That's sort of the idea that if we, in attempting to explain away that which is experienced, the experience itself is diminished.
The shamanic realm is to get you out of the word set. For skeptics, that's impossible, and they just can't see that and it just makes no sense.
The real alchemy is transforming the base self into gold or into spiritual awareness. That's really what new alchemy's all about.
You had to be able to lift yourself outside of the time stream - and that essentially became what is called the yoga of time travel.
Most people who've never experienced non-ordinary states of consciousness and only hear them described tend to try to describe them in terms of the logical, rational way of looking at things, the so-called scientific explanation, which often leaves a lot lacking and doesn't really fulfill understanding the experience at all.
All we know is that you are, if you will, the acme of perfection.
Reality includes both the past and the future, but existence includes only the present and is totally dependent on the reality of past and future universes. Without them there is no existence now.
Illness is something out of balance, rather than something within balance. It's been something that is created and it's been created for a purpose and a reason, and that purpose or reason may not be obvious to the person that has the disease. Nevertheless, there is something going on and it's not always easy to find that out.
Chemistry comes about through the transformation of earth, air, fire and water. All chemistry is just movement within those things, and so we experience the joys and the sorrows of hot and cold, and dry and moist, because of these chemical transformations. In a similar way, we create and experience a world of time, space, motion and energy, through our intuitions, our thoughts, our sensing and our feeling.
It came to my mind that in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in Indian spiritual literature, and in the Bhagavad Gita, and when I started reading about outstanding yogis and people of exceeding spiritual power such as Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda, they all had the ability to do what we would call - I don't know what you would even call it - psychic phenomenon, magic, transform objects, be able to perceive the future, the past and the present simultaneously.
When I worked with various healers of one kind or another, very often what came up was that there was an "inner" person who was controlling what was going on in the life of the "outer" person, who thinks he's in control of his life. That inner person has a vested interest in keeping the person from getting well, so the healing doesn't take place.
I want to explain the new alchemy [in the "From Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to a New Vision of Mind and Time"], which has to do with understanding what I call the subjective and objective qualities of existence.
The old alchemy, or what was just called alchemy, has a history. Most people, if they've been trained in sciences, think of alchemy as the precursor to chemistry. Back in time, people were called alchemists and they worked for kings and rich people, smelting metal and trying to change base metal into gold, because the king wanted to be richer.
You can't blame the person for creating that illness for themselves, because it was a creation. If you could find out how you created it, you might be able to find out a way to let go.
Every book I write is filled with ideas to open people's minds. And many of my books are intended for the lay mind, for people who have no idea about what's going on in quantum physics. They are meant to get big ideas across in the simplest way so young people can start to wrestle with these ideas.
Alchemy and Kabbalah are later developments in my thinking. I think the primary interest has been the relationship of magic and mystery to logic and understanding. Those are the primary driving forces of my life. I have this ability, for some reason, to be able to hold both the Magical MysteryTour we're on in conjunction with the logical rigor of understanding theoretical physics, which makes me kind of a rare bird, because usually you're one or the other.
In the Greek way of dealing with alchemy, which was earth, air, fire and water, these were the objective qualities. Within the objective qualities - things of earth, air, fire and water - are our subjective experiences of hot, cold, dry, and moist.
We have a sense of continuity, which gives us what we call a sense of time. Through our ability to have remembrances of both what's coming and what's happening and what has happened, we begin to piece together a logical picture of the world.
I'm not talking to you from the point of view of wishful thinking or imaginary craziness. i'm talking to you from a deeper, basic understanding.
We all get out, maybe for longer than we wish, because we all pass this mortal coil more or less and so we certainly get a chance to experience it again, and we've experienced it before we were born. So it's more or less our natural place of being, unless you believe that the only time you're conscious is when you're alive.
The kinds of mystical experiences that I have had definitely convinced me that I was able to get out of time. I have had experiences, or brief glimpses, of being able to see the future and then come back into time, and then go into extraordinary realms of the past.
A lot of things occurred to me with shamans in Peru.There were a number of different kinds of experiences that you learn from doing ritual and taking ayahuasca [a common tropical forest hallucinogen] is the key to understanding the native consciousness and perception of the world with the Peruvian shamans that you wouldn't get unless you had been with them, but every shamanic tradition, including the Native American tradition of medicine and cleansing ritual, like the Sun Dance or the sweat lodge.
Certainly in terms of technology, it's made a tremendous impact, but medicine is still within the realm of what we might call "objective" science. It's still part of the objective way of looking at the world.
We find that alchemy has to do with magicians or magic and may even have roots in the Chaldean people who lived in the land that we now call Iraq.Abraham emerged and took a flock of people with him into Egypt. They were later called the Hebrews because of the valleys that they came out of. The alchemy that they saw was a transformative power within the individuals to affect the "out there" reality - and that, of course, is the basis of shamanism and is the basis for most magical and so-called Third World belief systems.
It's very frustrating if you've never had an experience and somebody comes up to you and says, "I've just been on a flying saucer." Your tendency is to think, "Oh, this guy must be wacko, nuts, having an hallucination. None of that can be true because none of that has ever happened to me."
