View from the Other Side of My Head

The View From the Other Side of My Head chronicles the first few years of my education in shamanic trance. Beginning with a co-worker's request that I help her with a rather unusual homework assignment, my deepening exploration of the dreamworld, accompanied by various Spirits and informed by anthropological scholarship, modern shamanistic literature, and recent neurological studies, leads me to a new understanding of ancestral and personal traumas, intimacy with a tree, the bowels of a Phoenix, several moments of satori, and a wilder and wider sense of the human mind's workings, capabilities, and place in the world. This memoir of a modern American's inadvertent introduction to and fascination with the dreamworld presents an unusual perspective on shamanic trance. It is unlike the vast bulk of literature on the subject in several ways. Although it is informed by Polynesian shamanic tradition, it is neither an anthropological study nor a contribution to the history of religion, nor does it purport to convey ancient Indigenous wisdom. (Pace, Carlos Castaneda!) It is not an account of drug-induced mental states (no drugs were abused in the making of these trances). It is not a how-to manual. It does not attempt to express a philosophy, ideology, or theology of shamanism. It does not proceed from a stance of authority, rather, it is an "Alice's-eye" view of the plunge into Wonderland: a step by step account of a modern, agnostic/atheist American, educated to view the world through the lenses of verbal fluency, Aristotelian logic, and Western science, suddenly discovering that within him and biologically integral to him resides a consciousness additional to the one apparent to daily awareness; a consciousness that operates, as do the many biological organs and processes that work autonomously within us, to maintain, inform, and mediate our relations with the world and within ourselves. The book describes the profound disorientation, confusion, and socially isolating impact of the experience, and the author's adjustment to it. It contains numerous descriptions of shamanic trance states. Within the limits of verbal language's ability to do so, the author attempts to convey as faithfully as he could what he saw, felt, heard, and did. In this, too, the book is unusual, being the rough testimony of a novice's stumbling progress into the dreamworld, rather than the polished reports of " journeying" by experts and adepts in which an interpretive coherency constructed after-the-fact may obscure what it actually was like to be there. As such, the book is particularly directed towards people who are curious about the experiential aspects of shamanic trance, and people who are in the initial stages of exploring trance for themselves and want the support, validation, and sense of community that comes from comparing experiences. It meets needs beyond those addressed by the "how-to-be-a-shaman" literature and largely ignored by scholarship. The book's organization is unusual. It combines poetry and prose to depict the story holistically and in keeping with the interface between the sensual, imagistic, allusive language of trance and the more purely verbal focus of our ordinary means of discourse. I wanted to give the reader a more accurate taste of shamanic trance than can be achieved by prose alone. I have worked hard to avoid the main pitfall of such hybrid writing, which is to impair accessibility and clarity.