Shamanism: the new frontier
Kay
by R. V. Scheide -- When I was 17, I had a dream in which I forgot my
own name. A question bobbed to the surface --who are you?-- and just
like that, all sense of what is commonly referred to as identity or
the self vanished. I heard my name called, but did not recognize it. I
saw my own face, but it was unfamiliar. The sounds and images faded
into an infinite void from which no frame of reference could be drawn,
self or otherwise. I had ceased to exist. Yet the sense of existence
persisted. I instinctively understood that what was once me was now an
indivisible part of this existence. This was how life would go on. The
instant I pondered how I could possibly know this, since I had ceased
to exist, I woke up.
I've never forgotten that dream, and the memory of it has served me
well. When I read French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre's assertion
that "nothingness lies coiled within being like a worm" in his classic
philosophical text Being and Nothingness, I knew exactly what he
meant. Jung's collective unconsciousness? Been there. Nietzsche's
eternal return? Done that. All of these examples seem like valid
interpretations of my experience.
But was my experience valid?
Until relatively recently in the Western world, the answer was no.
Back in Galileo's day, 400 or so years ago, dreams, hallucinations,
souls, spirits and other metaphysical phenomena were cast out as
objects of legitimate scientific inquiry by the Church, which didn't
want anyone else cutting in on the God business. What originally
evolved out of religious intolerance --scientific method-- ironically
morphed into its own dogmatic secular religion, nowhere moreso than in
the medical sciences. If it can't be measured with instruments --and
so far, no one has built a device capable of detecting, say, a soul--
it doesn't exist, as far as Western medicine is concerned. We're
living in a material world.
Enter the shaman. For thousands of years, individuals with specialized
knowledge of both the natural and the supernatural --sometimes
referred to derogatorily as witch doctors, wizards, warlocks and
witches by us moderns-- have practiced the healing arts. From
indigenous tribes in North and South America to practitioners of
3,000-year-old traditional Chinese medicine, such healers approach
health problems from physical as well as spiritual perspectives. Now
the West, blinded by science for a half a millennia, is finally
catching on. Shamanism now pervades everything from complementary
medicine to quantum physics. It may even contain the meaning of life.
Since the 1960s, anthropologists like Michael Harner, founder of the
Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Mill Valley and author of The Way
of the Shaman, have helped reintroduce the Western world to the
shamanic healing traditions of our distant past. These traditions,
still practiced by intact indigenous tribes and other non-Western
cultures around the world, take a decidedly different view on reality;
namely, that there are at least two sets: "ordinary reality," which we
experience in our normal waking state, and "nonordinary reality,"
which occurs in dreams or induced trances.
"One of the distinguishing characteristics of the shamanic
practitioner is the ability to move back and forth at will between
these realities with discipline and purpose in order to heal and help
others," writes Harner in his article "Science, Spirits and
Shamanism." It seems that my dream of 27 years ago qualifies as a
quasi-shamanic experience: I crossed into nonordinary reality and
returned with knowledge that has proven quite useful to me in ordinary
reality.
Unlike Western scientific method, shamanism validates such
experiences, believing them to be the stuff that ordinary reality is
made of. The shamanic technique of flipping back and forth between
realities has proven to be a powerful metaphorical tool for
understanding diverse complexities ranging from interpersonal
relationships to quantum mechanics. Its use has gone decidedly
mainstream. The Four Agreements by San Rafael author Don Miguel Ruiz,
who trained as a Nagual shaman in the Toltec tradition of his native
southern Mexico, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for
two years.
From Harner to Ruiz and beyond, there is no shortage of shamans in the
North Bay. Despite a reputation as the woo-woo capital of the planet,
more than a few genuine masters are in our midst. Some of these
practitioners guide the curious through group ceremonies that emulate
Native American shamanic tradition, combining dance, percussion and
chanting to create a trancelike experience. Others take Harner's
"discipline and purpose" to the limit.
Dr. Gary Daniel, a Santa Rosa-based motivation and behavioral
specialist with 20 years of experience and Ph.Ds in hypnotherapy,
hypnotic anesthesiology and transpersonal psychology, approaches
shamanism from a more Western perspective, merging sound, light and
computer technology with shamanic healing traditions to create a new
modality of treatment: techno-shamanism.
