosis, lucid dreaming, and satori are impossible or pathological has cost us dearly. But times are changing. Much of the social turmoil beginning in the 1960s reflects the West’s initial, tumultuous transition from a monophasic to a polyphasic culture.y The popularization of the powerful psychedelic LSD, together with its chemical cousins, such as mescaline and psilocybin, unleashed experiences of such intensity that in the 1960s they shook the very foundations of our culture. A Pandora’s box of altered states, heavens and hells, highs and lows, trivia and transcendence cascaded into a society utterly unprepared for any of them. 396
The West also began to discover contemplative and spiritual practices and their states of consciousness. Meditation and yoga flooded in from the East; Jewish Kabbalah, Christian contemplation, and Islamic Zikr reemerged in the West; and shamanic practices immigrated from tribal cultures.
Their impact reverberates to this day, and the Western world will likely never be the same. For better and for worse, these experiences and states have molded culture and counterculture, art and music, science and psychiatry, and catalyzed social movements such as those for peace and civil rights. They continue to inspire spiritual practices, to fertilize brain research, and to suggest new understandings of consciousness, creativity, and cults. Millions of Westerners now practice meditation, yoga, and contemplation, and research on altered states flourishes. The transition is still far from complete, as culture wars and drug wars attest, but the balance has shifted, and the Western world seems on its way to becoming a polyphasic culture.
THE POLITICS OF SHAMANIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Shamanic studies reflect this shift and, for several decades, have emphasized the importance of ASCs and ASC-inducing techniques. Yet recently there has been a backlash. A minority movement has emerged to dismiss the importance or even existence of ASCs in shamanism and to expunge words such as “trance” or “ecstasy” from the discussion. Leading this charge has been the French anthropologist, Roberte Hamayon, whose goal is succinctly summarized in her paper titled “To Put an End to the Use of ‘Trance’ and ‘Ecstasy’ in the Study of Shamanism.”140
Hamayon makes three valuable criticisms, but goes too far in her conclusions. Her first critique is that the terms “trance” and “ecstasy” are painfully vague, ill defined, and sloppily used. She is perfectly correct, and neither term recognizes the rich variety of shamanic states nor do they identify precisely the nature of these states. Consequently, in later chapters we will map these states with a new technique that allows far greater precision than previous methods. We will also avoid the term “trance,” while retaining for occasional use “ecstasy” where it implies an ASC associated with a subjective out-of-body experience.
Hamayon’s second concern is that altered states are not universal in shamanism. Certainly she is correct that some practitioners who have been called shamans do not induce altered states.
Hamayon’s third concern is how we determine whether practitioners are actually in altered states, let alone which state they are in. Clearly there are many cases in which we don’t have enough information to decide.
But Hamayon goes too far when she concludes that there is no valid reason to refer to a shaman’s state of mind at all. Her preference as a social anthropologist is to use nonparticipant observation to focus on objective behavior and roles. Like any method, this one has a selective focus, yields selective findings, and overlooks others.
Every method sets unavoidable limits on knowledge because every perspective both reveals and conceals. In contemporary philosophical terms, each epistemological method reveals or unveils congruent observations, while leaving others latent and invisible.
What is invisible to the objective methods of social anthropology are subjective experiences and states of consciousness. That these are invisible is not a problem per se. However, it becomes a problem when these undetected states and experiences are then denied and reduced to merely objective behavior and physiology. Hamayon’s purely objective approach allows her to conclude that states of mind are not “a necessarily relevant question to the study of shamanism in ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ societies.”141
Hamayon’s denial of the possible role of altered states in shamanism seems to reflect several factors:
• First, some of the groups she worked with may not use them.
• Second, her commitment to objective methods makes it difficult for her to recognize subjective ASCs.
• Third, she makes no reference to the use of psychedelics, whose mind-boggling states can hardly be denied by even the fiercest critic of ASCs.
Finally Hamayon makes no mention of having undertaken shamanic practices herself. Consequently, she may be limited by what Michael Harner calls cognicentrism, which “is the counterpart of ethnocentrism between cultures, but in this case it is not the narrowness of someone’s cultural experience that is the fundamental issue but the narrowness of someone’s conscious experience.”146
States of consciousness are clearly central to some shamanic practices. Hamayon correctly warns that we need to be careful and precise in naming and discussing these states.
MODIFYING CONSCIOUSNESS
Of course, shamans are not the only ones who have developed techniques for modifying consciousness. Fully 90 percent of the world’s cultures have institutionalized ASCs, and in traditional societies these states are usually sacred. This is “a striking finding and suggests that we are, indeed, dealing with a matter of major importance.”30 Clearly humankind has devoted enormous energy and ingenuity to altering consciousness. The physician Andrew Weil, best known for his books on complementary medicine, concluded that the “desire to alter consciousness periodically is an innate normal drive analogous to hunger or the sexual drive.”401
So shamans are hardly alone in seeking alternate states of mind. Meditators, yogis, contemplatives, and mystics also seek them and claim that it is these states that birth the deepest realizations. Mystical traditions have therefore developed techniques for altering consciousness in systematic ways, and these techniques constitute a technology of transcendence and a technology of the sacred.
Spiritual traditions serve as road maps for applying this technology. Religious and spiritual traditions are created, and their higher reaches preserved, by people who first open to transcendent states and then provide practices whereby others can also access them. In this way, subsequent generations of practitioners can re-create the founder’s insights and states of mind. And the first such tradition was shamanism. However, with its many healing and other techniques, it is also more than only a technology of transcendence.
At its best, the shamanic tradition transmits information and techniques that allow novices to re-create the altered states and abilities of their predecessors. Each generation can then refresh a living, continuously re-created tradition and even add to its accumulated treasure of wisdom and techniques.
Truth Decay: The Ritualization of Religion
But transmission can fail. When this occurs, the technology of transcendence is lost and, with it, transcendent states and direct experience of the sacred. Transformative techniques now give way to mere symbolic rituals, direct experience yields to secondhand belief, and doctrine decays into dogma. This is a process of “truth decay” or “the ritualization of religion” of which the Tao Te Ching laments: “Ritual is the husk of true faith.”243
Examples are widespread throughout the world’s religions. In fact, authentic spiritual traditions with effective sacred technologies capable of offering true transcendence are far rarer than conventional institutions offering comforting rituals. In technical terms, transcendence (growth beyond one’s current stage) is far rarer than translation (support of one’s current stage).411
Examples occur in shamanism, and Hamayon describes one herself: “The modern-day successors of shamans in urbanized Siberia confine themselves to such practices as speaking with their patients, laying on of hands, massaging, etc…”141 Ritualization has also replaced realization in contemporary Japan, where today:
Trance occurs only rarely. The capacity for this kind of dissociation, and for the visionary journey which goes with it, seems to have diminished in recent centuries, and today the magic journey is most commonly accomplished by symbolic action in full waking consciousness.25
Of course, these purely ritualistic practices would not meet the stringent definition of shamanism used in this book. Here the focus is on practitioners who employ an effective technology of transcendence to induce ASCs, journey, and directly experience the sacred.
The survival of authentic spiritual traditions depends on succeeding generations continuing to access the transcendent states from which the tradition was born. Shamanism has been largely successful in this. For thousands of years it has survived as a vibrant tradition that has successfully preserved one of humanity’s earliest technologies: a sacred technology of transcendence for inducing specific sacred states of consciousness.