2014 Personality Lecture 04: Heroic & Shamanic Initiations (Part 02)

I'm actually supposed to be talking to you about constructivism today, but I'm not going to. I'm going to continue talking to you about what I was talking to you last time, and I'll collapse the constructivism lectures into one lecture, so it'll keep us on track.

Um, I want to tell you a little bit about a little bit more about this image and what it probably means, and then we're going to continue with our discussion of shamanic transformation and its relationship transformation.

So the first thing, if you look at the picture on the right, the first thing you'll see, of course, is that it's a tree, and the tree is associated with the snake. Now, I believe I told you guys about Lin Bell's research and the relationship between predatory snake prevalence and the acuity of human vision. Is that you remember that? Okay, that's good.

So to me, what the image on the right looks like is, first of all, it's like the ancestral home of human beings for tens of millions of years, or our ancestors. So that the tree with the snake, it's like the primary human environment, maybe 60 million years ago. It's not human at that level, but it's part of our evolutionary heritage.

And then it's also part of why we have a sense, especially that large trees are sort of sacred. That's one of the senses that drives environmentalism, for example, because environmentalists are often very interested in protecting old growth forests, which is actually kind of weird because old growth forests are ready to burn down, and they're also kind of biologically dead because no light can get to the bottom, and nothing grows down there. So they're just trees, and they're almost dead trees.

So, you know, from the perspective of biological diversity, they're not really that fruitful an environment, but human beings still have some real kinship with those gigantic trees, and we feel that there's something, you know, natural and sacred about.

So superimposed on that is, I think, something like the next stage of human evolution. And so, you know, these representations were made by people who were trying to represent sorta the ultimate reality of mankind. And so superimposed on the tree is a mountain, and a mountain is a nice representation of a pyramid, and a pyramid is a nice representation of a dominance hierarchy.

Of course, I already mentioned to you that human beings live in dominance hierarchies and that they're a very permanent part of our environment, being at least 300 million years old and possibly older than that. So when the human imagination is trying to conceptualize what constitutes ultimate reality, that's a reality that's often beyond what you can merely see.

Because the things you see that are directly in front of you are not necessarily the most real things. In that, many of the things that you see are transforming fairly rapidly; they're not permanent in any real sense. I mean, automobiles you see all the time, but they've only been around for 80 years. You know, it's not like we've adapted biologically to their presence.

So you have the mountain in the middle, and the mountain is sort of sitting in a circumscribed territory, and the idea there is that there's a dominance hierarchy that human beings inhabit, and it always occupies a particular territory. And the dominance hierarchy is like the culture, the place of culture that mankind exists within. That's surrounded by the chaos outside.

And the chaos outside is represented by, well, there's two snakes in the picture on your right. The snake in the middle is an Ouroboros, which is a snake that eats its own tail, and it's representative of the chaos that's outside of the familiarity of your culture.

And so that's, it's a very, as we've mentioned already, it's a very intelligent perspective because it says, well, mankind always lives in culture, and surrounding culture is the unknown, and that's the eternal habitat of man, of human beings.

So and then I showed you this picture briefly, and that's the picture that was derived by a German researcher who was examining the visions of the Peruvian Amazonian Indians, the shaman. And you can see that it's almost staggeringly the same as the Scandinavian perspective, factored right down to the snake eating its own tail, which, by the way, is an extremely common ancient symbol.

So it's quite remarkable.

Now what might unite, and then I talk to you about my son's drawing. I haven't didn't get to this one, though. Now, what might unite these different visions, say that the Scandinavian vision and the Amazonian shamanic vision, are the methods that the people who had the visions used to induce them.

And I'll talk to you a little bit about that, but first of all, I'm going to tell you about this picture because I think this is one. There's a couple of variations of this picture that I found. I actually don't know its name, but I think it's one of the most amazing images I've ever come across because in some ways it sums up Christianity in one picture. And that's no easy thing to do.

And the reason I think it's important to talk about this Christian representation, for example, though we've already talked about some DST representations, is because in so far as we're embedded in Westernized civilization, the roots of Westernized civilization push themselves down into Christianity.

And then deeper, there's deeper substrata under that—the religious structures that preceded Christianity. But if you want to understand the Western notions of the person and the ideal person as well, you have to look at the structure of the systems that Western civilization grew out of.

Because the religious systems, for example, are the systems in which the idea of the ideal emerged. And so you can't come to grips with the idea of the ideal or the idea of mental health, which is an ideal, without understanding the ground out of which these ideas emerged. You can't come to terms with it in any fundamental sense.

And the thing is, if you're doing clinical psychology, for example, you have to come to terms with it in a fundamental sense. Because a lot of the time when people come and see you, the reason they come and see you is because their sense of life's meaning has been shattered, and they're unable to proceed without the restoration of that meaning.

So maybe their belief systems fell apart, and they faced some sort of tragedy that's just blowing them into pieces, and they have no idea how to orient themselves. Because life always presents an existential question, and one that we'll deal with later, which is life is difficult, and it's characterized by suffering.

And because of that, there has to be a reason to stand up against that, and so the reason has to be made coherent. So you have to know in some sense that you're the sort of creature that can voluntarily face the tragic conditions of existence and prevail. And that's a religious presupposition fundamentally because it's based on, it's a hypothesis in some sense, that human beings are like that.

So let me tell you about this image because it's a staggering image; it's so brilliant. So the first thing you'll notice is that, of course, there's a tree in the middle of it, and it sort of looks like the tree that, you know, a little kid would draw. They sort of look like lollipops or something like that. So it's a schematized tree, and you'll see, of course, that the snake is wrapped around the tree.

The snake and the tree seem to come along together unbelievably often. So Asclepius' rod, for example, Asclepius is the Greek god of healing, and you see the symbol of the Greek god of healing, which is Asclepius' rod, is still used to represent physicians. And it's a rod with a snake wrapped around it too.

And the snake represents transformation because it can die, it can shed its skin and sort of be reborn, and for many other reasons besides. But in this representation, which is partly derived from Genesis and then partly derived from the development of Christian ideas for thousands of years after that, there's a particular idea that's being portrayed.

Now, you notice that up in the tree there are little things that look like fruit, and one of those things is a skull. Right now, so the idea there is that the fruit that the tree produced is in some manner equivalent to death. Now, in this Genesis story, what happens is that Eve tempts Adam with the fruit from the tree, so she offers him this fruit.

Now, that's a very interesting thing because women, historically speaking, have been gatherers. Like, men do the hunting, generally speaking, in archaic societies, and women do the gathering. And human beings have also subsisted for large parts of the evolutionary history before we were human beings as foragers; we ate fruit.

And the reason we have color vision, by the way, is so that we can detect ripe fruit, and ripe fruit is also tightly associated with sexuality. So, like, if you look through the ads in women's magazines, the makeup ads, the associations between ripeness and fruit and, say, women's cheeks and women's lips are always very much, they're much put forward, you know.

And so there's a tight association between sexuality and food for a variety of reasons. But so Eve basically tempts Adam in some sense into a conscious relationship with her by offering him food, and in the case of the Genesis story, it's ripe fruit. And so it's an enticement, and she also entices him into self-consciousness, which is quite interesting because, number one, women do make men self-conscious.

