ISISIS

FOR I WILL TAKE AWAY THE NAMES OF BAALIM OUT OF HER MOUTH AND THEY SHALL NO MORE BE REMEMBERED BY THEIR NAME"

4	ISHI	45	27	9
5	BAALI	25	16	7
6	BAALIM	38	20	2
15		108	63	18
1+5		1+0+8	6+3	1+8
6		9	9	9


5	BAALI	25	16	7
6	BAALIM	38	20	2
		63	36	9

	BAAL	16	7	7
	I	9	9	9
	M	13	4	4
	THIRTEEN	99

"Several other scientists and researchers- have. studied the shamanic practlces of ancienf Egypt and their use of psychoac�tive drugs. They include Benny Sharion, a cognitive psychblogist and philosopher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Carmichael agreed emphatically with Narby's observations that useful information can be gained by- shamans in their ecstatic states, from communion with otherwordly entities. He told us:

These substances are-used as vehicles to expedite shaman�sistic performance, in that the shaman is able to, elevate his consciousness to a new level, whereby he can experience nature at a much more astute, acute and engaged level than is the normal case with human perception. He is then able to witness natural phenomena which other people are not able to witness in normal states of consciousness. . . That is what gives himl his deeper and more profound insights into nature and the world. ²⁴

But what are the entities? Are they 'real', or elaborate constructs of the shaman's mind? Carmichael pointed out that this question involved the whole philosophical and metaphysical argument about the nature of reality itself, and was probably unanswerable. We suggested that one test of the reality of the shaman's experi�ence was whether the knowledge he acquired actually worked � which, as we have seen, it most assuredly does. Carmichael agreed.

"Turning to the question of the inexplicable knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, Carmichael - who is well acquainted with the ideas of the New Egyptology - told us:

My own belief at this point in time is that the pyramids were not built by a space-faring race that came from a Martian colony. I see no evidence for that whatsoever . . .While it's unsound of modern Egyptologists to presume that plants and other substances were used by the ancient Egyptians in sacred contexts solely for their decorative or the aesthetic properties, it would be just as unsound for us to believe that they had to build the pyramids in exactly the way that we suppose that they would have built them.lt might no thave been slaves and whips, nor may it necessarily have been through, some sort of acoustic levitational technology. It may have been some other way. There may be be a technology between those extremes.Shamanistic experience could well have been the door, the gate, the stargate through which the ancient Egyptian architects and engineers were able to achieve that technology.

So what are the entities? Nature spirits, the gods, a dramatisa�tion from the shaman's subconscious mind, somehow, personifying information picked up by ESP or even DNA? or could the shaman really be in contact with beings on some far-off world?"

"Jeremy Narby told us: 'I guess this is what your average Amazonian shaman would testify: travelling in his mind to another planet' He .referred to the paintings of an Amazonian shamaman, Pablo Ameririgo, who depicts-the things he sees under the influence of ayahuasca, saying:

Different plants contain different molecules, and they set off different. kinds. of visions. There are; even different kinds of ayahuascas, some of which are a lot more organic and make you see things about nature on Earth, whereas others will make you see things more like distant worlds with cities / Page 358 / and so forth. In Pablo Ameringo's pairitings you get a bit of both. If you look at the paintings of the distant cities � because this is one of the common themes that comes up ,in the ayahuasca literature, distant cities with hypersophisti�cated technology an~d so on - they're filled with pyramids, and Babel towers, and minarets.

Although such scenes and entities may well not originate from another planet, no one has all the answers. It will probably turn out to have a much more complex - and stranger - explanation than a straightforward extraterrestrial hypothesis. But it may be significant that Whitley Strieber has described similar visions of 'golden cities' and exotic otherworldly structures.²⁵ Similarly, the Space Kids, while in hypnotic trance induced by Puharich, also described alien cities. Does this imply that their experiences were basically shamanic? And - at least in the case of the Space Kids - was it the result of a deliberate experiment to induce shamanic experiences?

On the other hand, could the shamanic experience really be of extraterrestrial origin - or is such a question meaningless? Narby says:

The Western world that has started to rediscover all these old out-of-body experiences is glued down in a kind of 'fifties techno-vision that seems like kindergarten. When you've spent time with Amazonian shamans, they seem like university professors compared to kindergarteners. The old texts describe them as 'spirits from the sky'. I like the sound of that more than 'extraterrestrial intelligence', because the latter has all that kind of 'fifties baggage that isn't necessary. 'Spirits from the sky' sounds kind of beautiful.

Not everything in the shamanistic experience is beautiful - though. Narby warns:

Not all spirits are friendly and benevolent. One can make / Page 359 / parallels with biology quite simply. In other words, there are organisms that impart health, happiness and food to the human species, and there are others, like the HIV virus for instance, that break into the immune system and screw us up. It's all part of life. And death.

Even highly trained shamanistic initiates can encounter not just evil, but also trickster spirits. Perhaps this should be a warning to those amateurs who believe that they are in touch with the gods.

The evidence of shamans and mystics suggests strongly that there is a stargate and it is possible for individuals to step through it into a magical otherworld. But it is not a physical device like the rippling vortex machine of the movie. Just as Michael Harner's internal journey brought him face to face with animal�headed gods so reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian deities, so it seems each of us already possesses the means to meet the gods. Perhaps this is what the Hermeticists - the much later initiates of the old mystery schools - meant when they taught that man is a microcosm of the whole universe. It is interesting that Dale E. Graff, the man who was not only director of-the US Army's remote viewing STAR GATE project, but also chose its highly evocative name, wrote:

Stars send faint light from a cosmic distance. They may for�ever remain out of reach, but not the Stargate within. Our inner Stargate can be found by anyone who chooses to search.²⁶ No teacher, priest or guru can locate the stargate for us, so our quest for it and its mysteries, if we care to look for it, may be long and hard. The problem is that many find it easier to listen to those who promise to deliver the stargate already neatly packaged and temptingly ajar, and to invite mighty ineffable beings to step through it to inspire us with awe, enliven our dull existence and make us feel special, chosen - until we realise that in coming through they have slammed shut the ultimate prison door through / which there is no escape. The beings who come as gods may not exist beyond top-secret rooms inside government buildings or in the fevered imaginings of channellers. But even if they do come from distant star systems, we have a right to defend our minds against what is dangerous and corrupt.

