 Well, hello everybody. I'd like to welcome you to our panel today. Actually, I'm going to introduce you. Oh, yeah. Thank you. But no, that's fine. And we can never be welcome too much. This is Andy Gervits, the president for the anthropology of consciousness, and we are glad that you were here with us for our next panel of the first day of our spring conference, our first fully online section meeting in our 39 years of holding conferences. This is, it has been a profound experience so far. The panels have all been absolutely dynamite. This is, as I said early on, the most diverse, the most accessible. And the conference with the least ecological footprint that we've ever held. And so in spite of all the challenges we've all faced through the past year and a half and longer, we're responding to it in really innovative and really interesting and collaborative ways. And this conference is absolutely the apex of that so far. Thank you for being here and participating in what is really some groundbreaking work with using these digital spaces to connect and share information and build community in ways that we haven't ever done as far as we know in the history of our species. And so it's a very exciting time. Even as we struggle to figure out what links to click on and how to share screens and how to get our audience to play and all that. It's worth it because we are laying the groundwork for what I hope to be several generations of people to take this forward and interact and help prepare the world in ways that we are yet even able to imagine. I'm speaking to you today from Portland, Oregon, which as I've said before rests on the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualat and Kalapua, Malala, and many other tribes and bands as the original caretakers of this land. I want to begin my time with you by acknowledging their presence, their dignity and their continued struggle for respect, for restoration and reparation. I would not be here on this land able to be with you today if it were not for these peoples and for their historic and continued displacement. Part of the work of the conference and of this organization is to do our part to help address that. We are in a webinar format. And so if you are not one of the panelists, you'll notice that you don't have the ability to turn your camera on or your audio. So you're going to need to turn the chat on and please do that as quickly as possible because we're going to be communicating a lot of things to you through the chat window. So make sure you have that on so you can be made aware of the things that we're going to be sharing there. It's also a great place for you to share the questions that you have for us, any type questions or questions that you have for the panelists. We would prefer that you submit your questions through the Q&A box, which is on the bottom of your screen as well. This way we can keep the questions separate from the other kinds of things that are going in the chat box. But if you forget that or don't do that and end up putting a question in the chat box, we'll do our best to grab it and bring it over for the Q&A session as well. The only other thing I'd like to say, and then I'm going to hand things over to Christina, is that if you would like, you have the ability to rename yourself. If you go click on your name, click over to the right, you'll be able to rename yourself. We ask two things. One, that you go with a name that as closely resembles the name you registered with as possible. This way we can reconcile our list of attendees with those who are supposed to be here in the room. We're not looking to throw anybody out. We're just looking to maintain security and good flow of energy for the conference. And as you can see, some of us have already done. If it interests you and if you would like to, and if you think it would contribute to an atmosphere of inclusiveness and a welcoming and safe space, you feel free to add your chosen pronouns to your name. This is not a requirement, but if you'd like to do so, we'd be happy to have you do that as well. Okay, this panel is entitled, Altered States of Consciousness and Transcendent Change. And without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to the panel chair, Christina Calcott from Fort Lewis College. Christina, welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much, Andy. And thanks to my fellow panelists, Elaine Dennis and John Napora, who are going to present as well during this panel. My name is Christina Calcott. I'm coming to you from Ute, lands in Southwest Colorado. And I'm going to present a paper entitled or a presentation entitled, Amazonian shamanism and the chemical turn, reengaging the material and nontological studies. Let me turn on my timer. All right. So in 2013, I wrote a paper on interspecies communication for Robin Wright's shamanism class at the University of Florida. I was a first year graduate student and had just re-entered the Academy after a 20 year break. The paper went on to be published in the European Journal of Ecosychology and has since been translated and republished in French and Portuguese. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited 27 times. I say these things not to brag, but to illustrate my level of consternation regarding the fact that for a long time, I didn't even believe myself what I had written. The paper was based on very little field research and was largely a literature review on the songs associated with ayahuasca shamanism, songs that are popularly known as icaros. Now I am often reminded that not everyone knows what ayahuasca is or knows what the icaros are. So let me give a brief overview of this field of research. Ayahuasca is a multi-plant beverage or tea used in the Amazon for various purposes. But the foremost purpose is shamanic divination and healing. It is used in a ceremonial setting and shamanic songs or chants often known as icaros are used to guide the process and to evoke the presence of healing spirits. These songs are indispensable in ayahuasca shamanism and it is often said that the measure of a shaman lies in the quality and quantity of his or her songs. It is often said that the icaros are obtained through a process of dieting with plants which entails ingesting preparations of various medicinal plants while observing strict prohibitions on food and drink, social and other kinds of behavior usually while in isolation in or near the forest. In my paper, relying heavily on the work of Eduardo Luis Luna, I argued that these songs constitute a form of communication between plants and people. I used the concept of phytosemiotics to explain how this can be the case. Put briefly, I showed that the secondary chemical compounds produced by plants might generate biological and psychological effects in the body and mind of the shamanic apprentice that are then interpreted and reproduced in the form of song. In the paper, I wrote, in the process of interpretation and reproduction, the initiate organizes and codifies these signals into culture-specific mimetic responses. In this case, icaros. In other words, a particular plant might introduce a unique auditory effect in the apprentice. The apprentice then interprets the sound as the icaro of that plant and strives to reproduce the sound through song. When I first wrote it, the statement was a response to one of the paper's reviewers who encouraged me to speculate about the specific nature of the communication between plants and humans. Even though the idea of speculating made me uncomfortable, as a pre-master's graduate student, I was eager to get published. So the phrase culture-specific was basically a logical workaround or a way of saying that any interpretation and musical