I mean, that's sort of an ultimate truth of the nature of the relationship between men and women, and rejection in particular is something that makes men self-conscious. And they're much more exposed to that than women are in the sort of sexual dance because women, on average, are quite successful at seeking out sexual encounters, where men are on average very unsuccessful at doing the same thing.

So they suffer a lot of rejection. That's a very fundamental form of rejection, right? It's like, well, you know, you're good enough to maybe tolerate being alive and all that, but your genetic material should by no means be allowed to, you know, move itself into the future. It's a really fundamental form of rejection, and the rejection is, well, you don't measure up, and that's certainly the ground of self-consciousness.

And so there's a lot of weird things tangled up together in the Genesis story. So Eve gives Adam the fruit, and what happens is it wakes him up. What the story says is that the scales fall from his eyes. And then the first thing that happens is he realizes he's naked. And that's a very interesting kind of realization because to be one of the very common nightmares that people have is that they're naked in front of a crowd.

So you might say, well, what does it mean to be naked in front of a crowd? Well, it means to have your vulnerability exposed to the arbitrary judgment of the cultural mass, you know. It's a nightmare for most people, and human beings are very weird animals because most animals wander around on four legs and, of course, that means the armored part of their body is what shows, right?

Their spine and their ribs along the back, which is pretty tough and hard. But human beings are standing up, so the most vulnerable parts of our body are broadcast straightforwardly. So when human beings woke up during our evolutionary progress towards the kind of consciousness we have, when we became self-conscious, that was essentially equivalent to recognizing our naked vulnerability. And that's what the Genesis story is trying to relate, you know.

And it also points out that snakes, women, and fruit played an integral role in the development of human self-consciousness. And so here, the fruit that's being eaten is equivalent to death, and that's why there's a skull in the tree. And so, because what happened was when people became self-conscious, like consciously self-conscious, we started to understand the full nature of our vulnerability.

And so what does that mean? Well, for human beings, in part, it meant that we discovered time. Like, and that's a great thing to discover because then it means you have the future to think about. But it's also an absolute bloody catastrophe because you also understand that the future is finite and that your life is bounded and that you will end.

And as far as we know, human beings are the only creatures that have to contend with that knowledge. And once you have it, like once you wake up like that, there's no going back to sleep. Like it’s a qualitative transformation in the nature of experience. And, you know, the Genesis story pushes the idea further. It says the fact that we've woken up and are aware of our vulnerability is also what makes us fallen creatures.

It makes us alienated from existence in a way that animals aren't. And so what that also means, and this is sort of an existential idea, is that the rise of self-consciousness in that manner, which is in part the knowledge of death, is also what's made people, um, well, one of the things that happens, for example, in Genesis is it’s quite a funny story.

So Eve makes Adam all self-conscious, and then they wander off and cover themselves up, right? Which is sort of the first entry into cultural artifacts into the paradisal state. It's right. The first thing you do once you realize you're naked is cover yourself up. Now, you know, that story is often interpreted in a sexual way, and there's elements of that, but it's more pragmatic.

It's like, yeah, once you figure out that you're naked and that you're going to freeze to death and then it's cold in the future, it's like the first thing you do is cover yourself up. You know, and people have been wearing clothes for a very long time. We've been wearing clothes for so long that body lights are adapted to clothing.

And so it's been tens of thousands of years. So, you know, and obviously human beings are also the only creatures that wear clothes, which is, you know, and it's a human universal, by the way. People wear clothes everywhere, and virtually everywhere that human beings have been discovered. So you cover yourself up, and that's the first indication that you're aware of your vulnerability.

But you're also aware of the necessity of taking care of yourself as a, you know, as a separate entity, which animals don't really seem to have that notion. I mean, they get hungry and all that, but it's not obvious that they, you know, that they can extend the idea of hunger into the future.

So that, you know, so that they're caring about times that are not here yet. Now, what happens after people become self-conscious? They cover themselves up, and then God comes into the garden, which he’s always doing to have a walk with Adam, and Adam can’t be found.

And so God says, you know, well, you know, where are you? You know, what are you doing hiding away? And Adam’s cowering behind a bush. This is really stupid. He’s there with Eve, you know, thinking, I suppose, that God can’t see through the bush or whatever it is that he’s thinking. And, you know, he makes a case that God asks him, what in the world he’s doing hiding.

And he says, well, I’m naked. And God says, well, you know, how do you figure that out? And of course, Adam, being the heroic figure he is, immediately points to Eve and says, well, it was the woman’s fault. You made her for me, but, you know, it was her that tempted me.

So it’s really quite a comical story. It’s often been read by sort of patriarchal Christian interpreters as a story that implicates Eve in the initial destruction of mankind. But from my way of reading it, it’s just as hard on Adam or even worse because he’s such a cringing coward when things really start to go wrong.

I mean, the first thing he does is hide because he’s naked, and the second thing he does, as soon as he’s pushed on it a bit, it’s like, it’s your fault, it’s your fault. You know, he won’t take responsibility for it. And that's also an extremely complex story because one of the things it implies is a brilliant idea.

If you can imagine metaphorically that walking with God means something like, you know, staying in close contact with the divine nature of being or something like that and having ultimate faith in the positive nature of reality, things that might be damaged if you became self-conscious, well, why would you stop believing in that?

Which would be to stop walking with God? And the answer to that is, well, you become aware of your own vulnerability and your own, you know, finiteness, and that makes you afraid, so you hide. And that is what people do; they do that all the time. It’s a chronic state of human existence that, in many ways, you hide from the best parts of yourself.

And I mean, adolescence is usually like the painful acting out of that process over a protracted period of time, and people often never really recover from that. They won’t bring their best forward because they’re afraid. And, you know, and they’re afraid for good reason.

And so God says, well, now you’ve done it. You know, we can’t undo this and so now out you go. You’re not going to be in Paradise anymore, which means you’re no longer going to be unconscious like a happy child. It’s like you’ve screwed up completely. You know you’re finite now. You’re going to have to work because now you’re aware of the future.

And so, you know, all these things can go wrong so you’re going to have to work because you realize that the future could be dangerous. You have to fix things up. And he tells the women that they’re going to suffer dreadfully in childbirth.

It’s very well, it’s very interesting because there’s a reason that women suffer in childbirth, and the reason for that is that their child’s heads are too big. I told you about that the last time we met, you know. And so the story there also associates cortical expansion with self-consciousness and with the difficulty of birth.

It’s a bloody brilliant story; it’s just unbelievable how much information is packed into it. And then that’s very characteristic of archetypal stories.

It also helps you see how the, you know, another manifestation of the kind of tree symbolism, say, that’s characteristic of the Scandinavian stories, the Peruvian Amazonian stories, and the role of the snake play. No trees without snakes, no Paradise without snakes, no ability of mankind to ever produce a bounded environment that’s safe without something chaotic managing to come inside of it.

There’s no way you can do it. It’s a very paradoxical element of existence. So that’s pretty interesting. So that’s what’s happening with Eve. On the right side of the picture, you see the skeleton at the back there, representing death, you know.

