Same visions

[amj]

I noticed that someone, in a recent post about mushrooms, mentioned seeing the same image of a Mexican cow-headed god that his friend saw... How common is it for two (or more?) people to have the same visions while tripping? I ask this because a relative of mine recounted a story about how he and his twin brother had the same swampy vision while on LSD. What do people think about this?

(I don't really read trip reports on the Internet much - am a bit naive about these things...)

[Buzz]

Actually it was an Egyptian goddess in a plate made in Mexico.

On at least two other occasions, another friend and I saw two other goddesses. However, I can't say how common this is.

[Buzz]

An afterthought,
From my reading and a few stories I've been told, Central and South American shamen seem to see what their initiates see, sometimes even knowing ahead of time what is in the vision cards.

There are a few people on this forum who could probably tell you more about this, from direct experience.

[Woodpecker]

During my brief foray into technical writing, I learned the concept of single sourcing, which is basically writing a text one time for multiple applications. In that spirit, here is an example of the above, from an e-mail I wrote to Sherwin Nuland.

"

I'm willing to leave the door open a crack for some of what the ancients called magic. Here, roughly, is why:

First, the breakdown of things in the universe into matter and energy seems not to take consciousness into account. You can't weigh consciousness or measure it on any known machine (brainwaves don't count, being only a by-product), but how real it is, or seems to be. I think, therefore I am, I think. Mythological thought would make more sense if we hypothesized that there might be, under certain circumstances, the same kind of give-and-take between consciousness and energy and matter that there is between energy and matter.

Second, a small event in 1994 convinced me personally that the shamanic world had validity outside what went on in my mind. During one ceremony, Cesario Piaguaje, my teacher, and another shaman, Tinti Payaguaje, had perceived (/imagined) the presence of a great number of winiawai, doll-sized celestial beings, who had descended in their multicolored tunics and crowns to listen to the shamans' songs and dance with Tinti; after the ceremony, Cesario was disappointed that I hadn't seen them.

The next ceremony, Cesario drank a cup of yage and went to sleep in a hammock. Near him in another hammock, I stayed awake all night, listening to the sounds of the jungle and drinking three cups, each about two hours apart.

At one point the night seemed to become gloomier than before. Perhaps thicker clouds passed under the moon. I heard a sleeper sigh. And I became aware of a hallucination I didn't want to see: a semitransparent, slightly glowing red devil, dancing in place in the open space between the hut we were in and the next. Goat-legged, grinning. Not looking at me, but seemingly aware that I was looking at him.

I looked away and took a moment to be cross with my mind for having conjured this image up. "OK, it must be gone now," I thought. I looked back and it was still there. Damn. I looked away again. Perhaps coincidentally, midway between me and the devil was a plant the Secoyas call nuni, which Cesario had told me has the power to repel the devil. This was reassuring.

The next time I looked over there, the apparition had vanished. I thought about other things. I had recently been reading a Spanish comic book version of Dante's Divine Comedy, so I went over that. I remember that I also thought a lot about European history that night, and the way that cultures seem to need to practice war and make alliances and practice more war to avoid being overtaken and conquered by whoever's in the next valley or city-state or nation. It all seemed movements of energy creating, destroying, and rebuilding themselves in ever larger and stronger forms and structures.

Cesario woke up and began to sing, the yage's synesthetic properties allowing his voice to evoke various pleasant, colorful, abstract, richly detailed images in my mind's eye; perhaps my mind's interpretation of his musical distillations of his life experience; perhaps my mind's wandering through true extradimensional hyperspaces in a Platonic infinite world. After a while Cesario said to me, "Look, there they are." I opened my eyes and looked where he was pointing, the peak of the hut's roof, in time to see the beautiful legs and feet of three robed women, whom I understood to be angels, rise up slowly through the ceiling.

Cesario sang a while longer, then went back to sleep.

At any rate, the next afternoon, Cesario said to me, "The Devil was here last night, wasn't he?"

My jaw must have dropped. "I guess so."

"He was dancing, right over there, wasn't he?"

"I guess so."

He seemed to have seen just the same image as I had, but his interpretation was slightly different. I had understood the imaginal figure as "a devil" whereas he had called it "the Devil."

Over a year later I asked Cesario to describe the apparition of the sky people who seemed to have descended to listen to his song, the ones who had looked like three female angels to me. He said he had seen the winiawai he always sees--small multicolored people, each with four brilliant crowns stacked atop his or her head in the manner of the multiple-crowned angels mentioned in the Jewish apocryphal Book of Enoch.

I find the devil episode fairly convincing; it's hard not to believe that Cesario didn't somehow see the same thing that I saw, and that argues to me for the validity of some shamanic ways of seeing or knowing. Although it's hardly a repeatable experiment--except to people willing to suspend their disbelief and fear long enough to enter the shamanic world.

"