Fantasy and Reality

Germs and atoms are as much a fantasy to Amazonian tribes as their demons are for us.

One morning in 1981, while I was living among the Pirahãs, near the mouth of the Maici River, in the center of the Amazonian rain forest, I was awakened by the sounds of people yelling and crying. I had been researching the Pirahã language and culture now for some four years, so I spoke the language reasonably well. The yells tore me from my pleasant liminal state between sleep and alertness. I rose, slipped on my gym shorts and flip-flops and ventured outside to see what was going on.

Some twenty Pirahã men, women, and children, their numbers growing by the second, were gesticulating and yelling, some crying in fear, at a spot on the bank across the river. I asked what they were pointing at. A man looked at me incredulously, demanding "Don't you see it? It is a kaoáíbogi ('fastmouth' – a jungle entity separate from humans but like them in many ways). I looked again. And again. I asked again. The response was "The fast-mouth is there right now!"

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Denial of sight - of full consciousness - operates by the designation of invalidating force to specific aspects, facets of forms of intent and expression. Invalidating force itself operates through self-doubt and division, as guilt, as fear, terror and rage and the range of 'negative' emotions' that are 'negative' by nature of rising from a negative shadow of a positively asserted self-image of concept.
The split off and denied consciousness implicitly operates as shadow power or hidden power. Few see it as more than a disturbing thoughts that they seek to escape asap, and unseen is unchecked and in our midst - in a great variety of ways. But 'modern' man would insist this a psychological issue and not otherwise 'real'. For the designation of an 'external' physical reality is itself a defence against relationship with a sense of consciousness that is untrustworthy, deceitful and terrifying. That this state is dis-integrity calling for healing is not apparent to the split off fragmented 'consciousness' that is coercively controlling the experience of its reality by the survival instinct operating through a misidentification.
Many traditional peoples and indeed very young and some who are not as psychically shielded, experience and participate in a greater or more inclusive consciousness of the Movement of Being that Is Life (prior to the imposed and asserted model of self and world that filters a distorted perception of it). So much that is considered Real is based on a fantasy of self-concept, and much that is denied and invalidated as fantasy is Real - but of a multidimensionality that the limited, linear and controlling concept cannot tolerate without revisiting its own imprint of separative identity. Hence many facets of his own lost consciousness first appear demonic and much of what appears protective reinforces a caged and trapped sense of self that operates blindly against the whole and of course against its own true good.
Just as explorers risked their lives in opening up a greater world to awareness than a local cultural reality allowed, so within consciousness are the taboos of ancienterrors being recognized as 'local reality' and expanded or explored beyond. Not least because space and time are closing in on Earth in ways that cannot be long survived without radically fresh perspective.