Der Tod als zentrale Kraft von Machtbewusstsein

I like people who make me think

Elizabeth Gilbert: Being a genius or having one

Paul Stamets' six mycological solutions

I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions, using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium. The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it's extremely tenacious. This holds up to 30,000 times its mass. They're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature, the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the land masses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mycelium, so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs. Dusty and I, we like to say, on Sunday this is where we go to church. I'm in love with the old-growth forest, and I'm a patriotic American because we have those.
Most of you are familiar with portobello mushrooms. And frankly, I face a big obstacle when I mention mushrooms to somebody, they immediately think portobellos or magic mushrooms. Their eyes glaze over, and they think I'm a little crazy. So I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group. We call it mycophobia: the irrational fear of the unknown when it comes to fungi.
Mushrooms are very fast in their growth: day 21, day 23, day 25. Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics. In fact, we're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom. A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta, a super-kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together. We share in common the same pathogens. Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi. But here is a mushroom that's past its prime. After they sporulate, they do rot. But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest. They give rise to the trees, they create the debris fields that feed the mycelium.
And so we see a mushroom here sporulating. And the spores are germinating, and the mycelium forms and goes underground. In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be more than eight miles of these cells. My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium.
This is photo-micrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey. And notice that as the mycelium grows, it conquers territory and then it begins the net. I've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years, I have thousands of electron micrographs, and when I'm staring at the mycelium I realize that they are microfiltration membranes. We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium. It inhales oxygen, just like we do. But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs. And I present to you a concept that these are extended neurological membranes. And in these cavities, these microcavities form, and as they fuse soils, they absorb water. These are little wells. And inside these wells, then microbal communities begin to form. And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms.

I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth's natural Internet. When you look at the mycelium, they're highly branched. And if there's one branch that is broken, then very quickly, because of the nodes of crossing - Internet engineers maybe call them hot points – there's alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information. The mycelium is sentient. It knows that you are there. When you walk across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris. So I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful model. The Earth invented the computer Internet for its own benefit, and we now, being the top organism on this planet, are trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.
Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land. They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed several hundred million years later. How is that possible? It's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates. Makes the rocks crumble, and the first step in the generation of soil. Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together. So fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates. And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix.
This was first discovered in 1859. This is a photograph by Franz Hueber. This photograph's taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia. 420 million years ago, this organism existed. It was called Prototaxites. Prototaxites, laying down, was about three feet tall. The tallest plants on Earth at that time were less than two feet. Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom. Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms. All across most land masses. And these existed for tens of millions of years.
Now we've had several extinction events, and as we march forward, 65 million years ago ... most of you know about it: we had an asteroid impact. The earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth. Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, because fungi do not need light. More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light. So the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a foregone conclusion, at least in my own mind.
The largest organism in the world is in Eastern Oregon. I couldn't miss it. It was 2,200 acres in size. 2,200 acres in size, 2,000 years old. The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick. How is it that this organism can be so large and yet be one cell wall thick, whereas we have five or six skin layers that protect us?
The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom. It bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt.

We were involved with several experiments. I'm going to show you six, if I can, solutions for helping to save the world. Battelle Laboratories and I joined up in Bellingham, Washington, there were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste. One was a control pile, one pile was treated with enzymes, one pile was treated with bacteria and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium. The mycelium absorbs the oil. The mycelium is producing enzymes, peroxydases, that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. These are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. So the mycelium becomes saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned six weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark, and stinky. We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms, and the color changed to a light form. The enzymes re-manufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates. Fungal sugars.
Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms. They're very large. They're showing how much nutrition that they could've obtained. But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life. Whereas the other three piles were dead, dark and stinky, and the PAH's, the aromatic hydrocarbons, went from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 in eight weeks. The last image we don't have: the entire pile was a green berm of life. These are gateway species. Vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities.
So I invented burlap sacks (bunker spawn), and putting the mycelium using storm blown debris, you can take these burlap sacks and put them downstream from a farm that's producing E. coli, or other wastes, or a factory with chemical toxins, and it leads to habitat restoration. So we set up a site in Mason County, Washington, and we've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms. And I'll show you a graph here. This is a logarithmic scale, 10 to the eighth power. There's more than a 100 million colonies per gram, and 10 to the third power is around 1,000. In 48 hours to 72 hours, these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times. Think of the implications. This is a space-conservative method that uses storm debris. And we can be guaranteed that we will have storms every year.

