tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61707051584577933412024-03-18T10:35:24.665-07:00Ayahuasca AnonymousFrom 12 Steps to Power Plants: My Healing JourneyRomulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-7137946806298432592024-02-15T14:11:00.000-08:002024-02-29T11:15:04.369-08:00Where All of This is Pointing, Part II<p>The last time I drank Daime was an instructive experience for me. The work I attended was the one devoted to Yemanja, the Yoruba queen of the sea. I had been to a number of Yemanja works in the past, and had always found them cleansing and healing.</p><p>This time was different. One thing I noticed right away: when the names of the different Yoruba deities would appear in the hymns (Yemanja, Ogum da Beira Mar, etc.) I no longer felt comfortable singing them and stayed silent at those points. It wasn't anything I had consciously thought about, just an intuitive reaction in the moment.</p><p>The work was deeply unsatisfying to me, in a way that I had never experienced before with Daime. As I wrote in the last piece, I was actually left afterward with a suicidal impulse and a feeling of mild possession.</p><p>When I stopped to consider why that was, the answer felt obvious: my relationship with Jesus Christ has become exclusive.</p><p>I've always been a Christian when I consider it honestly. I was raised in the church and I never fundamentally questioned the notion that Jesus was the master teacher who came here to show us the right way to live. I see too much evidence to support that and it resonates too deeply within my being for it to be false. No verification by experts required.</p><p>However, I was also raised in a degenerate society. I was exposed to porn as a child. I grew up surrounded by sexual imagery in movies, TV shows, billboards, newspaper ads, etc. The true purpose of sex (the sacrament of a pairbonded man and woman in the confines of marriage to serve as the generative force of families) was obscured from me, and I was instead presented with a vision of Sex as Amusement Park. I think we can all see where that has taken us as a society*, and my experience with it was probably not more successful than most.</p><p>These false teachings had an effect on me. In sexual terms, I ended up behaving in a manner unbecoming for a Christian. This then had a spiraling effect: unable to resist that particular departure from Jesus' teaching (and his teachings on sex are incredibly restrictive -- no Free Love for adherents of JC), I found myself unable to resist others as well.</p><p>In the context of the current discussion, this has to do with idolatry and demon-worship. Jesus is quite clear on the exclusivity of his status as teacher and savior:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the Father, except by me.</i></p></blockquote><p>A lot of "modern Christians" (heretics) are totally incapable of handling this exclusivity. I had a similar mindset for a long time: <a href="https://bahairesources.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/bs-coexist.png">the Coexist bumper sticker</a> <i>used </i>to make sense to me (I have since pegged it as globalist/Luciferian propaganda). Sorry, guys. At no point in the Gospels does Jesus make a virtue of "tolerance" (the expansion of Jewish messiahship to non-Jews falls under a totally different category than the commission of sexual sin, or worship of other gods). He really just couldn't be any clearer on this, and it's quite a propaganda feat that it has been so obscured by mainstream Christianity.</p><p>So in the context of the Daime, this means that I've become fundamentally uncomfortable with it as a syncretic religion. Which is a bummer, because Mestre Irineu founded the Daime on pretty strict Christian lines: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dumRKIVZ2tE">his hinário</a> is entirely devoted to Jesus, John, Mary, the Holy Spirit and the other Christian fundaments.** The other stuff about Yoruba and Amazonian deities was added after his death.</p><p>I've come to view it as a diminishment rather than an addition. Here's the main problem: I don't think there's any possibility that these other beings have not received (and do not continue to receive) human sacrifice. That's what was revealed to me after the work. </p><p>I'm honestly not sure how I ever managed to get any benefit at all from such entities, but prior to 2020 acknowledging them in the works seemed to be ok for me. Not anymore.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Enter through the narrow gate. For wide and spacious is the path that leads to destruction, and many find it.</i></p></blockquote><p>Today I know that I must have no other teacher, no other healer, no other redeemer than Jesus of Nazareth. I am not attempting to convince you of this; it's simply my conclusion (arrived at very reluctantly, I might add -- I've probably always personally tended more towards spiritual eclecticism). In fairness, I guess I would say it is my strong recommendation that you follow my lead here. But the decision must be your own.</p><p>Certainly there are enough clues to help you in your choice. Maybe start by considering that there's no such thing as an AntiBuddha, or an AntiMohammed.*** Only Jesus is worth the trouble. What is the unifying philosophy of all the globalist psychos trying to enslave us? <i>Antichrist</i>. What's the opposite of that?</p><p>It's not complicated. It's just difficult. That's why so few people do it. There is no more demanding code of conduct in the world than Christian morality. Its list of renunciations is astonishing:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>No holding onto anger</li><li>No revenge </li><li>No moral grandstanding</li><li>No fornication </li><li>No sexual deviance of any kind</li><li>No "chosenness" (for anyone)</li><li>No domination (no empire)</li></ul><p></p><p>No wonder they killed him! People love that stuff!</p><p>On the flipside, his followers are taught to be humble and modest, to lead through service, to pray for our enemies, to reject violence, to feed the hungry, to comfort the sick and visit the prisoner.....the list is long.</p><p>It's long and it's not very lifestyle-centric. </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><i>"Oh my God that is like so inconvenient"</i></p><p><i>"I mean, really, is he even thinking about my needs at all?"</i></p><p><i>"You know, my therapist said I really need to start prioritizing myself"</i></p><p><i>"But it's supposed to be all about me -- the marketing all told me so"</i></p><p><i>"Oh how dare you"</i></p></blockquote><p>I'll be honest. I'm not really sure that medicine work is sustainable post-Covid. Certainly, in my view medicine can no longer be safely consumed in the typical New Age/left-leaning cultural milieu that has dominated its use so far. Demonic Evil has been openly unleashed in the world, and such a childish, retarded, credulous worldview is completely incapable of reckoning with it.</p><p>I mean, really, it's like a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3fZTkW-ZY8">JP Sears bit</a>:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><i>"So I was communing with Mother Ayahuasca in ceremony last night, and she told me that I really need to just do as I'm instructed by Dr. Fauci and the CDC...."</i></p></blockquote><p>LOL</p><p>No. The path forward for medicine drinkers is obvious: if we are to do it at all, we must drink in a rigorously Christian setting. It's our only hope for safety in this perilous, volatile time. In fact, if sufficient numbers of people were to do this (drink ayahuasca in order to know Christ), I don't think there's any telling how hugely positive an effect it could have on the planet.</p><p>Thor is not going to get us out of this mess, and neither is Odin. Vishnu is not going to do it. Not Zeus, nor Athena. Not Huitzilopochtli. Certainly not Set or Baal or Moloch.</p><p>Not one of those <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUTkzDcqW5g">ET rape-os</a> could give a shit about us. All they ever wanted to do was fuck us and eat us and make us mine gold.</p><p>Jesus wept for us, and then he went to the cross for us. He completely inverted the sacrificial paradigm. After having spent his life teaching and curing us. Indeed his yoke is easy and his burden is light.</p><p>Sooner or later, every knee shall bend. Easy or hard, Christ is King.</p><p>God bless you, whoever you are.</p><div><br /></div><p>* On a related note, if kids being fondled by sex offenders in drag in libraries is "progress" to you, please signal that to me in some clear manner so that I never, ever drink medicine or associate in any way at all with you. Wake the fuck up.</p><p>** Those familiar with Mestre's story will recall that when he first drank ayahuasca, he found the practice infested with paganism and black magic, and he received instruction from Our Lady that he should only drink by himself until he was ready to launch the new church she was entrusting to him (the Santo Daime). Sadly, much of the Daime has gone full-circle back to paganism and now requires reform to bring it back into line with the vision Mestre originally received.</p><p>*** Another indicator is the vehemence with which the dark occultists of Hollywood constantly attack Jesus and Christians. "You know you're over the target when you're getting flak." I have also heard several whistleblowers describe how the name "Jesus Christ" is forbidden to be uttered in the DUMBs and other black facilities. He's the fly in their ointment.</p>Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-66234880576996696352024-01-20T09:37:00.000-08:002024-01-20T09:37:59.572-08:00Where All of This is Pointing, Part II sincerely hope that any readers I have are weathering this global storm well. Things have been quite difficult in my life, difficult in ways that ayahuasca, Daime, or any other variety of plant medicine are powerless to solve.<div><br /></div><div>That was the exact message I was given by Aya herself the last time I sat in traditional Shipibo-style ceremony, in December of 2020. It was chilling and stark. She said to me "I have nothing more to give you. What you're going through is beyond my power to heal or affect in any way. For that matter, look around at the other people surrounding you in the circle. Do they seem like they are thriving? Do they look like they are living in Truth?"</div><div><br /></div><div>It was <i>chilling </i>and <i>stark</i>. Ayahuasca basically repudiated herself to me, at least in the context of that particular group. I have heard of others having this experience as well.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>For me it was an unwelcome revelation. I first drank in 2014, and I had come to rely on medicine as a cornerstone of my spiritual practice. The circle I was sitting with had been a home to me for several years, but was no longer. I felt disoriented and afraid.</div><div><br /></div><div>I drank a few more times at the Daime church I belonged to, until I essentially had the same experience there as well. That one may have actually been worse, with an entity apparently attaching itself to me during the work and then encouraging me to kill myself the next day. It took about a week for me to recover.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div>That was in the Spring of 2022, and I've not had medicine since then.