I have heard the view expressed that you should not read whilst doing a dieta, as the idea of dieta is to empty yourself in order to be able to receive the spirit of the plant or tree. (For an excellent account of what is dieta click here). I’m not ‘advanced’ enough for that and besides I dislike over-generalized rules – though the basic food restrictions of dieta are important as well as the requirements not to have sex or drink alcohol.
It is, however, important what you read on dieta. Someone once said to me, and I agree, that you diet the book as well. On a previous diet, over two days, I read the novel “State of Wonder” by Ann Patchett, which a fellow dietero had brought with her. The novel is set in the Brazilian Amazon and touches on the theme of relations between indigenous and white people – in the case of the book, white people working in a transnational North American pharmaceutical company.
After finishing the book, in ceremony that night, it filled my consciousness. I felt there was a terrible coldness at the core of the book – a heart of coldness rather than darkness – and wondered if this was deliberately and cleverly constructed by the author to show the effects of the objective, rationalist, clinical Western world-view of the characters or whether it was an aspect of her personality that was expressing itself, largely unconsciously, in the writing. If anyone knows the book and/or the author I’d be very interested to hear your view on this. Despite the title, there is very little wonder in the book.
My companions laughed as I spent most of the time after the ceremony in the early hours of the morning expounding on how much I disliked the book, especially the way I thought the author had imposed her will on two of the characters at the end of the book – though all credit to the writer for having such a provocative impact.
For my recent thirty day dieta, I took eight books with me, four of which were about the history of the Americas. This post will be about three of these books, which together form a trilogy called ‘Memory of Fire’. I aim to write further posts about the other books I read.
The three volumes of ‘Memory of Fire’ are written by Eduardo Galeano – a Uruguayan writer best known for another of his books, entitled ‘Open Veins of Latin America’ (1971), which was banned by the military governments not only of Uruguay but also Argentina and Chile. Hugo Chavez, ever provocative, gave a copy of this book to Barack Obama at the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago in 2009.
Eduardo Galeano
Galeano was born in Montevideo in 1940, and worked as journalist until the military coup in Uruguay in 1973, when he was first imprisoned and then exiled to Argentina. In 1976, the Videla military regime seized power in Argentina and Galeano fled to Spain after his name appeared on a death-list.
In three books, written between 1982-1986, Galeano traces the history of the Americas, beginning in Volume 1, called ‘Genesis’, with the creation myths of different indigenous peoples, and then, from 1491 to 1700, tracing the arrival and impact of the first European colonialists, conquistadores, adventurers, slave-traders and missionaries on the original inhabitants of the Americas.
The second volume ‘Faces and Moods’ covers the period 1701-1900, and the third volume, ‘Century of the Wind’, begins at the start of twentieth century and ends, relatively arbitrarily as the author himself says, in the year 1986.
This trilogy should be mandatory reading for anyone visiting Latin America.
What makes these books so creative and unusual is that the entire three volume history is sketched out in mosaic form, using short, (roughly half-page), passages of text, which include stories, poems, songs, theatrical vignettes, fables, excerpts from written historical records, accounts of historical events and the author’s own comments. All this is put together in a beautiful, almost hallucinatory prose style that is close to poetry. All these different pieces of the mosaic combine to form a complex, interrelated, colorful, magical narrative. If only all history could be taught this way.
To give a few examples that suggest the scope and depth of this work, all taken from the last volume about the twentieth century.
1. On the wonder of Latin America (p.123):
1943: Sans-Souci
Carpentier
……….. In Haiti, Carpentier learns that there is no magic more prodigious and delightful than the voyage that leads through experience, through the body, to the depths of America. In Europe, magicians have become bureaucrats, and wonder, exhausted, has dwindled to a conjuring trick. But in America, surrealism is as natural as rain or madness.
2. On Chaplin and Keaton (p.145):
1952: London
An Admirable Ghost
…………….Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
3. On Che Guevara (p.191):
Iconic photo of Che by Alberto Korda
1965, Havana
This Multiplier of Revolutions
Spartan guerillero, sets out for other lands. Fidel makes public Che Guevara’s letter of farewell. “Now nothing legal ties me to Cuba,” says Che, “only the bonds that cannot be broken.”
Che also writes to his parents and to his children. He asks his children to be able to feel in their deepest hearts any injustice committed against anyone in any part of the world.
Here in Cuba, asthma and all, Che has been the first to arrive and the last to go, in war and in peace, without the slightest weakness.
Everyone has fallen in love with him – the women, the men, the children, the dogs, and the plants.
4. On the Amazon (p.222):
1975: Amazon River
This is the Father of All Rivers,
the mightiest river in the world, and the jungle sprouting from its breath is the last lung of the planet. The adventurous and the avaricious have flocked to Amazonia since the first Europeans who came this way discovered Indians with reversed feet, who walked backward instead of forward over these lands promising prodigious fortunes.
Since then, all business in Amazonia starts with a massacre. At an air-conditioned desk in Sao Paolo or New York, a corporate executive signs a check which amounts to an extermination order, for the initial job of clearing the jungle begins with Indians and other wild beasts.
They gave the Indians sugar or salt mixed with rat poison, or bomb them from the air, or hang them by their feet to bleed to death without bothering to skin them, for who would buy the hides? The job is finished off by Dow Chemical’s defoliants, which devastated Vietnam’s forests and now Brazil’s. Blind tortoises stumble around where trees used to be.
I have to stop giving examples here as otherwise I will reproduce the whole book. The genius of the books lies in how these fragments reverberate together and combine to produce a compelling overall picture.
The key point (if such a nominalistic word like ‘point’ can be used in this context) I took from this trilogy is that the whole continent’s history is drenched in blood. I knew this about Mexico as I lived there for seven years and had become fascinated by its history. In every country the pattern was the same – colonization, slaughter, torture, rape, slavery alongside forced evangelization and expropriation of natural resources – especially, in the case of the Spanish, gold and silver.
Galeano shows how not only principally the Spanish in Latin America, followed by the Portuguese in Brazil, were leading this colonial pillage, but they were supported by English capital and the lucrative slave trade as well as by Dutch trading companies. Much of the gold and silver that was sent to the Spanish Crown was used to fund debts incurred to Flemish and English financiers. Globalization was already in its formative, early stages.
What also particularly struck me is how this pattern has continued throughout the twentieth century – what the English newspaper editor Harold Evans praised as the “American Century” (meaning the USA). Galeano lays bare the mechanics and excesses of US Imperialism, and shows how the US, facilitated by the US Army School of the Americas they created in Panama for training budding military dictators, brutally and bloodily intervened in Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, and 1925 and even in 2009 according to Global Research and Wikileaks), Nicaragua (1909 and 1979-early 1990s), La Paz, Bolivia (1946), Bogota, Columbia (1948), Guatemala (1953), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973), Uruguay (1973) and Argentina (1976) to overthrow democratically elected governments and/or install and maintain puppet military dictatorships.
