Tag Archive for 'shaman'

The Extinction of Culture

How many of us truly realize that we are programmed from the moment we are born into this power structure and the reality that we call our life? Can any of us fathom the fact that the same biological machine, the same DNA coded species, the same hardware, and your very flesh and blood, existed thousands of years ago in an Bugs?animalistic state?  Science demonstrates that humans, no different than us, were in existence thousands of years ago. The animal possessed the same mind, but it existed in small hunter/gatherer tribes – gathering food from the woods, attacking small animals, foraging under rocks for insects and climbing up trees for fruits. This same animal did not have any writing. This same animal used primitive stone tools to prepare food and kill all threats, from harmless beasts to any stranger, who of course, existed in the same state of mind and therefore was a threat. This animal was our body, but it wasn’t our mind.  It was a homosapien, but can we still say that it was truly “human?”

What we have in common with our ancestors is this very primitive animal brain that runs on many primitive instinctual animal programs. The actual capabilities of this brain, however, are quite high. In the past, we could not use all of these brain functions because we did not exist on a state of consciousness where we were driven to utilize the hunter gatherer girlmore advanced “human” areas of our brain. Unfortunately, we are still not using the full capabilities of this brain.  We still have these biologically ingrained animalistic instincts and these instincts are really to follow the leader and stay programmed to consensus reality. Consensus reality at the time of early man was really just a collective band of humans that worked to do what it took to survive and fight off any potential threats.

To put it simply, we are innately programmed to survive in harsh unforgiving environments and social programming was the defense mechanism to protect the primitive human. To act like everyone else did: violent and primitive, was to simply ensure survival. Its disgusting for us to think about, but there was a time when a man was expected to rape and pillage and women were considered mere property. Today we condemn such behavior but to act in any other way in the not so distant past would be anything but human.

Our species – homosapiens – have existed for half a million years. Strangely, it was only about 40 thousand years ago when mankind suddenly saw this explosion of language, art, religion that has since driven our progress to this day. Somehow groups broke out of the animal and suddenly they let loose out of the hunter gatherer primate into a real human: the human as we know it, with ideas, with chKathakali / ?????
allenges, with art, with issues and with philosophy. We developed a new reality for ourselves using newly discovered psychological and physical tools, the fruit of using the rest of our brain and not kowtowing to the animal. By breaking out of consensus reality and redefining it, we then had to maintain this redefinition for future generations so they would not exist in the same primal world by following their innate animalistic programs. So culture was developed to maintain a new consensus reality. This way future human offspring born into this society, while still possessing the animal instinct, would be programmed into a different, socially created, mode of reality.

Many anthropologists and writers believe that it was the hallucinogenic drugs that were responsible for helping humans break out of the animal, break out of the primal mold and leave consensus reality. And thus, by breaking out of consensus reality, we did not need to follow the rules of the animal kingdom, which was the old reality. What humans demonstrated was the ability to redefine reality. Of course we could maintain those new realities using culture, but when we stopped breaking out of the animalistic mold, the normal processes go back into operation and we start going back to instinctual behavior, which is to realign the program to consensus reality, to follow the program culture has set for you. As we see in history, often cultures have remained largely stagnant until some significant worldview altering event.

Now we know how our ancestors escaped from the primal hell they inhabited thousands of years ago. But what kind of reality did we escape into.  Today, many humans in modern societies are plagued by disillusion, depression and anxiety disorders, and carcinogenic environments?  Coulsdon, Surrey, 2002Consider that very little of what we do throughout the day is truly conscious behavior. We are raised programmed into consensus reality and we stop thinking and start reverting back to the primal programs – “follow the leader and stay with the status quo.”  Even though culture was created using tools that could redefine it, like language and art, people instinctually tend to stay within the consensus mode rather than challenge the status quo by using cultural tools and trying to redefine reality. Modern western culture is the most rapidly evolving macro-culture, and while it is shifting ever more rapidly, it has not changed very much and most of the pushes to change culture have come from technology. Western culture is by far the most advanced and most far removed from the primal and it is because of we took technology and ingrained it into our culture, thus creating western industrialized civilization. The reason technology has driven our rapid advancement is because technology evolves at an exponential rate and continually produces artifacts that challenge our perceptions of reality. We are born programmed into our culture, we then interact with the constantly evolving technology, and what results is this self driving, self evolving force: the so called “information revolution.” Using culture we have been upholding our reality and by using technology we have created an automatically evolving culture.

Now here we are today, on the verge of singularity and rapid paradigm shattering changes that will completely redefine our existence and what it means to be human. Pretty soon “homosapiens” may not exist, because we will change ourselves to fit our own designs and we will no longer be human, but a strange bionic meld of man and machine. We will be, “more human than human” so to speak.  Master of RealityThis leads to the question philosophers have asked for thousands of years: what does it mean to be human? I think the real answer is that humans have the potential to escape social programming, for better or for worse. To be human is to exercise the will to select your reality and to pick and choose aspects of programming that you want. In essence, to be truly human is to escape social programming and choose certain behaviors so as to fit in comfortably, yet still think for oneself.