If we are right, then this warning does not come a moment too soon. If we are wrong, then we still have time to learn to be proud of our humanity - and find the stargate for ourselves."

"In reading the literature on Amazonian shamanism, I had no�ticed that the personal experience of anthropologists with indige�nous hallucinogens was a gray zone. I knew the problem well for having skirted around it myself in my own writings. One of the categories in my reading notes was called "Anthropologists and Ayahuasca." I consulted the card corresponding to this category, which I had filled out over the course of my investigation, and noted that the first subjective description of an ayahuasca experi�ence by an anthropologist was published in 1968-whereas sev�eral botanists had written up similar experiences a hundred years previously. 10

The anthropologist in question was Michael Harner. He had devoted ten lines to his own experience in the middle of an aca�demic article: "For several hours after drinking the brew, I found myself, although awake, in a world literally beyond my wildest dreams. I met bird-headed people, as well as dragon-like creatures who explained that they were the true gods of this world. I enlisted the services of other spirit helpers in attempting to fly through the far reaches of the Galaxy. Transported into a trance where the supernatural seemed natural, I realized that anthropol�ogists, including myself, had profoundly underestimated the im�portance of the drug in affecting native ideology."¹¹

At first Michael Hamer pursued an enviable career, teaching in reputable universities and editing a book on shamanism for Ox�ford University Press. Later, however, he alienated a good portion of his colleagues by publishing a popular manual on a series of shamanic techniques based on visualization and the use of drums.

One-anthropologist called it "a project deserving criticism given M. Hamer's total ignorance about shamanism."¹² In brief, Hamer's work was generally discredited.

I must admit that I had assimilated some of these prejudices. At the beginning of my investigation, I had only read through Hamer's manual quickly, simply noting that the first chapter con�tained a detailed description of his first ayahuasca experience, which took up ten pages this time, instead of ten lines. In fact, I had not paid particular attention to its content.

So, for pleasure and out of curiosity, I decided to go over Hamer's account again. It was in reading this literally fantastic narrative that I stumbled on a key clue that was to change the course of my investigation.

Hamer explains that in the early 1960s, he went to the Peru�vian Amazon to study the culture of the Conibo Indians. After a year or so he had made little headway in understanding their reli�gious system when the Conibo told him that if he really wanted to leam, he had to drink ayahuasca. Hamer accepted not without fear, because the people had wamed him that the experience was terrifying. The following evening, under the strict supervision of his indigenous friends, he drank the equivalent of a third of a bot�tlee. After several minutes he found himself falling into a world of true hallucinations. After arriving in a celestial cavern where "a supernatural carnival of demons" was in full swing, he saw two strange boats floating through the air that combined to form "a huge dragon-headed prow, not unlike that of a Viking ship." On the deck, he could make out "large numbers of people with the heads of blue jays and the bodies of humans, not unlike the bird�headed gods of ancient Egyptian tomb paintings."

After multiple episodes, which would be too long to describe here, Hamer became convinced that he was dying. He tried call� / Page 55 / ing out to his Conibo friends for an antidote without managing to pronounce a word. Then he saw that his visions emanated from "giant reptilian creatures" resting at the lowest depths of his brain. These creatures began projecting scenes in front of his eyes, while informing him that this information was reserved for the dying and the dead: "First they showed me the planet Earth as it was eons ago, before there was any life on it. I saw an ocean, barren land, and a bright blue sky. Then black specks dropped from the sky by the hundreds and landed in front of me on the barren landscape. I could see the 'specks' were actually large, shiny, black creatures with stubby pterodactyl-like wings and huge whale-like bodies. . . . They explained to me in a kind of thought language that they were fleeing from something out in space. They had come to the planet Earth to escape their enemy. The creatures then showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence. Before me, the magnificence of plant and animal creation and speciation-hundreds of millions of years of activity-took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to describe. I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus in�side all forms of life, including man."

At this point in his account, Harner writes in a footnote at the bottom of the page: "In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA."¹³

I paused. I had not paid attention to this footnote previously. There was indeed DNA inside the human brain, as well as in the outside world of plants, given that the molecule of life containing genetic information is the same for all species. DNA could thus be considered a source of information that is both external and in�ternal-in other words, precisely what I had been trying to imag�ine the previous day in the forest.Page 56 I plunged back irito Harner's book, but found no further men�tion of DNA. However, a few pages on, Harner notes that "dragon" and "serpent" are synonymous. This made me think that the dou�ble helix of DNA resembled, in its form, two entwined serpents.

AFTER LUNCH, I returned to the office with a strange feeling. The reptilian creatures that Harner had seen, in his brain reminded me of something, but I could not say what. It had to be a text that I had read and that was in one of the numerous piles of docu�ments and notes spread out over the floor. I consulted the "Brain" pile, in which I had placed the articles on the neurological aspects of consciousness, but I found no trace of reptiles. After rummag�ing around for a while, I put my hand on an article called "Brain and mind in Desana shamanism" by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff.

I had ordered a copy of this article from the library during my readings on the brain. Knowing from Reichel-Dolmatoff's nu�merous publications that the Desana of the Colombian Amazon were regular ayahuasca users, I had been curious to learn about their point of view on the physiology of consciousness. But the first time I had read the article, it had seemed rather esoteric, and I had relegated it to a secondary pile. This time, paging through it, I was stopped by a Desana drawing of a human brain with a snake' lodged between the two hemispheres (see top of page 57).

