Avatar, the Psychedelic Worldview and the 3D Experience

For years, the psychedelic community has been anticipating the arrival of a new
psychedelic medium which will be ushered in by the appearance of a new technology.
The idea that technology and media can enhance psychedelics and even have psychedelic
qualities has, after all, been an integral part of the psychedelic movement since the
electronic trips festival of the sixties, Timothy Leary's enthusiasm for personal computer
technology in the eighties, and Terrence McKenna's advocacy of virtual reality
technologies and the internet in the nineties. Bets have been placed on 3D, HDTV, virtual
reality, and other technologies, however, for a long time none of these seemed to take off
in a massive way or fulfill its psychedelic potential in a way widely appreciated by the
public.

Relations between psychedelics and popular culture continued, however, to be prosperous

and fruitful. As noted by psychedelic thinkers such as McKenna and Eric Davis,
psychedelic aesthetics have been continuously assimilated into mainstream media, as for
example in the visual language of contemporary commercials and mainstream films.

The 2000's have been highly psychedelic in media. Ever-increasing film and screen
resolution, the use of bright, colorful imagery in commercials and music videos, the
imaginary landscapes created by computer generated animation, and the use of
extravagant and highly associative visual language have all contributed to a psychedelic
tendency in media in the first decade of the 21st century. Today, the advent of computer
generated 3D cinema brings on a hope for a major psychedelic turn in electronic media.

Psychedelics and the 3D Experience

Psychedelics have always been about pushing the boundaries of perception, and adding
new dimensions to our perception of reality. Similarly, media has continuously sought to
add ever more dimensions in its efforts to technologically capture and represent reality --
from still photography to the moving image, from silent films to "talking pictures," and
from B&W to color, where the evolution of film seemingly stops. For the past 60 years,
motion pictures have had more or less the same appearance in terms of the basic
characteristics determined by screening technologies. Now, a new generation of 3D films
aims to bring a whole new dimension to entertainment media.

What could be more psychedelic than a medium that requires the viewer to wear strange-
looking, outlandish glasses that distort one's view of the world? What better metaphor is
there for the psychedelic experience, and the idea that we are continuously experiencing
the world through different valves and filters, than the use of lenses that expose a whole
new dimension of perception?
The 3D experience and the psychedelic experience make us appreciate the visual richness
of the world and become enchanted by the multi-dimensionality of reality. 3D is a highly
psychedelic experience not only in the fact that it adds a new dimension to media
perception and renews our sense of wonderment at the visual world, but also in shaking
our perceptions of the world by giving a third dimension to a picture screened in two
dimensions. In one of cinema's earliest and most famous screenings, the crowd ran away
from the theatre after an approaching train appeared on the screen; when watching a 3D
movie for the first time, many people gasp, clutch their hands, get a dry throat, and after
leaving the theatre, some people report a distressing sense of dizziness.

Thus, 3D dissolves the boundary between drugs and technologies. If you take off the
glasses during a 3D screening and look around the theatre, you will notice that the people
around you don't see you, since the 3D glasses block and darken the majority of their
field of view. The uninhibited, almost primal expression one can see on their faces is not
unlike that of trippers under the influence of some drug.

3D is the new and the most immersive media drug to have emerged out of our high-tech
media complex, the most successful attempt to emulate the effects of the psychedelic
state.

Psychedelic Storytelling

Hollywood cinema has been flirting with our culture's subconscious for some time now.
Blockbuster fantasy and sci-fi films, ever-more popular in recent years, have acted as a
Jungian shadow to our culture's proclaimed rational and materialist view of reality. Films
such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of
Narnia, and The Golden Compass have presented us with a re-enchanted world. The last
four of the above list of movies also posit an unseen and outlandish reality existing
alongside the "normal" world, and this serves to support a growing sense of paranoia
about the deceptive qualities of consensus reality and the existence of hidden and
enchanted dimensions to our world. Cinema has thus functioned as our culture's
collective dream, bringing to view its most repressed archaic realms.

