The Vision

Tony Crisp

It was from visions in dreams that the motivation for this book arose. They were visions that suggested unprecedented changes emerging in our own times.

Farley Mowat, in his book People of the Deer, writing about his contact with the Inuit, says that we forced them into our way of life and dispossessed them of their self sufficiency, food source, lands and life. We, the white race, have denied them the right to function as viable human beings according to their own desires and capabilities.

The statement refers to many more people than the Inuits, and includes the north and south Native Americans, the Australian Aborigines, and the native people of many other lands, some of whom now live in what amount to ghettos surviving on state aid instead of being self sufficient and proud people. Having seen some of these people, many of whom resort to alcohol and drugs to take the place of racial pride and spiritual wisdom, it seems we spread a poison that turns them either into almost sub-human beings, or they too become bent on grabbing as much from passing trade as we do ourselves. Only a few manage to maintain their inner integrity.

A drunk aboriginal. Contributing factors include poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, gambling and pornography. Children are turned into prostitutes.

I write that not as a criticism of our ways, but as a warning. What stood out in the visions leading to this book is that the poison we spread among others is eating away at us. Look around at the amount of alcohol consumed, the drugs used simply to manage to face daily life, the uncountable people taking antidepressants and psychoactive medication, the suicide rate, the unbelievable gap between rich and poor, the terrible amount of murder and rape - even children - in our society, then decide for yourself if we are not poisoned by the way of life, the attitudes and the spiritual deadness we spread elsewhere. I believe the change we face is the end of an age - the death of a way of life we ourselves poisoned.

As an example of this, a recent documentary on UK's BBC Radio 4 explained how psychiatrists and traditional Peruvian shamans are successfully tackling heroin and alcohol addiction using ancient tribal methods of seeking visions using the jungle vine ayahuasca. Jacques Mabit, the director of Takiwasa, a centre for treating drug addictions, says that the lack of meaning in life in western society leaves a huge vacuum in a person that can be the root cause of addiction. The success rate at the clinic is as high as 70 percent.

A jungle meeting to use ayahuasca

But how does a drug deal with drug addiction and enable the person to find healing? Well, first perhaps we need to put our finger on the sickness. Mabit calls it lack of meaning. That only scratches the surface though. If, as I say, we too have been absorbing the poison, what is it and what are its symptoms? Comparing our beliefs and convictions to those people we dispossessed may help with this. It is a fairly accurate generalisation to say that tribal people believed they existed as part of nature and the land. Often they owned nothing and had no concept of ownership.

The massive difference between rich and poor we experience did not exist for them. They felt a connection with each other and a real reason for working together and supporting each other. In most cases they had no monetary system. Food was seen as a gift from the planet or life, and reverenced and shared. They were certain their earthly life was an expression of a force or awareness far greater than their limited present life, and at death they entered this larger life. Many of them deeply respected their ancestors and could see how their present life and its advantages were a continuum from the past.

For ourselves, our medical and scientific authorities tell us we only exist because of the biological and neurological functions of our body. When those fail we are dead - finished. We have no felt connection with other forms of life in any other way than that we eat them and need them to fulfill our needs. The only thing of any importance is money, because without it you are the lowest of the low - a loser who cannot take any of life's goods. This is a huge game because everything, if you are near the bottom, is owned by somebody else, and with no money you either have to get things by crime or by obeying the demands of others. There is really no such thing as self sufficiency. It is replaced by dependence unless you have managed to hoard or obtained money or goods in whatever way. But even that is uncertain. Many humans are bred or trained to be consumers or workers, as in a beehive. To gain even a place to live, which so called primitive peoples can manage in a day or two of labour, we have to work and struggle year after year. Many never achieve that. I have seen people in India living in garbage sacks strung on sticks, or in shacks most of us in the west wouldn't even keep our garden tools in.

Often we do not know who our neighbour is next door, except on a superficial level. We struggle to survive for ourselves and perhaps our family alone, not as an integrated community. The huge aim in education and life direction is industry and often war. The raising of children and the wonderful opportunities of education and experience we could give them are there only for those with money - and even that is made difficult by the structure of our society and its systems.

Obviously I have exaggerated, but have done so to paint a graphic picture. Tribal peoples also fought savage wars over territory, and still do. They were and are not all wise as far as their relationship with the land and animals is concerned. But I paint this picture to show why Mabit uses a drug to help those who come to the clinic. They are looking for a vision, a new way of experiencing and looking at their life. They seek to be pulled out of the worldview they have been raised in to see if they can find one that doesn't destroy them. The way of life they know, the beliefs and attitudes they have grown up with, have led them to a devastated life and they want something else.

