Thank you so much!

Christine Houde

1. A methodological question. As there is no way to disprove the cryptomnesia hypothesis once it’s been offered because it’s always possible to postulate that someone “must” have had previous cultural exposure to something to have a religious experience of it even if he/she asserts otherwise, what does the hypothesis really prove – beyond the fact that the person offering the cryptomnesia hypothesis subscribes to an explanatory paradigm in which the collective unconscious is ruled out a priori and you need a more “rational” explanation? I’m all for confirmation loops where informants and investigators conspire to provide explanations to which both can agree, but this particular one sounds like it could serve as the basis for a kind of cognitive imperialism privileging Western rationalist over traditional religious accounts. Is this fair? If it’s fair, is it troubling? Why or why not?

2. Your “Power Dynamics in Ritual Healing” course sounds fascinating. I think it probably helps illustrate the insightful connections Steve Beyer drew between Heidegger (and possibly many other thinkers broadly termed “postmodern”) and shamanism. At least, there’s a fundamental parallel in the epistemologies at work – both seem to be about negotiation to produce shared interpretations within an agreed upon paradigm of interpretation. I wonder if the defining difference between the classical modernist scientific paradigm and postmodern or traditional healing paradigms is found precisely in this question of relationship – modernist scholars try to produce “objective” accounts of reality they can force others to agree to for their own good, rather than hashing out and ritually performing a temporary consensus about reality that can lead to healing?

I’m just thinking out loud – this may be a little disorganized.

Very interesting conversation.

+Wulfila, you write “Clinical investigators are approached by people who feel they have a condition that a certain kind of expert can treat, and the experts have an interest in acting accordingly. To call this bias is perhaps a misunderstanding of what is at work in any act of knowledge, which is more like a matter of negotiating agreement within a particular regime of interpretation than providing an “objectively” valid interpretation of facts.” I had a class many years ago on “Power Dynamics of Ritual Healing” and one of the points that came up among the ethnographers we read was that a big part of (shamanic) healing was coming up with a narrative that made sense to the healer and the patient. For instance, the patient was driving and nearly had an accident, and part of the soul jumped out, so we have susto, and we can retrieve the soul through our procedure.

I was just discussing matters related to the collective unconscious with Steve via e-mail. I want to paste some text below because it works around to Kali and Kuan Yin. Steve and I got on to Jung’s idea that there were various racial or ethnic unconsciouses, which didn’t sound completely nonsensical to me, either because we consciously identify with our heritage, or because we may have some more subtle intellectual connection with our ancestors. I mentioned a couple of experiences that had made me think the second possibility could be true, and Steve said they could be examples of cryptomnesia. I admitted he was right, and went on in the following vein:

“A really clear cryptomnesiac experience I had in a vision was being on Pluto, and looking back at the sun, which appeared as simply the brightest of the stars in the sky. A couple years later I found that Carl Sagan had written a passage inviting the reader to imagine being on Pluto and seeing the sun that way, and it was in something I had read years earlier.

“Of course, it’s possible to flip the causality around and say that I read the Sagan passage as a boy because I would one day have the real experience as a man.

“That, to me, is ayahuasca logic….

“Similarly, every encounter I had with cats or with cat energy or even with things like photos and videos of jaguars, I came to see as an approach of the jaguar spirit to my soul, one step closer each time.

“It’s like +Wulfila’s visions of Kali and Kuan Yin. He must have known a little about them before seeing them in his visions. If we take the intellectual path that the ancients took, and conceptualize these as disincarnate forms of consciousness coexisting with but a little superior to our own, well then of course they can approach us at will, and in their own ways, by appearing to us in books and in paintings.

“I’m not saying this is all true, I’m just saying it’s consistent with the evidence that we have.”

N

I’m a little annoyed by some methodological considerations in this piece – Steve seems to demand a standard of clinical objectivity I think most researchers in the social sciences today would believe can never be met. We have our own version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work in that most (all?) investigations with human informants result in a confirmation loop – the informant socially bonds with the investigator showing them attention and tells them something like what they want to hear. This is worse in clinical situations (such as psychotherapy, Jungian or otherwise) because people approach these situations with the expectation that there is something wrong with them that therapy can fix (a form of self-selection bias) and the therapist is biased to interpret symptoms in terms of treatable conditions it is in the purview of his/her professional competence to fix (a form of confirmation bias). Your Freudian analyst is never going to diagnose susto, even in a Hispanic patient manifesting symptoms for which that’s a culturally-appropriate diagnosis. Clinical investigators are approached by people who feel they have a condition that a certain kind of expert can treat, and the experts have an interest in acting accordingly. To call this bias is perhaps a misunderstanding of what is at work in any act of knowledge, which is more like a matter of negotiating agreement within a particular regime of interpretation than providing an “objectively” valid interpretation of facts.

From what I’ve read of trip reports by ayahuasca drinkers, visions of snakes and jaguars are not as common when they drink outside of the jungle.

this is a challenging article. As for the phallus hallucination, i related it to the birkeland currents : http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/arch08/080717stringtheory.htm –then there’s some UFO stuff linking sun and UFO’s.

I digged it because i drew a comic book with sun rays turning mad people–then there too these studies with solar storms and psychotic breaks. I thought about on the collective unconscious at the time, because when i draw it i had no notions about anything at all that–i was only a weirdo smoking pot. Anyway, and after your experience with shamanism, do you feel jung’s concept or anything similar is wrong?

I recall too reading about a guy doing lots of psychedelics and talking to living archetypes–i think it was on Zoe7’s second book.

thanks