VISIONARY by GRAHAM HANCOCK : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW : NOTES and QUESTIONING (PART TWO)

 BEINGS

ARE THERE BEINGS THAT ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT US in the hallucinogenic experience? Or are at least sentient if yet invisible to us in ordinary perception, who are AWARE we exist?  In a 2001 science experiment what was reported by subjects given the same essential chemical in Ayahuasca, a new idea was brought forth. What if what was happening was that the chemical was sort of rewiring the brain so that we could see what really exists rather than interpreting and making it all up?

I'll tell you right now, regarding the experiences reported by Amazonian natives who use a snuff with DMT, the reportage gets close to what some UFO abductees report.  Such as the implantation of crystals (or what is perceived to be a crystal) but can also be quite violent such as experiencing being beheaded. (And this is why you should never ever take such a substance without supervision by a shaman or elder, or someone who remains in this world while you go off somewhere, and can watch you and prevent you from hurting yourself.)

WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON WITH OUR BODIES AND MINDS?

Reported is that one human in eight reports at least an hour in which they did not know where they were or what they did.  (i.e. missing time.  My long ago friendly associate Arthur Kane told me that he and his wife experienced this).

One in five woke up paralyzed at least once.  (This has happened to me.)

One in twelve saw unusual lights or orbs in a room.  

(A couple years ago I was shown a film, taken by a security camera, that was the most convincing orb film I have ever seen.  It's held privately and is not on the internet. Security alarms had gone off at that location two nights in a row and the filming was by the installed camera, no humans around. Multiple orbs were moving as if dancing back and forth - like in a square dance if you can imagine that - while one went up and back to the camera eye itself. There is outside lighting at the location, but the place is locked up, up from car-level in front, and fenced in, so the concern there was a break in or perhaps a raccoon or other wildlife inside. None was spotted.  There was no sign of damage or creatures. These orbs could not have been made by, say, headlights or flashlights.)

Author Graham Hancock states that he did not believe in nuts and bolts spaceships or aliens with physical bodies going into this aspect of visionary experience, research, or reportage.  He states that having completed his investigation he still does not believe in nuts and bolts spaceships or aliens with physical bodies, calling his beliefs hardened.

I have not and do not consider myself to be a UFO abductee. However, I do know that people who experience sleep paralysis do sometimes believe this experience is that aliens have sort of stunned them and is the beginning of an abduction. Science suggests that the mind has woken before the body and it only seems like its been a while since one could move.)

Hancock brings up the reportage of John E. Mack, who was almost kicked out of academia when he decided to work with UFO abductee's.  (He was a professor at Harvard, and a psychiatrist, and had a good lawyer work for him when he was threatened with loosing his position at that college.)

IS THE UFO ABDUCTEE EXPERIENCE also a CULTURAL INTERPRETATION?

Why, for instance, does a shaman experience beings counting his bones, with one extra rib being the qualification of being a shaman?  (Why are shamans with six fingers depicted in ancient Magyar images of shamans?  We know that extra fingers or toes happen in humans and is considered a genetic mutation, as are extra teeth.)

John Mack's work with the UFO ABDUCTEE's showed that they were not "crazy" or lunatic fringe people.

BEING FLOATED OUT OF THE WORLD...

The question I have here is... is it lucid dreaming?  Is it astral travel? WHY would HUMANS who ARE NOT using a hallucinogenic substance, have an experience that they remember well after waking up or returning to their bodies that is also reported by shamans?

Australian aborigines climbing a rope into the sky where they can talk to the star people. Beams of light that pull humans to UFO's?

(This is why finding a crashed UFO or shooting one down out of the sky becomes important, because a vision does not prove the physical existence)

Hancock himself having had the experience of what might be called a Grey while under the influence of Ayahuasca...  Finding rock art that depicts what might be considered to be aliens or ancient astronauts... Abductees saying that their first visions of the aliens were animals...  (I recall Whitley Strieber, perhaps the most famous UFO abductee, stating that owls were the "screen image" the aliens were using and he experienced a fear upon seeing owl images.)

SPIRIT HELPERS or familiars?

Stories of shamans being raised to be shamans before birth.  Stories of origins in the stars. Celestial wives.  Having many children by extra-terrestrials?  Or humans pulling spirits down from the sky to remain here...

