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Michael Harner’s Lost Lectures: Volume 2

"Mystery of Shamanic Dismemberment," Santa Clara, 1995

"Rebirth," Painting by Beth Lenco

Forward

In 1995, the 14th International Transpersonal Association Conference was held in Santa Clara, California. The theme of the conference was "Spirit in Action: Awakening to the Sacred in Everyday Life." [1] At the conference, Michael Harner delivered this 40 minute lecture on the topic "Mystery of Shamanic Dismemberment." The phenomenon of shamanic dismemberment, as Michael later described it in Cave and Cosmos, "is a healing in which the journeyer receives a new spiritual body, free of illness and pain, with positive consequences for one’s health in ordinary reality." [2] At the conference, Michael's lecture was introduced by psychologist, writer, and researcher Ralph Metzner, who collaborated on psychedelic research with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (a.k.a. Ram Dass) at Harvard University in the early 1960's. [3] The lecture was recorded to a cassette tape which ended up in storage. Around the year 2025, the tape was rediscovered in the FSS archives, and the recording was digitized and transcribed. The original audio recording is provided below for interested listeners. — Robbie Priestley, Editor

Introduction by Ralph Metzner

[Michael Harner] had actually been to the Amazon, and he had done something that was unspeakable in anthropology or social science generally. He had actually taken the native [4] people at their word and followed their recommendations, which was to experience a magical transformative medicine that they had in their practices for himself—to see for himself as a true scientist would. Fifteen years later or so, I met Michael again [5] under very different circumstances, and where I really started to learn from him about shamanism. Not only about shamanism, but shamanic practice—shamanic journeywork practice—for which he's become well known as a primary exponent of the rediscovery and reapplication of the most ancient method—or set of methods and practices—on this planet for healing and obtaining knowledge.

It's no accident that in our time there's a tremendous hunger for the kind of knowledge and healing that the shamanic traditions provide, that Michael has been teaching people for close to 20 years now. Because we live in a time that is marked by incredible social pathologies, and fragmentation, and dislocation, and really—madness—with tremendous amounts of healing, and new knowledge, and new perspectives [that] are desperately needed. In particular, the kind of healing and knowledge that will balance and heal our relationship to the earth, to the biosphere, to the natural world in a new way. This relationship, as we know, is severely and pathologically imbalanced.

It's very interesting to me that [Michael is] going to talk about the mysterious experience of shamanic dismemberment. This is one of those things where people hear about dismemberment, and they think "well this is really too weird—you know, why would somebody want dismemberment?" Or, "why would somebody think that dismemberment is a healing experience or is a positive thing—something that you want to cherish or treasure or even pursue?" And that is the mystery about it. It is so radically different from what anything that we might expect. Yet, this is what the shamanic traditions say. We're talking about dismemberment—that is, [a] dismemberment experience that is undergone voluntarily, intentionally, purposefully for the purpose of healing.

This is so radically different from anything that we imagine. We think of healing as making you feel good—you know, making you feel better. You hear "dismemberment," it sounds like torture. So what's the explanation for this strange paradox? This is what [Michael is] going to talk about today. It just strikes me that it's really interesting that we're living in a time when many, many people feel fragmented and dismembered by conditions under which we're living. It feels like our whole society is undergoing something like a dismemberment, or fragmentation, or [a] "splitting apart into many fragments kind of an experience."

But, it's not voluntary, and it's not intentional, and it's not purposive, and it's not experienced as healing. That may be in many ways the most significant aspect of really studying the shamanic traditions again, because maybe through seeing how these ancient, ancient, most ancient, traditions on this planet handle this. We may be able to learn how to transform these very painful kinds of things that we're going through as a society, as a species, as a civilization, into something that is healing and may end up saving our sanity after all—perhaps. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you—Michael Harner.

