Transpersonal Realilties

13 Nov Transpersonal Realilties

I have a close friend who works internationally as an ayahuasca shaman, facilitating groups and follow-up sessions. She told me a story of one time when a group she was leading was actively in the throes of the medicine, and some Native Americans showed up. They began talking with her about what was going on. “How did they know?” I asked. “How did they know what was going on, and come over and talk with you?

“They just know,” she said. “That’s the reality they live in.”

This story came to mind while reading Bedard’s (2023) article on Indigenous cultures and the deep weird quality of their worldview and ceremonies. As Cutchin (2023) pointed out, Indigenous cultures have no word for “fiction” because there is no sharp distinction between imagination and reality. Their worldview appears to be closer to what is called panpsychism, or the belief that all matter has some form of consciousness, and that our concept of matter only reveals some of its attributions (Sjostedt-Hughes, 20230). Weirdness is not marginalized as it is in the mainstream culture, in fact, the strange and weird are welcomed as vital to survival.

In that culture, other realms of reality overlap with the material world, weaving in and out, moving between. The other beings that live in other worlds are accepted as fact and recognized. The “mysterious compliment of ordinary and non-ordinary reality” are embraced. There is also an acceptance that the deep weird can and will occur at any time. There is a total lack of the mainstream’s fearful, horrifying, distrustful, and disregarding attitudes toward what it doesn’t understand.

Sjöstedy-Hughs (2023) also suggests that all physical causation may be a mental causation, and that “in other words, matter is an abstraction.” The consensus worldview ignores and hides from so much. This class concludes with the irrefutable fact that truth is deeply weird.

References

Bedard, R. E. M. (2023). Jiisakiiwigaan: Shaking Tent Ceremony as Sacred Metamorphosis in Hunter, J, [Ed.} Deep Weird: The Varieties of Strangeness Experience. August Night Press.

Cutchin, j. (2023) “The Projectionist’s Booth:” High Strangeness Viewed Through the Lens of Cinema in Hunter, J, [Ed.} Deep Weird: The Varieties of Strangeness Experience. August Night Press.

Sjöstedy-Hughes, P. (2023). Panpsychism: Minds in Nature In Hunter, J, [Ed.} Deep Weird: The Varieties of Strangeness Experience. August Night Press.

© 2024 Catherine Auman

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