Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Just want to keep us focused, you cover a whole lot of ground in your
book.
  

    
With regard to the Mysteries, they did a pretty good job of keeping
them a mystery...historical references give a fair estimation that
Plato, Aristotle and quite a good deal of the Greek cognitive elite
were either members or aware of the Eleusinians. Would you please
reiterate what your research indicates they may have been about?
  

    
25 is a good summary Ted, thanks. but in passing years, i'm less
concerned about legalization.  Like marijuana, it is effectively legal,
at least in some locations..  i do think the legal argument is tenuous
as Jon noted, but the book is larger than that i think.  

i found it interesting that Jon's focus in initial questions about the
shamanic roots of Christianity was interesting; if i had thought
commercially, i would have emphasized the Da Vinci Code kind of
resonance.  i actually read Baigent and Leigh's Holy Blood Holy Grail,
and am probably one of several hundred who later kicked themselves for
not thinking to turn it into a novel.
  

    
Ha, me too.  Although there are few of us who could have managed to
turn it into to one both as idiotic and as entertaining as Dan Brown's
version.
  

    
Well shoot, I don't have your book at hand then, but I'm very
interested in the basics of shamanism (w/ or w/o drugs) and how they
may still persist today. Are you willing to say a bit about that for
us?
  

    
I was fascinated by a couple of things in that early part of the book
- one was how you were defining a Western shamanic tradition, and the
other was how it fed into both Christianity and paganism/witchcraft as
competing religions. I've thought a lot about how we've built a complex
of myths around a misunderstanding of pagan traditions - the Halloween
version, with evil witches and warlocks, vampires, werewolves, etc. 
  

    
I've often thought that some of the more pathetic excesses of the "New
Age" movement reflect the fact that all human cultures must have a
shamanic/ecstatic tradition.  If  you're lacking that, it's like eating
a diet with no vitamin C - you're gonna get sick.

It's easy to roll your eyes at things like the seekers who recently
were broiled in that phony sweat lodge ceremony run by a con man, but
at least they're looking for what we've lost.
  

    
There is an interesting Jewish guy named Gershon Winker who runs a
retreat center in New Mexico.  He does a lot of collaborations with
American Indians and writes about a Jewish shamanistic tradition.

He has an orthodox hasidic background, did the yeshiva study and was
ordained as a rabbi.  Then he started thinking with his schlong,
abandoned his family, and started chasing women.  Now he acts as a
circuit rabbi and started showing up as a "new age" presenter at
promoted events and workshops.

I never could understand the appeal of Christian televangelists until
I encounter Winker.  I read his material and almost forked out $1000 to
go to one of his retreats in New Mexico.  The guy is smart and he
knows what he is talking about.  He also makes very interesting
connections between disparate traditions and with a single tradition. 
But then there is the carnival barker side to him.

<http://walkingstick.org/>    
  

    
the basics of shamanism - well, when i gave up on the historical
evidence, i returned to what i think is a truism - ecstatic, or merely
meditative states, are a practice anyone can pick up. like Hunter
Thompson, i don't recommend drugs to anyone, but they worked for me in
showing the way to interesting spaces. Shamanism also then is about
integrating those states into daily life - for me, values of
community/interpersonal closeness, and also environmentalism, come
through in a deep way in those states. even my interest in and
experience with online communities (um, yeah this one), "group minds",
grew out of those visionary states. my third book, though published
before this one, called Neurosphere, was all about that. 

so, carnival barker? yeah, but did you enjoy the roller coaster? 
  

    
I'm not certain, but I think it's true, that every culture has their
shamans in one form or another. Those who handle the myths, the sacred,
the epiphenomenal. 

Arthur Berger has a nice game for all this: take any myth, Greek myths
work easiest for us, and follow it through some filters; ex:

Myth/Sacred Story -- Oedipus -- theme of son killing father and       
                     
                                marrying mother

Psychoanalytic --            -- Oedipus complex

Historical experience        -- Revolutions; American, French,Arab

Elite Culture                -- Sophecles, Oedipus Rex; Shakespeare,  
                        

                             -- Hamlet
Popular Culture              -- Jack the Giant Killer

Everyday Life                -- Oedipus period in little children
  

    
You can play with Jung's archetypes and Joseph Campbell's cultural
parallels, or even add entheogenic as a filter.
  

    
(Have to say I'm amused that, like me, you have an MPA.)

What do you think about some of the Christian traditions that are
including hallucinogens now, like Santo Daime?
  

    
Good question about contemporary shamanism. Also wondering if you'd
like to talk about some of your own experiences?
  

    
whenever convenient, i wonder if you might comment on something i
heard just today, in a store ... that natural entheogens were
discovered all at about the same time all over the planet ... ¿ true ?
... i think the guy who said this is into terrence mc kenna, whom i've
not read ... but it seemed synchronistic to hear during this dynasty of
inkwell.vue ....
  

    
We were at the Tattered Cover in Lodo tonight and I tried to get a
copy of your book, but it wasn't even in their catalog yet, Don. Alas.
I shall keep trying.
  