I read the text above the drawing and learned that the Desana consider the fissure occupied by the reptile to be a "depression that was formed in the beginning of time (of mythical and embry�ological time) by the cosmic anaconda. Near the head of th.e ser�pent is a hexagonal rock crystal, just outside the brain; it is there where a particle of solar energy resides and irradiates the brain."¹⁴

Several pages further into the article, I came upon a second drawing, this time with two snakes (see top of page 58). (Diagram omitted)

The human brain. The left hemisphere is referred to as Side One, and the right as Side Two. The fissure is occupied by an anaconda. (Redrawn from Desana sketches.) From Reichel-Dolmatoff (1981p. 81). (Diagram omitted)

According to Reichel-Dolmatoff, the drawing on page 58 shows that within the fissure "two intertwined snakes are lying, a giant anaconda (Eunectes murinus) and a rainbow boa (Epicrates cenchria), a large river snake of dark dull colors and an equally large land snake of spectacular bright colors. In Desana shaman�ism these two serpents symbolize a female and male principle, a mother and a father image, water and land. . . ; in brief, they rep�resent a concept of binary opposition which has to be overcome in order to achieve individual awareness and integratiog;; The snakes are imagined as spiralling rhythmically in a swaying motion from one side to another."15

Intrigued, I began reading Reichel-Dolmatoff's article from the beginning. In the first pages he provides a sketch of the De�sana's main cosmological beliefs. My eyes stopped on the follow� / Page 58 / ng sentence: "The Desana say that in the beginning of time their ancestors arrived in canoes shaped like huge serpents."16

At this point I began feeling astonished by the similarities be�tween Harner's account, based on his hallucinogenic experience with the Conibo Indians in the Peruvian Amazon, and the shamanic and mythological concepts of an ayahuasca-using people living a thousand miles away in the Colombian Amazon. In both cases there were reptiles in the brain and serpent -shaped boats of cos�mic origin that were vessels of life at the beginning of time. Pure coincidence?

To find out, I picked up a book about a third ayahuasca-using people, entitled (in French) Vision, knowledge, power: Shaman�ism among the Yagua in the North-East of Peru. This study by Jean-Pierre Chaumeilis, to my mind, one of the most rigorous on the subject. I started paging through it looking for passages rela�tive to cosmological beliefs. First I found a "celestial serpent" in a drawing of the universe by a Yagua shaman. Then, a few pages / Page 59 / away, another shaman is quoted as saying: "At the very beginning, before the birth of the earth, this earth here, our most distant an�cestors lived on another earth. . . ." Chaumeil adds that the Yagua consider that all living beings were created by twins, who are "the two central characters in Yagua cosmogonic thought."¹⁷

5	TWINS	85	22	4
	AND
3	DNA	19	10	1
	TWINS
3	TWO	58	13	4
3	INS	42	15	6
		100	28	10
		1+0+0	2+8	1+0
		1	10	1
			1+0
6	TWO INS	1	1	1

"These correspondences seemed very strange, and I did not know what to make of them. Or rather, I could see an easy way of interpreting them, but it contradicted my understanding of real�ity: A Western anthropologist like Harner drinks a strong dose of ayahuasca with one people and gains access, in the middle of the twentieth century, to a world that informs the "mythological" con�cepts of other peoples and allows them to communicate with life�creating spirits of cosmic origin possibly linked to DNA. This seemed highly improbable to me, if not impossible. However, I was getting used to suspending disbelief, and I had decided to fol�low my approach through to its logical conclusion. So I casually penciled in the margin of Chaumeil's text: "twins = DNA?"

These indirect and analogical connections between DNA and the hallucinatory and mythological spheres seemed amusing to me, or at most intriguing. Nevertheless, I started thinking that I had perhaps found with DNA the scientific concept on which to focus one eye, while focusing the other on the shamanism of Amazonian ayahuasqueros.

More concretely, I established a new category in my reading notes entitled "DNA Snakes."

Interview of Jeremy Narby, author of 'The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

Todd Stewart of Ascent Magazine (Canada) interviews Jeremy Narby

1. Could you sum up your book "The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge"?

Research indicates that shamans access an intelligence, which they say is nature's, and which gives them information that has stunning
correspondences with molecular biology.

2. Your hypothesis of a hidden intelligence contained within the DNA of all living things is interesting. What is this intelligence?

Intelligence comes from the Latin inter-legere, to choose between.
There seems to be a capacity to make choices operating inside each cell in our body, down to the level of individual proteins and enzymes. DNA itself is a kind of "text" that functions through a coding system called 'genetic code', which is strikingly similar to codes used by human beings. Some enzymes edit the RNA transcript of the DNA text and add new letters to it; any error made during this editing can be fatal to the entire organism; so these enzymes are consistently making the right choices; if they don't, something often goes wrong leading to cancer and other diseases. Cells send one another signals, in the form of proteins and molecules. These signals mean: divide, or don't divide, move, or don't move, kill yourself, or stay alive. Any one cell is listening to hundreds of signals at the same time, and has to integrate them and decide what to do. How this intelligence operates is the question.

3. DNA has essentially maintained its structure for 3.5 billion years. What role does DNA play in our evolution?

DNA is a single molecule with a double helix structure; it is two complementary versions of the same "text" wrapped around each other; this allows it to unwind and make copies of itself: twins! This twinning mechanism is at the heart of life since it began. Without it, one cell could not become two, and life would not exist. And, from one generation to the next, the DNA text can also be modified, so it allows both constancy and transformation. This means that beings can be the same and not the same. One of the mysteries is what drives the changes in the DNA text in evolution. DNA has apparently been around for billions of years in its current form in virtually all forms of life.
The old theory - random accumulation of errors combined with natural selection - does not fully explain the data currently
generated by genome sequencing. The question is wide open.

4. The structure of DNA as we know it is made up of letters and thus has a specific text and language. You could say our bodies are made up of language, yet we assume that speech arises from the mind. How do we access this hidden language?

By studying it. There are several roads to knowledge, including science and shamanism.

5. The symbol of the Cosmic Serpent, the snake, is a central theme in your story, and in your research you discover that the snake forms a major part of the symbology across most of the world's traditions and religions. Why is there such a consistent system of natural symbols in the world? Is the world inherently symbolic?

This is the observation that led me to investigate the cosmic serpent. I found the symbol in shamanism all over the world. Why?
That's a good question. My hypothesis is that it is connected to the double helix of DNA inside virtually all living beings. And DNA itself is a symbolic Saussurian code. So, yes, in at least one important way, the living world is inherently symbolic. We are made of living language.