James Cameron's Avatar, as well as adding a new level of psychedelic visual richness to
the 3D film, also features a good deal of these subversive messages and ideas. It is as
anti-civilizational and anti-technological as a John Zerzan book, psychedelic like a
Terrence McKenna talk, and glorifies the indigenous and shamanic world view. The fact
that some people have failed to appreciate these highly explicit traits in Avatar, and call it
clichéd or hackneyed is, to my mind, largely based on blindness to Avatar's role as a
mythic specimen of our culture.
Some people who didn't like Avatar's story told me that its main shortcoming is that it is
told in a too conventional way. It tells a story we all already know. I could certainly see
what they mean, but then again it made me think of Joseph Campbell's Monomythconcept
which claims that there is one basic story that returns in most of the world's ancient
myths. This story, which features the hero with a thousand faces, is a story in three parts
(departure-initiation-return) which Campbell describes as follows:

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural
wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero
comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow
man"[1]

There is only one story that really matters. This story has been with us ever since the
invention of myth and it is the same as the classic story of the heavy psychedelic trip,
which is about departure from your everyday world and conception of yourself (taking
the drug, and going on an inner journey), death/initiation (facing your demons, which
sometimes leads to a feeling of death), and return (the spiritual rebirth which is the
catharsis well known to many users of psychedelics). This story, hard-wired into the
structure of the far-reaching psychedelic experience, is the primal story, the one that
entheogens have conveyed to humans over thousands of years in shamanic cultures
around the world. The psychedelic story, told to us by a plant, might even be the origin of
the monomyth.

Even though I adore movies unconventional plots structures such as Pulp

Fiction, Memento and Shortcuts, I also keep my heart wide open for our primal story. I
believe that the primal story about the hero who overcomes his challenges and goes on to
triumph, a story which stands at the basis of many religions and myths, is of utmost
importance to our culture. It is the psychedelic story that defies logic but gives us hope.
So please, do tell us this story again and again, because it makes us believe, because it
gives us hope, and that is what we need, and without it we are lost; it is the only story
really worth telling. Avatar tells that story.

Avatar and the World of Shamanism

Avatar tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine arriving at
the alien planet of Pandora to replace his recently murdered brother as the operator of an
avatar, an hybrid entity identical in physical structure to that of the alien natives of
Pandora, but controllable by a pilot with matching DNA.

Jake now has two twin brothers. One dead, the other, an alien incarnation of himself. In
order to penetrate this alien being, Jake must empty his mind, go into dream-state, and
connect with him in a special pod from which his consciousness is technologically
projected to the Avatar. The life of one is the dream of the other. Where one reality ends,
another reality begins.

Transmigrating between two parallel realities is a highly psychedelic idea. This is, after
all one of the central tenets of the shamanic view of the world. As extensively described
by Michael Harner and others, many shamanic cultures see the reality exposed by
psychedelics as the one true reality.

Zhuangzi told us that he once dreamt he was a butterfly, and when he woke up he didn't
know if he was Zuhangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was
Zuhangzi. What is reality and what is a dream? Some claim that our whole waking life is
just a dream; others propose that we live to dream, and that waking life is just a
secondary phenomenon to support dreaming.

Jake falls asleep and connects to an ancient and enchanted land of the cultural
subconscious, where he will confront the indigenous shadow of civilization. After
establishing contact with the Na'vi tribe, Jake will undergo an inner transformation. He
will learn to perceive nature's sacredness, like a Na'vi tribesman, and even begin to see
nature as his mother.

