blackness and stars that were very far away from me… I didn’t think I really got anything in that short time, but since you asked specifically, I realise I did – and the impression is staying with me”.
The most intense of all postures was the Tattooed Jaguar, a shapeshifting posture for experiencing reality through the eyes of a cat. “I journeyed in this posture and met the ‘Mother Jaguar'”, said one student. “It was incredible. I was fully grown but compared to the size of the mother, I was a six week old kitten”.
The Tennessee Diviner (described to students as ‘Tennessee D’) – a divinatory posture, as the name suggests – on the other hand, had a more limited effect. In retrospect, this is not so surprising. The essence of divination is to hold a question in mind during the journey and without knowing the purpose of the posture, this was impossible. Students mentioned only an “intense experience” and a feeling of “lightness”.
I wonder how your own results compare.
CONCLUSION
It seems clear from the experiences of students, and from Goodman’s own research, that these postures do produce qualitatively different experiences to those normally found in meditative practice, that each posture was different in itself from others, and that the effects experienced are consistent with the findings of Goodman and Gore.
Some postures by their very nature do seem to open a specific doorway to particular otherworldly territories or states of being, and if this is so, our distant ancestors had access to a vast knowledge that we can only guess at today – although practice may help us get closer to their experiences and to their knowledge of other