Lecture by Michael Harner

Thank you, Ralph. It's great to get an introduction from an old friend. [...] Well, the dismemberment experience, as Ralph indicated, is one of the most famous and mysterious occurrences in tribal shamans' journeys. This non-ordinary occurrence, commonly recounted by Siberian shamans, is also widely known through accounts by Inuit or Eskimo Shamans, Aboriginal Australians, South American Indians, and other shamanic peoples. In dismemberment, Indigenous shamans making journeys to the Lower or Upper World typically find themselves being attacked and their bodies destroyed—down to the bones. The attack may be by wild animals, by "savages" (in quotes), as they perceive them, who chop up the journeyers, or by other entities. Although there are many variations in this experience, the basic aspects typically reported by the shamans themselves involve being stripped to the bones and then having their organs and flesh rebuilt up from them.

Ethnographers and scholars of shamanism have long puzzled over the meaning of such reports. While recognizing the experiences to have initiatory significance, anthropologists often have tended to assume that the experiences were implicitly programmed outcomes of culturally learned expectations, derived from specific Indigenous traditions. In other words: that culture is the explanation. My own experientially-oriented investigations while teaching practical shamanism have led me to quite different conclusions. For example, many contemporary urban beginners in shamanic journeying who have never heard of the dismemberment experience have it happen to them spontaneously, sometimes during their very first journey to the lower or upper worlds.

As is well known, Siberian shamans' accounts of being dismembered while journeying to other worlds are perhaps the most famous. So let us take a representative Siberian example as our first case. [6] An Avam Samoyed [7] was very ill and expected to die. Almost unconscious, he made an involuntary journey to the lower world, where he was led on by two spirit animal helpers, the mouse and the ermine. Following them, he came to a desert and saw a distant mountain. After three days travel, he reached it. Now, in [shamanic] journeys—and you probably have had similar experiences of the compression or extension of time in altered states—in [shamanic] journeys, the time might be even years, which takes place sometimes in half an hour of journeying. But these are called journeys outside of time by some of the Siberian shamans. It's a different relation to time.

What is this memory? It is one memory and yet many. It is the Dreamtime. It is the mythic reality. It is the reality where there is no time. It is the memory of the union with the universe that existed before we were each individualized through conception and birth into this ordinary reality. It is the memory of the cosmic consciousness from which we came and to which we will return. This is perhaps the greatest unexpected gift of dismemberment/rememberment.

Michael Harner

So after so after three days travel, he reached it. Now he reached it and entered an opening and came upon a naked man working on a bellows. A blacksmith, in other words. On the fire was a cauldron as big as the earth. The naked man saw him and caught him with his huge pair of tongs. The novice had time to think, I'm dead. The man cut off his head, chopped his body into bits, and put everything into the cauldron. There he boiled the body for three years. The blacksmith then fished the Samoyed man's bones out of a river in which they were floating, put them together, and covered them with flesh again. Also, the blacksmith covered the Samoyed's eyes so he could see shamanically and fixed his ears so he could understand the language of plants.

Now for comparison, let's consider the account of a Euro-American who had never heard of the shamanic dismemberment experience, and his only assigned mission in this initial journey was to meet an unknown animal in the lower world. [8] So to the sound of monotonous drumming—and in our work we use drumming exclusively, which in fact drumming or other monotonous percussion sound is the typical way of journeying probably in close to 90% of the world's shamanic cultures. It wasn't the way I was introduced to journey, which was with strong psychedelics in the upper Amazon. But in general, that's the way it is with drumming or something similar. [...] They're different doors, but they get to the same place.

So to the sound of this drumming, he went down through the hole at the bottom of a tree he knew in ordinary reality, thence through a cave and emerged into sunlight on the first level of the Lower World. There he met a fawn that led him to a grassy forested knoll where there were other deer. Like shamans in some cultures sing their journey experiences as they travel, he narrated his experiences as he journeyed. His words tell the rest. And we have a technique where the person can sing or recite their journey as it's happening, much as a sports announcer is review reporting on a game. In fact, it can intensify the experience. It's called simultaneous narration. So here we have his words as it's happening.