6. You write of how the ideology of "rational" science, deterministic thought, is and has been quite limiting in its approach
to new and alternative scientific theories; it is assumed that "mystery is the enemy". In your book you describe how you had to suspend your judgement, to "defocalize", and in this way gain a deeper insight.
Why do you think we are often limited in our rational, linear thought and why are so few willing and able to cross these boundaries?

I don't believe we are. People spend hours each day thinking non-rationally. Our emotional brain treats all the information we
receive before our neo-cortex does. Scientists are forever making discoveries as they daydream, take a bath, go for a run, lay in bed,
and so on.

7. What are the correspondences between the Peruvian shamans' findings and microbiology?

Both shamans and molecular biologists agree that there is a hidden unity under the surface of life's diversity; both associate this
unity with the double helix shape (or two entwined serpents, a twisted ladder, a spiral staircase, two vines wrapped around each
other); both consider that one must deal with this level of reality in order to heal. One can fill a book with correspondences
between shamanism and molecular biology.

8. Do you think there is not only an intelligence based in our DNA but a consciousness as well?

I think we should attend to the words we use. "Consciousness" carries different baggage than "intelligence." Many would define
human consciousness as different from, say, animal consciousness, because humans are conscious of being conscious. But how do we know that dolphins don't think about being dolphins? I do not know whether there is a "consciousness" inside our cells; for now, the question seems out of reach; we have a hard enough time understanding our own consciousness -- though we use it most of
the time. I propose the concept of "intelligence" to describe what proteins and cells do, simply because it makes the data more
comprehensible. This concept will require at least a decade or two for biologists to consider and test. Then, we might be able to
move along and consider the idea of a "cellular consciousness."

9. The implications of some of your findings in The Cosmic Serpent could be quite large. How do you feel about the book and what it says? Why did you write the book?

I wrote the book because I felt that certain things needed saying.Writing a book is like sending out a message in a bottle: sometimes
one gets replies. Judging from the responses, a surprising number of people have got the message loud and clear.

Most definitions of "science" revolve around the testing of hypotheses. Claude Levi-Strauss showed in his book "The savage mind"
that human beings have been carefully observing nature and endlessly testing hypotheses for at least 10'000 years. This is how animals and plants were domesticated. Civilization rests on millennia of Neolithic science. I think the science of shamans can complement modern science by helping make sense of the data it generates. Shamanism is like a reverse camera relative to modern science.

11. The shamans were very spiritual people. Has any of this affected you? What is spiritual in your life?

I don't use the word "spiritual" to think about my life. I spend my time promoting land titling projects and bilingual education for
indigenous people, and thinking about how to move knowledge forward and how to open up understanding between people; I also spend time with my children, and with children in my community (as a soccer coach); and I look after the plants in my garden, without using pesticides and so on. But I do this because I think it needs doing, and because it's all I can do, but not because it's "spiritual."
The message I got from shamans was: do what you can for those around you (including plants and animals), but don't make a big
deal of it.

"Deep in an underground chamber a solemn group of men is seeking guidance from death. They are dressed in white robes and chanting softly around a casket that is sealed with wax. One of their members is steadfastly counting to himself, carefully marking the time. After about eight minutes, the casket is opened, and the man who nearly suffocated inside is revived by the rush of fresh air. He tells the men around him what he saw. As he passed out from lack of oxygen, he saw a light that became brighter and larger as he sped toward it through a tunnel. From that light came a radiant person in white who delivered a message of eternal life.
The priest who is attending this ceremony is pleased with the results. "No man escapes death," he says. "And every living soul is destined to resurrection. You go into the tomb alive that you will learn of the light."
The man who "died" but is now reborn is happy. He is now a member of one of the strangest societies in history, a group of civic leaders who induced nearly fatal suffocation to create a near-death experience.
Sound like a cult from some place in northern California? ex-hippies looking for a new high, perhaps? Not at all. This
was the cult of Osiris, a small society of men who were the priests and pharaohs of ancient Egypt, one of the greatest civilizations in human history. This account of how they / Page 79 / inspired near death is an actual description of their rites from Egyptologists who have translated their hieroglyphics.
One of the most important Egyptian rituals involved the reenactment by their god-king of the myth of Osiris, the god who brought agriculture and civilization to the ancient Egyp-tians. He was the first king of Egypt who civilized his subjects and then traveled abroad to instruct others in the fine art of civilization. His enemies plotted against him. Upon his re-turn to Egypt, he was captured and sealed in a chest. His eventual resurrection was seen as proof of life eternal.
Each new king was supposed to be a direct reincarnation of Osiris. An important part of the ceremony was to reenact his entombment. These rituals took place in the depths of the Great Pyramid and were a prerequisite for becoming a god-king. It is my guess that many slaves perished while the Egyptians experimented, to find exactly how long a person could be sealed in an airtight container and survive.
Nonetheless, these near-death experiences were more im-portant to the Egyptians than the lives of a few slaves. After all, this was the age of the bicameral mind, a period in which men believed that their thoughts came to them from the gods and were not internally generated. For the Egyptians, thoughts and dreams were gods speaking to them.
Prior to the evolution of individual consciousness, people were what Princeton psychiatrist Julian Jaynes calls "bi-cameral." By this, he means that they did not understand that their own thoughts and actions were generated from within themselves, but rather that they thought external gods created these thoughts and actions. For example, a fully conscious human thinks: I am hungry and I will make myself a sandwich. The bicameral man thought: The gods have created a pain in my belly and cause me to find food to satisfy them. The Iliad is an excellent example of bicameral thinking: It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into / Page 80 / battle, another who urges him to go, and another screams through his throat (at his enemies). In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are-to the bi-cameral man-the actions and speeches of gods.
This bicameral thinking has long vanished from human beings, ever since the evolution of language and writing. Once men could write down their thoughts, and read what other people have written, they came to understand that each human being has an individual consciousness, and that gods do not direct our every action.
However; ancient Egypt was a prime example of a bi-cameral society. Jaynes states that Egyptian civilization was controlled and directed by the bicameral voice of their first god-king" Osiris. It was essential to their civilization that each new king consider himself to be the vehicle of the halluci-nated voice of the dead king whose admonitions still con-trolled society. What better way to generate this absolute continuity of the god-king than to have each new king undergo a near-death experience. Just as children that I in-terviewed often perceived the light that they saw as the light of Jesus, these king-initiates would perceive that same light - as the spirit of Osiris.
A near-death experience by a bicameral man would have extraordinary significance, more so even than it has to mod-ern man. For one thing, it would be absolute proof of eternal life. Since they felt that the gods inspired their every thought, a near-death experience would be like having a god open the doors of perception to a mortal.
An NDE gave Egyptian rulers a sense of all-knowing. Before they were sealed into the casket, they only acted like kings. Afterward, they felt as if they had deeper knowledge of the world around them.
I also believe that an NDE as part of a king's job description / Page 81 / may account for the unusual peace and prosperity that Egypt enjoyed for the nearly two thousand years that the pharaohs reigned. As happens with those who experience NDEs today, these kings were transformed by the humbling and exalting experience of near death. They developed a reverence for the love that people share with one another. They became kind and caring and interested in the universe and the world around them.
These were people who supported extensive research in astronomy. With their "primitive" tools, they were able to obtain a vast knowledge of the stars, even finding dark stars that we have been able to confirm only with powerful telescopes.
The ancient Egyptians were advanced in medicine and the use of foods and antibiotics to prevent epidemics among pyr-amid workers. They knew of special diets of red onions, bread, and garlic that stimulated the immune system, a diet that was only recently endorsed by the National Science Foun-dation. They even had a fair amount of knowledge about surgery.
Archaeologists have deciphered the exact experience of these mystery rituals, and virtually all agree that its purpose was to generate an understanding of eternal life. Their un-derstanding of the death process has been handed down through the ages in a document known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead. This book is simply a detailed description of a near-death experience. It starts with a judgment scene and goes on to reveal many gods and various voices, continues on a long boat trip through a dark tunnel, and ends with union with a bright light.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is quite similar to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a manual for dying that was passed by word of mouth in Tibetan culture until about fifteen hundred years ago, when it was recorded by Europeans.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives the dying person con-trol over his own death and rebirth; The Tibetans, who be-lieved in reincarnation, felt that the dying person could influence his own destiny. The Tibetans called. this book Bardo Thodol, or "Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane." It was meant to be read after death to help the de-ceased find the right path.

