Archaeologica.org

Ouch... my head hurts...

.....the Shamanic is not conjecture or hypothosis. It is a living breathing experential cross cultural and cross dimensional portal to our past/present/future as seen through the eyes of the "transported" or designated "transporter".

At some point in this thread, the discussion of the Bicameral mind was a "Jaynesian" take on the paleolithic world in the light of Mircea Eliade's work or possibly visa versa.

Beages, Julian Jayne's academic tenure was more likely dashed on the shore of his insistance of there actually being a historical moment of the split from we/me to me/them. How about looking at it as more of a hysterical expression of the shift/loss from the priest in in my head to the priest in the temple.

Ishtar mentioned the Shamans access to the "Membrane" between the seen and the infinately larger unseen ....think % of the iceberg below surface.

To view a Paleolithic artifact in the light of a world in which the maker/user of that artifact may have had a substantially more porous membrane between their waking and dreaming world than ours, may lead to something.

woodrabbit wrote:Ouch... my head hurts...

Or as Jill Bolte Taylor might say, "why do we have to leave la la land?".

I feel your pain, woodrabbit. But I think we are still required to speak about this thing to others who have enquiring minds and advanced and beautiful intellects like John's... otherwise, the artefacts will remain misunderstood.

'Scuse me, while I kiss the sky!

woodrabbit wrote:Ouch... my head hurts...

.....the Shamanic is not conjecture or hypothosis. It is a living breathing experential cross cultural and cross dimensional portal to our past/present/future as seen through the eyes of the "transported" or designated "transporter".

At some point in this thread, the discussion of the Bicameral mind was a "Jaynesian" take on the paleolithic world in the light of Mircea Eliade's work or possibly visa versa.

Beages, Julian Jayne's academic tenure was more likely dashed on the shore of his insistance of there actually being a historical moment of the split from we/me to me/them. How about looking at it as more of a hysterical expression of the shift/loss from the priest in in my head to the priest in the temple.

Ishtar mentioned the Shamans access to the "Membrane" between the seen and the infinately larger unseen ....think % of the iceberg below surface.

To view a Paleolithic artifact in the light of a world in which the maker/user of that artifact may have had a substantially more porous membrane between their waking and dreaming world than ours, may lead to something.

Woodrabbit -

Sanity is the state of being in which - in addition to talking to yourself - you are capable of answering yourself.

Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.

What you might be experiencing is the tale of the seven men and the elephant.

Kipling did a nice version of it - either in Tales from the Hills or The Just So Stories, can't remember at the moment.

Anyway,

You have seven people each of whom possess only one "Sense."

And an Elephant.

Each defines the beast according to his one sense.

You can anticipate the results.

We - none of whom come from an undiluted Shamanic tradition -

Are precisely equivalent to the seven men attempting to

Describe the Elephant.

Bluntly, we will be forever on the outside

Looking in,

Due to our selfconscious and intellectually based patterning.

Whether it is Jaynes, or Olson, or Eliade, same problem.

We are on the other side of the mountain.

Now, when I was about ten years old,

We were looking for traces of early man near Calico, California

On a dry late Pleistocene lakebed -

And this is for you, Minimalist -

It was the red/gold cold wind sage smelling

Early morning with the light very low on the ground

Over a windblown acreage of ancient cobbles as far as the eye could see,

and

I saw and picked up a handaxe, or

Better yet, the handaxe saw and picked me up,

A pointed, heavy oval of brick-red chert

And felt the hand of the maker in my ten year old hand.

Not an intellectual image,

A muscular hand pulsing with blood,

Giving me that handaxe.

At that moment I "saw" all

The thousands of generations of

Both people and animals

And became whole in a way

- Despite the following decades of the vicissitudes of surviving in 20/21 century America -

Which has never abandoned me.

In a non-intellectual, perhaps even schizophrenic sense. that

Handaxe was, is and forever will be my first touchstone.

There have been others since.

The elders, be they man or stone or plant or fish or bird or mammal or mollusc or arthropod - you get the drift -

All are there, all the time, to talk with.

Anyway, Woodrabbit, in my opinion the pain you are experiencing

Will always happen, and increase in intensity, to the degree that

You try to stuff the un-selfconscious non-temporal awareness of just what

In the beautiful hell is going on at the moment

Into the proverbial self-conscious 5 pound bag which meets the

Mensuration standards

Of the International Society for Protection of 5 Pound Bag Standards.



hoka hey


john

We - none of whom come from an undiluted Shamanic tradition -

Are precisely equivalent to the seven men attempting to

Describe the Elephant.

A Hindu Parable

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk
Cried, "Ho! what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up he spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope.
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Moral:

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen.



I've always thought that this poem was about religion rather than shamanism, because a person who has access to the shamanic state does 'see'. That's why he's sometimes called a seer. But religion is about blind faith.

Well, anyway, I expect I'll be seeing some strange things this week. I'm off to the next part of my course where we'll be learning to be psychopomps, which I'll explain as some who read this thread may not know about them.

As you can see from this Wikipedia link, mainstream thinking about psychopomps from Greek mythology is that they are angels or spirits that carry the soul at death to its next destination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopomp

In fact, psychopomps are not angels or spirits, and this is just how religion hijacked the idea, or subsumed it into itself.

