Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening: Phil Borges at TEDxUMKC (1)

Translator: Mika Fukasawa Reviewer: Maria K.

Good evening.

One of the things I love about visiting indigenous cultures

is it lets me step back in time and see how we all lived centuries ago.

In doing that, I've noticed so many things,

things that we've gained and things that we've lost.

One of the things I've really noticed

is the fact that our relationships are much different.

First of all, our relationship to the land.

In indigenous cultures there is no grocery store,

in tribal cultures, especially, no utility districts,

no water districts, no fast food restaurants.

Nothing stands between them and their survival,

other than their own ingenuity and their own knowledge of the earth.

They have a very intimate knowledge of the earth.

It's always astonished me.

This one Hawaiian woman, who was at the beach and I met her,

she saw this crab flipping out sand out of the hole.

She said, "Look, sand is going to the North.

There will be a storm coming tomorrow."

Sure enough, the storm, it shows up tomorrow.

They're more or less the PhDs of their place on the planet.

The other relationship that I've noticed is so tight

is their relationship to each other.

Again, they don't have the institutions.

They don't have social security.

They don't have an IRA or a 401(k) plan.

They don't have elder-care facilities.

They completely depend on each other for their survival, again.

That produces a real tightness.

I've noticed women at a well in Africa for instance.

They're all sitting around, joking and talking.

They're nursing their babies.

The woman that needs to go to get the water

will take her baby and pass it to another woman.

She'll start nursing it.

That woman will see her goat run off, and she'll pass the baby to a third woman.

She'll start nursing it.

These kids are kind of even raised communally.

They live in extended families, and that brings a real tightness.

The other relationship that I want to talk about tonight

is the relationship to spirit.

It's a very strong one.

This is Malik

and her great grand daughter Yasmina.

They spend all their time together,

14 hours a day working in the garden.

I've seen this in Africa, Asia, South America.

I ask, "Why are these two people that are so different,

together all the time?

There is a big age difference."

They said, "No, no. You don't understand.

Yasmina is just coming out of the spirit world,

and Malik is just about to go back into the spirit world.

So they really do have the most in common."

They literally pray to the spirits of the forests, the mountains, the rivers.

They put spirits in everything.

Their ancestors' spirits are so important to them.

In the beginning, I sort of looked at this

as superstition, uneducated, naive thinking.

Over the last 30 years, I've slowly changed,

and I want to talk to you a little bit about how that change came about.

About 25 years ago, I was doing a project in Tibet

on the human rights issues there, and I had the opportunity

to go and meet the medium that channels the oracle of Tibet,

the Dalai Lama's oracle.

It took place in this little monastery.

There were about 60 monks in there;

they led the medium in, sat him down,

put this big hat on his head, a very heavy hat.

His face turned red.

The monks started chanting and beating their drums.

He kind of went into this trance,

and he started talking in a real high-pitched voice.

The monks started writing down everything he was saying,

and then,

after about five minutes of that,

he fainted, and they literally had to carry him out of the room.

I just watched this, and I was wondering,

"Is this a performance? Did he have a heart attack?"

But two days later, I was able to interview the medium.

His name is Thupten, he was 30 years old at the time.

He is 50 now.

He said that he didn't remember a thing that he said

when he was in this trance.

He felt very weak right afterwards, for a day afterwards.

So I said, "Well, how did you become the medium?

How did you get this job?"

And he said, "You know, when I was younger,

I had started hearing these voices.

I started feeling very ill, and I was very confused,

and in fact, I thought I was dying at one point.

An older monk came to me and said, 'Hey, you've got a gift.'

He taught me how to go in and out of trance;

he nurtured me; he stayed with me for the whole year."

Now he's the Dalai Lama's Oracle, the Oracle of Tibet.

Two years later, I was doing a project for Amnesty International

up in the Northern part of Kenya, in the Samburu area,

and I was taking pictures of these people.

My guide turned to me and said,

"You know, their predictor has told them

that you were coming to take pictures of them."

I didn't think too much about that

because there I was taking pictures of them.

He went on to say, "They also said that she said

that you would hide from them when you took their picture."

I said, "No, I don't hide, I use very short lenses.

I'm usually right in front [of] the person when I take their portrait."

That night I was home, cleaning my lenses, packing my bags,

and I realized, yeah, I've brought my new camera

that I've never used before.

It's this Panoramic camera.

And this is the way I've got to focus that, in total darkness.

All of a sudden I thought, "Well, that's a coincidence."

My assistant said, "That's amazing."

It was just something we kind of filed away,

but at that point, I decided what I wanted to do

is start actually seeking out these people

that go into altered states of consciousness

in order to heal or predict for their tribes.