(For a really good article in the UK newspaper ‘The Guardian’ by Baltasar Garzón about what happened in Chile in 1973 and subsequently, published very recently on the 40th anniversary of the military coup, click here.)
‘El Grito por Allende’ by Eduardo Galeano
In addition to aiding the assassination of democratically elected leaders such as Salvador Allende in Chile, the US were implicated in the so-called accidental deaths in aircrashes, all in 1981, of Jaime Roldós, President of Ecuador, Omar Torrijos, the de facto leader of Panama and General Rafael Hoyos Rubio, the Head of the Peruvian Army, all opponents to US economic interests. All deaths were put down to: “Bad luck, human error, bad weather”.
(As an aside, the background to the deaths of Roldos and Torrijos are well explained in Jon Perkins excellent book, ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’.)
‘Century of Wind’ gave me great, additional respect for Fidel Castro. Despite the problems of Cuba, which I know first hand from my visit there seven years ago, and which have been largely caused by the US economic blockade, Fidel has managed for over 50 years to resist US attempts to overthrow or assassinate him.
It is said that “history is written by the victors”. These three books show history on the side of the vanquished. Overall, despite this terrible history of oppression, plundering and suffering over five centuries, what shines through in these three books is the spirit of the people, constantly rebelling, constantly being crushed, yet never extinguished.
The trilogy is a remarkable achievement and comes with some impressive recommendations. Doris Lessing, one of my favorite authors and winner of the Nobel Prize Winner for Literature in 2007, said simply: “I like this book”.
And I like very much what the English writer and critic John Berger wrote:
“To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness. Thanks to him, our crimes will be remembered. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness, furious.”
If you have any interest in Latin America, I urge you to read these books. I am very grateful to my friend S. for giving them to me. A perfect gift for my dieta.
I am lying on my thin mat in the dark under a mosquito net in my monk-cell like wooden room. It is two hours before the tenth ceremony of my 30 day dieta at 9pm and I am taking refuge from the mosquitoes – this is their ‘happy hour’.
In my mind, I am calculating the dates of the next five ceremonies, which happen every other night, until I reach 15, when I plan to make the return trip upriver to Pucallpa. I’m missing my son, his partner, their beautiful Belgian Shepherd dog Lenka, and my friends in Pucallpa, as well as all the people I am in touch with via the internet.
Suddenly the unbidden thought occurs to me: “I could go back in five days after the twelfth ceremony. After all, it’s not as if there are a rigid, set number of days for this dieta – it can be from ten days to one year.”
This idea becomes enormously attractive. The dieta is going well but I have not felt in strong contact with the palo that I am dieting. (Palo is a generic word in the tradition I am working in that is used to describe a tree or plant that is taken into the body during a dieta). As often, I have hugely overblown expectations that, because this is a shamanic dieta, I will be seeing brightly colored energy patterns in the form of Shipibo designs. So far, this has not really happened, though once I did see an animal like a small raccoon crawling all over my Maestro, which I assumed was one of his guardianes or familiars from the spirit world.
I work out all sorts of reasons connected with work, being able to do the yoga class I had recently discovered, being able to be in contact with friends and family, and even concerning finances why it seems a really good idea to end the dieta after twelve ceremonies. It all makes perfect sense. Fortunately, I have the presence of mind to think that I must ask Madre Ayahuasca about this decision in the ceremony that night.
About thirty minutes before the ceremony is due to begin, I get up from my mat and go to the porch of my Maestro’s house where he is talking with an older Shipibo man who often also attends ceremonies. Shortly after, they are joined by my Maestro’s elder brother (who is 82), together with his older brother’s son and daughter, who have all arrived to take part in the ceremony.
My Maestro asks me to put up the large mosquito net that the ceremonies are conducted under. This is the first time I have done this unaided. I know that I should not tie the eight strings of the mosquito net to the beams of the house in my normal way – unfortunately, I never went to the Boy Scouts as a child so have only learned to tie one crude knot. The trouble with this knot is that under the weight of the net pulling it, it becomes impossible the following morning to untie the knot, which then has to be cut free.
I have seen that my Maestro has a way of tying knots that can be gently pulled apart the following day as if by magic. I regret that I have never asked him to show me this knot, but manage to secure the net by winding the strings many times around the beams and assorted long nails of the house’s structure. I pray this will be good enough and thankfully the net stays in place all night.
Once we are all under the net, it is down to business. My Maestro softly whistles an icaro into the white plastic medicine bottle. I have previously mixed three different batches of different medicine into this bottle, one of which had been given to me by a young Australian woman who was here for two ceremonies towards the beginning of my dieta. The particular medicine that she had was made by the most renowned of the four elder brothers of my Maestro.
I am handed a beautiful wooden cup, shaped like a small chalice, from which to drink the medicine. The five Shipibos gulp the medicine down straight from the bottle. As always, I find it hard to welcome the medicine into my body. I cough, rinse my mouth with water, spit, and blow my nose four times. I think of my friend who is the only person I know that drinks the medicine as if it were a fine cognac, slowly sipping it and savoring the flavor. No wonder she has such a strong and intimate connection with Madre Ayahuasca.
The medicine comes on strongly and quickly. I feel pleased to have an empty stomach to receive her and glad that I had a good, long shit shortly before the ceremony, which makes me think that, hopefully, I will not need to be rushing out to the bathroom in the early stages of the ceremony.
As the mareación (the word used here to describe the effects of the medicine) is building, loud mainly Peruvian pop music starts to play nearby. Actually I quite like the softer, gentler songs but it’s mixed in with American hip-hop, which seems wildly incongruous. After about twenty minutes (I think, but by now normal time is no longer counting) the music stops as suddenly as it began.
There is then a long wait before the first icaro is sung. I’m expecting my Maestro to start singing his traditional opening icaro, but he waits patiently, smokes a mapacho, and then waits more. Maybe, my increasingly scrambled brain thinks, he’s waiting for the energy from the music to dissipate. (Later, I learned he was waiting to see if anyone else might start to sing).
By now, the mareación is full on in its early stages. I have been attending to these early stages with as much care as I can muster, and many of my previous ceremonies in this dieta have been focused on what happens in this early phase. I realized a number of months back that the images I typically experience here are fast-moving, bizarre and relatively meaningless. It’s my subconscious representing itself as a constantly shifting, cartoon, superficial, plastic kind of Disney World – as I first thought.
Later, the more interesting idea came to me that this material is not purely personal, as I had first assumed – influenced by nearly all the figures in psychology I had studied (with a few brave exceptions like Jung and Hillman), who seek to locate our psyches solely in an inner realm and do not see their connection with the larger world-soul.
I had begun to see that this material that I experience at the start of the mareación, whilst clearly personal at one level, is also intertwined with and reflects deep processes of social conditioning. Just before my dieta, I had found the following quote by Terence McKenna which expresses this succinctly and beautifully:
“You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
In an early ceremony in this dieta, I had become conscious that I need not be at the mercy of these images – that is a purely passive recipient of them. I could stop them by opening my eyes and focusing on the present moment and, with effort, I could also stop them with my eyes shut.
