Jaguar cover

Open here to read David Arnson’s entire review of The Jaguar that Roams the Mind.

Like a signed copy from the author? Please see the sidebar on the right to purchase a copy.

We are grateful to once again be able to act as a bridge for a small group of people to journey into the depths of the vegetalista tradition in the Peruvian
Amazon at Mayantuyacu with the maestro curandero Juan Flores. Of Ashaninka descent and with over 40 years of experience as a healer, Juan founded this
center for traditional healing and learning deep in the forest. We have been working with him for eight years and his work and being are not only dear to us but we have witnessed and experienced in ourselves his effectiveness, impeccability, and deep knowledge.

As two participants in our last pilgrimage wrote,

Journeying to Mayantuyacu with Robert Tindall was a blessing for me that was greater than I can put into words. My experience in this heavenly sanctuary in the rainforest of Peru transformed me to the core. I returned home a new man, plain and simple. What’s more, the experience was very different than I had imagined it before going. I had thought it would take me to places in myself that, perhaps, I wouldn’t be able to handle. But, quite to the contrary, the moment I arrived in Lima, I began feeling a deep sense of relaxation, peace, and homecoming. Arriving at Mayantuyacu, my heart began to open, immediately, and I felt a quality of love and care that permeated the whole landscape and each and every person who lived and worked there. Finally, the healing that I received left me feeling more integrated, conscious, and grounded in myself, in my purpose as a human being, and in my confidence and ability to engage my life and work with more passion, conviction, and heart-centered focus and practical awareness. Said another way, Juan Flores and his apprentices offered me the most masterful and graceful healing that I have ever received in my life. And, Robert Tindall’s support and facilitation of my process, with his sensitivity and awareness, demonstrates the depth of his understanding of the process of engaging this powerful medicine work. My 12-day stay at Mayantuyacu was nothing less than life-changing. I plan to return next summer, and the summer after that, and the summer after that….Mayantuyacu is now part of me and I am part of Mayantuyacu. Thank you for everything, Robert!

My first morning at Mayantuyacu, surrounded the sights, sounds, and smells of the jungle, I knew that my decision to embark on that first journey was a good one. So much so that I returned again the following year and plan to do the same in 2012.
I remember Juan telling us that Mayantuyacu was our home while we were there and it certainly began to feel that way. The people that live and work there are so kind, happy, and generous. There is a beautiful flow and synchronicity to everything that happens. It is the perfect place to awaken to the beauty that is life on this planet. Robert is an easy-going leader that’s always there when you need him, yet allows ample time for you to explore on your own. I have great admiration for the profound love and respect that Susana and Robert have for the medicine. They have both been wonderful mentors to me as I find my way.

Hope to see you there!

This journey, led by both Robert and Susana, will start in Lima July 25th and will conclude in that city after spending 12 days at Mayantuyacu on August 8th.

We take care of airfares and taxes Lima-Pucallpa-Lima, lodging in Lima and Pucallpa, transportation to and from Mayantuyacu, food, lodging and plant work at the center, as well as coaching and translating before, during and after the experience. Please write for the cost of the journey. If you plan on joining this expedition, please reserve your space asap so we can begin making reservations and purchasing tickets!

We will follow a flexible itinerary of personal interviews with the healer, classes, purges, diets, plant baths, hikes in the jungle and healing ceremonies, sensitive to the rhythm that develops at Mayantuyacu on its own. Individuals seeking treatment for specific ailments need to communicate with us so that a special regime of treatment can be arranged with the Master in advance.

If you live in the Bay Area, we will have two meetings in order to prepare us as individuals and as a group to the work. For those living in other areas, we will schedule meetings over skype.

We are excited to share this world that is so precious to us, an opportunity for immersion in the jungle, its cosmology, and its ancient healing traditions.

Please contact Robert for more information at tigrillo@gmail.com. This is an open invitation, so feel free to post it or share it with friends.

In love, to all our relations!

Robert and Susana

This online, live broadcasted intensive will feature Benny Shanon, Steve Beyer, Ken Tupper, Martina Hoffman, and Susana Bustos on consecutive Sundays, from October 9 to November 6. Each session consists of a 90 minutes presentation followed by a 30 minutes Q & A in which you can participate from anywhere in the world from a laptop with a broadband connection.