</div><div><br /></div><div>The reason I'm writing this now is that I feel a need to convey a warning to people about this entire undertaking: <i>things are different now.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Looking back at the pieces I wrote between 2014 and 2017, I can see a naive optimism in them about the healing potential of plant medicine. It was genuine, and I don't retract what I wrote. At that time I was having a profoundly positive experience with the aid of Daime and Aya, an experience in which I was healing from heavy PTSD that had dogged me since I was little. I will never renounce the good things those substances and their attendant beings brought into my life, and I will always be grateful for them.</div><div><br /></div><div>The problem is that the whole world is radically different now than it was then. The occult government that actually calls the shots on this planet revealed itself overtly in 2020. Whether you refer to it as the Cryptocracy, the permanent government, Babylon, the Beast System, the oligarchy, the Illuminati, the 300, whatever: that thing finally and openly revealed itself to the world. The esoteric became exoteric.</div><div><br /></div><div>I mean, really: if <a href="https://www.grammy.com/videos/sam-smith-kim-petras-unholy-2023-grammys-watch-performance-live-65th-grammy-awards" target="_blank">this</a> doesn't make it plain to you then nothing will. Brought to you by Pfizer.</div><div> </div><div>I discussed these things in <a href="https://ayahuasca-anonymous.blogspot.com/2020/07/medicine-is-only-tool.html" target="_blank">my last piece</a>.</div><div> </div><div>In this piece, I am going to discuss the effect that all of this has on the entire plant medicine proposition. I'm going to start by stating what I believe ayahuasca and Daime (and hoasca, and yagé, etc.) actually are: I believe that they are biological programmable devices. Something like Read Only Memory (ROM) in plant form.</div><div> </div><div>I think all entheogens share some portion of this reality, but I find the description most applicable to ayahuasca and its derivatives, for the simple reason that humans actually have to make the brew (as opposed to, say, mushrooms just growing in manure or being cultivated). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH6zL2gYkpc&t=312s" target="_blank">That process</a>, as one can imagine, creates a strong and intimate connection between the humans and the plants. The plants, in fact, act essentially as biological silicon wafers that are programmed with logic. Not just logic, so much more -- love, intention, thoughts, beliefs, understanding, propaganda, delusion, deception.....</div><div> </div><div>Do you see the problem? If the brew is made by confused and mind-controlled individuals, how can it produce good results?</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm just gonna say this flat-out: most medicine drinkers that I have met are lefties. This has got to be addressed, because of the way that entire phenomenon has been weaponized in the culture. Those of you who consider yourselves that, please do not jump to offense at things I'm going to say. Instead, maybe take a deep breath and ask God to reveal Truth to you. Maybe strive for humility in the recognition that you do not know everything.</div><div> </div><div>Maybe consider for starters the fact that I myself was a devoted left-winger for over 3 decades. I grew up in Reagan-Bush era America, and I found the huge military budgets and wrecking of our industry distasteful, as well as union-bashing and support for genocidal Third World dictatorships. Not understanding the concept of the freemasonic checkerboard (controlled opposition), I assumed that the best antidote to depredations committed by the right-wing must be left-wing politics. I was suitably indoctrinated.</div><div> </div><div>This more or less worked for me until about 2016. The presidential election that year completely changed how I view politics in America. Or really anywhere, I guess.</div><div> </div><div>It was shocking for me to see, on social media and in the world, formerly rational-seeming friends of mine go totally insane over Donald Trump. It was shocking to see them, as a result of this Trump Derangement Syndrome, support one of the most obviously corrupt and truly evil politicians ever, even preferring her to Bernie Sanders (who at least seemed to be saying some reasonable and appealing things in 2016, and had huge popular support), all on the basis of a trashy, low-IQ identity politics that elevated the symbolism of her "gender" above rational concerns about her obvious warmongering, neoliberalism, and actual criminality. All done with a sort of breathtakingly smug self-assuredness that by believing everything told to them by corporate media(!) they were sure to permanently occupy THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY.</div><div> </div><div>What I was noticing was the total oligarchic convergence of what had been the American "left-wing" by a radically corrupt DNC and an activist donor class, all aided by the trashiest and most servile media apparatchiks imaginable. Real journalists such as Glen Greenwald and Chris Hedges have covered this extensively, so I do not need to get mired in the details of it. I'll let it suffice to sat that I believe the Occupy Wall Street movement truly frightened our ruling class. People were finally starting to figure out the real deal in this country, with the rhetoric about the "1%" actually getting to the heart of the matter. This was not something that could be allowed.</div><div> </div><div>To gauge the success of their efforts, all one needs to do is look around. Instead of a united and coherent "99%", we have the fractured mess that is American society today, certainly closer to civil war than I've seen in my lifetime. As I saw someone put it, today you have people who make $100,000 a year actually believing that the biggest threat to them comes from people who make $40,000 a year, all on the basis of identitarian factors such as race, sexual orientation, political party, religious confession, etc.</div><div> </div><div>It's a joke. It's an obvious oligarchic swindle. If you've fallen for it, shame on you.</div><div> </div><div>If you've fallen for it you're in a tremendous amount of danger. If you've fallen for the notion that the biggest threat facing America is from the half of the country that supports Donald Trump, rather than the transhumanist/depopulationist fiends of the WEF, Club of Rome, Bilderbergers, etc. (to say nothing of our own utterly traitorous political class), then you'll believe other nonsense as well. You'll believe that the correct response to a disease with a 99+% survival rate is to lock down society, trash the economy, mask and isolate children and plunge them into despair, and ultimately force people to inject themselves with poison. You'll believe that it's somehow virtuous to eliminate national borders. You'll believe that the sexualization of children represents the cutting edge of morality. You'll believe that some vague mandate for "social justice" legitimizes burning down American cities.</div><div> </div><div>I don't know about you, but I don't want to drink medicine brewed or administered by people who hold such beliefs. Given the dynamics I've outlined above, I recognize the tremendous danger that would pose to my spiritual, emotional, and moral well-being. </div><div> </div><div>Please don't imagine that I am offering up the GOP or any "right-wing" institution whatsoever as the antidote to all of this. That is not my meaning. I view the DNC and GOP as 2 sides to the same uniparty coin. Both of them are up to their eyeballs in the literal blood of children. Before there was Pizzagate there was the Franklin Savings and Loan scandal (look it up if you're unfamiliar).</div><div> </div><div>I am, however, saying this: the "woke" ideology is a purely satanic construct. It's Babel 2.0. None of that is energy I welcome into my spiritual practice, and you shouldn't either. To do so is to court disaster.</div><div> </div><div>Medicine places us in an extremely vulnerable state. All of the defensive barriers of waking, sober consciousness are lowered. If you take well-made medicine in a truly safe and loving environment, this can result in hugely positive healing and transformation. If, however, you take questionable medicine in a satanically mind-controlled environment, you are inviting literal demonic possession.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>There is a solution to all of this. I will cover it in Part II.</div>Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-80663976136315492102020-10-29T09:17:00.002-07:002024-02-10T08:56:02.704-08:00Medicine is Only a ToolI haven't been drinking medicine much lately. Not because I reject sacrament itself. No, I still hold the plants and the benevolent beings they give us access to in great reverence. It is precisely this reverence that mostly compels me not to drink, at least in the ways that are currently available to me.<br />
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What I've been having trouble with is my fellow practitioners. Too many people aren't taking this seriously enough. Too many people refuse to abandon their pleasant and false ideas of who they actually are, of what the world actually is. Too many won't acknowledge just how serious our situation on this planet has become. Too many refuse to humble themselves before the grueling and necessary process of (false) ego disassembly. Too many won't feel their deepest hurts. Too many cling to the illusion of control. Too many imagine that the mere act of drinking medicine and acting "spiritual" puts them in some special club that is automatically guaranteed salvation. </div>
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Too many refuse to trust in God.</i></div>
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All of this has to go. <i>It has to go</i>. That means it's <i>going</i>, whether we like it or not. Easy or hard - that's our only choice.</div>
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People think they're making the easy choice, with all the denial and the sweeping under the rug. They're not. They're deferring payment, and adding interest. The bill is coming due. Very, very soon.</div>
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You can feel it. I can feel it. We can all feel it. It's all out in the open now, the darkness and the filth that has festered at all levels of our species, from the individual to the institutional.<br />
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At the individual level it's clear to me that way too many people, whether medicine drinkers or not, have no interest in doing real shadow work. In the general populace it's depressing but perhaps understandable. Do I really expect rigorous personal honesty from a generic American consumer drone? I do not. Their unconsciousness and anaesthesia is utterly predictable.<br />
