3) Personal Doubts Regarding this Anomalous Experience

Still curious about my experience and, hoping to learn more about it, I eagerly shared the account of my dream during my Sunday school class. Here again my peers laughed at my dream. My teacher responded by saying, “there were some things we were not meant to know”, which provided the introduction to her lesson about the “evils of science and technology.” Following class, my Sunday school teacher suggested I stop reading so many weird science books and start reading the Bible more often.
What continued to puzzle me was that I was not reading any “weird science books.” I was reading books about space travel and dinosaurs, but these had nothing to do with the content of my dream. What sort of “weird books” were they talking about? And why, if these books talked about experiences like the one that I had had, were they supposed to be “weird science?”

Continuing to reflect on my dream for the next few days, I eventually reached the conclusion that I had had some kind of “religious” experience: that I had been called to investigate experiences of this kind and, thereby, somehow explain them. How I reached this conclusion is difficult to truly know; yet something inside me demanded that I give this problem my full attention. Although my ability to formulate any kind of sophisticated hypothesis was limited at this time, I reasoned (using less precise concepts and language) that this experience was religious in the sense of a deeply mystical experience, which somehow allowed me to transcend the space-and-time between me and my friend.

One of the many concerns I have experienced when discussing this dream is the way people try to reconcile this account. Most people tend to discount it, like my teachers and peers did, as the product of an over-active imagination. The other common response is I must be suffering from some kind of mental illness, or that I am just plain lying. This is why my dream caused so much distress in those I told it to. Not only was this account something outside the domain of science, but my story had also been fairly accurate in predicting the future.

Had I lived in a culture where shamans existed, the response to this dream may have been quite different (Achterberg, 1988; Harner, 1988; Krippner & Villoldo, 1986; Krippner, 2002; Villoldo & Krippner, 1987; and Van de Castle, 1994). Possibly I would have been taken aside and tested by the tribal shaman to see if my natural talents did, in fact, lie in this area. If such testing would have proven successful, perhaps I would have been accepted as the shaman’s apprentice and been guided on a path to assist me in actualizing my talents as one of the tribe’s future shaman.

Holger Kalweit provides an example of this in his book Dreamtime and Inner Space: The World of the Shaman (1984):
. . . a report by the famous Polar explorer Knud Rasmussen about the Caribou Eskimo shamaness Kinalik may serve as an example. Rasmussen describes her as being about thirty years of age, very intelligent, neat, trusting, and communicative. She became a shamaness as a result of a vision of death; more precisely, she “died” from being shot. She was chosen for shamanic training because she had dreamt that a man of her tribe would become ill. This was taken as a sign of her shamanic talent—the spirits had imparted news to her in a dream (Kalweit: 9, 1984).

Jean: But it is pretty hard for a six-year-old to interpret a dream accurately, without some kind of distortion.
Schroll: Sure.
Brad: But this dream did not require an interpretation of itself.
Mary: It found validation later.
Maria Carrera: This is the problem. Nowadays a child tells you a dream like this and you get into trying to interpret it. You do not see it with the eyes with which it needs to be seen. Someone tells you I’m hearing voices and you immediately ignore seeing a way that would reveal that it is possible. That it could be you are. . .
Jean: Sure, people hear voices.
Maria Carrera: . . .really hearing voices.
Schroll: Right, you believe it is a sign of mental illness.
Maria Carrera: That’s right.
Schroll: And it might be.
Maria Carrera: And it might be, you’re right. Many times. . .
Schroll: There are people that suffer from these kinds of delusions.
Helen: How do we know what the “right perception” is? How do we know which is which?
Schroll: That’s the problem. This is precisely why we need to have people that are well trained in this kind of assessment, so that they can assist us in making this decision or diagnosis. The point I am trying to make here is that historically there were people that knew how to make this distinction or diagnosis. The shaman was actually an individual that would be the equivalent of the modern psychologist, psychiatrist, theologian, or anthropologist of consciousness (which we shall discuss in more detail in chapter 6). But they were much more than this. Shamans were also masters of ecstasy that used a variety of methods as part of their practice. They incorporated dance, medicine, the healing arts, visual arts, all sorts of movement, and techniques for having visions. Shamans knew about certain plants that enhanced these visions and a variety of others for healing. Today the shaman’s knowledge, as well as the contents of their medicine bag, is divided up into a variety of different disciplines. Shamans also possessed the ability (based on the fact that if a person knows, really knows, having had the kind of visionary experiences like the dream I discussed) to determine if someone was suffering from some kind of disease, or whether they were just faking or lying. Shamans were able to know if the person was really having visions, or if they were just making up fantastic stories. Either way, the shaman would be capable of acting accordingly.

It is this absence of diagnostic ability within the worldview of EuroAmerican science that demonstrates one of its many limitations and its need for revision. I do not feel like what happened to me was unique. Much to the contrary, these kinds of experiences happen to a lot of people. But when most people have experiences like the dream I described, the tendency is to try and forget, because it is easier to forget about these encounters with alternate reality and go out and get a job and make money. It is easier to discount our journeys into nonordinary states of consciousness and go on with life as usual, telling ourselves that we are just having fanciful dreams. It is easier to become part of consensus reality and say that these phenomena we have been talking about do not exist.

We are not encouraged to continually say that there is something “out there” that needs to be investigated. We are seldom reminded that without our testimony phenomena of this kind will continue to be ignored and not be seriously investigated. And we know why too, because phenomena like the dream I described go beyond the limitations of our known reality and are phenomena that most people do not directly encounter. Instead we find that the usual response to these phenomena is one of contempt and suspicion.

From the perspective of a stage theory of consciousness and/or a gradual development of optimal health, Ken Wilber refers to this fear and distrust of anomalous experience as the problem of structural adaptation (Wilber, 1983). I therefore acknowledge my debt to Wilber for his excellent summary of structural adaptation and the basic framework of developmental psychology, whose perspective on this I have paraphrased in the following paragraph. Jean Piaget has proposed that during the first 18 months children exist in a pre-verbal, pre-conceptual world referred to as sensorimotor. Linguistic referents are, therefore, beyond the reality of the child’s world during this stage of growth. Gradually during the preoperational stage (from the age of 18 months to seven years) the child becomes structurally adapted to the use of language. This stage prepares the child for the emergence of concrete operations (such as serration, which makes possible arithmetic, classification, and so on) which are actualized from the age of seven to eleven years. It is still beyond the reality of most children at this age to grasp purely symbolic hypothetical problems that are commonly associated with formal operations. For instance, the structural adaptation of children that have mastered concrete operations are able to solve most problems within the reality of three-dimensional space, that is, problems concerning the manipulation of an objects width, length and depth. Children at this age are not, however, structurally adapted to grasp the reality of the fourth dimension (time), because its understanding requires the ability to think abstractly.

Likewise the average person reaching Piaget’s stage of formal operations (age 12 to adult) are still not structurally adapted to the domain of transpersonal experience. This absence of adaptation does not preclude the possibility that a person may experience anomalous experiences or glimpses of the transpersonal, like those Maslow referred to as peak-experiences. Wilber goes on to point out that individual peak-experiences are:

". . . fleeting, impossible to replicate, privitistic, and altogether too brief to establish any claim to cognitive validity, as philosophers were very happy (and very correct) to explain. On the other hand, if we understand that yogic, and sagely knowledge-claims are based, not on belief, faith, or transitory experience, but on actual levels of structuralization, cognition, and development, then the deep structures of their truth-claims assume a perfectly appropriate, verifiable, and replicable status" (Wilber; 73, 1983).1

References

(references here will be posted at the end of the last blog entry of this series)