For several months now, and especially in the opening ceremonies of this dieta, I have been undergoing will training with Madre Ayahuasca. She’s good at psychic boot-camp. She showed me how to create my own imaginative images by first visualizing and focusing solely on a huge, ancient oak tree with spreading branches on the outskirts of a village in Southern England, where I used to live. Is this what Jung and Corbin were getting at by active imagination, I wondered? And in my third ceremony of this dieta, I experienced being completely concentrated in my will which I visualized as a shark. Hence its name, ‘Fin’.
Back to the present. There is now an an increasingly slippery, chaotic feel to my mareación. It’s never quite clear to me how I pass out of this phase – I’m sure its helped by the icaros that are now being sung, but pass out of it I do. It’s in the following stage that I usually experience the most valuable teaching and learning.
I went into the ceremony with the intention of connecting more strongly to the palo I am dieting. I am holding a small piece of this palo that a friend had given me. Suddenly, I am in the presence of the spirit of the palo, what the Shipibo call its ‘dueño’, which translated literally means ‘owner’.
This presence is vast, formidable, completely implacable. He tells me – and the presence is undoubtedly masculine – that if I want to experience his world, I have to agree not to write about it. Immediately, my heart agrees, though later my mind has its reservations. He does not even want me to mention his name. Nothing. No publicity, which he is not remotely interested in – he almost despises it.
After I agree to his terms, I am allowed to visit his world.
Later, I think that for me at least, and possibly others, entry to his world comes at an appropriate price. “Cobra caro”, as is said in Spanish – “the price is high“. He was asking me for an offering, and also making it clear that his world is not to be entered lightly and certainly not to be used as blog-fodder. I am being asked to sacrifice the part of my ego that likes to tell its adventures, (if they are indeed its adventures, which I doubt, though the ego usually comes along for the ride), and that has to be a good thing.
It may seem paradoxical that I am writing this now but I understood that it is the specific details and content of his world that are not to be revealed. Writing about the process of arriving there is just about acceptable.
Gracias a la Madre Ayahuasca. Gracias a todos los Palos Curanderos.
Painting by Michael Birnsting
Dear Readers
I am just about to go on a thirty day dieta at an indigenous community about ten hours downriver of Pucallpa. No internet or cellular phones for a month. Wonderful! So this blog will be quiet for a month or so.
In addition, I will be doing the dieta in a more traditional way, staying alone in a small wooden house in the jungle by the riverbank outside the community – apart from participating in the fifteen ayahausca ceremonies that are part of the dieta.
This time I will be dieting ayahuma, one of the mighty Amazonian trees.
Previously, I have dieted the two plants bobinsana and chricisanango, both separately and together. I wrote about these experiences here. For a very good article about what is a dieta, click here. And for an interesting discussion thread about the need or not to comply with the restrictions of a dieta, click here.
One of Don Machinga’s roots
I have also previously dieted Machinga – another huge tree, who was the inspiration for this blog. Don Machinga has been quiet recently, partly because I inappropriately said too much on this blog about my experiences with him and Madre Ayahuasca. I wrote about all this here.
Communicating about our experiences with La Madre Ayahausca and the plant spirits is tricky. I have been very struck by Rudolf Steiner’s advice (though I don’t follow it!) that we should not talk at all to other people about experiences of what he calls ‘higher realms of consciousness’. I can see that it can take them too far into the daylight world of ego consciousness.
On the other hand, I recently came across an podcast by Terrence McKenna where he says:“It really frustrates me when people have psychedelic experiences and don’t talk about them, because to me, that’s what they’re for. They’re to fertilize the enterprise of communication. It’s to be talked about. And if it’s not talked about it’s sort of like seeds which fall on sterile ground.”
One other reason to talk to others is to help assimilate the experiences. The trick is to bring it into the ego-world but without letting the ego colonize the experience.
I also find talking to others helps me ground the experiences and put into context some of its crazier excesses. In the act of communicating to others, I can see that what some of what I thought to be true in the mareación, may be overly subjective distortions or exaggerations. Still, as Theodor Adorno, the Marxist social theorist, said about psychoanalysis: “Nothing is true in psychoanalysis except its exaggerations.”
Clearly, there are no rigid rules about this. A lot depends on how the experience is talked about and the reasons for talking about it – to genuinely share with others or to impress them.
I look forward to engaging with what I want to communicate about my experience of this dieta when I come back to Pucallpa in early September.
Before then I will leave you with a short story I found:
“There is a great story on a researcher who went to the Aborigines. During a conversation, she said something about the 5 senses to an old Aborigine woman, who completely stopped doing what she was doing, which was quite unusual among the Aborigines. She looked at the researcher and said “So you only have 5 senses?! Well, that explains a lot…”
Huichol artwork
Like many people, I avidly read Carlos Castenada in the late sixties and seventies. About a year ago, I re-read his second book, first published in 1971, ‘A Separate Reality.’
I was impressed (again). The book is a very clear and well-argued account of the reality(ies) that mainstream Western culture denies and/or ridicules, and which La Madre Ayahuasca can show us. As a bonus, Carlos writes like an angel.
Wondering what had happened to Carlos Castenada, as I had lost track of him over the years, I researched him on the internet. For this kind of purpose, the internet is indeed a thing of wonder.
The article about him on Wikipedia refers to the controversy in which he and his work became embroiled in the seventies. In particular, there was a book published in 1976 called ‘Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory’ by Richard De Mille – adopted son of the famous Cecil B. De Mille, and an early convert in 1950 to Scientology to boot, (though he and L. Ron Hubbard later parted company for reasons of “mutual dislike”).
Richard de Mille claimed that Castenada was a charlatan and plagiarist. This was based on the painstaking detective work he had done, going over the library records in UCLA, where Carlos had done his PhD, and showing that at the exact times in his books that Carlos was claiming to be with his teacher, Don Juan Matuas, in Mexico or Arizona, he was actually taking out library books in California.
This study did a lot to damage Castenada’s reputation and raise questions about the veracity of the accounts of his time with Don Juan. Reading ‘A Separate Reality’, I have to say that I find the accounts completely convincing. If they are indeed made up, it is still a beautiful and astonishing work of fiction.
A couple of months ago, I came across one of Castenada’s later books, ‘The Eagle’s Gift’ (1981). This book begins after the time that his teacher Don Juan has vanished – it is suggested into another dimension – with his group of eight female warriors, three male warriors and four couriers.
Initially, I found the book heavy-going and somewhat incredulous, but then began to suspend judgement and enter into the story. Carlos has been made leader of a group of seven people, all of whom, including himself, are massively disoriented because of the disappearance of Don Juan.
