open_space

I friend of mine gave me a push to start posting out there in public what I write, not out of some skill in the art but of an urge of adventure. That motivates me in the right way for I tend to judge the quality of my output not the joy I get from it. So before I turn into an old grumpy man prematurely, here is the first of a set of posts that I intend to write about Mexican and more broadly perhaps Mesoamerican spirituality, shamanism and the scientist --yes, you read that right-- the scientist that has brought the field into the eyes and ears of the public whom now even has an award winning film by Ida Cuéllar that dramatizes his life and work: The Secret of Dr. Grinberg which you can watch for free on Vimeo.

Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum is surrounded by mystery and controversy not only for the topics that he liked researching but because of the fact that he ended disappearing until this day without notice leaving everything behind him untouched. People around him claim wild hypotheses about what happened. From becoming enlightened and dropping the body and its manifestation in a rush of energy which wouldn't leave a trace behind to him being kidnapped by the CIA.

I don't intend to write much about the conspiracies surrounding him since I personally find them as speculative entertainment but not much more than that. What I intend to focus on in this series of posts is on the work regarding consciousness and the Mexican shamanst hat he developed while at the institute he founded at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM): The National Institute for the Study of Consciousness that was an offshoot of the Psychology department at the time. This I intend to explain and comment from the lens of occultism.

Reading Dr. Grinberg's work it is clear that he was already keenly aware of what occult philosophy labels as "the taxonomy of planes". That range from the material to the spiritual with rough intervals that is meant to model the descent of power from the spiritual source of everything we usually define as gods to the infinite complexity of the material plane we now understand as biochemical reactions, wizzing subatomic particles and all in between them in increasing degrees of specificity. It is by using this model of planes and the different bodies that several esoteric schools claim we have that we can put to words the dynamics of experience between the individual human being and the cosmos.

Jacobo wasn't a materialist and he had compelling arguments for that which he even got into mathematical formulae. What he focused most however, was on this god given given and mostly ignored phenomenon we call "experience", the quality of experience to be more precise. For him, experiencing is the most miraculous happening and he argues how experience is not a physical phenomenon or even that it springs from it, that is, consciousness does not and cannot arise from matter itself but rather matter is animated by planes higher above, planes that provide the mechanism by which mysticism and magic works.

Similarly to Eliphas Levi, Jacobo argues that logical and rational analysis reaches its limit were perceiving and experiencing starts and thus rendering the reach of science restricted to the material plane exclusively, the lowest of the planes we human beings can experience. If one want to know the realms beyond solid matter and clunking beers one has to dare tread the path of yogis, mystics and mages.

Jacobo had no alternative to this because during his most productive stage of his research he met an assortment of Mexican shamans and mystics that casted a bright enough light for no shadow of a doubt to remain: from his most famous subject, the psychic surgeon and national hero Pachita to more modest mayan "abuelos" like Don Panchito. Scientific materialists of our age, of course, when challenged with such a phenomenon and questioning seem to have settled by assuming that consciousness does not exist at all --when they dare to not ignore it-- without providing any supporting evidence that differs in any significant sense from twisting ones mind into knots. These modern batch of pseudo-scientists claim that consciousness is a clumsy by product of firing neurons which leaves painfully clear that big areas of the scientific endeavor have preferred a comfortable arrogance fueled by ideological submission to the grant bearers rather than the messy adventure and mad questioning that the founders of the field exhibited with so much glory a few centuries ago and to this day scientists keep ridding the wave.

Basically, what Dr. Grinberg discovered by a set of fascinating experiments and meeting remarkable people is that there is a field which we interact with that enables minds to become entangled and communicate in the manner of telepathy even in a physiological level and that provides the portal by which spirituality enters the human world. A different french occult philosopher a few centuries earlier called it The Astral Light and he called it The Nueronal Field which is a crucial component for him to develop his Synthergic Theory that was meant to explain "The complex interaction between the neuronal field and space which manifests as an interference pattern we call the energetic structure of experience.

If this sounds like a wild ride, you are right. I am currently going through his monumental series The Shamans of Mexico from which I'll be basing myself mostly among other works and Traditional Mexican Philosophy. Before we take that plunge however, we might need to set the stage by providing a framework we can use to talk about energy and its manifestations.

So stay tuned and I look forward to sharing this adventure with you.