I'm sorry, I thought this essay was great. I think people are reading it too much as a scientific treatise, which it's not. This is more of a beatnik train-of-t

I'm sorry, I thought this essay was great. I think people are reading it too much as a scientific treatise, which it's not. This is more of a beatnik train-of-thought exercise trying to make sense of their own life experience and trying to draw parallels to some common pop-scientific theories relating to the "shamanistic hypothesis". A question I still have that the essay only sort of touches on is why there are these "shamanistic tendencies". I've heard from many different sources that this type of shaman behavior is essentially selected for in our lead up to the dawn of civilization (8k-10k years ago) but I still haven't heard of a satisfactory reason of why. This essay is making the argument that it's because the shamans can make sense of weird shit that happens. Another person in this thread is basically making the argument that the shamans are drug dealers of the tribe. Both could be true but it still seems a bit unsatisfactory to me.