Beyond the Human Imagination

Beyond the Human Imagination

What is Shamanic imagination and how does it differ from ordinary, everyday concepts of reality?
The Construction of Shamanic death can be seen as the release of the imaginistic from the confines and parameters of the dualistic and mundane mood of consciousness. This area cannot be accessed through the modes of thought that are prior to initiatory experience of death. A new mood structure has to be encountered in order to understand the imaginistic. I use the word encounter because the first principle of understanding this area is the realization that death means the death of the prior form of consciousness and the releasement from all aspirations to ego-related control structures.

The term "mood structure" is used with care. The entrance into this territory is sometimes described as a ‘tracking’ or a form of ‘scenting’. It is related to what we understand by an emotional response rather than an analytic one. It is aligned to a feeling and a sensing, a form of remote sensing which defies attempts at entrance by logocentric methods. All that the rational achieves in any attempt to enter this region is to reinforce the inadequacy of this approach in our minds. In The Mushrooms of Language, Henry Munn describes the entrance into the imaginative world of the shaman.
"Let us go to the cornfield looking for the tracks of the spirits' feet in the warm ground. So then let us go walking ourselves along the path in search of significance, following the words of two discourses enregistered like tracks on magnetic tapes."

(in Harner p.89:1973.)
and

"Let's go searching for the tracks of her feet to encounter the sickness that she is suffering from. Animals in her heart? Let's go searching for the tracks of her feet, the tracks of her nails. That it be alleviated and healed where it hurts. What are we going to do to get rid of this sickness?
(Ibid.p.92)
In this sort of experience the relationship between language and thought is not the subject and object directed form of thought of mundane experience. Rather, the shaman is the prey of language. The imagination of death becomes new imagination precisely because the imagination has been released, or prised by death, from the strictures of the mundane consciousness.
"It is not I who speak," said Heraclitus, "it is the logos." Language is an ecstatic activity of signification. Intoxicated by the mushrooms, the fluency, the ease, the aptness of expression one becomes capable of are such that one is astounded by the words that issue forth experience. At times it is as if one were being told what to say, for the words leap to mind, one after another, of themselves without having to be searched for : a phenomenon similar to the automatic dictation of the surrealists except that here the flow of consciousness, from the contact of the intention of articulation with the matter of rather than being disconnected, tends to be coherent: a rational enunciation of meanings. Message fields of communication with the world, others, and one's self are disclosed….."
(Ibid.p.89.)