If six degrees separate in the middle of the jungle, does anybody hear it?

While reading Paul Adams' article on "topologies of communication" I could help but think about an experience a friend of mine had while she was lying in the mud in the Amazon jungle, crawling on all fours, projectile vomiting, and hallucinating her dead grandmother under the influence of Ayahuasca.

I know this sounds weird.  But let me explain.

Ayahauasca is a psychoactive beverage made from the boiling together of two plants that indigenous people in Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, and Brazil have sipped for thousands of years. Many of them use it for healing rituals, most of the time under the guidance of a shaman who helps guide the drinkers through the "underworld" and confront any issues that may arise for them as the hallucinations become more powerful.

Make what you want of this.  Whether or not you believe in "underworlds" many people around the world do, and the various names used to describe these worlds could fill an entire book.   So let's step into this belief system for a second.

Back to my friend.  Many of these communities, looking for additional ways to support their income, have opened up these ceremonies to Westerners.  This is where she comes in.

Ayahuasca is a purgative, so several hours into this experience she is projectile vomiting up a tsunami, when all of a sudden her vision starts to clear and she sees a perfectly lifelike vision of her grandmother.  Not a "hallucination" she tells me, because you can always tell the difference between a hallucination and reality, unless you're schizophrenic.  But this appears to her just as her grandmother would have in real life.

Anyway her grandmother sits down next to her on a log and they talk for a few hours.  Sometimes the grandmother turns into a lion, but mostly she looks like her regular self.  I forget what they talked about, but it's not important.  The really interesting part is what comes next.

After her grandmother leaves the shaman comes and sits down next to her.  He makes a hand-rolled cigarette, waves some smoke around her, and offers it to her.

Then he says, "Your grandmother looks like a nice lady.  I saw the two of you talking but I didn't want to disturb you."  And he goes on to describe exactly how she had appeared, what she was wearing, and even the way she walked.

Needless to say, my friend was a little shocked.  Especially when the shaman followed it up with this:

"You guys have your Facebook, your ways you stay in touch with each other," he said.  "We have the ayahuasca.  Now that you take it you can see that none of us were ever really apart in the first place."

I know this sounds like another wing-nut hippie tale.  There are days when I'm not sure I believe her myself.  Then I read Adams' line-

“...social space was structured very differently than the map and it would only yield its secrets to a new, non-cartographic way of thinking and visualizing.”

..and I got to thinking about other "non-cartographic" ways of thinking.  For all of Adam's claims about social media dissolving borders, space, and time, it obviously hasn't.  We still list the country we're in at the present, the times at which we make comments, and even our coordinates (if we dabble in police-state entertainment technologies like FourSquare).  And I don't want to rush to any conclusions, but I'm pretty sure we don't use Facebook to communicate with the dead.

So let's imagine for a  second that Ayahuasca is a doorway into a new kind of networked reality, where everyone living or dead could communicate on an equal basis in a common language that we all could understand. Imagine that we could freely access this reality as easily as logging into our World of WarCraft account. 

How would this change relationships of power and inequality?  How would this affect our real-world and our online networks?  How would it change the assumptions we hold about other people?  

For most people, an online world is the closest they will come to this kind of  reality.  I think the explosion of these kinds of online, networked games masks a deep-rooted, subconscious desire people have to merge with this kind of Ayahuasca reality.  Carl Jung talks about a "collective unconscious," a kind of ancestral memory, like a vast warehouse of symbols and half-remembered stories that we all share as humans. Looking at the global interest in both game worlds and drug worlds, maybe these are two paths that we're unconsciously seeking out in order to plug back in to the same reality.  

It could be that this post is just an excuse to wade off the deep end of the lunatic fringe.  But I think it's important to step outside of the box and study "weird" ideas as seriously as the serious ones.  Why should we keep from looking down certain paths, just because science hasn't caught up to where we're at yet?