Instant Shaman (two)

I remember, as well, in my late teens experimenting writing poetry. I would play loud music and write, thinking the music could help me access the poetic experience, as though it could somehow block the ego that is usually situated, like a filter, between the poet and what he is writing. All of my experimental writing was done with this in mind, whether concrete or sound poetry, or the cut-ups and visual collages that I also did. I know that some people have tried writing while on various “recreational” drugs, or while intoxicated after drinking alcohol. Alcohol never much interested me, it is only in the last ten years or so that I have the occasional social drink, and I did try hallucinogenic drugs a few times but found the results dismal. Mainly I felt that I didn’t like having my consciousness played around with by alcohol or hallucinogens. I also spent years sitting at my desk for several hours every evening writing hundreds of poems, being alone, telling no one what I was doing, and filing these poems in the small cubbies on either side of the desk, with no thought whatsoever of this writing having any purpose other than that I enjoyed writing poems.

The shamanic experience, the shaman’s journey, is usually described as one in which the shaman listens to repetitive drumming in order to enter a hypnogogic state. This type of religious experience seems to be caused by the release of endorphins in the brain. This does not refute the content of the experience, it only explains the physiological response to an experience and the experience of the Divine is possible without drumming, or any outside stimulant. There is something greater than the individual ego, it is what W.T. Stace described as “the undifferentiated unity of the universe.” I remember this phrase very well because Stace’s book on mysticism, The Teaching Of The Mystics, Selections From The Great Mystics And Mystical Writings Of The World (A Mentor Book, New York, 1960) had a profound affect on me when I was still in high school. I remember going to a used book store in downtown Montreal, where a cousin worked, and buying two books, one was by W.T. Stace and the other was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet which I never read. I still have both of these books. When I was in high school I read Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics (Wilshire Book Company, Hollywood, 1968), a book that teaches self-hypnosis. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who discusses, in this book, how a visualized experience of something is the equivalent, for the mind, to actually having had the experience. I read Maltz’s book and learned his technique for self-hypnosis and visualization. Self-hypnosis is a state of deep relaxation in which the conscious mind is situated between wakeful consciousness and sleeping unconsciousness. Meanwhile, I also remember my brother was interested in hypnosis and that he once hypnotized me, around 1962-63 when we still lived on Oxford Avenue, and he gave me a post-hypnotic suggestion, that I would get up and get a drink of water, and I remember walking to the bathroom and drinking from the tap (as we did for some reason) immediately after coming out of the hypnotic state. To this day I practise Maltz’s self-hypnosis when I can’t sleep, and over the last ten years or so I have used it for entering shamanic journeys.