XI. Essay on Reality
Aspects of consciousness
In the course of the lecture, "Introduction to the Study of Religion and Consciousness," I became aware of a particular aspect of consciousness, which refers to the truthfulness or reality of all the spiritual happenings and experiences heard and seen in the lecture. How does it work, was the question that came to my mind, because it is impossible to believe so completely when a shaman can heal through ghost contact patients and using different trance techniques, much more incredible things like operations on the body without bloodshed and with subsequent Wound healing, as if the procedure had never taken place, with the difference that healing had occurred. How is it that this is all real and has not been recognized or even displaced in our society for so long.
I am already busy with the perception and my personal recognition of reality. In doing so, I go the ways that allow me to look behind the scenes. I try to communicate with the spirits with the help of different techniques, whilst some of my experiences are amazing. I would like to begin by simply writing about what seems to be the core of the matter - what possibilities of agitation are offered to me in the trance? For the time being, however, some definitions are needed to understand the words used correctly. I begin with the most difficult. What is reality? For me, reality is all that I can perceive, but also everything I can not perceive and yet has an effect on me - quasi an unconscious perception. It appeals to me in so far as I react to it in some way and my reaction is only a picture in front of the "inner eye" that comes up when I keep my eyes closed and I think about it. That is, I and everyone else have their own reality in which everyone moves. The shared reality is then the overlap of all those individual realities. Thus a dream for others can become real if several dream the same or something similar and this is interpreted as something collective. Together, we create a reality that, in a certain frame with gradual progress, represents a reality for all of us. Thus, new realities are invented and old views are classified as unreal and the image of reality changes with the passage of time.
However, in order to be able to deal with a specific subject, I would like to write about what it means to make a dream come true by hatching into a reality which only seems to spring from our head and which is so real that we have faith Everything else is a dream and our loved ones, friends and acquaintances are in a great error because they would not recognize that they are an image of a still more real reality in which other laws are valid and stand in space and time completely without any meaning. It is only when you are out of this reality - from the "altered state of consciousness" - into the everyday consciousness that it comes to this fatal realization that the everyday consciousness as well as a dream is a construct of our brain and you want to wake up and can not because you are already awake. I had such experiences after the use of the psychoactive substance Salvinorin A, which is contained in the plant Salvia Divinorum. This experience has a strong spiritual character, but I would like to emphasize that it was not so "spiritual" at all because I felt the experienced spirits as completely real and saw them more than matter solidified in the structure of reality. Tough facts have been presented, such as the construction of matter from hundreds and millions of entities, which, as individual beings, were part of the reality in the structure, and as mosaic building blocks in the form of one of the others filled the being. When suddenly the matter opened in a crack and I immersed in this entity structure, I heard voices that spoke extremely urgently to me. In this state, I could see a structure that spread over everything, from which seemingly the absolutely creative and absolutely alive emerged. Everything was embedded in it. And it seemed to be easy to influence the structure and to do things that in everyday consciousness simply caused problems.
So what is reality? This question can not be answered. Just the fact that it is constantly changing and that every one is involved in it makes the hope of the all-comprehensive realization disappear. But the religions of the earth have long known this knowledge: Man can always experience only a part of his consciousness or as a practiced shaman or a Yogi you always only temporarily cover a wide range of the spectrum. In my own experience it was so that in the transition to a different state of consciousness, the previous consciousness was blinded and I was in a different to completely irrational environment. This transition is comparable with a time-lapse of one's own life. So I have now only a limited access to consciousness in my childhood - I can either no longer remember it, or I just can not imagine how it was then as a child - I only have a vague feeling about it. That is, a state of consciousness experienced in trance can not be taken to one hundred percent with the everyday consciousness. The experience is in one inside, but it predominantly plays out in the subconscious. And there is, in my opinion, the point where a shaman "works" and so the possibility has to change.