Drawing from in-depth interviews to Peruvian ayahuasqueros and their clients, Susana will show how the icaros sung during ayahuasca ceremonies contribute in generating therapeutic states of consciousness, how they are used as main healing tools, and how ayahuasqueros and clients explain their effects. Furthermore, she will use concepts from disciplines such as music therapy and sound healing, psychology, and anthropology, to guide us in the understanding of the experience of the icaros as a healing phenomenon.

For more information and to register, please click here

I was rendered speechless by the sheer audacity of the question — Tolkien’s work is fantasy, right?

Now I know there is such a place.

About this passage into myth-time the poet Gary Snyder wrote, “There is an almost visible line that a person could walk across: out of history and into the perpetual present, a way of life attuned to the slower and steadier processes of nature. The possibility of passage into that myth-time world had been all but forgotten in Europe [by the Renaissance]. Its rediscovery — the unsettling vision of a natural self — has haunted the Euro-American peoples.”

In short, the passage involves reawakening to our indigenous, native perception of the cosmos. It involves communion with our wild nature and our ancestors who knew that way, from whatever place on Earth we originally sprang from.

Noble Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, in his poem, “From the Republic of Conscience,” affirms the ancestral way is quite close, within living memory in some pockets of culture, such as he depicts surviving in his native Ireland. He also claims that once the time-depths of the indigenous mind have been rediscovered, there is no turning back again. One is given a task.

From the Republic of Conscience

I

When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me photographs of my grandfather

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
you carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II

Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightening
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

Their sacred symbol is the stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office –

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III

I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
and I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West. Rather, they are simply unrecognized. Native symbiosis in a living, sentient cosmos is found at the very origin of the European literary tradition.

To be published by Inner Traditions in August of 2012, Our Native Mind: Homer, Tolkien, and Prophetic Indigenous Vision, by Robert Tindall and Susana Bustos Ph.D., is an exploration of the shamanic culture of ancient Western story and the possibility of awakening our native perception in our own time.

Weaving together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoeic work of J.R.R. Tolkien, anthropological studies, and the voices of practitioners of plant medicine paths North and South, Our Native Mind explores their common features of rapturous and healing song, resident plant divinities, shamanic permeability of consciousness, visionary trajectories, animal transformation, and sacred topography.

By reclaiming our native vision, we uncover traces in the Homer’s great epic poem, the Odyssey, of indigenous prophecy on the emerging two roads of Humanity: “those who know they belong to the Earth” and those who seek material, individual gain in a condition of spiritual disunity. In Odysseus’ violent encounter with the Cyclops, we find the prehistoric bardic tradition’s kinship with Hopi and other native visionary traditions.

Given the present pace of ecological and cultural extinction of species, cultures, and peoples around the globe, it is an opportune time to give heed to the indigenous voice calling out from the heart of the Odyssey.

Here is an excerpt from the Our Native Mind:

Indigenous, permeable consciousness and inspired song not only occur in ancient Greek texts, but are found at the very origin of the Celtic and English literary tradition. In the Irish mythological cycle, the poet Amergin wins the island of Ireland for his people by invoking the goddess Éire, the spirit of the land, and then singing his symbiosis with the cosmos:

I am the wind that breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combatants,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am the wild boar in valor,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of science,
I am the point of the lance in battle,
I am the God who created in the head the fire.

Such indigenous perception continued strongly among the early saints of the Celtic Christian tradition. In fact, the first Anglo-Saxon poet celebrated by name, Caedmon, received the gift of song in a way strongly paralleling the Amazonian experience of “receiving an icaro.”

Icaros, the healing songs which are called “the quintessence of shamanic power,” are often received by shamans “directly from the madres (spirit mothers) of the plants, frequently through dreams, visions, or auditory stimuli experienced during intensive ‘diets’ with the plants.” Such songs, with their supernormal timbre and melodies that touch the mind with wonder, can affect the listener profoundly.

As a recent visitor with us to the jungle, an aficionado of jazz, who, turning to me after a ceremony listening to the icaros of Juan Flores, said, “Man, this is the kind of mastery you only rarely hear in jazz clubs, but it’s even more than that. It’s like he’s playing your soul.”

The ancient Greeks and Celts knew the power of music to alter consciousness quite well. In the most ancient records of the Celts, we learn of the god Lugh’s visit to the court of Nuada, where he took up the harp and began to play. “Plucking the strings gently and soothingly Nuada and his company fell into a peaceful sleep. When they woke, Lugh played for them slow airs that made them weep. Then the music got faster and happier and, drying their tears, the whole company began to smile and laugh. Their laughter got louder and louder until the rafters rang with the sound.”

