Cosmic Serpent

"All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saying as much for millennia. He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time. It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary. It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision."

- Jeremy Narby (1959 - )
The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

A Personal Universe

"Poetry remakes and prolongs language;
every poetic language begins
by being a secret language, that is,
the creation of a personal universe,
 of a completely closed world.
The purest poetic act seems to
re-create language from an
inner experience that …
reveals the essence of things."

- Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Another World

[There is a...] "...long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world."

- Hal Zina Bennett (1936 - )
Spirit Circle: A Story of Adventure & Shamanic Revelation

Transcendent Other

"...the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed."

-  Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)
Food of the Gods

Interpenetrating Worlds

"Instead of negating the conflicting aspects of a paradox, you advance your understanding when you can hold both sides of a dichotomy in your mind at the same time, reconciling rather than negating. One could embrace paradox as an operating, operative principle, rather than seeking to deny or dissolve or dilute it. Rather than seeking to resolve dualisms and institute some grand ‘theory of everything’, the science of the imagination would embrace and explore paradox, going deeper into conundrums, relinquishing delusory attempts to achieve certainty. We may find that thought and language are creative aspects of being, tools for transforming reality. If the universe is actually a projection of subtler levels of the psyche- a loom of maya- then we may discover that the vibratory lattices of interpenetrating worlds elaborated by current physics are descriptions of the psyche itself, in its fully ensouled unfolding."

- Daniel Pinchbeck (1966 - )

Breaking Open the Head:

A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism