The only overt reference to shamanism that Marechera makes is to Castaneda’s don Juan.
Nevertheless there is a link between primeval consciousness (at the level of the lizard part of the homo sapiens brain) and early levels of consciousness mapped out by schools of object relations. Both involve efficient ways of communicating that are beneath the level of rational consciousness.
Lizards even have a role within the don Juan narrative. In effect, if you get a pair of lizards and sew up the jaw of one and the eyes of another and set them free, they can become your spirit messengers. What does this suggest, other than that one can learn to experience reality as through the (in some ways more efficient) lizard part of one’s brain.
The lizard part of the brain is cold-blooded, lacking in emotional nuance. Perhaps this is the key indicator I have been looking for, for example, when I perceive that there is something hyper”scientific”, something transhumanly objective, in looking out at the world in this way. You see various actors and players in the human arena for what they are, rather than having your perspectives influenced by shades of emotional meaning. This detached and cold-blooded way of looking at the world, our through the lizard brain, enables the “seer” to contemplate the interactions of other lizard brains, occurring beneath the surface of human rational consciousness. So it lends a different perspective — based on awareness of instincts that are geared towards survival rather than being geared towards processing emotional nuances.
From personal experience, this lizard brain part of the mind does in fact exist. I have operated within it, when I suddenly saw that it was not possible for me humanly take any more emotional abuse, or to reason with it. At that point, the mammalian brain switched off, and I began to operate from the lizard brain. (It is hard to describe how efficient this lizard brain is, in a fight for survival, only you feel really, really calm, as if human nuances do not matter, as if only one goal matters. Time slows down, and you see things happening in slow motion, but you don’t feel anything.) In my experience, the lizard brain is what facilitates the killer instinct.
Somehow knowledge of the functioning of the lizard brain in humans is linked to shamanism. I would say it is linked at the level of understanding the preconscious roots of power relations. I think that it is the cold-bloodedness of this level of consciousness that gives it its objectivity, enabling the subject to extricate herself from conventional modes of power relations, whilst developing a masterful knowledge of how they function.
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