reproduction of phytochemical cues would be a product of the consumer's musical enculturation, more than anything the plants had to say. As my research progressed, I found it difficult to find any shamans whose personal trajectory matched that of the classic literature on shamanism. In other words, that they had dieted with plants for years in order to learn about the properties of those plants and to acquire songs. Where did I go? It increasingly seemed to me that, regardless of the state of the art at the time of Eduardo Luna's field work, by the time I got to the field, shamanic assertions of interspecies communication were nothing more than a means of laying claim to privileged and therefore unverifiable knowledge. A sort of Amazonian esotericism in which a direct and personal relationship with the divine, in this case, with plants and their guardian spirits conferred power and knowledge upon its claimant. As my research has progressed, what I've found is, of course, an expansive and complex amount of diversity within the world of Amazonian shamanism, which means that many findings can be true at the same time, including contradictory findings and including most of the findings that I elaborated in my first paper. I think that in most cases, in ayahuasca shamanism exhibit signs of greater human agency than plant agency. I might describe them as products of the enculturated human imagination, as stimulated and shaped by the action of plants on the mind and body. The prominence of human agency makes the final outcome no less remarkable if we consider that the outcome, if we consider that outcome as a form of co-creation between plant and human. As I wrote in my dissertation, this is the very place where cultural creativity emerges as a result of interaction between human and non-human nature. Such cultural creativity is in keeping with the processes of adaptation as a core feature of cultural ecological adaptation, Allah Julian Steward, who wrote that cultural ecological adaptations constitute creative processes. On the other hand, I have seen rare examples in which direct memesis is also at play. In 2018, I was interviewing an elderly Kichwa couple in San Martin, Peru, on the edge of the Peruvian Amazon, about medicinal plants known as Pergas. The woman described to me the spirit of ayahuasca. It's the sound of a chainsaw, she said, and she heard it once when she took ayahuasca. She said, that's how the ayahuasca emits its secret, she said. Her account bears remarkable similarity to that of a Pistaza Kichwa woman I interviewed once from Ecuador, who described the voice of ayahuasca by making a sound that I can only describe as that made by the blades of a helicopter in motion. This quality of sound appears to have been approximated by the quickly repetitive, almost vibrational quality of the vocables in an icata, sung by Jacques Mabit, owner of the therapeutic center, Takiwazi in Terrapoto, Peru, whose primary training was with Lomista Kichwa shamans. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen to share the sound of that song with you. This comes from a little clip off of YouTube. So you can kind of hear that really quick, vibrational quality, which is what I heard those Kichwa women trying to reproduce when they made the sound of the voice of ayahuasca. In both cases with these Kichwa women, it was clear to me that the sound that they were describing or reproducing was what Western science would call an auditory hallucination. And yet to them, it was the speech of the plant itself. Their assertions are in keeping with the very common Amazonian belief that language is not limited to human or linguistic sounds. And with the finding that non-human languages often quoted in human speech by means of onomatopoeia. In these cases, the emic view is that the sound they heard was the voice of ayahuasca itself. The eating view is that the sound they heard was the psychoactive effect of the secondary compounds present in the plant material. Compounds that as a class tend to serve functions of defense, communication and cooperation, both within the plant itself, between parts, and between the plant and its environment. The voice that they reported was not only the effect of these signaling compounds on the brain itself, but also the interpretation of the effect of those compounds as a form of speech. This is a process not entirely dissimilar from the interpretation of other exogenous cues. For example, birdsong or the sound of a tree falling in the forest. As is generally agreed upon with regard to the ladder, for example, the sound of a falling tree is not the vibrations that result, but the reception of those vibrations by the structures of the ear and the interpretation of that stimuli by the brain. A critique of my theory will be that with regard to the secondary compounds present in the ayahuasca plant that are believed to be a sole source of activity, harming and harming and their relatives, we don't know exactly what the function of these chemicals is. They may or may not be signaling chemicals. My response would be that the isolation of molecules and the attribution of a plant's medicinal qualities to those molecules is a reductionistic approach that not only sidesteps the holistic approach of Western herbology, not to mention Amazonian ethnomedicine, but is also beside the point. Many forms of communication are not intended as such or are readily misinterpreted. This multivalence or even equivocation are true for the communicative properties of plant secondary compounds as well, in which it is accepted that these compounds may or may not have evolved as signaling compounds, but that the signaling function may be spandalous or a secondary result of their positionality within an ecosystem. It is also observed that many of these chemicals are multivalent exercising both communicative and physiological functions. The potential for misinterpretation of these phytochemical cues is widely recognized by Amazonian shamans who regularly call ayahuasca a liar. On the other hand, there's evidence that secondary compounds and the psychoactive effect that they produce on the species that ingests them can confer fitness benefits on the producer as well as the receiver. Research on honeybees and caffeine-producing plants has shown that low levels of caffeine and flower nectar serve to enhance the bee's memories, not just through Pavlovian associative response, but by the direct stimulation of memory-encoding brain structures, as well as to stimulate the bee's pollinating activities leading to increased pollination of the donor plant to the plant's benefit. What's more, the secondary compounds present in some nectars can serve to reduce the pathogen load of its pollinators in nectars, and nectars containing these compounds may be preferentially sought by pollinators for this specific reason. This is, of course, not the only example of self-medication by a non-human species. However, the increasing body of research on the mediation of pollinator-flower interactions by psychoactive medicinal compounds is important to our conversation because of the widespread recognition that these interactions are situated within a complex and ecologically sophisticated system of interspecies communication involving indexical flower signaling, bee dances, and more. My contention that the spiritual beings of the plant world are related to their chemical constitution is supported by Michael Uzyndoski and Edith Kalapucha-Tapwee's account of gathering medicines with their healer friend Fermin, who is Quechua also of Ecuador. As they walked through the forest, Fermin broke off leaves and stems, tasting and smelling them in order to assess their strength. Their aroma was