The Soul Journey

The signature Axeti Nete ASC, referred to by terms such as ‘magical flight’ and ‘soul journey’ may be experienced in a CSV ceremony. The near-universality and continued spontaneous manifestations of this separation of self from body in near-death experiences and contemporary spiritual practices suggests that soul flight is a manifestation of innate psychophysiological structures. These innate structures of the soul journey are an engagement of representations of self and others manifested in a visual symbolic capacity.

Soul flight has implications embodied in the etymological roots of the word ‘ecstasy’—standing outside of oneself. This reveals the ability of perspective-taking that is derived from the capacity to take the role of the ’other’ towards one’s self. It is also a capacity derived from mimesis, the ability to represent with the body.

The body is a neurological basis for human experience and knowing and is a principal aspect of metaphors used in analogic thinking. Body image combines memory, perception, affect, and cognition in presentational symbolism, utilizing the capacity for cross- modal translation that is at the foundation of symbolic thought and Axeti Nete practices. This cognitive feature of Axeti is an extension of human cognitive potentials. This presentational symbolic system is based in pre-linguistic structures and provides mechanisms for representation and new forms of self-awareness that produce transcendence of ordinary body- based awareness and identity.

Out-of-body experiences emphasize a sense of reference no longer tied to the physical body, which is the original form of knowledge. Body-based representational systems provide a symbolic system for all levels of organization from metabolic levels through self-representation and advanced conceptual functions. The body-image dynamics of Axeti soul flight are a natural symbol system, a biologically based model that organizes both internal and external experiences, as well as a reference system that extends awareness beyond the body.

The participant’s visionary experiences engage the use of a presentational symbolism. Symbolic imagery and visions engage the same brain structures associated with processing perceptual information and dreaming. Images are a pre-verbal symbol system that have the capacity to recruit and coordinate muscle systems to achieve goals, arousing autonomic responses and engaging unconscious muscle control centers.

Ceremonial soul flight engages psychobiological communication processes that mediate across different levels of information processing, integrating unconscious, non-volitional, affective, and psychophysiological information at cognitive levels. This visual information system links domains of experience, integrating somatic, psychological, and cognitive levels through visual images and analogical processes. These visual symbol systems provide advantages in engaging an analogic system of analysis, synthesis, and planning based in visual images, exemplified in the information received in Axeti soul flight.

These special forms of perception and information integration provide adaptations derived from the survival benefits associated with enhanced information availability and expanded understandings of self and environment.

The ASC is an adaptive response involving enhanced integration of information from operators of the unconscious mind, integrating the body-level awareness of the pre-linguistic and pre-conscious mind into consciousness. These principles of integration are the underlying basis for Axeti ritualistic practices associated with the spirit world.

The Supernatural, Self, and Society

These projective processes involve the use of spiritual concepts as ‘super persons’ that are used as models in the development of personal identity and qualities. Spirit assumptions are reinforced by an innate capacity for social intelligence, the ability of humans to infer the mental states of other members of the species and to predict their behavior through an intuitive ‘theory of mind’.

This ‘theory of mind’ combines mental structures that detect animate agents, determines what they are looking at, inferring their intentions (goals), and ascertaining their belief systems. More than any other species, humans need information about the surrounding environment and cooperation with others to adapt to their local ecological niche and to be of service to others.

The need for cooperation with other humans makes essential some knowledge of their mental states. The social mind inference system is extended through spirit concepts. Most people are limited in their access to social information about others, whereas spirits have full access to strategic information about other’s motivations and actions.

Spirit knowledge is an important adaptation, one that has an empirical basis in the implicit and unconscious cognitive processes that humans engage through divinatory practices. The CSV believes that ayahuasca as a supernatural agent expands human scenario building, helping them to engage in mental thought processes without actual circumstances. Imagining scenarios and possible consequences is an example of decoupled cognition, a mental ability also manifested in play and concepts of spirits that violate intuitive assumptions.

The ability of the mental hardware programs (inference systems) to operate decoupled from environmental input allows them to operate independently of actual experience, functioning in a counterfactual mode that explores alternative scenarios through imaginary characters that engage the process of inferring mental states of others, allowing our practitioners to become more empathic and understanding of human behaviours and the thoughts that lead to those behaviors.

Spirits are also useful strategic concepts in personal identity and social integration. Spirits have social psychological functions as fundamental representations of the structure of human psychology, a language of intrapsychic dynamics of the self and psychosocial relations with others. Spirit beliefs also reflect the cultural dynamics of social and interpersonal relations.

Spiritual knowledge is used in CSV beliefs to manipulate self-dynamics and personal identity. Beliefs about the particular qualities of spirits are learned, providing symbolic systems that reflect ‘complexes’, integrated perceptual, behavioral, and personality dynamics that operate independently of ego control. Manipulation of these complexes through CSV ritualistic practices can heal by re-structuring and integrating the unconscious personality dynamics with social models, paralleling standard psychiatric procedures of healing through uniting the unconscious and conscious mind.

Spirit Relations and Self: The Guardian Spirit

Axeti Nete practices of soul recovery and beliefs in plant and animal allies and guardian spirits reflect aspects of self-representation involving sacred others who are formed in the intersection of spiritual beliefs and the social and cultural worlds, where cultural processes induce spiritual referents into personal identity.

Relations with spirits engage the human capacity to ‘take the perspective of others’, incorporating others’ perceptions into our own identity. Spirit relations also engage self-development by using representations provided by plant and animal spirits and allies.

Animal powers engage a specialized innate capacity for organizing knowledge about animals and recognizing ‘species essence’. Animal species provide a universal analogical system for the creation of meaning, particularly representations of self- and social identification.

Plant spirits and animal powers as aspects of the self are exemplified in the guardian spirit concepts where self-development involves incorporation of plant and animal spiritual properties within identity and personal powers. Plant and animal relationships provide a representational system used as a model for self-development and self-differentiation, allowing for depictions that both engage the characterizations derived from the universal features of a biologically based ‘natural history’ as well as the introduction of culturally specific and local meanings of plant and animal species. These allies and guardians empower people in adult role development by guiding personal and social choices.

Spirits’ characteristics provide ideals that structure individual psychodynamics and model social behavior in exemplifying norms for self and psychosocial relations. Spirit allies provide alternate forms of self-representation that facilitate social and personal differentiation and provide psychosocial and cognitive mechanisms for problem- solving and mediation of personal and social conflict.

Spirits provide diverse self-representations that can serve as variable command-control agents for mediating conflict between the different selves and instinctive agents. This enables the operation of the social organism with respect to a hierarchy of goals by using Axeti Nete spirit concepts to facilitate orientation of problem-solving modules to non-routine tasks and mediate hierarchies of personal and social goals.

The use of spirits to model the self provides processes for social-psychological transformation and therapeutic change. CSV ceremonies engage spirits to provide cathartic transformations of personal and social psychodynamics through direct experience by the participant. Personal spirits provide protection from stress and anxiety by helping with the management of emotions and attachments.