So this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time. This is my wife Dusty with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis = Agaricon. It's a mushroom exclusive to the old-growth forest, that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D. as a treatment against consumption. This mushroom grows in Washington state, Oregon, Northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe. May not seem that large, let's get closer! This is extremely rare fungus. Our team, and we have a team of experts that go out, we went out 20 times in the old-growth forest last year - we found one sample to be able to get into culture.
Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old growth forest I think is absolutely critical for human health. I've been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program. We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water, and mycelium harvesting these extracellular metabolites. And a few years ago, we received these results. We have three different strains of Agaricon mushrooms that were highly active against pox viruses. Dr. Earl Kern, who's a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department, states that any compounds that have a selectivity index of two or more are active. 10 or greater are considered to be very active. Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range. There's a vetted press release that you can read, it's vetted by DoD, if you Google "Stamets" and "smallpox". Or you can go to NPR.org and listen to a live interview.
So, encouraged by this, naturally we went to flu viruses. And so for the first time I am showing this. We have three different strains of Agaricon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses. Here's the selectivity index numbers. Against pox, you saw 10s and 20s, now against flu viruses, compared to the ribavirin controls, we have an extraordinarily high activity. And we're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical. We tried it against flu A viruses, H1N1, H3N2, as well as flu B viruses. So then we tried a blend, and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1, and we got greater than 1,000 selectivity index. (Applause) I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense. (Applause)

I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi, fungi that kill insects. Our house was being destroyed by carpenter ants. So I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites. I did something that nobody else had done. I actually chased the mycelium when it stopped producing spores. These are spores. This is in their spores. I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form. And so the industry has spent over 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house. But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form. And I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house, and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores. They gave it to the queen. One week later, I had no sawdust piles whatsoever.
And then - a delicate dance between dinner and death - the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified and, boing, a mushroom pops out of their head. (Laughter) Now after sporulation, the spores repel. So the house is no longer suitable for invasion. So you have a near-permanent solution for re-invasion of termites. And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites and fire ants. Then we tried extracts, and, lo and behold, we can steer insects to different directions. This has huge implications. I then received my second patent and this is a big one. It's been called an Alexander Graham Bell patent, it covers over 200,000 species. This is the most disruptive technology, I've been told by executives of the pesticide industry, that they have ever witnessed. This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world. You could fly 100 Ph.D. students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores.

And so I came up with a Life Box because I needed a delivery system. The Life Box – you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference – you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agaricon mushroom. The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium. And then you put tree seeds in here, and then you end up growing – poten tially – an old growth forest from a cardboard box.
I want to re-invent the delivery system and the use of cardboard around the world, so they become ecological footprints. If there's a YouTube like site that you could put up, you could make it interactive, zip code-specific, where people could join together, and through satellite imaging systems, through Virtual Earth or Google Earth, you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes.
You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes, you could add water – I developed this for the refugee community – corns, beans, and squash, and onions. I took several containers – my wife said, if I could do this, anybody could – and I ended up growing a seed garden. Then you harvest the seeds – and thank you, Eric Rasmussen, for your help on this – and then you're harvesting the seed garden. Then you can harvest the kernels, and then you just need a few kernels ... I add mycelium to it, and then I inoculate the corn cobs. Now, three corn cobs, no other grain – lots of mushrooms begin to form. Too many withdrawals from the carbon bank, and so this population will be shut down. But watch what happens here. The mushrooms then are harvested, but very importantly, the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars. And so I thought, how could we address the energy crisis in this country? And we came up with Econol.
Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary and you gain all the benefits that I've described to you already. But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent, and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels. So we build the carbon banks on the planet, renew the soils ... these are a species that we need to join with. I think engaging mycelium can help save the world. Thank you very much.