And so that’s good old Eve. And then on the left side here, you have the embodiment of the church and the Christian tradition. Now, she’s also handing out things that are from the tree. And so this is like that the religious stories in general are stories about tragedy and redemption. That’s sort of what makes them religious stories.

It’s like they outline the terrible things that can happen to you, like in the most brutal possible way and then they provide a theory about a motive being that might help you address that. So that’s the redemptive part. And so the redemptive part here is, you see in the tree there’s also a crucifix; it’s sort of the counterpart to the skull.

And in the tree, all these little fruits, and some of them are obviously the apple skulls that Eve are handing out, but what they are on the left-hand side are hosts. And the host is the little thing that Catholics eat during the Mass, and the host is hypothetically part of Christ’s body.

And so that’s a, what it’s a derivative of the Last Supper. And so, and there’s an unbelievably archaic idea that lurks underneath that because it’s basically a cannibalistic ritual.

And the idea is essentially that if you could identify something that’s an ideal and you can incorporate it and you do that most basically by eating, because that’s how you incorporate most basically, then that can become part of you. So you can take on the attributes of something by incorporating it.

And so part of the Christian drama is an attempt to inculcate in its followers the idea that you should imitate the ultimate ideal. The question is, well, what’s the ultimate ideal? Different religions handle that in different ways. So Buddha, for example, is an ultimate ideal for Buddhists; Christ is an ultimate ideal for Christians.

So then you might say, well, what exactly is this thing that’s ideal? Okay, so the host is part of it; so partly it’s the body of Christ, and partly it’s wheat and wafer.

And the reason it’s made out of wheat is because wheat was regarded as a dying and resurrecting crop because it’s a crop that, you know, disappears in the fall and then comes back in the spring like most agricultural crops do. So it’s kind of an eternal miracle.

So it’s like the dying and resurrecting corn god. And so that’s a pagan idea that’s sort of assimilated to the Christian idea. And then there’s something that’s more profound underneath that, which is that the idea is that the part of the human spirit that can accept death and die and resurrect itself, which means to continually transform in the face of tragedy, is the thing that’s the antidote to the painful catastrophe of self-consciousness.

It’s a staggering idea. I’ve studied personality theory for a long time, and the first thing that I’ve discovered in relation to this is almost all the personality theories that we have that involve movement towards a state of improved health are predicated on the idea that people transform through a process of painful transformation.

It’s like dissolution, a part of your personality which is painful and chaotic, and then the reconstruction of that into a more fulfilled form. And the reason that’s associated with acceptance of vulnerability, it’s brilliant.

This is why humility is a virtue from the religious perspective, is that you cannot change until you admit that you’re wrong and that part of you has to go. So you have part of admitting your insufficiency, being willing to sacrifice that insufficiency to let it go so that something new can rise out of the ashes.

And sometimes that can be your whole personality. You know, to the degree that you’re pathological in your fundamental structures, man, there may be things that you have to give up that are huge chunks of your life.

So the alternative is to be in pain and suffering and misery. And, you know, that can turn into cruelty and murderousness and, and things that are much, much more terrible than mere suffering.

So that’s the idea here; it’s the whole, the whole story of human redemption in a single image. Mind-blowing, brilliant.

And, you know, it took people like, it took people thousands of years to think up this image or maybe tens of thousands of years. So there’s so much thought packed into that image that it’s being beyond, virtually beyond comprehension, remarkable image.

So here are some other representations of trees that I think are quite interesting. So the first one here is a sculpture, a living sculpture that’s a representation of a cathedral. You can see, obviously, how the trees, the curvature of the trees makes this, you know, beautiful arch that’s echoed in the Gothic cathedrals.

And the Gothic cathedrals are stone trees, essentially, the fs being the trees. And so, in some sense, they’re representative of the forest—that’s human beings’ primal home. But they’re representative of something more than that too.

Because the Gothic cathedrals are these interesting trees made out of stone that are also places of light. Because what the Gothic cathedrals are basically—they’re what they’re made of is the interplay between tree-like stone and light. The stained glass windows, of course, are the light.

And so there’s this idea that the ultimate structure is some tree-like column that’s invadable by light. And in some ways, that’s an analog of the body and its function. So, and you see symbols that are associated with this.

Well, first of all, you see—sorry, these are echoes. These are echoes of the tree-like structures that are within because the tree structure is a structure that many biological forms take. And so, you know, that’s the—that’s the nervous system tree.

This is really worth meditating on for a bit because most of us are convinced that our brain, you know, is in our head, and really that’s not right. It’s just not that accurate.

I mean, look at the dissemination of your nervous system throughout your body. You know, your brain is distributed through your body. Your spinal cord is pretty damn smart, you know; it can walk by itself.

So, for example, if you take people who are paraplegic but have only—they’ve managed spinal damage at a point that doesn’t—they’re no longer able to voluntarily control their leg. If you hoist them up and put them on a treadmill and tilt them forward, their legs will walk by themselves.

So, because your spinal cord is smart enough to walk. I mean, you need your brain to tell it where to go, but in some people who are paraplegic, they’ve been taught to walk in a controlled fall.

And so it’s quite interesting. So, you know, your spine isn’t stupid; it’s part of your brain. It’s just a lower part that’s more associated with movement. But, you know, your whole body is full of a central nervous system.

There are more neurons in your autonomic nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system that controls your internal organs, than there are in your brain. So, like, you know, you’re stuck right in your body, and the idea that you’re in your brain, in some ways, it’s like a hangover of the soul theory.

You know, the Cartesian duality that makes mind and body something separate and united. I mean, I believe there’s something to that theory, but, you know, it definitely underestimates the degree to which you’re an embodied nervous system and that the structure of your thought is predicated on the fact that you’re in a body.

Like, you’re an embodied cognitive creature, and you wouldn’t think or be the way you are without the body. It’s not like an appendage to your brain. You know, that is how it works at all.

You can see the brain and the spinal cord as a tree, and you can see the neurons themselves as a tree. So the tree-like structure echoes at different levels of the nervous system. These are very interesting representations.

So the man in the lotus position—why lotus position? That’s another tree metaphor. So a lotus is a very interesting plant. So what a lotus is, is that it grows on water. So the water’s deep, and maybe the top of it’s clear, but then the bottom of the water is very, very murky and deep and dark.

And so it represents the dark element, say, of the unconscious mind or the unknown that we aren’t privy to. And the lotus grows way down into that and then into the soil below, and so it comes out of the darkness, the soil and the darkness, and then through the dark water and then up into the clear light.

And on the surface of the water, it blooms. And so it opens up like a mandala, like the stained glass window on the right. It opens up like that—and in the middle of that, the Buddhist sits in his triangular position in the lotus position, and that represents enlightenment.

And what the whole image represents is the coherent ordering of multiple levels of structure, all the way from the primal material up to the high level of consciousness. And so the Buddha is like the ultimate flower of the lotus tree, so to speak.

Just as in Christianity, Christ is the ultimate manifestation of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Very, very analogous ideas. And, and there’s reasons for this too.

And part of it is something like if your psychophysiology was properly adjusted so you weren’t working across purposes to yourself and so that you were nicely aligned, straight up, physically healthy, and not like the defeated lobster scuttling around, the information flow through your nervous system through your body and your mind would be optimized.