Part of what the priest is supposed to read goes like this: "Thy own intellect, which is now voidness. . . thine own consciousness, not formed into anything, in reality void. . .will first experience the Radiance of the Fundamental Clear Light of Pure Reality.
"The union of your own consciousness and the Clear Light is the state of Perfect Enlightment. This is the Great Body of Clear Light. . the source of life and light."
How similar the Tibetan beliefs to the Egyptians and other ancient people too, from Europe to Africa.
The Aztec Song of the Dead represents a work that served to enlighten the Aztecs about the world beyond. This was a society, that practiced ritual and slow death as part of their basic religion.
Their Song of the Dead tells the story of Quetzalcoatl, their god and legendary king who discovered the arts, science, and agriculture and who represented the forces of civilization, good and light. He is described by his people as "igniting the creations of man's hands and the imagination of his heart."

Their Song of the Dead reads like a poetic version of a near-death experience. It practically scores off the top of the scale of the Near-Death Experience Validity Scale developed by researcher Kenneth Ring. The Song reads like this:
"Then the time came for Quetzalcoatl to die, when he felt the darkness twist in him like a river."
He then had a life review, in which he remembers all of his good works and is able to settle his affairs. He then "saw / Page 83 / my face/(like looking into a) cracked mirror." He hears flutes and the voices of friends and then passes through a shining city and over hills of many colors.. He comes to the edge of a great sea, where he again sees his own face, during which time "the beauty of his face returned to him."
There is a bonfire on the beach in which he throws himself,and . . .

It ended with his heart transformed into a star.
It ended with the morning star with dawn and evening. '
It ended with his journey to Death's kingdom with seven days of darkness.
With his body changed to light.
A star that burns forever in that sky.

All of these cultures believed they left their bodies and embarked on a spiritual voyage, a journey that had the same traits as that of Katie, who nearly drowned in that swimming pool in Idaho."

"After the Seattle study, in which we determined that a person must be on the brink of death to have a near-death experience, we asked ourselves another question: What is the relationship of NDEs to hallucinations and other psychic phenomena?
We researched the medical literature and found that NDEs are unique. No other hallucinations, visions, or psychic phe-nomena are identical to NDEs. I have to say that I was surprised. I assumed that I would find many drugs that mim-icked the experience. I was mystified to find that marijuana, / Page 103 / psychedelics, alcohol, narcotics, anesthetic agents, Valium, lack of oxygen to the body, or severe cpsychological stress did not cause NDEs.
A form of gas therapy called the Medune mix did cause experiences similar to NDEs, but I believe that was because patients actually were near death from being forced to breathe a high concentration of carbon dioxide. This was done in the name of psychotherapy in the 1940s, as a possible cure for depression and other mental disorders. Treatment was halted when the expected results didn't occur.
Our research stumped me. I was not alone in my inability to find drug or psychological causes for NDEs. A number of
researchers, including Raymond Moody, psychologist Ken-neth Ring, and even astronomer Carl Sagan; could find no common pathway to explain the near-death experience- except near death, that is. Moody, the first medical doctor to study the near-death experience, concluded in a 1988 Psychology Today article that "for years I have been trying to come up with a physiological explanation for NDEs, and for years I have come up empty-handed."
My first hint of a solution to this problem came when I was casually discussing NDEs with Art Ward, former chair-man of neurosurgery at the University of Washington. Ward is a great thinker, a surgical artist, and a crusty old man whose shoot-from-the-hip style causes many junior residents to cower in fear. He is not given to metaphysical thinkin.g; "hard science" and just the facts are his domain. Yet when I described NDEs to him, he was already very familial with them. He had heard them recounted from many of his own patients.
Ward remembered one patient who experienced every trait of the near-death experience while Wilder Penfield poked an area of his brain with an electric probe. As part of the patient's / Page 104 / brain was stimulated, he had the sensation of leaving his body. When, another area close by was stimulated, he had the sensation of zooming up a tunnel, and so forth.
Ward thought that the area Penfield was probjng was the right temporal lobe. He felt that some very interesting ex-periments could have been conducted had they thought of them at the time. For instance, they might have devised ways to see if these people were really leaving their bodies. Un-fortunately, said Ward, nobody thought of it at the time.
This was an intriguing lead. Our team of researchers began to examine Penfield's work. Buried in a forty-year-old text- book, we found clear reference to areas of the brain that, when electrically stimulated, produced out-of-body experi-ences. At times patients on his operating table would say, "I am leaving my body now," when he touched this area with an electric probe. Several reported saying, "I'm half in and half out. "

