(b) Living Simultaneously in Two Worlds
I t is clear from the shamans’ responses and the extended textual research
material, that when fully initiated the shaman lives simultaneously in the material
world and in a shamanic realm where s/ he is able to converse with entities from
that realm and explore its topography. The experiences of the mythopoeic writers
and readers were very much the same; they too seem to enter a different
dimension of consciousness, of experience and knowledge. The fact is that when
ordinary waking consciousness gives way to SC or MLC, an entirely different faculty
takes command, a faculty that knows things usually hidden from the everyday ego
because it facilitates journeying to an elsewhere-place foreign to ego consciousness.
An explanation of the dynamics of this capacity of shamans and mythopoeic
writers to see more deeply through the membrane between mundane existence and
the hidden is described in Chapter 2, in the section From Hermeticism through
Sufism to Romanticism. There I described a double vision which reflected a kind of
Hermetic consciousness that is not disturbed by problems of subject and object,
consciousness versus the unconscious, inner and outer, material and immaterial; a
consciousness that travels freely along the place-elsewhere-place continuum. I n
this mode the shaman and the mythopoeic writer, and reader, experience a
borderline perception that sees the one in the other, intertwined. I ndeed, this
concept of double vision or simultaneous existence should not imply seeing two
things at once or existing in two places at once or of transforming one into the
other. I t is a single mode of perceiving and existing in which the doubleness or
polarity of things , as in the finest metaphors, is obvious because we are both
seeing and seeing through, experiencing existence on both sides of the place-
elsewhere-place-consciousness Mobius strip-like continuum. Along that continuum
an irrefutable primordial intelligence operates freely because the subject, the ego, is
in abeyance; the shaman or mythopoeic writer becomes the universe’s experience
of itself as a human being ... after all this body is made of the very stuff of the
universe. There is no outside or beyond to the realization of the universe from
which to come; the shaman and mythopoeic writer, prior to initiation or an initiatory
event, only thought they were a separate identity, as was explained in the empirical
and textual research described in Chapters 4 and 5.