evidence of their power, they write. However, the idea of power wasn't limited to a biochemical assessment, but to an assessment of the plant's personhood. Certain flowering specimens Fermin described in a way that equated them with shamans. Earlier in this presentation I used phytosymiotics as a theoretical framework for describing the communicative properties of plants and the indexical quality of their signaling compounds as they exert their agency upon the human body. Others have used the concept of ecosymiotics to describe the incorporation of plants into human sign systems. I suggest that neither of these is quite adequate to accommodate a communicative system in which plants and humans are embedded together within a web of chemically mediated signaling compounds. In a 2019 essay, John Hartigan writes about plants as ethnographic subjects inquiring into the means and methods by which ethnographers might understand about the social lives of plants within a world of other plants. Again, his investigation is limited to the plant world rather than the broader world of humans and plants, but his essay is firmly embedded within the ontological turn as is mine. In this essay Hartigan uses the language of quote unquote the chemical turn to describe what may be an emergent form of ethnography that engages with plant chemicals to describe and understand plant chemicals. We recognize that as part of the broader ontological term with which Hartigan is engaged, we recognize the co-constitutive nature of humans and other than humans and communicative processes, much as historical ecology and ethnobotany have resituated humans as co-creators of what otherwise appears to be a non-human landscape. In other words, humans do not have to dominate a domain in order to be embedded as an active participant within it. Now in approaching the ontological turn, I want to acknowledge its critics but also to push back against them. On the one hand, some critics seem concerned with the abstraction or romanticization of indigenous culture inherent in ontological queries. I think I've shown here, however, that the human and other than human beings that populate the landscape of the ontological turn are not abstract biological beings. The involvement of the human mind and imagination in these communicative and representational processes does not diminish that fact. Another critique of the ontological turn is that it de-centers the struggles for survival of the indigenous groups with which it is concerned. Again, I reject that notion. The ethnography of religion or shamanism is not antithetical to political ecology and indigenous politics. The work of Richard Chase Smith, ethnographer and founder of Peruse Institute, which is one of the preeminent organizers for indigenous territorial rights in Peru, should be proof enough that this argument is flawed. Likewise, in my own investigations into shamanic music among the Kichwa of San Martin, Peru, I found that when shamans call to the spirits, other spiritual and elemental forces as well as human healers both living and deceased, they do so by naming sacred sites in the landscape of San Martin where these healers and healing forces are said to reside. What is particularly relevant here is that these sacred sites lie in the mountainous regions of the regional landscape in territories that have either been lost to colonization or to agricultural expansion or that have been set aside in conservation areas that are in effect off limits to the Kichwa. The Kichwa are actively engaged in a number of legal battles to regain access to and title to these territories. My Kichwa colleagues were not only delighted to discover the Cosmovision, that's their word, embedded in shamanic song that I presented to them, but we have used these findings in a paper that aims to support the Kichwa claims to these territories as sacred sites which, according to international law, should be returned to the Kichwa if not in full title, at least in access and co-management with regional authorities. That's all I have for you today and thank you for your time. So now we are going to turn to Elaine Dennis. She's got a paper for us. She's from John F. Kennedy University and her friend. And she's talking about the development and the transformation of identity. Thanks. Thank you. And the society for anthropology of consciousness. I want to recognize the lands of the Wapow people here in northern California where I Yeah, so thanks again. It's great to be here at the sea change conference and present the research from my paper and my inquiry group. The topic is sacred plant medicine, persistent conditions and transformation of identity. And definitely in the area we're seeing a lot of sea change in with psychedelic medicine, plant medicine, and specifically treating a lot of these treatment resistant or persistent conditions. And so I'm presenting a paper and research that was part of the second year of my consciousness and transformative study program. And I will go into my launching statement, which is illness and healing and psychedelic medicine experiences can all have profound and significant effects on people's lives. There is a theme of rights of passage in both illness and psychedelic experiences. Rights of passage typically have the phases of separation, initiation, and return. In illness, there can be phases of rejection, engulfment, acceptance, and enrichment. Okay, so in psychedelics, the phases are preparation, your setting of your intention, set and setting, and then engagement and then integration of the experience. And the question that I had was about identity. How is identity transformed on this path from illness to healing with psychedelics? And so that brings me to my journey and how I ended up here today talking about healing and plant medicine. I started my career in Silicon Valley and I was an evangelist for Core Technology for Adobe and Apple, which took me into the music area in digital film, digital music, eventually I found myself working in the bowels of the entertainment industry in Hollywood. And it's very fast paced, overstimulating, chaotic, doing energy. And 10 years ago, I woke up one morning and I was like, are we having an earthquake or what? And it felt like the ground was moving. And I had had a sudden onset of subjective dizziness. There was no earthquake. It was basically just happening within my nervous system. And I had a lot of rocking and swaying and brain fog because the symptoms didn't resolve. And it took me about nine months to actually find a doctor that knew what was going on. I had a neurological diagnosis of silent migraines, vestibular migraines, so that's your equilibrium and your ability to balance, which is why I felt like I was off balance. I also feel that there was definitely a trauma component involved as well. And this kind of went on for a while at varying intensity and started to become more intrusive in my life over time because I was sensitive and everything became a trigger motion, computer use, crowds, sounds, and eventually it really affected my quality of life. I had difficulty focusing and functional issues and I basically became chronic because my symptoms didn't resolve and were causing me impact to my functionality. And so I basically went through that stage of separating. I left Los Angeles and moved to Northern California. I slowed down on my work and my social. I put a pullback. So I went into the separation, isolation, and I basically tried everything under the sun. You know, Western medicine, pharmaceuticals, alternative treatments, therapies, and basically nothing worked for me. I was treatment resistant. And so I had, at this point, decided to go back into school. I was seeking out