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enhanced—as if there were times when one had to believe in order to see, rather than the other way around.
    This realization led me to decide, now that I was trying to map the cul-de-sac of hallucinatory knowledge, that it would be useful not only to establish its limits from a rational perspective, but to suspend disbelief and note with equal seriousness the outline of the ayahuasqueros’ notions on the other side of the apparent impasse.
    I read for weeks. I started by refreshing my memory and going over the basic texts of anthropology as well as the discipline’s new, self-critical vein. Then I devoured the literature on shamanism, which was new to me. I had not read as much since my doctoral examinations nine years previously and was pleased to rediscover this purely abstract level of reality. With an enthusiasm that I never had at university I took hundreds of pages of reading notes, which I then categorized.
    Five months into my investigation, my wife and I visited friends who introduced us during the evening to a book containing colorful “three-dimensional images” made up of seemingly disordered dots. To see a coherent and “3-D” image emerge from the blur, one had to defocalize one’s gaze. “Let your eyes go,” our hostess told me, “as if you were looking through the book without seeing it. Relax into the blur and be patient.” After several attempts, and seemingly by magic, a remarkably deep stereogram sprang out of the page that I was holding in front of me. It showed a dolphin leaping in the waves. As soon as I focused normally on the page, the dolphin disappeared, along with the waves in front of it and behind it, and all I could see were muddled dots again.
    This experience reminded me of Bourdieu’s phrase “to objectify one’s objectifying relationship,” which is another way of saying “to become aware of one’s gaze.” That is precisely what one had to do in order to see the stereogram. This made me think that my dissatisfaction with the anthropological studies of shamanism was perhaps due to the necessarily focalized perspective of academic anthropologists, who failed to grasp shamanic phenomena in the same way that the normal gaze failed to see “three-dimensional images.” Was there perhaps a way of relaxing one’s gaze and seeing shamanism more clearly?
    During the following weeks I continued reading, while trying to relax my gaze and pay attention to the texts’ style, as much as to their content. Then I started writing a preliminary version of a second chapter on anthropology and shamanism. One afternoon, as I was writing, I suddenly saw a strikingly coherent image emerge from the muddle, as in a stereogram: Most anthropologists who had studied shamanism had only seen their own shadow. This went for the schizophrenics, the creators of order, the jacks-of-all-trades, and the creators of disorder.
    This vision shook me. I felt that I had finally found a warm trail. Without wasting time, I continued in the same direction.
    As I felt certain that the enigma of hallucinatory knowledge was only an apparent dead end, and as I was trying to suspend disbelief, I started wondering whether I might not be able to find a solution after all. The passage that led to the shamanic world was certainly hidden from normal vision, but perhaps there was a way of perceiving it stereoscopically. ...
    Speculating in this way, I realized that the hallucinations I had seen in Quirishari could also be described as three-dimensional images invisible to a normal gaze. According to my Ashaninca friends, it was precisely by reaching the hallucinatory state of consciousness that one crossed the impasse. For them, there was no fundamental contradiction between the practical reality of their life in the rainforest and the invisible and irrational world of ayahuasqueros. On the contrary, it was by going back and forth between these two levels