> > ...I cannot imagine what value Barry sees in it. > > Xenophaneros: > It is not what other people say, but how you manage > their effect on you that makes them valuable... > For Carlos and don Juan, it's all about the substances they partake. The idea in shamanism is to get high, to fly up in an altered state, into a separate reality, and learn to communicate with the spirits; to journey with them and learn from them and to master them.
And why? To get POWER. Only known photo of don Juan Matus According to Campbell, "...the supreme goal of the shaman is to abandon his body and rise to heaven or descend into hell, not to let himself be 'possessed' by his assisting spirits, by demons or the souls of the dead; the shaman's ideal is to master these spirits, not to let himself be 'occupied' by them."