More on Mental Imagery and Shamanism

by RUTH-INGE HEINZE Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, 260 Stephens Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A. 23 Ix 85 Noll's (CA 26:443-51) survey has to be taken with a grain of salt. The reader is asked to look at the cultivation of mental imagery, and this imagery is then used to investigate the role of visions in shamanism. Do we have an agreement on what is meant by "mental imagery"? Does Noll always differentiate between an image (vision) reaching the human mind, the process of decoding, and an image produced by the human mind? Though the receiver of a signal has to reproduce the signal in the process of decoding its message, the receiver is not the originator of the signal. Noll does not discuss the image makers. Buddhists distinguish between the sense object and the sense organ which perceives this object. The sensory perception is sent to the brain to be decoded. To re-cognize the object, the brain depends on its memory bank, attempting to match the perception with available cognitive grids-it looks like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like, or feels like something experienced in the past. Where a match occurs, the re-cognition activates feelings about the object. These feelings fall into three major categories-pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent. They motivate the individual to react, enjoying the pleasant, avoiding the unpleasant, or discarding the recognized perception as irrelevant. Here we have a clear sequence of perceiving, processing, recognizing, feeling, and acting (or not) operating upon a stimulus coming from outside of a system. When no sensory input occurs and ideas and other abstractions emerge, they are processed cognitively like the five sensory perceptions. Therefore, the "mind" is a sixth organ of perception. The mind appears to be a window onto different levels of reality. It facilitates, channels, and could process unlimited knowledge if our autonomic nervous system did not protect us from system overload and if cognitive grids imposed during socialization did not edit out "undesirable" information. Information-processing mechanisms (p. 446) react to perceptions of all six senses, e.g., shamans report on voices heard. If these messages are general in nature, they translate them into ordinary language. If they seem ineffable, they use symbolic or ritual language, i.e., mental imagery. Visions themselves are not "crude"; rather, the shaman's receptiveness needs refinement. Freud's pressure technique, Ferenczi's "forced phantasies," and Jung's "active imagination" (p. 451) are techniques designed for curing patients and leave out the image makers. In his extensive survey of shamanic characteristics, Noll finds Shirokogoroff's judgment about the "instability" of shamans, Wilson and Barber's "fantasy-proneness," and Devereux's schizophrenic metaphor (n. 7) unfounded and tends toward La Barre's "vatic" personality, which supports the role of shamans as messengers and mediators. During my twentyfive years of research in Asia (Heinze 1984), only 2 of 122 shamans showed pathological symptoms; the rest dissociated professionally at will and entered and left dissociative states with ease despite temporary flooding during peak experiences. The "autogenous" process (p. 444), one "that begins of itself . not through external causation," leaves out an important element-the trigger. On the other hand, Noll talks about the "deliberate, repeated 'self-inducement' of mental imagery" leading to a "cognitive figure-ground-reversal" in which the "vividness of mental imagery" is increased "until it is attended to as primary experience" and "the vividness of percepts" is diminished "until they are attended to as a secondary experience" (p. 445). These explanations are too mechanistic. Shamans are not robots that, computer-like, reproduce the information stored in their minds. This is documented by the many available records on shamanic visions, e.g., Black Elk Speaks (Neihardt 1967), a book Noll does not mention. Shamans, like artists, transcend ego boundaries. They reduce their selective permeability so that they can connect different grids and integrate different levels of reality. It is reductionist o consider these different levels as merely stereotypical, mnemonic devices. Shamans have a greater tolerance for chaos because they do not feel threatened by finding themselves in a state of apparent nonconformity. They do not abandon form; they are capable of seeing form in the formless and constantly recreate forms. Shamanic visions are unique events. Visions supply the material out of which images are made. Shamans then become image makers. The suggested research obviously requires an interdisciplinary approach.