I imagine this:
In every state of the trance I have experienced - and this is in a list the following situations: migraine, high fever, dancing on an electronic music event, MDMA, ingesting mushrooms, LSD, Salvia Divinorum, DMT-containing plants and meditation I had similar experiences. At least one element is present in every form of trance, and these are visual forms and patterns which, depending on the nature of the trance, flow dynamically in front of the inner eye until completely superficially and bizarrely overlap the outer world with open eyes. These patterns and images do not have time or space in the physical sense, but rather in the psychological sense. I apologize if it is now difficult to understand or to comprehend my writing. In any case, it is about something repetative and about the relationship between things. Thus I often recognize continuations of points of objects or images that come out like a flame. Patterns begin to repeat and fill the space. In the case of migraine vision, the space is wrapped in a pattern that, like a wall or a lattice, overlays the reality. In meditation, energies and images flow from the center of the body into the space, creating an atmosphere that includes everything that is necessary at the moment, for example to solve a problem. It is different in the case of very intense experiences, such as the Salvia experience indicated above. I see repetitive things there, but, as with a mushroom experience, knowledgeable entities come to the fore, who are communicatively able to linger around or in oneself.
From the consideration of how consciousness arises at all, I have developed an idea what this other world is. In principle, it is logical, but this idea naturally lacks any scientific basis. What are thoughts? Someone once said that one can also look so deep inside a brain, but a thought will not be found. The brain currents can be measured and presented as EEGs and so many conclusions can be made about the state of consciousness. It is possible to detect the semiochemical substances in the brain and thus determine the psychological effects on the person concerned. If one thinks that the nerves are communicating via electrochemical stimulus lines and molecules are responsible for the transmission of the information, there are chemical changes that have to proceed according to quantum mechanical principles. When I imagine that matter is a state of energy, it is easy for me to imagine any energy whirl that characterizes an atom is a field that resonates with the entire universe, which through its total resonance carries within it the plan of the whole being and in this sequence can be considered as an independent entity. Thus, everything that consists of matter and everything that has to do with energy would have something divine in itself, since in resonance the entire universe vibrates in it. Consciousness is then the consequence or the sum of thoughts that a person can have. Well, and what are thoughts? In the most difficult form of meditation, the thinking of nothingness, one quickly realizes that thoughts are not arbitrary. Thoughts have nothing to do with our will, and the words I write here appear to be a succession of thoughts I have made, but I have come to the conclusion that I do not have these thoughts, but that my thoughts are a series of resonances of the universe in the electrochemical course of the brain. From the individual resonance fields of each atom (I use the word "atom" in its meaning as an indivisible particle - quasi also electrons, quarks, etc ...) and from the interactions of the electromagnetic fields in the brain with the universal fields (earth magnetic field, Sun winds, etc ...), a mosaic forms a mirror in a special form, because this mirror is nothing but our consciousness, and we reflect the universe in itself, and let it through our personal filter. (The word person comes from the Latin word "personare" which means "passing through".)
Consciousness is thus, according to my definition, a product that can not be created individually, but only in the interplay of all elements in the universe. The free will, which we regard as the fundamental rights of men, is only free in so far as we think that our own thoughts are also the result of our sole creative process. I do not see this because we can not exist completely isolated and exist alone in this world, and so we are always part of our overall consciousness, and only the personal perception filters out the individual consciousness.
As a result of these considerations, thoughts have come up in me that try to bring order into my personal image of shamanism, religion and consciousness. If there was no place for shamanism in our western culture, and only in recent decades has a cautious integration of the thought, which is at home in the culture of every culture, at least in the roots of every culture, then the question arises as to how a Western European can understand and comprehend what shamanism is. Language as a form of communication is well established, as is writing, pictures, symbols and many other ways of communication - for a few decades, the Internet, the virtual space, as a means of communication. Spirits, gods, entities, plants, animals and emotions - are these things not also a form of communication? Are, for example, spirits not also placeholders for information? Is it not the gods of whom man has always received advice? Are not emotions that inform ourselves and others about what is going on in us and around us? Just as a word has a meaning, just as a picture has a content, in the same way spirits and gods have their messages. Shamanism as a form of communication is perhaps more intelligible for a Western European intellect than the image of a man who goes into trance and makes incredible things. A green serpent, who an initiator sees when she is ready for her fertility, is not only the image of a green serpent, but a whole story behind which the girl gets told in the course of her life and is thus a great intracultural construct of a reality that she can share with all other members of this cultural society and does so. Similar to a driving license, which also contains a whole history of events in our culture, and which every bearer of this bill is entitled to steer a car, the bearer himself and all the members (police, transport, etc ...) know what this appearance means. The difference is that the driving license is a picture in the outside world and the green serpent is a picture of the inner world - an invisible world that takes place in the subconscious. According to Freud, we know that there is something like a subconscious, and that this also determines our life - not less than the world of the conscious. I ask whether we should not reunite both worlds and recognize both as reality, so that we can fully live a life as a human being and enrich ourselves in all areas (politics, society, medicine, art, etc ...).
