Supernatural Visions

"In the last few decades, a new kind of art has been striking natives and tourists of Peruvian Amazonia with great wonder and enchantment: ayahuasca‑inspired visionary art. This very original iconography emerges directly from the artists’ visionary experience under the effect of the ayahuasca brew. [...] With the use of figurative techniques, sometimes learned in art schools or developed autonomously, mestizo visionary artists manage to translate and share their colorful supernatural visions with a much wider public than that directly involved with ayahuasca shamanism. One of the most important effects of this translation, in my view, is to render visible the invisible dynamics of shamanic worlds, even to untrained eyes. [...] This art functions as a shining window to the spiritual worlds of ayahuasca shamanism, translating the multidimensional and extraordinary visions to our more familiar realm of everyday iconic images."

- Vinícius Dino, Visionary Art in Peruvian Amazonia:
The Power of Images and Translation Effects

Altered State of Consciousness

"Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an [altered state of consciousness] ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. 

The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. 

Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. 

As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the 'principle of parsimony,' Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like 'Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily' or 'Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.' The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the 'primitives' who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious."

- Rick Strassman (1952 - )
 Inner Paths to Outer Space

Escher, Paul Klee, and a Turtle, Oh My...

...to which the tagline can read: a snapshot of the corner shelf in the study of a photographer prone to a gentle madness (where the "madness" refers to the deep passion for books, and is part of the title of a book - not shown - that describes that passion). My home, much to wife's dismay, is filled with books; all kinds of books; a veritable (countable) infinity of books, though a demonstrably smaller infinity than, say, the infinity represented by the categories one can imagine by which these books can all be distinguished, and that they collectively represent an intertwined wisdom about. Short books, and long; dime-store paperbacks and coffee-table-sized hardcovers; textured papers and glossy; those with pictures and others with only text; books about history and culture; philosophy, art, religion and Zen; the collected works of Chekov, Ellery Queen, Stanislaw Lem, and Philip K. Dick (with scattered books and tapes by Alan Watts); travelogues about conquests of Everest, Antarctica, and Ayahuasca; biographies of Maxwell, Dirac, and Feynman, as well as Ansel, Cartier-Bresson, and two Westons (Edward and Brett); books on self-organized vortices of consciousness and anything else mused on by Hofstadter; Christopher Alexander's magnum opus; and more books on physics and photography than most dreams can conjure over a dozen or more nights!

Borges famously introduced a ridiculously wondrous taxonomy of all knowledge in his 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (which he claims to have taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge). The categories of animals alone includes: 

"Those that belong to the emperor;

Embalmed ones;

Those that are trained;

Suckling pigs;

Mermaids (or Sirens);

Fabulous ones;

Stray dogs;

Those that are included in this classification;

Those that tremble as if they were mad;

Innumerable ones;

Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush;

Et cetera;

Those that have just broken the flower vase;

Those that, at a distance, resemble flies."

And to this whimsical classification I introduce another that leads directly to the title of this blog: an image of the books (and of whatever else might fall onto your camera's sensor) that sits directly in front of you as you work on your images on a computer. Arbitrary? To be sure. Meaningful? Only to the extent that it is a well-formed query that has a definite answer; it may even provide a glimpse of what "interests one" most, right now, as in "I need this and that reference to be by my side." If we are what we read (and eat, and see, and do, ...) then surely our most immediate literary/visual companions are what we are at this moment (so long as they assembled on the shelf by themselves).

So my soul, right now, evidently needs these 15 books to be within easy reach as I muse and ponder and tinker with tones and forms on my computer: 9 are related to photography, 3 to art, and 1 each to mathematics, physics, and an "uncategorizable" category onto itself (best defined by its title: The Art of Looking Sideways); well, these books and an image of an old, wise sea turtle who - like a Zen sage -  quietly reminds me of the transience of all categories and classifications, and that, eventually, even my desire to look sideways will drift into a timeless void.

What do you, kind reader, find on your easy-to-reach shelf of books and memorabilia?