Intriguingly, the stages of trance that Lugh escorts his listeners through are similar to the progression used by the Huichol Indians of Mexico, a culture among whom traditions as old as the ancient Celts have been preserved. As Bob Boyll, a roadman in the Native American Church related to me, during peyote ceremonies with the Huichol elder José Rios, listening to Rios’ songs Boyll found himself repeatedly progressing from deep isolation and sadness to ecstatic celebration within the space of a single evening. Rios eventually explained to him that the Huichol utilize two modes in their songs. The first sung is the “mode of the orphan,” which brings about forgetfulness, sleep, and the sorrow of an orphan. The second sung is the “mode of the flowers,” which carries the listeners to a consciousness of eternity, of joyous growth and expansion. This parallel suggests that Lugh’s music may have been not only cathartic, but deliberately designed to be so.

It was in such a highly musical culture that Caedmon, an Anglo-Saxon herdsman around the year 650, landed. According to the early church historian the Venerable Bede, the simple laborer often felt backward and inadequate around the Irish Christians, and Bede describes how, “Often at a drinking gathering, when there was an occasion of joy when all must in turn sing with a harp, when Caedmon saw the harp nearing him, he arose for shame from that feast and went home.”

One night, after quietly slipping out of another gathering, he went to tend the animals in the stables. There, “When he set his limbs at rest and fell asleep, some man stood by him in his dream and hailed and greeted him and addressed him by his name: “Caedmon, sing me something.”

Caedmon responded, “I do not know how to sing and for that reason I went out from this feast and went hither.”

To which the figure responded, “Nevertheless, you must sing.”

“What must I sing?” asked the bewildered Caedmon.

Said this mysterious figure: “Sing to me of the first Creation.”

Caedmon then launched out in a fine blaze of song, with an erudition and musical intelligence that he never known before. The day following, he described his dream to his foreman, who brought the event to the attention of the Abbess Hilda. Caedmon’s gift was tested and confirmed when he composed and sang for her and her counselors.

From this, and subsequent accounts, it is clear he received a true initiation, for while he was widely imitated, his “poetic language adorned with the greatest sweetness and inspiration” could not be equaled, and caused many men and women to abandon worldly lives and take up the religious path. As the Venerable Bede puts it, “not through man that he songcraft learned, but he was divinely aided and through God’s gift received the art of poetry.”

A thousand years earlier, the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras performed equally mysterious “soul adjustments” with his music. According to his biographer, Iamblichus, Pythagoras, like Caedmon, did it “not through instruments or physical voice organs; but by the employment of a certain indescribable divinity, through which he extended his powers of hearing, fixing his intellect on the sublime symphonies of the world, producing a melody fuller and more intense than anything effected by mortal sounds.”

If Caedmon’s song was anything like the inspired strains of the ancient Greeks, and those who still sing in the Amazon, it had the ineffable quality of presencing its subject: Caedmon didn’t sing about the creation of the world. He sang the creation of the world anew.* As we know from Homer’s descriptions of the bardic art, listeners to ancient singers didn’t hear about divinities or past events, they experienced or relived them through the vision-provoking powers of the bard’s voice.

Similarly, in the Amazon today, shamans are able to presence their subjects through their icaros. As Luis Eduardo Luna reports, “don Manual Córdoba Ríos is able, through imitation, to bring visions of birds and animals to people so they are able to study their behavior. Though the icaros, the shaman is able to ‘become one’ with the animal and see the world accordingly.”

This presencing power of shamanic song is not, therefore, merely vision provoking. It can reveal realities with their own tenaciously independent ontological status, which interpenetrate with our own. A fine illustration of the mysteriously empirical workings of shamanic song comes from a healer in Chazuta, Peru, who leads ceremonies with the plant medicine ayahuasca for both locals and visiting Westerners.

In one ceremony, a Scottish woman, at the height of the vision-inducing affect of the brew, found herself in the living presence of a dragon, a mythical beast from her own native land. Synchronous with her unfolding vision, sitting in the darkness across the room from her, an unsuspecting Don Orlando found himself beholding an animal such as he had never seen before: a gigantic, fire-breathing serpent with wings. Awestruck, he burst into song, even as Caedmon once did, receiving the fully formed icaro of the dragon that both mediated its power into the ceremony and accompanied the Scottish woman’s experience in perfect syntony.