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What's far less excusable to me is this same tendency in people who claim to be spiritual warriors. I grow tired of counting the number of people I've met in this plant medicine venture who absolutely refuse to truly know themselves, to examine all their ugly, uncomfortable secrets. I've encountered way too many whose conduct outside of ceremony is jarringly discordant with the high ideals we all claim inside. They lie. They cheat. They gossip in an ugly, harmful fashion. They have no sexual morality. They behave in other obviously selfish and harmful ways. </div><div><br /></div><div>Somehow these people consider deep, honest self-examination optional. It is not. Not if your goal is to receive anything remotely meaningful or effective from these plant teachers. </div><div>
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If it isn't then I'm quite sure I don't want to drink with you. This is not even just a question of spirituality or morality or aesthetics. It's a question of self-preservation. Ayahuasca opens a Pandora's box of shadow material in those who consume her. Combine that with deep moral, emotional, and spiritual disturbance and you could have a real problem on your hands.</div><div><br /></div><div>A shaman friend of mine told a hair-raising story from one of the centers down in Peru: a guy drank and afterwards attacked another pasajero with a knife; the intended victim grabbed it and killed him instead. Can you imagine?</div><div><br /></div><div>I myself visited a Daime community in Brazil where the leader and his son had been murdered by a young man who should never have been given the sacrament, but was. That mausoleum made quite an impression on me. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't want to get caught up in a similar scene. High personal integrity of all participants guarantees the integrity of the container, and minimizes the probability of mayhem. Sounds good to me.</div>
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<div>At the institutional level, the macrocosm mirrors the microcosm. All of that personal immorality multiplies itself out in the society to justify and reinforce the tyranny we all live under. Of course Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. Of course the implications of that are massive. Of course the official 9/11 story is a joke. Of course chem-trails are real (look up, for fuck's sake). Of course Covid-19 has been massively manipulated by a bought-and-paid-for media to further God only knows what kind of dystopian, tyrannical, globalist agenda. Of course there has been a massive, 70+ year-long coverup of the ET presence on this planet and all of the potentially liberating technologies and advances in consciousness associated with it. Of course corporate media is always lying to you about all of these things.</div><div>
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So draw the conclusions.</div>
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The notion that you can simultaneously: 1) achieve enlightenment through plant medicine; and 2) believe what is being fed to you by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc. is absurd. The list of things those propaganda organs have deceived us about is staggeringly long. To continue believing their lies is just crazy. I'm not claiming to have some line into absolute truth. But I am claiming to know absolutely where not to look in my quest for anything even remotely connected to truth, and it starts with corporate media.</div><div><br /></div><div>We don't even need to get into questions of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3xK5O7Iqo0&feature=emb_logo" target="_blank">outright intelligence community bribery and manipulation of news media</a> (though we certainly should). Simply examining the economic facts around how the "news" is produced should be enough, as Noam Chomsky illustrated almost 30 years ago with "Manufacturing Consent". Am I really going to look to the New York Times to tell me the truth about vaccines when pharmaceutical companies regularly take out full-page ads there? Come on. Grow up.</div><div><br /></div><div>Facing these questions is tough; I get it. The only thing that could possibly be worse is what's in store for us if we don't. The plans are hidden in plain sight: the openly proclaimed eugenicist goal to reduce the human population to 500,000,000; Bill Gates' public endorsement of totalitarian bio-tyranny through nano-particle-laden vaccines and microchip implants; the blatantly obvious spraying of chem-trails over the whole globe; the increasingly obvious dark occult practices of our so-called "elite"; the shameful and undeniable systematic kidnapping, rape, and murder of untold thousands of children yearly in these occult ceremonies; the obvious mainstreaming of pedophilia that they hope will enable them to bring it all into the open. </div><div><br /></div><div>I never wanted to know any of this stuff. Knowing it is traumatic and terrible. It is scary. It is deeply alienating, at least when so much of the world is so totally asleep. It is burdensome. It implies a call to action that seems terrifying to follow. </div><div><br /></div><div>I wanted to hold onto the indoctrination I'd received as a child: that our world essentially resembles a <a href="https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_fill,g_auto,h_1248,w_2220/f_auto,q_auto,w_1100/v1555316679/shape/mentalfloss/scarry_primary.jpg" target="_blank">Richard Scarry book</a>, with the baker and the plumber and the delivery driver and the grocer and the teacher and everybody else going about their business honestly and decently (and comfortingly rendered as cute anthropomorphic cartoon animals). Bad people around the edges, sure, but that's what the police (did Scarry actually represent them as pigs?) are for: to bring these rogues to justice and keep the rest of us safe. All in all, a world that is what it seems.</div><div><br /></div><div>Alas, this appears not to be the case. There is no point in me attempting to dictate to you all of the specifics of some pre-approved worldview; you have to do your own research. Proceed with caution: there are plenty of charlatans, egomaniacs, lunatics, and counterintelligence agents out there. Trust your gut. If somebody feels like a liar or a self-promoter or a wacko, move on. If they resonate with your heart and experience, check them out. Meditate on their information and ponder what it means for you. </div><div><br /></div><div>I can give you a small list of people I've found illuminating; you can see if they help you:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Neil Kramer</li><li>Dr. Steven Greer</li><li>Tiffany Fitzhenry (mostly when she's talking about Hollywood)</li><li>Mark Passio</li><li>Tony Rodrigues (SSP)</li><li>Jay Parker (SRA)</li><li>Dave McGowan</li></ul></div><div>There was a point in my own journey, just a few months before I flew down to Peru and drank for the first time, when I made the following prayer in my desperation and desire for a way out of the dreadful hole I was in:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"Please, God, show me the whole truth."</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Careful what you ask for. There have been times since then when I've longed for the unconsciousness I suffered from/enjoyed in my 20s. At the level of both personal and global awareness, <i>I have longed for it</i>. There's no getting it back.</div>
<div><br /></div><div>I invite you to join me in my discomfort. It is the first step towards real freedom. For all of us.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>God bless you, whoever you are.</i></div><div><br /></div>
Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-53137326040946930452017-11-15T10:34:00.000-08:002019-09-16T07:43:50.846-07:00Reckoning<div>
I think it is time for ayahuasca drinkers to make peace with twelve-step programs. Not just on a secret, ad-hoc basis, but formally. Officially. </div>
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I know plenty of people doing the other. Lately I've had the great blessing to serve as guardian at some truly outstanding ceremonies, ones that a couple of good friends of mine lead. And it's hilarious - every time I go it seems like I meet some new AA apostate who is drinking medicine on the sly to further his spiritual development. Sometimes several of them in the same weekend.</div>
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These guys are interesting to me because they have all continued to be regular meeting-goers. As I've described in this blog, I have not. I pretty much recoiled from the phenomenon in the early stage of my medicine-drinking career. For me, ayahuasca seemed to have quickly and thoroughly supplanted 12-step programs and everything they entail - going to meetings, reading the book, working with a sponsor, sponsoring others. </div>
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As I've related, after I came back from Peru I felt an energetic dissonance whenever I went to a meeting - like I was being pulled downward. The people, for the most part, seemed to be resonating on a lower frequency than the medicine drinkers I had begun associating with. There was also the simple fact that after 12 years I was tired of hearing the same shit you always do in meetings. Perhaps the phrase "It works if you work it" had some efficacy for me the first 100 times I heard it; after that, not so much. And the idea of hiding my new-found sacrament, never daring to speak openly of it in a meeting - well that was just ridiculous to me. The notion of being classed as some poor relapser who needed to step up and grab a desire chip right after the meth-freak who just wrecked his car/beat his girl/got out of jail/all of the above -- the notion of having this done to me by some ignorant, small-minded AA fundamentalist -- well, this was simply out of the question.<br />
<br />
It's been over 3 years since I attended meetings. Kind of astonishing, when I think about it. I was a 3-meeting-a-week guy. For 12 and a half years I was, without a single relapse. And it wasn't just meetings - I did service work at the local jail, I had sponsees, I made phone calls, I inventoried regularly, I read the Big Book - I did just about everything an AA is supposed to. I meant it.<br />
<br />
Then I pretty much stopped on a dime. I informed my sponsees that I could not in good faith act as a representative of an organization I no longer felt a part of, and I split.<br />
<br />
For a long time I didn't really think any more about it. I was too busy on my new path - facing the challenges, reaping the rewards. When I thought about AA I would kind of shake my head, feeling a touch superior, perhaps. I definitely felt glad to have graduated.<br />
<br />
Then a funny thing started to happen. I began to notice that at least a few of the medicine drinkers I encountered seemed a touch delusional. They seemed a little too comfortable in their egos. They seemed like they were bullshitting themselves. Like they imagined themselves as protagonists in a Carlos Castaneda novel. Like they hadn't examined their own motives and beliefs rigorously enough.<br />
<br />
<i>Like they hadn't done a fifth step.</i><br />
<br />
<i>Like they hadn't done any of the steps.</i><br />
<br />
Whoa. I was fascinated by my discovery. I had come to take the steps and everything they involve -- surrender to a higher power, rigorous honesty, a complete willingness to acknowledge and let go of my character defects, a fervent desire to be of service to others -- for granted. I had completely internalized them, and I sincerely tried (however inadequately) to live my life according to them.<br />