"I don't know what I should do, whether I should sit down, stand up, or walk, or, oh, the deer disappeared. It's like I stayed at the knoll, but you know, the sun went down, and it's dark now, and there's a fire. And now I'm just supposed to be with this animal—but it is like there's something going on around the fire. It's like there is a pot or a cauldron boiling. The voices are calling to me to come closer. I'm supposed to look into the boiling pot. I don't know if I want to, though. I'm wondering where the deer is, because that's all I was supposed to do, is to be with this animal. I don't know. I feel like it's around. Oh, I'm the deer. It's like I'm the animal now."

And I just mentioned parenthetically that this is part of ongoing shamanic experience. Merging. One initiation after another, merging the animals, merging the plants, merging the rocks, merging with their patients, merging with the universe. It's all part of the initiation that goes on and on.

"Now I'm like the fawn and I feel real cautious about it, you know, wanting to approach the fire and you know look into the bubbling cauldron. Oh dear, the scene has changed, just like it went dark, and I thought I was a deer, and then I became me again, and the deer was separate. Now it's like it's a village scene. It's like dusk. And it's like dusk and it's like a teepee and there are people moving around. I guess I'm in the center of it, but I don't think anyone sees me I can't tell where the deer is. Oh, I'm like the deer. I'm the deer. And everyone is jumping on me or something. And oh, I'm the deer, and they all cut me up and threw me into the pot. That's why I was the deer and I didn't want to walk in towards the pot, because now I'm the deer and it's like—well no one told me, but I appeared there. And now like they all got me. They put knives in me and cut me up and butchered me and I'm cooking in the pot. And now people are eating me. You know, it's like I'm cooked up in a stew. This is bizarre. I'm cooked up in a stew, and it's like everyone is eating the deer, but I'm watching it from—I don't know where I'm watching it from. Oh, I see it's like I'm above. I'm above them and I'm just like watching them and I'm dead."

This is what I call an out-of-spirit experience. You know, out of body is you are quite familiar with. Now you're out there already and then you also can move out. It's also it's related to the doppleganger [phenomenon].

"And I'm in their stewpot cooking over the fire and I'm watching them go about their lives. It's almost like I didn't die. I mean, you know, I still feel like I'm alive or something watching them, but I no longer have a body. I don't know what's going on. Just like I'm fading away. Yeah, I died. And I went to where there were those singing voices and into the darkness, but I see that there is more light. It's like I can go on from here where I am dead. And I can come back again. And this is part of the experience. Wow!"

Okay, and that's how that narration ends. There is some deviation here from our own shared culture. Okay, in the above experience that I just gave you, this Western journeyer not only was cut up and cooked in a cauldron in the manner of the Samoyed shaman, but first had the experience merging with the deer, separating from the deer, and then being one with the animal while being butchered. Then he saw the scene in an out-of-body type of experience similar to that reported by near-death survivors. Thus he learned that he still had existence, even though he no longer had a body, an important teaching. As a bystander, he saw his flesh, the same as the deer's, being eaten. Much is reported for Inuit or Eskimo shamans viewing their bones while being elsewhere as onlookers. He also learned, as have shamans before him, that, quote, I can go on from here where I am dead. And laughing, he says, I can come back again. His laughter is symptomatic of the joy and ecstasy resulting from a dismemberment experience.

He received these revelations in a profound shamanic state of consciousness, as indicated by his deep, intense breathing. He was prepared to journey onward and learn more, but the drumming callback signal sounded. So we returned. We never talk during these journeys. The only thing that happens is that when it's time to come back, either on the drumming tape, it's the end of a half an hour or it's in the live session, then there's a signal done with the drum for the person in return. Now being cooked up and cut up in a cauldron is only one of the many cross-cultural scenarios of shamanic dismemberment experiences. Furthermore, the cross-cultural comparisons and regularities can be incredibly detailed.

The following example of a journey by a Euro-American woman illustrates this point, as will be discussed at the end of her account. [9] Now in this case the journeyer has a divination mission, to ask for health information from her tutelary spirit, in this case, a teacher, or a being in human form. Specifically, she's requesting advice on achieving optimum health for herself. To her astonishment, her tutelary spirit both dismembered and reconstituted her with new body parts. She had never heard nor read of this rememberment experience. And this again is a simultaneous narration account. She's talking as it's happening.

