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Dr. Arthur Cushman - Rock Art 29
194 Plays4 years ago
In this episode we interview Arthur Cushman a neurosurgeon that specializes as well in ethnobotanical’s that have indigenous origins and he is a student of the study of the use of various means to us to achieve altered states of consciousness and will mention his experiences with respect to rock art sites in the far west fascinating and engaging.
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Transcript
Introduction & Rock Art Conservation
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites. So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org
00:00:48
Speaker
Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to the Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:01:34
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 29, all you rock art fans and archaeology podcast network listeners. This is
Introducing Dr. Arthur Cushman
00:01:43
Speaker
Dr. Alan Garfinkel, and in this episode, we're gonna be interviewing Dr. Arthur Cushman, who's a neuroscientist, a neurosurgeon, and someone who is specialized in ethno-medicine and integrative science, and has experienced quite a series of transformations in his life. Come on and listen.
00:02:09
Speaker
Welcome out there, all you listeners of the Archaeology Podcast Network. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel. This is the 29th episode of your Rock Art Podcast. And we are absolutely blessed and honored to have a medical doctor, Dr. Arthur Cushman.
00:02:31
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hailing all the way from Tennessee, who has an extensive background really in neuroscience and also in the study of ethno-medicine of the indigenous, the Native American people, and the nature of the relationships that has to rock art,
00:02:51
Speaker
cosmology and artistry. Dr. Cushman, can you hear me OK? Yes. Great. Well, it's an honor and a blessing to have you. We had talked about doing this for quite a while, haven't we? Yes. Yes. And so the way we open this up, the million dollar question, of course, the one that we start with in this interview is if you could share with our listeners kind of your story of how you became interested in the study of Native people,
00:03:19
Speaker
the
Early Influences and Rock Art Discovery
00:03:20
Speaker
study of perhaps neuroscience and ethno-medicine, and your journey to perhaps anthropology, archaeology, and even Native American rock art. And with that, I'll give you a platform to start. I'm a board certified neurosurgeon where I grew up near a little small town called La Sierra, California. Our house was up against a hill.
00:03:47
Speaker
with large granite boulders and right across the street there was a large pictograph of a cross with dots on each side and also some other things and we found artifacts
00:04:03
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little, uh, svelts and arrowheads and other things in the area. And where was this? What, what, what, what part of the country was this in? La Sierra, California. Oh, La Sierra, California. Oh, okay. And my father was a professor of physics.
00:04:21
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in mathematics, but he also was very interested in archaeology and nature in general. He also studied quantum mechanics at the University of Southern California.
00:04:38
Speaker
And he worked out at the place called the Integraton near Landers or Joshua Tree, California, where they were working on a project for time travel and rejuvenation that ended up being shut down. When I went out to the desert and to the mountains near Idlewild, I'd beg him to take me to Rock Art Stites when I was a small boy.
00:05:08
Speaker
One of his best friends was a, well, he called them at times a Paiute Indian and at other times a Chimihuahua Indian, which I think the Chimihuahua came away with here actually, Southern Paiutes, and they taught him
00:05:27
Speaker
many mystical and unusual things about how to sense the presence of animals and how to connect with the past. When I was in college, I spent a summer working for Dow Chemical Company in Chiapas, Mexico, collecting
Indigenous Healing Practices
00:05:48
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medicinal plants. I was a Spanish translator and we went into small villages and we would pay the local curandero or curandero to take us and show us the various plants that they use for medicines and we'd put them in bags and take them up to an oven high in the Sierra Madre mountains where we dried them and then sent them off
00:06:18
Speaker
Anyway, I became interested in Ethnobiology at that time. I had a stomach ache. We had really nothing to take for it. So I went into a boutique and asked the court on data if she had something for a stomach ache. She looked at me and she said no.
00:06:42
Speaker
We don't have anything for stomach ache, but we have something for you. She said, stand there, hold your arms out. So she looked at me. I felt very odd. And then I saw her looking at all of these jars of plants, bags of plants. And then I saw her stop.
00:07:06
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And she took some dried leaves out, wrapped them up in a newspaper.
00:07:14
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and gave them to me. And of course, being a curious university student, I asked her, I said, well, how did you know which one to use? And she said, well, the spirits told me. And I said, well, how did they tell you? And she said, well, I saw a light around the plant that you're to take. And I said, that's amazing. And I said, well, what do you do if somebody comes in and they're sick?