psychospiritual material and so I found the program at John F. Kennedy for consciousness and transformative studies. And so there I learned about healing in expanded states and the work of transpersonal psychologists and Stan Groff and the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, MAPS, and I also was learning about some work that was being done specifically on treatment-resistant conditions like major depressive disorder of which 30% of those cases are treatment-resistant. PTSD, 40% of those cases do not respond to traditional treatment and also a lot of people with migraine disorders do not respond. So I had read about some studies specifically where people with migraines were healing with the plant medicine. So in 2019, I weaned off all of my medicine and I went on multiple intentional medicine ceremonies including ayahuasca, psilocybin, and I also worked with MDMA and psilocybin together. And then after these experiences, I was able to stay off. I never had to go back on my daily pharmaceutical medicines that I had weaned off of and I remained low in my symptoms. The thing that I noticed was that I was definitely having identity issues. I wasn't my former self that I had been before the illness and I was not consumed engulfed by the illness because my symptoms had been reduced. So I went on a search for other people who had this similar experience and so I started to put together a study around that. And here I'll just go into a little bit of the literature from my paper. Dr. Stan Groff, who you probably are familiar with, is a psychiatrist who was among the first to work legally with LSD in the 50s in Prague and then later in the United States and he worked with thousands of patients over a couple decades and he found that unconscious emotional material reliably emerged in these psychedelic sessions wherein the psychogenic symptoms that people were having and in some cases they were people with skin disorders or migraines or you know then anxiety and things like that. But these could be tended to and thus healed and so he really paved the way for a lot of what we see now in the renaissance of research going on and John Hopkins has been doing a lot of research. They have hundreds of papers and have worked with lots of different medicines and conditions and one of the observations that they have made is that high doses of psychedelics that provide this mystical experience for people in which they have a sense of unity, interconnectedness, transcending space and time, etc. And it's in those states where the therapeutic benefits come so and lasting effects on people's behavior and their mood. And then I also looked at the rites of passage, literature that pertains to illness and the phases that we talked about a little bit earlier about separation, how illness pulls you away from your work and your family and friends the more you get consumed in it and you know there can be an incorporation if your symptoms are resolved. There's also something called illness identity. There was a paper written about this chronic illness in adults and the identity, the degree to which the illness is integrated into someone's identity and so people with chronic illness can cycle through the phases or remain in any one of those phases. So rejection and engulfment are associated with maladaptive, psychological and physical functioning and then the acceptance and enrichment is you know when you've moved into a healthier place with your illness. So I started a cooperative inquiry and cooperative inquiry is a group that I started for inquiry into the shared lived experiences around illness and so it's a qualitative kind of research and I was a participant as well as a researcher in the group. So I put together the criteria for participants based on my own experience and so participants were 25 or older they had had a persistent illness for five or more years and they had used psychedelics as a therapeutic and then had been low in their symptoms for one year following the psychedelic use. So we had six weekly meetings on Zoom that were about an hour and a half usually and we the process of inquiry with cooperative inquiry is that you go through cycles of action and reflection. So as a group we decided what we wanted to look into in our experience and then how what kind of a practice we were going to use to to go deeper into what our experiences were. So then we came back after that into the next meeting and shared those those reflections with others and then we kind of reframed them and figured out what we learned from the actions that we took and that's really kind of the cornerstone of how cooperative inquiry works. So everybody agreed that identity was an important part to inquire into and they all wanted to do that. So the first inquiry that we did was a dialogue with our illness or illnesses and in the first person and so that was really interesting the shares that we had and one of the reflections that came from a participant about that was that I became the illness it possessed me and dominated my life and that reflects the the the research that you know persistent health symptoms can basically engulf a person and then upend their sense of themselves so affecting their identity because they've pretty much become consumed by the illness and then the second inquiry we did was writing a letter to the medicines so you know in some cases there were lots the letters were long because there were different medicines that people had tried and different experiences and things that they wanted to express and that was really interesting and fruitful and I just pulled some excerpts one person said thank you for teaching me about surrender forgiveness and bringing me back to joy another person wrote I felt deeply humbled in your presence I felt the deepest compassion for myself and every living thing and another part of this is sort of goes to what you were talking about Christina is they were there were many experiences of you know spirits the plant spirits and guiding entities or entities that were helping to remove energies and things like that so it was it was a really interesting inquiry and we we found that high doses of psychedelics do convey those mystical states where in you know people can surrender and have greater self-compassion and self-confidence and the shifts can occur where healing emerges and then we we did a further inquiry into what were the the qualities and behaviors of phases that we saw ourselves go through like what were the phases that we we felt that we had gone through and what was our our behaviors and you know pathologies and archetypes and things around that so we we did that one cycle and then we added a visual story component to the second cycle which was really kind of brought it home because you could see pictures of people in their wounded self-staged and basically the qualities that we associated with the wounded self were chaotic and consumed never being gentle with oneself and then that's sort of that separation engulfment part of the rights and then the healing self which was seeking and vulnerable and confused and this was sort of in that liminal or acceptance space and then the emergent self which was had qualities of integration growth authentic being more authentic and you know sort of incorporating knowledge from the experience and so we also found that you know you can overlap in these stages you're not really clearly in any one or the other and people slipped back from where they thought they had been you know in a more emergent stage to a wounded self stage so those were the phases that we found and then let's see yeah just being a part of the group the process of deep inquiry with peers was in itself a part of the