"I'm floating slowly upwards from the plateau. I'm beginning to pass through a cloud floating up. It is a gray cumulus cloud. I'm still floating up. I'm going through something else, a clear sheet of haze. Now I'm standing on a plain. P-L-A-I-N. The ground is hazy yellow. A sort of ghost horse with an Indian on it is approaching. He turns back towards some hazy mountains. There are two other horses with Indians on them. They seem quite ethereal and ghost-like. Now I'm turning in another direction. I see a very beautiful Indian princess-like goddess. She has on a buckskin dress with glass beading across the chest. The design is a purple flower with yellow leaves. There is an edge of black beads around them."

"The tail of an animal is hanging from her waist, an ermine tail hanging down from a belt around her hips. She has moccasins with beads, like those that were on her chest. I see her face more clearly now. She is tall, slender, and she has high cheekbones. She is wearing a beaded headband. On each side of the headband is something of an animal nature hanging right by her temples. She is smiling. Are you my teacher? Yes. She is my teacher. I have a question. Could you please answer it? How can I have optimum health? She reaches out her hands towards my hands. She has her hands on the tops of mine. Her skin is quite soft and warm. I feel an electrical sensation flowing from her hands up my arms as far as my elbows. It is sort of infiltrating past my elbows with green light reaching my shoulders. Purple, like neon light, is swirling at each of my shoulders. Her hands have become one. We are merged at the hands. I am starting to take on energy that is flowing from her body. A ray of red neon light is shooting from the purple light on my shoulders into my chest area. A white light is floating out of my chest. It is exploding, making fireworks like skyrockets, up into the air and coming down on each side of me. Now a stream of white light is going from my heart to her heart. We are connected at our hearts. The stream of white light is becoming quite large. Our whole chests are connected with white light. Now the connection is beginning to happen between our foreheads. It is yellow light. Now becoming a solid golden yellow rod. It is light that has become solidified between her forehead and mine."

"We are becoming one. A green light is circling my waist and becoming a figure eight, connecting her waist with mine and flowing between our waists. Her hands aren't lying on top of mine anymore. We are joined at the fingers now. We have one set of fingers that go from my hand to her hand. There are no fingernails. We are joined to the fingertips There is a band of purple light around our pelvic areas. Our legs are merging at the knees with a pink light. Our toes have become one. There is a golden light surrounding me. We are becoming one. We are merging into one body. We are one. We are spinning. We are one ball. Spinning, spinning over a landscape like a golden tumbleweed. There are sparks of light pouring off of us. We are a whirlwind of light. We are spinning light. We are one spinning light. Golden light. Thrashing, sparking. We are pure electricity now. We have collided with something. We rolled into a stone, something like a big granite block. We have split into two halves. I am a piece of solid gold. I am a gold rock form. She is also in gold rock form. I am a piece of solid rock. I am gold. I am in the form of gold. My human form is not here. It feels a bit scary wondering if I will get my human form back again, because being in gold is like being paralyzed. A hand is coming out of that other half of the piece of gold. She is reaching out to me. I have an arm coming out of the gold too. Once again we are holding hands. It is my right hand and her left hand. She is stepping out of her half of the golden ball."

"I see her again. She is trying to pull me out. I'm not coming out very easily. Just my arms are out. I am a skeleton. I am a skeleton of purple glowing light. My skeleton is made of amethyst. That is all there is of me. In my eye sockets are two emeralds. I am being healed. From the very base of my body, from the very base, from my bones, where my third eye would be, is a diamond, a cut diamond. The facets are sending out light I am an amethyst skeleton with two emeralds as eye sockets and a cut diamond where my third eye is. That is what I am now, right at this moment. My teacher now looks like she was when I first saw her, but I look like something from outer space. I don't have any flesh. Liquid is pouring down on me. Something like liquid gold is pouring down on top of my skeleton. It is turning into veins and arteries. I see my heart, my heart is gold. I'm getting veins now, and they are liquid gold, and my heart is gold I am an amethyst skeleton with emerald eyes, a cut diamond in my forehead, and now I have a golden heart with arteries and veins of gold. There is a liver being formed for me somewhere. It is made of it looks like ruby. It is like a liquid ruby. I see hands putting it into the place where my liver would be. There it is."