Insect People.

Houses of smoke?

What we used to call incubi and succubi...

Fairy...

Changelings.... switched with human babies... UFO abductee mothers being shown babies and told to nurse.

Corrigans

Crop circles as fairy rings?

Hollow hills.  Indian mounds?

PORTHOLES.... springs, wells, caves...

It's been years since I encountered a book like this one and it contained far more entwined subjects than I could have imagined as I read it on Hoopla. It was one of those I could not put down, or in this case, stop hitting the forward button on.

More coming...

C 2023  Christine Trzyna

THERE IS A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT : THE SMITHS (MORRISEY)

Happy Birthday Michael...

YOU REALLY GOT ME : THE KINKS

VISIONARY by GRAHAM HANCOCK : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW : NOTES and QUESTIONING (PART ONE)

Back in pre-college and college days, anthropology of religion was of great interest to me. I studied belief systems, seeking commonality among religions at first, and was fascinated with what might be considered pagan or primitive. The Greeks, The Romans, the Egyptians...  Native Americans... Among the many books I encountered, sought, and read that had to do with what and why people believe(d) as they do, I read around the subject of rock art.  Rock Art, as well as the hallucinations and visions that our ancestors had thousands of years ago, is the subject of the book VIsionary, by Graham Hancock.

I learned through reading and in anthropology classes that rock art was generally thought to be the work of shamans or the work of hunters who, perhaps, imagined the success of the hunt before they went out to kill, as a kind of psychological pre-hunt ritual, perhaps the essence of positive thinking.  If they were hunting cattle, then they might create images of the cattle or men with the heads of cattle (pre-cattle aurochs).  Bison.  Horses.

Another notion that's promoted is that the underlying theme of cave drawings is abundance and fertility. Rather than the hunt, this might be about the wish for animals who are being domesticated to be fruitful and multiply. 

Some rock art is elegant and sophisticated. We often think that our ancient ancestors were too stuck in survival mode to have the time to create art or become sensitive artists. (Rather I think most of their art did not survive weather and time and a cave is a sheltered environment that better preserved the art.) Some rock art is rudimentary. Thanks to carbon 14 dating, an idea of when humans created this art, which often features half animal humans, has evolved and been accepted by academic science.  

While my study of rock art did brush up with the use of hallucinogens by people who did not keep written records or print books but remembered their origin stories and spiritual beliefs through story telling and being taught by previous generations, I myself never sought the experience. Friends from long ago did try LSD, reporting in some frightening experiences, such as visions that their house was on fire.

I learned that there were also symbols such as spirals, ladders, star-like motifs, and so on that were found on rocks in various places around the world which seemed to show a possibly universal rather than culturally-bound experiences. These motifs coexist with images of the half-animal humans in some places.  

What you see under the influence - what they saw - was supposed to be cultural or rooted in a conscious belief system. Thus, if a particular animal was local and hunted, supplying necessary protein in a diet, and thus a desired animal that one might also be grateful to, it would feature in the rock art. Thus a Christian who ventures to the spirit world is expected to see Jesus or angels, while a Hindu might meet with Krishna or Vishnu... that's the general idea.  (NDE's - Near Death Experiences seem to play out the religious-cultural expectations of encounter.)

But what about all those images of lion-like creatures where lions did not exist? Were those animals that once lived in that part of the world but are extinct?

If the substance is Datura, which grows wild in Southern California, will that result in the vision of a different animal or half animal - half human than if a person is under the influence of  Ayahuasca, a brew from plants the Brazilian rain forest?  (With Ayahuasa Tourism being what it is, I wonder if these plants will become crops in California.) Why would an animal that is not native to Europe, such as a lion or big cat, or a stag deer, have become such an Icon in Europe, I ask, as it appears in the family crests and armory of many families from medieval times.)

In Visionary by Graham Hancock, an "out of the box" thinker and earnest non-academic researcher, who has been pilloried by them, we learn that the use of hallucinogens inspired the rock art of half-human animals. It turns out that these half -human animals, supposed to be cultural, may just be what shamans and other users of hallucinogens see while under the influence of a brew and that the hallucinogenic experience is universal. 

Hancock, who has used Ayahuasca in supervised situations many times, and says snake images are universal with it, says yes, it is the substance that moves a user towards a certain repertoire of visions.  (This is the latest, trendy hallucinogen and is being tried by Westerners far from the Amazon where it originates.)

