You’re here today so I can teach you about phonomancy. You need to know about phonomancy if you’re going to be a part of the new jukebox musical I’m putting together, The First Church of David Bowie Shamanic Cabaret.
This should be the easiest writing assignment ever. I’ve been thinking about this non-stop for nearly five years. I have a great deal of useful information to impart to you. It’s just that the whole thing is so gigantic I don’t know where to begin.
What is phonomancy? It’s a method for inducing visionary trance. It’s based on singing and dancing along to popular songs while on a hefty dose of psychedelic mushrooms (and other substances). With enough practice, it can create a state the religious scholars call gnosis, meaning, first-hand, direct experience of the Divine. You can see—and talk—to God. Gods. All kinds of things, actually.
I believe it was TV’s Dr. House who said, “If you talk to God, you’re religious. If God talks to you, you’re psychotic.” That’s a good line, but it’s simply not true. I’m not going to debate with you whether it’s possible to talk to God and get a response. If, for whatever reason, you don’t think it is—if, for instance, you think the question is stupid because as an atheist, you think God doesn’t exist—that’s cool. There’s the door.
But I should be clear that I think it might not matter if the experience you have of God talking to you reflects a reality outside of your own consciousness. As long as you think it’s real, it’ll have real effects of you. It can change your life. And on the way you’ll have some of the most outrageous fun human beings are capable of. You can be—or at least have a completely convincing experience of being—a superhero. Someone with extraordinary abilities who lays their life on the line for the good of others.
We’ll get back to that in a bit.
As we go, I’m going to occasionally pause to unpack something I’ve just said. Here we go, first time:
Psychedelic mushrooms. Otherwise known as magic mushrooms. If you stumbled across some sprouting from a pile of cow poop or a decaying cedar log, you’d have no way of knowing there was anything special about them. They’re not an outrageous color. They don’t glow in the dark. And yet they naturally contain a substance—psilocybin—that is a very strong psychedelic.
I know everyone here has had some experience with psychedelics. That was a condition for even getting this far in the casting process. But you might not know that “psychedelic” is a word meaning “mind-manifesting.” Meaning that when you ingest a psychedelic, not only does it affect your perceptions of the world around you, it also make you more aware of the contents of your consciousness. That’s what primarily interested scientists who started studying these substances after Albert Hoffman accidentally discovered LSD 25 back in 1938. Psychedelics made people very aware of what they were thinking, or what they were seeing in their mind’s eye. Sometimes so much so that they became overwhelmed and disoriented by the onrushing contents of consciousness. Scientists that this state of overwhelm, which can be very scary, was similar to disease of schizophrenia, and thus coined another term for psychedelics: “psychotomimetic,” which is to say, “mimicking psychosis.”
But in a fairly short time people started noticing something else about psychedelics. They often induced experiences that on a phenomenological level were similar to that of the visions recorded by mystics in various religious traditions. In other words, psychedelics sometimes gave people an experience of God. They weren’t just talking about God, or thinking about God. They were experiencing God, up close and personal, and experience often had a life-changing impact. God was no longer an abstraction, a nice idea or a comforting (or scary) story. God was real, a power beyond all understanding. And they had touched it, as it were, with their minds. Thus scientists came up with yet another term for psychedelics: entheogen, meaning “manifesting God within.”
As effect go, this wasn’t an outlier. Over the years, a lot of people on psychedelics had and are having some kind of encounter with a dimension of reality that seemed to totally transcend this one. It’s been the subject of a number of scientific studies, and there evidence is there: psychedelics cause, in about 7/10 people, a mystical-type experience.
Mysticism. In common parlance, mysticism means “belief characterized by self-delusion or dreamy confusion of thought, especially when based on the assumption of occult qualities or mysterious agencies.” Fortune-telling, mind-reading, faith healing, astrology, crystals, etc. In religious studies, mysticism is “belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.”
Phonomancy takes it as a given that at an ultimate level, all is one. Everything is a manifestation of a Universal Mind. It is possible experience oneself as dissolving into that Mind—that is, to experience oneself as dissolving into identity with everything. As Daniel Johnston put it in “I Dropped Acid With Caroline”
I dropped acid with Caroline, and we were one, we were one
We also think there’s a lot more to it than that. Our cognitive model—there’s that term again—has a lot more in common with the Hermeticists and Neo-Platonists of the early Common Era than it does with Buddhist ontology. The basic idea is that there is an Ultimate Ground of Being, that Ground is the Universal Mind, and that through a process of self-contemplation, the Universal Mind creates layer upon layer of fractically self-similar realities, each enclosing the next like matryoshka dolls. Although we are under normal conditions utterly oblivious of this fact, human beings are hyper-dimensional entities that exist on every level of consciousness simultaneously. Each of us has a Higher Self; that Higher Self in turn has a Higher Self, and so on, all the way up (or back, or down, or in) to the Ground. We are One, the Universal Mind, but we are each also nodes on a network of consciousness. God is, in fact, the Divine Archetype of Networks.
We take Oneness as a given, but we’re not interested in classical mysticism, to be honest. Unified Mind will always be there; in the meantime, there’s a whole universal network of minds to explore! An infinite variety of outrageous and deeply meaningful information to be discovered and integrated. This information is experienced as visions, and these visions are obtained shamanically.
Oh boy! New terms to unpack.
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