As discussed, little of what we do today is conscious, but when presented with the ability to leave earth and the ability to leave your body, all you truly have is your consciousness. Culture is basically a tool to maintain a consensus reality, but consensus reality is a very limited perspective on reality. Consensus reality, and therefore culture, are really holding us back and we need to understand these ideas as the necessary evils that they really are and realize that we can transcend this idea of consensus reality and culture. Today, humans in the western industrialized world largely have peace and safety, but we need to take the risk to break out of the program. We need to let it go, or it will have a very negative impact on our future.

We need to establish a primacy in personal reality over consensus reality. Soon we willLight-bot have the technology whereby we will not need culture to program us into reality, because we will comprehend and define our own reality. But we cannot let ourselves program into one person’s or one group’s or one government’s view of how reality should be or let this program influence us when we begin to re-engineer ourselves genetically. We need to destroy culture, establish individual primacy, kill the old gods, destroy the old paradigms, and start afresh. We need to break out of this power struggle reality and understand that it is not the only way, that there can be more, there is more, and that we just need to unlock it. If we want to deal with a rapidly changing reality and a tangible possibility of defining our own reality, then we must turn to the only tool that has proven to break us out of consensus reality and show us that reality is always anything we want it to be. We need to turn to the world where there is no limit to reality, and this is the world of the shaman and guru: the world of knowledge, spirits, sounds, and visions. It is a world that human cultures have found many ways to access, and a world that has contributed on so many levels to our advancing state. We just need to find the right keys that work in our own life to the right doors that exist in our own minds and we will see all the possibilities, and then we can aim for what we individually deem is the best.

Culture will soon be a dead idea, a relic from our “primal” pre singularity past. Soon we will be able to define our reality using technology. We won’t need a culture to program the human to work in reality because the individual will program reality to work with them. Soon we are going to jump-start evolution on a timescale never seen before and never comprehended before except in the altered state. We must make culture and the machinery of the status quo extinct or we will become extinct.  We must change, we must evolve, and we must abandon all that holds us back.  Forever changing is not easy and it is the burden of being human but it is this burden that allows us to transcend into beings that are more human than human.

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Spirituality: Past – Present – Future

It is clear that altered states of consciousness have played a major role in the development of the human species and must play a pivotal role in our future.  The merging of a technological-material society with the study of altered states truly began with the study of eastern philosophy by Europeans in the later 1800s and early 1900s.  This led to parallels drawn between these ideas, the ancient and modern western occult practices, visionand experiences with psychoactive drugs.  Europe was a hotbed for eclectic mystics including Crowley and Gurdjieff.  Once mescaline was introduced in the study of abnormal psychology the interest in altered states exploded.  This soon led to the discovery of new psychoactive ethno botanicals, synthetic chemicals, and native American shamanism.  Soon all these seemingly disseperate ideas coalesced into an understanding that altered states were critical to humanity.  But what role do altered states play besides the scientific study of the schizophrenic and the mystic?
Altered states of consciousness allow the exploration of five things, which often link together and overlap:

  1. Human psychology:  Transpersonal psychology has opened the door for the use of altered states of consciousness to explore and integrate the subconscious mind.
  2. Spirituality:  altered states of consciousness allow for the dissolution or near dissolution of the ego and an experience of divine ecstacy across all cultures and spiritual traditions
  3. Creativity: altered states of consciousness open up new pathways and new perspectives for thinking allowing ideas to flow forth.  Examples include the discovery of DNA by Francis Crick, the admitted applied use by programmers in silicon valley, and of course, this book.
  4. Exploration of reality: beyond the realm of divine ecstacy, altered states of consciousness allow for the exploration of inner space that eerily parallel our knowledge of outer space.  Contact with entities and visions reminiscent of deep space are conjured up in these spaces.
  5. Hedonism:  sometimes the altered state can just be an experience of pure bliss and fun.