The book turns into a gripping account of his attempt, aided by La Gorda, one of the group, to recover his memory about everything that had happened leading to the disappearance of Don Juan and his group.
About two thirds of the way through ‘The Eagle’s Gift’, I started to look into Carlos Castenada again on the internet and came across this excellent article on Salon.com, written in April 2007, called ‘The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castenada.’
The basic argument of the article, to quote the summary at the beginning, is as follows:
“The godfather of the New Age led a secretive group of devoted followers in the last decade of his life. His closest “witches” remain missing, and former insiders, offering new details, believe the women took their own lives.”
This article is disturbing. It says that Castenada vanished from public view in 1973 and devoted his time to accumulating a cult-like group of women followers. In the 1990s he once again began appearing in public to promote Tensegrity, a group of movements that he claimed had been passed down to him by 25 generations of Toltec shamans.
More disturbing is the fact that when Castenada died in April 1998 of liver cancer, within a few days five women from his inner circle disappeared. In 2006, the remains of one of them, Patricia Partin, found in Death Valley, were identified using DNA analysis. The others vanished without trace.
The article in Salon.com gave me a more troubling perspective on what I was reading in ‘The Eagles Gift’. Carlos’ desire to lead a group of seven other apprentices of Don Juan to enter another dimension – mirroring the path that Don Juan had followed with his group – began to seem like an eerie presentiment of the negative cult-like aspects of Casteneda’s later years and death.
Despite this, however, there are some exceedingly interesting passages in Chapter Eight of the book, called “The Right and the Left Side Awareness”, about the nature of perception.
“Don Juan told us that we are divided in two. The right side, which he called the tonal, encompasses everything the intellect can conceive of. The left side, called the nagual, is a realm of indescribable features: a realm impossible to contain in words. The left side is perhaps comprehended, if comprehension is what takes place, with the total body; thus its resistance to conceptualization.”
The left side is the site of what Don Juan calls “the second attention”. To quote at greater length:
“Another feature of those states of heightened awareness was the incomparable richness of personal interaction, a richness our bodies understood as a sensation of speeding. Our back-and-forth movement between the right and left sides made it much easier for us to realize that on the right side too much energy and time is consumed in the actions and interactions of our daily life.
La Gorda [Castenada’s companion] could not describe what this speed really was, and neither could I. The best I could do would be to say that on the left side I could grasp the meaning of things with precision and directness. Every facet of activity was free of preliminaries or introductions. I acted and rested; I went forth and retreated without any of the thought processes that are usual to me.”
I think those with more than a passing familiarity with La Madre Ayahuasca will recognize the accuracy and subtlety of this description.
Casteneda continues:
“We became cognizant then that in these states of heightened awareness we had perceived everything in one clump, in one bulky mass of inextricable detail. We called this ability to perceive everything at once intensity. For years we had found it impossible to examine the separate constituent parts of those chunks of experience; we had been unable to synthesize those parts into a sequence that would make sense to the intellect. Since we were incapable of those syntheses, we could not remember.”
This paragraph offers a brilliant and remarkable explanation as to why, in some encounters with La Madre, I feel I am having significant experiences but afterwards cannot remember them.
He goes on to say that our incapacity to remember is because we cannot order these experiences in a linear sequence. “The task of remembering“, he writes, “was properly the task of joining our left and right sides, of reconciling those two distinct forms of perception into a unified whole.”
When I read these lines, I felt very excited because they re-connected me to the fascinating and erudite book by Iain McGilchrist called ‘The Master and the Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern Western World’ (2009), which I have raved about before.
McGilchrist’s basic proposition is that the right and left hand brain hemispheres represent two distinct modes of ways of being and perception – what we pay attention to and how we do that. In brief, the right side of the brain (in Don Juan’s terms the nagual) is able to be present to the world as a whole, in its flux and embodied particularity, whilst the left side of the brain (the tonal in Don Juan’s language) represents this experience to us one-step removed so that we can control and manipulate it.
The world of the left side, in McGilchrist’s words, is “explicit, abstracted, compartmentalized, fragmented, static (though its bits can be re-set in motion, like a machine), essentially lifeless. From this world we feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful.“
McGilchrist adds that the world of the left side of the brain is the world of the ego, of survival. His basic thesis is that contemporary culture has come to be overly-dominated by this side of the brain. Instead of serving the right side of the brain, the left side has usurped control.
Casteneda was writing about this in his own language 28 years before McGilchrist’s book was published. I find it hard to credit that he was able to make all this up. His work may well be a combination of fiction and non-fiction but, 45 years after his first book was published, his work is still an eloquent and creative exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness, which continues to inspire others and show that another world is possible.
It’s worth remembering too that Castenada was originally Peruvian, from Cajamarca. He was born in 1925 and moved to the USA in the 1950’s so he is writing in his non-native language which makes his writing style all the more remarkable.
One final point about Castenada. The basic quest of Don Juan is for power, not in a narrow egoistic sense, nor power over other people, but still power. But to what end was this power used for? In Casteneda, it seemed to be an end in itself rather than to be used for healing others. Castenada and Don Juan would probably reply that it is in service of the evolution of the universe.
ADDENDUM: for a reasonably good BBC documentary (apart from the amateurish psychedelic graphics) about Castenada which includes interviews with people who studied with him, click here.
Illustration by William Blake
One possible explanation of what substances – commonly called hallucinogenics, psychedelics, entheogens or psychoactives – do is to remove the filters from our normal way of experiencing the world.
By the way, none of those four terms above strike me as satisfactory. I particularly dislike hallucinogens as it automatically implies that the worlds encountered with La Madre Ayahuasca are illusory, whereas many people say that: “they are more real than reality.”
Psychedelics, I think, as a term comes with too much baggage from the sixties, and also suggests a specific set of visual images that people may or may not experience.
I, for example, see very few of the visual geometric images that people often experience with la Madre Ayahuasca.
Entheogens, with the meaning of “generating the divine within” is much closer to the mark but still has a somewhat clumsy ring about it.
I like the name psychoactives, but on reflection, there is a problem here too in that our psyche is always active. Sugar, caffeine, alcohol and, in fact, anything we ingest (or even experience) is also psychoactive. We are what we eat.
Whatever we call these various substances, whether man-made like LSD, or natural like La Madre Ayahuasca and Grandfather Peyote, what they all have in common is that they can show us that what we normally experience as a given, taken-for-granted reality, is, in fact, constructed. This can be both wonderfully liberating and/or profoundly destabilizing.
What first brought me to La Madre Ayahuasca in my fifties was still trying to figure out an experience I had as a callow youth with LSD when I was catapulted into so many different worlds, and worlds within worlds, and worlds within worlds within worlds etc., that I was never sure that I had returned to the world I first started in. In one way, of course, that was true. My life was forever altered by that experience and the world I thought I knew no longer existed.
R D Laing
I came across a term that R.D. Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist, coined, which I thought best described the experience that LSD gave me – ‘ontological insecurity’ – the sense that there is no firm psychic ground to stand on.