<br />
I never stopped being a good AA.<br />
<br />
I made the unconscious assumption that anyone and everyone who accompanied me on my new path would naturally also have learned these basic spiritual lessons.<br />
<br />
Hah!<br />
<br />
Alas, it is not so. I am most displeased to report that there are any number of poseurs and shallow spiritual materialists who drink medicine regularly. I certainly do not find them to be the majority, but I do experience them as a saddeningly significant minority.<br />
<br />
How they manage it is a mystery to me. I find the force of ayahuasca simply overwhelming to my ego and all of its petty nonsense. She cleans me right out, every time.<br />
<br />
Why they would even bother in their attempt is even more incomprehensible. It's like they're standing just outside of an open bank vault, free for the taking, and they're combing the ground for loose change.<br />
<br />
But then again, maybe not. Maybe to make that metaphor more complete, in front of the vault there's a football field's worth of hot coals that they have to cross bare-footed while birds of prey swoop down on them and headhunters pepper them with poison darts.<br />
<br />
In the end I suppose it looks like cowardice. Wide and spacious is the path that leads to destruction, and many find it. May God have mercy on them.<br />
<br />
The 12 steps are no proof against this phenomenon. The distressingly large number of dry drunks who haunt AA meeting houses are a depressing reminder of this fact.<br />
<br />
However, they are a useful tool. The principles of humility, honesty, willingness, and service they embody are solid ground on which to stand in this spiritual trial that every true seeker undergoes. If sincerely applied, they are consistent and effective antidotes for our innate love of delusion.<br />
<br />
<i>It works if you work it.</i><br />
<br />
Damn. In the end it seems I return to the AA stock phrases that still crowd my brain. I suppose there's a reason that they became clichés in the first place.<br />
<br />
Once more I am issuing a call to action to those of you who feel compelled to read this blog*:<br />
<br />
<i>Let's integrate these two things.</i><br />
<br />
It's what Bill Wilson wanted, you know. After his own transformational experience with LSD-25, he suggested what amounted to a 13th step - careful, clinical application of psychedelics in order to expand the consciousness of the newly recovered alcoholic, to get to the root of the reasons they drank in the first place. <i>To heal trauma.</i><br />
<br />
He was completely shut down. Threatened with banishment from the thing he had founded. Ridiculed and marginalized by the same frightened, ignorant people who have ended up dominating that organization.<br />
<br />
You shall know the tree by the fruit. What's AA's success rate for long-term sobriety? Single-digit percentages, right? That's the number I seem to recall hearing in meetings. That's about what it looked like to me, surveying the landscape of retreads, relapsers, and suicides who could never seem to get adequate traction from the 12 steps devoid of sacrament.<br />
<br />
What a miserable joke. It's time to right this twisted state of affairs.<br />
<br />
The solution is plain to see, right in front of us, though its details are not yet clear. Maybe a new organization, one that is based on the 12 steps but explicitly recognizes the use of plant medicine. Some amalgam of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Santo Daime, perhaps. Maybe simply a recognition in our minds that these paths are not contradictory. An openness to a fruitful, beautiful, healing union of the two, in accordance with the vision of AA's founder. A recognition that the two things need each other desperately: AA needs the biochemical and spiritual agent of transformation offered by true sacrament; the ayahuasca tradition needs to be cleansed of cultural detritus that has built up over its millennia of use.<br />
<br />
How this will come about is not for me to say. That is for you people to work out. I am but a messenger.<br />
<br />
<i>God bless you, whoever you are.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
* I am still amazed at the footprints my readers leave. Google tracks you, you know, as it does all of us, and then reports your whereabouts to me. From the four corners of the earth you come, it seems - Russia, Finland, Canada, Peru, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Ukraine, France, and here in the USA. I thank you all for your attention to these pressing matters. </div>
Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-1997189409411946412017-06-17T08:39:00.000-07:002017-06-19T08:59:01.473-07:00On the Antidepressant Qualities of AyahuascaThis last weekend I had the chance to drink ayahuasca, and so I did. It marked the 70th time that I have done so. The gratitude I feel for this opportunity can't be expressed with human language - the opportunity to truly learn myself and the Universe, simply by drinking this divine, foul-tasting brew. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.<br />
<br />
I tend to focus a lot in this blog on the spiritual and emotional aspects of my recovery from PTSD. These are paramount for me. But another, subtler transformation is also being wrought by ayahuasca - the healing of my brain chemistry. This is something that feels like it's been happening in the background the entire time. Neural paths have been re-rerouted. Diseased matter has been regenerated. Chemical levels have been normalized. New connections have been formed.<br />
<br />
A primary effect of this is that my depression is being lifted from me. It's so profound a change that it is very difficult to tabulate or comprehend. It's not that I have new furniture, or a new house to put it in, or a new piece of land on which to place it all. It's more basic than that. The air I breathe is different. The ground I walk on is not the same. The stars that adorn my sky have been totally reconfigured. My relationship to the world is new.<br />
<br />
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote <a href="http://www.rilke.de/gedichte/orpheus_eurydike_hermes.htm" target="_blank">a really gorgeous poem</a> describing a "world of lament" that featured "ein Klage-Himmel mit entstellten Sternen" - "a lament-heaven with disfigured stars".<br />
<br />
This poem has always spoken to me, particularly this stanza:<br />
<br />
"....a whole world of lament arose, in which<br />
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,<br />
road and village, field and stream and animal;<br />
and ... around this lament-world, even as<br />
around the other earth, a sun revolved<br />
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-<br />
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars...."<br />
<br />
I, too, have had my own separate world, distinct from the worlds inhabited by my fellows. A world created almost entirely by trauma, neglect, and emotional poverty. It was made by others, but ultimately embraced by me. I didn't know what else to do.<br />
<br />
In terms of brain chemistry and mood, my world looked like constant, more-or-less severe clinical depression. But those are just words. They cannot convey the reality of what it is like to live in that state. The hopelessness of it. The despair. The heartbreak. The exhaustion. The longing for release, by any means at all.<br />
<br />
When I went to meetings I used to often hear people say "How you feel isn't important, it's what you do that counts." And my response was "Yeah, well, maybe for you. You try feeling this way for a week and then get back to me."<br />
<br />
I was, <i>louvado seja Deus nas alturas</i>, never really inclined to suicide. But I understood it when others did that. Even though it frightened me and angered me and I would sometimes lash out in my heart at them, I knew why they did it. Now I just send them all prayers. I've felt too many of their spirits come through me and other members of our community during mediumship ceremonies. Suicide's definitely no solution. They're in a rough spot.<br />
<br />
I got on antidepressants in my late 20s, and I stayed largely on them for 12 years. They managed my symptoms pretty well, and without too many side effects. Eventually I just got tired of being dependent on them, and so I quit.<br />
<br />
My experiment went surprisingly well for a couple of years. I was working out like crazy, and that seemed to compensate for my lowered serotonin levels. I felt pretty good.<br />
<br />
But then things started piling up - divorce, unemployment, other family problems. A return of major depression and severe PTSD. I quit sleeping, and I started cracking up. But there's no need describe my journey to ayahuasca, <a href="http://reset.me/personal-story/personal-story-ayahuasca-healed-beyond-alcoholics-anonymous-provide/" target="_blank">I've already done that</a>.<br />
<br />
What I want to talk about now is what happened after she found me. And that is, at least in terms of my mood, nothing at all. I drank 20, 30 times and got essentially no relief whatsoever from depression. I started to feel horribly bitter and betrayed - "healing" had been dangled in front of me like a carrot in front of a busted-up old mule, and then apparently yanked away before I could grab it. I wanted to kick somebody. I especially wanted to kick the author of that famous National Geographic article, the one who described how <i>1 ayahuasca workshop</i> had permanently rid her of depression. What the hell was wrong with me? I felt broken beyond repair.<br />
<br />
Again, <a href="http://ayahuasca-anonymous.blogspot.com/2015/12/ayahuasca-and-marijuana-part-1.html" target="_blank">I've already described</a> how cannabis has given me profound relief from depression. But about a year ago, it started to become plain to me that this is more than simply a question of helping manage my symptoms and giving me short-term relief from suffering. Something else has happened, as well. It has taken a very long time, far longer than was promised, and certainly far longer than I ever wanted. But it has finally happened.<br />
<br />
Somehow, working in conjunction, ayahuasca and marijuana together have actually re-wired my organism. Now, even when I fast from both medicines I can tell that my base mental and emotional state is far more balanced and healthy than it was before I started this work. I am less inclined to pessimism. I can actually feel joy (a rare experience indeed in my former life). I laugh a whole lot more.<br />
<br />
I can sleep at night. <br />
<br />
That one's huge. As I have discovered to my great cost, sleeplessness and depressed mood can very easily form a negative feedback loop that ends in psychological catastrophe. The lower your serotonin, the worse you sleep.....the worse you sleep, the lower your mood..... add that up for a few weeks and see where you end up. Scary.<br />
<br />
A sweet and beautiful friend of mine, a man who has completed a traditional Shipibo apprenticeship in Peru, describes in a matter-or-fact way how people tend to find plant medicine in times of great disruption and crisis in their lives, and how plants serve to balance our organism during these times. Certainly that has been my experience.<br />
