During a shamanic journey, I encountered an animal I did not recognise. It had a presence that was unmistakable, a distinct energy and character, and it communicated with me clearly. When I came back, I had to look it up to find out whether it existed at all. It did. It was a snow leopard. This is not the usual starting point for a discussion of the problem of other minds. The usual starting point is Descartes, or Wittgenstein, or the philosophical literature on analogy and i

We live in a culture that has decided, largely without examining the decision, that propositional knowledge is the real kind and everything else is something lesser: intuition, gut feeling, superstition, or at best a heuristic waiting to be replaced by a proper algorithm. Ryle, Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, Damasio, Klein: these are not fringe thinkers. They represent decades of serious philosophical and scientific work showing that this picture is wrong. The body knows.

In scientific observation, the observer is supposed to remain separate from the observed. In shamanic journey, they interpenetrate. When I journey to understand a client's situation, I'm not observing it from outside. I'm participating in it. The boundaries between my consciousness, the client's consciousness, and the situation itself become fluid. Where's the boundary? What's subject and what's object?