Post-modern philosophy has been making much the same point throughout the twentieth century. (Mind you, it’s one thing to know this intellectually and another to fully experience it.)
Others, such as Dennis McKenna, whether they are consciously following Nietzsche or not, refer to this groundlessness as the abyss. Nietszche also warns us that:
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
It took me thirty years, which encompassed two marriages and having two children, to have the courage to return to these experiences of groundlessness.
Thankfully, the experiences I have had with La Madre Ayahuasca have not been so profoundly terrifying as that initial LSD experience and, if anything, have shown me the opposite – that there is indeed psychic ground that we can stand on. This ground, though, is constantly shifting. As my friend and teacher Papamiki once said to me (and I don’t know if this is original or not):
“The bad news is that we are falling through the air without a parachute. The good news is that there is no ground.”
One major difference that I have found with La Madre Ayahuasca compared to LSD is that, even in the worst moments, I have sensed a presence accompanying me, that is ultimately benign – though very exacting. The experience with LSD was one in which I was ultimately completely existentially alone and lost in a meaningless, random world.
This difference is partly due, I think, to the fact that LSD is a man-made compound and that we are graced with La Madre Ayahuasca’s presence through her physical existence as a plant in nature.
The difference is also due to the fact that I have always encountered La Madre Ayahuasca in a ceremonial context with capable guides helping me navigate by means of the icaros they have sung.
So, to return to the idea at the beginning of this entry, and which is actually a theme present throughout this blog, how do we understand the kinds of experiences we have with – to use another inadequate descriptive term – mind-altering substances?
One common idea is to think in terms of filters – that these substances remove the filters that normally mediate our experiences of so-called reality. As the comedian Robin Williams once said: “Reality – what a concept!”
The most eloquent exponent of this view of filters was the author and philosopher Aldous Huxley, who recounted his experiences of taking mescaline in Los Angeles in May 1953 in “The Doors of Perception” – a title which is believed to be behind Jim Morrison’s choice of the name of his band, ‘The Doors’.
The mescaline was administered by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond who Huxley had written to after he had read about his research on schizophrenia using mescaline. Humphrey Osmond’s story is also noteworthy. He invented the term “psychedelic” which he said meant “mind manifesting” and called it “clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations.” Unfortunately that is no longer true, especially since Timothy Leary got hold of the term.
Osmond is also known for a study in the late 1950s in which he attempted to cure alcoholics with high doses of LSD. He claimed to achieve a fifty percent success rate. One of his patients, Bill W., was a man who would later co-found ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’.
Incidentally, Huxley had previously written in 1952 that drugs were “toxic short cuts to self-transcendence”. Not a man to mince his words, Aldous. Also, not a man incapable of changing his mind.
Illustration from the ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ by William Blake
The title of Huxley’s book was taken from William Blake’s beautifully illustrated poem ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Blake, too, has long been a hero of the romantic poets and the counter-culture. His poem, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, which is worth reading in full, and the first four lines of which are often used to describe psychedelic experience, begins:
And Eternity in an hour”
To conclude this entry, I’m going to use a quote I found in the excellent Wikipedia article entitled ‘The Doors of Perception’:
“In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on LSD that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception. Huxley was overwhelmed to the point where he decided his previous experiments, the ones detailed in Doors and Heaven and Hell, had been nothing but entertaining sideshows. He wrote in a letter to Humphrey Osmond, that he experienced “the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. … I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been. … And the things which had entirely filled my attention on that first occasion, I now perceived to be temptations – temptations to escape from the central reality into a false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge.”
This quote takes this entry full circle in contrast to my own LSD experience, which, in reverse to Huxley’s experience of LSD, was a vivid and terrifying shadow of what I was later to find with La Madre Ayahuasca.
Whilst I have been in Mexico, I found myself absorbed in compiling a list of the 100 best films I have seen to be included on my Facebook page.
(Those of you who are Friends with me on Facebook, can see the full list here)
As I was doing this, and thinking about the films that had impacted me most strongly – which was the main criteria for being on my list – I had the idea to write a blog entry about the seven best ayahuasca related movies.
These movies might be – actually hopefully will be – a surprise. I’m deliberately not including any of the ayahuasca documentaries which seem to be mushrooming at the moment nor other films with a more or less explicit focus on ayahuasca such as Jan Kounen’s two 2004 films ‘Blueberry/Renegade’ and ‘Other Worlds’ – nor related documentaries such as Mitch Schultz’s ‘DMT the Spirit Molecule’. All or part of these three films can be viewed on the links indicated in the previous sentence and are well worth seeing.
(Also, I do intend to stop writing in lists soon – they do seem, however, for better or worse, to generate blog traffic. Actually, I’m beginning to suspect that writing lists is part of a neo-liberal or Illuminati New World Order plot to dumb-down writing, get us to believe that everything can be quantified, and to think constantly in hierarchical categories.)
So, with no more ado and no further discursions into the ideological basis of lists, here is the list of films. Be warned – this list contains spoilers!
1. Andrei Rublev (1966)
If any film deserves to be authentically described as spiritual – a now much debased and over-used word – this is the one. It actually made my number one film of all time, and I’ve only ever seen it on DVD. The director of the film is the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky (132-1986) of whom Ingmar Bergman said:
“Tarkovsky for me is the greatest director, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”
The film basically tells the story of the artistic and spiritual path of Andrei Rublev – a Russian icon painter in the 15th century. Without being overly-deterministic and spelling everything out, as a Hollywood film typically would, it shows how the events of his life formed him to create the radiant, spiritual masterpieces that were his icon paintings.
To me, it illustrates the path of a shaman. It shows the dedication needed (the years of apprenticeship spent cleaning his masters’ brushes), the many twists and turns of the path, the confrontation with darkness, and ultimately the need to be graced by God or Spirit to truly work in service of others.
The last point is made in an extraordinary sequence in which a young boy oversees the casting of a huge bell, knowing his life is at stake if the bell does not ring properly. He claims to have the knowledge to make the bell passed on to him by his late father – a renowned bell-maker – but when the bell is finally made, struck, and rings true, the boy collapses on the ground in tears saying he did not really know how to make it.
To the watching Andrei, who has stopped painting, this is an example of the power of faith. Breaking his vow of silence, he tells the boy they should go together.”You’ll cast bells. I’ll paint icons.”
2. The Truman Show (1998)
Normally, I have to confess that I can’t stand Jim Carrey. He seems to be constantly acting a caricature of himself. But in this film, and also in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he is brilliant.
This film uses the metaphor of a man whose whole life is unknowingly to him the basis of a reality show populated by actors to explore the way that our everyday reality is socially conditioned and constructed.
It’s essentially a film about ‘waking up’, which has been one of La Madre Ayahuasca’s principal teachings to me. ‘Waking up’ is also an initiation. In the film, as the character Truman Burbank grows to suspect the nature of the world that has been made for him, and, overcoming his fear of water, he embarks on a journey to the limits of this world where he finally meets and confronts, Christof, his creator. (As a piece of movie gossip, this part was originally offered to Dennis Hopper.)