And that would enable the reality that you’re attached to and part of to flow through you, sort of in an untrammeled way. You know, instead of you’re all full of cricks and trouble and problems and places that are badly aligned, and you know, you haven’t got the opportunity as a consequence to sort of get access to your own wisdom, as you’re sort of a bent representation of who you could be.

And so part of this—and also, the stone and glass that’s represented in the cathedrals is a representation of the idea that there should be a balance between structure and light in you. It’s like it’s the metaphorical idea, and that you should be properly oriented physically so that you’re in touch with the ground of being in a way that makes you wise and solid.

And that’s one of the things that enables you to take on the tragedy of existence without becoming weak. I mean, these are brilliant ideas.

So this is an Eastern mandala. And to me, what it is, is it’s a tunnel into this tree-like structure. It’s like a cross-section of the tree-like structure, and it’s as if you’re looking into the tree-like structure down to the micro-elements of being.

And there’s a representation there about how perfectly aligned everything is at every level of resolution and every level of manifestation. So he’s that, that or that’s inside it. That’s another way of looking at it. It’s the same representation on the western side of things.

It’s like that stained glass window’s like a cross-section of the trunks that make up the cathedral. All these buildings, like the medieval people, spend a lot of time building those cathedrals. You know those things were massive works of culture.

And some of them took hundreds of years to build. I mean can you imagine modern people building anything that would take like even a hundred years? It’s like we want things to be up in six months, you know, at most.

Those medieval people would work away for like 300 years on a cathedral. They were really serious about what it was and what it represented. You know, they were trying to produce the embodiment of the highest ideal in architectural form.

You know, and we’ve lost a lot of that. Even on the campus you can see that because if you know, if you go over to the sort of classical side of the campus it’s all, you know, cathedral-like and beautiful, and there’s some—there’s some attention being paid to the aesthetic element of the wisdom that’s embodied there.

And then you come over on this side, it’s a bloody, like, it’s hideous. It’s a factory, you know? The aesthetic is so terrible, it’s, it’s appalling. All the buildings that, you know, they're built to last for 50 years, and then they’re outdated, and they’re completely cheap and hideous.

And, you know, they’re cinder block, you know, and fluorescent lights. It’s like, come on, you know? And they have—you guys sit in these things that are so uncomfortable that you wouldn’t put your dog in them.

And, you know, it’s well, it’s lost—lose this sort of thing, you know? There’s a big difference between a medieval cathedral and the Cathedral in this bloody place, you know? But what you’re supposed to be in a university is something that’s like a medieval cathedral.

You know, it’s a testament to the best that mankind has to offer. You don’t put it in a box like this. It’s appalling; it’s really, it’s appalling. There’s no excuse for it.

I actually think it’s a conscious effort to subvert the values of the university because it’s not a factory. You’re not factory products. You know, the university is here to teach you how to be human beings, and that’s the highest thing that you can aim for.

And to subvert that to a lower order, it’s the worst thing that can be done. It’s a crime against humanity. There’s no excuse for it. And the ugliness that goes along with it is part and parcel of the subversion.

It’s like a hatred of the highest values. It’s a terrible thing.

So, you know, nobody—none of you are going to go home and say and feel proud that you were sitting in this room. You know?

All right, so now the shaman are very strange people, and it's very difficult to know how long archaic people have been practicing shamanic rituals. But we know that it's tens of thousands of years.

And we also know that most of the shamanic rituals and the visions that accompany them are induced by some kind of hallucinogenic substance. And it depends, like it depends on the culture what the hallucinogenic substance is.

But one of the things that's quite interesting about them is that they all have basically the same chemical structure, and I'll show you that in a minute. So in the shaman, people who are chosen to be shaman are basically, you might think of them as the repositories of the oral tradition of the culture.

You know, because most cultures have—for it to be a culture, first of all, if it’s a culture and it’s living, it’s been around for a tremendous amount of time. You know, and non-literate cultures have to carry the wisdom that they have with them in oral form or in embodied form.

So in ritual form or in oral form, and somebody has to be the fundamental repository of that kind of wisdom. So sort of the storyteller of the tribe and the keeper of the flame, so to speak. And that’s usually the role that the shaman has.

And they’re the people who are contacted when something’s gone wrong with you, if you’re sick or if, you know, you’re having real trouble mediating with another tribe member, someone like that, or, you know, when you’re maybe overcome with awe because you’re looking at the night sky.

You know, it’s the shaman who’s supposed to be dealing with the realities that are outside of day-to-day reality. And so they’re like masters of sacred space; that’s one way of thinking about it, and sometimes they’re that way because their father was a shaman or maybe their mother.

And sometimes it’s because they’re kind of peculiar, you know—they’re people who are visionary as part of their temperament. And we know that visionary, so to speak, is an element of temperament. It’s associated with trait openness, and that’s associated partly with intelligence but also partly with creativity.

And those things aren’t exactly the same. So some people are more imaginative and visionary than others. And in our culture, those would be people who tell great stories. Like, JK Rowling is a really good example of that.

She’s been a shamanic intermediary for an entire generation of young people with these massive books that she’s written that, you know, have a mythological core right down to their essence. And Stan Lee, who ran Marvel Comics, is another person like that, you know, who’s had an immense cultural influence because he’s brought these ancient stories back up from the depths and put them into modern form, you know?

And the writers of these things are quite consciously aware of what they’re doing with regards to the relationship with the underlying myths. They’re not stupid people. And even if they were, their readership rapidly informs them if they’re deviating from the, you know, proper narrative arc of the story.

Because those all those superheroes have their, you know, dedicated cults of followers, and they make bloody sure that the new writers don’t mess around with the story. And so not only is it top-down from the writers, but it’s also bottom-up from the readers, so they’re all participating in the construction of a continuing cultural apparatus.

So spontaneous vocation, while you’re sort of designed for hereditary transmission, well, you know, it’s a familial issue. And then there’s the personal quest issue too. So, you know, that’s sort of associated with spontaneous vocation.

So and the personal quest element would be, there’s always people in every culture who are fundamentally obsessed with the pursuit of meaning, you know? That’s their essential orientation towards life. They’re not particularly practical, like a conscientious person would be because a conscientious person works, you know, and their head isn’t in the clouds.

But there are types of people who are not like that at all; their heads are in the clouds permanently, and you know they’re extraordinarily imaginative and creative, and they’re thought leaders in many ways for the culture.

Because a lot of what cultures learn in an articulated sense, a lot of what they become conscious of is presented to them by artists, in somewhat unconscious form, long before the full meaning of the, of what’s being portrayed is articulated, just like that.

You know, I just showed you that tree image with Mary and the church, you know, on either side of it. It’s not like the person who drew that knew what they were doing; they knew more about what they were doing than the people who couldn’t draw that sort of thing.

But they were existing on the edge of their knowledge, making this representation, thinking, I’m trying to get at something here; I’m trying to get at something here, but they didn’t really know what it was because the idea is so complex that, you know, when people are coming up with it over these thousands of years, they don’t realize the full import of what it is that they’re revealing.

