Time for a Vision Quest?

It's there, can you see it?

“Five months into my investigation, my wife and I visited friends who introduced us during the evening to a book containing colorful "three-dimensional images' made up of seemingly disordered dots. To see a coherent and '3-D' image emerge from the blur, one had to defocalize one's gaze. "Let your eyes go," our hostess told me. "As if you were looking through the book without seeing it. Relax into the blur and be patient." After several attempts, and seemingly by magic, a remarkably deep stereogram sprang out of the page that I was holding in front of me. It showed a dolphin leaping in the waves. As soon as I focused normally on the page, the dolphin disappeared, along with the waves in front of it and behind it, and all I could see were muddled dots again.

This experience reminded me of Bourdieu's phrase "to objectify one's objectifying relationship," which is another way of saving "to become aware of one's gaze." That is precisely what one had to do in order to see the stereogram. This made me think that my dissatisfaction with the anthropological studies of shamanism was perhaps due to the necessarily localized perspective of academic anthropologists, who failed to grasp shamanic phenomena in the same way that the normal gaze failed to see "three-dimensional images." Was there perhaps a way of relaxing one's gaze and seeing shamanism more clearly?

During the following weeks I continued reading, while trying to relax my gaze and pay attention to the texts’ style, as much as to their content. Then I started writing a preliminary version of a second chapter on anthropology and shamanism. One afternoon, as I was writing. I suddenly saw a strikingly coherent image emerge from the muddle [PHORPH!], as in a stereogram: Most anthropologists who had studied shamanism had only seen their own shadow. This went for the schizophrenics, the creators of order, the jacks-of-all-trades, and the creators of disorder.

This vision shook me. I felt that I had finally found a warm trail. Without wasting time I continued in the same direction. As I felt certain that the enigma of hallucinatory knowledge was only an apparent dead end, and as I was trying to suspend disbelief, I started wondering whether I might not be able to find a solution after all. The passage that led to the shamanic world was certainly hidden from normal vision, but perhaps there was a way of perceiving it stereoscopically…” - Jeremy Narby, 'The Cosmic Serpent'

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Join us on the patio under the stars for Helping Friendly Book Club #28 on June 5th (‘Two Six Eve’) at ‘The Wild Detectives Bookstore and Bar’ in the Bishop Arts District. We will be discussing “The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” by Jeremy Narby, and we will also be voting for our next three books to read. Come contemplate the Mystery and help steer the ship by casting your vote and letting your voice be heard.

Thank you to everyone who has already sent in book suggestions for the ballot. I will put what books we have on the list below and in the Facebook Event Page so we can discuss them amongst ourselves before we vote on June 5th. Your input is encouraged and appreciated! We’ve asked Pallas Athena to be our Helping Friendly Patroness and we’re highlighting female authors this time around, so if you have any additional nominations please email them to connect@helpingfriendly.com ASAP. Thank you!

INTERVIEWER: Could you sum up your book "The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the Origins of Knowledge"?

JEREMY NARBY: Research indicates that shamans access an intelligence, which they say is nature's, and which gives them information that has stunning correspondences with molecular biology.

I: Your hypothesis of a hidden intelligence contained within the DNA of all living things is interesting. What is this intelligence?

JN: Intelligence comes from the Latin inter-legere, to choose between. There seems to be a capacity to make choices operating inside each cell in our body, down to the level of individual proteins and enzymes. DNA itself is a kind of "text" that functions through a coding system called "genetic code," which is strikingly similar to codes used by human beings.

Some enzymes edit the RNA transcript of the DNA text and add new letters to it; any error made during this editing can be fatal to the entire organism; so these enzymes are consistently making the right choices; if they don't, something often goes wrong leading to cancer and other diseases.

Cells send one another signals, in the form of proteins and molecules. These signals mean: divide, or don't divide, move, or don't move, kill yourself, or stay alive. Any one cell is listening to hundreds of signals at the same time, and has to integrate them and decide what to do.

How this intelligence operates is the question...

One of the first big decisions you face when you embark on the Quest to discover the lost Secrets to Eternal Joy and Never Ending Splendor (#SEJNES) is what to take with you, and what to leave behind. When you go on a ‘Hero’s Journey’, there are only so many presuppositions about the truth you can start with, and only so many you can hold onto at any one time. You have to assume you’re going to be discovering new ideas along the way, and in order to make room for those ideas, you’re going to have to let some of your old ideas go. I imagine this process being something similar to the way a lobster molts, or a snake sheds its skin…

The absolute sovereignty of the “rational gaze” is one presupposition the Western Mind finds especially difficult to loosen its grip on because it's so fundamental to the materialistic worldview of the last 200 years or so. Fortunately for us, we’ve already learned that the ‘map is not the territory’ and we’ve been developing our capacity to use language ‘like a thorn to remove a thorn’ for sometime now. We already know that our ‘Identity is like a Mosaic’, and in order to remain supple and travel well we have to keep our Identity lubricated. ‘Wet things don’t pop bubbles.’

Jeremy Narby is a master at this and he takes us with him on his own first person adventure of discovery in “The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” He offers us a window into his own rational thinking process as he grapples with trying to reconcile the inexplicable (from a western perspective) reality of South American shamanistic knowledge with the inherent limitations of the fractured rational gaze. A vital sense of WONDER is profoundly important on the Quest for SEJNES, and this book gives us great deal to wonder about. This book offers the serious seeker a paradigm shift, a “paradoxical passage to the Otherworld”, and a paradigm shift is something akin to shedding your philosophical skin.

Join us June 5th when we collectively “defocalize” the programming of our rational gaze and re-examine our presuppositions about the inherent Intelligence of Nature.

Yes there will be a #CosmicDoorPrize, and yes first timers are welcome, so come for the #mentalpollination and stay for the #brainhoney. Let's shed our skin for the summer.

As ever,
Cole
@hfbclub

Practice Your Defocalizing

If you don't have time to read the book, watch this interview with the author and you will have plenty to Contemplate the Mystery with.

Book Ballot - June 2018

Book Nominations for June 2018: Where should we search for the SEJNES next? (We will vote for 3 at our next meeting on June 5th)

“Wheels of Light: A User's Guide to the Chakra System" by Anodea Judith
“Women Who Run With Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature” by Connie Zweig
“All About Love” by Bell Hooks
“Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels” by Loretta Graziano Breuning
“Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard
“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
“A History of God” by Karen Armstrong
“On Glory Roads: A Pilgrims Book about Pilgrimage” by Eleanor Munro

The Helping Friendly Foundation is on a mission to elevate the public conversation and connect people through books in convivial ways. If you'd like to learn more about how you can help please let us know.

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INTERVIEWER: DNA has essentially maintained its structure for 3.5 billion years. What role does DNA play in our evolution?

JEREMY NARBY: DNA is a single molecule with a double helix structure; it is two complementary versions of the same "text" wrapped around each other; this allows it to unwind and make copies of itself: twins! This twinning mechanism is at the heart of life since it began. Without it, one cell could not become two, and life would not exist.

And, from one generation to the next, the DNA text can also be modified, so it allows both constancy and transformation. This means that beings can be the same and not the same. One of the mysteries is what drives the changes in the DNA text in evolution. DNA has apparently been around for billions of years in its current form in virtually all forms of life.

The old theory - random accumulation of errors combined with natural selection - does not fully explain the data currently generated by genome sequencing. The question is wide open.

The structure of DNA as we know it is made up of letters and thus has a specific text and language. You could say our bodies are made up of language, yet we assume that speech arises from the mind. How do we access this hidden language?

By studying it. There are several roads to knowledge, including science and shamanism...

#readingthebookseries