<br />
Today I no longer feel the need to kick all of the ayahuasca poster children. I have become one of them. What a wonderful thing that is. I wish it for you, too.<br />
<br />
God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
<br />
<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-36896732828193412052016-12-28T09:14:00.000-08:002016-12-28T09:14:08.414-08:00On the Question of Sociopathy There is a notion that has taken hold in a large part of the world's population (at least in the so-called "developed" countries) that is totally false. That is the notion that it is somehow spiritually unevolved and undesirable to ever engage in conflict. To ever call out people on their wicked behavior. To ever disagree with bad ideas. Forcefully to do these things.<br />
<br />
I am serving notice to this delusion right here, right now.<br />
<br />
I have a sense that this falsehood has its origin in the New Age movement - [soft, amber light and tinkling bells, breathy female voice] "We must focus on the light." It's true enough, as far as it goes. Our reality follows our intention and our attention, and so we should predominantly focus those on positive things. However, what this worldview fails to account for is what we are supposed to do when confronted with Evil. It avoids the question altogether. Perhaps it assumes that there is no such thing.<br />
<br />
This is patently, demonstrably false. How do I know? Because I have had intimate experience of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sociopath-Next-Door-Martha-Stout/dp/0767915828" target="_blank">sociopaths</a>. And when you've done that, you've looked evil in the eye. I won't go into great detail on this, since others have done a fine job of it. But the bottom line is this: they aren't like the rest of us. They are incapable of empathy, of any sort of real human connection. Instead, they understand only domination. They appear to be wired like reptiles, in a way that precludes mammalian warmth and bonding. Wild, dangerous characteristics mark them. They can lie without affect! They don't feel fear in the face of terrible consequences! They cannot love!<br />
<br />
How weird that the human species is burdened with these beings! Somewhere between 1-5% of our total population they form, it seems. What a strange, cosmic sort of affliction! What does it tell us about our mission on this planet, our burden, our gift, our <i>lesson</i>? That we should somehow have to learn how to manage these creatures who masquerade as our brethren, but in fact are among us as wolves among sheep?<br />
<br />
And learn this we must. Learn it we must. Every tribal or sectarian war in humanity's long, sordid, blood-soaked history has its origin in these reptiles in human skin, these Hermann Goerings and Josef Stalins and Henry Kissingers and Hillary Clintons. Every industrial and post-industrial horror afflicted on human beings around the world has its origins in these "people", these Morgans and Rockefellers and Krupps and Rothschilds. The most prodigiously murderous among them we learn by name. The more mundane we simply feel as a dark, miserable leavening throughout our species, the nameless killers and enforcers and witches and manipulators and hatchet-men who dog us so ruthlessly.<br />
<br />
<i>As wise as adders and as gentle as doves</i> - so must we be. We must contain them. We must contain their Evil. As near as I can tell, they're not really even in the driver's seat - sociopaths appear to me to be nothing more than vessels for hateful, hurtful, hellish spirits. I guess you could say it's not entirely their fault.<br />
<br />
We must approach them in a spirit of charity, but not of foolishness. We must pray for their souls' healing and at the same time we must not be taken in by them. But what must we do with them?<br />
<br />
Do we kill them all? Somehow that seems incompatible with the rest of our program here, with the medicine drinking and divine knowledge and compassion and all. Do we lock them up until they die? Maybe. Certainly the studies that have been done on rapists and torturers indicate that these creatures have no interest whatsoever in changing. They will never not pose a deadly threat to all other human beings. Maybe a wise and decent incarceration is the best that any society can hope to achieve with them. A recognition that they are a severely damaged subset of our species that must be quarantined for the common good.<br />
<br />
Do we feed them plant medicine? Maybe. I read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/world/americas/a-hallucinogenic-tea-time-for-some-brazilian-prisoners.html?_r=0" target="_blank">a fascinating article</a> in which the author describes how an offshoot of the Daime in Brazil is working with violent offenders to help them understand the meaning of their crimes. I think it's probably too early to tell what its results will be.<br />
<br />
I don't know. I don't think anyone else does, either. Honestly, I think what I'm doing here is issuing a call to action to those who feel inclined to read this blog: let's drink and consider the problem. Let's ask Mother Ayahuasca for guidance on the question of sociopathy. She'll come up with something far better than we ever could, I'm sure of that.<br />
<br />
Because what's absolutely clear to me is that it's one of the most important questions facing our species right now. Quite possibly the most important. Think about it. What do you experience, over and over, almost everywhere in the world you go? Good people. Decent people. People who are hospitable and kind to strangers, people with light in their eyes who want to do good things.<br />
<br />
And yet where are we as a species? On the edge of the abyss, that's where. Why?<br />
<br />
<i>"It's the sociopaths, stupid."</i><br />
<br />
Truly, the time that Jesus and John spoke of is here. All that has been hidden is being brought to light. And I assert that this is the most important of all of those hidden truths. It's the lynchpin. The world really is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEa4Igjxu9k" target="_blank">run by a cult of sociopaths</a>. They're the ones causing all of the mayhem. This is the central fact that we are never supposed to understand. We're supposed to believe the lying propaganda of the sociopaths. The problem is always <i>out there</i> - it's the Russians, it's Iran, it's the terrorists, it's the landowners, it's immigrants, it's the Jews. There's a shepherd in Afghanistan who poses a deadly threat to my freedom.<br />
<br />
No. This has always been the sociopaths' greatest victory. Conning humankind into believing that some sort of external tribal danger threatens us, when in fact the real danger has always been right next door. Perhaps it has been in our own home. A tribe of people that exists in all of the world's tribes, indistinguishable on the surface from everyone else, yet bearers of an evil so profound that it's on the verge of snuffing us out.<br />
<br />
We have to decide if we're going to allow them to do that. To snuff out our light. Because that's what they're really after. They hate and fear the light in us. It has no home in them, and yet somewhere deep down they wish it did. Their reaction to this profound discomfort is simple and brutal: they want to put out the light. They want to destroy innocence and beauty.<br />
<br />
We must turn into a race of beings that is no longer vulnerable to sociopaths. That's the first step. To recognize them for what they are and to make a decision down to the depths of our souls that we will no longer be victimized by them. If we do that, we render them powerless.<br />
<br />
As medicine drinkers it is incumbent upon us to bear witness to these truths. Simple-minded New Age foolishness and wishful thinking is inadequate to the question of sociopathy. We must bring this question into the light of the medicine. Sunlight dries out the garbage. Once we solve this problem we will be much further down the road towards the bright future that awaits us.<br />
<br />
God bless you, whoever you are.Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-533534334128985592016-09-30T08:17:00.001-07:002017-04-27T06:04:27.178-07:00The Incredibly Messy Reality of Healing from TraumaI've stated here before that I was severely traumatized as a kid. That is true. I won't go into the details. Doing so serves no purpose, and, bluntly put, it's no one's business but my own. But it is important to note the fact itself. Why?<br />
<br />
<i>Because the human race is drowning in trauma and the spiritual disease that results from it, and we will perish if we don't heal.</i><br />
<br />
Think about what we've been through as a species. What we've put ourselves through. Just one aspect of it, maybe. Like war. Think about what it means that organized, state-sanctioned mass murder is accepted by human beings everywhere as normal. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-Society/dp/0316040932" target="_blank">A really amazing author wrote a really amazing book</a> on what killing does to a human being (a normal one, not a psychopath). It's a completely unnatural act, and it's a devastating one - for the perpetrator, the victim, the survivors, everybody. Then multiply that out the many millions of times that it occurs in our world. It stuns the heart and boggles the mind. Our world is drowning in it.<br />
<br />
My experience mirrors that of the whole. So perhaps by relating this experience I can offer some benefit to those in need. Lord knows I could have used such a reconnaissance, but I never got that. As far as I knew I was an absolute trailblazer in terms of recovering from this level of trauma. In high school I knew other guys like me, guys who'd been hurt as bad as I had. But they didn't go to college like I did, they went to the military or jail or insane asylums.<br />
<br />
In comparison to those guys I was lucky. Pay it forward.<br />
<br />
I first got into therapy when I was 20. A bad breakup got me into it (funny how that can crack us like nothing else when we're young). However, it very quickly became apparent to me that I needed to deal with much deeper issues that underlay the profound sense of anger and sadness and fear and unease that had always been with me. I needed to address the abuse and neglect that I had suffered as a child. The appalling and total lack of love and connection that characterized my spectacularly dysfunctional family.<br />
<br />
I jumped in. I didn't try and sweep it under the rug, pretend it wasn't as bad as it was. I just started doing the work.<br />
<br />
And what work it was. Crying and shaking and shouting and hitting inanimate objects in rage. Feeling utterly consumed by rage, grief, and terror - all of the things I could not feel as I was actually undergoing the trauma. <i>Letting it out.</i> All of it, or as much as I could get to in a single session. Individual therapy. Group therapy. EMDR. Holotropic breathing. Meditation. Chi gong. Then, eventually, when the process had dragged on waaaayyy too long and my organism couldn't take the strain anymore, anti-depressants. Then 12-step programs, which, at their core, never even recognize the reality of trauma.<br />
<br />