Emotions as a form of communication have made shamans as their specialty and in this field, the shamanic worldview is a pre-prepared science for the explorers of Western science, whose content we only need to learn. (I write Western Europeans and mean all people who have grown up in this culture.) What I want to say is that, before our age of science, which began with the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle and Co., and then later experienced its breakthrough in the Renaissance, mankind attained knowledge with a very elaborate and sophisticated approach. In my opinion, the universities are recognizing this old knowledge little by little and, if possible, examining it in a scientific way. I was astonished to note that at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, where I study Landscape Planning, a method is developed that works with an ancient approach to knowledge, which is intuitive, to create a plan of a landscape. This method, which is available in the subject Theory and Methodology of Landscape Planning, is called Geomancy. Geomancy is the doctrine of the knowledge from/of the earth. It assumes that everything is animated and that it is possible for humans to come into contact with their surroundings through emotional communication and to consult entities in the landscape. This approach is, in a certain way, a shamanistic approach, since it also acts on different levels of consciousness. As a geomancer, I enter into a state of the middle, which is nothing more than a form of meditation, and thus listen to the landscape. Certain forms in it (in the landscape), and particularly plants like old trees, reveal in this state of consciousness a great deal of knowledge about emotions that arise like images and "speechless thoughts" within this consciousness. When I then step out from the middle and reflect on the impressions I have experienced, and reflect on the facts, conclusions and indications which, in an astonishing manner, fit and if implemented, lead to specifically positive results. This example shows me that many things will be possible on the way of intuition and developments in our society suggest that we will still have a lot of experience here, as there are a large number of persons who, according to West European laws in an illegal way, but still have a considerable amount of experience when they experiment with entheogenic substances or even develop proper knowledge constructions. These people use the Internet as a communication platform where all knowledge converges and is discussed in forums and blogs. The new ways of communication provided through the Internet are already a form of shamanism - why? Because I believe there are conditions that make shamanism possible at all. In our society there are either small groups where shamanism lives or even globally in unmanageable groups through the Internet. I see here the possibility of emotional interaction with and among each other as a basis for shamanistic action. This emotional freedom is given in real space in small groups and also by lack of control and under the apparent protective mantle of anonymity on the Internet. In other global forms of communication this emotional space is not present. I think of the staged media landscape, be it TV, radio, print or various other media (SMS, partly also the WWW, etc ...) - none of these media shows emotions. In a certain sense, emotions are reproduced, and emotions are also aroused by consumers, but there is no way to communicate these emotions. There are rudimentary valves like reader letters, but in the context of real communication these are negligible. Only via forums on the Internet there is something like a memory, which can be called up anytime and anywhere. And in the memories of the forum participants, who are really sitting in front of the computer, a new world of thoughts is growing, which is created virtually in the virtual space and which is then born in the form of stories, art and others. If the non-everyday reality we experience in trance states is comparable to the virtual cyberspace, then the question arises for me, what is the result in cyberspace - what knowledge can arise from it? Is it not a knowledge of collective subconsciousness? When the shaman, in the state of trance, gets an insight into the collective subconsciousness of his tribe and experiences it in the form of audiovisual impressions in the "inner eye", an Internet user gets an insight into the collective subconsciousness of the global Internet community through the computer screen and the connected loudspeakers. And the collective subconscious is a collection of texts, images and sounds, and, on the other hand, of symbols, spirits, and gods.
Finally, I would like to say that with spirits, gods and entities, usually emotions are meant, which arise individually, in the group or freely out of nature. And in nature, emotions are felt in the form of aesthetics and everything that belongs to it. The gnarled ancient tree or the expanse of landscape - the link between externality and personal emotion is aesthetics.
A (google:)translation of chapter 11 of my book "Selfhealing" which is not published yet and will never be and it is written in German.