integration for people and was very healing and enriching the cooperative inquiry provided a framework and a safe environment for deeper exploration of this journey from illness to healing and a couple quotes someone said I consider this part of my integration these inquiries helped me to realize my own transformation and then um yeah the group process served as further integration through the witnessing and the sharing of the stories so another person wrote hearing others be so open and vulnerable was very powerful and um yeah it was really incredible because the group actually wanted to continue working together when we finished our six cycles and everybody's kept in touch and actually uh some of us have actually met in person the people that were close enough to do so so there was a definite bond and and healing through the witnessing and sharing of lived experiences so thank you thank you for the gift of your presence and allowing me to share my story and my research with you yes thanks for that Elaine yeah thank you Elaine next we're going to have John Napora from the University of South Florida he's going to talk to us about healing and trance in Morocco thank you Christina and thank you again Elaine for sharing that was really interesting um thank you as well to Andy and for the Society of Anthropology of Consciousness for giving me an opportunity to present what I'm going to talk about and I also want to thank the many Moroccans and Sufis or Muslim mystics that I was fortunate enough to meet during my research in northern Morocco in the brief time I have I wish to expose you to the practices of some Sufis or again Muslim mystics and really a small number of them small in relation to the number of Sufis worldwide and if you don't already know of these practices done by some Sufis they are indeed worth knowing about as they might expand our conception of the human condition and its potentialities time permitting and of course God willing I also wish to provide a cultural analysis or interpretation of their practices including noting culturally constructed motives for their actions as informed by the socioeconomic relations in which the practitioners are embedded or enmeshed overwhelmingly the majority of those who practice such acts which I'm about to mention are poor an ethnographic fact that has been supported by other ethnographers of Sufism in Morocco such as Vincent Crapanzano perhaps is significant to understanding their acts the performers of them also lack honor the overarchingly encompassing and guiding social value in Morocco and more specifically honor as prestige the practices I want to note for your benefit include many acts of self-harm such as drinking hot boiling water eating prickly pear cactus spines and all self-flagellation with prickly pear cactus hitting themselves in the head with a sharp object such as a knife or perhaps a clay pot with great force slashing at their wrists with a knife and throwing themselves headfirst into a wall as there may be many others I have not seen or read about or ones I am simply forgetting is quite possible that those are not all the acts I saw were typically performed during Sufi rituals at night in someone's home the company of both men and women and were typically done typically done well in an altered state of consciousness state which can be seen as a condition of trance which was entered into without the use of any drugs or intoxicants they were also typically performed by men but women also occasionally engaged in similar acts of self-harm and again in mixed company it may be important to note that other such practices among Sufis exist in other parts of the Islamic world again one has to keep in mind that it's only a small number of Sufis who engage in such acts those Sufis amongst the Kurds of Kurdistan may provide the most well-known examples I also want to point out a striking historical parallel that again some of you may know about but if you don't it's worth looking into the so-called Jansenists of early 18th century France and seemingly in particular in Paris also engaged in literally striking forgive the bad pun striking acts of self-injury and also maintained that they felt no pain while engaging in them to me it is indeed remarkable that those Sufis whom I spoke to about their acts of self-injury maintain they felt no pain either during or after their acts of self-violence the obvious question to address how can that be the case that quickly leads to another for at least some of those engaging in such acts they also maintain they feel not only do they maintain they feel no pain but actually that they feel better afterward how indeed can that be the case and again you have a striking parallel amongst the so-called Jansenists of early 18th century France after committing their acts of self-violence they too maintained felt better afterwards the answers to such questions likely involve a number of levels of analysis including psychological ones such as offering emotional release in a culture and now I am indeed talking again about Moroccan culture which offers few emotional outlets there are simply too many possible levels of analysis for me to go into here in the short time I have I should also note that the Sufis I'm referring to in the paper were not one of the groups which were central to my research in northern Morocco that's to quote Evans Prichard I do not make far-reaching claims I'm sorry if I disappoint on that on that point I should limit myself to what I'm confident in stating and with what is consistent with cultural anthropology and since Christina mentioned anemic approach I will also say that at least initially I'm taking anemic approach relating the Moroccan Sufis actions to their salient categories and to their religious idiom through which they understand their acts one of their most salient religious categories is the famous barakah the blessing and power which comes from God though its ultimate source is a law typically Sufis are followers of a particular saint the ones I knew in Morocco who were willing to speak to me about their actions felt they were experiencing and participating in the barakah of the particular saint they followed it was his barakah that was protecting them thus showing that they had a close relationship with their saint in Morocco to be close to a saint or to again refer to a Moroccan category to be a worker for a saint brings barakah they were also demonstrating their Nia and I'll put the term in chat for everyone I want to see what I'm referring to and yes in the Latin letters Nia is another crucial Moroccan and really Islamic category with a range of entangled and encompassing meanings including intention or purpose moral intention correct purpose and it's also been translated as devotion or faith through their acts of self-harm the Sufis have shown their devotion or Nia to the saint in turn the saint rewards them with his blessing his barakah the proof of that and now I'm taking something more of an etiquette approach is being able to engage in such dramatic acts of self-injury and not only survive but also not to feel any pain how can they not feel better their injurious acts mark them not only physically at times but also is having a special relationship with a saint and through him Allah they have been transformed from simply being among the many poor and those who lack prestige to among those who have the barakah like the saints themselves to whom they have simultaneously shown their devotion and closeness at least temporarily excuse me during and after their rituals they enjoy excuse me an enhanced sense of self and indeed from their perspective I think it's safe to say a blessed sense of self and again the proof of their