    
Left Hand Books in Boulder has it, maybe Lighthouse books too. 

entheogens all discovered at the same time? i have no idea, but really
can't imagine how one would go about proving that. on the other hand,
Karen Armstrong recently wrote a book about the Axial Age, noting that
all the major world religions emerged at relatively speaking the same
time, between 800 BCE and 200 BCE (not sure why it doesn't explicity
include Christianity, but does point to Greek rationalism. 

i think it no great surprise that Santo Daime would find Christianity
and entheogens compatible. in the book i highlight the Greek Orthodox
religion i grew up in as one that has stayed largely unchanged in
ritual and approach for at least a thousand years, and much of the use
of chanting, lighting and incense is meant to put one in at least a
mild altered state.  the Orthodox monks of Mt. Athos added to their
monasticism a meditative exercise called "hesychasm", almost an Eastern
form of mediation.  there was a period in the 18th century when some
monks especially devoted to hesychasm started a reform movement, and
were known as Kollyvades, after the koliva funeral cake I mentioned
earlier which is baked with Demeter's pomegranate seeds. 

finally, as to my own experiences, i guess i would only say at first
they were intensely personal, and had a deeply spiritual impact on me,
who was otherwise a sophomoric atheist at the time.  Later, I
participated in more public festivals like Dead shows, but both sorts
of settings engendered group mind types of experiences that led me to
the works of Teilhard de Chardin, who i suppose best characterizes my
subsequent religious views (minus the Jesuit overlay), all of which was
the subject of my Neurosphere book. 
 
(as for the MPA Sharon, i guess amusing - but maybe shamanic values
like communalism or environmentalism actually lead some of us to a
non-profit, public service orientation. ) 
  

    
Can you say more about your religious views and how they connect to
Teilhard. (An Episcopal priest handed me a copy of _The Phenomenon of
Man_ when I was around 18; it had a profound impact on me at the time,
though I'd have to re-read it to remember why. The concept of noosphere
has come up a lot in my conversations and talks about the Internet).

Another question, though I'm not sure you can answer it solely based
on your research, is how drugs that were ritualized and ecstatic became
"recreational"?
  

    
oh, i don't know that i ever considered acid "recreational". sure had
some crazy fun party time, but always felt it was to be taken
seriously. 

Teilhard posited a noosphere, a thinking layer of united humanity,
resting above the biosphere, and that it was the product of forward
evolution.  the connectedness of humanity echoed teachings of many
world religions, but reconciled with the theory of evolution.  

working in the telecomm industry, and having been on the Internet at
least since 1980, i felt the technological phenomenon was a clear
manifestation of the theory of greater connectedness. Neurosphere tried
to articulate how one might watch the next developments of technology;
they should increase awareness, connectedness.  if i was smarter, i
would have invested in social networks as an obvious next instance
confirming the trend.  

i think the connection of technology and spirituality is not something
that is widely resonant, and I am wrestling with a followup to the
Neurosphere book with a title of Technologies of Awareness. Would that
catch anyone's eye out there? 
  

    
Yes indeed.  I would suggest including a little on the technologies of
obfuscation as well. Technologies has a sort of "tools" ring to it.

Tools need to be well-honed, proper to the specific application and
skillfully employed (to push the metaphor a bit).  BTW I like the
"practical" tone of such a metaphor. 
  

    
The discussion of "recreational" vs. more sacramental (or simply
exploratory) drug use is one that comes up repeatedly.

While there was no real consensus in the counterculture of the 60s and
early 70s as to what the drug experience meant or how it should be
approached, there was a widely shared consensus that it meant
*something* and was not simply a source of pointless fun.

With the collapse of the counterculture and the intensification of the
War on Some Drugs, I suspect that there are a lot of younger people
who might regard the idea that one would take, for example, LSD in
search of enlightenment to be simply bizarre.  When I went back to
college as an older student in the 1980s, I certainly ran into people
who just thought of LSD and other hallucinogens as "party drugs."
  

    
LSD is back again, at least in the high schools where I live,
Phoenix...almost all recreational, after the first ah-ha experience.
Upon reflection, that's because there are no shamans and no cultural
context for these kids to put it in.  It's just one more high.
  

    
Right, it seems we've actually moved backwards in that sense.  The
counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, for all its excesses and faults,
did at least include the idea that LSD and other broadly similar drugs
might be used for spiritual growth or to gain psychological insight.

I'm not sure if that idea is even in the air anymore.  Although I
guess we're discussing it here... :-)
  

    
That idea was part of the zeitgeist because there were popular culture
figures advancing it as a possibility. Even that wretch Leary had it
as a central part of his rap. 
  

    
Good point.  It's become completely pushed to the fringes (no offense
meant to anyone taking part in this discussion!).

I figure every President since Clinton has done at least some drugs
growing up and that they all know very well that the War On Some Drugs
is a hopeless crock and will never be "won."  And still the folly
continues.
  

    
I knew a guy who claimed to have attended acid parties at RFK's
apartment in Manhattan. A very credible source, by the way. Claimed
Rosey Grier scored it.