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Märipa: To Know Everything The Experience of Power as Knowledge Derived from the Integrative Mode of Consciousness
Abstract
Shamans of the Piaroa ethnic group (southern Venezuela) conceive of power in terms of knowledge derived from visionary experiences. Märipa is an epistemology concerning the translation of knowledge derived from the integrative mode of consciousness, induced primarily through the consumption of plant hallucinogens, to practical effect during waking life. I integrate mythological, neurobiological, experiential, and ethnographic data to demonstrate what märipa is, and how it functions. The theory and method of märipa underlie not only Piaroa shamanic activity, but all aspects of Piaroa life; mythology, causality, eschatology, and history. Piaroa shamanic practices involve conditioning the mind to achieve optimal perceptual capacities that facilitate accurate prediction and successful psycho-social prescription. Piaroa shamans describe their technologies of consciousness in terms of gods and spirits, but also in terms of studying and the acquisition of information. Because neurobiological processes underlie the development and experience of märipa, the language of neurobiology enables a partial translation of this indigenous epistemology. The concepts of feed forward neural processing and somatic markers are central to the processes of mental imagery cultivation that Piaroa shamans employ to divine solutions to adaptive problems. Piaroa 'techniques of ecstasy' involve the ability to apply mythological templates of human adaptation to schemas of human behaviour based on years of social analysis in association with heightened information processing capacities derivative of refined experimentation with the integrative mode of consciousness. Keyordsshamanism, neurophenomenology inugrativeconsciousness, hallucinogens
... Nevertheless, Harner posits that the SSC allows the shaman to experience unconscious contents emerging from within the psyche, implying that the spirit world represents a nonordinary psychic modality. As noted above, shamans may not generally consider their visions to be the result of a mode of consciousness, but many shamans explicitly use techniques for developing mental capacities that allow them to see in the spirit world (see Rodd 2003). How particular shamans conceive of and understand their experiences may differ from scientific theories of visions, and the validity of such theories must be empirically investigated. ...
... In fact, it is essential to avoid uncritically applying this internal/external distinction, which may or may not be supported by the ethnographic facts. For example, Piaroa shamans explicitly discuss techniques for developing mind or knowledge, which argues against the assumption that the shaman believes his or her vision occurs solely in the external objective world (Rodd 2003). ...
This article considers the shaman's visionary encounters with spirit beings from the critical viewpoint of several innovative theories of shamanism: Richard Noll's cognitive approach and Michael Winkelman's neurophenomenological perspective. These distinct approaches are analyzed in light of Jung's central concepts of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the individuation process, which have had a huge formative influence upon the academic investigation of visions and spiritual experiences. The centrality of Jung's theoretical reasoning within these recent studies of shamanism strongly demonstrates the continued importance of his analytical psychology and provides valuable insight into the historical and conceptual development of this expanding field of interest.
... Rodd elaborated on the practice of the acquisition of knowledge from the 'integrative mode of consciousness', i.e., from altered states induced by ayahuasca and other plant-based medicines (Rodd, 2003). The training of a guide involved conditioning the mind to achieve optimal perceptual capacities that facilitated accurate prediction and successful psycho-social prescription. ...
[link: https://doi.org/mmf8] Psychedelics are currently being studied intensively for the treatment of various psychiatric disorders. Ayahuasca, a plant-based extract originating from the Amazonian area, is traditionally consumed in ritualistic group events. The related indigenous traditions date back hundreds of years and have amassed vast amounts of knowledge on the therapeutic use of psychedelic and non-psychedelic plant-based substances. These traditions require a prospective ceremony facilitator to undergo years of intensive training to acquire knowledge, mental power or self-confidence, stability, sensitivity, intuitive treatment outcome prediction skills, musical skills, and sufficient physical strength. These qualities of a facilitator, in the presence of integrity and love, largely determine treatment outcomes. In Europe, predominantly in the first decade of the 2000s and in the early 2010s, some individuals began building connections with diverse indigenous groups and syncretic churches of the Amazonia in an attempt to find cures for their treatment-resistant psychiatric conditions. Small circles of other patients in need of similar treatment formed around them. This led to the formation of decentralized, diverse local ceremony cultures that either followed the principles of the traditional lineages of their origin or synthesized various influences. These unofficial ceremony contexts appeared to complement official healthcare systems, offering efficient methods unavailable in the medical context and correcting the consequences of medical malpractice and neglect. These ceremony contexts appeared highly communal, were largely based on volunteering, and contained mechanisms for self-correcting possible emerging issues. They seemed to function as systems for collecting, preserving, storing, and distributing knowledge of psychedelic therapy methods; in other words, systems for knowledge base building and innovation.