"Now there are hands bringing other organs to me. It is happening so quickly I can't see what each organ is. There is my spleen now. It is like liquid sapphire. I think I'm being made of stones. It is strange. These stones are spirit helpers for my body. These stones are healing me. My body is being healed. Flesh is coming in, it is flesh, it is new flesh. I have muscles now too, they are strong. They are strong new muscles. The flesh is new, the hair is new, the teeth are new. I am being healed at a cellular level. My precious stones. I still don't recognize myself. I almost feel like I have wings, like I'm an angel. I feel like I have died. I am an angel. I have wings. They are big golden wings. I have a white robe on. And I have a golden light coming out of my head. My teacher is touching me with her hands. I am returning to my human form again. I kneel. She says, You have a new body. You will know how to take care of it. My health has been restored. I've been healed by the stones, and she's singing these words now. A golden rod of lights is coming in through my head and coming out of each leg at my toes. is making a humming sound."

"I am lying down now. My teacher is sitting beside me. I see green people at my feet. I don't know if they are real or if they are Egyptian mummies. They don't look human. The middle one seems human. I think she has a message for me. She is handing me something on a tray. It is a ball, a glass ball. She says It is filled with light and energy. It is all the energy you will need. Thank you. Thank you. It is a gift. It is a gift from a very ancient being. It is such an important gift. It took three people to give it to me, one to hold the energy, and the two others to somehow help and protect it. It is a very beautiful, wonderful gift. I am very grateful. I don't know what to say. Thank you. Thank you doesn't seem like it could ever be enough. There is purple light coming out of my shoulder like rods of light. I am being called back now by the drum. My teacher is sitting me up. We embrace. I thank her. I'm walking back. She is behind me, but I don't know if she is coming with me. I'm floating down, I'm floating down. Rose petals are floating down too. I am now back sitting on the plateau."

Now this was an emotion-filled journey for this woman, as you can imagine. Afterwards, she had this to say:

"I asked how I could have optimum health and I was changed, energized, turned into pure energy, and then into metal. I felt I was really metal. Then I was built up again from the bones and helped by the mineral kingdom and stones. I was recreated and then given all the energy I needed. And I was told that I would know how to take care of myself. Being changed into so many different things has left me a little stunned. I feel like my question is answered more than I thought it would be answered. At times it was scary just being in such a different form than I'm used to. A part of me was afraid when I was the metal and then the skeleton that I wouldn't get the rest of my body back. Also when I was the angel, I didn't know if I would get my body back again. A lot of the time I was frightened about what was happening to me. All the energy changes. I think it might take a little while to sort of absorb it all and incorporate it. First I joined with my teacher, then I became a ball of energy, and then metal. Then I was a skeleton made of amethyst. I felt totally recreated. Some of these forms were so foreign that I was somewhat frightened that I might stay in those other forms because I didn't really get told, you know, ahead of time."

Well, I did I didn't know this was going to happen to her. That's one of the nice things about shamanism is I really don't have to know what's happening. The spirits take over. And by the way, in this divination journey, as in many divination journeys, you'll ask for information, and you'll get information, but you also get spontaneous healing too. Both things happen. You get more than you asked for, if they feel it's appropriate.

"I didn't know anything. It just started happening, so I got slightly blown away. I guess I felt I died When I first came back, I felt frightened because I wondered, do I still know my children? Do I still know anybody that I knew? But I'm sure that as time goes by I will. In fact, I probably know everybody still, but I feel like I am new. I was recreated, but instead of turning back into me, I turned into an angel first. I finally got my body back, a body back, but it was an angel I knew I wasn't back and then my teacher touched my cheek and I turned back into me. She was helping to bring me back I was told that now I had the body, uh the new body, I would know how to take care of it. It was like I was given a second chance."