00:07:39
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And you don't see any plants light up," she said. Well, she said, then the spirits may guide me out into the desert or to the mountains until we find the proper plant. She said, in the Bible, it's called the Shekinah light.
00:07:58
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We follow this kind of light until it comes to the plants. Then we sit down and talk to the plants and just ask them if they're the correct plant. If they say yes, can we use you?
00:08:14
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They may say yes or they may say, no, I'm the only plant in this area, but if you go follow the light more, we'll show you some plants you can use. Then they ask the plants, do you use the leaves, the roots, the stem, the flowers?
00:08:31
Speaker
seeds or whatever and the plant will tell them exactly what they need to use and then we put it in a little bag but we make sure that if there's we preserve the plant as much as possible. So I said well what do you do if you
00:08:48
Speaker
go and you don't find any plants or you aren't showing anything. She's laughing. She said, the other doctor, the botanist with you already told me, you're going to go to medical school. And she said, when we say that happened, we know you need to go to Tutsa Guterres, the capital of Chiapas and see a medical doctor because you have something wrong, like a large abscess or tumor
00:09:16
Speaker
broken bone that we can't set. So I said, well, that's great. So then I became interested in that and more than that. Where did you go to school? I attended high school at Thunderbird Academy, a boarding school in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I met a number of Native American friends.
00:09:39
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And I went to Los Sierra College now, Los Sierra University. And then I went to University of Southern California, Los Angeles County Medical Center for my internship. And then I took my neurosurgery at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California.
00:09:59
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How was that experience of being in a conventional medical situation and learning the sort of Western practice of science? How did you feel about that vis-a-vis your pre-existing associations with Native people? I'm sure there must have been some disjunction there, some sort of misalignment. Some people think there is, but I'm what I guess you'd call an integrative doctor, and I've always felt that
00:10:25
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old ways of healing and herbs and laying on of hands and prayer and modern medicines and surgery all work together and it should not be separated. The separation is artificial. The medical doctors often treat diseases, they cure it, but they don't heal it. The healing requires
00:10:51
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that the mind, the body, the spirit and the soul and everything
00:10:56
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Be healed together and not just taking a pill or having an operation you need to work on the whole person and did you begin in practice in that fashion in a much more integrative way or did you practice a more conventional medicine I practice pretty much standard standard medicine, but I always always believed in prayer and
00:11:24
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laying on of hands and I also knew a number of herbal treatments and other things and just basically encouraging people and talking to them and finding out what's going on with them, which isn't exactly the way medicine and surgery are frequently taught.
00:11:50
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Did you have a practice of medicine initially in California or did you migrate somewhere else? No, I went immediately to Tennessee. California was having a, I had six different offers in California and then they had a malpractice crisis in which nobody, no new doctors could get
00:12:14
Speaker
insurance, so I knew I had to go someplace else, so I had a stepbrother practicing in Nashville. I went to Nashville and talked to them at Vanderbilt and so forth, and I was accepted in the Nashville area with open arms.
00:12:30
Speaker
That's great. So when you began your practice in Nashville, what area of medicine, you talked about neurosurgery at some point, and I think I always talk about neuroscience. What exactly were you engaged in and how did that lead you on into sort of the more integrative and more ethno-medicine and cognitive neuroscience and rock art elements?
00:12:54
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you know, where I sort of found you and connected with you, I presume much later in life. But I know that when we first met, and I know you had some great interest and brought one of your colleagues with you, we had some great conversations and have sort of followed each other's research tracks, as it were.
00:13:14
Speaker
Well, I just started out just doing surgeries and evaluating people, treating trauma victims in the hospital and so forth. And then something bad happened. I fell on the operating room. The floor was slippery and I injured both hands requiring surgery on my hands and also on my shoulder.
00:13:41
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and which essentially put me out of doing much in the way of surgery. So I just started mainly evaluating patients and I noticed this large black spot on my abdomen.
00:13:59
Speaker
and I had it biopsied and later a white excision and left no deception. Anyway, I had malignant metastatic malignant melanoma and they did scans on my brain, lungs, liver, abdomen all over. I spent about a week or more at Vanderbilt getting every kind of test, knowing to God and man. And then they came and they said, well, of course sorry, you have metastatic
00:14:28
Speaker
malignant melanoma and there's no treatment for it.
Ayahuasca Healing Experience
00:14:34
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Let's stop there. I know we're developing a cliffhanger for this, but we're pretty much filled with that first segment and I can't wait to find out how this continues and what particular experiences you've had. See you on the flip-flop, gang.
