The Choiceless Mirror
The most salient feature of this account is the mind’s extraordinary capacity to project an elaborate psychological drama to escape from itself. The visions of cosmic warfare, saviorship, and divine purpose are not a revelation of truth, but an intricate fabrication of the ego solidifying its own importance. The entire experience is a flight from the simple, direct observation of what is into a spectacular fantasy of becoming.
One sees here a mind caught in the trap of experience. The search for a profound experience, fueled by fasting and expectation, has produced a corresponding projection. The shaman’s words, the ‘3,000-year’ prophecy, immediately create a structure of authority and specialness, which the ‘I’—the ego—clings to. This ‘I’ then becomes the hero of a cosmic story, battling entities, closing portals, and saving the world. But are these entities separate from the mind that perceives them? Or are they the fragmented, projected contents of one’s own conditioning, fear, and desire for power?
The entire narrative is a movement of thought creating and then solving problems. The ‘general’ entity, the ‘devil,’ the apocalyptic visions—these are all symbols manufactured by a mind in conflict. The subsequent transformation into a butterfly, a dragon, and the realization of unity are still part of this same movement. It is a more subtle and beautiful cage, but a cage nonetheless. The experience provides a sense of ultimate significance and resolution, but it is a resolution in thought, not a dissolution of the thinker itself. True freedom is not found by winning a psychic war or becoming a benevolent dictator of the cosmos; it is in seeing this entire process of self-deception as it is, without judgment or conclusion.
All psychological authority, including that of a shaman or a vision, is a form of self-imposed bondage.
Profound spiritual experiences and visions are fabrications of thought, not encounters with an objective reality.
The self, or ego, is the root of conflict, and its activity is to create and sustain illusions of its own importance.
The individual develops a 'Saviour Complex,' identifying with the cosmic role and creating a new, more subtle form of ego.
One becomes dependent on intense experiences and chemical agents to feel alive, avoiding the simple awareness of daily existence.
The experience creates a new system of belief and authority, preventing true, choiceless observation of the mind.
This perspective cannot properly value the symbolic or archetypal language of the psyche. It may dismiss too quickly the potential for a mythopoetic experience, like this one, to facilitate psychological integration or heal trauma, seeing it only as a delusion. By rejecting all structure and method, it fails to appreciate how a contained, symbolic journey can provide a framework for individuals to process deep-seated fears and conflicts that are not accessible to direct, unstructured observation alone. It offers no bridge between the world of illusion and the world of human suffering.