work; the (original) viewers of the cave pictographs and the readers of the
mythopoeic writers has the potential to elicit not so much an interpretation of the
symbol but more the experience of it.
I t must be accepted that the state of mythopoeic consciousness that
visionary shamans and mythopoeic writers enter is not aberrant. I ts veracity is
irrefutable and more coherent than that of the empirical world where reality is
perceived by the senses and when upon returning to ordinary consciousness, the
beholders of this world are perfectly aware of having been to an actual elsewhere-
place. They are not schizophrenics who are seized by some terrifying and
uncontrollable aberration of consciousness. The world that they visit is hidden
behind the very act of sense perception and has to be sought underneath its
apparent objective certainty. For this reason we definitely cannot qualify MLC as
representing the ‘imagined’, meaning fantastical or nonexistent. MLC facilitates
access to a world that is ontologically as real as the world of ordinary
consciousness.
I n fact, MLC, or aspects of it, may be the key to our continued survival as a
species since it provides a deeper awareness of our transcendental nature; that we
are evolving towards spirit, or rather that we are in fact spiritual beings who are
gradually becoming aware of our spiritual essence. Thus, reading and its
accompanying state of absorption could be seen as a spur to psychological, or more
especially, psychospiritual evolution and higher states of consciousness, the
‘shamanising’ of modern humanity so that it might be able to live in two worlds at
once, the physical and the imaginal.
The following chapter will examine the nature of place as a continuum that
parallels consciousness, including its mythopoeic and imaginal dimensions.
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