00:14:50
Speaker
Welcome back, listeners, to the Rockguard podcast. We had a bit of a cliffhanger in the first segment. We have Dr. Arthur Cushman with us, who's a neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and ethno-medicine expert. And he was talking about sort of a cataclysmic situation he was in. Can you reframe that for our listeners here and tell them what situation you were in? Anyway, I had what many people call the dark night of the soul.
00:15:20
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I fell on the operating room badly, injuring both hands and my shoulder and had several surgeries on them. I then noticed a big black spot on my abdomen. I had several surgeries for that anyway. So I mentioned before I had metastatic malignant.
00:15:43
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melanoma and the scan showed that it was widespread in my body. And I was told, well, you just need to probably go down and rent a house on the beach and sit in a chair and read some books until you die. And I said, well, you know, I'm not ready to die. So I saw a advertisement for a
00:16:08
Speaker
alternative healing and shamanic healing course in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And so I said, well, I have nothing else to try. Why don't I go to go to that? And so I went there where I met Dr. Alberto Bioldo has a
00:16:29
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PhD in anthropology and when he went to South America he learned their healing methods and found that they worked. So I talked to him and he said he needed to join me down in the jungles of Peru and have a healing
00:16:48
Speaker
with probably the most potent medicine in the world. It's called ayahuasca, so I was very, very lurry about that. I said, well, what do I have to lose? So I bought a ticket, went down to Lima, and then over to this place called Puerto Maldonado on the Madre de Dios River, which is a branch of the Amazon, and we went on a lunch.
00:17:16
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They called it a launch for hours and then I went and I was so weak at this time it took several people to help me up the steps to a lodge that was above the river. The river was about a mile wide. On the second night there I went over and had the ayahuasca and that's a very long story but anyway I had a miraculous vision in which
00:17:43
Speaker
angels came down from the heavens and put their hands on me like a healing.
00:17:50
Speaker
And I felt like a loud shock, and then I had a near-death experience in which I went into this nothingness, or la nadas, I call it in Spanish, and then saw this beautiful land, and Jesus was, I mean, Archangel Michael was standing on one side of this beautiful land. My parents were on the other side, and
00:18:14
Speaker
Jesus and my grandparents, and on the other side was Mary, and I could see her heart beating in her chest. Michael held his sword down, and Mary held her hand out, and I told me, I must return to earth. So I said, no. I said, I'm tired of this. I don't want to go there with Daddy.
00:18:38
Speaker
with my father and mother and all my relatives and all that beautiful land, please don't send me back. And they said, well, you're going back. So I went back and came back into my body with a big plop. And then these little midget things came out with sticks and they beat me. And they said, you're full of
00:18:59
Speaker
And I said, that's your ego. You've got to give that up. And I said, you're to be a bridge person between the world of traditional medicine and the world of mystical medicine and healing. So after that, I went and studied there for a while with Carol, Q-U-E, apostrophe, R-O.
00:19:25
Speaker
Peru and then I also, by mysterious methods, I ended up with Tata Cachora. He's also known as Don Juan. He's now 106. He'll be 107 in a couple of weeks. He was Carlos Castañeda's teacher and probably the greatest herbalist in the world. I began studying with him and with
00:19:54
Speaker
He's a Yaqui, his grandfather was a Geronimo, and his mother was a Lacandon Maya from Chiapas, Mexico. Anyway, I found that I could communicate with him telepathically. He introduced me to the local
00:20:14
Speaker
Kumeyaay people who you've met one Marta and they began to take me to their sacred sites and ceremonies and particularly their rock art sites. How did you meet Marta? She was down there in Baja, California at Tata Kachora is what they call, dance or ceremonial dances that they had. I met several other people and then they
00:20:44
Speaker
We went down to central Mexico where I met the Nahuatl people and they also took me to their sacred sites and ceremonies. And then I guess when we're ready I'll explain some of the things about what they taught me about rock art and sacred sites and how you could actually visit them by going back in time.
00:21:12
Speaker
Let's jump for a second back to your circumstances. The conventional doctors basically gave you a death sentence, and did you go back and then be retested to ensure that you in fact were healed? And what did they say once you... Tell us that part of the story. I think that's important. Well, you might not.