Cristof attempts to persuade Truman to return to his artificial world arguing he will be more happy there. Truman’s response is to walk through the Exit Door. As Rumi wrote:
“Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”
3. The Matrix (1999)
This is a film that I was not so impressed with when it first came out – especially with all the hype surrounding its release. Two years into my relationship with La Madre Ayahuasca, I saw it again and got the point.
Like The Truman Show, but using a different metaphor – that of being plugged into machines – it shows that the world we typically take for granted is an illusion. Once we ‘wake up’ out of this world, in the case of The Matrix by taking the blue pill, there is no turning back.
Recent experiences with La Madre Ayahuasca are showing me that The Matrix really might be onto something. As I wrote in a previous post, in one ceremony, I had the realization that what I thought was this rather trashy, B-movie world of my subconscious that I had to avoid getting trapped in, was not just a personal realm, as most psychology would have us believe, but was rather a realm of social conditioning.
That realm, in my opinion, exercises much more power over us than we would like to believe. The interesting question is who controls that realm?
4. Groundhog Day (1993)
This is said to be His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s favorite film. Actually I just made that up – I suspect he prefers Pulp Fiction – after all, the guy has gotta relax some time. However, I did once see on a website the film described as the Buddhists’ favorite film of all time.
This film brilliantly shows the iterative, cyclical nature of thinking, of learning, of our current lives as a whole, and of our past and future lives. It points out the paradox that we are always the same and yet constantly changing.
For me, the strongest connection with ayahuasca is the loop-like nature of my thinking. La Madre Ayahuasca clearly shows me how my mind revolves in repetitive circles, and, as in the film, the only way out is through the connection with the heart.
5. Avatar (2009)
This film has the most obvious connection with La Madre Ayahuasca on the list. In fact, I was told at an ayahuasca retreat by one of my fellow participants that he had met movie special-effects technicians who had worked on this film at another retreat and they were regular drinkers of ayahuasca.
I’m sure that nearly all the readers of this blog don’t need me to spell out the plot or the ayahuasca connection. If you are reading this and have not seen the film, do go and see it.
The curious thing for me is that despite its critique of the brutal exploitation of natural resources and indigenous people and the over-dominance of the technological view of nature, the film is itself an example of that high technology world with its state-of-the-art 3D experience.
6. Solaris (1972)
I’m referring here to the original 1972 version here by Tarkovsky – the same director who made Andrei Rublev – not the Hollywood remake thirty years later, which actually was also good, notwithstanding the prime shots of George Clooney’s butt.
This film, like others on the list, explores how reality is constructed. The difference with this film, though, is that rather looking at how reality is externally imposed upon us, the film explores the way in which we each actively construct our own worlds.
This is done in the film through a group of astronauts in orbit around a strange planet that has the ability to make real whatever they are thinking and feeling, especially in relation to their repressed memories. Similarly, La Madre Ayahuasca is known for her ability to pull out of people past, often traumatic memories, but in her case as a way to help heal the wounds occasioned by the original traumas and perpetuated by the repressed memories..
Incidentally, in case this film sounds like a sci-fi version of the Law of Attraction, it has a beauty, subtlety and mystery completely lacking in the crass, spiritualized materialism of much of the stuff I have seen about the Law of Attraction.
7. Wings of Desire (1987)
In one of my very early encounters with La Madre Ayahuasca, I re-experienced my bodily incarnation into this life. One minute, I seemed to be floating in some distant, unknown realm, the next I felt myself drawn into a human body, and knew I was going to be a certain personality.
When I thought about this afterwards, I remembered Wim Wender’s haunting and beautiful film Wings of Desire, and the scene where the angel decides to be human in order to experience the sensory pleasures of life on earth and experience human love with a lonely trapeze artist.
When I saw the film again, and saw the sequence where the angel falls to earth to take on a human body, in which the color shifts from sepia-toned black and white to full technicolor, I thought it the most wonderful and ingenious cinematic representation of the incarnation process.
Wim Wenders made a sequel to this film called Faraway so Close, which is also very worth tracking down.
I’m sure there must be other films that readers of this blog would connect strongly to La Madre Ayahuasca. Please add them in the comments section and say something of what they mean to you.
Plaza de Armas, Pucallpa
Pucallpa is a noisy, dirty, dusty, rubbish-strewn, crime-ridden city. It is also the ugliest city I know. There is maybe one building of any historical or architectural merit. In his remarkable book, ‘One River’, in which he lovingly recreates the extraordinary Amazonian voyages of Richard Schultes, (the celebrated Harvard Ethnobotanist), Wade Davies says of Pucallpa: “it is a place so dismal that within hours of arriving I had booked passage to Iquitos”
So what is there to like about it?
First, bear with me whilst I give a short preamble about the title of this entry. It is recommended to write lists on blogs. As I wrote before, the most popular post on my blog about living and working in Mexico was called “Seven Reasons to Live in Ciudad Guzman“. Partly as an experiment in the list format, I wrote a post on this blog called “Seven Good Reasons to drink Ayahuasca“. So far, I have had more hits on that entry in one day than any other entry in this blog.
I have another post on my Mexico blog called “Ten Reasons to Fall in Love with Mexico“. It’s a bridge too far to attempt a blog entry entitled “Ten Reasons to Fall in Love with Pucallpa” but let’s try for seven reasons to like this crazy, humid, jungle city on the West bank of the River Ucayali in the Peruvian Amazon.
1. La Madre Ayahuasca
The main reason most foreign tourists come here is to drink ayahuasca. That is a very good reason. There are some wonderful indigenous ayahuasceros living in and around Pucallpa. There are also many charlatans and, worse, people here who can do you considerable harm. I hear more and more stories of people being taken advantage of – financially, sexually and psychically.
If you are coming here to drink ayahuasca please make sure you drink with someone recommended by someone whose judgement you trust.
2. Yarinacocha
As I wrote elsewhere, when I first visited Yarina, the indigenous part of Pucallpa, and I commented to my friend, who has lived here for ten years, that the vibe was much gentler than Iquitos, he said to me in a conspiratorial whisper: “It’s the heartland”. He meant it is the heartland of the Shipibo-Konibo people who have lived for thousands of years along the river Ucayali and its tributaries.
Unlike downtown Pucallpa where most people I know only go to spend the minimum time to do necessary errands, it is pleasant to walk around Yarinacocha. The lake itself is beautiful, especially at dawn or sunset.
The human-scale plaza here too is quirky and attractive, unlike the monstrous Plaza de Armas in Pucallpa, which is a concrete wasteland ringed on one side by two hideous buildings – the cathedral and the city’s municipal offices – displaying the monumental, neo-fascist style favored in the eighties in many Latin countries. As one of my favorite Spanish phrases says, “como si fuera poco”, the plaza is topped off with a central, intimidating phallic sculpture.