Let us be clear. This has nothing to do with the recreational and 'fun' use of drugs. That is yet another facet of our sick society, that so many try to escape into a drugged altered state of consciousness. In older cultures drugs such as tobacco, ayahuasca, ibogaine in Africa, psilocybin mushrooms and cacti containing mescalin in South America, were never used 'recreationally'. They were used very carefully as a means to find a fuller vision of life and death, and a meeting with oneself. From the beginning in the west, LSD was used as a tool for psychotherapy.i It enabled the cure of problems previously thought incurable. That was and is possible because LSD, along with psilocybin and mescalin, temporarily remove the barrier between our conscious personality and the usually unconscious and vaster level of us that connects with the foundations of life in us. They enable a vision, an awareness, of who you really are. But more importantly they enable you to face your buried past, underneath which is the self-existent core of your being. That has nothing to do with a fun trip. It is hard work, it confronts you with pains and knowledge about yourself you may not wish to meet. You discover the blockages that have led to the distorted life many of us lead, and the agonies that lead to violence, crime, and inability to relate cooperatively. But, most importantly, you gradually remember your life right back to the womb and beyond. That is important because most of us are amnesiacs, not knowing who we are and where we came from, and we have been raised to believe that is normal.

In 2003, The UK newspaper The Guardian, reported that Howard Lotsof, a 19 year old heroin addict, took some iboga because he couldn't get any heroin. It led him into a thirty six hour confrontation with his past memories, uncovering the roots and causes of his addiction. When he emerged he found all craving for heroin had gone. He is still free many years later, and works extensively to promote the fact that addiction can be cured. viii

But this is not an argument for using drugs to gain a vision. I only present that information because it is so well documented that serious addiction, depression and other human ills are not incurable. There are thousands of case histories, dozens of books, wads of research papers telling its story. But I know from personal experience it can all be done without drug use. Starting in the sixties through exploring dreams and various methods of self exploration, I learned what inner shifts are necessary to allow our conscious personality to experience its roots and our usually unconscious inner life.

What is it like to explore your unconscious or superconscious?

It is all very simple and uncomplicated. For thousands of years people have understood exactly what I learned, and directly experienced their inner depths for themselves. So I know it is possible and I made the journey - am still making it because it is infinite. ix Such aroused or personally enabled dreams and visions have inspired, warned, directed and transformed people throughout human history. Anthropologists discovered that tribal peoples constantly used them to heal sickness, find where best to hunt, and also to know what herbs could be used in sickness. Some of these traditional herbs, originally discovered through a dream or vision, are now part of western medicine.

It is only with the advent of the organised approach to the Christian experience, and the scientific outlook on life, that the respect and use of personal dream and visionary experience faded into the background. Then the psychiatrists Freud, Jung and Adler resurrected them, but science, looking at these dreams, these visions, only as neurological or physiological phenomena, and modern Christianity looking at them sometimes as works of evil, still largely sees them as random, meaningless, or illusory. This is a bit like looking at the veins and digestive tract of a child and thinking you know what and who that child is. Dreams and visions are far more than any logical analysis or partial understanding of a body system reveal, just as human personality is far more than any medical or psychological diagnosis can say. They connect with all we are. Shakespeare dramatised something of this in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock wanted a pound of flesh from Antonio. But you cannot separate the flesh from the blood, and the blood from the person, and the dream or vision cannot be separated from the whole being. Through them we know something of our wholeness and our connection with the whole.

Social and personal changes in the past, and those we face in the future, can also lead us into the wilderness of our mind and emotions. It is a spiritual desert. In that place the forces of mind and emotion are turned against ourselves. In that experience our will can be broken, hope vanquished and all efforts seem pointless. In the past these depressive powers that can possess a person were thought of as evil spirits. Ancient peoples everywhere found their own methods of dealing with them. They sought reconnection with the life process that had given them existence. Throughout the world and imbedded in language there are different names for this connection with ones source, everything from God to Creator or the Great Spirit. The Naskapi Indians of Labrador called it Mista peo - the Great Man. In their great isolation they depended on Mista peo to guide them through life, and in meeting the difficulties they faced in surviving. And although our rational mode of thinking and problem solving is an enormous aid in dealing with life, it does not connect us in a life giving way to our own roots.

In Peru the local drug ayahuasca is used help clear out the dark fears and life experiences that cloud a life. In Gambia a shrub called ibogaine was employed for the same purpose, to heal and reconnect the person with their core. In Mexico, mushrooms containing psilocybin or cacti containing mescalin were, and still are, seen as aids to the healing of a burdened spirit or to gain life enhancing visions. Other cultures have used an enormous variety of techniques to enable people to break through the limited awareness of the conscious and rational mind to reveal the often wonderful treasures usually held within the darkness of what lies beyond our everyday awareness.

Today we need such healing and reconnection more than ever. As an example of this, ibogaine is used in clinics in Canada, the UK, Holland and Mexico as a one treatment route out of heroin or alcohol addiction. People who have used it say that it pushes them into a thirty four hour confrontation with childhood and adult traumas and experiences that were at the root of their addiction. Their experiences show them that addiction and depression arise out of past experiences that had remained unconscious and undealt with.ii

Liberty Caps - Toadstools containing psilocybin

But ibogaine, ayahuasca, mushrooms and cacti are only one route to releasing experiences that can heal and give a vision of a new you. Past cultures have developed innumerable methods to gain the vision that can heal and make whole. In fact in the past you were not considered a full person unless you had sought the vision that could give meaning to your existence and clarify your path in life. Such visions were seen as of enormous importance because they enabled the person to see and know who they were in the widest sense, and also to see their links with the world around them. So visions are sought not only to look into the past but to uncover essential talents, release unique qualities and potential in order to meet what life has in store. As Jacque Mabit points out, the lack of this dimension in most people's life today is a major factor in the number of suicides, sufferers of depressive illness, and even crime.

The infinite potential

I could write at length about why this is so; about how our conscious personality is only a tiny part of who we are. I could repeat the left and right brain theories, and point you to the experience of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who, after experiencing a stroke that damaged her left brain functioning, experienced the enormity of what was usually beyond her daily awareness.iii But I believe if you are reading this book you may already have a background in understanding that. If not, there are many books committed to explaining. This is not the place to repeat those arguments, but if you do need to see them, read some of the many books specifically designed to present that information.iv

Possibilities of a new life

Calling this possibility of a wider experience of yourself 'vision' or the unconscious is not a clear enough description to really help connect with what is possible for us. It helps to recognise that the mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without your conscious effort or participation. You share that journey from conception to birth with all the other life forms that exist with you on this planet. But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins. However, our personality, our conscious self, is almost entirely blind to, and often defended against, the awareness of this life process, this unconscious yet continual 'something' that gives us existence. In fact we exist as a sort of tiny bubble on the surface of a vast ocean. But even so, most of us are totally blind to the reality of that - until our eyes are opened in what has been called the experience of vision. David Bohm, one of the foremost theoretical physicists of his generation, says about this that there are two types of experience we have of the world around us. There is the 'explicate' order and the 'implicate'. He defines the explicate order as the impressions of the world gained via our senses and the interpretations the brain places on these impressions. These impressions and the brain's interpretations - based on millions of years of evolutionary experience and input - lead to a view that we each have separate minds in isolated bodies.

The implicate order exist within the intricate simplicity of things.

The implicate order is the universe as it is when we move beyond the limitations of the senses and the brain's limited evolutionary programs. Then we begin to see the universe as a single indivisible whole, and ourselves as intricately part of that whole. Bohm says that 'if we don't see this it's because we are blinding ourselves to it.' The visionary experience re-establishes our ability to see reality.

This is a rather weak analogy, but on my home computer I have hundreds of books and documents in digital form. As I sit and write I am usually limited in my knowledge to what I personally know, and even more limited by what I remember in my normal state of awareness. But if I want more information on any subject I can search that vast collection of written material in three or four seconds.v That is akin to the right brain activity of being able to access everything you have ever personally experienced, read or thought. But then there is another level still. I can go onto the Internet and interact with millions of people worldwide. And that is what happens inwardly, with far greater subtlety and relevance when we touch that great ocean of life of which we are an intricate part of.vi

When you experience that ocean you know it is the fundamental and unchanging core of you. You know yourself as part of something amazing, awe inspiring and beyond final description. You know also that the core of your own life is also the core, the foundation, of the universe. There is no separation. There is no beginning or ending.

Accessing the power

I said earlier that I observed what shifts were necessary to make in my feelings, body and attitudes, in order to allow the visionary experience. The process so fascinated me I wanted to know more and be capable of more. Besides which, as said elsewhere, some of that impulse was due to my seeking a way out of depressions and physical pain. But the further I went into the territory, the more I realised what incredible possibilities we all have. I cannot claim to be a genius of vision, but I have found healing, and I have found a sustaining peace and readiness to meet each day, feeling I have what it takes to deal with it.

What I discovered was that the different pathways to vision all have a very similar basis when you look at their fundamental process. They are often very different externally, everything from dance to holding the breath. The mushroom or ayahuasca route is not one many of us wish to take, so this other drugless route has become a wide thoroughfare for people seeking healing and wholeness. Some of the pathways have become commercial enterprises, or they claim to be the one and only path. As Suzanne Segal says in describing her own wonderful awareness of the core, 'If you could see things as only and exactly what they are, you would see that the 'you' that is seeing is the vastness itself.' You are what you seek, and there is nothing you need buy from another. If the doorkeepers of such paths have something of such value, something that places them irrevocably in union with the infinite, they will give it to you with love, or ask you to support them in presenting this opportunity to others.