Gene Matto

James Arthur

John Trudell

Christ himself is a powerful shamanic figure

01/01'06 CMN @ 6 min) Yes, this is one of the extraordinary mysteries that I found myself confronted most closely in this research. You know, it's difficult enough if you get 20 people together in a room and have them witness some event, it's difficult enough to get them all to agree on what they have seen. We know this from psychological studies: if 10 different people witness a crime, they will give 10 different descriptions of the perpetrator. But here is the bizarre thing: in experiences that our scientists define as non-real or illusory, the experiences that we call hallucinations, in those experiences people all over the world universally report the same experiences, and that is the experience of passing through into another realm which is absolutely real, convincingly, seamlessly real, which is inhabited by intelligent beings who seem to want to communicate with you. And these beings often take the form of half-animal, half-human hybrids. And overlaid against the perception of these beings, there are often geometrical patterns, grids, zig zags, wavy lines appear as well. And this is universal. It's found from people from all different cultures and at all different periods of history. It's documented in the painted caves from 35.000 years ago. This same experience, that people in modern lab research using hallucinogens to investigate human consciousness report, encountering exactly the same kind of beings, the half-human, half-animal hybrids, for example, that we find painted on the walls of the caves 35.000 years ago.

What it really tells us is that we must try to explain, why it is that people experience the same thing in this supposedly non-real realm. And one possible explanation for it – and that's the explanation that shamans all over the world offer – is that that other realm, that we enter in the altered state of consciousness, is in fact real. And that is why people see the same things, because they're going to the same places, they are projecting their consciousness into the same places. And this is what shamans believe, and the shamanic view of the universe and of reality is radically different from the view of western science. Western science believes, that if you cannot weigh something, measure it and count it, then it simply doesn't exist, it's not there. They must be able to approach it with their instruments and if they can't, it doesn't exist, it's an illusion. Shamans review things quite differently. They believe, that whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not, we are tied up with the spiritual realm, and if we wish to deal with problems in this physical world than we cannot ignore that spiritual realm. And often the root cause of problems will be in that spiritual realm. So rather than sticking their heads in the sand and pretending that it doesn't exist, what shamans attempt to do is to become masters of that realm. They developed technics for altering their consciuosness at will, and the most widely used technic is the use of hallucinogenic plants. But there are other technics as well. And they enter the other realm, and they master it, and they deal with it and negociate with the spirits there, and they frequently bring back useful information of great value in this physical world, particularly to do with healing.

This is a bridge which helps people in western culture to understand what's going on here. Because now for the first time, thanks to quantum physics, which really goes back to the 1920s or so, thanks to the insights and discoveries of quantum physics, most people are aware that the existence of parallel dimensions is a very real possibility. Quantum physicists have powerful experimental evidence, indirect evidence, to suggest that these parallel dimensions exist. And one of the big projects of quantum physics is to crack open the parallel dimensions, to find a way into them. And that's what the largest scientific instrument on the planet, the Large Hydrogen Collider in Switzerland, is partly about, a multi-billion dollar instrument, designed to explore parallel dimensions.
Well, that's what shamans have been doing for tens of thousands of years.
They've been exploring parallel dimensions, and they call them spirit worlds, and they don't need a gigantic instrument to do it. They use the power of their own minds, the power that is inherented in their own brains. Perhaps what they are doing – we need to think of the brain as a receiver of information, as a receiver of consciousness – perhaps what they are doing is retuning the receiver wavelength, so that shifts them off – shall we call it – "channel normal" and puts them into another channel, where the information that they receive is real and is valid, but is not accessible to us in normal states of consciousness.

