- seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
But we may wonder whether this distinction between ‘real’ and ‘in the mind’ is all
that clear. The hekura dancing down their shimmering trails and the stars coming
down from the sky are not physical, publicly measurable objects. Yet they have
been seen again and again by countless peoples separated in time and space in
their different cultures across the world. To this extent, they are publicly available.
If you took the right mixture of drugs, in the right setting, you would see them
too. What sort of reality does that give them? And what is it about the mental that
makes us so hesitant to call it real?
One controversial player on this edge of reality is anthropologist Carlos Casta-
neda, famous for his many books about his teacher, the Yaqui Indian Juan Matus
(Castaneda, 1968). As the story goes, Castaneda first met the old brujo, or med-
icine man, in the summer of 1960 at a bus depot in a border town in Arizona.
While Castaneda prattled on about how much he knew about peyote, and what
he wanted to learn, Don Juan peered at him patiently with shining eyes, knowing
that Castaneda was talking nonsense. But they met again and Castaneda became
Don Juan’s apprentice for four years. This ‘man of knowledge’ taught his disciples
sorcery, taking them through strange rituals and journeys, and using three hallu-
cinogens: peyote, which contains mescaline; jimson weed or datura, which con-
tains tropane alkaloids including atropine; and mushrooms containing psilocybin
(Chapter 13). According to Don Juan, peyote teaches the right way to live, while
the other drugs are powerful allies that can be manipulated by the sorcerer. Cas-
taneda suffered ordeals of sickness, pain, confusion, and whole worlds of visions
that were, according to Don Juan, not hallucinations but concrete aspects of real-
ity. Castaneda dubbed them ‘a separate reality’ (1971).
After many years of training, Castaneda began learning to ‘see’: a non-ordinary
way of looking in which people appear as fibres of light, as luminous eggs in
touch with everything else and in need of nothing. His head once turned into
a crow and flew away, he heard a lizard speak, and he became a brother to the
coyote. On one occasion he used jimson weed to fly, as medieval witches were
said to do by using the chemically related deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna.
He argued with himself and with Don Juan that his actual physical body could
not have flown, yet it apparently ended up half a mile from Don Juan’s house.
Finally he learned to keep death ever-present and not to be so concerned with his
ordinary self – indeed to stop the internal dialogue and erase his personal history.
Similar experiences are reported with ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic drink made
by Amazonian shamans and used for healing, insight, and many other purposes
(Chapter 13). The effects last many hours, with after-effects sometimes going on
for days, and can be varied and controlled for different purposes by fine variations
in the method of preparation. Most common are colourful visions of snakes and
serpents, as well as bodily distortions and even the sense of being transformed
into another creature or transposed into other worlds of living plants and animals.
Luis Eduardo Luna, Director of the Research Center for the Study of Psychointegra-
tor Plants, Visionary Art, and Consciousness, in Brazil, offers a detailed description
of the visual experiences induced with ayahuasca. Although the visions often move
with head and eye movements as you would expect in a hallucinatory experience,
sometimes ‘it is as if I am totally immersed in a three- dimensional world, so that, as
in the real world, when turning my head, different things would be perceived’ (2016,
p. 258). He notes that sensorimotor possibilities are limited in the visionary realm:
