blink

I just finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and was very impressed by it. One piece that particularly struck me was his description of the food tasters (chapter five, pp 176-186). They were able to train their taste buds to an extreme - even being able to taste the differences between different quality ingredients in different batches of the same foods. Gladwell writes that they are able to understand so much about their tastes because they have an extensive vocabulary to describe what they are tasting. They are able to talk extensively about a brief moment of taste. Gladwell's book is all about how people make snap decisions, so this fits right into his theme.

Earlier, he writes that most people who are asked to describe why they like or dislike something end up changing their opinions once they have tried to justify it. They lose that moment of experience to the longer thinking process. The food tasters are able to hold onto their initial opinions because they were trained to accurate describe the initial experience and therefore don't need to change the taste to fit the description.

I see a clear link between this and shamanism. When I first began having shamanic experiences, my initial reaction was to try to explain what happened. Part of working with a teacher was having him explain what was happening, but I still wanted a clearer idea of what was going on. It's the same as driving a car: you press on the gas and the car goes, but most people have no idea what's going on under the hood. I used to be an auto mechanic so I have a pretty good idea what's going on. I know all the names of the parts and what they do. Shamanic healing is a lot like driving. I turn on the key and call the souls. Then I drive around, though not always knowing where I'm going, and then people get healthy. I have no idea what's going on under the hood: what makes the car move or how the engine works.

In my practice, I've found that the Jewish explanations for the experiences seem to most accurately describe what's happening, which is why I try to study as much as possible. But I've heard a lot of crazy explanations for what's going on once you turn the key. It seems that people can't accurately describe what they are experiencing (myself included) and so we do our best to come up with an explanation. And the explanation sometimes, or often, changes what we experience. I've seen that often the explanation is more about the practitioner than the experience.

So what if we took a page from the tasters and came up with a detailed vocabulary for describing the experience of driving the shamanic car. Not how it works as I think that's beyond us and will always remain a mystery, but what we actually experience. I have no idea how to do this, but am curious to see what I can come up with.