9	ARCHETYPE	101	47	2

7	SYLVIAN	102	30	3
7	FISSURE	97	34	7
14		199	64	10
1+4		1+9+9	6+4	1+0
5		19	10	1

The area he "was "mapping" was the Sylvian fissure, an area in the right temporal lobe located just above the right ear. When he electrically stimulated the surrounding areas of the fissure, patients frequently had the experience of "seeing God," hearing beautiful music seeing dead friends and relatives, and even having a p-anoramic life review.
This was an exciting find. Up until this point, the existence of archetypes was only a theory from psychotherapist C. G. Jung, who described them as being psychological phenomena present in the genetic makeup of all people, regardless of race, creed, or color.
We were stumped. We had confirmed the specific area of the brain where NDE's occur, but we didn't know what was actually happening"when they occurred.
Someone proposed that this experience was a defense mechanism, a way for the body to fool itself into believing that it was surviving death. That theory made sense to a point, / Page 105 / but it didn't explain the reason that these experiences were so consistent from one NDEer to the next. After all, why would a person on the brink of death almost always have an experience that was so similar to what another person on the brink of death experienced? Why were they leaving their bodies, zooming up tunnels, seeing beings of light, and all those other things? Why weren't they having experiences so individual that they couldn't be categorized? That the distress of near death causes a neurological response almost explains it. But there is some research that couldn't be ignored.
The research on out-of-body experiences, which about twenty-five percent of NDEers have, represented very com-pelling evidence that something was leaving the body.
We discussed the research of Michael Sabom, an Atlanta cardiologist who has done some fascinating work on out-of-body experiences and people who almost died of cardiac arrest. In these experiences, a person in a near-death crisis claims to leave his body and watch his own resuscitation as the doctor performs it in the emergency room or during surgery. Sabom had thirty-two such patients in his study.
Sabom asked twenty-five medically savvy patients to make educated guesses about what happens when a doctor tries to get the heart started again. He wanted to compare the knowl-edge of "medically smart" patient with the out-of the body ex-periences of medically unsophisticated patients.
He found that twenty-three of the twenty-five in the control group made major mistakes in describing the resuscitation procedure. On the other hand, none of the near-death pa-tients made mistakes in describing what went on in their own resuscitations. This presented very strong evidence that these people were actually outside their bodies and looking down as they said they were.
Sabom's research represented excellent empirical evidence of a life out-of-body, or at least an extremely sensitive sixth / Page 106 / sense. So did many of the stories we had heard from patients and other doctors.
Dr. William Serdahely at the University of Montana Med-ical School told us the remarkable story of an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy.
Jimmy was fishing from a bridge when he slipped from his perch on the railing and hit his head on a rock in the water below. The doctor's report says that Jimmy had stopped breathing and was without a pulse when a police officer pulled him from the deep water in which he had floated facedown for at least five minutes. The policeman performed CPR for thirty minutes until the hospital helicopter arrived, but he reported that the boy was dead on the scene when they started the rush to the hospital.
The boy lived. Two days later, he was out of his coma.
"I know what happened when I fell off that bridge," he told his physician, who related this story to us. He proceeded to describe his entire rescue in vivid detail, including the name of the police officer who tried to resuscitate him, the length of time it took for the helicopter to arrive on the scene, and many of the lifesaving procedures used on him in the helicopter and at the hospital.
He knew all of this, he said, because he had been observing from outside his body the entire time.
It was not my intent to assess whether or not these children actually left their physical body during their near-death ex-periences. In every case in which children could provide details of what was going on outside their body at a time that they were unconscious, it was astonishing to me how accurate these details were. If two female physicians attended the re-suscitation, the child would accurately report that fact. If they were nasally intubed, they were able to report that. If they were taken to other rooms for X-rays or procedures, again, they were always accurate in their descriptions. This does not / Page 107 / mean that they were actually outside their physical bodies, however, as comatose patients simply may have better abilities to perceive what is going on around them than we have previously understood."

"Hamer explains that in the early 1960s, he went to the Peru�vian Amazon to study the culture of the Conibo Indians. After a year or so he had made little headway in understanding their reli�gious system when the Conibo told him that ifhe really wanted to leam, he had to drink ayahuasca. Hamer accepted not without fear, because the people had wamed him that the experience was terrifying. The following evening, under the strict supervision of his indigenous friends, he drank the equivalent of a third of a bot�tle e. After several minutes he found himself falling into a world of true hallucinations. After arriving in a celestial cavern where "a supernatural carnival of demons" was in full swing, he saw two strange boats floating through the air that combined to form "a huge dragon-headed prow, not unlike that of a Viking ship." On the deck, he could make out "large numbers of people with the heads of blue jays and the bodies of humans, not unlike the bird�headed gods of ancient Egyptian tomb paintings."