3. The Restaurant ‘El Paraiso’
Having been rude about the Plaza de Armas above, it’s saving grace is that on the opposite side to the cathedral and municipal office buildings there is a very good vegetarian restaurant. It’s run (well) by Seventh Day Adventists but we should not hold that against the place.
Besides, the family who run the restaurant are charming, and the food is excellent. They do a very good value set menu for 7 soles (less than $3 USD). It’s the only place I know in Pucallpa where you can get a reasonably-sized portion of freshly-cooked green vegetables. They also sell good products such as granola and muesli, natural yoghurt without sugar, and healthy biscuits.
4. The ice cream parlor ‘La Muyuna’
Conveniently just around the corner from ‘El Paraiso’ in the street Jr. Sucre, there is another little oasis of paradise in downtown Pucallpa. This is ‘La Mayuna’ which sells natural, possibly organic, regional ice cream. It’s surrounded by three other ice cream parlors but the quality and taste here is head and shoulders above the others.
I nearly always order the coffee ice cream as it is so good, but have recently branched out to two more flavors – chocolate and peanut and strawberry yoghurt. For the more adventurous, there is fantastic range of jungle fruits including aguaje, guanábana, camucamu, charada, taperiba, sachainchi, ungurahui, tamarindo, maracuya, humari and lúcuma.
5. Hotel ‘Los Gavilanes’
This hotel has a good location in a quiet part of the indigenous area of Pucallpa within walking distance of the Plaza at Yarina. It’s another oasis in the frenzy of Pucallpa and has a good restaurant.
For Pucallpa, it’s relatively expensive – a double room costs 90 soles (about $36 USD) per night – but for that price you get breakfast, occasionally erratic wi-fi, cable TV, a good room with a balcony, and the use of a good-sized pool.
The staff are, mostly, very friendly and a few go by weird and wonderful names. The best cook here, who unfortunately now has left, is called Hitler. The tiny, undernourished odd-job man is called Rambo.
The owner, Don Ramon, used to allow ayahuasca ceremonies in a wooden hut on the roof until the bad publicity occasioned by the American teenager dying in an ayahuasca ceremony and being unlawfully buried in the Chimbre Shamanic Center, in the region of Madre de Dios, just under a year ago. He has, though, allowed me to plant chiricsanango, bobinsana and ayahuasca in the hotel gardens.
6. Mapachos
Vigilio makes the best mapachos (pure, rolled, dried and shredded tobacco leaves with no additives) in Pucallpa and most likely the whole of the Peruvian Amazon. He used to have a stall in Mercado Dos but since the municipality closed that down, he has moved operations to his daughter’s shop which sells cleaning products at Jr. Sucre #785 (UPDATE. He’s now back in one of the stall outside Mercado Dos)
7. El Reloj Público
OK, I’m beginning to scrape the barrel now. This tower, the only building of any interest in Pucallpa, located by the main port, has a certain colorful, surreal charm, enhanced by the fact that, despite it being known as the public clock, the time is fixed permanently but differently on each of its four faces.
I hope I have been able to do Pucallpa justice. I missed out the best place to have coffee – one of the only two expresso machines in Pucallpa – which is Dulcemanía on Jr. Raymundi #389. The other place with a small expresso machine is ‘Si, C’est Bon’, (pronounced here as ‘Sexy Bon’), which has a good location on the Cathedral corner of the Plaza, but the coffee is wayward at times.
I also heard recently that the market at Bellavista is good – although it has a section illegally selling animals.
I’ve also just found a good yoga class after months of searching.
If you have any other suggestions for liking Pucallpa please add them to the comments.
This post has its origins in a furious row I had with a good friend after an ayahuasca ceremony almost a year ago. Partly what incensed me in the row and further fueled its flames was my friend’s dogged insistence that I should think positively about the situation.
At the time I said: “I’m going to write a critique of positive thinking. It’s overrated”. It’s taken me a while to get there but here it is.
So, first, what is “positive thinking”?
Here is one definition I found:
It can be described as the practice of embracing the affirmative in our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, our reactions and our speech.
Positive thinking is a mental attitude that admits into the mind thoughts, words and images that are conductive to growth, expansion and success. It is a mental attitude that expects good and favorable results. It is strategy that can be used to make you feel good about yourself.
Here are two further quotes from a positive thinking site:
“Get going. Move forward. Aim High. Plan a takeoff. Don’t just sit on the runway and hope someone will come along and push the airplane. It simply won’t happen. Change your attitude and gain some altitude. Believe me, you’ll love it up here.” Donald Trump
“Manifesting is a lot like making a cake. The things needed are supplied by you, the mixing is done by your mind and the baking is done in the oven of the universe.” Stephen Richards, Think Your way to Success: Let Your Dreams Run Free.
So how could anyone possibly object to this? Its almost as American as freedom, apple-pie and motherhood. Here are the five reasons:
1. Origins
It’s significant to see where positive thinking came from before it was embraced by new age philosophies.
Positive thinking is generally credited as coming into the world as the brainchild of the minister and prolific author, Norman Vincent Peale.
His book, “The Power of Positive Thinking” was first published in 1952. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 186 consecutive weeks, and according to the publisher, Simon and Schuster, the book has sold around 5 million copies.
Peale has impeccable right-wing credentials. The Wikipedia article about him says:
Peale was politically and personally close to President Richard Nixon’s family. In 1968 he officiated at the wedding of Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower.
President Ronald Reagan awarded Peale, for his contributions to the field of theology, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian honor in the United States) on March 26, 1984.
The Rev. Billy Graham said at the National Council of Churches on June 12, 1966 that “I don’t know of anyone who had done more for the kingdom of God than Norman and Ruth Peale or have meant any more in my life for the encouragement they have given me”.
In 1960 Peale, as spokesman for 150 Protestant clergymen, opposed the election of John F. Kennedy as president. “Faced with the election of a Catholic,” Peale declared, “our culture is at stake”.
That last statement does not seem very positive.
And just in case there is any further doubt of his connection with the ruling WASP elite, Peale was also a 33 degrees Scottish Rite Freemason.
2. Denial of the Shadow.
My principal objection to positive thinking is that it has an overly simplistic and naive view of human psychology. Put succinctly, it denies the depth of the dark side of human nature.
This was pointed out way back in 1955 in an article by psychiatrist R. C. Murphy, published in The Nation, titled “Think Right: Reverend Peale’s Panacea.”
This passage from his article is so good, and the language so eloquent, that I’m going to quote it at length.