Certain shamans even claim to “‘understand’ the language of certain animals,” according to Luis Eduardo Luna, in the old European sense in which Sigurd, having tasted the blood of the dragon, could understand the language of birds and animals.

Inspired singers seem to tap into something energetic woven into the fabric of creation. In an illustration of Caedmon on the cross at St. Mary’s at Whitby, an angel is reaching down to touch his harp and a descending dove has just alighted upon his head. These are now such familiar symbolic tropes for divine inspiration within the Christian tradition, we can miss the obvious: Caedmon is being played by creation, not the other way around.

This is a different kind of song, more akin to shamanic inspiration, about which curanderos often say, “‘It’s the genie of the plant who does the job, not me.’ Many of them add that a humble, loving, and praising attitude while singing is what the spirits require.”

Caedmon’s voice was clearly touched by an Otherworldly, angelic strain that leaves mere human musicians in the dust. An account of St. Brendan, from the 10th century, can give us an idea of the power of this song. It tells how the saint, whenever music was played in his monastery, would quietly insert wax plugs in his ears, which he continually wore on a string around his neck. One day a talented harper, determined to receive Brendan’s blessing for his music, barged his way into an audience from the saint and played for him. Brendan visibly endured a performance that probably would have left us wonderstruck. Perplexed, the student asked,

“Why do you not listen to the music? Is it because you think it bad?”

“Not for that,” said Brénainn, but like this. One day when I was in this church, after Mass I was left here alone, and a great longing for my Lord seized me. As I was there, trembling and terror came upon me; I saw a shining bird at the window, and it sat on the altar. I was unable to look at it because of the rays which surrounded it, like those of the sun. “A blessing upon you, and do you bless me, priest,” it said. “May God bless you,” said Brénainn, “and who are you?” “The angel Michael,” the bird said, “come to make music for you and your Lord.” “You are welcome to me,” said Brénainn. The bird set the beak on the side of its wing, and I was listening to it from that hour to the same hour the next day; and then it bade me farewell.”

Brénainn scraped his stylus across the neck of the harp. “Do you think this sweet, student? I give my word before God, that after that music, no music of the world seems any sweeter to me than does this stylus across the neck, and to hear it I take to be but little profit.”

St. Brendan not only heard heavenly music, he sailed, as did Odysseus, to islands inhabited by divinities. Here Brendan and his monks arrive at the island of Paradise, a feat that could be accomplished in the sacred topography of ancient and medieval Europeans.

Such transporting heavenly songs can still be heard in the shamanic traditions of the Amazon jungle. As Pablo Amaringo, the most recognized and talented of the Amazonian visionary painters explained to us, “When you listen to the song of a spiritual being, an icaro, what a marvel!” Saying this, he pointed to one of the princely figures that inhabited the spiritual landscape of the painting unrolled on the table before us. “With this song you could live for millions of years. No desire to eat. You don’t want anything, you’re so content. The first time I heard an icaro, I said to my master, ‘I would like to live with this for the rest of my life.’ Without it wouldn’t be living. The contentment, happiness, I don’t know how many other things, but how, how beautiful. Those are the icaros.”

*This phenomenon reflects the widespread indigenous apprehension, as shown by Mircea Eliade, that human relationships with the eternal “paradigmatic models revealed to men in mythic time” need to be periodically regenerated through their reenactment or reliving in sacred time. In this way, the vitality of the origins of a culture continues to flow from its timeless source.

Traditional people, and I think the people of the Paleolithic had, very probably, two concepts that change our vision of the world. The concept of fluidity and the concept of permeability,

French Prehistorian Jean Clottes, interviewed in Werner Herzog’s recent exquisite film, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” continues describing the creators of the art of Chauvet Cave, whose works dates from 32,000 B.C.E., thus:

Permeability means the categories that we have, man, woman, horse, tree, etc., can shift. A tree may speak. A man can get transformed into an animal and the other way around, given certain circumstances. The concept of permeability is that there are no barriers, so to speak, between the world where we are and the world of spirits. A shaman, for example, can send his or her spirit to the world of the supernatural or can receive the visit of supernatural spirits. When you put those two concepts together, you realize how different life must have been for those people from the way we live now.