The next subject for consideration is how altered states operate.  To understand this, one must look at the various ways altered states are induced.  Here is a basic breakdown:

  • Mind/Body Control:
    • Kundalini yoga
    • Holotropic Breathwork
    • Tantric Sex/Sex Magick
  • Drugs:
    • Hallucinogens
    • Deleriants
  • Stress:
    • Fasting
    • Sweat Lodge
    • Sleep deprivation
  • Spontaneous:
    • Mystical experience
    • Out of Body Experience
    • Near Death Experience
    • Sleep States
  • Technology:
    • Drum and Dance
    • Magick/Ritual
    • Brain Machines

Clearly there is a plethora of ways to achieve an altered state.  The states themselves are varied and some are better suited for specific purposes (of the five listed earlier) than others.  There is an alchemical action at work, as a material action and a material change causes an experience of the non material.   EEG recording electrodesThe nature of this alchemical process, however, remains a mystery.  While endogenous DMT release has been posited as one of the possibilities, I do not think that this is the critical factor.  Nor do I believe an altered EEG pattern is solely responsible.  Rather, I think that somehow, endogenous chemical processes or altered brain wave states (which may cause endogenous processes to occur) cause a flow of kundalini energy.  Thus, it is my belief that pranic/chi energy is solely responsible for altered states of consciousness.  While many will argue that traditional shamanism does not employ the technology or paradigm of kundalini yoga, and will be correct in that argument, I will suggest that shamanic practices activate the energy.  Now if all these methods use kundalini energy, why then do they derive different altered states and why, if kundalini yoga has complete mastery of bio-energy, do kundalini yogis not report similar experiences to practitioners of the other methods of altered states?

I see kundalini yoga as basically a shortcut to divine ecstacy, creativity and the exploration of reality.  Hombre Rojo - Red ManDrug induced shamanic states on the other hand unleash kundalini in an uncontrolled manner, which is why many followers of yoga and other natural more control oriented states suggest that use of such drugs is dangerous.  Of course, if one is adept at navigating altered states, drugs can open pathways far easier and faster than using just kundalini yoga.  I see the varied techniques as the difference between taking the highway, the scenic route, or skipping the drive and hopping on a jet.  You are traveling and the destination is the same, but what you see along the way is going to be very different.  Kundalini yoga takes some planning, maps, and you have to pay tolls.  The shamanic path allows you to see all the sights along the country road but you could get lost and may never arrive at the final destination.  Of course full mastery and full exploration of kundalini yoga is likely to allow the full exploration of all the possibilities of kundalini energy.

But how did these ideas originate?  How were the technologies discovered? No doubt drugs and sex magick were discovered naturally.  Yogic postures and breathing may very well have developed out of sex magick or fitness regimes.  Or perhaps through spontaneous movements on drugs to help the flow of energy, which is a commonly reported symptom of kundalini awakening.  The shamans’ development of rituals and symbols to work within the spirit world clearly led to the development of Magick as a separate technology.  But what about drum and dance?  Far more perplexing is the complexity and scientific understanding found in yoga.  Questions like this are perhaps better left to ponder in the altered states themselves.

Where does this leave us?  In our society we have neither the time no the patience for the rigorous training of yoga, we do not have the faith required in magick, nor the mythic framework for shamanism.  The neoshaman of today is at once at a great advantage and a great disadvantage.  Where once the secrecy of these arts ensured at the least that the knowledge was not diluted, now much of what passes for occult reality is nothing but new age trash.  An ambiguous topic is whether the neoshaman is at a loss with the lack of a mythological framework.   Without a mythological framework, it is difficult to traverse the realms of the altered state.  Of course, the myths also limit the experience and the response to the said experience.  The rational materialist framework has at once destroyed the myths but allowed for globalization and a profusion of new ideas and frameworks.  While rationality can only bring us as far as we have objective data (which is lacking in the world of the Other) it has allowed the seeker to pick and choose from the vast spiritual database of all surviving cultures.

At times it seems as if the exploration of altered states was some type of networked project.  Different scripts for the software of the soul were developed across the globe only now can finally be integrated into a cohesive methodology.  Indeed, the idea of a networked software project reminds us that the future holds many possibilities for further exploration of altered states.

What will the future of mystic states feel like?  Imagine getting high on information.  Imagine comprehending the entirety of wikipedia in one glorious eternal moment of bliss when one merges with the spirit Alex in the mind machineof the wiki.  Such experiences are not far off.  However, plugging into data sources will not provide us with the other aspects of the altered state, that is, self awareness and integration of the subconscious.  Already we have mind machines and binaural beat brain wave entrainment technology.  As we are better able to measure and map the processes of the mind, we shall dig deeper and deeper into the mysteries of consciousness.  Nanobots, targeted drugs, advanced vibratory and audio entrainment, and the further study of the human nervous system will no doubt coalesce to create as of now unimaginable technologies that can trigger a variety of mystical states of consciousness.

Everyone will soon be able to experience states in which the past present and future is realized as only now.  Everyone will be able to experience those brief, yet eternal moments of complete understanding where social programming dissolves and the underlying structure is exposed – where the links between concepts are seen and ideas flow faster than the speed of light.  The archetypical structure that created certain ideas will be seen in relation to the ideas of the past.  Soon, all imaginative people can speculate as to the future while the enlightened pioneers shall see the future.

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