enhanced person hood is their ability to transcend the physical pain they of course may also be transcending their specific personal pain or pains and in doing so I think it also safe to say that they are transcending the oppressive system of economic and social relationships in which they find themselves in whatever pains either physical or emotional they may experience as a result of those they may lack honor as prestige within the general structure of moroccan society but they can affirm or assert their honor as morality and in so doing their personhood they can make a claim to greater honor as morality than others who have no such close relationship with the saint for they have shown again at least temporarily during their rituals that they have the barakah and at least some can even pass it on to others in the context of their rituals through bestowing their blessings again like the saints themselves and their descendants transcendence for such sufis can be seen as simultaneously deeply religious moral of course social cognitive and likely emotional as they transcend whatever forms of pain they may be may be experiencing in their everyday lives including feelings of being diminished socially and economically thus for the same sufis there can indeed be seen some gain for their intense and self-inflicted pain thank you thank you very much john now we have about a half an hour left for discussion and questions and so if we'd like while attendees are thinking of some questions and maybe posting them in the q&a and or the chat room please again the q&a is preferred but if you post them in the chat that's fine as well and if you really would rather speak directly your question then just go ahead and raise your hand and we'll try to accommodate that as well but in the meantime do the panelists have any things that I saw folks taking notes would you like to maybe ask each other some questions and speak to each other about what you just presented for a couple of minutes while the question coming in yeah I definitely had some thoughts for Elaine I don't know if I have a specific question but I'm sure you can comment on this one of the things that I find in and that I've really found very interesting in what I would call traditional Amazonian shamanism which would be that which is not influenced by tourism right because that's a whole different a whole different standard but you know in traditional Amazonian shamanism of which there are very many kinds one of the really consistent things that we see is that this idea that all illness is caused by external forces by usually other people but sometimes like an element in the natural natural world or an outside other than human being but they all have these external causes and what I've found really useful for that I mean it has its pros and cons but one of the things that I've found useful and that one of my shamanic colleagues also recognizes is that that externalizes that illness and what you're identifying is that people you know from our culture where we find the source of illness often to be internal that makes us identify with it so I find it interesting that you're bringing this up within the context of the shamanic and psychedelic studies do you have any thoughts on that sure yeah um well there is sort of a place where people do not they may reject their illness that is like an illness identity too where you know you don't accept it but I can share with you one of the comments from the medicine letter that was written by one of the participants who I think this was in an ayahuasca where she said she met this being that was scanning I met this being that was scanning my body and asked him who are you and the being responded I'm you and she deduced that it was her higher self and then these beings came in the form of light beings and they were like collective beings but they were scanning her body and actually removing the illness from her so yeah I don't know if that answers the question but it's sort of like you can see that this is maybe your higher self coming to help heal this this illness that has been created within you yeah that's interesting because that's almost like we're seeing um sort of an identification with the other the other being this other being that then induces the healing that's interesting yeah we have a comment in the chat that I'll read out for folks and John this is directed to you and then we have a question yeah I saw it thank you thank you brother folks yes absolutely uh it comes from Cheryl and the comment is Gary Schwartz in his lab at the university of Arizona studied the American Sufi studied and American Sufi not the one professor of pediatric psychology at Case Western University and affiliated with the Baghdadi Tariqa putting a spear through his cheek in an altered state uh Cheryl's actually present for this the piercing was complete remained for several minutes and then completely healed up and then 20 minutes after withdrawal they all went out to dinner afterwards and he had no after effects except happiness he then prayed um is it uh I'm sure I should turn your voice because I'm going to botch these uh Cheryl you should be allowed to speak now is that Celsilla of shockios for power and blessing during the event uh Cheryl is a Sufi yourself and happy to talk more about this uh so John did you have any response to that and Cheryl you should be able to talk now as well if you wanted to to respond or add any context to that and then we'll get to Daniel's comment as well just emphasize my um thanks to you Cheryl for sharing that and that practice of putting a sharp object through the cheeks um is as you are likely to know one of the things that the uh one of the acts that the Sufis amongst the Kurds of Kurdistan are famous for and experience no pain and it's absolutely indeed extremely remarkable as what I remember seeing is um they're putting things that look a lot like they're about the same length as say sewing needles through both cheeks and not experiencing seemingly any ill effect from doing that it is indeed just to me at least mind boggling thank you again Cheryl I'd love to hear more yeah well Gary was doing uh Gary was doing work on alternative stuff of uh anything weird he was especially studying channelers but he found this fellow and this is a you know this is a straight up African American faculty member from Case Western came to sit and tie sat down in the chair being videotaped in the whole thing went into his prayer place which he said for him it's chanting the names of every shake you know and you do the shake and then his teacher and his teacher and his teacher and his teacher and his teacher he knew all those names that was his mantra or chant all the way back to Muhammad and he chanted all of those and then he gave a little signal with his finger that he was ready to do it and they were videotaping all of this and filming it and measuring his aura and everything you can imagine and so then they got ready for the you know sort of special measurements and stuff and they had it all on videotape and we're going to show it somewhere and it was this it was remarkable in so it was remarkable in its sensationalness of this piercing happening and everything and it was remarkable in the ordinariness of this man and how it was for him and so I just want to support in a way once this is in people's lives it it's there it's a huge blessing but it's every it's sort of every day you know it's normal it was amazing it was completely amazing yeah it really is and I think you're well I'll put it this way hopefully supporting or at least relating to what I was saying with your comment that seemingly from his perspective it's seen as a blessing absolutely totally