After multiple episodes, which would be too long to describe here, Hamer became convinced that he was dying. He tried call� / Page 55 / ing out to his Conibo friends for an antidote without managing to pronounce a word. Then he saw that his visions emanated from "giant reptilian creatures" resting at the lowest depths of his brain. These creatures began projecting scenes in front of his eyes, while informing him that this information was reserved for the dying and the dead:"

"Ward remembered one patient who experienced every trait of the near-death experience while Wilder Penfield poked an area of his brain with an electric probe. As part of the patient's / Page 104 / brain was stimulated, he had the sensation of leaving his body. When, another area close by was stimulated, he had the sensation of zooming up a tunnel, and so forth.
Ward thought that the area Penfield was probing was the right temporal lobe. He felt that some very interesting ex-periments could have been conducted had they thought of them at the time. For instance, they might have devised ways to see if these people were really leaving their bodies. Un-fortunately, said Ward, nobody thought of it at the time.
This was an intriguing lead. Our team of researchers began to examine Penfield's work. Buried in a forty-year-old text- book, we found clear reference to areas of the brain that, when electrically stimulated, produced out-of-body experi-ences. At times patients on his operating table would say, "I am leaving my body now," when he touched this area with an electric probe. Several reported saying, "I'm half in and half out. "

"The area he "was "mapping" was the Sylvian fissure, an area in the right temporal lobe located just above the right ear. When he electrically stimulated the surrounding areas of the fissure, patients frequently had the experience of "seeing God," hearing beautiful music seeing dead friends and relatives, and even having a p-anoramic life review.
This was an exciting find. Up until this point, the existence of archetypes was only a theory from psychotherapist C. G. Jung, who described them as being psychological phenomena present in the genetic makeup of all people, regardless of race, creed, or color."

"I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus in�side all forms of life, including man."

"At this point in his account, Harner writes in a footnote at the bottom of the page: "In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA."¹³

I paused. I had not paid attention to this footnote previously. There was indeed DNA inside the human brain, as well as in the outside world of plants, given that the molecule of life containing genetic information is the same for all species. DNA could thus be considered a source of information that is both external and in�ternal-in other words, precisely what I had been trying to imag�ine the previous day in the forest.Page 56 I plunged back irito Harner's book, but found no further men�tion of DNA. However, a few pages on, Harner notes that "dragon" and "serpent" are synonymous. This made me think that the dou�ble helix of DNA resembled, in its form, two entwined serpents."

6	DOUBLE	59	23	5
5	HELIX	58	31	4
11	DOUBLE HELIX	117	54	9
1+1		1+1+7	5+4
2	DOUBLE HELIX	9	9	9

"AFTER LUNCH, I returned to the office with a strange feeling. The reptilian creatures that Harner had seen, in his brain reminded me of something, but I could not say what. It had to be a text that I had read and that was in one of the numerous piles of docu�ments and notes spread out over the floor. I consulted the "Brain" pile, in which I had placed the articles on the neurological aspects of consciousness, but I found no trace of reptiles. After rummag�ing around for a while, I put my hand on an article called "Brain and mind in Desana shamanism" by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff.

I was stopped by a Desana drawing of a human brain with a snake' lodged between the two hemispheres (see top of page 57).

Several pages further into the article, I came upon a second drawing, this time with two snakes (see top of page 58).(Diagram omitted)

Intrigued, I began reading Reichel-Dolmatoff's article from the beginning. In the first pages he provides a sketch of the De�sana's main cosmological beliefs. My eyes stopped on the follow� / Page 58 / ing sentence: "The Desana say that in the beginning of time their ancestors arrived in canoes shaped like huge serpents."¹⁶

To find out, I picked up a book about a third ayahuasca-using people, entitled (in French) Vision, knowledge, power: Shaman�ism among the Yagua in the North-East of Peru. This study by Jean-Pierre Chaumeilis, to my mind, one of the most rigorous on the subject. I started paging through it looking for passages rela�tive to cosmological beliefs. First I found a "celestial serpent" in a drawing of the universe by a Yagua shaman. Then, a few pages / Page 59 / away, another shaman is quoted as saying: "At the very beginning, before the birth of the earth, this earth here, our most distant an�cestors lived on another earth. . . ." Chaumeil adds that the Yagua consider that all living beings were created by twins, who are "the two central characters in Yagua cosmogonic thought."17

These correspondences seemed very strange, and I did not know what to make of them. Or rather, I could see an easy way of interpreting them, but it contradicted my understanding of real�ity: A Western anthropologist like Harner drinks a strong dose of ayahuasca with one people and gains access, in the middle of the twentieth century, to a world that informs the "mythological" con�cepts of other peoples and allows them to communicate with life�creating spirits of cosmic origin possibly linked to DNA. This seemed highly improbable to me, if not impossible. However, I was getting used to suspending disbelief, and I had decided to fol�low my approach through to its logical conclusion. So I casually penciled in the margin of Chaumeil's text: "twins = DNA?"

These indirect and analogical connections between DNA and the hallucinatory and mythological spheres seemed amusing to me, or at most intriguing. Nevertheless, I started thinking that I had perhaps found with DNA the scientific concept on which to focus one eye, while focusing the other on the shamanism of Amazonian ayahuasqueros.

More concretely, I established a new category in my reading notes entitled "DNA Snakes."

13	AYAHUASQUEROS	171	54	9
11	DOUBLE HELIX	117	54	9

3	SUN	54	9	9
5	WORLD	72	27	9
5	ROUND	72	27	9
4	BALL	27	9	9
7	SPHERES	90	36	9
7	BUBBLES	63	18	9

"I AM LAZARUS COME FROM THE DEAD COME BACK TO TELL YOU ALL I SHALL TELL YOU ALL"

4	HOLY	60	24	6
5	BIBLE	30	12	3
9	HOLY BIBLE	90	36	9
		9+0	3+6	9
		9	9
9	HOLY BIBLE	9	9	9

IF ANY ONE SHALL ADD UNTO THESE THINGS GOD SHALL ADD UNTO THEM THE PLAGUES THAT ARE WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK

AND IF ANYONE SHALL TAKE AWAY FROM THE WORDS OF THE BOOK OF THIS PROPHECY GOD SHALL TAKE AWAY THEIR PART OUT OF THE BOOK OF LIFE AND OUT OF THE HOLY CITY AND FROM THE THINGS WHICH ARE WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK

Verse 17/18 the word them substituted for him and Verse 18/19 the word one replaces man their replaces his

"One sunny afternoon that spring I was sitting in the garden with my children. Birds were singing in the trees, and my mind began to wander. There I was, a product of twentieth�century rationality, my faith requiring numbers and molecules rather than myths. Yet I was now confronted with mythological numbers relative to a molecule, in which I had to believe. Inside my body sitting there in the garden sun were 125 billion miles of DNA. I was wired to the hilt with DNA threads and until recently had known nothing about it. Was this astronomical number really just a "useless but amusing fact,"^l as some scientists would have it? Or did it indicate that the dimensions, at least, of our DNA are cosmic?