Fuck, what an ordeal. For over two decades I suffered like this. The means were insufficient to the end - healing a severely, fundamentally wounded human being. A statistical write-off, an outlier like me had the temerity to demand peace and happiness and fulfillment in this life, and neither the medicine nor the spirituality available in my culture could deliver the goods. Full. Stop.<br />
<br />
I've talked about this before, my <a href="http://reset.me/personal-story/personal-story-ayahuasca-healed-beyond-alcoholics-anonymous-provide/" target="_blank">preparation and final journey to ayahuasca</a>. What I've found in her fills me with a gratitude I can't begin to express. I wish I'd been ready for her 20 years ago. But, as they say, everything is always perfect, and I can't help but believe that my own life's trajectory also embodies this truth.<br />
<br />
Ayahuasca is healing me of trauma. Completely. Not as quickly as I would have liked, certainly not as quickly as some of the absurd, irresponsible, marketing-driven nonsense on the Internet would suggest, but nonetheless effectively. And as I leave this phase of my life, the phase in which almost every day has been largely defined by PTSD and my attempts to cope with it and/or recover from it, I can't help but muse on my entire experience with it.<br />
<br />
It has involved a huge amount of emotional release. Sobbing, yelling, smacking things, shaking in fear - a whole lot of very messy stuff. Here I am explicitly indebted to <a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/statesman/obituary.aspx?n=dan-p-jones&pid=149684665" target="_blank">one man</a> who showed me the effectiveness of emotional release therapy. And here I run up against one of society's most basic taboos - the honest, open expression of male emotion. When I was 6 years old I broke my arm. Fell off of a fence. The neighbor, a helpful sort who drove a truck and abused the shit out of his kids, came over to make sure I received the proper coaching - "Don't cry! Be a man!" But as marginal as this character was, he was enforcing one our culture's central tenets - men don't cry.<br />
<br />
What a load of bullshit. And make no mistake - this is some costly bullshit. And some <i>engineered</i> bullshit. Refusing men their natural emotions turns them into caricatures - perhaps the thug, perhaps the eunuch, perhaps the poseur, perhaps the technocrat, perhaps the bum. Often the addict. But never, ever the whole man. And let us not imagine that our appointed overseers desire to have a race of <i>men</i> running around this planet, claiming their rightful sovereign authority over themselves and their families. Saying "No" to the vast loads of insane, totalitarian nonsense we are expected to swallow in this perverted society.<br />
<br />
How I touched the third rail of our culture when I dared to undertake true healing! I left the reservation! And there were never any shortage of people to let me know how wrong I was for doing it. How fucked up I was for feeling my feelings. Sometimes they did it blatantly, literally telling me that it was pathological for me to feel such intense sadness or anger. As if it were my fault. Sometimes they'd couch it in a feigned concern for my well-being - "Do you really think it's healthy to feel this sad? Have you thought about medication?" As if I had a choice in feeling these things or not. As if they deserved nothing better than being obscured by pharmaceuticals. One spectacular sort of dirtbag, one of the perpetrators/con men you occasionally find in an AA meeting, suggested that I was just talking about trauma as a way of manipulating people into feeling sympathy for me. As if I were like him.<br />
<br />
That's the core of their reaction, always. Projection. There's nothing like honest emotional expression, especially "negative" emotions like sadness and anger, to set off buried trauma in others. And especially if it's a man doing the expressing. So it works like this:<br />
<br />
1. One person expresses a "negative" emotion such as anger, fear, or grief.<br />
2. The other person resonates on the same frequency because of some unresolved trauma in their own life, manifesting as an uncomfortable feeling.<br />
3. To minimize their own discomfort, the second person makes the first bad and wrong.<br />
<br />
It really is that simple. Once you see through it, you can't be tricked by it anymore. It has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with them.<br />
<br />
And it's a crime. It is keeping our species and our planet in bondage to dark forces. That vast pool of rage and despair that exists in humanity - that's what our overseers draw on to fuel their wars and their race hate and their social apartheid. That's what fuels their consumption machine that is consuming the planet - "I feel horrible. Maybe this new product will help."<br />
<br />
There's only one way out - we have to <i>let it all out</i>. How perfect that ayahuasca is so effective at purgation. Don't be confused by the spaceships and the dolphins and the patterns and all the other stuff, if you happen to experience such things. What it's really about is expelling things - out of every orifice you have, out of your very organs and pores. Out of your heart and mind, out of your soul.<br />
<br />
OK, that's not really true. Once you get enough of the garbage out of the way, you truly can receive divine instruction and power. But don't get it twisted. There's no way to avoid that first stage, the unpleasant one. Not if you're going to receive everything these master teachers have to give you.<br />
<br />
Embrace it. Revel in the agony. Give the Devil his due.<br />
<br />
Then move beyond it. That's important. It's possible to get stuck in the darkness, and that doesn't serve anyone. Please believe me when I tell you I have intimate knowledge of this danger. For me, navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of squelching productive emotional release and becoming lost in a morbid version of it has been a tricky balancing act, indeed.<br />
<br />
And the medicine helps me see this, helps me make the incredibly subtle and difficult decisions I must make during this process. God how I love it! I feel so in love with ayahuasca today - Mother Ayahuasca, Hoasca, Yage, Vegetal, Santo Daime - all of the many forms she takes. In every one of them she is cleansing and purifying and strengthening the soul of humanity.<br />
<br />
I truly wish this experience for you, too.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>God bless you, whoever you are</i>.Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-27821368314566215822016-07-24T07:07:00.000-07:002018-06-13T06:38:11.325-07:00We Must Be Soldiers of the Light, Part 2It's not exactly news that our species is in a profound crisis. War, environmental catastrophe, endemic poverty, political collapse, economic disaster, perversion and degeneracy at every level of society. Most people remain in a state of panic and helplessness around these events, trapped at the material level of perception (and hence convinced of their own insignificance), never understanding the root cause of all the chaos.<br />
<br />
As medicine drinkers we must go deeper. We must understand that there is a spiritual war going on right now. It is being fought over the future of our planet - whether or not the Earth will remain able to support life. It is being fought over our future as a species - whether we will continue living in the degraded, ignorant, violent slave state which has been the human condition for as long as history records, or whether we will realize our true nature as spiritual beings having a physical experience and live accordingly. Whether we will continue even to exist as a species.<br />
<br />
In this spiritual war there are forces of darkness and forces of light. Thus we are left with 3 possible courses of action:<br />
<br />
1. Try to remain neutral.<br />
2. Join the side of darkness.<br />
3. Join the side of light.<br />
<br />
I would contend that number one is always an illusion and impossibility, since alleged neutrality always redounds to the benefit of the perpetrator. Silence is complicity.<br />
<br />
If you're interested in number two, you're probably not reading this blog. If you are and you've come here by mistake, then by all means accept our prayers and best wishes for your soul, because you need them.<br />
<br />
Thus we are left with no choice at all - we must be soldiers of the light. Sounds great. What does it mean?<br />
<br />
First of all, let us be clear: it never, ever means harming our follows. If you've picked up a gun in your attempt to do the Creator's will, you're far beyond the help of my modest little ayahuasca blog. It's a tautology: a loving and beneficent creator can never wish the destruction of his and her creation. Any other creator is not possible to conceive, since the prerequisite of creation is care. So we can all take a deep breath and relax: our true God wants us to be happy, joyous, free, and at peace. The crusaders and jihadists of the world are lost souls, serving a lying, demonic entity who masquerades as the Supreme Being.<br />
<br />
Fair enough. We have discussed what it is not, but what is it? First of all, it is caring enough to know ourselves. Truly, deeply know ourselves. How are we to remove the splinter from our brother's eye if we are blinded by the beam in our own? We must recognize our faults, explicitly, humbly, and honestly. Our shit really does stink. Having acknowledged and digested these painful and inconvenient truths about ourselves, we must then invite our Creator into the deepest recesses of our soul to clean us on the inside.<br />
<br />
This is the purgative stage of the ayahuasca journey, and it's tough - really tough. It requires a warrior to even contemplate it, let alone see it through to completion. But if you would have freedom, real freedom in your life, there is no alternative. Whether through the medicine or another means, you must abandon yourself to this process - self-knowledge, cleansing, and divine transformation.<br />
<br />
How fortunate that ayahuasca is such a profound help to us in these tasks! Funny how it works out that way. The 12 Steps get the theory right, but those programs lack the medicine, the sacrament - the actual agent of transformation.<br />
<br />
Having cleaned our container, what comes next? For most of us there is a selfish component. We must take care of ourselves - neglected careers need tending, unfulfilling relationships need mending or abandonment, personal dreams need nurturing and nourishment. This is all valid and necessary.<br />
<br />
But it is not enough. I would submit that a necessary component of an authentic medicine journey absolutely must be a deep commitment to making things better on this planet. To being of service. To joining the Army of Light.<br />
<br />
Lord knows our task is herculean enough. We need all the help we can get.<br />
<br />
Here is my own belief about the matter. If it were a question strictly of numbers, we'd be fucked. If a majority of the humanoids on this planet today - the thoughtless, ignorant consumer golems who swill beer and chase tail and whip in and out of traffic and consume reality TV and don't give a shit when some goddamn drone strike kills another 50 kids in Yemen - if a majority of those people had to suddenly and miraculously undertake a kundalini yoga practice, or become chi gong students, or start drinking ayahuasca regularly, or do <i>anything at all</i> in order to know themselves and hence collectively lift the broken and impoverished consciousness of our species, we'd be fucked. It's not gonna happen.<br />