I mean, just as you don’t realize your own full import by whatever—this is from Meri Alad— by whatever method he may have been designated, the shaman is recognized as such only after having received two methods of instruction.

The first is ecstatic dreams, trance visions. The second is traditional shamanic techniques, names, and functions of the spirits, mythology and genealogy of the plants, and secret language. The two-fold teaching imparted by the spirits in the old master shaman constitutes initiation.

And so that's a very interesting representation of the manner in which personal revelation becomes knowledge. So, you know, let’s say you’re beset by like a very frightful series of nightmares.

I mean, what that’s going to do is drive you to try to understand how to represent what you’re having nightmares about in terms of the cultural elements that you have at hand because that—that’s what makes you sane. You know, if you’re having experiences that are beyond the norm, unless you can incorporate them back into your culture, you’re alienated from your culture, and that’s a terrifying thing.

It means like you might be the only person that’s insane, like you, and you know it’s very intolerable for people. It’s bad enough to be different, but to be so different that you’re incomprehensible, it’s like to you, that’s the sort of horror you don’t want to encounter.

So the shaman are people who are possessed by like a rich inner fantasy life but who are simultaneously capable of taking that and weaving it into the cultural mythology that they’re part of.

That’s what makes them sane rather than insane, right? Because a schizophrenic is someone who has visionary experience, although it’s often auditory. You know, they hear voices and they’re possessed by spirits in a sense. You see them wandering down the street, you know, muttering to their own internal voices, but they can’t integrate any of that with the culture, and so they’re just—they’re gone, like they’re lost souls.

So the shaman is someone who does both; you know, who has the visions but who incorporates it at the same time. So he’s someone who is master of the visions and not victim of them.

And so there are technologies that allow people to do that, and a lot of them are associated, as I said before, with the use of various hallucinogenic substances. In Siberia, the youth who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior.

For example, he seeks solitude, becomes absent-minded, loves to roam in the woods or unfrequented places, has visions, and sings in his sleep. In some instances, this period of incubation is marked by quite serious symptoms. Among the Yakuts, the young man sometimes has fits of fury and easily loses consciousness, hides in the forest, feeds on the bark of trees, throws himself into water and fire, and cuts himself with knives.

Those are ordeals in a sense, you know? A future shaman among the Tungus, as they approach maturity, go through a hysterical or hiatal crisis, but sometimes their vocation manifests itself at an earlier age.

The boy runs away into the mountains and remains there for a week or more, feeding on animals which he tears to pieces with his teeth. He returns to the village filthy and blood-stained, and it’s only after 10 or more days have passed that he begins to babble incoherent words. So you think, from the perspective of modern human beings, that this is something like descent into the unconscious structures that underlie normative cognition, just like you descend into that at night when you dream.

It’s a very peculiar process that you’re all perfectly capable of engaging in, but most of you have virtually no control over it. I mean, there are people who dream lucidly, you know, and who can exert some conscious control over their dreams.

Most people can learn how to do that to some degree, but in our culture at least, most people dream unconsciously, and it’s just something that happens to you and not something that you’re actively engaged with. The strange behavior of future shamans have not failed to attract the attention of scholars, and from the middle of the past century—by which he meant the 19th century—several attempts have been made to explain the phenomenon of shamanism as a mental disorder.

But the problem was wrongly put, for on the one hand, it’s not true that shamans always have to be neuropathic or neurotics or people who are not well put together mentally. On the other hand, those among them who had been ill became shamans precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cure.

So what that means is these are people who’ve undergone some kind of existential crisis, sometimes one that’s induced, you know, as part of the process that turns them into shamans, but they were able to undergo that existential crisis and then put themselves back together.

And so that’s what makes the masters of the chaotic realm, so to speak. And so you’re starting to fall apart and you don’t know what to do? Well, the best thing you can possibly do is find someone who’s been there and come back. And that idea of going somewhere and coming back is also a very, very common mythological story.

So that’s the story of The Hobbit, for example, right? The hobbit goes off on this quest and he undergoes all sorts of trials and he encounters the dragon that lives underneath everything, and he gets the gold from the dragon, which is the information that the dragon stores, and then he comes back to his community, and he’s transformed.

But he’s strange; like, he’s gone off on this big adventure. Now he’s like well put together with tough, and he’s also rich, but he’s also peculiar. You know, when Bilbo goes back to the Shire, you know, everyone—no one’s exactly sure what to do with him.

CU now he’s contaminated with everything that he’s gone through. So he’s like an agent of chaos himself, you know, and someone who’s somewhat terrifying but, you know, useful if you have to have a consultation about how you might deal with the next dragon.

So now I said that a lot of the shamanic initiatory rituals seem to be associated with the use of hallucinogenic drugs. And so the most common ones that we know about are mushrooms. So, for example, there’s this mushroom, which many of you probably seen in fairy tales, right? That’s on the cover of fairy tales very frequently, and that’s called an Amanita muscaria mushroom, and it’s generally viewed as extremely toxic.

And there’s some—there’s some reason for that because it can make the people who eat it very sick, and now and then people do die from it. But mostly, it’s extraordinarily hallucinogenic. The Vikings, for example—this is quite a terrifying story—the Vikings used to take Amanita muscaria mushrooms before they went on their pillaging trips.

And they used the mushrooms to transform themselves into the equivalent of predatory monsters. So they usually—their sort of target was wolves or bears, and the word berserk, which is what the Vikings used to go, meant bear shirt.

And so they would train their young men to eat these hallucinogenic mushrooms and turn themselves into pain-free predators, and then they would take them before they went on a pillaging raid. And so you just imagine, you know, you’re sitting there in northern England, and you’re in your village, and it’s all peaceful, and these bloody crazy Vikings come all out of the ocean in their boats, you know, the open boats that they’ve traveled across the North Sea, and they’re all like stoned out of their gourd on Amanita muscaria mushrooms and all convinced that they’re like predatory bears.

And that’s exactly how they’re acting, and they have no pain whatsoever. It’s like, that’s not a good scene, you know? And the Vikings come through and they just destroy everything. It’s like, so that’s—they were used for martial purposes by the Vikings, but they’re—they’re a drug that’s used very commonly by people who are inducing shamanic experiences among themselves across the whole northern part of Europe and Asia, and they grow almost everywhere.

So those are the original magic mushroom, you know, the magic red mush with the white dots. And if you look in, you can see these things in drawings everywhere, especially in fairy tales. Very common representation in fairy tales.

Um, there is some evidence that religions that are, I suppose, in some ways, more articulated and sophisticated in that they’re more articulated—like Christianity, say, compared to the more shamanic religions—also have their roots in hallucinogenic experience, and this may be true to a degree that we really don’t understand.

So, for example, this is something, this is taken from the Codex, which is the 11th-century, fundamentally 11th to 13th century because there were copies of it made at different times. What you see here— it’s mind-walling, really—is that the tree that the snake is associated with is a psilocybin mushroom.

And that’s a very characteristic representation of the psilocybin mushroom. And the fruit that Eve is feeding to Adam is part of the psilocybin mushroom. And there is speculation—you know among people who are at the fringes of evolutionary theory—that part of the way that human beings levered themselves up into increased consciousness was by the use of mushrooms.

