00:00.00 archpodnet Go. 00:02.47 alan Welcome back. This is ah Dr Alan Garfinkel with the Cal California rock art foundation your rock art podcast. We have Laura Lee with us from the felicitus Goodman Institute and we're talking about ecstatic postures and altered states of. Consciousness and other ways to think about altered states of consciousness Laura so we ah stopped at segment one and we're talking about some of the means by which we can enter into these altered states of consciousness. Without using any sort of psychotropic substances is that correct. 00:43.73 Laura Lee Yeah, you know I think the anthe engines are generated from within in certain ah practices such as ours I think that why would nature give us those neurology for ecstatic states if it wasn't. Also going to give us the activation methods for these altered states. So I think that it's um, what I've learned is that they're they're surprisingly easy to enter into without any outside agents and that the body loves these you mentioned flourishing before the emotional state. And that is something that we do see in our sessions is that they are ecstatic. They are touching something larger than ourself and when we were talking about the visions earlier and what's also surprising and what landed my husband and I to say there is something real going on here. This isn't just from our own. Um our own minds. This is something of a shared ah shared mind something larger that we're touching and that is that we can do a session and we do this on Zoom currently via the pandemic really pushed us all into Zoom and it works perfectly by the way over Zoom I think it's because we're. Entering that state betwixt in between where the center is everywhere and the boundaries are nowhere those subtle states and then we connect on those levels but we can also for many years we're doing this workshops in person and invariably. We would have a session where. 02:13.44 Laura Lee At the end. Everybody shares the highlights of their Journeys We go around a roundtable one by one and it's only after that that we are sharing hey this is the artifact that inspired the posture. We just did 2 things that are interesting that happened that are noteworthy and this is what keeps us. Intrigued in researching personally is that we will have shared elements of a vision whether it's the same posture or different posture. Um in each session. There are across the board commonalities temperature shifts and sound shifts and time shifts and visionship. All of this. Ah, a whole spirit journey that you're on but that there'll be elements that are shared by the participants unique to that particular session and also that some deep meaning comes up. There's a theme that comes up that is ah like a life lesson. Um, on the eternal wisdom sages of the ages type level that comes up and it's as though we are actors on the scene that we are players on a stage and that the visionary journey we're given which is much like a dream you inhabit a dream body an energy body. Ah, spirit body and then you go off exploring and the laws of physics are rather different inside that Dream. For example, we find that if we're in a pool of water and we're we're in the ocean we can breathe underwater no Problem. We can fly no problem. Ah we can journey down wormholes out to the outer edges of the Cosmos. No problem. 03:47.13 Laura Lee So The the laws of physics are different there or so to our perception. But so we find that there's There's some commonalities there and um, we find that often. There's a cultural clue in the artifact. So For example. We can say oh here, Let's do this posture. It'll be from a goddess ah artifact a venus artifact in a particular pose and people will report even men feelings of nurturing and sexuality and fertility and Birthing. Pregnancy Um, holding a child being a child. Um this regeneration and rebirth happening across the board. So and it's only then that we go oh look. It's a venus artifact isn't that interesting so it gets intriguing on many levels. 04:42.91 alan It seems like this kind of exercise might have tremendous scientific value in the study of rock art ah have you applied any of this to particular Images. Of Rock art panels or or the kind of images that appear on rock Art panels. 05:06.63 Laura Lee Um I would like to suggest that um, a rock art figure that we're all familiar with that we find around the world is one of our favorite postures for Paul and I and it's the one where the fingers are spread very wide. The arms are held up to either side in a kind of a w so your elbows are pointed down and your hands are about the level of your shoulders and your feet are spread right? and so we stand in this posture and do our thing. It's extraordinary. The amount of energy that pours through you. And it's as though we are liaisons between the earth and the heavens the energy we feel like um, the hollow bone where we're just a conduit for for energy the hands get activated the hands start pulsing often. Um, they get very hot and ah so often we find. But afterwards the rattle is ended and we're we're just slowly coming out. Um back into shifting into this reality because it certainly feels like we have a foot in this world and a foot in that world and it's like driving a car you can upshift downshift depending on where you're going and we're slowly back. Your hands are activated. you feel like you are a font of energy. How are you going to use it people are doing I myself do this too hands on healing for oneself radiate out to the universe. Um, it's important not to try to do that not to direct this process during the rattling. 06:39.79 Laura Lee During the rattling. It's about receiving the vision. You are the recipient. Um, you are the transmitter receiver. But you are there's downloads happening you want to just be open to that. But afterwards it's like oh you are activated. You are energized do with it what you will and so a lot of the. Also healing activity takes place in those several minutes after the rattles ended and we're then um, going to pick up a journal. It's important to write that's part of a ritual write it down these can be as fleeting as a dream. We had a neurologist friend Garret Meyer out of Germany. Who had experimented a lot with lucid dreaming who came and spent a week with us at our institute and afterwards he said you know it's not lucid dreaming I've studied that but it's kind of the same cloth and I said Garrett describe to us what you think is happening in the brain. He said the best explanation he can give us was. You are remaining fully awake. So your centers that support the waking state are fully on they have not turned off but simultaneously we find he believes that they're the centers that support. The dream state are also activated not all of it. It's not a full dream state. But many of the centers and I think the visionary processing the the traveling in a spirit body. All of that you are you are landed in that kind of a dream body and the the scenery of in front of you is very much like a dream it shifts it changes it morphs. 