... Märipa is a shaman's power to cure or cause harm and also the epistemology concerning the translation of knowledge experienced during visionary experiences to practical effect during waking life (Rodd 2003). According to Piaroa shamans, three principle psychoactive substances (dädä [Malouetia sp.], yopo [a snuff made from Anadenanthera peregrina] and capi [Banisteriopsis caapi]) facilitate entry to a realm of potentially infinite understanding of past, current and future ecological, social and individual situations. ...
The Amazonian cosmos is a battlefield where beauty is possible but violent chaos rules. As a result, the Piaroa world is characterised by an ongoing battle between shamans who uphold, on behalf of all Piaroa, the ideal of ethical living, and forces of chaos and destruction, epitomised by malevolent spirits (märi) and dangerous sorcerers. This essay draws on ethnographic research involving shamanic apprenticeship conducted between 1999 and 2002 to explore the ethics of Piaroa shamanic practice. Given the ambivalent nature of the Amazonian shaman as healer and sorcerer, what constitutes ethical shamanic practice? How is good defined relative to the potential for social and self-harm? I argue that the Piaroa notions of ‘living by the law’ and ‘the good life of tranquillity’ amount to a theory of shamanic ethics and an ethos in the sense of a culturally entrained system of moral and emotional sensibilities. This ethos turns on the importance of guiding pro-social, cooperative and peaceful behaviour in the context of a cosmos marked by violent chaos. Shamanic ethics also pivots around the ever-present possibility that visionary power dissolves into self- and social destruction. Ethical shamanic practice is contingent on shamans turning their own mastery of the social ecology of emotions into a communitarian reality.
... In keeping with the field of anthropology, the value of neurophenomenology is naturalistic and introspective, and application is directed toward diverse subjects encountered in cross-cultural comparison, and ethnographic and applied fieldwork; for example, consciousness (Laughlin, 1988), religion and spiritual practices (Dornan, 2004;Krippner & Combs, 2002;Laughlin, 1992Laughlin, , 2011Peters, 2004;Rodd, 2003;Vásquez, 2011;Winkelman, 1996aWinkelman, , 1996bWinkelman, , 2010, theory (Laughlin & Throop, 2006;Laughlin et al., 1990;Peters, 2000;Throop, 2003b;), the anthropology of experience (Desjarlais & Throop, 2011), time consciousness and culture (Laughlin, 1992;Laughlin & Throop, 2008), dreaming and dream cultures (Kirmayer, 2009;Laughlin, 2011), the structure of the ancient mind (Dornan, 2004;Laughlin & Loubser, 2010), the nature of the "ethnographic epoché" (Throop, 2012) and healing (Groisman & Sell, 1996). ...
Every thought, image, feeling, intuition, awareness and sensory experience is mediated by the organ of experience—the brain. This chapter discusses the concepts of consciousness and phenomenology, and goes on to talk about the origin and meaning of the concept of neurophenomenology. It focuses on “study of experience” and examines the natural biological basis of lived experience. The chapter explores the range of problems that might profitably come within the purview of a neurophenomenological analysis. For cognitive neurophenomenology, the implications are radical, in that the approach requires considerable alteration in the design of laboratory or clinical research protocols. For cultural neurophenomenologists, the challenge is to acquire the requisite training in neuroscience (or add a neuroscientist to the team) as well as learn to use transpersonal field methods to access the experiences had by one's non-Western hosts while in alternative states of consciousness.