Psychedelics invoke a kind of dream experience. They are about traveling between
dimensions, leaving the commonplace dimension of reality for an enchanted world. But
for a citizen of the west living in a modern society ignorant of the shamanic (and
psychedelic) view of reality, penetrating the enchanted realm of the psychedelic
experience is a wholly different experience than it is for an indigenous person who was
raised within a shamanic context. Following the concept of the re-enchantment of the
world in contemporary spiritual thought and culture, as used by Christopher Partridge and
Wouter Hanegraaff, one should say that the western user of psychedelics does not enter
an enchanted world but a re-enchanted world. He re-enters his world, perceiving a world
formerly devoid of spiritual or non-materialistic meaning with new eyes, the
supernaturally inclined eyes of psychedelics.[2] This re-enchanted world which Jake
enters in Avatar, by becoming a Na’vi tribesman, is the psychedelic world of shamanism.

Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is a botanist trying to establish relations with
the Na'vi, a quest not unlike that of ethnobotanists and anthropologists such as Richard
Evans Schultes, Michael Harner, and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, researching the role of
psychedelic substances in shamanic cultures.

The Na'vi, an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Pandorian hominid aliens, is spiritually

led by the Tsahik, (C. C. H. Pounder) a female shaman who interprets the will of Eywa,
the great mother, whose name and essence seem to resemble both that of Eve, the mother
of all life, as well as Gaia, the planet mother of all life. The Na'vi culture, similarly to
other shamanic cultures, believes in the "flow of energy," a "network of energy that flows
through all living things." It pays great respect to the "spirits of animals" and when a
Na'vi tribesman kills an animal, he performs a ceremony to consecrate its soul, as is done
in many archaic cultures. The individual's rite of passage includes learning to ride
the Ikran, a giant carnivorous bird, which resembles the giant mythic bird that appear in
various shamanic cultures such as those of the northwest coast of America, and is closely
related to the figure of the Shaman, who is often associated with large birds such as the
eagle. If all that wasn't psychedelic or shamanic enough for you, the Na'vi people also
worship a "tree of souls," through which, while dancing and singing, they connect to the
planet's soul, and become a part of the collective consciousness. The meaning of the
wordayahuasca in the Quechuan language, it is worth mentioning, is "vine of the souls."

The singing ritual held by the Na'vi around the tree of souls, in which all members of the
tribe become one with it, might remind one of contemporary ayahuasca ceremonies. One
of ayahuasca's active chemical constituents, harmaline, was originally known in the west
as telepathine, and indeed many indigenous cultures claim to join their minds under the
influence of ayahuasca and reach unanimous group decisions in states of collective
consciousness, a claim corroborated by McKenna who has also claimed to have
witnessed telepathy during ayahuasca ceremonies.[3]

McKenna described the shaman as the one who, when you come to a village in the
Amazon where foreigners appear maybe once a year, is distinguished from all others by
the fact that he is not at all interested in your fancy boat or watch. The shaman transcends
cultural boundaries; he looks at you to see what kind of person you are.

Seeing is important. "I see you," one of the sacred greetings of the Na'vi, refers to seeing
into a person, seeing his essence and actual being. When Jake arrives to the Na'vi tribe
and is about to be killed by the angry crowd, it is the Tsahik, the shaman, who examines
him with her wide-open eyes to recognize his essence, and then decides to let him stay.
Later in the film, when all have turned against him, after his apparent betrayal of the tribe
has been exposed, she will also be the one to set him free. She has seen something.

Jake is allowed to stay, and then something interesting happens. Borges, in his "Story of
the warrior and the captive" tells us of Droctulft, a barbarian warrior who fell in love with
the Roman city Ravenna and with the concept of civilization. He deserted the barbarian
armies and joined the Romans in defending the Roman empire. In a diametrically
opposed way, Avatar is about a warrior coming from a hyper-technological society to
destroy nature falling in love with the forest, and defecting in order to defend it.

"One life ends, another begins." The Avatar story is as anti-civilizational and neo-
primitivist as it gets. When Jake is accepted to join the tribe for a period of
apprenticeship, the tribe's Tsahik says, "We'll see if we can cure the madness." The
madness referred to by the Tsashik is of course the madness of civilization, the madness
of the materialist technological world from which Jake comes. From the shamanic point
of view, civilization is madness (and vice versa). This madness must be cured; one reality
tunnel must be given up and exchanged with another one. "Hallucination" and "reality"
must change places, in a process remarkably similar to that of the psychedelic experience.

