Craft

Process Paper #3

Human kind has a deep-seated urge to transcend. The drive to eat, drink, fuck, sleep, all natural, organically arising from within the needs of the human body and spirit. So it is with transcendence. It is not such about transcendence with a capital T, but more so transcendence in the meaning to explore the vast potential of ones psyche. Since Hoffmann, we have a host of new synthesized materials that lead to these expansions that we seek. Still prior to that, ancient technologies have always existed, using any plant or fungus available to ascend/descend further than the restrictions of our everyday consciousness. It is as if we all somehow, someway feel the insufficiency of our personal, isolated selves.  Remember the playground when you were a kid? Remember spinning around in circles like whirling dervishes? The trance like states brought on this innocent ecstasy, fulfilling these innate wishes to expand further than the ordinary.

I remember…

My Self sitting on the verge of a psychedelic opening, you know... that moment when the crevice is beginning to form. My body was caught in a repetitive bounce and shuffle, and the music was shattering against my face and through my body. People surrounded me, but somehow it was just the music and me. And this crevice got wider, and the depths revealed to be voids. At some point I was not even here anymore. I was in a sweaty concert hall, but really, I was clinging to the zenith of a mountain, engulfed in this new-age, twisted shamanistic experience. I was afraid, and I was ecstatic.

Later on I found I felt the same way sitting in a dark, quiet hut on the beach, within a small group of people while the ayahuascero sang through the night. I found his music at some point stopped being music, but instead was a two headed snake transportation for my expanding consciousness. My body caught in its rhythm, shook and shook. The crevice had been growing larger and the void promised only more depth. I was within terror, but when it was over I was smiling.

In the narrow confines of my individual egotistic experience, I have found myself spontaneously inviting my Self into the explorations of consciousness. As I crept from shadows to shadows, I found I gathered around me physically and psychically a quiet multiplicity of fellow seekers and searchers making their way through the darkness toward the light. The Cartesian worldview, still dripping in blinding light stood high to create shadows on these shamanistic, ecstatic states of exploration, healing, and celebration. McKenna says in his book Food of the Gods, “In the West there has been a steady focus on the ego and on the god of the ego – the monotheistic ideal. Monotheism exhibits what is essentially a pathological personality pattern projected on to the ideal of god: the pattern of the paranoid, possessive, power-obsessed male ego.” This puritan tradition has broken its relationship with the feminine. The colonizing rape of the land pushed these healing technologies into the deep, dark shadow.

Somehow now, as the Cartesian ego seemed to be perhaps loosening its grips on us, we become more whole, more aware of our deep intuitions, letting us remember our deep desires to reconnect with our hearts, and bodies, and the energies that stream through us, that there is magic within us that has been untapped. Technology is not regulated to your latest IPhone or heart rate monitor. There is a gradual, intuitive realizing of our shattered relationship with the plants, the earth, and the feminine. We are still maladapted, but from within us we our guided toward entelechy.

As a global community, our foray into physics has evolved greatly from the safe rigidity of Newtonian physics, to what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance,” which is what we now know as non-locality. This concept is of course spilling into the field theory of mind and consciousness. Consciousness is just a substrata of matter itself. Our waking consciousness is just one aspect of our whole and infinite consciousness. It is in accessing these states through ingestion, prayers, meditation, breathing, music, etc. that we are able to access a channel of deep knowledge, medicine, and love. These are spoken in languages that words cannot be put to. These mystical states, states of ecstasy, or spiritual emergency have been anthologized and ridiculed, ‘spooky actions at a distance.’ As physics advances to show that non-locality has proof, these states of consciousness can no longer be discarded. 

Jung says, “The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal the new and productive impulse cannot come from established values of the ego. When there is an impasse, and sterile time in our lives – despite an adequate ego development – we must look to the dark, hitherto unacceptable side that has been at our conscious disposal. This brings us to the fundamental fact that the shadow is the door to our individuality… it represents the first stage toward meeting the Self.”

If we believe McKenna’s stoned ape theory, humans dashed out of the African savannah, eyes brighter, minds wider, and loins throbbing, only to bestow on themselves delusion, devaluation, and oppression. Now, at this brink in time, we find ourselves at the height of innovation, making preparations to leave the planet for another, and the revival of shamanism, prodding us to push harder, faster, wider. Nature is not our enemy, it is our ally, the catalyst to our inner technologies.