Before I make your brain slowly melt inside your head by showing you this time-lapse video of the cosmos as seen from Borrego Springs, California, let me share with you something that a 7-year-old told me this morning at Starbucks.
At the heart of everything, we are all locked into one incomprehensible galactic struggle for ultimate understanding and ‘world creation.’ In South American shamanism, world creation is an essential device that enables the shaman to gain access to an object that has been forgotten or lost in their present reality. Mircea Eliades calls the reality in which we inhabit ‘the profane.’ This profane reality retains the flaws that hinder it from becoming the idealized reality accessed by the shaman. The constructed universe of the shaman may not be manifested at all but a shared reality that is only accessible to non-corporal deities. The shaman has access to this universe through the use of hallucinogens, a vital key that can access this universe.
That was actually a snippet of my PhD thesis that I wrote back in 2008 — but I’m sure you guys couldn’t tell the difference. Now if you need your brain to slowly detonate in your skull, check out this time-lapse video from Sunchaser Pictures of the galaxy using 25-second exposures tracking the movement of the stars. Those eerie statues in the middle of the desert are a nice touch too. Props to Popsci for the find.
{vimeo}71227394{/vimeo}
