It's my sister's birthday, today.
When I was five, I wrote a card for her that began with the letter A underlined. It said: "shy is 4 yis old." After that, I began writing backwards because I was looking into a mirror to correct my handwriting as I wrote.
At that tender age, I had been misled by authoritarian advice, which held that if you want to check your speech, check it in the mirror. If you want to check your handwriting, ditto. The assumption is that if you were looking at either directly, you would be too subjective in your analysis.
Of course, this advice later became the foundation for my idea of shamanistic doubling: you can obtain a kind of difference of perspective by distancing or dissociation. This will produce unpredictable and novel results, which enhance experience and creativity, whilst at the same time producing a form of objectivity that runs counter to authoritarian mores.
UPDATED:
Q. But is shamanism really a form of intentional dissociation or is it the ability to access an expanded and perhaps more true version of reality?
A. One loses one's sense of attachment to mundane and conventional forms of behavior, when one dissociates. These no longer seem as necessary or as inevitable as before. Consequently one sees the truth, that one's capacities for LIVING are much broader than one had assumed.
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