<br />
Fortunately, it doesn't have to. That's not how evolution works, it seems. Here I am radically and admittedly out of my depth - I am no scientist. However, many very intelligent and accomplished people are describing a similar process, a new way of looking at species development. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtgLklXZo3U" target="_blank">Rupert Sheldrake</a>, for instance. It seems that when some critical mass of members of a species come to a realization, <i>all of them get it</i>. As if by magic. As if they were all helping to manifest some idea of themselves that both 1) exists independently, beyond themselves; and 2) is affected by their own development. Something akin to Platonic Form, but conceived as a conversation instead of a decree.<br />
<br />
There appears to be some evidence for this idea. I'll be honest though, I don't care so much about that. I like the idea because I know in my heart that it's true. I like it because it conforms to my own experience of life - what I have been through myself and what I see mirrored back to me in everyone who chooses this path. That we are all evolving beings, and that we are in charge of the direction in which we evolve. And that entire human systems (especially families) can be healed by one person fully channeling Divine Love.<br />
<br />
What pure, beautiful Grace.<br />
<br />
It seems that, in stark contrast to the Newtonian/positivist/materialist intellectual savagery we've been taught as gospel for 300 years in the West, mind trumps matter. Matter is just stuff. Mind is what organizes it. And it is a noun that is always correctly expressed in the singular.<br />
<br />
We are all conductors of Universal Mind. Whether we take responsibility for that fact is another matter entirely, but fact it remains. Realizing this fact is the central purpose of our incarnation on this planet, in these bodies.<br />
<br />
The satanists, the dark occultists with their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpKdSvwYsrE" target="_blank">bizarre and unholy elite rituals</a> who run this whole show, they know this. They don't ever lose sight of the fact that mind dictates matter. Their minds are powerful and united in service of the Dark Principle. They have been for a long time.<br />
<br />
We must match them and overcome them. Not through hateful combat. Not through attempting their destruction. Through loving them and illuminating the darkness in them. First in ourselves, then through every broken, tormented being that desires healing from this medicine. Those of us who feel this call must answer it - we must offer ourselves in charity for the spiritual elevation of our species.<br />
<br />
We must love them out of existence.<br />
<br />
We must also hold deeply and firmly in our hearts and in our minds a beautiful vision - for this planet and for our species. A world without armies and jails and kleptocratic corporate criminals enslaving us for their own tiny benefit. A world without hunger and murder and rape and poverty and child abuse. A beautiful garden that we all can share.<br />
<br />
We absolutely can have it. Never believe the cynics and the cowards who would snuff out these dreams in the name of "realism". They seek justification for their own abandonment of the struggle, that's all. They won't get it from me.<br />
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This is not some idle, flaky hippy nonsense. This is architecture. Again, mind precedes matter. As a species, we dream our reality into existence. It is high past time for a new one. Let's bring it into being. Now.<br />
<br />
God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
<br />
<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-10347841310627773552016-06-18T09:30:00.000-07:002016-06-18T09:30:27.549-07:00We Must Be Soldiers of the Light, Part 1We must be soldiers of the Light<br />
We must not shirk this call<br />
10 million arms of destiny<br />
5 million souls in all<br />
<br />
We drink this holy sacrament<br />
She shows us who we are<br />
We take this knowledge to the streets<br />
We bring it from the stars<br />
<br />
When troubles come, and come they will<br />
We ask you for your aid<br />
Divine protection all around<br />
To shelter what we've made<br />
<br />
Beginnings of a brand new world<br />
That's here for us at last<br />
A million years of peace on Earth<br />
Conclusion of our past<br />
<br />
Embrace this vision, let it seep<br />
Into your heart and mind<br />
Then drink, friend, drink, and drink again<br />
And live the Truth you find<br />
<br />
[sorry, I just couldn't help myself - R]<br />
<br />
<i>God bless you, whoever you are.</i>Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-67766514940796498652016-06-04T10:18:00.000-07:002016-06-04T10:18:49.275-07:00The Reality of Spiritual WarfareAyahuasca has changed my perception in so many ways that it is difficult to count them all. One of the most basic is that I have been shown the reality of spiritual warfare.<br />
<br />
It sounds crazy to even say - "spiritual warfare". My mind races to images of <a href="https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2014-01/enhanced/webdr02/30/23/enhanced-10878-1391142666-16.jpg">witch doctors</a>, rattles, spells, and incantations. Every bit of my cultural programming rejects it as primitive and superstitious. Perhaps it is. But is it wrong?<br />
<br />
I don't think so. I first heard about it when I was in Peru. One of the facilitators recounted seeing an entity leave someone during ceremony - a small, dark golem-like creature that bounced around the maloka until one of the shamans banished it from the space. At the time, I thought "Wow, that's wild." It didn't really go any deeper, though. It was just a story.<br />
<br />
It became much more immediate to me as I started really exploring my current path. A while ago my community received a visiting elder from the rainforest. This man's specialty is waging spiritual warfare - casting out demons and lower intelligences, rebuking them, giving them ayahuasca to drink, and sending them towards the light. I was very frightened to even attend his ceremonies. They are noted for turning the participants into media - vessels for suffering spirits to inhabit briefly in order to experience the healing of the medicine.<br />
<br />
Sounds scary as hell, doesn't it? It sure did to me. But, as is my wont, I went anyway. I guess I've learned over the years that the level of fear I feel about an experience usually corresponds to its healing potential.<br />
<br />
That equation was again verified for me. During two ceremonies I learned a number of things. The first of these is that I appear to be a natural medium. As soon as the space was opened to incorporation, I had a suffering spirit enter me and do its thing. And what a thing it was - thrashing about, pounding the floor, roaring like an animal, and then collapsing into a pool of wrenching tears. All of that rage was just a way of covering up a sea of grief, loneliness, and despair. And then, through me, the entity drank ayahuasca and moved out of my body.<br />
<br />
At first it was bewildering and terrifying. I had had control of my body taken from me by another being. Naturally, I flashed back to other times in my life when I did not control my own body - the times when I was being abused as a child. So the experiences blended together, and it just felt like another violation.<br />
<br />
But by the conclusion of the weekend, I had a very different perspective. For one thing, I felt totally clean on the inside - like my heart and soul had been scrubbed with a wire brush. I had incorporated a total of 4 times, and the passage of these creatures through my being had had an unbelievably cleansing, useful effect on me. The depression I was suffering at the time left me completely. In clearly seeing these tormented spirits in me who were not me, and then having them leave, I was able to better understand who I am. Where <i>I</i> end and <i>they</i> begin.<br />
<br />
For another, I realized that several if not all of the entities had already been with me for a long time. We carry them around, you know. Sometimes they apparently follow our families for generations, these dark, fearful, angry beings who feed on our torment. I appear to have been a real fun-house for them. But they have been given notice. They must leave - whether to the light or to more darkness is their choice, but I'm onto them and they're no longer welcome in me.<br />
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I also learned that we shouldn't fear them. All of the drama they stir up is just distraction, designed to draw our attention away from their fundamental weakness and terror and confusion. Truly, they only have as much power as we give them.<br />
<br />
And isn't that always the case with the dark principle? There's a reason he's called the Lord of Lies. All of the satanic enchantments and delusions are designed with one purpose - to lead us away from the true love and majesty and power of God.<br />
<br />
That was the central lesson of all for me - God has all power. And it's not just some tidy, abstract, antiseptic "God-force", it's palpable angelic presence and embodiment - St. Michael, Jesus, Mary, St. John, Yemanja. Guardians and guides, angels and archangels, all of the beneficent beings of the Celestial Court. They surround us always. All we have to do is call on them.<br />
<br />
Good Lord - do you realize how I sound to myself right now? Like some kind of pitiful, deluded New Age fool. Like all of the crazy mystical nonsense I used to mock as an angry young punk rocker. I'd never say these things if they weren't absolutely true. I have felt their truth down to the core of my being. Their truth has set me free.<br />
<br />
At this point my conscience demands that I make a disclaimer - I could never have come through such a potentially disastrous experience so successfully without a <i>lot</i> of help. And make no mistake - it is potentially disastrous. To have one of these malevolent beings enter you and stay there - that can be a real problem. But, guided by incredibly wise and powerful teachers, and held in the firmness and love of my tradition, I have successfully made it through several of these ceremonies now. All clear on the other side. Much, much clearer, in fact.<br />
<br />
We are absolutely in the midst of a spiritual war right now. On one side are arrayed all the forces of darkness - the demonic entities who would rather see this planet incinerated than see humanity evolve spiritually and take its rightful place among the stars; their enforcers in the Bohemian Grove crowd; and all of their useful idiots. On the other side we have all the forces of light - The Supreme Creator, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, St. John, St. Michael, the Buddha, all of the angels and archangels, and all Light and Love in the whole Universe. All of our brothers and sisters who join us in this fight. In their thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands and in their millions they join us.<br />
<br />