Yes, I think, there is no doubt about this. If you go back to the source of any of the great religions, you're going to find shamanic experiences. Now I realize, that this may cause offense and I don't wish to offend Christians. I just ask Christians to review this information with an open mind. St Paul and his Damascus Road Experience is of fundamental importance to Christianity and to development and spread of Christianity.
What St Paul experienced there was a classic shamanic experience: a blinding light in a sense of a complete change of his life, of a whole new flood of information came into his mind. And from that, much of the spread of Christianity owes its strenght. Christ himself is a powerfully shamanic figure. Most shamans around the world today believe, that they are partly from the spiritual realm, that they may have a mother or a father in the spiritual realm, and that they are connected to this world and to the spirit world.
And of course, Christ is the same kind of figure: he is partly divine and partly human, part spirit, part man. So I think, the connections are very clear and very obvious there.

The problem is ... we can find this in all religions, in the case of the Mormons, for example. What has Joseph Smith encountered but an angelic being, a supernatural being, who presents to him certain texts on golden tablets. The case of Mani, the Manichaen faith, he also had almost identical experiences. You can repeat this story again and again in religions: At the very source and heart of the religion is a profound experience that an individual or a group of individuals had in an altered state of consciousness. Then what happens is that the classic bureaucratic structures of humanity begin to impose themself on this original experience and within a few generations, the religion has moved away from direct experience of the spirit realm and substituted a class of priests in between us and the spirit world. And those priests are generally motivated entirely by this world, and religion then becomes an instrument of material oppression and control, and is co-opted by the political establishment, when in fact at the heart of the religion is a direct experience of another world. Those were relegated to myths, and, in fact, you find in many religions as they develop, they turn against the notion that those who follow the religion should experience altered states of consciousness. Many religions are vehemently opposed to altered states of consciousness, even though their own validity derives originally from an altered state of consciousness. But this is a normal process. This is what human beings do. Human beings are power animals, and any structure can be co-opted to the power interests of particular groups. And that's unfortunately what is happen with religions. And the great world religions today are all in my view very far removed from their shamanic roots, greatly to their cost.




Ja, das ist eines dieser außergewöhnlichen Mysterien, denen ich mich bei dieser Untersuchung besonders intensiv widme. Es ist schwierig genug, wenn man 20 Leute in einem Raum hat, die gemeinsam Zeuge eines Ereignisses werden, diese dazu zu bringen, überein zu stimmen in dem was sie gesehen haben.
Aus psychologischen Studien wissen wir: wenn 10 verschiedene Personen den Hergang eines Verbrechens beobachten, werden sie 10 verschiedene Täterbeschreibungen bekommen. Doch jetzt wird es ganz verrückt: bei Erlebnissen, die unsere Wissenschaftler als nicht real oder illusorisch definieren – wir nennen sie Halluzinationen – bei diesen Erlebnissen berichten Menschen überall auf der Welt alle von denselben Erfahrungen, und zwar, dass sie den Eindruck haben, in ein anderes Reich einzutreten, das sich absolut real anfühlt, überzeugend nahtlos real und das von intelligenten Wesen bewohnt wird, die allem Anschein nach mit dir kommunizieren wollen. Diese Wesen nehmen oft die Gestalt von Mischformen aus Mensch und Tier an, wobei die Wahrnehmung dieser Zwitterwesen oft von geometrischen Mustern, Gittern und Zick-Zack-Linien überlagert ist, Wellenlinien tauchen auch auf. Und das gilt allgemein. Das ist so beschrieben worden von Angehörigen der verschiedensten Kulturkreise und Geschichtsepochen. Es ist dokumentiert in Höhlenmalereien, die 35.000 Jahre alt sind.
Dasselbe Erlebnis, das Menschen unter modernen Laborbedingungen nach Einnahme von Halluzinogenen zur Erforschung des eigenen Bewusstseins haben, trifft z.B. haargenau auf dieselbe Sorte Halb-Mensch-Halb-Tier-Mischwesen, die wir seit 35.000 Jahren auf Höhlenwänden verewigt finden.