a blessing and not everybody can do it it's a sign that you've really bowed to God yeah and through in this case through a saint in his case through a chain of shakes uh-huh John we have another question from Daniel Lindy or lend says John I enjoyed your talk I'm wondering about the extremes of self-harm was there variation in the amount and do you have any thoughts on what accounts for more or less self-harm and then he follows up by saying I'm more interested in the depth of involvement and not per se on the harming only or potentially seeing harming as an indicator of involvement might help if I could see the question I mean certainly there were different forms of self-harm and some of those were certainly less less damaging than others that is certainly my impression like drinking hot boiling water is not as potentially injurious as striking oneself in the head with something and I've displaced uh Daniel's two questions or his question in the follow-up in the chat box to you if you're able to see that if that will help you in answering I'm not sure about variation in the amount certainly is I hopefully mentioned um variation in form and what accounts for more or less self-harm that's a good question Daniel I've turned your mic on if you'd like to come on and maybe say something to help you know add some context to the question or maybe yeah thanks thanks Cindy hey John how you doing I was better before your questions Daniel so no I'm just really just first there was a fascinating talk but I'm I just I'm wondering if you know there's so much in in the US where we see self-harm as an individual pathology and and here you're looking at how it it's really a cultural practice in many ways and so I'm just even as a cultural practice I'm just wondering not just variation in forms I guess as you put it but variations and and are they some people doing it more to indicate more affiliation I got that sense from some of your talk but I just wanted to hear more about that two things very briefly with regard to your last question that's a tough call as to whether um more involvement is being shown by what one is doing um the the greater the self-harm I think it does logically follow the more barricade one must um have to be experiencing or participating in to keep one from severe physical harm it's also got to be pointed out that in keeping with what you were just saying many many Moroccans do feel that what these types of Sufis are doing these particular Sufis who are engaging in acts of self-harm they do perceive of them as having some sort of malady I mean the term sick was was literally used as in yes a psychological emotional problem that's certainly from what I gathered discussing this many Moroccans that certainly wasn't true of all Moroccans but for some Moroccans they you know did see such practices as try to use your phrasing as a form of pathology or illness but those engaging in such practices certainly do not and really in diametrically opposed terms they're actually beneficial for them thanks John you're welcome thank you for your question to send the question over we actually have another question in and coming in the q&a but I'll ask this first of the other two panelists and then uh move on to Anil's question and that's this even though it was John's paper that dealt with self-harm I wonder if both Elaine and Christina could speak to um at least in the context of your work in your presentation where self-harm fits into it because it's obviously uh you know when someone's uh in an addictive situation or even you mentioned working in the music industry or even the uh phytosemionics like just the way we control our visual and auditory spaces and and and have and have those uh polluting influences that come in that a lot of shamanic work especially for those of us in the west that have lost connection to or to roots otherwise uh seek out we're trying to limit components of self-harm even as we might engage in in certain practices and rituals that might at least initially cause some harm to the body into the psyche while while both break apart and realign so I just wonder if you might each speak to the the role of self-harm in the people that you work with and the people that you've studied and how it relates as a sort of component of healing. I don't know that I have much to say on it um I'll think about it but do you have any comments Elaine? I do um as far as the people that were participating in my co-inquiry group there were a number of people who had had suicidal attempts or you know had had been very close to suicide attempts that was their turning point to actually start working with the medicine so I don't know if that's really answers that question um but that was sort of the experience in in in our in our group is that for a number of people that was their turning point um to realizing that they were needing to try something different than what they were doing. Um with the kitchen that I work with uh Indigenous group of the Western Amazon um you know they definitely don't necessarily talk about self-harm and I don't think they practice it that I know of it's a pretty uh you know pretty wholesome bunch of people I guess that's the best way to put it but uh I'm looking at what this person aka Maheshwari has said in the Q&A about using the language of self-transcendence through bodily paths and I think that's definitely a better um uh description of what they would be doing in the Amazon and with Amazonian shamanism um again there's not a lot of talk of self because it is um well it's uh culture with a lot of personal autonomy but there's not a lot of focus on the self necessarily um so much as there is the family right and then the community secondary to that but the family is the main thing but there is a lot of transcendence through especially through bodily paths it's a very embodied sort of practice Amazonian shamanism so I would definitely agree with that language yeah I think that might have been the genesis of my question too is that is this a an experience that in certain contexts is to be avoided or transcended or one that one experiences transcendence through participating in and I think uh Anil's question actually gets to the heart of what I was asking more so uh before we go on to the other question in the chat um John did you have anything to add to that this notion of uh the term self-harm sounding like body-centric language maybe not in the right way but using something about self-transcendence through bodily paths how do the people you work with speak of this practice do they do they use an equivalent term to self-harm or do they speak about it differently they don't uh they don't phrase it in terms of self-harm no at least not to the um best of my memory or knowledge of I don't ever recall seeing that in the literature um they simply do these acts and they typically don't like talking about them and I think again that's at least in part because at least some Moroccans see what they are doing as um a sign of ill health and some Moroccans would see what they were doing and certainly many many Muslims would as shameful because of course in Islam one is not supposed to harm the self one is not supposed to harm the body and in the ethnographic literature uh the at least what I'm aware of terms that are typically used are self self mutilation self self harm self injury and I never actually saw any self mutilation so I avoided that extreme one but they don't they don't categorize what they're doing in such terms to the to the best of my knowledge they don't use such categories we have a question in the chat for Elaine thank you for that clarification John I think Anil brings up an interesting fissure there in terms of