As Terrence McKenna never grew tired of reminding us, the psychedelic experience
dissolves boundaries. It dissolves the boundaries between "reality" and "hallucination,"
between "madness" and "saneness." After all, the common thing to the psychedelic
movement and the anti-psychedelic movement is that they both proclaim each other
insane. While under the influence of psychedelics, and to a significant extent also during
periods of psychedelic use, one experiences the world as magical. The everyday world of
yesterday suddenly seems to be the bleak, colorless one, the deadly illusion of an
unaware mind. Two opposites, hallucination and reality, dream and waking life, suddenly
exchange places. Could the dream life be the true life?

This is what is happening to Jake. He wakes up in his pod and suddenly real life is not in
the cold technological world of his unit, but in the forest, running on giant tree branches,
riding his giant carnivore bird, the Ikran, and being with his love, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana),
the daughter of Tsahik and her husband Eytucan the clan leader. Jake must choose
between cultures and world views, between the technological world with its materialistic
worldview and the forest with its shamanic perception of reality. Like Droctulft, he
changes sides. By the end of the movie he will be calling the humans "aliens," and in the
closing scene of the movie he will kill his human incarnation and transform himself
completely into the avatar.

Avatar is not only psychedelic in form but also in message.

Reality Pods

In 1954, John Lilly, a neuro-physician on his way to becoming one of the pioneers of
research into the nature of consciousness, invents the isolation tank -- a pod which
isolates the person inside it from external stimulation and triggers an alteration of
consciousness. Lilly, who kept close relations with the Californian counterculture of the
sixties, also combined his isolation tank experiments with psychedelics, going into long
trips inside his tank, a practice memorably presented in the filmAltered States (1980),
which was loosely based on Lilly's work.

40 years later, the pod is back, and not for the first time. A decade before Avatar, The
Matrix featured a person lying in a pod, isolated from reality, and communicating with
another reality. What does it mean for us that the two most influential mythic films that
our culture has produced since Star Wars both feature a person lying in a pod
communicating with a different reality, a being split into two parts, one of them artificial.
Could this mean something? Could they mean that we are the ones inside the pod,
disconnected from our true body?

Taking off one's 3D glasses and inspecting the movie viewers, identical looking with
their 3D glasses on, staring at the screen, immersed in a 3D world, unable to see their
physical surroundings and completely unaware of them, one might think that the 3D
experience is the pod. But more generally, the pod might represent all our technological
shells, from clothing to our cars and our houses -- the technological shells that keep us
away from direct contact with the world.

Avatar, it is worth noting, is a highly ambivalent and even paradoxical film. It uses the
most advance technology to go on a long harangue against technology. But it has the
maybe naïve hope that our pod experience, like Jake's, will make us want to leave our
pods and reconnect with our bodies.

This too, is quite similar to the psychedelic experience. Psychedelics return us to our
native bodies, to a more primal experience of the body, one which precedes the numbing
effects of civilization on our relation with the body. When Jake is projected into his
Avatar body for the first time, he spends the first moment examining his hands and feet,
moving his fingers and toes playfully and calling “this is great!”. This part actually
reminds one of watching a person in the beginning of a psychedelic trip, examining his
hands as many trippers often do, amazed about being inside this avatar, the avatar of the
body. Realizing that your being is immersed inside a body and being surprised by that
fact, feeling amazed by one’s body, is also a well known reaction to the psychedelic
experience.

