Belief that consciousness may persist after death is partly driven by near-death experiences (NDEs) and deathbed visions—mystical experiences reported near death. Some NDEs, termed 'Peak in Darien' experiences, involve visions of deceased individuals whose death was unknown to the experiencer at the time. Such cases offer some of the most compelling evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond bodily death.
Westerners and Peruvians who participate in ayahuasca ceremonies in the Peruvian Amazon report similar experiences but interpret them through different cultural lenses. Local Amazonian users typically view negative or dark experiences as attacks by malevolent shamans hired by community members, while Westerners see them as part of their own psychic processes. However, Western shamanic apprentices often adopt the sorcery and shamanic warfare concepts into their worldview, indicating that apprenticeship involves a radical shift in interpretation. The author's own fieldwork experiences challenged the dominant anthropological paradigm that shamanic experiences are culturally defined, as well as the author's largely secular worldview.
Psychosis is an inner journey across an isthmus between the sensible world and the divine mystery, leaving the self as a ruin. The author reflects on their own psychotic episodes, which involved hallucinations of war and a dream of Krishna, and connects them to the experiences of Ilyas, a patient in Stefania Pandolfo's ethnographic work. Ilyas's murals and the author's writings from a psych ward are residues of an experience that confounds pain and pleasure. Islamic theological concepts like nafs, qalb, and barzakh provide a vocabulary for this interior topography. Recovery is a return to normalcy, but the self remains haunted by the crossing, a faultline in consciousness forever.