Disruptive Strategies

Immanuelle used extensive disruptive strategies to reach nobility which are celebrated in Alolalia.

Quotes
Steve Taylor, In his book "Waking from Sleep" talks about these disruptive strategies that people, even today, use in order to try and bring about what I called awakening experiences. These radical transformations in people's sense of self and reality. I'm going to talk about that.

But one of the main ideas here is what a shaman is typically doing is trying to disrupt the normal ways in which you're finding patterns in the world. Why would you want to disrupt the normal way you find patterns in the world? Because the way you find patterns - and remember I said this; the very thing that makes you adaptive also makes you subject to self-deception - the way you find patterns is very profound.

So this is something I study as a scientist. Many of you may have seen this. So this is called "The Nine Dot problem". You have to join all nine dots with four straight lines. You have to start the next line from the terminus of the previous line and when people see this they initially say "well this is very easy! Of course I can do this! One, two, three, four... Oh wait I missed the Middle dot! OK one, two, three... Wait! One, two, Wait! One, two..." And then a pause. This actually turns out to be a very difficult problem for people to solve: Joining all nine dots with four straight lines. But why is it hard? One line, two lines, three lines, four lines. What was hard about that? And when you do that of course people get angry at you they say "you cheated! You went outside the box! You went outside the square!" That's where 'think outside the box' comes from. Now why that was hard is because you projected a pattern here. The Square. And then you engaged unconsciously - unconsciously - your skills of connecting the dots. When you were a kid you'd connect the dots. And when you connect the dots you're not supposed to do this: make a non dot turn. If you do that, you won't get a picture of a picnic table, you'll get like an acid trip psychedelic thing. So, unconsciously, you project a pattern and then you activate the appropriate skills and then you're locked and you're blocked. You can't solve that problem, not because of anything there in the data but because of the way you have framed it.

You have to disrupt your framing. We're going to talk a lot about that: in order to get an insight, in order to get an insight. Now let me tell you something, again to start to introduce this to you. Saying to people "think outside the box", and this is kind of funny if you think about it... Saying to people "think outside the box" does not help them with this problem. Giving them the belief that they have to go outside the box does not help them to solve this problem! That's what I meant when I said "you shouldn't reduce all of your sense of knowing to believing". What's involved here is not believing that you have to go outside the box. It's knowing how to go outside the box; how to alter your attention; how to change your perspective on what's salient to you. [On] what is relevant. How to alter what's important or real to you. Now what shamanism is, is it's a set of practices, disruptive practices and attentional practices that are designed to disrupt everyday framing so that the shaman can get enhanced insight. Now what kind of insight? Insight into patterns in the environment that other people might not be picking up on. Enhanced insight - mind-sight - into other people. And here's the sense of participatory knowing that I mentioned. When the shaman is enacting the animal, the shaman isn't having beliefs about the deer. The shaman is becoming the deer. I don't mean metaphysically, but the shaman is trying to get together the sense of the skills, the kind of perspective the deer has, the way the deer thinks, the kind of world the deer lives in... And by becoming the deer, by having this participatory knowing of what it is to be a deer, it enhances the ability to track and find the deer. Now these enhanced capacities for insight, and mindset, participatory knowing, means the shaman combines a lot of things that are for us in separate individuals. shamans are highly charismatic. Imagine if you could take a rock star, a super rock star, a super therapist, a super artist, put them all in one individual and then they come to you when you're sick! They can enhance your ability to trigger your own placebo effect. The placebo effect is real! 30 to 40 percent of all real medication - the ones we sell as real drugs - is placebo effect! If you have an individual that can trigger that, and that's all you have at that time, that's still 30 to 40 percent better than you had before. So what are the shamans doing?