the large ears of the spiritually advanced

The title slug is from a passage I just now found in Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. Here's a bit more context... Don Caesario usually maintained the distanced but regal demeanor of someone with command over the deep mystical realms. He resembled a high Tibetan lama, with Asiatic features and the large ears of the spiritually advanced. Well, sure, I thought, the large ears of the spiritually advanced, why not? I had to stop for a moment to let that sink in, find the deep bedrock substratum of my inner-racist Ur-tantric archetypal unconscious and have its way with the roof-brain chatter of my First World Western ego. Yippee ki yay, motherfucker! I check my ears in the mirror. Hmmm. Here's a picture of the guy who wrote that book, Daniel Pinchbeck, whose mom once dated Jack Kerouac back in the, you know, day. This factoid seems to form an essential bit of grounding for a man so hip, so in tune with the zeitgeist that you can, and should, expect offhand references to ayahuasca tourism, entheogens, ecodelics, 2012, and "the playa" -- that last an integral codeword in the lexicon of Burning Mania. What I want to know is, why does he keep his ears covered up like that? OK, full disclosure: I don't know if Pinchbeck really says "ecodelics" anywhere, but I did find the quote by searching Google for "ayahuasca tourism," a concept I had not encountered before this morning, but whose main contours I immediately grasp: rainforest shamans, organic DMT, parrots, Sting, and obnoxious techno-yuppies who've read way too much Maslow and Metzner. But maybe I'm just getting old. I have to admit that my one experience with DMT: The Spirit Molecule was over 40 years ago in Buffalo, New York, hardly the right "set and setting" for the type of eco-aligned spiritual visions that are driving the current economies of Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru (if you don't count the crack). And no vomitous jungle juice for me, no Sir. I smoked the shit. The instant result was like the fleeting after-death flashback one might have after a highway head-on with a speeding semi. Of course, had I prepared myself properly with fasting, prayer and a cheese-free lifestyle, my body probably wouldn't have melted into the rug like that. Out of dozens or possibly hundreds of unpremeditated mind alterations, that five-minute DMT ride was by far my most terrifying trip. I have to say, though, that it was curious how, after I magically re-corporated and walked into the kitchen, the cabinet doors and drawers were all opening and closing by themselves. Was it a message of some kind? At this far temporal remove, I suppose I shall never know.

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