A New Wave of Psychedelic Cinema

In his inspiring book Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken tell the story of one of the first giant
Sequoia trees to be discovered by the American settlers, in Calaveras County, California.
More than 300 feet in height and thirty feet in diameter, the tree was unlike anything the
western world had ever seen. An entrepreneur by the name of George Gale saw a great
business opportunity. He and his associates decided to cut down the Sequoia and take it
to be exhibited around the world. The 2,500-year-old tree was so big that its felling took
several weeks to accomplish, even with a big group of workers. Hawken tells us that
when the tree finally fell, the noise woke people in mining camps fifteen miles away. The
huge tree held so much water that it remained green for several years after being cut.
When parts of the tree were presented in New York and London, the exhibitions caused a
public outcry against the utter cruelty of its destruction, and this was one of the triggers
of the environmental movement.
The story of that great Sequoia is mirrored in the story of the giant hometree of the Na'vi
people which is destroyed by the bulldozers and explosives of the "Sky People" (Earth
people). When Jake, praying at the Tree of Souls, asks Eywa (Mother Nature) for help, he
says, "See the world we come from. There is no green there. They killed their mother."
And indeed the myth of the matricide, the killing of Mother Nature that stands at the base
of Avatar, is not fictional at all. Indigenous tribes have been going extinct for the past few
hundred years, and are today facing major calamities brought on by oil companies and
ruthless international corporations, the mercenaries of civilization who invade the jungle
to supply our ever-increasing appetite for energy and products.

One of the most engaging sequences in Avatar is the one in which the Na'vi tribe are
fleeing the violence and destruction brought upon the forest by the machines of
technology. When I watched it for the second time, it seemed to me that these Na'vi
people escaping the machines were actually us, humanity, trying to flee the consequences
created by our technologies in the beginning of the 21st century.

Avatar relates a violent and realistic story that is taking place as you read this, which is
why its message is so important. But it is also a story of a conversion, of Jake's
conversion from the way of technology, from the promethean culture of the "sky people,"
as the humans are called by the Na'vi, to the way of the forest. Avatar is a story about
transformation, one which humanity direly needs these days, when a radical
transformation of our relation with nature has become a necessity.

With its psychedelic qualities and ideas, shamanic values, and indigenous
politics, Avatar challenges the reigning values of our culture on the most fundamental
level. That this film, which challenges all that is sacred to western materialistic thought
and champions shamanic ideas and values deemed to be ludicrous by the dominator
culture, has already earned more than a billion dollars and is quite probably on its way to
becoming the highest grossing film of all time, is for me no less than
amazing. Avatarbrings psychedelic visuals and ideas as well as shamanic values to
millions of mainstream moviegoers. Could that have anything to do with the fact that it is
in the new digital 3D? Considering that the next big 3D event is Tim Burton's Alice in
Wonderland, a story jammed with weird acting mushrooms and even weirder realities, it
seems that we might be facing a kind of psychedelic renaissance brought on by 3D
cinema.

Could Avatar and Alice in Wonderland be the first messengers of a new psychedelic
wave ushered in by a new medium with psychedelic tendencies? Could they be the ones
to bring psychedelic values and ideas into mainstream thinking? I'm not sure that would
be enough; however it seems that one of the techniques traditionally used to create the 3D
effect in cinema might be helpful as a metaphor in understanding the place these films
might play in today's culture. The Pulfrich Effect, used to create stereoscopic images,
relies on the principle that the human eye processes information slower in darker
conditions to cause one eye to see reality in delay, thus creating a 3D illusion when
watching moving objects. It is as if your two eyes were watching the screen from two
different points in time, or from two different points in space. Similarly, the new 3D
wave allows us to view culture from two distinct points of perspective in space and time:
one of a culture completely immersed in consumerist mania, the other of a culture which
keeps a strong relation to its mythic roots in nature. This multi-dimensional effect, which
allows us to view ourselves from two different perspectives at the same time, might hint
at the transformations ahead.

[1] Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968, p. 30 / Novato, California: New World Library, 2008, p. 23.

[2] By this I do not mean to claim that psychedelics are supernatural, at least not here, but
only that they encourage the formation of a supernatural view of reality.

[3] Again it is worth noting that I am not claiming that telepathy actually occurs during
ayahuasca ceremonies, although something resembling it is definitely at play in some
cases, but only that ayahuasca is considered to be telepathic and conducive to collective
states of consciousness in many shamanic cultures