That's what I started doing.

By the way, here is the woman that was the predictor.

I did take her picture with a panoramic camera.

Her name is Sukulen.

She is 37 years old - or was, at the time - five kids.

She had the very same story as the medium of the Dalai Lama.

When she was 12 years old, she started having visual hallucinations.

She started feeling sick and dizzy.

Her grandmother came and said,

"You know, you've got a talent," and she nurtured her through it.

I literally went around the world

and doing my human rights work and started finding these shamans.

The way I would find them -

they never introduce themselves as shaman.

You would never know who they were unless you ask the community members,

"Who is the healer here? Who goes into trance?"

And they would tell me and lead me to the person.

So this is Nomage. She is a Mongolian shaman.

I'll just show you some of the 40 I interviewed.

This is Morgan Yazzie, he is a Navaho medicine man.

This is Lindsa.

She is a shaman in Eastern Siberia.

Mengatohue, a shaman in the Romani tribe,

in the Amazon in Ecuador.

One of the last shamans I interviewed was right on the Pakistan-Afghan border.

There is a group of animists there, called the Kalash.

There's only 3,000 of them left, and they are surrounded by Islam.

They hold on to their animistic beliefs.

They are very interesting-looking. They are blond-haired, blue-eyed.

They say they are the remnants of Alexander the Great's army.

They are very fun-loving, they make their own wine,

but I went there because I was told

that there was a six-year-old boy that was being initiated to be a shaman,

and I wanted to see him.

Everybody I had interviewed up to that point

had been a shaman for years.

I wanted to find somebody in that process of initiation.

When I got there, I found: no, he wasn't six years old,

he was a 60-year-old goat herder up in the mountains.

(Laughter)

So that's the shaman rumor mill.

But anyway, I had taken my 16-year-old son with me

as an assistant.

We had to hike for about a day and a half

to get up to the top of the mountain where Janduli Kahn was herding his goats.

He was the shaman for the Kalash people.

And again, I asked the same questions.

"How did you get into this? What do you do for your tribe?"

He had the same story of hallucinations, being mentored by an older shaman.

The shamans, in different cultures, induce their trance in different ways.

By the way, shamanism is a universal practice.

It's the world's oldest spiritual practice.

There is a lot of common denominators,

but the way they go into trance can differ.

In Mongolia, they beat a drum next to their ear.

In South America, they take psycho-active plants, like Ayahuasca.

In Pakistan, they use something that is quite unique:

they burn juniper branches, they slaughter an animal,

pour the blood over the burning branches,

and then the shaman inhales the smoke to go into trance.

Here I am trying to talk him out of doing a ceremony for me

because I don't want him to kill one of his animals.

He said, "No, I have to do it.

My spirits are telling me I have to do it.

You've come so far."

So the next morning, his sons started the fire,

started burning the juniper branches.

He started praying to the mountain spirits,

the spirits of the forests.

They slaughtered the animal, and he started inhaling the smoke,

and then he went into trance.

He stayed into trance for about five or 10 minutes,

and when he came out, he was very silent, he hardly said anything.

He was very talkative before he went into trance.

And I thought, "Well, this is kind of strange."

I asked one of his sons through my interpreter,

"What happened to him? What did he say? Did he see anything?"

And the son just said, "The only thing he said is,

'Your journey is going to be extremely difficult,

but you are going to be safe.' That's all he said."

The next day my son and I took off.

We left his camp and walked down the mountain

and headed up further into the Hindu Kush Mountains.

We were out in the middle of nowhere, we had a jeep,

and my son started getting sick.

He evidently picked up a bug in the water around Janduli Kahn's camp.

First day went by, he couldn't keep anything down.

Second day, third day, fourth day.

Couldn't keep anything down for four days.

He was getting so weak he could hardly walk.

I was totally freaked out.

We pulled into this little village,

and we happened to run into a doctor from Islamabad,

who was visiting his mother,

and he happened to have a bag of glucose and saline and an IV drip

and some oral rehydration salts, and we brought Dax around.

To me it was like a miracle that the whole thing happened.

I'll tell you a little bit about the shamans.

First of all,

this is the common things with shamanism;

it's not always true, but in general.

They typically are identified with what they called the "Call."

And the "Call," [for] the ones I interviewed, almost all of them,

it was a psychological crisis.

Secondly, they almost always had a mentor.

Somebody that has been through it,

and has come out the other end of this psychological crisis,

and can show them the ropes,

and show them, and tell them, and comfort them along the way.

And then they have to face what they call the initiation.

It's almost always this death.

A death of their old self and a rebirth of a new self.