While she was wandering lost in the van I was dreaming of being lost on the streets of Dallas. I'm working extensively with metaphors associated with the color blue while writing my dissertation. They just keep popping up everywhere as I write toward Bluevolution". The station wagon I was driving and by which I was left was a deep, certain blue.

The questions that interest me are not the analytical/scientistic ones like "are the reality of dreams and waking reality related or not?". Rather I wonder at how they seem related and how my thinking and feeling changes when I notice the relationships that present themselves as obvious but non-linear and evocative but not subject to the scope of my capacity to comprehend.

A big part of the dissertation I'm writing and community we are building has to do with shifting in perception back and forth between the literal (myths of Progress, Science, and mechanized Industrialism) and the metaphorical (myths of Soul, Humanities, Poetics). Dr. Dan Noel was convinced that the contemporary search with which many folks are identifying themselves as "spiritual but not religious" has to do with a desire for a more conscious metaphoricality in relationship to spirit and soul realms, a more purposeful fiction-consciousness that acknowledges the overlaps of the poetic, psychological, literary, spiritualigious :) , and the fundamental systemic presupposition of unconsciousness- that which may be related to through imagination but never fully known - shared by all these approaches.

In wondering in mystery, I am interested in a transition from both the power-base clergy authenticated by apostles of a dominating idea but also from the "native medicine man" sprung fully clad from the head of a colonizing Nostalgia. Both are invested by the contemporary scientistic imagination in knowing something, some sympathetic prestidigitation, that gives access to some place inaccessible to "normal" people. I wonder if Noel meant to imply not a neoshamanism, though that is the word he chose, but something less Nouveau that follows our revisioning of what is native to the spirit and soul in a contemporary contextlessness seriously lacking in nativity. I thought about referring to this imagination in creative motion as post-shamanism but heard Thomas Holcroft's admonition ringing in my ears that "The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post."Still post-shamanism might work, or how about metashamanism? The metashaman is certain to know some things that I don't, but the reverse is also guaranteed to be true. What attracts me is that she knows differently some how, in some way that I can feel at first and then understand, but which requires some sustained practice to continue deeply enough to apply. It is the way of her knowing, the art in her process that I find compelling. She moves by way of the imagination, making fiction, making community that is aware of itself dreaming its own consciousness, identity, purpose, and culture.

An additional thought.

from wikipedia (see link above)

"The gom jabbar is a fictional device appearing in Frank Herbert's Dune universe. According to Terminology of the Imperium, the glossary of the novel Dune, the gom jabbar is "The high-handed enemy; that specific poison needle tipped with meta-cyanide used by Bene Gesserit Proctors in the death-alternative test of human awareness." In Dune, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam uses a gom jabbar to test Paul Atreides just prior to his departure to Arrakis. This "humanity test" is carried out with a box that produces pain by nerve induction, causing severe pain that is strictly psychological. Only a human is considered to be able to withstand the urge to take the hand out of the box. Any person who does withdraw their hand is stung with the gom jabbar, causing instant death. Later in the novel, Paul's sister Alia uses the "Atreides gom jabbar" to kill the evil Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. It is also possible that the phrase Gom Jabbar may cover other methods of death with a similar aim, as Paul Muad'Dib tells Reverend Mother Helen Gaius Moheim, "I remember your gom jabbar, you remember mine. I can kill you with a word."

In context between the Butlerian Jihad and presupposing the animality of humanity, the test from Frank Herbert's Dune novels implies that to be human means not only being able to endure pain but being able to suffer on purpose. A machine (outlawed after the Jihad) simply ignores pain (a contemporary virtue) and an animal simply flinches away. The human, knowing death in advance, choose suffering in order to survive metaphorically and literally. What the reviewer for wikipedia doesn't understand/state is that the "other forms of death" uses the literal needle as a metaphor for the entire process - as test, to discern and then form humanity through suffering and death, etc.

Noel (see above) uses the idea of Castaneda's work being "shamanovels", purposefully fictive in order to create an environment wherein imagination rules, teaches, deceives, acts culturopoetically (witness the growth of "neoshamanism") in the making of the world.

I find myself thinking of using "Gom Jabbar" as a perfect piece of terminology for a bluevolved metashamanism. It is obviously from fiction and therefore almost cannot be misinterpreted literally. It evokes a complex of images suitable to an imaginal journey into interrelated metaphors in which the kind of thinking is naturally exposed to the initiate. Very cool. This may find its way into further development.