Es sagt uns, dass wir versuchen müssen eine Erklärung zu finden, warum das so ist, dass in dieser angeblich nicht-realen Welt Menschen dieselben Erfahrungen machen. Eine mögliche Interpretation dafür ist – Schamanen in aller Welt bieten diese Deutung an – dass dieser andere Bereich, den wir in einem veränderten Bewusstseinszustand betreten, tatsächlich real ist. Leute sehen deshalb dieselben Dinge, weil sie an denselben Ort gehen, sie projizieren ihr Bewusstsein an denselben Ort. Das ist, was Schamanen glauben, daher ist die schamanische Sichtweise auf Weltall und Wirklichkeit grundverschieden von der westlicher Wissenschaftler. Westliche Wissenschaft glaubt, wenn du etwas nicht abwiegen kannst, nicht messen und nicht zählen kannst, dass es schlicht und einfach nicht existiert, es ist nicht da. Sie müssen mit ihren Instrumenten darauf zugreifen können – geht das nicht, existiert es nicht und ist ein Hirngespinst. Schamanen betrachten Dinge ganz anders. Sie glauben, ob wir es mögen oder nicht, ob wir damit einverstanden sind oder nicht, wir sind verbunden mit diesen spirituellen Gefilden, und wenn wir Probleme in dieser körperlichen Welt bewältigen wollen, können wir diese geistige Dimension nicht ignorieren. Und oft wird die eigentliche Ursache unserer Probleme auf dieser geistlichen Ebene zu finden sein. Anstatt also den Kopf in den Sand zu stecken und vorzuschützen, dass sie nicht existiert, versuchen Schamanen dieser Realität Herr zu werden. Sie entwickelten Techniken, mit denen sie ihr Bewusstsein nach Belieben umwandeln. Die am häufigsten angewandte Methode dabei ist die Verwendung halluzinogener Pflanzen. Doch es gibt auch andere. Und sie betreten dieses Reich, und sie meistern diese Situation, und sie beschäftigen sich damit, und sie verhandeln mit den Geistern dort, und sie bringen nicht selten nützliche Informationen von hohem Wert mit zurück in diese körperliche Welt, insbesondere was Heilverfahren betrifft.

Das ist eine Brücke, die Menschen aus der westlichen Welt hilft zu verstehen, was hier vor sich geht. Weil jetzt zum ersten Mal dank der Quantenphysik – in Wirklichkeit geht das schätzungsweise auf die 20er Jahre im letzten Jahrhundert zurück – dank den Erkenntnissen und Entdeckungen der Quantenphysik die meisten Leute die Existenz von Parallel-Dimensionen als eine sehr reale Möglichkeit anerkennen. Quantenphysiker verfügen über beeindruckende experimentelle Hinweise, indirekte Nachweise, die nahe legen, dass diese Parallel-Dimensionen bestehen. Eines der ganz großen Projekte der Quantenphysik will die Parallel-Dimensionen aufknacken und einen Eingang finden. Zum Teil war das der Grund für den Bau des größten Wissenschaftsapparats auf dem Planeten, dem LHC in der Schweiz, einem Multi-Milliarden-Instrument, entworfen zur Erforschung paralleler Dimensionen.
Nun, genau das praktizieren Schamanen seit Zehntausenden von Jahren. Sie haben Parallel-Dimensionen, die sie Geisterwelten nennen, aufgespürt und ausgespäht und brauchen kein gigantisches Gerät um es zu tun. Sie nutzen die Kraft ihrer eigenen Psyche, die von Natur aus präsente Power in ihrem Hirn. Was sie möglicherweise machen, ist – wir müssen uns das Gehirn als einen Empfänger für Information vorstellen, als einen Empfänger für Bewusstsein – sie verändern möglicherweise die Empfänger-Wellenlänge, und das schmeißt sie aus dem – nennen wir es mal – "Kanal Normal" und steckt sie in einen anderen Kanal, wo die Information, die sie empfangen, echt und gültig aber für uns im Normalzustand nicht zugänglich ist.

