After 400 years of separating our rationality from all the other ways we know “things,” our wisdom has been watered down, our intelligence short-circuited.. Like animals in zoos, we have been boxed too tightly to nurture our full capacity for aliveness.

 Are my friend’s experiences really delirium?

I am currently enthralled with Stephan Harding’s book: Gaia Alchemy – The Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul. A lightning bolt seared a bolt of truth inside me when Harding describes how, for centuries now, reason has been considered our superior function and everything else about how we know is considered inferior. When modern science came on the scene and Christianity dominated European cultures, that schism became sharper as we pursued becoming cultured, civilized. Along with separating the head from the body, we forgot we were mammals, separating our bodies from the body of the world. If we can’t measure it, IT is called secondary. Being able to quantify validates everything, qualities are ignored as fluff. All our experiences of smell, taste, intuition, goosebumps, butterflies in the belly, etc are relegated to the broom closet, unimportant, out of sight out of mind.

Are my friend’s experiences really delirium, described as “an acutely disturbed state of mind”? ( New American Oxford Dictionary )

 As Daniel Quinn points out in a speech from 2002, we modern, urban peoples still cling to at least 3 medieval beliefs. Though we humans, in general, have embraced the idea of our Earth being round – hard to dismiss if you travel in an airplane – we continue to think we are flawed, that we are meant to live the way we do, and that we humans are a different order of being, separate from the “rest of the living community.” Quinn asserts with confidence that in 200 years, people will know we belong to the web of life. The source of his confidence?  “If people go on thinking we belong to a separate order of being, then there will be no people living here in 200 years”.

Are my friend’s experiences really delirium, or could they reveal something wondrous?

Years ago – back in 1980 – as a new PhD psychotherapist – I began exploring expanded states of consciousness – not with drugs but with the guidance of the 1972 book by Jean Houston and Robert Masters: Mind Games – A Guide to Inner Space. During one of the sessions my colleagues and I experienced, I learned about the two hemispheres of my brain, learned, too, that they collaborated. Viscerally, unmistakably, I witnessed a gorilla in my right hemisphere reach a long arm out to bridge the gap between hemispheres to reach a banana in my left one. The banana represented “food for thought.”   

Forty years later, I’m reading a book: DMT – the Spirit Molecule – A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences by Rick Strassman, MD. In those pages I learn about the pineal gland and how its release of hormones may be a biological basis for spiritual experiences. We are hard-wired for experiences way beyond the quantifiable, often beyond words, too.

Anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, PhD, from whom I learned Ecstatic Postures, described urbanized humans of today as “ecstasy deprived”. She attributed our addictive behaviors and rampant dis-ease to that primal hunger ( See philosopher, Bruce Wilshire’s book: Wild Hunger – Primal Roots of Modern Addiction.)

So, are my friend’s experiences really delirium? Instead, might they be evidence of a long locked door swinging open to landscapes we have forgotten, to sensory abilities that have been dormant for thousands of years. Our human species is immature. Evolution still shapes us. I know the day will come when a doctor will respond to a patient like my friend: Oh yes. We’ve heard stories like that before. Our bodies are amazing, aren’t they, our bodyminds especially! I encourage you to trust the validity of your experiences. They’re worth remembering, maybe even practicing. We’ve only just begun to explore our human capacities now that science and spirituality can move forward together. Let me know how your experiences unfold, ok?