The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience [Hardcover]
Author: Benny Shanon | Language: English | ISBN: 0199252920 | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience
Free download The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link
Free download The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link
This is a pioneering cognitive psychological study of Ayahuasca, a plant-based Amazonian psychotropic brew. Benny Shanon presents a comprehensive charting of the various facets of the special state of mind induced by Ayahuasca, and analyzes them from a cognitive psychological perspective. He also presents some philosophical reflections. Empirically, the research presented in this book is based on the systematic recording of the author's extensive experiences with the brew and on the interviewing of a large number of informants: indigenous people, shamans, members of different religious sects using Ayahuasca, and travellers. In addition to its being the most thorough study of the Ayahuasca experience to date, the book lays the theoretical foundations for the psychological study of non-ordinary states of consciousness in general.
Direct download links available for The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience - Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press (January 23, 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0199252920
- ISBN-13: 978-0199252923
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,038,662 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This is one of the most compelling books on altered states I�ve read, up there with James�s Varieties of Religious Experience, Huxley�s Doors of Perception (to which Shanon�s title alludes) and PIHKAL and TIKHAL by Ann and Alexander Shulgin. Unlike, say, the psychedelic performance artist Terence McKenna (whose writings I enjoy), Shanon�s authorial persona is earnest, serious, straightforward, absolutely trustworthy. He is a true scientist, dedicated to precise reporting and careful analysis rather than to entertainment. Not that his book is dull. Far from it. Antipodes is suffused with a sense of genuine adventure, of a kind that has virtually vanished from modern science. Plunging into the depths of his own ayahuasca-intoxicated mind, Shanon resembles one of the great Victorian explorers trekking into uncharted wilds, maintaining his equilibrium and wits even in the face of the most fantastical sights. Like Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle, Shanon is concerned primarily with collecting and categorizing data rather than theorizing. At the end of his book, however, he ponders his and others� experiences and draws some tentative conclusions. Ayahuasca, he asserts, can be both truth-revealing and "the worst of liars." Shanon remains skeptical of the occult claims often made for the drug�that it puts us in touch with spirits, makes us clairvoyant, lets us leave our bodies and travel astrally. He suggests that ayahuasca visions are products of the imagination rather than glimpses of a supernatural realm existing in parallel to our own. This proposal will sound reductionistic to some, but it is actually quite provocative, and raises many questions requiring further consideration.
INTRODUCTION
What happens when a worldly Israeli cognitive psychologist goes to the Amazon Basin where he ingests the famed psychotropic concoction Ayahuasca (the `vine of the dead') again and again and again? Our intrepid philosophical psychologist is no longer a sprightly youth, maddened for adventure. He is instead an accomplished theoretician with widely published articles (several in this journal) and a noted book (*The Representational and the Presentational*, 1993) that speak the from the perspective of cognitive (or phenomenological, for Shanon) psychology against the reductive tendency to view the mind's activities as created by the the brain's activities. Even before his Amazonian quest, he placed himself in the Gibsonian camp seeing the mind as dynamic intermediary between organism and environment and active participant in both. What did happen is this extraordinary book, a scientific analysis of his own visions and the education of both Shanon's views and, perhaps, his soul.
Benny Shanon's accomplishment in this unique and carefully written treatise is nonpareil. In his landmark attempt to chart and classify the experiences that follow ingesting the Amazonian brew, Ayahuasca (always capitalized by Shanon), he demonstrates a will to observe and explain as relentless as carbon steel, but his seeing and experiencing also require him to be as flexible as tungsten when he must shape his interpretations within experiences that have all but overthrown the pretense of objective observation. Indeed, as he becomes `educated' through his journeys with this brewed plant compound, apparently beginning his own shamanic initiation, his will, his very self must capitulate to experiences beyond words.
No comments:
Post a Comment