Ayahuascademia
Unrobed and undercover, I recently gave a talk in a secret Amsterdam basement to a group of researchers engaged in the academic study of ayahausca.
My point was that clinicians, therapists and anthropologists should take note of how traditional practitioners work with ayahuasca, and pay attention to what is considered important in the Amazon. Doing that, we might avoid the mistakes of the nineteenth century medics who investigated Chinese medicine and hypnosis with their own limited tools and concepts, ignoring reports of hundreds of individuals cured of diphtheria, and hundreds of cases of amputation under hypnosis.
Riots & Revelation
“Shop looted and youths storm McDonald’s and start cooking their own food”
- Daily Mail
(Do you want Armageddon with that, sir?)
I was at a demonstration once when someone tried to climb the Downing Street fence. The police responded as you might expect, we all got squeezed a bit, and I went home, shaken by my first taste of civil unrest. Some years later I saw a football riot kick off in Manchester, from the top deck of a bus on the Oxford Road. It was so stupid that it was funny, fizzling out as quickly as it had started.
Tonight, London braces itself for a fourth night of disorder, with police numbers tripled, and talk of water cannon and rubber bullets. I have been teaching about riots at school today, pausing as sirens go past the window, encouraging Colombians to loose the “ee” in “eesmashing”, drilling Koreans to say “vandals” rather than “bandoos”. We were joking about what we would loot that night, but speeding fire engines aren’t all that funny. Stories of rioters breaking into McDonald’s and flipping burgers are hilarious, but also spine-chilling. Given complete autonomy, what kind of mind chooses to do that?
Unprecedented riots look like part of an unprecedented apocalypse to me. Rioters and authorities, like their counterparts in the Middle East, co-ordinate their efforts through technologies which didn’t exist a few years ago. The Arab world is ablaze, the economies of the US and much of Southern Europe are melting, but perhaps something is emerging from the flames. Residents of some areas got together last night to defend their streets when it became clear that the police were overstretched, proving that a united community is quite capable of facing challenges without state intervention. The broom army organised their clean-ups on the same new technologies as the police and thieves.
Radio Revelations
Straight outa Texas!
On American Freedom Radio…
With Casper Leitch on Time4Hemp Live!
And the Reverend Chris Bennett
And the Reverend Dean Becker
And the Reverend Nemu – Forming a high holy trinity on one wavelength!
Pyschoactives in the ancient pages of the Bible,
and wickedness in the new bills of parliament:
Yee-ha!
Links:
Onward & Foreword!
Good Tidings, Bold Brethren!
My HEART is SHOUTNG, oh Sisters of Sense and Sweetness!
The author David Jay Brown has written a glowing foreword to Nemu’s End
He is, by way of introduction above and beyond his many honours and accolades, the guy who came up with “BS” for Belief System, as used in the books of his friend Robert Anton Wilson.
Scroll down for his bio and his foreword.
But first, the spirit of the Lord moves me to poetry, and to photoshop:
Save the experts!
People of the world!
Get involved with The Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform.
Join their mailing list, and be part of the movement to rethink the UN conventions on drugs. 10 million prisoners and 38,000 dead Mexicans in four years is too high a price to pay for an unscientific and immoral convention.
People of England!
Psy-Christ
Psychedelic Christianity
Ayahuasca religion is a strange concept to get your head around, even before you drink ayahausca. At my first session about ten years ago, I was very keen to try the brew, but the shirts and ties and general Christian vibe made me feel instantly uneasy.
The obvious question is: What does Christianity have to do with psychedelics?
Amongst anarchists, occultists and hedonists, there is much which is objectionable about Christianity. This article is about my induction into the Christian mythos, but fear not, you proud and proper transgressives, there will be no repentance for my old devilish ways. Read the rest of this entry »
Tsunami
Soma city in Fukushima prefecture was my home for two years in my early twenties. It is, what is left of it, just south of Sendai. Friends I have managed to contact are alive, stoic, and commendably Japanese. I’m still hopeful about others, but I taught literally thousands of children there, some of them from Minami-Soma, which was completely levelled.
This is an email from there:
Thank you Danny ! My family is OK, and my friends too. Of course I received severe damage in my shop. But the building does not fall down, my house too – We can live.
This earthquake is the bigest in the world – Magnitude 9.0. The size that nobody can imagine – Once in 1000 year?
Some friend lost their house by Tsunami-over 10m. Yurie lost her house. Tsunami came west of Nityu (daini-tyugattukou) - I saw big fisherman’s boat on the road near Nityu. Near beach, houses were broken and move in Soma, Isobe to Sinchi – Nothing. Read the rest of this entry »
Mercury Magick
Moving from the academick to the poetick.
Mercury, Oh Mercury,
Much more to me than 5 and 3,
Bodaciously, caduceously
In and out and back to me
He walks the sky intrepidly
He fools the gods mercilessly
Mercy mercy Mercury
White hot and scolding morphing key
Ayahuasca Laws
Ayahuasca and the Vines of Politics
After bubbling and brewing away for millennia in the Amazon, ayahuasca began seeping out through the foliage at the turn of the 20th century. This powerful visionary tea was adopted by rubber tapper communities in what is now the Brazil-Bolivia-Peru borderland, and various sects emerged, including Santo Daime. A syncretic mix of Catholicism, Spiritualism, and indigenous shamanism, it spread to the rest of Brazil in the 80s, and today there are groups dotted around Latin American, Europe, and the US, as well as in Japan, India, Australia, Israel, and other places.[i] This article focuses on the legal history of Santo Daime (SD), of which I am a member, though other lineages also have international profiles, the most widespread being the União de Vegetal (UDV). Read the rest of this entry »
Christ-mass Murder
“Can we have a word with you mate?”
“Yes of course, officer,” I replied.
“We just saw you shooting across the park, all in black, wearing a hooded top. Can you tell us where you have been?” Where had you been, eh?