"Shamanism Plugs into the Wall," is how Daniel describes it in an
essay recently published in the collection The Heart of Healing,
edited by Dawson Church and featuring contributions from such
luminaries as Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil. Daniel is co-inventor of
the NEURO (short for "neuro-imaging optimization") system, a
computerized biofeedback system employing vibration, sound and optical
lasers. "We're just using high technology to do what the Indians did
with drums and fire," he says. "This takes all the guesswork out of
it."
The real trick to shamanism is the moving back and forth between the
two realities at will. An altered state is required. Shamans from many
indigenous tribes throughout the Americas used hallucinogens to induce
such states, but that's a little impractical in the legally
prohibitive 21st century. Fire, drums, dancing and chanting sufficed
for other tribes. The NEURO system claims to get the job done more
quickly than either of those methods, and is totally legal to boot.
The system is the featured attraction at Allura du Jour, a high-tech
mind and body spa founded by Daniel and partner Debra Corrigan.
Stepping inside is kind of like diving down that rabbit hole in Alice
in Wonderland. Plush, overstuffed sofas squat like giant mushrooms.
Columns and pedestals are finished in a powdered cocoa color that
looks edible.
And in its own separate dark chamber sits the NEURO, a sculpted
human-form-fitting chair with a bank of computer monitors and
equipment, twin lasers perched on a pedestal in front of the chair and
duplex cables snaking across the floor connecting everything together.
The chair is lined with a latticework of miniature speakers that
transmit auditory vibrations through human bone. It also contains
sensors that monitor the body's vital statistics, translating the data
via computer algorithm to approximate the subject's brain-wave pattern
on a screen: alpha, beta, theta or delta. Daniel manipulates NEURO's
vibration, sound and light elements to achieve the desired brain
state.
From previous experience, I know that I'm one of the 20 percent of the
population who is relatively easy to hypnotize, so eagerly accept an
offer to "test drive" the system.
Encased in the NEURO chair, I close my eyes and laser spirograph
patterns flicker across my eyelids. My breathing slows. The light
seems to penetrate my visual cortex. The "sounds" of wind blowing and
waves crashing throb through the chair and up and down the length of
my skeleton, making it feel as if my body is levitating on an
invisible cushion of sonic energy like a puck on an air hockey table.
My breathing, the throbbing sounds and the pulsing lasers seem to
synchronize and I slip into the deepest, purest trance I've ever
experienced.
A prerecorded voice not unlike Stuart Smalley's, the character played
by Al Franken on Saturday Night Live, begins reciting first-person
positive affirmations: "I have the power to take control of my life. I
am a creative person. I will reach my full potential."
It doesn't seem silly at all. In fact, I believe every word with every
vibrating molecule of my being. As Daniel eases off of the machine, an
effect he calls "fractalization" kicks in: I am floating in a sea of
what looks and feels like television static. It's the closest I've
ever come to experiencing that same infinite void from my dream.
Perhaps it was psychosomatic, but my mood is elevated for weeks after
that 12-minute session.
"I knew that light and sound have a tremendous effect on the body, and
I knew there had to be a way to synthesize it," Daniel later explains.
He's used the system to treat clients ranging from creatively blocked
professionals to hardcore nicotine addicts. Believing in the process,
however, is a major hurdle to overcome.
"The shaman somehow tapped into their subject's ability to believe in
the shaman's power and create a true healing event," he writes in
"Shamanism Plugs into the Wall."
"Today's healer must overcome the fear from acquired wisdom in the
subject by overloading the subject's consciousness and thereby opening
the mind at the subconscious level to new ideas and possibilities."
Like Gary Daniel, Allen Hardman began his shamanic explorations as a
hypnotherapist. A chance encounter with Four Agreements author Miguel
Ruiz led to nine years of study with the Toltec Nagual. With the
master's blessing, Hardman last month branched out with his own
shamanic workshop, the Lucid Living Intensive. Computer-savvy and
modern, Hardman is often jokingly referred to as the "high-tech
Toltec."
"I'll often take people into essentially a hypnotic trance, to give
them the sense of the mindless divinity, to experience what they
perceive mindlessly," he says. Sensing the mindless divinity--an apt
description of my original dream experience. Such insights, from
dreams or induced trances, can open up new, less distorted channels of
perception.