And you can see in the representations over there, some of them are absolutely remarkable, like the one on the top right-hand corner there. That’s Christ, and he’s standing there like this with his hands up.

And then underneath, the bottom half of that circle is a psilocybin mushroom, with the head in u, like the main body of the mushroom is in the same position as Christ's head, and the offshoots of the mushroom are in the same position as his hands.

So, well, God only knows what that means. So that’s very strange, and a remarkable thing, and we really don’t know what to make of it. And there’s a lot more investigation to be done on that.

This is an Ayahuasca vine, and it’s the—it's part of what the Amazonian shaman used to brew their hallucinogenic mixtures, and none of the westerners who’ve gone to study the Amazonian shaman can figure out how the hell they determined how they were going to make their mixture because it’s virtually impossible to make.

You need to take the vine, and then you need to take another plant that doesn’t grow in the same place, and you have to mix them together in the right proportions, and then you have to cook them together for 72 hours and you have to do that without breathing in any of the vapors.

And you know, there’s thousands and thousands of different kinds of plants in the Amazonian jungle, and it isn’t obvious in any way how the people who are using these mixtures figured out how to make them. And if you ask them, they say, well, the plants told us how to do it.

And you know, for modern Western people that’s not much of an explanation, but it’s certainly the explanation that the tribesmen seem to stick to. And you know, God only knows how people gather their information. You know chimpanzees use medicinal plants; you know, they’re capable of finding plants in their habitat they can eat that are—ticks or so on—that help them deal with diseases.

And it’s not clear at all how they figured that out. So there are lots of mysteries about the origin of human knowledge, that’s for sure.

So three sources of potential visionary experience. And this is very interesting. So here’s the biochemical construction of hallucinogenic chemicals. So the first thing you see on the bottom right is a serotonin molecule.

Now, serotonin is, in some ways, it’s the major brain neurotransmitter. The reason I say that is because during your embryological development, your brain grows out, you know, it sort of flowers forth, and it’s guided in its development by the serotonin system—the system that uses serotonin as its primary neurochemical transmitter.

So it’s not only a very archaic system, and it’s so old that you share it, as I’ve mentioned before, with crustaceans, but it’s also the system that sort of puts you together as you emerge out of nothing. And so you see its peculiar chemical structure there, and then you see these are all different hallucinogenic substances.

Um, this one is psilocin, for example. And, um, they’re all—and DMT is a very weird chemical. It’s very illegal, DMT; it produces—it's part of Ayahuasca, although Ayahuasca is made with a plant that contains DMT and then something called an MAO inhibitor, which decreases the rate at which your body breaks it down.

But pure DMT produces an instantaneous 10-minute hallucinogenic high where people constantly report contact with aliens. There’s a psychiatrist who spent years documenting DMT experiences, and every single person he walked through the experience with reported the same thing—they’re shot out of their body, they’re immediately in an alien landscape.

So, well, you know, what that seems to indicate is that, you know, from a more purely rational perspective, is that these chemicals produce characteristic experiences that are associated with visionary experience. They put you in something that’s like a dream state.

Now, oddly the dream state seems to be somewhat similar from person to person, but there are ways that, in some sense, the contents of the unconscious mind could be made manifest to the conscious mind, at least for brief periods of time. Sometimes that can be clearly horrifying because sometimes people take these chemicals and have, like, the worst experience of their life, and part of that seems to be associated with the sort of thing that might happen to you in psychotherapy.

So, for example, if you were convinced that your psyche wasn’t very well ordered and you were harboring sort of dark secrets and lies, and all the sorts of things that might complicate your life and all sorts of familial pathology and, you know, cultural baggage, and like the horrors that sort of live inside your brain, you know, in psychotherapy you would sort of confront those one by one.

In a hallucinogenic experience, you might confront all of those at the same time, you know? And for many people, that’s exactly equivalent to a quick trip to hell, and it’s not something they’d rather repeat. So now, why that—why things are set up that way? Well, who knows, you know?

I mean, we don’t really understand these things. We don’t understand the relationship between the parts of the brain that are articulated and conscious and then the lower parts that are sort of the repositories of traumatic information. Um, and there are deeper mysteries that we don’t understand too.

So it turns out—I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the term epigenesis, but there are studies of epigenetics now that show that there are certain experiences that alter your genetic structure. And, well, we know that partly because when, like, if you put yourself in a new situation—a radically new situation—new genes will turn on inside of you, and they’ll code for new proteins and they’ll build new structures for you, so new neurological structures sometimes.

And that’s part of how you can adapt, and it’s also part of the reason why banging yourself against various obstacles, you know, in a kind of systematic way, is a good way of expanding your range of capabilities. So we know that experience can turn new genetic processes on that, that are sort of latent prior to that.

But what we didn’t know was that some of those experiences transform your genetic structures in a way that you can transmit to your children. So—and that’s Lamarckian evolution. No one ever hypothesized that that was possible.

But you can look it up; it’s mainstream science now, although, you know, people are still not really sure what to do about it, how to think about it from a conceptual perspective because that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to be possible.

So, you know, we have no idea to what level of being your experiences can be encoded, and we really don’t know how you encode experience anyways. We don’t know what the fundamental structures of your memory are, how that’s associated with your conceptions of time and space or, and how that’s related to your ongoing experiences.

Like those things are deeply mysterious to us. And what happens, at least in part with the hallucinogens, is that they seem to take all the horrors and terrors that you haven’t dealt with and just put them in your face now.

And that’s part of the shamanic experience. And so it’s not something for people to take lightly. And, you know, and generally, people don’t.

So, but I’ve often found that it was very strange that these chemicals produce experiences that are so strange that our culture instantly deemed them illegal. You know, for me, it’s like looking at what happened back in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church went after Galileo because he had something, you know, strange to say about the moon.

It’s like these experiences have tapped into something that’s a very, very primordial element of human existence and is associated, say, with the shamanic rituals that have been going on for tens of thousands of years and that human cultures have always used to orient themselves.

And there’s so much and the current culture that, you know, we punish people severely for experimenting with them. It’s very, very peculiar behavior.

So although there’s no doubt that this sort of thing is dangerous and very peculiar, but you know, so the shaman report relatively constant types of experiences when they’re undergoing their transformative experiences.

And here’s a couple of them. One is climbing the world tree. We’ve already talked about the world tree and what that seems to be, if you look at the reports of the shaman, is that they seem—their consciousness seems to be able to move itself up and down levels of analysis that aren’t necessarily available to you in your normal state of consciousness.

Now, whether or not that’s a real phenomenon or whether or not it’s part associated with the dream isn’t exactly clear. So, um, part of it is, for example, that, you know, the shaman become convinced that they can communicate with things like plants at a very fundamental level, but they are also capable of, when they climb up the tree, for example, of entering sort of the realm of their ancestors and communing with them.

And I just read a book here recently about the revival of Mongolian shamanism, and the Mongolian situation is kind of interesting because it was a pretty archaic culture, and then the Soviets came in there and, like, communized it, you know, which was sort of economically useful but socially it was an absolute catastrophe because the Soviets were murderous beyond belief.