... Yopo is consumed during the performance of songs, myths and cures, to understand social and ecological relations in the present and to envision amenable futures (Rodd 2003), to defend or attack during sorcery battles, and in social settings among other shamans, family and friends. José-Luis, a senior Parguaza River shaman, explained that he consumes yopo to "find food, to protect my family," and to provide a healing service to those in need. ...
Most Orinocoan ethnic groups, including the Cuiva and the Piaroa, use yopo, a hallucinogenic snuff derived from the seeds of the Anadenanthera peregrina tree. This study contrasts Piaroa and Cuiva attitudes toward and uses of yopo in light of ongoing processes of social change. We do not believe that these sociocultural forces will lead to a phasing out of yopo in Piaroa and Cuiva life. However, we demonstrate how, in nearby communities, a combination of historical and ethical contingencies lead to very different patterns and understanding of drug use. Yopo is strongly associated with the performance of narratives central to each ethnic group's cosmology and identity. Cuiva yopo consumption is also a means of resisting persecution and asserting the right to a just reality. Piaroa attitudes towards yopo are affected by the interplay of shamanic ethical principles and missionary activity, and are sometimes paradoxical: yopo is the reason for harm and the means of salvation; required by shamans to create the future and yet regarded by many laypeople as a relic of the past. We identify persecution, local responses to missionary activity, and shamanic ethics as key factors affecting the evolution of hallucinogen use by Amazonian ethnic groups.
Divination has been practiced as a way of knowing and communicating for millennia. Diviners are experts who embrace the notion of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice. They excel in insight, imagination, fluency in language, and knowledge of cultural traditions and human psychology. During a divination, they construct usable knowledge from oracular messages of various sorts. To do so, they link diverse domains of representational information and symbolism with emotional or presentational experience. Their divinatory acts involve complementary modes of cognition associated with these rather different symbolic forms. In representational symbolism, intentional reference, within a relatively controlled inductive reality, is paramount, while in presentational symbolism, implicit experiential immersion, within a free-flowing context, is grasped intuitively. Wherever a theory of divination has been elicited from diviners, there is a clear recognition of the overlapping of inductive, intuitive, and interpretive techniques and ways of knowing. In order to arrive at a theory of practice for divination, as a form of practical consciousness or knowledge within different modes of cognition, one must take what diviners say and do seriously. Recent scientific studies reveal that consciousness is connected both to electrical information in the brain and nervous system and to electronic semi-conduction in body tissues. Brain consciousness is embedded in body consciousness and coupled to it. This validates the experience of mind-body consciousness diviners have used for millennia in their performances.
An overemphasis on the interpretation of language has impeded understanding of the cultural and cognitive logic of sorcery's focal acts: divination and sorcery battle. Among the Piaroa of southern Venezuela, divination and sorcery battle are conducted during hallucinogen-induced visions, and are predicated on an epistemology that privileges forms of knowing that are neither linguistic nor language-like. I suggest that Piaroa sorcerers use hallucinogen-induced visions to map the social ecology of emotions in ways partially explainable by cognitive science, and that mature contemplation may provide the anthropologist with a means of understanding relationships between nonlinguistic thought and culture. I interweave an account of my participation in a sorcery battle with neuropsychological interpretations of cognition and emotion to present a navigation of a negative affect theory of sorcery. The navigation of negative affect theory complements sociological and psychoanalytic approaches while emphasizing the cognitive skills and visionary experiences that underpin the practice of sorcery by shamans.
This article explores informational uses of spiritual information presented in spiritual publications. Informational use entails cognitive or communicational activity that — on the basis of information — focuses on representations of the perceived existence, whereas practical use of information centres on tangible — material or energetic — activities of the real world. Some earlier research has been done on the informational uses of information, but spiritual information has been ignored almost altogether in this context. The empirical work was grounded on a representative sample of spiritual texts. The method of analysing the data was inductive content analysis. The main result of this study was the discovery and dissection of three fundamental varieties of informational information use: internalizing information, processing knowledge, and externalizing knowledge. The classification constructed in this study can be seen as a useful tool for further investigation into information use, but it should be refined in subsequent research.