"Light carries the message perfectly, but our normal channels of
perception distort the message," he stresses. By focusing or
"channeling" individual awareness in nonordinary reality--a process
known as "lucid dreaming"--distortion is ideally cut to zero,
permitting experienced Toltec shamans to take control of the dream or
trance, a useful tool for exploring still more channels in nonordinary
reality. But Hardman prefers focusing his advanced student's awareness
toward ordinary reality, a process called "lucid living," and a fairly
radical paradox occurs: as the distortion clears, students realize
ordinary reality is but a daydream. That means, just as in lucid
dreaming, ordinary reality can be controlled.
Since light seems to play such a significant role in a wide array of
shamanic traditions, it is perhaps not surprising that quantum
physicists--the scientists who study quarks, the tiny packets of
wave/particle that seem to oscillate between matter and energy at the
subatomic level--are interested. As psychiatrist and physicist Arnold
Mindell demonstrates in his seminal book Quantum Mind: The Edge
Between Physics and Psychology, there appears to be a profound
relationship between the mathematics of quantum mechanics and the
ordinary and nonordinary realities of the shaman.
The equations used to describe wave motion in quantum physics utilize
complex numbers, a combination of real numbers and the so-called
imaginary numbers based on the square root of -1. If you didn't make
it this far in high school math, don't worry. Mindell proposes a
fairly simple hypothesis: the real numbers are analogous to ordinary
reality; the imaginary numbers are analogous to nonordinary reality.
"We have seen that the patterns found in the psychology of perception
in shamanic experience are consistent with patterns found in math and
now in physics," Mindell writes. "This consistency points to the
unified field, the dreamlike substance of experience, which is basic
to life, to psychology and physics, to electrons and their observers,
to all of us as we live and grow."
Not coincidentally, Mindell compares the way physicists think about
imaginary numbers with the shamanic concept of lucid dreaming. "When
you multiply a complex number by its conjugate [mirror image or
reciprocal], the result is an entirely real number," he writes. In
other words, the equations describing energy waves appear to correlate
with the shamanic notion of a mindless divinity from which both
nonordinary and ordinary reality arise.
Could the shaman's mindless divinity and the so-far-undiscovered
unified field be the same thing? Perhaps. Physicists from China, where
traditional Chinese medicine or qigong (pronounced "chi-gong") has
been practiced for the past 3,000 years, have speculated that chi, the
energy or life force that flows through the body, emanates from the
unified field or a similar structure in theoretical physics known as
the quantum vacuum.
A rich tapestry of overlaying traditions compose qigong, including
martial arts, acupuncture, natural medicine, diet and a system of
movement similar to the yoga, in which special poses, mimicking
spiritual animals such as the turtle, crane and bear, help channel the
flow of chi through medians and other conduits of the body.
Chi itself is most often compared to electricity because it is thought
to flow through these medians and conduits like electrons through a
wire. Skilled practitioners such as Grand Master Jin-sheng Tu, a
Taiwan native and one of the foremost qigong practitioners in the
United States, claim they have the ability to "emit" chi as a healing
power.
Master Tu speaks little English and doesn't call himself a shaman, but
in his self-styled qigong garb, he certainly looks like one, a bandana
covering his long, thick black locks, tight breeches tucked into
thigh-high lace-up boots with pointed toes that curled over on the
tips like an elf's shoes. When I first met him, he was balancing on
eggs in his bare feet while painting a fairly accurate watercolor of
Bodhidharma, who brought Zen Buddhism to China.
"Where does chi come from?" I asked through an interpreter.
Rather than speaking, Master Tu held up his left arm as if he were
waving goodbye and made a little clutching motion at the air. He
pointed his index finger straight up, like he was testing the wind.
Then, through the interpreter, he asked me to hold out my right palm.
He lowered his index finger to the precise center of my palm, and when
we touched, a jolt of energy lasting five seconds or so passed into my
hand, not unlike this shock you'd feel if you touched your tongue on
both terminals of a 9-volt battery.
Master Tu had given me a fresh shot of chi.
He never really told me where chi comes from, but I think I've got it
figured out by now. It comes right out of the air we breath, flowing
back and forth between ordinary and nonordinary reality, occasionally
making itself known to those who are willing to do the work in its
purest form: the mindless divinity, that infinite void from which no
frame of reference could be drawn that I dreamed of so long ago.
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