Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Thank you.
You know, one of the sayings that the Tibetans have that I really love
is that every one you meet,
everyone you come in contact with,
everyone that's in your life
at some time has been your mother.
And they tell this story to their children,
and they use this story as a tool
to deepen their compassion,
and they tell this story in a way
that allows them to widen their compassion
so they expand their circle of compassion,
as they call it,
to include all sentient beings.
And I was given the opportunity
to look a little more deeply into their culture
when I was invited to go and watch
the medium that is -
the medium that channels - how to explain this? -
the medium that channels the Dalai Lama's oracle.
And it was in this little monastery very near the Dalai Lama's house,
near the Dalai Lama's compound in Dharamsala, India.
They brought him into the room,
and they put a hat on his head that weighed about 80 pounds,
and he started to go into trance,
his eyes rolled back,
the monks started chanting and beating drums,
and then he started talking in this high-pitched voice.
And as he was talking,
the monks came up and started writing everything he said.
He talked for about ten minutes,
and when he finished, he sort of rolled back his eyes,
the monks took off his hat, and they carried him out of the room.
As I watched this whole thing,
it was so surreal and theatrical
I almost thought that a curtain could come down
and the monks would come out
and take a bow with the medium at the end of it.
But two days later, I got to interview him.
And his name was Thupten; he's 30 years old; he's a monk -
thirty years old at the time.
He was very humble; he was very honest.
I didn't notice anything about him
that would make me think he was putting on an act.
And I asked him, "How did you get this job?
(Laughter)
How did you come into this?"
And he said that when he was 12 years old,
he started hearing voices and he started feeling very sick.
He didn't know where the voices were coming from;
he was very frightened.
And an older monk took him aside and told him he had a gift.
And he said, "This is the way you handle this state."
The monk showed him how to go into the trance,
how to come out of the trance.
He spent a year with him.
And he ended up becoming the medium for the Dalai Lama's oracle,
the Nechung Oracle.
It was about a year after that I heard the Dalai Lama interviewed.
He said, "You know, you people in the West
really don't understand what the Nechung Oracle is;
you think it's strange.
But he actually gives us very important information."
And he said, "He actually predicted the invasion of our country;
he let me know when it was time for me to leave and go into exile,
and so we get very important information out of him."
So it was about two years after that
that I was in Northern Kenya visiting the Samburu people,
doing a little piece for Amnesty International,
and my guide that I had with me, who was Samburu,
turned to me and said,
"You know, these people have been told that we are coming, by their predictor."
And he went on to say
that the predictor said we were going to be taking photographs,
we were going to be interviewing,
and he said, "The predictor also said
that you hide when you take your photographs."
And I do anything but hide when I take my photographs.
I'm about this close to the person, in their face with my Hasselblad.
And a little bit after that, I remembered I brought a new camera with me.
It was a panoramic camera, a view camera,
and this is what I look like when I'm taking those pictures.
(Laughter)
So I said, "Hmm."
So we tracked down the predictor,
and she was a 37-year-old woman named Sukulen;
she had five kids.
And she had the same story as Thupten, the medium,
only she was not only having auditory hallucinations,
she was having visual hallucinations.
She felt very sick,
and she had a grandmother that came to her
and told her that she was gifted,
told her she could be of service to her community.
So I decided I would start seeking out these people
and see what this was all about.
So I went around the world;
I went to Africa, Asia, North and South America, Indonesia;
I went up to Arctic village,
interviewing these people.
This is one of the people I interviewed, Namid.
She's in Mongolia.
She's a healer,
and she had the very same situation:
hallucinations, a mentor came and helped her.
And so as I interviewed these people,
the majority of them had this situation usually in adolescence.
I started thinking: you know, if you're a 13-year-old child,
and you start hearing things and seeing things and feeling sick,
and you're taken to the doctor,
and if you're leaving the world of agreement, like this,
which is very frightening,
if you're taken to a doctor here, you're not told you're gifted;
you're usually told that you have a mental problem.
You either have depression, you have bipolar, schizophrenia,
your brain chemistry isn't quite in balance,
so they'll give you drugs to balance that, so you're drugged.
And it's a whole different experience.
And you can imagine the outcome is totally different.
