MIRRORS, PORTALS, AND MULTIPLE REALITIES |
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| Authors: | George F. MacDonald John L. Cove Charles D. Laughlin Jr. John McManus |
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| Affiliation: | George F. MacDonald is director of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, 241 Cite des Jeunes Blvd., Asticou Centre, Hull, P.Q., Canada KIA OM8.;John J. Cove is associate professor of anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada KIS 5B6. He is the author of Shattered Images: Dialogues and Meditations on Tsimian Narratives;(Carleton Univ. Press). Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. is professor of anthropology at Carleton University and is co-author of Biogenetic Structuralism;and The Spectrum of Ritual (both Columbia Univ. Press). John McManus is a free-lance psychologist and writer living at 852 North 22nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19130 and is co-author of The Spectrum of Ritual;(Columbia Univ. Press) and Science as Cognitive Process (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press). |
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| Abstract: | Abstract. A biogenetic structural explanation is offered for the cross-culturally common mystical experience called portalling , the experience of moving from one reality to another via a tunnel, door, aperture, hole, or the like. The experience may be evoked in shamanistic and meditative practice by concentration upon a portalling device (mirror, mandala, labyrinth, skrying bowl, pool of water, etc.). Realization of the portalling experience is shown to be fundamental to the phenomenology underlying multiple reality cosmologies in traditional cultures and is explained in terms of radical re-entrainment of the neurological systems mediating experience in the brain. Phenomenological experiments with mirror portalling devices from both the Tibetan and the Tsimshian religious traditions are reported. |
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| Keywords: | brain and states of consciousness cosmology meditation religious experience shamanism symbolism |
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