Posts Tagged ‘ayahuasca’
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.
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 »
Viva o nosso feitio!
This is how daimistas make ayahuasca.
It is my answer to Scotland Yard, HM Customs, and The Sun (see previous post)
O ouro que tem na terra é a luz que brilha mais
Chapel Perilous
The apocalypse is where the veiled is revealed. It is how the unconscious becomes conscious, and how discoveries hiding in the shadows have their covers dissed. Nemu’s End: The History, Psychology, and Poetry of the Apocalypse considers this process as it occurs in our society, in our history, and in our brains.
In science, revelation works through dreams, visions, insights and eureka moments, and is responsible for far more groundbreaking ideas and technologies than rational thinking and tapping on calculators. An apocalypse can be a personal event, when normal linguistic and psychological limitations are temporarily broken down. When this happens, whether spontaneously or through meditation or psychedelics, people may become capable of mental feats which were previously impossible, and aware of things which are usually invisible.
On another level, an apocalypse is an event which occurs collectively during intense periods of transformation. Each time this happens, horizons expand, new scales are opened up, new frontiers are discovered, and new philosophies and technologies are developed, invariably sparking social and political unrest. In seventeenth century Europe, a new order emerged, and was accompanied with an unprecedented body count. It also happened in first century Jerusalem, and there are signs that another upheaval is underway today, which will be global in its implications.
Despite the inelegance of street preachers and the disinterest of the sensible majority, the apocalypse is relevant to our lives, and becoming more so every day. Blinkered rationalism is a bulldozer lurching down a dark cul-de-sac at the end of the world; revelation is a magick bus bouncing down the path of understanding towards the light. This book is the story of the apocalypse, how it has been experienced in the past, and how it is unfolding today. It is written in the faith that revelation is open to everyone, and in the hope that we embrace it before our bulldozer squashes the life out of us.