“With saccharine terrorism, Mr. Peale refuses to allow his followers to hear, speak or see any evil. For him real human suffering does not exist; there is no such thing as murderous rage, suicidal despair, cruelty, lust, greed, mass poverty, or illiteracy. All these things he would dismiss as trivial mental processes which will evaporate if thoughts are simply turned into more cheerful channels. This attitude is so unpleasant it bears some search for its real meaning. It is clearly not a genuine denial of evil but rather a horror of it. A person turns his eyes away from human bestiality and the suffering it evokes only if he cannot stand to look at it. By doing so he affirms the evil to be absolute, he looks away only when he feels that nothing can be done about it … The belief in pure evil, an area of experience beyond the possibility of help or redemption, is automatically a summons to action: ‘evil’ means ‘that which must be attacked … ‘ Between races for instance, this belief leads to prejudice. In child-rearing it drives parents into trying to obliterate rather than trying to nurture one or another area of the child’s emerging personality … In international relationships it leads to war. As soon as a religious authority endorses our capacity for hatred, either by refusing to recognize unpleasantness in the style of Mr Peale or in the more classical style of setting up a nice comfortable Satan to hate, it lulls our struggles for growth to a standstill … Thus Mr Peale’s book is not only inadequate for our needs but even undertakes to drown out the fragile inner voice which is the spur to inner growth”
Positive thinking denies what Jung called the shadow and therefore the power of the unconscious. It becomes another way of asserting the centrality, colonizing power and control of the ego.
Moreover, by denying this aspect of our nature, and seeing it as ‘negativity’, the shadow goes further underground where it is likely to wreak more havoc. In a good article on the shadow from the Psychology Today website, Dr. Stephen Diamond, who incidentally is described as ‘Ph.D. Evil Deeds’ (I wonder where you study for one of those?), says:
“The shadow is most destructive, insidious and dangerous when habitually repressed and projected, manifesting in myriad psychological disturbances ranging from neurosis to psychosis, irrational interpersonal hostility, and even cataclysmic international clashes. Such deleterious symptoms, attitudes and behavior stem from being possessed or driven by the dissociated yet undaunted shadow.”
3. An Affront to the Soul
Here, as before in this blog, I am drawing on the profound psychological thinking of James Hillman.
To cut a long, brilliant argument from his book ‘Revisioning Psychology’ very, very short, Hillman says that our soul is displayed in our psychological symptoms, those bothersome aspects of ourselves that the ego would like to eliminate – because they threaten its assumed supremacy – and that our spirit would like to transcend. Yet it is in these symptoms that soul, depth and meaning can be found in our lives.
As Leonard Cohen sings: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Positive thinking, and its contemporary variants like ‘The Law of Attraction’, suggest we can have complete control over the reality we form.
On one of the at least fifteen (and still counting) Facebook pages based on the Law of Attraction, the preposterous proposal is made to: “Click on the “Manifestation Blueprint” tab to get our proven step-by-step blueprint for attracting anything you desire”.
Whilst my experiences with La Madre Ayahuasca have shown me that our thoughts and feelings do indeed powerfully shape our reality, it is entirely another step to suggest that we, that is predominantly our ego, can master this reality. Shit happens. Divine Grace exists outside of our control.
As the theologian John Krumm said of Norman Vincent Peale’s ideas:
“Very little is said about the sovereign mind and purpose of God; much is made of the things men can say to themselves and can do to bring about their ambitions and purposes……..The predominant use of impersonal symbols for God is a serious and dangerous invitation to regard man as the center of reality and the Divine Reality as an impersonal power, the use and purpose of which is determined by the man who takes hold of it and employs it as he thinks best”
Apart from the intellectual poverty and arrogance of these ideas, they are an affront not just to my soul, but to the anima mundi or soul of the world – the two of which ultimately coincide.
4. Political neutrality.
This perspective that we create our own reality (which we do) conveniently ignores that our reality is also shaped by political, economic, cultural and social forces – that is it is bigger then just me.
In a series of recent ceremonies with La Madre Ayahuasca, I was spending a lot of time in what I first assumed was my personal subconscious. I was rather distressed at what a trashy place this was – no important insights, let alone transcendental experiences.
Then in one ceremony, I saw that what I assumed was my personal subconscious was also a wider collective realm, not as interesting or deep as Jung’s collective unconscious, full of rich symbolism and mythology, but more like the film ‘Matrix’ where I was plugged into what I can best describe as social programming devices.
Viewing this as a purely personal world is a clever sleight of hand (by who?) which obscures the social nature of this world. I am still hesitating to go the next step which is to see this as part of the conspiratorial (reptiles? illuminati? aliens?) mind-control program.
5. Link to neo-liberal capitalism
Related to the fourth reason above, positive thinking is the ideal ideological accompaniment to unfettered neo-liberal capitalism. I have already made this connection in relation to the kind of language we use in a previous post.
A philosophy that emphasizes extreme individual freedom to choose, acceptance of the social and political status quo and refusal to see how the world is socially and politically shaped, expansion and growth with no sense of limits, distaste for and denial of genuine suffering, dovetails very nicely with the global neo-liberal economic project.
I’ll leave almost the last word to Bill Clinton who said the following on hearing of Norman Vincent Peale’s death:
“The name of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale will forever be associated with the wondrously American values of optimism and service. Dr. Peale was an optimist who believed that, whatever the antagonisms and complexities of modern life brought us, anyone could prevail by approaching life with a simple sense of faith. And he served us by instilling that optimism in every Christian and every other person who came in contact with his writings or his hopeful soul.”
By contrast, in an article in the New Republic, July 11, 1955, the mental health expert and Harvard Scholar Donald Meyer said Peale was a con-man and a fraud. He tellingly makes the point that:
“In more classic literature, this sort of pretension to mastery has often been thought to indicate an alliance with a Lower rather than a Higher power.”
One of the principal themes of this blog is the encounter between Western rational, materialistic culture and the world shown to us by La Madre Ayahuasca.
In this post, I want to approach this issue of the meeting of two very different worldviews through the example of an NGO (Non Governmental Organization or non-profit) project in an indigenous community.
Towards the end of the last year, I was involved in the building of a fish farm in a Shipibo community. The fish farm is part of a larger educational project attached to the State school in the community, which aims to offer a genuine, extensive intercultural education to its students teaching them about the rich Shipibo cosmovision and culture. Read more…
It is 1.30am on Sunday morning. I am sitting in the dark on the cement floor of a wooden house in the indigenous area of Pucallpa listening to Maestra R. sing to her aunt, Maestra A. There are five of us in the ceremony and Maestra A. has recently finished singing to each of us in turn. Whilst Maestra A. sang to us, Maestra R. sang to two of Maestra A.’s daughters and is now singing to her aunt.
The moment is exquisite. I feel that the two of them are keeping a candle flame alive that has been flickering throughout the night. Maestra A. is one of many Shipibo people who have left their riverside, rural communities to come and live in the city. Because of her work as a curandera (healer), especially with foreigners, she has access to a reasonable, even if highly fluctuating, income and can live relatively comfortably in the city. This enables her, like many Shipibo curander@s, to be able to support her large family of five daughters, one son, and many grandchildren. Read more…
Conversations with Don Machinga and Other Beings 