If one gazes into the paintings of the lions in Chauvet cave long enough, one realizes they are not, in fact, paintings! They are the lions themselves, or rather, the imprint of the animal spirit upon human consciousness. With no separation between the artist and his subject, even gazing upon the images through the medium of photographs provides a glimpse into the permeability of consciousness of the paleolithic artist/shamans. In fact, the living quality of the images, the sense of being surrounded by spirits, much like Odysseus encounters in Hades, is also reported by the scientists and others who visit Chauvet cave. Herzog stated it was a positive relief to return to the surface after longer sessions of filming!

Perhaps the most beautiful expression of the Dreamtime quality of the caves, where the fiction of the temporal separation of events in time melts away and simultaneity in spirit reveals itself, are the footprints found in the depths of Chauvet cave of a wolf and a boy, standing next to one another. The scientists who study the cave do not know if the wolf was walking with the boy, if the wolf was stalking the boy (or vice versa), or even if the footprints are from the same moment in time or separated by thousands of years! And yet, from the indigenous perspective, like the cave paintings, the footprints themselves are direct imprints of the realm of spirit. Human and animal walk together in the eternity of Dreamtime.

You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them Spoken by a Crow elder to Gary Snyder.

Indigenous perception may not only be poised to reassert itself if we just hunker down to the earth again, but it may also be a natural mode of perception for human beings. Certainly it is instinctual to children.

A friend of mine, Brian, related to me how, as a boy growing up in a rural area of Illinois, a raven used to come to him in his dreams. It taught him the kinds of things ravens know, and with Brian upon its back, would take him flying over the landscape surrounding his home, showing him hidden things in the forest. One night the raven took him to visit an old broken-down carriage from the previous century, decaying silently in an unvisited part of the woods. Upon waking, Brian bound out of bed and raced out to locate it, following the raven’s instructions. It was there, sure enough, right where the raven had shown him.

For my friend, the visitations of the raven were a special gift, a source of love and companionship his family couldn’t give him. “I actually looked forward to dreaming more than I did waking,” he laughed. “That raven was my best friend.” It is certain Brian needed kinship with the animal world to survive: his father abandoned him and his brother to the streets a few years later.

His bond with the raven was broken, just as such magical perception has been educated and persecuted out of children and whole populations for centuries now, when he made the mistake of revealing the wealth of his inner world to his family. They scoffed. They ridiculed him. They suspected his sanity. The seed of rational doubt and shame planted in his mind, the raven faded away.

Yet there is plenty of evidence that, even as adults, we can recuperate from the suppression of our native perception. We may even make these crossings into the indigenous mind and not even fully recognize its implication.

As a young man, I had the opportunity to join the members of Ring of Bone Zendo for a Buddhist retreat in the wilderness of Death Valley in California. It was rigorous. We got up and began meditating well before dawn in the freezing cold and practiced silent mindfulness throughout the day’s blazing heat as we walked, ate, and worked together. At night we sat in meditation again for a couple of hours beneath the stars, finally crawling into our sleeping bags in the shivery cold again, sometimes with light snowfall dancing in the beams of our flashlights.

After many days of practice, my perception started to loosen, to shift from the habitual, and I became susceptible to teaching from the ancient land. The moment came one evening as a primitive stone tool found on the desert floor made its round from hand to hand.

When it came to me I held it, and feeling how it nestled familiarly in my palm, the hand that had once carefully fashioned it upon the shore of a lake vanished long ago in geological time reached over the centuries to touch me.

With a sudden physical vertigo, I saw and felt the constellations in the sky of my mind wheeling backward, beyond 1492 into the time depths of this continent.

Wrenched free of the artificial, vision-constricting European time-line that had been forced upon my native perception of the world, I understood that my country, the United States of America, which my school textbooks had hammered into me was the most significant thing to ever happen to the Northern hemisphere, was a flash in the pan compared to the ancient cultures that inhabit it as their own.

I believe that day I became the first of those in my English and Danish lineage to set foot in the sacred topography of the New World, receiving the seed of an indigenous, native intelligence within me. Eventually, it would lead me into the Amazon rainforest as an apprentice in the tradition of shamanic medicine.

In this epiphany, I was perhaps being inducted into a lineage of Westerners who have gone native. The founder of the Buddhist community I was practicing with was, in fact, the same poet quoted above, Gary Snyder. Snyder also wrote, “For the non-Native American to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island.”

This meditation on our innate potential to go native again is excerpted from our forthcoming book, Awakening our Indigenous Mind.

Works Cited

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004 (pgs 41-42).

