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Foreword
Bridging Realities: A Challenge for the Inner Shaman Stanley Krippner The term "consciousness" and its equivalents in non-English languages can be de-
scribed in several ways, some of them contradictory. For my own work with tradi-
tional healers and indigenous peoples, I have found it useful to define con-
sciousness as the overall pattern of perception, cognition, and/or emotion that
characterizes the behavior and experience of an organism at any given point in
time. This definition allows me to investigate awareness, attention, memory, mood, feeling,
intention, volition, or any of the other proposed components of the overall mosaic. An-
thropologists have always given implicit or explicit acknowledgment to these phenomena but
in the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC), we have made them the major
focus of our research into the belief systems and evolution of human societies and the in-
dividuals, families, kinship groups, and ethnic conglomerates they encompass. | Stanley Krippner is
Distinguished Professor of
Psychology at the California
Institute for Integral Studies
and is professor and director
of consciousness studies at the
Saybrook Institute in San
Francisco, California. He is
widely published in the fields
of psychology, parapsychol-
ogy, and the study of con-
sciousness, including Human
Possibilities ( 1980 ) and is
editor of the biennial book
series, Advances in Parap-
sychology. | This issue of ReVision and the next, entitled "Culture and Ways of Knowing," are an elo-
quent testimony to our endeavors in SAC. The nine major articles were originally panel
presentations at the SAC 1992 annual meeting in San Rafael, California. They represent one
of the themes that ran through the entire conference: how does the cultural context affect
how and what we know? As I listened to the presentations during our 1992 meeting, I was
reminded of the perspective on shamanism taken by the Paratinin tribe of Brazil, specifically
that "there is a little bit of shamanism within each of us." Shamans can be described as
socially sanctioned practitioners who purport to regulate their attention (and other aspects of
their consciousness) in order to obtain information not ordinarily available, using it for com-
munity service. Shamanism, therefore, can be defined as a body of diverse techniques by
which the components of consciousness are purportedly altered, in a systematic and disci-
plined manner, to perceive, cognize, and emote in ways that obtain socially useful data, for
example, for weather forecasting, for hunting, for protection, for worshipping, for diagnos-
ing and healing, and for entertaining. As SAC members, we often attempt to contact our inner shamans for the purpose of add-
ing to the repository of human knowledge and understanding. In these endeavors, we may
begin to perceive and assimilate hitherto undetected patterns of behavior and experience that
construct meaning for a community and its members. Shamans were probably humanity's
first performing artists, storytellers, and mythmakers. SAC members, as this collection of
papers makes apparent, are cognizant of the salience of narrative, of text, and of discourse
in the construction of reality and the attribution of meaning to that construction. One con-
tributor (Wilkinson) refers to the "containers" within which the individual or the group
develops a particular relationship to experience. Like the ubiquitous multihued containers
made of diverse materials and molded into varied shapes periodically unearthed by ar-
cheologists, these structures must initially be appreciated on their own terms. Just as the
classifications of native pottery are dependent on the background of the archeologist
creating the categories, the consciousness researcher's classification of "states," "levels," or
"stages" of "shamanic," "yogic," or "mystical" conscious experience is dependent on the
language and belief system of the person who packages these experiences and draws lines
across and between what are, at best, amorphous and intangible phenomena. For me and my fellow SAC members, these considerations serve as constant reminders that
scientific investigation in the anthropology of consciousness must attempt to avoid the distor-
tions that result if a linear method is used to access a non-linear process, if we adopt interpretive
frameworks that assume a cognitive homogeneity among people, and if we attempt to identify
the meaning in a given situation by isolating it from its cultural and historical milieu--and from
our own prejudgments. We need to reject both the imperialism of the ego's approach to knowing
and the imperialism of the physical/natural science approach to data collection! -168- | |