00:21:37
Speaker
might not want to hear it, but they said what you had had nothing to do with those healings. That's a bunch of garbage, rubbish. You had what's called a spontaneous remission. We don't know what causes spontaneous remissions, but we can certainly tell you it had nothing to do with taking that weird
00:22:03
Speaker
Listen agenda and Peru are having other healings
00:22:08
Speaker
by other people. I said, you're wrong. I know exactly when I was field. Oh, and by the way, three days after the healing, I went up high into the Andes Mountains, where I climbed a 3,000 foot
00:22:34
Speaker
peak to a sacred site, they were really worried about me. And they sent a man with oxygen, which I didn't need. But a few days before that, I was unable to barely walk without to help. So, you know, that's what we call a miracle or something that can't be explained. And that course did not want, they didn't
00:23:03
Speaker
They didn't want to hear that, of course, but I think definitionally, by even conventional medical science, what you experienced is a supernatural experience and a miracle that you went from being given a death sentence and having cancer all over your body and I figure fairly instantaneously healed. Have you had any negative consequences after this? No.
00:23:33
Speaker
No, in fact, I have there's a specific enzyme called LDH or lactic dehydrogenase that is elevated with metastatic malignant melanomas. My levels went from so high they were basically unmeasurable to low normal range which have remained for the last 14 years and also all my scans everything
00:24:01
Speaker
All I had was a chest x-ray and it showed that everything was gone. So I said, just let it be. I'm not going to go have thousands of dollars worth of scans because I already know I'm healed.
00:24:15
Speaker
So, you experienced ayahuasca, I guess that people say it's one of the more powerful hallucinogens or ethno-pharmacological elements to create altered states of consciousness. Do you agree on that? Is that considered to be? Oh, I agree.
00:24:36
Speaker
I agree that in my case it was necessary and it was probably planned for me but I do not encourage people just to go take it to have a nice trip or because they have a lot of emotional problems are all messed up. I have one friend that's had
00:24:56
Speaker
18 Ayahuasca trips and he's still as messed up mentally as ever. In other words, you should ask for guidance with this sort of thing. And if you're guided to do it, yes, if you're not, or if you're taking it for a party, as Tata Kachora said, if you play with medicines, you're playing with a dark
00:25:20
Speaker
The serpent may bite you and kill you if you use it correctly.
00:25:28
Speaker
it will heal you, but you only need to use things like that if the Great Spirit or God or Creator guides you to use it. It's not something to be going down and having a big ayahuasca party down in the jungle someplace. So I think what you're saying is you have to be properly postured. You have to have the right consciousness, the right perspective,
00:25:54
Speaker
a heavy dose of humility and have an understanding and appreciation of what you're doing and why you're doing it and have a circumstance that is desirous of that kind of experience. Am I at all correct? Absolutely correct.
00:26:15
Speaker
Okay, so you had these experiences, you met quite a plethora, quite a variety of curanderas, shamans, Native American doctors and individuals who are healers or people that have practiced in the supernatural and altered states of consciousness.
00:26:36
Speaker
Where did that lead you? How did you segue or where did you go next from that sort of intensive experience? You've obviously had an amazing transformation in your life, sort of being pulled from the jaws of death and in turn being recreated, if you were, transformed by the power of the alternative therapies of native people.
Integrative Healing Focus
00:27:02
Speaker
What implications did that have on your life? Well, of course, I could no longer do surgery, so I do now. I try to do education and I try to do
00:27:17
Speaker
help people. I do healings. If I'm called to do them, I don't charge for them and I don't solicit them. People come to me, basically come to me out of the blue. I think they're guided by spirit to come.
00:27:34
Speaker
Okay. And I presume you have a shingle of business. You had alluded to that in the past that you set up some sort of an alternative kind of, you know, therapeutic entity to help people, right? Right. And what was that exactly? It's called Quantum Neuroscience Center. Okay. And what does that do?
00:27:59
Speaker
What do we do? We work with people to heal them in whatever way is necessary. Some people require prescription medicines for their problems and some people herbs and some people just need a change of lifestyle. Okay. And you help all kinds of people with all kinds of problems, do you? Yes.
00:28:24
Speaker
Okay. And how do people hear about you? Just word of mouth. Okay. Fast. Zero advertising.
00:28:33
Speaker
Well, that's absolutely wonderful, Dr. Cushman. I mean, that's a fantastic practice. We're almost through with the second segment. Maybe in this next segment, we can drill down to some of the things and perspectives you have on Native American rock guard and how your experiences with healing and working with the medicinal experts, the ethnomedicine and the shamans relates back to rock guard.