perspective of these practices the question is for Elaine Mark Flanagan asked would you be able to elaborate a little more on the regimen that you used to help heal your illness was it informal or with guidance of some kind westernized like MDMA assisted psychotherapy or indigenous ayahuasca ceremony what's traditional leaders and shaman yeah well I did a combination of things but I worked with shamans in ayahuasca ceremonies multiple ceremonies and then I worked with guides and with the psilocybin medicine and and combination also in a psilocybin MDMA session with a guide and and then I had some of my own self-guided experiences with MDMA but I did the intentional ones were all with people who were trained to work with the medicines and yeah I have done some micro dosing but again I find that the higher doses is where the healing for these kinds of difficult to treat conditions really seems to come through for people I mean in in my group the people that were in there had tried so many different things and they were like me they got to the point where it was like nothing is working I'm willing to you know go to another country and do two weeks worth of you know ceremonies somewhere or you know try try ibogaine or yeah there were a lot of different medicines that people tried that helped them when nothing else did and and all those people did work in situations where there were ceremony and intention thank you there's a comment in the chat from I just lost it oh from Cheryl who says another point is to show the power I'm assuming of the cell farm of the saints and Allah the saints can protect against such harms what other help can they provide and I think this is an interesting question again you know maybe I was a comment but maybe to John into the whole group is when we're talking about self harm what what self is it that we're talking about um as a religion professor I know that you know folks that I've studied with through the years whether it be Houston Smith Joseph Campbell and others make a distinction between a quick metaphor is when we walk into a room with a series of fluorescent lights on we can say the light is on or the lights are on we can talk about the individual bulbs or we can talk about the light as a collective entity and if we talk about the individual bulbs one of the things that happens with the individual bulbs is they burn out and break right and they wear down and then they're replaced and so if we identify with the bulb then we are identifying with a course of suffering and degradation and disintegration if we identify with the light right then that changes our association with the body and the treatment of the body and even the decay of the body because the decay of the body becomes not then a trap but a release of the core identity back into its larger and more eternal essence and so I'm wondering what you folks think about that there's a question in there somewhere seems like a great idea to me I think um from a Sufi perspective I think that you've named it very well and that when a lot of the Sufi purification on the path is to get rid of your individual ego identity light bulb if you will and become one with the light and that may be what these people are experiencing showing having a heightened experience of it because there are witnesses I'm not I'm not quite sure how it works but I do think that that light bulb versus the lights is a really good analogy for what's what this path is about the Sufi path other questions comments well this has been an absolutely wonderful panel thank you all so much for you've given us a lot to think about the breadth of these presentations I think are spectacular and I also I'm really intrigued at the way they actually speak to one another even though maybe on the surface the first two cover a different range than the final and we're dealing of course as anthropologists we're crossing from Abrahamic to non-Abrahamic traditions which gives us a whole different set of cultural associations and ways of thinking about these terms like the self and the ego and the body and that and even within that while we're honoring the the uniqueness of those traditions there's this interesting continuity that we're seeing that is these practices are trying to move people out of the private self and into a context of deep connection to the other and that's at least one of my main takeaways from all three of the papers and so thank you all so much for that thank you Andy thanks for putting this all together and thanks to Elaine and uh John for your great papers we have another session we have just a couple of sessions left for the evening we have a break now and then at three o'clock we have our keynote session for the day and that's a roundtable discussion that's going to be chaired by Dr. Nicole Torres who's our journals managing editor and a longtime anthropology of consciousness member she's been popping in and out of sessions today and she'll be leading a roundtable discussion of water activists and water protectors um some indigenous some not uh in a pretty fascinating conversation about spiritual activism through through water and our connection to water um and that begins at three o'clock eastern time uh and that will be a roundtable discussion the link is there in the chat it's also in our on our community's page um and then the other thing is our zoom happy hour tonight for those who are able to make it after that and i believe that starts uh that'll be nine p.m uh eastern time six p.m pacific the link to join the happy hour has been put on the uh conference communities page i'll pop that again in the chat we'd love to see all of you there but uh try to make it at least to the to the roundtable panel i think that you'll very much enjoy that oh yeah the link's been posted in the chat a couple times for the zoom happy hour as well um thank you everyone for being here thank you for being a part of this conference so far it's been absolutely spectacular oh oh and yes i've just been reminded about our conference our after party after zoom that will be on abracadabra on twitch tv which is a group that we're partnering with of activists environmental activists and electronic music producers um that have a lot of overlap with consciousness studies and as well because one of the i'll just say this before we end one of the real goals for us is to take the wonderful work that you folks are doing and not have it just die in these sessions and die in the academy but actually expose the ideas and expose the work to other folks who aren't maybe working in these settings all the time and who don't have the luxury of being able to attend these conferences but make sure that we're getting these ideas out in front of larger communities and so that'll be that'll be a part of the twitch affiliation as well thank you all so much thank you andy thanks everybody christina in a lane quick quick questions yeah christina the panel you were referring to that we were on together triple a that was the one dealing with um paranormal phenomena i write about that um could be give me to look it up real quick i don't remember it i did uh i think i did a paper on the dieta shamanic dieta uh was it in montreal no it was in washington dc okay all right sorry i'm thinking of a separate one 2017 thank you very much for your paper really enjoyed it thank you thank you yeah we do so many of these conferences together they all bleed together i've had participants from this conference writing me saying what's my paper on yeah exactly we find many of them and we're just inundated so i think we're interesting it's super interesting yeah yeah well thanks so much y'all it was fun all right thank you it was thank you andy yeah thanks andy