So that's the end of her account, but I'd like to now share some things here from the ethnographic literature. One of the interesting things about her account is that she was completely unsophisticated about the anthropological and shamanic literature, as mentioned before, and not even heard of shamanic dismemberment. And yet what she experienced fits well within the range of the details of dismemberment experiences in the ethnographic literature on shamanism. To start at the beginning, she meets her teacher and asks how to have optimum health. The teacher takes her hands and the journeyer. feels an electrical sensation flowing into her. This is one of the ways spiritual power feels, is a kind of energy, as you all know, as it is passed on to a shaman or from a shaman to a patient. Indeed, she immediately recognized that she is taking on energy. The power or energy manifests itself as purple light that sends red light into her cheek, then a white light floats out of her chest.

Similarly, Jívaro or Untsuri Shuar shamans in the upper Amazon see a person's power manifesting itself as light in rainbow colors in the chest, and in the case of a particularly powerful person sometimes as a white light in the chest. She is undergoing spiritual death and rebirth. As Mircea Eliade observes, all experiences of the supernatural light present this common denominator. Anyone receiving such experience undergoes a change in being. A meeting with the light indicates a spiritual rebirth. The white light floating floating out of the journey's chest demonstrates that it is a form of power by exploding. In a similar way, the Untsuri Shuar people, with whom I've spent quite a bit of time—that's why I'm quoting them—in an altered state of consciousness, may see a light emanating power vision—Arutam—explode in darkness at the sacred waterfall.

The white light then goes out from her heart. The radiation of light from one's body is known to the Igloolik Eskimo as lighting or enlightenment and as part of shamanic initiation. As an Igloolik shaman said I had gained my Qaumaniq, my enlightenment, the shaman light of brain and body, and this in such a manner that it was not only I who could see through the darkness of life. But the same light also shone out from me, imperceptible to human beings, but visible to all the spirits of earth and sky and sea, and those now came to me and became my helping spirits. The light going out of her heart connects with the heart of her tutelary spirit or teacher. She merges with the spirit teacher and becomes one with her. This merging with the teacher is another classic step in shamanic experience.

In Siberian tribes and among the Tamang of Nepal—described by Peters [10]—where the shaman goes to his spirit teacher in the upper world and in white light becomes one with the teacher. As Peters notes, the shaman is at the same time the god and the divine son. I and the father are one. Yellow light becomes a golden rod connecting her forehead to that of the teacher. The forehead among the Australian Aboriginal shamans is the location of the strong eye that permits one to see shamanically. And among the Dayak of Borneo, gold dust is put into the eyes to give an initiate shaman keenness and strength of sight. The journeyer subsequently becomes a skeleton, first of light and then of amethyst, a kind of quartz crystal.

Becoming a skeleton is one of the most famous widespread shamanic initiatory experiences being described in detail for tribes in Siberia as well as among the Eskimo and in Australia. Then liquid gold flows into her, becoming her arteries, veins, and heart. This echoes reported shamanic journey experiences among the Yakut of Siberia, where a future shaman, after being reduced to a skeleton, is given new blood. She next receives emerald and diamond crystals in her head, another common cross-cultural initiatory experience. Similarly, among the Conibo Indians of South America, a shaman introduces rock crystals into the novice's head. These then take the place of these organs and become his strength. It is well known in shamanic cultures that crystal—usually quartz—power helps the shaman to see. For example, among the Wiradjuri of Australia, quartz crystals were put into water to be drunk in order to be able to see ghosts, which they mean spirits. When the Australian Aboriginals journeyed to the upper world, sometimes the spirit teacher, Baiame, sang a quartz crystal into the forehead of the journeyer so that he would be able to be seeing right into things. You're wondering why I am saying "he" all the time? I'm quoting things, and it just is the way it was written.