And then in 1989, they just left, and so the Mongolians, like, they were completely up in the air then because their traditional culture had been fragmented. And you know the whole communist thing was a bust, and they reverted back to shamanic practices.

And the shaman told them that part of the reason that they were all suffering was because they had lost contact with their ancestral spirits. And partly what they meant by that was that the continuity of the culture had been disrupted, and so people were identityless, you know?

And it was funny because when Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet Union and he wrote extensively about the Soviet experience, his eventual conclusion was that the best route for the Soviets to take after the collapse of communism would be a return to the sort of evolutionary process of development that characterized their exploration of Orthodox Christianity.

Because you have to fall back to something, you know? Because people need a meaning structure, and you know modern people have a hard time with incomprehensible religious meaning structures because, you know, we demand a certain amount of rational clarity.

But there’s a problem with that because the absolute mysteries of life cannot be formulated with rational clarity. You have to kind of encapsulate them in a mystery that’s partially understandable because, because otherwise they stay completely out of your grasp, you know, and you have no answer to the question, you know, well, what’s the ultimate purpose of life?

You know, well, you’re not going to be able to get that answer in a really tight box, you know, that you could open up, and it’s just going to provide all the answers.

It’s going to be murky because partly because it has to apply to everyone. But the fact that it’s murky and symbolic in a sense and sort of multifaceted doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary or wrong.

And, you know, the more I’ve studied the theories that underlie personality theory, the more I’ve become convinced, and for me, convinced beyond a doubt that the connection—our connection to the archaic structures of the past that defined our cultures, like without that, you’re without roots, you know?

And that makes you weak. That’s the big problem; it makes you weak. There’s nothing to you. Every whim can possess you.

Every stupid political idea that comes along is instantly your god. You know, and you’re certainly capable of going crazy with masses of people in all sorts of insane ways.

It has direct consequences; you have to be grounded in something. According to a Yakut informant, the spirits carry the future shaman to hell and shove him in a house for three years. It doesn’t sound very pleasant.

Here he undergoes his initiation; the spirits cut off his head, which they set off to one side, for the novice must watch his own dismemberment with his own eyes. And they hack his body to bits, which are later distributed among the spirits of various sicknesses.

It is only on this condition that the future shaman will obtain the power of healing. His bones are then covered with new flesh, and in some cases he has also given new blood.

And so the fundamental structure of the shamanic ritual seems to be the death of the experiencing person, and they seem to experience that as a physiological transformation. So it’s the conscious experience of their own death and their dissolution, right?

Right to, you know, the dust and ashes from which human beings originally arise. One of the specific characteristics of shamanic initiations, aside from the candidate’s dismemberment, is his reduction to the state of a skeleton.

We are here in the presence of a very ancient religious idea which belongs to the hunter culture. Bone symbolizes the final root of animal life, the mold from which the flesh continually rises.

It’s from the bone that men and animals are reborn. For a time they maintain themselves in the existence of the flesh, then they die, and their life is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton from which they will be born again.

And then people who undergo these experiences seem to—as I said—seem to experience their own death in a conscious manner. And that’s a very difficult thing to understand, you know?

It’s not obvious either for people who aren’t, what would you say, who aren’t accustomed to those sorts of extremes of experiences. It’s not obvious at all how much of this sort of thing you have to become conscious of, you know? Because death is obviously one of the things that terrifies people deeply.

And it’s not obvious how you should accustom yourself to that. So I can tell you a story that’s quite interesting.

I had a client at one point who was a vegetarian. Um, and that actually turns out to be relevant. Part of the reason that she was a vegetarian was because she couldn’t even go into a, like, a um, what? A grocery store where there was a butcher department.

Like she couldn’t even look at the array of meat; it just horrified her. And it was associated with something that was like a Sleeping Beauty complex for her because when she was a child her parents treated her like she was a fairy princess, and they really protected her from everything.

You remember how many of you have seen Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty? Yeah, well that’s interesting that so many of you would have. You remember there’s a—when the girl is born when Sleeping Beauty is born, they don’t invite someone to the christening. Who do they not invite? The witch, right?

I think it’s Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, I think that’s her name. She’s the one that turns into the dragon of chaos at the end of the story.

Well there’s a message in there; it’s like do not shield your young people from natural catastrophe because it makes them unconscious, and it’ll come back and revisit them when they, well especially, you know, when they grow up, when they hit puberty, it’ll come back with force.

And if they’re unconscious—like if they’re not prepared, the horror of that will make them unconscious. And that’s what happened to this girl: like she was sleeping 20, 22 hours a day when she came to see me.

It’s like she was a fairy princess until she hit puberty, and then she was like an evil sloth, as far as her parents were concerned. It was like bang, things had, you know, things switched completely.

Of course, that was horrifying to her, but it was also tangled up for her with kind of the horror of life in general. And that was one of the things that made her so sensitive to, say, to these displays of meat, which are of course quite horrifying.

You know, it’s kind of remarkable that you can wander through them, you know, with, you know, maybe a little bit of discomfort, but you know, it’s slaughterhouse stuff, and, you know, to be normal is to be able to tolerate that, and that’s quite strange.

She couldn’t tolerate it at all. So, you know, I took her to butcher shops now and then because you do that with people. If they have an identifiable fear, it’s actually quite easy to start the psychotherapeutic process because you start to expose them voluntarily to the things that they want to avoid.

So you know, I took her into a butcher shop, and jeez, you know, just flipped her over. You know, she sat in the car afterwards and cried for 20 minutes and told me about how terrible life was and that she couldn’t live in the face of all this, you know, dismemberment and constant death.

And she was also very, very inclined towards identification, you know, with little cute animals, which is generally a fairly solid feminine trait, right? Because females are very attracted to things that are cute.

And cute things are basically infantile and helpless, right? That’s sort of what activates the cute detection, you know? It’s part of—well, it’s part of maternal behavior, and it’s really an important part, you know, because if you didn’t find your babies cute you’d really be in trouble, CU they’re a lot of—well, they’re a lot of trouble, you know?

And they push you because they require so much care, so they bloody well better be cute and smiley and, you know, make friends with you. So, but she, like, was hyper-identified with like little vulnerable animals, you know?

And that’s not good because she wasn’t just a little vulnerable animal. You know, she was also partly a predator. And human beings are partly predators, and you know, maybe you think that’s terrible, but that’s how it is.

And the predatory part of yourself better be incorporated and used because otherwise, first of all, you’ll be weak without it, and second of all, if you don’t incorporate it, believe me, that doesn’t make it go away; it’ll just go out and have fun on its own in ways that are unconscious that you don’t control.

So, she was a really good dreamer, this girl, and she could actually—she had lucid dreams; it was quite remarkable—and sometimes she could even ask her dream characters what they symbolized, right, in the dream.

You know, it’s the only time I’ve ever seen that. Although I’ve had some lucid dreamers in my practice. And one day, she had this dream because she was really having a hard time finishing university.

It was like her sixth year, seventh year, or something like that. And that was part because she slept all the time, and then she wouldn’t get anything done. Like she was trying to sleep to avoid consciousness, right? To avoid being alive because consciousness was too painful for her.