Psychopomping was once one of the many roles undertaken by the tribe's shaman on their behalf, by working in partnership with his own guiding spirits. But since the advent of religion and shamanism being banished or going underground, this function has not been performed by the shaman's replacement (the priest) because he doesn't know how to do it. In any case, he doesn't work with spirits (which he thinks are evil).

Thus, there has been no-one to perform this function for thousands of years. Some do make it through by themselves, but some have not been able to 'pass over' and there is now something shamans jokingly refer to as 'the pile up'.

These souls don't know they're dead and so can sometimes be the cause of much confusion, e.g. ghosts or poltergeists or any other such paranormal activity. So many shamans today are totally dedicated to the role of psychopomp, to clear that huge pile up, and so I guess that's where we're all be going this week.

We - none of whom come from an undiluted Shamanic tradition -

That's true. Very little in today's man-made outer world supports our inner, shamanic one, apart from Nature, which is being increasingly destroyed on a daily basis. Yet when we are in the shamanic state, we are experiencing the exact same experience that our most distant ancestors did thousands, perhaps millions, of years ago. So I wonder what it would be like to then emerge back into the outer world and find it to be, as they did, in a state that perfectly matched and was almost a direct outcome of what they'd learned in their journeying into other, inner realms.

"Holistic" is a word that comes to mind, and ''fractured" perhaps best describes our experience today.

Sanity is the state of being in which - in addition to talking to yourself - you are capable of answering yourself.

Sanity is a matter decided by a majority vote! You cannot have a mad majority.

Hello all,

Monday morning I was having some trees planted on my property when a contractor cut my cable line. That was a pisser! No cable TV or computer. So I'm glad to be back up, although now the cable company is going to dig a new trench across the yard one day soon, and I'll be down for part of a day again.

So, I've caught up here by reading the last couple of pages, and that's more than I've ever read in this thread. I can see that I need to re-emphasize something.

I was not talking about shamanism in any way. I did point out that there were factual errors made by an author in one book. In response, some of you are rushing to explain shamanism to me. I don't know how to say it more simply than to say that the subject of the book has nothing to do with whether or not the author got his facts correct or not.

Enjoy your discussion folks.

when a contractor cut my cable line.

Sue the bastard!!!!!

Minimalist wrote:

when a contractor cut my cable line.

Sue the bastard!!!!!

I felt like shooting him.

He took responsibility right away, I think we're cool there. But at some point this week I'm going to disappear again. It's weird not having my toys.

I concur with Ishtar, the Shaman would have "seen" the elephant despite any blindness, and possibly have an extended conversation with, if not briefly becoming an elephant him/herself.

John, I do so enjoy your Taoist take on things. I'm all for aspiring to the "here and now". Being in the moment is perhaps the only reliable working model for a life well lived, albeit challenging in the day to day.

However, I respectfully suggest that it may not always be a reliable doorway to the "there and then".

Ishtar, FYI...have left money in my will for the hiring of a Psychopomp in case I botch the Bardo.

woodrabbit wrote:I concur with Ishtar, the Shaman would have "seen" the elephant despite any blindness, and possibly have an extended conversation with, if not briefly becoming an elephant him/herself.

John, I do so enjoy your Taoist take on things. I'm all for aspiring to the "here and now". Being in the moment is perhaps the only reliable working model for a life well lived, albeit challenging in the day to day.

However, I respectfully suggest that it may not always be a reliable doorway to the "there and then".

Ishtar, FYI...have left money in my will for the hiring of a Psychopomp in case I botch the Bardo.

Woodrabbit -

I absolutely agree with your leadoff statement, that the shaman would have "Seen" the elephant in its entirety.

I was using the story as a metaphor for the massively fractured modern "intellectual" process as used to "define" a state of being, not as a metaphor for the Shamanic.


john

The Western author attributed to that poem, John Godfry Saxe, is a distant relative of mine.
While I have no doubt he stole the idea for it, I have to take pride in his translating not only the words but the thought.
He was a north New England preacher, without allegiance to country or church, in the American Revolution era.

Digit wrote:

Sanity is the state of being in which - in addition to talking to yourself - you are capable of answering yourself.

Sanity is a matter decided by a majority vote! You cannot have a mad majority.

Digit -

Sanity is individual.

"Madness" has, historically and selfconsciously, always been defined and inflicted by a plurality of

Political/religious/economic interests.

Consider the present sad state of affairs in the

Good old Yew Ess Aye as

Trenchant proof of a society ruled by a mad majority.

There are plenty of other examples, both

Historical and present.


hoka hey


john

You can't have a mad majority John, they would set the standard and define the others as being mad.

In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king!
If you haven't read the story I recommend it.

Digit -

"You can't have a mad majority John, they would set the standard and define the others as being mad."


Yes, you can. You have made my point precisely.

For example, the dust up between the Catholic Church/Spanish Inquisition

And one Galileo.


Or, better yet,

Das Klub's version of early man.

Would anyone her argue that Das Klub has been a mad majority for

Decades, and has every

Intention of retaining their lock on

The point that anyone who subscribes

To the pre-Clovis evidence

Is insane?


Yesssss?


hoka hey


john

I rather think you've proved my point actually, the Catholic Church in your argument representing the mad majority, they considered they were the sane ones and that Galileo was not. They imposed there will on the minority and set the standard.
Take global warming, despite all the evidence to the contrary the general population is still villifying anybody who argues that it is a natural phenomenum, Gore even suggesting that anybody who disagrees with him is insane.
If by present standards 90% of the population was insane they would section the remaining 10%.