This article is an autobiographical account of the author’s childhood struggle to survive in Stanford’s Learning House, a behaviorist program in the 1970s designed to help delinquents change. “The Minotaur of the Behaviorist Maze” offers an insider’s perspective on the consequences of treating a child as a stimulus–response organism in need of modification rather than as a human being in search of restoration of his or her innate wholeness.

In the mid-1970s as a boy of 9 years of age, divorce shook my family life and I fell out of the narrow world of the suburban middle-class into a children’s shelter in Pleasant Hill, California. The sudden loss of my family was painful enough, but what was to follow was to mark me even more deeply than my experience of incarceration. After a couple of months of scrambling to find my feet in the criminal underclass, I was placed in a Skinnerian behaviorist modification program with the Maoist sounding title of Learning House, sponsored by the Counseling Psychology Department of Stanford University.

Before I attempt to give an account of my experiences there, I need to state something about the condition of my memories of this time. Whereas my recollection of the shelter is clear (although colored with an adrenaline spiked haze of shock), and I have warm, colorful memories of my subsequent stay with a loving family in a foster home, my 9-month internment at Learning House is shrouded in darkness. I have no recollection of meaningful contacts or experiences—with the exception of clambering through the boughs of the huge tree growing in the front yard. It’s as if I was under an anesthesia that dulled my senses, and I have to reason as much from the lacunae in my memory as from the facts I still retain. There’s an underworld quality to these memories, like I am among the eidolon of the whispering dead, a fact that may be far more revealing than any objective information that might survive anyways. I offer this essay, therefore, not as an attempt to evaluate the overall efficacy of the Learning House program, but as a memoir of one child’s struggle to escape the behaviorist maze.

Learning House was a three-story, rambling building with many rooms. The inhabitants numbered around six children and two counselors, sometimes young married couples, who did half-week shifts in residence. The counselors were all students of behaviorist psychology at Stanford in their early twenties. Earnest and very white, they treated us with a disinterested kindness that occasionally turned into real warmth. I have no recollection of ever being hugged or feeling love or a sense of personal significance as an individual there. Equally strange, I have no recollection of older members of the behaviorist community being present. It was as if we were abandoned into the hands of young intellectuals, none of whom had children of their own.

My absence of well-being was also a consequence of being viewed primarily as a subject in a behaviorist regime, rather like the abstract consumer in the statistics of economic theory. We were subjects of study, and I remember the cold feeling that came over me when a director of the program showed me photos of us that had been displayed at a conference on the East Coast where the success of Learning House was touted. With an antiseptic smile, she told us we were now famous among the psychiatric community.

Yes, they were certainly good at smiling at Learning House.

Among the principal features of Learning House that are grilled into my mind is the jargon. What we soon learned on entry was to accustom ourselves to being under surveillance, that our behavior was being rated according to a point scheme that would determine our standing in a system of privileges. The score sheet was long, but the primary token to advancement an internee wanted to earn I still remember—the PPI, or positive peer interaction, which gained the lucky recipient 500 points. Its obverse, the NPI, or negative peer interaction, obviously docked an equal number of points. Counselors carried around little pads in which they jotted down notes about our behavior, and I remember gathering at the end of the day in the living room with the donated couches and carpets to hear the tallies that determined our privileges for the next day read out loud to us.

Surveillance did not cease when we left the doors of Learning House to go to school—my mother informs me I complained of being shadowed by graduate students who observed me from a distance. This was obviously awkward, and I can only speculate on how it affected my relation to society. It’s certain I turned anarchist at age 15, and have an intense resistance to “Big Brother” programs to this day. The secret police quality of the affair must have affected my relations with my instructors and peers. I can remember reading a note from our Chinese math teacher Mr. Chan, memorable for his habit of keeping human skulls sitting around his classroom, stating that he had thought I was a perfectly normal kid until being informed of the program I was in. Among my peers, I lost my sense of self-worth and adopted behavior patterns that ostracized me. Apparently, the behaviorists were unaware of this subtle alienation from the “normal” human society around us their own behavior was generating.

Punishments had an equally cold feeling, as if we left to float in a void in outer space. An internee who lost control of his emotions was taken and put into a closet beneath the stairs and left in the bare room with a single chair and a naked light bulb overhead until he had calmed down enough to be readmitted to human society. I still remember the threats others hurled from that space of containment, as well as sitting there myself staring at the unpainted runners ascending above me. Other times, I remember sitting in another room motionless and wondering how high I could count before I would be allowed to get up and move around again. All this had a quality of a theater of the absurd, because we were never taught, either by example or instruction, how to process our emotions and to develop an awareness of their root causes. Instead when we vented, we were punished with an emotional void.