If you are told you that you are of service to the community,
that your talents can be used, you're gifted,
that would give a totally different outcome
than if you told you're diseased.
Our culture has a hard time
with nonrational states of consciousness,
and that's one of the things I learned from this project.
I heard that there was a 10-year-old boy
that was in the process of being mentored to be a shaman,
and he was up on this border of Afghanistan and Pakistan,
in a little group of people called the Kalash.
So I booked a flight to Islamabad -
I took my 16-year-old son Dax with me -
and we headed for the Kalash territory.
The Kalash are animists;
they believe in the spirits of the mountains,
the spirits of the rivers,
the spirits of the forests,
and they're completely surrounded by Islam,
and they hold onto their traditions.
There's about 3,000 of them.
When I arrived and asked about the boy,
they said, "There's no boy here."
In fact, this 10-year-old boy
turned out to be a 60-year-old goat herder by the name of Janduli Kahn,
and he was their shaman.
So I got a guide, and we went up the mountain to meet him,
and I did my typical interview:
"How did you get into this?"
In his case, it was an older shaman that mentored him.
"And what do you do?"
He was a seer as well as a healer.
"And how do you induce these trances?"
The trances in each culture are induced in very different ways.
In the Amazon, it's psychoactive plants like ayahuasca.
In Siberia and in Mongolia,
they're beating a drum next to their head.
In Pakistan, what they did is they took some juniper branches,
they sacrificed an animal,
poured the blood of that animal on those juniper branches,
and then the shaman inhaled the smoke.
So Janduli Kahn wanted to do a ceremony for me.
And I tried to talk him out of it
because he would have to sacrifice one of his animals;
he had 60 goats, and I didn't want him to do that,
but he said, "I have to do it.
My spirits - I have to thank my spirits for sending you here;
you've come so far."
So there was no talking him out of it.
So in the morning, his sons started the ceremony.
They started the fire with the juniper branches,
and then they started praying to the mountain gods
and started praying for about five minutes.
And then they sacrificed the animal,
poured the blood over the juniper branches,
and he started inhaling the smoke, and then he went into trance.
And he was real quiet before this trance,
and he hardly said anything after,
and I was asking the sons,
I said, "Did he say anything after he came out of this trance?"
And they said, "He only said that your journey is going to be difficult,
but you will be safe."
And so my son and I left the mountain,
we got in the jeep with our driver and headed up into the Hindu Kush,
and he started getting ill.
And he got more and more ill as the days progressed,
for about four days,
and I was panicking.
We were in the middle of nowhere without a doctor,
and a doctor miraculously appeared and really saved him.
People ask me,
"What is it about shamans?
What type of power do they have?
How do they get their power?"
And I have no idea.
I know they tap into something.
Maybe they're tapping into the collective unconscious
that Carl Jung talked about;
maybe they're tapping into a parallel universe
that our astrophysicists are starting to tell us about.
I have no idea.
The thing I do know is their stories that they tell -
their myths of the spirits of the land,
the spirits of the forest, the spirits of the rivers -
those myths connect them to the earth
in a way - in such a profound way that I will never know;
I will never be connected in that way.
Joseph Campbell, who studied myths and cultures all over the world,
said, "Cultures are created, maintained and transformed
by stories we often refer to as myths."
And these myths,
the myths have sort of a negative connotation
in our world;
they're really thought of as being untrue,
but "Myths are neither true nor false, but symbolic stories" -
they're metaphors -
"that give us meaning and teach us how to act."
So some of the myths we grew up with,
that determine our relationship with the earth over time,
have not been the healthiest.
You know, fill the earth, subdue it, rule over the animals.
These myths are talking about domination and control
versus the myths of these indigenous cultures
that have more reverence and respect.
And these myths are starting to fray.
Joseph Campbell said,
you know, right now we don't have any myths that are governing us.
We're waiting for a new myth to be born.
And that myth has to, number one,
speak to the planet and speak to everyone on it.
I'm going to close with just one of my favorite quotes by Albert Einstein.
He said, "We human beings tend to experience ourselves
as something separate from the whole we call 'The Universe.'
This is actually an optical illusion of our consciousness.
It's like a prison for us.
Our task is to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
This is the only true foundation for our inner peace and security."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)