She next receives new body organs in the form of precious stones. This parallels the shamanic initiation of the Unmatjera tribe of Australia in which the Atnongara stones are placed in the initiate's body in connection with providing him with a new set of internal organs. A similar initiatory experience is reported for the Binbinga tribe. Then she receives new flesh, a process that is found wherever dismemberments have been reported by tribal shamans, and the healing is completed by giving her an entire new body. This generally is considered by scholars to represent death and then the rebirth of the person as a shaman. Indeed, she says, "I have died." She also exclaims, "I have wings. They are big golden wings." This too echoes the experiences of shamans and other cultures. For example, again, among the Wiradjuri of Australia, the journeyer grows wings after receiving quartz crystal water in the upper world from Baiame, a teacher. The growing of wings, as Eliade notes, as a result of mystical initiation is a well-known motif, found also in the higher religions. Thus, for instance, the Taoists believe that when a man obtains the Tao, feathers begin to grow on his body.

Then the teacher returns her to human form and tells her she has a new body and [she] will know how to take care of it—presumably as a result of the power and knowledge she has received. The journeyer states, My health has been restored. The journeyer sings, apparently in a state of ecstasy, aware that she has a new body free of illness This is not surprising, for dismemberment and reconstitution, as those of us who experienced it know, is a healing in which the journey receives a new spiritual body free of illness and pain. Another ramification is that it is an empowerment. So it is not surprising that she is given the gift of a glass ball filled with light and energy and returns to the middle world here. A crystal ball, of course, is a latter-day descendant of the shaman's quartz crystal representing light and power, the quartz crystal often being used by tribal shamans to enlighten darkness in order to see for divination and also used as a power object par excellence among the shamans of the upper Amazon and the northwest coast of North America.

And since we're in Silicon Valley (and some remarks have been made about that), I just wanted to mention that the use of the quartz crystal in the modern computers is just a continuation of an old California tradition going back six to eight thousand years as indicated by archaeology. Not in the computers that are mechanical ones, but certainly used in an analogous way by shamans to communicate, to see, and to work with power. So I think it's very propitious as a matter of fact that we're in Silicon Valley. Immediately after returning from her journey, she reviews her experience. She had at times been frightened, especially when she was not sure she would be able to return to human form. The fact that she was scared indicates how genuine and real was her experience. The depth and classic shamanic nature of her journey experience is also indicated by these statements that she made. "When I first came back I felt frightened because I wondered, do I still know my children? Do I still know anybody that I knew?"

Yet the initiation of the shaman never ends. My personal opinion is that even death is a continuation of the initiation. A great step on the return to complete union with non-ordinary reality, the hidden universe, and cosmic consciousness.

Michael Harner

Her remarks strikingly echo the account of the shamanic experience of a man named Ilpailurkna of the Australian Unmatjera tribe. As in her case, he underwent a dismemberment and reconstitution involving the use of stones and the replacement of his internal organs. When he came out of his altered state of consciousness, he had no idea where he was. And I'll quote now from an account from 1904, Spencer and Gillen. [11] Ilpailurkna had completely forgotten who he was and all about his past life. After a time the old man, his ordinary reality mentor, led him back to his camp, and showed it to him, and told him [...] that the woman there was his Lubra [12], for he had forgotten all about her. His coming back this way and his strange behavior at once showed the other natives that he had been made into a medicine man.

In a less dramatic way, the Euro-American journeyer only feared that she would not know anyone from her former life upon returning from her journey. After the journey was over, she found this fear was groundless. Yet these two examples, Western and Aboriginal Australian, illustrate how dismemberment is much more than the simple replacement of body parts, for the remembering of organs, including the brain and the heart, can also be accompanied by a remembering in terms of memory. It is an awakening of the possibility of letting go of ego-centered preoccupations with one's own personal history in ordinary reality and remembering one's heart and mind with a very ancient memory from non-ordinary reality.