00:29:01
Speaker
See you in the flip-flop, gang. Welcome back all to the Rock Art Podcast. This is the third and final segment in our hour-long production. We're blessed and honored to have Dr. Arthur Cushman, who's a cognitive neuroscientist and neurosurgeon, specialist in ethnomedicine, and has a fascinating
00:29:19
Speaker
life story. And I think in this last segment we're going to try to drill down and develop the relationship of rock art to all those topics that we've covered in the past two segments.
Spiritual Encounters at Rock Art Sites
00:29:31
Speaker
Dr. Cushman, maybe you can talk a bit about the relationship of rock art
00:29:35
Speaker
to shamanism and also the medicine healers of the native people. How does that relate back to what you've been talking about in terms of the nature of healing, medicine, and some of the supernatural experiences you've described? All right. Well, what I'm going to do is tell you an experience. I had another injury.
00:30:04
Speaker
how things worked out. I went with Dr. Alberto Bioldo on a camping trip in Canyon Deshais, the Navajo reservation in Arizona. We hiked down the old trail. I had a heavy backpack on. I had polio when I was little, so I was a little bit clumsy and I slipped and injured my
00:30:34
Speaker
ankle to a point where I was having trouble walking. Our Navajo guide, who was a healer, I didn't know it at the time, our medicine man, he took my backpack and he helped me down the canyon to the place where we camped.
00:30:56
Speaker
So every day they went on some different trips various places. Right next to our campground there was some ancient ruins and there also was a very large wall of rock art. So I hobbled over with him and with the others to the rock art panel and he
00:31:22
Speaker
He said, well, you better not go up to the ruins, that's another hour, so I will just stay with you, and I will teach you something about the rock art. So he said, well, you see here, there's a group of men on horseback carrying lances, and they're accompanied by a Catholic priest holding a cross.
00:31:47
Speaker
He said, that is obviously a recording of history. There's also a large pictograph of a cow. And I laughed and he said, well, that represents the arrival of cattle in the native country. So then he said, there's a number of very, very old rock art petroglyphs here.
00:32:15
Speaker
I want you to look at them with me. So he said the first one we're going to look at is called a spiral. I was familiar with that. It's very ubiquitous in rock art sites throughout the United States, Mexico, and the world. So I looked at it and he said, what do you see, my brother? And I said, I see a spiral. And he said, no, he said, you look at it. You hold your hands up.
00:32:44
Speaker
Your hands have consent saying that your eyes and brain can't, and you hold your hands up.
00:32:52
Speaker
At the elbow and tell me what you see So I didn't I said wow I said in three dimensions. It's a Heliacal spiral like a like a tornado or a whirlpool and he said he said exactly He said but you're missing the most important thing I said why I said well you said you look at it some more and
00:33:20
Speaker
You hold your hands up and put yourself in the right frame of mind and tell me what you see." And I said, it's moving. He said, absolutely. He said, it's a portal to another dimension. And he said, that's what to our people that many of the spirals represent. They can also represent that there's water
00:33:42
Speaker
nearby or other things, but it represents a portal. And he said, this area is a pair. He said, they placed their rock art here because it's an area of very high energy. And he said, I know you can sense it because I can see it in you. And he said, when you come to rock art site, sacred sites, you feel different. And when you look at them, you may or may not be able to tell
00:34:11
Speaker
what they mean. So then I said, look at the concentric circles. So I looked at the concentric circles. Oh, by now I knew what was going on. So I said, yeah, I said that's exactly the same thing as the spiral. It's three dimensional and you can actually see the spirals moving and you can see that it's a
00:34:38
Speaker
Portal and then I said look at the snake So I held my hands up to the snake and I said it's moving and I said yes a snake Energy connects us with the mother earth So I said that and then we saw some typical what people call shamanic vision lots of squiggly little lines here and there so I held my hands up to that and I said
00:35:05
Speaker
I see a man who's in a prayerful position. He's obviously having some kind of vision, and he's marking down what his vision is, but he doesn't want me to know what it means. And I said, you got it. That's another kind of
00:35:23
Speaker
Another kind of rock art, and that's rock art that is done on a vision quest, in which what you see has meaning, has personal meaning to the person that created the art, but it's not something that you can
00:35:41
Speaker
definitely tuned into, although if you hold up your hands you may find yourself in his shoes and you may be able to see or have some kind of a vague understanding of what's going on. I said that's another important part of rock art. So I said that's fine and I didn't really get around much rock art until I started going down to
00:36:09
Speaker
Baja, California, where the local people took me to a number of amazing rock art sites. You know, we went into a little shelter, and there was something on the ceiling, and the two ladies who are both kurandetas, or healers, kumiai tradition that said, what do you see up there? And I said, I just see a blob.