The many different paths to the one great ocean of Life can be summarised in a simple way because they all have a common factor. It, like dancing or meditating for extended periods, quietens your normal way of thinking and looking at the world. In a meditation seminar I attended that lasted for several days I observed this with great clarity. After three days of meditation I saw my thinking mind faint. It could no longer sustain the continued concentrated pursuit of the question we were asking. In the moment of my rational thinking mind fainting there was an experience of divine Life knowing itself as this man people call Tony. In that state I knew connection with all the people around me, and the birds, trees and earth. For they and I shared the same spirit. I had arrived home at the source of things. That experience, as ephemeral as it may sound, has given me something that strengthened me to pass through big life changes, and travel joyfully into old age.vii

If it is not clear what I mean when I say my mind fainted, it is no big mystery. You do it every night as you go to sleep. What you need to learn if you want to enter that wider life consciously is to reproduce that state of mind and body at will while awake and maintaining focussed awareness. If you can do that you can dispense with all the magical drumming, chanting, wild dancing and shouting, and all the other methods people learn to bring on the experience of this wider life. In sleep your waking personality drops into that wider life and usually loses itself until you wake or vaguely know your existence in dreams. But as you fall into sleep a very particular condition has to exist before sleep can happen. You surrender your hold on yourself.

You surrender your will and your body. If this did not happen the spontaneous and unwilled action of sleep couldn't happen, and the spontaneous and unwilled action of dreams, their emotions, sexuality, movements and sounds, could not occur.

The key words here are obviously 'surrender, spontaneous' and 'unwilled'. The action is to surrender and let go of your waking will.

When you experience your core self it is spontaneous and unwilled. It happens under its own impulse, not because you willed it, decided it, made it happen or created it with your imagination or desires. In other words you have two levels of will, your waking and your sleeping. There is the normal, personal awareness 'I want' type of will. Then there is the will or impulse that grew your body from a tiny seed and still maintains all the life functions sustaining your existence. If you have failed to see this before, or haven't yet acknowledged the extreme importance of this, then it is a sign of the sort of blindness afflicting our culture.

The way to be healed of such afflictions is first to recognise that we only run a very small part of the show, and with the humility arising from that recognition, salute the main and sustaining force in our life. To learn this we need to watch what happens as we surrender to sleep. Learn to reproduce the letting go, the surrender, the willingness to let the spontaneous and unwilled to express without interference. If you can, stand before the unknown of yourself as naked of beliefs and preconceptions as you can.

Life is already your body and soul. It created you. So don't be afraid to surrender everything to it. Open your body, your mind, your sexuality and emotions, your imagination and memories to that indefinable Creative that underlies your existence.

Gradually or suddenly it will be released from the bonds it has been tied by. It will emerge from the rubble of your life experiences, as painful and full of past miseries as they may be. It may shake you. It may take you on a journey into yourself and your past. It may open your eyes to worlds and experiences you never imagined possible. It may flow into your life as joy, purpose and direction, full of vigour and insight. Whatever it does trust it. The importance isn't simply to have an interesting experience, it is important because we are, in my opinion, facing a new era of human experience, and the new always grows out of the deeps of the human spirit. What we seek is that touch from our core; the touch that resurrects the old, giving it new life.

Remember, if you do not already know the wonderful experience of vision, then it is probably restrained, tied up, denied, even crucified and buried - maybe under generations of rubble. It may take time to grow through that rubble till you can actually see and experience its living power. Trust that as soon as you come naked to it, it reaches out to you. How can it not? It is yourself. When you first start this it may seem as if you are naked before nothing; that despite surrendering all of you, despite being ready to be moved, even shaken, and for Life to flow through you spontaneously, nothing is happening. That may tempt you to do something that appears more proactive, something you are actively doing or in control of, like a goal oriented meditation, a holy chant, a series of exercises or regulated breathing. Believe me, they are amulets to hold while in the darkness of your disbelief and blindness. The great act is nakedness. The great journey begins as soon as you offer what you know of yourself in surrender. The journey started by that nakedness begins to strip away all the old habits of thought and feelings in which you have been encased. If you can let love flow all the better. Imagine that - a glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable, the infinitely creative that is your very core. Is that something you can do?"

i See LSD Psychotherapy by W.D. Caldwell - Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof, Myself and I by Constance Newland.

ii See http://www.ibogaineclinics.com/ - http://www.ibogaine.co.uk/ibogaine6.htm - http://www.lunartproductions.com/

iii See http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/jill_bolte_taylor.html

iv See Breakthrough to Creativity by Dr. Shafica Karagulla, and There is a River by Thomas Sugrue.

v I use the software program dtSearch.

vi See http://dreamhawk.com/edgar.htm

vii This approach is called Enlightenment Intensive.

viii See http://www.ibogaine.desk.nl/lotsof.html for information about Lotsof and his work.

ix See the books Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof; Myself and I by Constance Newland.

Tony's in print Books in the UK or USA

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