Ja, ich denke, darin besteht kein Zweifel. Wenn man zum Ursprung egal welcher der großen Religionen zurückgeht, wird man auf eine schamanische Erfahrung stoßen. Mir ist schon klar, dass dies als Beleidigung aufgefasst werden könnte, und es ist bestimmt nicht meine Absicht, Christen zu nahe zu treten. Ich bitte Christen nur darum, diese Information unvoreingenommen zu überprüfen. Paulus' Damaskuserlebnis ist von fundamentaler Bedeutung für das Christentum, für seine Entstehung und Verbreitung. Was Paulus dort widerfahren ist, war ein klassisches schamanisches Erlebnis: ein blendendes Licht und der Aufruf, sein Leben komplett umzukrempeln. Eine völlig neue Flut an Information kam ihm in den Sinn. Diesem Schlüsselerlebnis verdankt die Ausbreitung des Christentums seine Stärke. Christus selbst ist eine machtvolle schamanische Gestalt. Die meisten Schamanen in aller Welt glauben heute, dass sie zum Teil von dem geistlichen Reich abstammen, wo sie eine Mutter oder einen Vater haben, und dass sie mit beiden, dieser und der spirituellen Welt, verbunden sind, und Christus ist natürlich auch so eine Figur: Er ist zum Teil göttlich und teilweise menschlich, halb Geist, halb Mensch. Ich denke, die Zusammenhänge hier sind sehr klar und sehr offensichtlich.

Das Problem ist ... wir treffen das in allen Religionen an, z.B. bei den Mormonen. Wem ist Joseph Smith denn begegnet wenn nicht einer engelsgleichen Gestalt, einem übersinnlichen Wesen, das ihm einige Texte auf goldenen Tabletts überreichte. Im Fall von Mani, dem manichäischen Glauben, machte der Gründer so gut wie das Gleiche durch. Diese Geschichte kann man bei Religionen immer wiederfinden: An der tiefsten Quelle und im innersten Herz der Religion trifft man auf eine profunde, mitreißende persönliche Erfahrung, die unter anderen Bewusstseinszuständen entweder von einem Einzelnen oder einer Gruppe gemacht wurde. Später dann beginnen die klassisch-bürokratischen Strukturen der Menschheit sich dieser Urerfahrung aufzudrängen, und innerhalb weniger Generationen hat sich die Religion von direkten Erlebnissen in geistlicher Umgebung fortbewegt und eine Priesterkaste zwischen uns und der Geisterwelt postiert. Und weil die Priester üblicherweise zur Gänze durch diese Welt motiviert sind, wird Religion immer mehr ein Instrument umfassender Unterdrückung und Kontrolle und schließlich durch das politische Establishment vereinnahmt, wenn doch eigentlich im Zentrum der Religion direkte Erfahrungen einer anderen Welt standen. Diese wurden rasch zu Mythen degradiert, und in der Tat, es trifft auf viele Religionen zu, dass, sobald sie sich entwickeln, der Gedanke, das Experimentieren mit veränderten Bewusstseinszuständen unter Anhängern der Religion zu fördern, verworfen wird. Viele Religionen sind sogar trotz der Tatsache, dass ihre eigene Geltungskraft ursprünglich von einem veränderten Bewusstseinszustand herrührt, vehement dagegen. Das jedoch ist völlig normal. Menschen sind Machttiere, und jede Sozialstruktur kann an die Machtinteressen bestimmter Gruppen angepasst werden.
Das ist es, was dummerweise mit Religionen passiert. Und die großen Weltreligionen sind in meinen Augen heute alle weit entfernt von ihren schamanischen Wurzeln, in hohem Maße zu deren Nachteil.