According to Jerome S. Stumphauzer’s (1986) Helping Delinquents Change: A Treatment Manual of Social Learning Approaches, Learning House formulated their approach thus:

The self-control training of Learning House consisted of a series of
sessions which taught children (a) to increase commitment, (b) to
develop awareness of the stimuli and consequences of their behavior,
(c) to rearrange their particular environment (including their thoughts),
and (d) to evaluate self-standards and to reinforce themselves for their
own behavior change. (p. 177)

The behaviorist agenda of training children to police their own psyches is made grimly evident by the following “outline of self-control training”:

Commitment

1. Recognize target behaviors through role-playing and video tape playback
2. Count target behaviors on wrist counter
3. Rate daily performance on target behaviors and compare with teaching parent’s rating (Stumphauzer, 1986, p. 178)

The reality on the ground looked a whole lot different than in the professional publications, however. Instead of becoming the behaviorist monk they intended, according to my mother and sympathetic professional observers, my coping mechanism was to stiffen and attempt to suppress my self-expression, to the point where I was becoming robotically alienated from my own emotions. By the time the program deemed me ready to graduate, I had, unsurprisingly, lost track of my soul. This is illustrated by a bizarre incident my mother related to me that occurred at the very end of my stay.

While I had wanted very much to return home, Learning House developed an antagonistic relationship to my mother and was incapable of helping us explore the underlying dynamics of the family that had led to its breakup.

Instead, they tried to make her set recording devices about the house. I suppose they needed more material to help me raise my awareness. My mother, to her credit, declined. The upshot of this general atmosphere of neglect was at graduation from their program I was still taking out the anger of my emotional exile on my brother and sister. In short, I was an emotional time bomb. When I learned of my mother’s decision to not take me home, I systematically tore up the front lawn of Learning House with my bare hands, the counselors reported with bewilderment. Apparently, they were blind to the symbolic value of the act.

Rather than confront such resonant manifestations of internal agony therapeutically, Learning House chose to give me “learning experiences.”

Probably some of these worked out fine, but the strange emotional void that permeated our world like a drug even appeared there. One of the learning experiences I had to undergo was to repeatedly find my way on public transportation from Palo Alto to my mother’s home in Pleasant Hill each weekend, rather than be picked up by my stepfather. This was a long journey into an unknown world for a boy of nine. Without warnings of the dangers I was about to face, but intuiting them, I burst into tears as the smiling counselor dropped me off at the Greyhound station, only to be comforted by an old man who put his arm on my shoulder and helped me into the bus. The old man couldn’t be there to protect me all the time, however. The old Greyhound station in downtown San Francisco, in whose lobby I sat waiting many times, was a hang-out for drug dealers, pedophiles, con-artists, and unstable street people of all sorts, none of whom I’d ever had experience with before. I narrowly escaped having molestation, or worse, as one of my “learning experiences.”

In all honesty, I now ask myself, what sort of doltish psychological intelligence would actually toy with exacerbating the abandonment that I had already gone through by sending me, unprepared, into the streets like that? This blind minotaur in the center of the behaviorist maze may be best illustrated by an excerpt from my book, The Jaguar That Roams the Mind:

Asked if I would participate in a “study,” I went to the university campus and sat in a lab lit by fluorescent lights and faced a bearded, long-boned graduate student. Setting his contraption before me like an earnest Jesuit with a sacred machine, he handed me a remote control wrapped in black electrical tape. I studied it, and then the machine: A miniature stage covered with sharp, cold, metallic objects like barbed wire, tacks and Brillo pads.

“No, thanks,” I said. But they forgot I was not a rat. Having passed through the world of internments, I refused gifts when I sensed the giver had something to gain from it. My conditioning was far deeper than he ever imagined (Tindall, 2008, pp. 29-30).

Like the bewildered Athenian youth released into the Cretan labyrinth, we children found an inhuman monster lurking at the institutional center of Stanford’s Skinnerian regime. It didn’t devour human flesh, however. It subtly consumed our humanity instead.

