Well, this would all happen naturally, and with a great deal of anxiety I imagine, as history builds to its ever more climactic and horrifying crescendo, and we would all be ignorant, or very baffled, about what’s going on, were it not for the institution of psychedelic shamanism. Remember, I said that what is dissolved are the crystalline structures of cultural assumption? Well, one of the strongest symmetries in our cultural crystal is the symmetry that gathers around the concept of past and future. The shaman actually rises into a domain where past and future are different areas on the same topological manifold. This is not a metaphor; it’s what’s really going on. If you think about shamanism in its classical guise for a moment, it is about predicting weather; predicting game movement; and curing disease. If you had a prescient or extraordinary understanding of the future, each one of us would be able to do these things. Predicting the weather? — you just look into next week, and there it is. Predicting the movement of beings? — same deal. Curing the sick actually involves very judicious choice of your patients, with a pre-knowledge of who will get well and who will not get well.
So it’s as though the members of a culture are imprisoned in linear time, and the shaman is not. And why not? Because the shaman has perturbed the brain states sanctioned by the culture — sanctioned by its educational processes, its habits, its attitudes. And into that vacuum created by the perturbation of these cultural values rushes the raw, unanalysed datum of reality. This is what Aldous Huxley called removing the reducing valve of consciousness. And suddenly, culture is seen to be a relative phenomenon, the stockbroker no different from the rainforest shaman, each somewhat similar to the Trobrian islander, or the Eskimo. Culture is simply clothing upon the human experience; but the human organism, outside the confines of culture, in a direct relationship to nature, transcends time and space. This was a fact, I believe, that was known in prehistory, and in fact was the source of paleolithic values, which were not material, not linear, not surplus-oriented, not class-oriented, not power-oriented; but rather, oriented toward a kind of egalitarian partnership in an environment of great material simplicity. And human beings lived like that for probably half a million years — with poetry, with dance, with mathematics, with magic, with story, with humour; but not with the paralysing and toxic artefacts of the late-evolving, machine-worshipping, monotheistic, linear, phonetic-alphabet tight-assed straight culture that we are a part of.
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