“I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part.
“‘No, no, no, no,’ I heard myself saying. ‘This is absurd, don Juan. What your saying is something monstrous. It simply can’t be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone.’
“‘Why not?’ don Juan asked calmly. ‘Why not? Because it infuriates you?’
“‘Yes, it infuriates me,’ I retorted. ‘Those claims are monstrous!’ […]
“‘I want to appeal to your analytical mind, ‘ don Juan said. ‘Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.’
“‘But how can they do this, don Juan?’ I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. ‘Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?’
“‘No, they don’t do it that way. That’s idiotic!’ don Juan said, smiling. ‘They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver – stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.
Don Juan continues: “‘I know that even though you have never suffered hunger… you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.'” (Castaneda, 1998, pp. 213-220)
Now, let’s go back a moment to something that Dr. Narby found in the literature of shamanism. He quotes the subjective description of the ayahuasca experience written by an anthropologist named Michael Harner. In the early 1960s, Harner was studying the culture of the Conibo Indians. He was told by the Indians that if he really wanted to understand their religious system, he had to drink ayahuasca. He agreed with fear and trepidation, and the following account of his experience was the result:
“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 to 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.
[…]”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 inside all forms of life, including man. In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA.” (Harner, quoted by Narby, 1998, pp. 54-55ff)
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