Some biologists describe DNA as an "ancient high biotechnol�ogy," containing "over a hundred trillion times as much informa�tion by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices." Could one still speak of a technology in these circum�stances? Yes, because there is no other word to qualify this du�plicable, information-storing molecule. DNA is only ten atoms wide and as such constitutes a sort of ultimate technology: It is or� / Page 104 /ganic and so miniaturized that it approaches the limits of material existence.2

Shamans, meanwhile, claim that the vital-principle that ani-mates all living creatures comes from the cosmos and is minded. As ayahuasquero Pablo Amiringo says: "A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everyfhing, which is the soul the plant, its essence, what, makes it alive." According to Amaringo, these spirits are veritabll, beings, and hhumans are also filled with them: "Even the hair, the eyes, the ears are full of beings. You see all this when the ayahuasca is strong."3

During the past weeks, I had come to consider that the per-spective of biologists could be reconciled with that of ayahuas-queros and that both could be true at the same time. According to the stereoscopic image I could see by gazing at both perspectives simultaneously, DNA and the cell-based life it codes for an ex-tremely sophisticated technology tha far surpasses our present day understanding and that was initially developdl elsewhere than on earth-which it radically transformed on its arrival some four billion years ago.

"This point of view was completely new to me and had changed my way of looking at the world. For instance the leaves of trees now appeared to be true solar panels. One had only to look at them closely to see their "technological," or organized, aspect (see top of page 105). (diagram omitted) This revelation was troubling. I started thinking about my eyes, through which I was looking at the plants in the garden. Over the course .of my readings, I had learned that the human eye is more sophisticated than any camera of similar size. The cells on the outer layer of the retina can absorb a single particle .of light, or photon, and amplify its energy at least a million times, before transferring it in the form of a nervous signal to the back of the brain. The iris, which functions as the eye's diaphragm, is auto�matically controlled. The cornea has just the right curvature. The lens is focused by miniature muscles, which are also controlled automatically by feedback. The final result of this visual system, still imperfectly understood in its entirety, is a clear, colored, and three-dimensional image inside the brain that we perceive as ex�ternal. We never see reality, but only an internal representation of it that our brain constructs for us continuously.⁴

What troubled me was not so much the resemblance of the human eye to an organic and extremely sophisticated technology born of cosmic knowledge, but that they were my eyes Who was this 'I' perceiving the images flooding into my mind? One thing was sure: I was not responsible for the construction of the visual system with which I was endowed."

1	I	9	9	9
2	ME	18	9	9
4	EYES	54	18	9
4	IRIS
	I	9	9	9
	R	18	9	9
	I	9	9	9
	S	19	10	1
	IRIS	55	37	28
		5+5	3+7	2+8
	IRIS	10	10	10
		1+0	1+0	1+0
	IRIS	1	1	1

This brew, commonly called yage, or yaje, in Colombia, ayahuasca (Inca 'vine of the dead'*) in Ecuador and Peru, and caapi in Brazil, is prepared from segments of a species of the vine Banisteriopsis, a genus belonging to the Malpighiaceae.-Michael Harner

*Inca "vine of the dead, vine of the souls," aya means in Quechua "spirit," "ancestor," "dead person," while huasca means "vine," "rope").

*Frightening ayahuasca experiences are quite frequent. It is common that people take ayahuasca only once, and are afraid to take it again."

"Ayahuasca is not something to play with. It may even kill, not because it is toxic in itself, but because the body may not be able to stand the spiritual realm, the vibrations from the spirit world. Pablo said he had several frightening experiences with ayahuasca. Three times he thought he was going to die.*One needs courage, a strong discipline, and to proceed by degrees. It is a long process that might take two or three years before one can venture into the higher realms."

"Frightening ayahuasca experiences are quite frequent. It is common that people take ayahuasca only once, and are afraid to take it again."

Page 98 / " The alchemists, Jung believed had been inadvertantly tap-ping into the collective unconscious. This led them to assume / Page 99 / they were following a spiritual path to enlightenment-when they were actuafly liberatiing their subconscious minds through the use of ritual. This is not far removed from other ritualistic events- those exploited by faith healers, the ecstasy experienced by ritualistic voodoo dancers, or charismatic Christian services. Jung said of alchemy: 'The alchemical stone symbolises some�thing that can never be lost or dissolved, something eternal that some alchemists 'Compared to the mystical experience of God within one's own soul.It tusually takes prolonged suffering to burn away all the superfluous psychic elements.concealing the stone. But some profound inner experience of the Self does occur to most people at least once in a lifetime. From the psychological standpoint, a genuinely religious atiitude consists of an effort to discover this unique. experience and;gradually to keep in tune wth it (it is,relevant that the stone is itself something permanent), so that the Self becomes an inner partner towards whom one's attention is continually turned.'⁵ To the alchemist, the most important factor in the practice was participation of the individual experimenter in .the process of transmutation. The genuine alchemist was convinced that the emotional and spiritual characteristics of the individual experimenter was involved intiimately wth the success or failure of the experiment. And, it is this concept, more than any other aspect of, alchemy, that distinguishes it from orthodox chemistry,- the scientific discipline that began to supersede it at the end of the seventeenth Century. The alchemist placed inordinate importance upon the spiritual element.of his work and for many sceptics it was this which.pushed the subject into the realms of magic and left it forever beyond the boundaries of 'science'."

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ISISIS LOVE LOVE ISISIS ISISIS LOVE 999 LOVE 999 LOVE ISISIS ISISIS LOVE LOVE ISISIS