It is considered natural for children to pose the deep questions; "Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of our life in the world?" But by the the time most children enter adulthood most seem to leave these basic queries behind and settle for lives spent tackling the immediate pressing concerns of paying the bills, keeping the house in order and the children fed. However, a seeming minority of adults, myself included, never lose their basic sense of wonder towards nature, humanity and the cosmos and spend their lives considering the deeper questions til the very end. Some become philosophers, some involve themselves with an established religion, while others concentrate on one of the many branches of science.
Myself, I've stayed a generalist, looking into the Great Mystery through a variety of lenses. In childhood I was fortunate enough to have had, with no effort of my own, what Abraham Maslow calls "peak experiences", mystical moments when my consciousness, normally only focused on the mundane details of daily life, suddenly expanded into a state of much wider and deeper perception with an accompanying feeling of ecstatic euphoria.
Later in life I was able to correlate my own experiences with such well-known historical figures as Walt Whitman, William Blake, even Dante and St Theresa, to realise there have always been human beings who have reported back sublime experiences such as my own beyond those felt through the five senses.
In my own life I was drawn to join the Quakers at fourteen years of age as a way of joining others in a meditative setting, then at eighteen I became a disciple of an Indian guru. His organization was permeated with irrelevant layers of baloney and spiritual bureaucracy, but there was an essence connected to the most ancient yogic wisdom of India that kept me in its orbit for over twenty-five years. Eventually there was a natural falling away from this path and I found myself drawn to two seemingly opposing ways on my personal quest to fathom that most basic of questions; "What the heck is this all about anyway?"
One of the ways was extremely cerebral: Cutting-edge science with its focus on holograms, quanta, string theory, astro-physics, new understandings about the role of consciousness and the like. The other way was not cerebral at all; in fact its focus was on the deep past when humanity was in a pre-rational state, namely shamanism, the original spiritual way of early humankind that is still employed by many indigenous groups who have maintained their traditional roots.
SCIENCE
I was attracted to the path of science because it is clear that at this very point in time we are cresting a hill, leaving behind one paradigm that has been in place for the last three hundred years (and has brought humanity to the brink of destruction and Orwellian enslavement) and just at the beginning of another that portends to complete a huge cycle. What appears to be coming into focus is nothing less than the merging of contemporary science with the most ancient of human wisdom traditions.
It is really easy to get bogged down in the minutae of scientific investigation. What I am always after is a distilation of basic scientific concepts to their essence without over-simplification to the point of incoherence. My own approach echoes that of Einstein's who attempted to "create the simplest possible scheme of thought that will bind together the observed facts".
I've read dozens of books from such notable authors as David Bohm, David F. Peat, Fritjof Kapra, Carl Sagan, Isaac Bentov, Michael Talbot, Lynn Taggert, Rupert Sheldrake and many others, but the writer who has helped me the most has been Ervin Laszlo, most especially with his work entitled "Science and the Akashic Field - An Integral Theory of Everything". In it this scientist-philosopher demonstrates that in addition to the existence of ever subtler energy fields from the Gravity Field, the Electro-Magnetic Field, the Higgs Field, the strong and weak Nuclear Fields, we now need to add the Akashic Field which can be understood as the original plenum of existence, the Metaverse out of which our universe was born and to which it will return.
In directing our attention to the Akashic Field he bravely paves the way for a reunification between the poetic mystical language of ancient Indian rishis who referred to Brahman as the absolute ground of existence and cutting-edge science which is now at the beginnings of a revolutionary change all the way down to its historical foundations.
Three hundred years ago the fledgling discipline of science and the scientific method had no choice but to distance itself from the Church which had hitherto been the sole arbiter of knowledge regarding the natural world and cosmos. By rightfully insisting on measurement and repeatable experiments it began the long journey towards the absolute materialism that today dominates academia.
The great revolution underway today can be expressed thusly: We are moving from a science which sees matter as its basic foundation to another perspective which understands that consciousness preceeds material existence - which is precisely the view held by the ancients. Or to put it another way; matter-before-mind is being replaced by mind-before-matter.
There is an enormous difference between these two viewpoints and right now there is a battle going on between the old guard of rank materialists who dominate discourse in the universities and scientific publications and more open-minded scientists who argue for a whole new pardigm in science, one that is inclusive and wholistic, one that is willing to consider all phenomena, however anomalous.
The stance of the materialist old guard can be labelled 'Scientism' and it can be identified as a particular level of consciousness no different than religious fundamentalism. It starts with a premise - everything is material - then all incoming data is forced to fit inside the narrow defining box of the premise.
That worked for three hundred years since Descartes and Newton, but now that line of thought finds itself trapped in a dead-end.
Finally there is no objective ground on which to stand.
Time for a paradigm shift.
SHAMANISM
The majority of pop music has always been mono-thematic in its choice of theme for lyrics. It's almost always about romantic love which can get tedious. So it was refreshting to me in the early 70's to hear ex-Beatle George Harrison put out the song 'My Sweet Lord' which breaks out of the mold entirely. The words of the song are a mystic's cry for direct perception -'I really want to see you, I really want to be with you'. Not faith but direct experience.
Direct experience has always been my compass needle and has steered me away from getting involved with any religion. Religions seem to me to be about faith, belief and also the sense of belonging to a community. Not for this loner I'm afraid. Yes I like to feel part of a community, but not at the expense of individual direct experience of the transcendent, by which I mean the world of expanded consciousness beyond the mundane (yet paradoxically immanent within the mundane as well, exemplified by William Blake's 'a universe within a grain of sand').
A shaman by definition deals with direct experiences. She or he leaves the world of the mundane behind and enters subtle worlds of non-ordinary reality to effect healing, to have questions answered or to contact ancestors. He or she also experiences directly that the universe is a vast interconnected web of wholeness.
A shaman or shamanic practitioner knows through direct experience that this world of consensus reality is but one station on the dial and that there are many other stations that can be tuned into. This world that the vast majority of people belive to be the only one is in fact only one of many. Cutting-edge physics is only now beginning to agree with this perspective but it is one that has been known by shamans, mystics and clairvoyants for millennia.
PABLO AMARINGO
In 2009 I and a friend were fortunate to visit the studio of visionary artist and ex-shaman Pablo Amaringo in the city of Pucallpa in the peruvian Amazon a few months before his death. He graciously agreed to a video interview for a book my friend is writing. Using an artist's brush for a pointer he stood beside one of his pictures and talked about his cosmology gleaned from direct experience as a shaman for many years. He said that this world is but one of many inhabited universes that interpenetrate with this one. He said that our sun and the planets are all inhabited by non-physical, but nevertheless totally real and alive beings. He said that all of nature is alive and conscious, even rocks, and that there are spirits animating all living things. He said that for him Christ was a very real presence and that he had met him during ayahuasca journeys many times as the force of absolute good in the universe. He said the spirit of Christ was absolutely central to the whole history of humanity.
What struck me with my background in Steiner education and anthroposophy was that he was echoing exactly what Rudolf Steiner had tried to communicate in the early years of the twentieth century.
Steiner was a clairvoyant who was able to perceive the Akashic field directly to gain the same insights as a mestizo shaman in the western Amazon. I like that.
To be continued.....