00:36:38
Speaker
I said, no. I said, they laughed and laughed. And they said, you hold up your hands. You'll see what it is. And I said, you know, I remember something from a few years ago when I was in Canyon Des Chays. So I held up my hands. And I said, wow. I said, that's a butterfly. Mariposa or Papilon. And they said, yes. And they laughed and laughed. And I said, oh, look at it. I said, wow. I said, they're flapping their wings. They're moving.
00:37:09
Speaker
So I said, yes, so we, you know, looked at other things. So then I got, this was kind of something really amazing. And then you
Astro-Archaeological Observatories
00:37:24
Speaker
can also see that a number of rock art places are actually astro-archaeological observatories where the sun shines in them at specific times of year.
00:37:37
Speaker
and I've identified three, one at Mockingbird Canyon in California, another one at Joshua Tree National Park, and another one at Baja California called Bayasito, which is really right on the border, and they all have very similar shields. The one in Mockingbird Canyon actually has a sun with a
00:38:05
Speaker
hummingbird with his beak in it, and the sun shines on it at the rising sun of the winter solstice. And there's other shields and things that the sun of the equinoxes shines on. So then I said that, you know, these fights are also used for girls' puberty ceremonies and so forth. Then one of the more
00:38:35
Speaker
amazing things. So I went to the Geoglyphs near Needles, California, that they call the Topak Maze. And I looked at it and part of it's been destroyed. And there also were other Geoglyphs there and things. And I said, you know, we walked around and I said, you know, you can't find any entrance or isn't any exit to both the Mojave
00:39:01
Speaker
In human speaking, people feel that this is the place where the spirits of the dead go and they must find their way out of this maze. And some of them, they said, never find their way out. And others, I said, well, I wonder what in the world this is. I looked up at the mountain behind it and I saw a big arrow pointing up towards the heavens and the
00:39:28
Speaker
The person with me, the native person, saw it also. And then the whole thing turned into a gigantic, like geodesic dome, both above and below, below the earth with many, many. And I could see that clearly that there were nine levels that are spoken of in the Toltec, Maya, Aztec traditions. And then I could see that,
Quantum Mechanics and Rock Art
00:39:58
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the exit was up above and that the entrance was down on the bottom. It was a huge spear and multiple different pathways. You could, you know, if you didn't know what you're doing or whatever or were totally lost, you could probably spend eternity wandering around in it. So I know that may sound many times
00:40:27
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beyond bizarre to use that same kind of thing. But I can assure you, everybody can't do this, and don't worry if you can't. God has given each of us different powers of observation. Some people can feel things, some people can see things, some people know things. We're all given different talents, and these talents in our modern
00:40:58
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busy world with television and cell phones and this and that and other things keeping us occupied. We've lost the ability to be in contact with the supernatural. But then again, I do not think any of this is supernatural. I think it can all be explained by quantum
00:41:20
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mechanics, which basically, one of the things that's been found is that the past, present and future are all present, where we are at the same time. And the time and space are an illusion in that you can actually, but by using your mind and the quantum world, you can actually go back in time, you can see what
00:41:50
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Rock art means you can see what life means. You can see many, many things. And it's up to you to explore and find out what your talents are. And in order to do this, the hand is the key. All of these people, everything we did, we found that if you rub your hands and hold the hands up with the elbows bent, that this somehow
00:42:20
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is like some kind of an eye that can put you in contact with the past and with the people in sites that were in the past in ways that classical Newtonian physics can't explain, but quantum mechanics is slowly explaining it and it's basically, it's up to you
00:42:50
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to explore this and learn this.
00:42:55
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That's that's about all we have time for. I would love to. It sounds like we need another hour at least to go to go in deeper. But I am I'm honored to have taken this amazing journey with you. And it's a blessing. I could riff on the Adderan posture and the nature of what you're talking about, the connection between the terrestrial and the celestial. But I'm going to I'm going to forego that and just thank you for reflecting and sharing
00:43:25
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the wonders of your life, your transformation and some of the supernatural and ethnobotanical and cognitive neuroscience realms that you're trafficking in. I applaud you. I'm very appreciative for your perspective and thank you for gracing our show. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure and I hope that what I have said will awaken
00:43:53
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awaken your mind to other realms of possibility. Thank you so much Dr. Cushman. See you next week all you rock art fans.
00:44:12
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Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. You can find this podcast on the educational podcast app Lyceum, L-Y-C-E-U-M, and wherever you find podcasts. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:44:51
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.