Noteworthy:  In some rock art settings the imagine of hand appears, which is thought to be like the signature of the artist. These hands are either painted on, or the person put their hand on the wall and dabbed around them or even spit paint.  In some rock art the natural forms of the stone are integrated into the art as if the rock form suggested the image.  Rock art sometimes suggests that the artist is imagining the animal or chimera of coming out of the rock or going in and out of the rock itself.

The book is plentiful with images of rock art at various locations including Europe - France and Spain - and South Africa.  

Hancock goes on to detail how it was that academics fought for professional prominence and their theories starting in the late 1800's (that era that was the beginning of anthropology, starting with the gentleman world travelers) and the "Frightening Power of Preconceived Ideas."  While it can be understood, by me, that so many were inventing anthropology and it's sister that goes hand in hand, archeaology, just like psychology, that there has been trial and error as well as tremendous mistakes, the question is if today's professionals in those fields are willing to go past what might be called the canon. 

ART FOR ART's SAKE or HUNTING MAGIC?

MUSHROOMS, WATER LILLY, MORNING GLORY SEEDS, PEYOTE CACTUS,  FUNGUS ERGOT...

Why, I ask, is there a human need to have out of this world experiences?  Is it because we wish to be reminded of the world we left before we came here? Or are we just bored with life as it is? Imagination and creativity is what's needed to progress or to deal with or extinguish the problems of life caused by change. Do we imagine creatures that do not exist on earth while under the influence or did these creatures once exist, perhaps created through some superior intelligence mixing the DNA?  While on Ayahuasca, Hancock saw a butterfly turn into a serpent, a serpent turn into a jaguar, and a huge insect with human features.

TRANCE:  SLEEP DISTURBANCES and DEFICIT, DEHYDRATION...  DRUMMING  (I think also mantra, and rocking the body while chanting or praying), certain music, bells... forms of dance..) 

ARE THESE IMAGES HARDWIRED INTO OUR BRAINS or NERVOUS SYSTEMS?

The neuropsychologists call these entopic phenomena, phosphenes, or form constants. 

WHAT ARE OR WERE THE POWERS OF A SHAMAN that are considered super-natural? Controlling the weather, in particular making it rain, so that the crops will prosper and animals and humans will be able to eat. Ability to locate animals to hunt. Being able to also check on family and friends - to understand their whereabouts, if they are alive, and if they are OK, understanding plants in particular knowing how to make healing botonicals, to control and alter consciousness. 

FIRST with HALLUCINOGEN VISION are the motifs, the geometric shapes. grids, zig zags, dots, eye-shapes, which seem to show up in ancient rock art all over the world.

NEXT are the animals and people, larger shapes... Snakes, jaguars, as well as monsters. At this point the user is moving into what is perceived as the spirit world.

FINALLY the icons, such as human-type spirits. Ancestors.  Reports of communications with the recent ancestors, such as parents and grandparents.

In some cases, AFTER-IMAGES, which we commonly call flash-backs, as if projected on a wall or ceiling. 

and MEMORIES of the experience.

PREHISTORIC HUMANS were wired just like us and we, them.

........

Datura also called Jimsonweed or Loco Weed was used throughout the region it grew which includes most of present day California. While under the influence, the shamans saw helpers they called mountain dwarfs, water babies, and rock babies...

VISION QUESTING...  In my post about Taisha Abelar, I mentioned that her book was suggested and loaned to me by a young friend, CB.  CB, in attempting to determine what she wished to do career-wise, went on a vision quest.  I'm not sure if she was part Native American, if someone who was or is Native American set this experience up for her, or where it was done as at the time some Westerners, without fear of accusations of cultural theft, were interested in various tribal beliefs and such opportunities existed without either. She reported, if I recall, that about three days into it, just when she was thinking of becoming a midwife, she saw a shooting star.

***

Hancock suggests that AFTER a visionary experience, the art's painted or carved memories of that vision on the rocks.

***

Bodily Sensations : Prickling. "Hairs" extending out. Less or more fingers and toes.

Prickling of body all over or a particular area of the body. Insects gnawing or crawling under the skin - as how the human perceives a bodily hallucination.

More coming up...