Provides a cross-cultural and neurobiological assessment of the nature of shamanism.
There is a growing interest in 'therapeutic narratives' and the relation between narrative and healing. Cheryl Mattingly's ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital investigates the complex interconnections between narrative and experience in clinical work. Viewing the world of disability as a socially constructed experience, it presents fascinatingly detailed case studies of clinical interactions between occupational therapists and patients, many of them severely injured and disabled, and illustrates the diverse ways in which an ordinary clinical interchange is transformed into a dramatic experience governed by a narrative plot. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including anthropological studies of narrative and ritual, literary theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics, this book develops a narrative theory of social action and experience. While most contemporary theories of narrative presume that narratives impose an artificial coherence upon lived experience, Mattingly argues for a revision of the classic mimetic position. If narrative offers a correspondence to lived experience, she contends, the dominant formal feature which connects the two is not narrative coherence but narrative drama. Moving and sophisticated, this book is an innovative contribution to the study of modern institutions and to anthropological theory.
This article reviews a number of recent publications in psychological anthropology that draw in varying degrees from psychoanalytic premises in order to theoretically address problems concerning the internalization of cultural meaning. The article begins with a discussion and critical comparison of Spiro's and Obeyesekere's perspectives on internalization that are in line with a number of classical formulations in anthropological and psychoanalytic theory, before turning to explore what appears to be an emerging new wave of perspectives in contemporary psychological anthropology that set out to discuss problems of internalization in the context of a complex modeling of psychological, social, and cultural processes. The article concludes with a brief discussion of where researchers may need to turn to further our understanding of `internalization' in relation to those intrapsychic, interpsychic, and extrapsychic processes underpinning the crafting of cultural minds.
Morphological data on structures of the principal limbic circuit show that they constitute a complex, hierarchically organized system, and that this is indeed a system with important intrinsic principles of organization. The morphofunctional interactions among the elements of this system are obvious from the successive transneuronal degeneration of the limbic structures after an interruption of their interconnections (Cowan and Powell, 1954; Bleier, 1969). The principal limbic circuit is supplemented by very significant interactions between the hippocampus and the brain stem reticular formation, with the septum as the intermediary link.
Although the facts and phenomena of consciousness have received attention in various forms in the past, it is only recently that the scientific community and the biobehavioral sciences in particular, have begun to recognize its study as a legitimate, even essential, domain of inquiry. Investigators who have attempted to explore this area of functioning have approached it from a myriad of perspectives, with a heterogeneous array of methods and techniques. The available literature in this area consists largely of a disparate collection of findings with an occasional, loosely woven theory. Most researchers working in areas of the biobehavioral sciences which have bearing on the study of consciousness are often not aware of data in a different, but related area which might be relevant to their investigations.
Since the time of atomists like Democritus, forerunner of Plato and Aristotle, two modes of scientific explanation have been used to fill the conceptual space between mind and brain, a dualism more grudgingly resistant to resolution than that of energy and matter. One method assumes a world of hidden realities, impenetrable, to be understood by conjecture and test, observations evaluated for their consistency with hypothetical constructs. The other requires an intuitive grasp of the essence, insightful awareness of the thing itself. The first approach defines a unification of mind and brain out of the possible; the second assumes it. Feelings about these orientations still run strong. In a recent book, the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper expressed irritation with Plato for intermixing these two thought styles without acknowledging the intermixture, concluding that only the conjectural-test approach is valid; the other kind of knowing Popper dismissed as a “will-o-the-wisp” (Popper & Eccles, 1977).
The history of psychology in this century can be charted in terms of the issue that dominated each decade of exploration. Early studies on classical conditioning and Gestalt principles of perception were followed subsequently by two decades of behaviorism. In the 1950s information measurement took the stage to be supplanted in the 1960s by an almost frenetic endeavor to catalogue memory processes, an endeavor which culminated in the new concepts of a cognitive psychology. Currently, the study of consciousness as central to the mind-brain problem has emerged from the explorations of altered and alternative states produced by drugs, meditation, and a variety of other techniques designed to promote psychological growth.