An article like this should appropriately end with a brief summary of subsequent events. After my release from Learning House, I attempted to integrate myself into the home of my father, where my life under the behaviorist regime was treated as an embarrassment. But the imprint of that experience proved tenacious: as I entered my teenage years, life rapidly drained of significance. Society appeared to function in mindless obedience to the dictates of a counterfeit central authority. True, of course, but there was no access to any meaningful reality beyond the lie. So it was the punishing void of Learning House took its toll. It was better to burn out in anger, alcohol, and drugs than live within such a system.

I ran away to grow up on the streets. For a number of years I played cat and mouse with the authorities and their factotums, the social workers and psychologists, drifting from placement to placement while caught in a web of substance abuse. Finally, burnt to the core, I sought out the family of an old friend and they took me in. I trace my trajectory back into an authentic belonging to society, which Learning House had done so much to rupture, there.

It was simply love and safety that I required to begin reknitting my psyche. Now as a writer and college professor, I work to convey deeper human values to those working to find their own way through the maze of false authority.

References

Tindall, R. (2008). The Jaguar that roams the mind. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.

Stumphauzer, J. S. (1986). Helping delinquents change: A treatment manual of social learning approaches. New York, NY: Haworth Press.

The healing power of icaros, the magic melodies of Amazonian shamanism, were the focus of Susana’s research in the Peruvian Amazon in 2004, where she participated in numerous ceremonies and conducted extensive interviews with healers and their clients in the vegetalista tradition.

Based on her findings, Susana gave this presentation on the therapeutic use of icaros in ceremonies with ayahuasca at the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) conference “Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century” in April, 2011.

Susana Bustos- Icaros: Song and Healing in Ayahuasca Ceremonies from MAPS: Psychedelic Science on Vimeo.

Is this the road of the single hearted?

Here’s the letter.

Things here in Sendai have been rather surreal. But I am very blessed to have wonderful friends who are helping me a lot. Since my shack is even more worthy of that name, I am now staying at a friend’s home. We share supplies like water, food and a kerosene heater. We sleep lined up in one room, eat by candlelight, share stories. It is warm, friendly, and beautiful.

During the day we help each other clean up the mess in our homes. People sit in their cars, looking at news on their navigation screens, or line up to get drinking water when a source is open. If someone has water running in their home, they put out a sign so people can come to fill up their jugs and buckets.

It’s utterly amazingly that where I am there has been no looting, no pushing in lines. People leave their front door open, as it is safer when an earthquake strikes. People keep saying, “Oh, this is how it used to be in the old days when everyone helped one another.”

Quakes keep coming. Last night they struck about every 15 minutes. Sirens are constant and helicopters pass overhead often.

We got water for a few hours in our homes last night, and now it is for half a day. Electricity came on this afternoon. Gas has not yet come on. But all of this is by area. Some people have these things, others do not. No one has washed for several days. We feel grubby, but there are so much more important concerns than that for us now. I love this peeling away of non-essentials. Living fully on the level of instinct, of intuition, of caring, of what is needed for survival, not just of me, but of the entire group.

There are strange parallel universes happening. Houses a mess in some places, yet then a house with futons or laundry out drying in the sun. People lining up for water and food, and yet a few people out walking their dogs. All happening at the same time.

Other unexpected touches of beauty are first, the silence at night. No cars. No one out on the streets. And the heavens at night are scattered with stars. I usually can see about two, but now the whole sky is filled. The mountains are Sendai are solid and with the crisp air we can see them silhouetted against the sky magnificently.

And the Japanese themselves are so wonderful. I come back to my shack to check on it each day, now to send this e-mail since the electricity is on, and I find food and water left in my entranceway. I have no idea from whom, but it is there. Old men in green hats go from door to door checking to see if everyone is OK. People talk to complete strangers asking if they need help. I see no signs of fear. Resignation, yes, but fear or panic, no.

They tell us we can expect aftershocks, and even other major quakes, for another month or more. And we are getting constant tremors, rolls, shaking, rumbling. I am blessed in that I live in a part of Sendai that is a bit elevated, a bit more solid than other parts. So, so far this area is better off than others. Last night my friend’s husband came in from the country, bringing food and water. Blessed again.

Somehow at this time I realize from direct experience that there is indeed an enormous Cosmic evolutionary step that is occurring all over the world right at this moment. And somehow as I experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart opening very wide. My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all that is happening. I don’t. Rather, I feel as part of something happening that much larger than myself. This wave of birthing (worldwide) is hard, and yet magnificent.

Thank you again for your care and Love of me,

With Love in return, to you all.

Originally published online @ Ode magazine