C 2023  Christine Trzyna

STORM : OTYKEN

From a small ethnic group of Siberia... 

GRAHAM HANCOCK on PARALLEL REALMS and THE VINE OF THE DEAD

A fascinating full lecture given years ago in South Africa, Hancock discusses the hallucinations that shamans and others experience drinking AYAHUASA.  The plant brew is not something to experiment with at home because the brewing requires special knowledge and should only be imbibed with shaman supervision.  Of great interest to me is that people using ayahuasa, no matter what culture they come from, seem to see the same type of vision.  And perhaps the UFO abductees are simply people whose brains supply the right stimulant to their pineal gland more naturally.

Stick with this lecture to the amazing anti-TV and anti-War conclusion.

Hancock mentions that a similar state is sometimes achievable through drumming.

***

This video is one that I listened to and embedded here on my blog because I think it's worth listening to.

TRIVIAL or SUPERFICIAL or LIGHTHEARTED ; THE LIST OF THE MOMENT

WHAT'S NEW?

I'm Curious About : Tantric Sex 

So Bad - So Good : The new trend for joke telling.

I Might Just Be Done With : Reading Magazines (Still interested in Vogue though.)

So funny! : The one about the Armenian with a parrot on his shoulder in a bar in Santa Monica.

***

AM I WHO I KNOW?

My Favorite Person Is : The one I have a crush on.

The Celebrity that Interests Me : Jack Huston

The Celebrities I've met (Just saying) : (Maybe another time.)

Historical Person I'd Like To Interview : Martha Washington

TRAVEL?

If I Could Travel Back In Time :  Isadora Duncan in Paris.

AM I WHAT I INDULGE?

Oldie Film I Watched Again : Crossing Delancey  (1988)

Oldie Favorite Album I Blissfully Recently Listened to from Beginning to End :  Echo In The Canyon : The Birth of the California Sound.

Book I Recently Read Cover To Cover :  I'll Build A Stairway to Paradise : A Life of Bunny Mellon by Mac Griswold

Book(s) I Keep Meaning To Reread : Vedic astrology books by James Braha (but I understand that he thinks his latest books are better.)

Person I Get and Nobody I Know Understands : Lately it feels like ME.

AM I WHAT I EAT?

Favorite Cheese Of The Moment : white stilton with mango and ginger

Bread : Belly Fat Alert.

Condiment : mayo

Sweet/Snack : walnuts

Spice : garlic

I'm Drinking : iced decaf coffee

I Just Cooked : egg pie with red peppers and paprika

I'm Craving : pizza with mushrooms and olives

AM I WHAT I BUY?

Sandals - three pair. Caramel. French Blue. Wheat.

eyeliner /smoky eye shadow

AM I WHAT I MISS?

My dog. That july supermoon had me in tears missing her.

Having my own garden in pots.

LATEST REALIZATIONS : 

The Universe says no. 

C 2023  Christine Trzyna

Ask yourself the same questions.

Don't let me influence you. 

I WANNA BE YOUR DOG : IGGY POP

CALIFORNIA : JONI MITCHELL

EYES WITHOUT A FACE : BILLY IDOL and STEVE STEVENS

TUPELO HONEY : VAN MORRISON FOR MY SWEET ANGEL DOG WHO DIED ONE YEAR AGO

So often I think of my dog, who lived close to 15 years, and was so special, so perceptive.

The morning after the afternoon she died, as I awaited her body to be picked up, I had a vision of sorts - a visitation perhaps - of a friend of mine who died years ago, at least a flash in my mind's eye. I knew he had come not just to comfort me but to take care of her.  Since then I had one dream in which I saw him at a bit of a distance with his little brown dog and mine.  My dog noticed me and met my eyes, before she went with him - perhaps her new owner.

How selfish can I be?  There are or were probably other people who she needs to visit.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN QUOTE

If all printers were determined to not print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Benjamin Franklin

CREATING A CHARACTER: EXPERIENCE THIRTY-NINE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

CREATE A CHARACTER

Create a person who would be your favorite playmate.  Where would you go?  What would you do? What would you talk about?  Or do you talk?  Describe this person in detail.  Then your interaction. 

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

WHAT'S GOING ON? : PLAYING FOR CHANGE

LIFE LIKE WIND DRIVEN CREATURES