08:14.29 Laura Lee But somehow you navigate that and you know the rule set you know what you're doing. It's like you are being fully informed. Um at the same time. So when part of you is that dreamer while when part of you is that um witness to this. From the waking state. So we call it being in 2 worlds simultaneously a foot in both worlds. 08:40.88 alan This ah experience that your ah colleagues and people that participate in these exercises I would say ah must have a shamanistic ah kind of akin to a shamanistic experience. 08:56.40 Laura Lee Oh indeed indeed and in fact, so much of the same iconography that is so well known in the shamanic realms We see what I like is that we don't advertise hey come and be a shaman you're going to have a shaman journey. We just say oh come and do this. 08:57.76 alan Am I correct. 09:14.98 Laura Lee So people from all over the world come who aren't schooled in any of this and we all see the ah the world tree we can become the tree our our heads are up in the heavens as branches or trunk in the middle world are feet deep into mother earth's roots. We experience that. We shapeshift into a tree for example and ah, there's an upper middle and lower world. We are Journeying. We don't shamanize on behalf of others. Although that can happen. We've had some extraordinary journeys but this isn't a doggling it up that I'm going to project and and do this. It's more like I receive a vision and somehow that vision just becomes exactly what we need at that time uncovering parts of ourselves that we didn't know needed ah healing or attention but certainly um certainly that happens so yeah it shares a lot with the shamanic world. And I personally and Goodman believed this too. She felt that this was the realm. We all inhabited. We had ready access as early cultures and then shamans then became specialized in this but she felt that the reason that humanity lost this. Was just the vagaries of time and our relentless pursuit of progress. Um that in small tribes. Everybody partakes. But as we became specialized and grew. Um I guess the ice age gendered agriculture became more possible communities grew larger. 10:51.50 Laura Lee Then we started to specialize with the kingship the priest who would say Oh now you can only access those realms through me and then the farmers and the military and the Artisans and the bakers and everybody was specializing and she felt that's when we lost already access to these realms. Historically. 11:13.32 alan So as in the contemporary study of shamanism. There's a ah number of scientific and medicinal aspects that are now being explored you mentioned microdoses of some of the you know the very ah. 11:31.48 alan Powerful altered states of consciousness from these various medicinal plants. Um does any of your experiences have profound effects on those that perhaps on individuals that perhaps are having are troubled. Either physiologically or in other ways. 11:55.67 Laura Lee Well Goodman would say that you need a healthy nervous system to do this and that ah we are not therapists and so I would hesitate to advertise oh come for a healing right? I mean we've had people that have showed up in our. Workshops who are bipolar and who are on various medications and stuff and you know wow um I don't feel equipped to handle that kind of thing that takes a therapist and a specialist knowing what they're doing. We're more for your average. Healthy nervous system seeker and um, but I I feel that the physiological shift there is so beneficial in healing but all of us need healing right? This is a world out of Kilter. We're all at balance and we're all need on healing. 12:44.20 alan And absolutely. 12:49.60 Laura Lee And um, it is interesting that we have ah many advisors that we work with from academic fields and one of them is Christine and Todd Vanpool out of the University Of Missouri who both teach anthropology there Christine teaches courses in um, the spirits. Of the spirit of Anthrop the anthropology of spirits was one of her latest books and cultures um shamanic cultures and Todd is a cognitive anthropologist. She's a cultural and they she's been doing our work with us since the pandemic started in April Twenty Twenty we went online. And she soon found us and she's she's contributing so much both of them and 1 thing she does is when we are doing a mesoamerican posture. For example, she can often pull down a pot behind her because that's one of her specialties and look at the iconography and make some direct correlations to. Not only the geometric patterns on the pod and that people have seen with the antic phenomenon and but also the cosmology and some of the experiences we have relate directly to the myths of those cultures as well. But people don't know it. it's it's interesting we're not all versed in the mythology of. All the ancient cultures but it certainly crops up aspects of it and helps us explain why we have the visions we do quite often. The vanpools took us to the um cognitive neurology lab at the University Of Missouri where we underwent some eeg tests. 14:24.20 Laura Lee We did 6 sessions with our practice between Paul and I we are waiting that was just in February so we're waiting for the results of those but this under we're going to be curious what we find there. But this underscores this sense of a waking dream where both the. Dreaming mind and our waking mind are activated simultaneously. There were glimpses of that when Goodman was invited to the universities of Munich and later vienna and they were doing several tests there eeg among them that showed beta plus theta um, not enough. 15:01.70 alan Fascinating Absolutely fascinating. Yeah, let's leave it there. Yeah, so there are physiological processes going on as well as neurological processes and let's ah, dig deeper on that in the next segment. 15:01.14 Laura Lee To a yeah, just a few subjects. The other thing they found was a lowering of blood pressure. Sure. 15:19.00 alan See in the flip flop gang. 15:19.93 Laura Lee Um.