And so, she had a dream one day that she met a gypsy that was traveling through the forest, and the gypsy told her that unless she was able, unless she would be willing to work in a slaughterhouse, she’d never finish her degree.

So she came and she came and told me that dream, and I thought, well, slaughterhouse? That seems a little bit difficult to arrange, you know? She wasn’t sure she could handle that.

Anyways, I said, well, is there anything that you can think of if you imagine something? Is there anything that you can think of that, you know, might serve as a substitute?

And she came back to me about a week later, and she says, she said, I want to see an embalming. And I thought, wow! That’s—that’s rough. That’s no doubt about that; that’s rough.

So I phoned around to a bunch of different funeral homes, and I told them that I had a client who was like so terrified of death that she couldn’t even live and that, you know, I wanted to bring her to the funeral home and walk through it.

And if it was possible to see an embalming preparation, and they were very understanding. It was quite interesting because, of course, funeral parlor people are kind of strange people, right? Because they’re dealing with death all the time; it’s like their daily life, you know?

And they get—so it’s, well, they’re not dying of horror every night. You know, they’re able to deal with it, which is a good thing, CU like we’d be knee-deep in bodies otherwise, right? Someone has to do this sort of work.

So, and apparently you can specialize in it, and so what that also means unless you think, you know, funeral parlor directors are like completely non-human in some fundamental way clearly indicates that it’s possible for a normal person to become so conversant with death that it’s daily business.

And you know, emergency department people are in that sort of situation, and people who drive ambulances, like human beings are bloody tough, you know? We can take something like facing death and turn it into an everyday occurrence.

It’s like it’s kind of horrifying, in a sense, to think that you could be that harsh in a way, you know?

But by the same token, you know, you don’t want to run away screaming the first time there’s an emergency in your life. You know what the hell good are you if, you know, someone close to you gets really sick and all you can do is whine and snivel about it because it’s so hard on you.

It’s like it’s not your turn for that; you should be strong so that you can help then, and that means that, you know, we have to be able to face these sorts of things. So anyways, we went to the funeral parlor, which is quite a weird thing for me too because I actually have rather a squeamish stomach; I’m kind of disgust-sensitive.

And so it’s hard for me, especially odors, just—they’re just not good for me at all. But, you know, so I could have never been a surgeon or anything like that.

But we went to the funeral parlor, and that I found it extremely interesting because, first of all, you actually need to know how these things operate because at some point you’re going to be called upon to deal with them.

And maybe it’d be nice if you had a little knowledge beforehand so that you didn’t only have the grief that was knocking you over but all the novelty that was associated with trying to orient yourself in that space.

And so we talked to the funeral director, and we talked to him about how he sort of managed his day-to-day encounters with death. And you know, he said he sort of saw it as his role to shepherd people through the grieving process.

And that for him, it had made him in some ways more acutely aware of the finitude of life, obviously, but that also made him more conscious of, you know, of each day, of the passing of each day.

And you know, that might be one of the things that’s salutary about facing your own mortality. It’s like waste time—here’s a good question for you guys: How many of you waste more than four hours a day?

Okay, okay, so I would say the reason you do that is because you haven’t really faced the reality of your own death. If you had done that, you would stop doing that. You would not waste time.

You know, and we could do a quick economic analysis. I like to do this with people. So what do you think your time’s worth an hour? Guess. We know it’s at least 10 bucks, right?

Because that’s, well, so the minimum value society puts on your labor is $10 an hour, okay? But you know, you’re smart and healthy and young, and so each hour is an investment in the future, so it has to be considered in that matter.

Because one of your hours is worth more to you than one of my hours is worth to me because you have so much of your future life still depending on it. So that’s a big deal.

So I would say $50 an hour is probably reasonable for what you guys are worth. It’s somewhere between 10 and 50 anyways. So you know, let’s assume 50. Okay, it’s 200 bucks a day. It’s 1,400 bucks a week. It’s 5,600 bucks a month.

$65,000 a year—it’s like you want to waste it, go right ahead, but that’s what it’s costing you at minimum, you know? And you know, you might think, well, no, because I’m not getting paid. It’s like wrong; you’re paid for your studies.

You just get paid 10 years from now. It’s just deferred income, and there’s a huge difference between people who have B’s and A’s. You know, B’s door shut, A’s doors open. And so, you know, you waste that time, you will bloody pay for it, and you don’t get it back either.

So, you know, if you’re awake and you know that this is waiting for you and that there’s only so much time you have, that can bloody well wake you up and stop you from wasting your time because you don’t have that much of it.

This is a medieval representation of—it’s a very strange representation, obviously, because it’s a crucifix and has a snake on it. It’s not—it’s a tree-snake thing, you know?

And it’s actually an echo; there’s a story in the Old Testament about Moses leading people through the desert, and it’s sort of a—you know, they’ve escaped from tyranny. So that’s the previous place of order. Now they’re in chaos because they’ve left tyranny, so they’re all wandering around sort of without their heads; they don’t know which way they’re going.

They’re trying to run away from something that’s bad and toward something that’s good, but they don’t know where they are. And so they get all kind of, you know, fighty and break into factions, and then they start worshipping false gods like golden calves and so on.

It’s fragmentation under pressure, right? And so, um, God gets irritated at them and throws a bunch of poisonous snakes into the desert because, you know, he’s such an easy guy to get along with! So he throws a bunch of poisonous snakes in there, and they go around biting all these people who are, you know, not being faithful.

And so all the people who are, you know, doubting Moses are starting to freak out because they keep getting bit by all these poisonous snakes. And so they finally call on Moses to ask God to be like, you know, call off the poisonous snakes; they’ll behave, just call off the poisonous snakes.

And God says to Moses to build, like, a staff with a bronze snake on it, and that if people will come and look at the snake, then they’ll be immune to the snake’s poison or the snakes will stop biting them.

I don’t remember which, and it’s—it’s a lovely story because it’s another exposure story; it sort of means that if you’re willing to gaze upon the thing that is most poison to you or that you’re most afraid of, that can help you overcome it, and that’s sort of what this is a representation of.

Except it’s more complex because this serpent’s tail sort of stretches down into infinity—that’s what that representation is—it’s sort of the manifestation of the unknown, right from the beginning of time and space.

That’s what that image represents, and that’s sort of the problem of humanity in some sense is that, you know, there’s an infinite number of troubles stemming from an infinite source—a remarkable representation.

I think you’ve heard about near-death experiences, I imagine. You know the idea that people see the light at the end of the tunnel, and then, you know, when they get through the light, they see all their ancestors there and something that vaguely resembles God, and you know, and that’s conditioned to some degree by their cultural background, but it’s a very common experience.

And this is actually a representation of that from a 12th—I think 12th to 13th century painting by Hieronymus Bosch. And this, so it seems to be the sort of thing also that’s characteristic of the shamanic experience post reduction to skeleton.

So the shaman dies, and then as a consequence of that, he ends up in a space that’s characterized by the presence of the ancestral spirits, whatever that means.

I mean, you could think about those as like each of you are embodiments of ancestral spirits, right? Because all the ideas you have, for example, are all—they’re all there. None of them are your ideas, or virtually none of them.

It