What is this memory? It is one memory and yet many. It is the Dreamtime. It is the mythic reality. It is the reality where there is no time. It is the memory of the union with the universe that existed before we were each individualized through conception and birth into this ordinary reality. It is the memory of the cosmic consciousness from which we came and to which we will return. This is perhaps the greatest unexpected gift of dismemberment/rememberment. Dismemberment is the gift of disunion from our ordinary reality egocentric individual consciousness including memory of it. Rememberment is the non-ordinary reality reunion with the infinite, the ineffable, the total universe. Not surprisingly, a principal reason that the dismemberment/rememberment experience is often recognized by shamans as a critical, sometimes even initiatory experience is that it can radically hasten one's almost inevitable change of perspective about what is ultimately reality.

Through the experience, the shamanic journeyers have dismembered much of their ordinary reality personal history and remembered their unity with non-ordinary reality—the spiritual reality lying outside of time. They now know that the difference between history and myth is that myth is always true. Not only does their perspective change, but their outward behavior. They are different, and their communities perceive the difference. It is recognized that the return journeyers have partaken of the divine or sacred. They are expected sooner or later to effect miracles, whether of healing, divination, or something else. This is why the dismemberment experience is often considered shamanic initiation in many cultures. Yet the initiation of the shaman never ends. My personal opinion is that even death is a continuation of the initiation. A great step on the return to complete union with non-ordinary reality, the hidden universe, and cosmic consciousness.

To those who have undergone dismemberments, there is a subtler and equally important side of the experience that does not lend itself easily to graphic description. This is the ineffable and therefore inherently indescribable experience of what happens on the shamanic journey as part of the reconstitution or rememberment. This is the experience of ecstatic union or reunion. Here are some of the descriptions Westerners have offered of the essentially ineffable emotional and spiritual feelings of spiritual union. They have experience with reconstitutional rememberment.

This woman says, "I feel myself kind of coming back together again, dancing and being playful with this vibration, with the tingling, and electricity everywhere, so aware of every single cell of my body, every single particle of my body. All there is in this place is just being, the vibration of this place. It seems like a source place, this vast energy. It's like this vibration can extend anywhere. Its intelligence can be called and connected to anything that calls it. I think it's what we try to call love."

Audio Recording

Note: this recording was digitized from a 30-year-old cassette tape. The audio is generally of good quality, but there is some minor distortion at times.

Acknowledgments

Text and Audio Copyright ©2026 the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Inc. All rights reserved.

Editor: Robbie Priestley, FSS Faculty Member.

Footnotes

  1. [Grof Transpersonal Training 1995]. To see a scan of the original conference brochure, please click here.
  2. [Harner 2013:183]
  3. [Presti 2019]
  4. Metzner and Harner both frequently use outdated terms when referring to Indigenous Peoples. These terms were considered accepted use in 1995, but are now known to be problematic in certain ways. Examples of these terms include "native," "Eskimo," "Indians," and several others. Metzner and Harner clearly did not intend to be derogatory in any way towards Indigenous Peoples or their cultures. The content of the text thus remains uncorrected with regards to the use of these outdated terms.
  5. The first portion of Metzner's introduction was apparently not recorded, so it is difficult to know what he is referring to when he says he met Harner "again."
  6. Harner also recounts this tale in Cave and Cosmos: "Being Cut Up and Cooked in a Cauldron: A Siberian Samoyed Account." [Harner 2013:174]
  7. The Avam Samoyed are "an indigenous Arctic people who traditionally resided in the lower half of the Taymyr Peninsula of Russia." [Encyclopedia Britannica 2026]
  8. Harner also recounts this tale in Cave and Cosmos: "Being Cut Up, Cooked in a Cauldron, Death and Rebirth: A Westerner's Account." [Harner 2013:175]
  9. Harner also recounts this tale in Cave and Cosmos: "A Westerner's Dismemberment and Rebirth With a Healing and a New Body." [Harner 2016:177]
  10. [Peters 1998]
  11. [Spencer 1904]
  12. A female Aboriginal Australian. This term is now outdated and considered to be racially offensive. [Conor]

References