Medicine drinkers of the world: a call to arms! Love is our sword and our shield. We cannot help but win. Victory belongs to the Light. Light illuminates the darkness.<br />
<br />
A beautiful, sweet, inspiring friend in my community, a man who truly walks this path, recently gave me some good news. He said that it had been unequivocally and repeatedly revealed to him in ceremony: the battle is already won. In the Astral it has been decided; the aftershocks of the fight are simply making themselves felt now in the material realm, with all of the bloodshed and mess that always entails for our broken species.<br />
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I choose to agree with him, because I have received the very same news. I hope you get it, too.<br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
<br />
<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-25276442766137528032016-05-19T07:43:00.000-07:002016-05-19T07:47:13.573-07:00The Choice of the Medicine DrinkerThe overwhelming force of the ayahuasca experience presents us with a pretty simple choice. On the one hand, we can surrender to it, opening ourselves up to the full meaning of the word "entheogen" - having Divine Presence enter every level of our being and remove every obstacle to its path in the process. On the other, we can learn to manage it.<br />
<br />
"You shall know the tree by its fruit."<br />
<br />
It's pretty obvious when we meet people who've chosen the former path - they have a sweetness and a light that is unmistakable. The word gets thrown about in a trite and abominable way, but in this case it's true - they are <i>childlike</i>. They are innocent of the crimes of this world. They are beautiful on the inside, whatever their outsides look like.<br />
<br />
The second category can be a bit trickier. The managers of the ayahuasca experience often have a pretty good rap. It's a part of their management. They can <i>sound</i> good. But their <i>actions</i> are another story - behavior does not match rhetoric, in alarming ways. Inevitably one finds significant holes in their spiritual development.<br />
<br />
Were they to examine these holes, they would experience profound discomfort. The avoidance of this discomfort is the reason people choose to manage the ayahuasca experience.<br />
<br />
This management can occur at every level - physical (purging, not purging), mental (allowing or refusing to admit difficult teachings), emotional (allowing or resisting tears or other expression), spiritual (limiting or not the amount of God we allow in). We can choose not to drink at all. We can choose to smoke marijuana to mitigate the full impact of the experience.<br />
<br />
Hah! You see where I'm going with this, don't you?<br />
<br />
This is what makes the second category the trickiest of all - almost all of us fall into it, in one way or another. Who among us can indefinitely sustain the full force of ayahuasca dismantling? People crack up from such stuff.<br />
<br />
The vast majority of us, particularly those of us with serious trauma in our past, <i>have</i> to manage our relationship to ayahuasca. To do otherwise is suicidal, and in some cases homicidal. I recently visited an ayahuasca community that had its leader murdered a few years ago - they let a young man drink with them who never should have done it, and he snapped. His was a case in which management was neglected, with terrible consequences.<br />
<br />
For the committed medicine drinker, then, management is a necessary evil. Perhaps the crucial distinction lies between the strategic and the tactical. At the strategic level we must abandon ourselves to God as expressed through this Holy Sacrament. We must strive to have our tiny individual wills utterly supplanted by His and Hers. We must completely let go of any attempt to manage the ultimate outcome - union with the Divine.<br />
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We must also recognize that this is a very long and difficult process. This brings us to the level of the tactical, at which management is not only forgivable but necessary. We must eat this meal in bites. All the nutrition in the world won't do us any good if we choke to death taking it in.<br />
<br />
And the entire time we are using our various tricks and tools to manage this essentially unmanageable experience, we must remember that nothing can or should stop our ultimate total surrender. That's the real trick. Never to confuse form and essence.<br />
<br />
Perhaps that first group I mentioned, the ones who have been so utterly cleaned and purified by the medicine, were simply very adept at their management of the ayahuasca experience. Perhaps they had a keen, persistent grasp of the difference between the strategic and the tactical. Perhaps they said a prayer something like this:<br />
<br />
<i>"God, please bring me to you in a way that I can manage."</i><br />
<br />
God bless you, whoever you are.Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-20517408832018667732016-05-08T11:54:00.001-07:002016-05-08T11:58:28.621-07:00Ayahuasca and Marijuana, Part 2Some months ago, after over 13 years of abstinence, I began smoking marijuana again. I did not do it lightly. I did it because I didn't really have any other choice.<br />
<br />
I found myself in a bit of predicament. I had definitively stepped away from the world of 12-step programs and into the world of plant medicine, in a way that I found to be exclusive. I did not regret my decision at all, but after almost a year of drinking ayahuasca I was having serious doubts about the sustainability of my new path. On the one hand, the chronic and unmanageable effects of PTSD had driven me to drinking medicine to begin with, and I had seen real improvement in my life as a result. On the other, the process of clarification was itself becoming unmanageable, with each ceremony bringing up yet another layer of trauma and the negative emotion around it, when the last one had not yet cleared away.<br />
<br />
And then a funny thing started happening. I began to get clear intuitive messages from ayahuasca that I should try smoking marijuana again. I talked about it with some trusted friends in my community, and then, finally, I did.<br />
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I am now a year into my experiment with resuming marijuana use, and here's what I have to say about it: it's great. I find her to be the perfect compliment to ayahuasca. In the warm, comforting, maternal, subtly visionary space she provides I am able to process the trauma and heartbreak that ayahuasca brings up in the first place. For me, the experience of ayahuasca tends towards the stark: truth, truth, and then more truth again. I find that marijuana softens all of those sharp edges and transforms the whole experience into something that actually works in my life.<br />
<br />
It's funny. When I combined marijuana with alcohol, the effect was synergistic and debilitating. Marijuana accentuated the toxic effects of the booze in a way that was truly dysfunctional. Today, when I combine her with ayahuasca, the effect is the opposite: she serves to spread ceremony out throughout my day-to-day life in a way that is useful, beautiful, and inspiring.<br />
<br />
A single ayahuasca ceremony can present a bewildering volume of information to assimilate. I find that I need more help unpacking it. A daily meditation practice helps with this greatly. So does smoking pot. Sometimes when I am high tears will come, cleansing me of a trauma that has been locked in my body for decades. Sometimes a lesson that was not fully obvious from the last ceremony will suddenly be brought into relief in a way that is clear and unmistakable. Sometimes a brand new insight will be given to me.<br />
<br />
Always my creativity is stimulated, with music, writing, and carpentry all flowing more easily. Always my fatherhood becomes more patient, gentle, and forgiving. Always my work output is enhanced, with seemingly intractable problems suddenly unraveling themselves in the visionary light of Santa Maria.<br />
<br />
Do I get all of this free of charge? I do not. My short-term memory is undeniably impaired, which requires me to manage appointments and scheduling more diligently. From time to time I find myself slipping into more addictive patterns of usage, in ways that feel unhealthy. I find that periodic fasts help greatly with this. In addition, ayahuasca herself tends to correct me, putting me back on the correct path and mitigating the danger of addiction.<br />
<br />
Perhaps most troubling, I have felt the need to keep this behavior hidden from my daughter, which can result in the feeling of sneaking around her. Honestly, I blame this one primarily on the sickness of our society at large, which does not (at least in Texas) sanction the use of this plant, and in fact criminalizes it. Eventually, when the time is right and she's old enough, I'll tell her about it.<br />
<br />
But when I think about where I was a year ago, these side-effects seem pretty insignificant. My depression has left me. I can sleep at night. My creative output has increased enormously. I am no longer troubled by thoughts of suicide.<br />
<br />
Just as important, I have felt no urge to resume drinking alcohol. Not even the slightest. When I told my old AA sponsor about smoking pot, he only made one request of me: that I call him if I were ever thinking about drinking again. I'm happy to say that I haven't had to.<br />
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In the combination of ayahuasca and marijuana, I have found a blend of plant medicine that truly works for me. I am very grateful for that.<br />
<br />
God bless you, whoever you are.Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-85828691671087549582015-12-29T08:44:00.000-08:002016-05-08T11:10:28.890-07:00Ayahuasca and Marijuana, Part 1Among some in the medicine world, I have noticed a certain taboo surrounding marijuana. I know that when I went to my first workshop, all participants were urged not to smoke for several weeks prior. I know that Graham Hancock has spoken repeatedly about being freed from a decades-long abusive relationship with it by his experiences with ayahuasca. I know that a good friend of mine, a man who is undergoing a true shamanic apprenticeship in the Shipibo tradition, casts a dim eye on its use.<br />
<br />
All of this is easy enough for me to understand. Marijuana abuse was inextricably tied to my own bottoming out with alcohol almost 14 years ago. I smoked all day every day, and it was pretty debilitating. It also combined with alcohol in a way that was truly dangerous for me, and led to an alarming number of vomiting, blackout drunks.<br />
<br />
So I get it. In contrast to most of my ayahuasca experiences, marijuana is physically pleasurable. Her spirit is also undeniably beautiful and feminine and seductive, and very good at pulling me in past my best interests. I have never, not even remotely, felt an addictive pull towards ayahuasca. But with marijuana, the potential is there.<br />
<br />
So I get it.<br />
<br />
And for the first year of my journey into the medicine world, I was content to leave her be. Anything else would have been inconceivable to me. After a dozen years sober in AA, just drinking ayahuasca was an enormous step for me. I had literally been <i>programmed</i> - conditioned to think in a way that was not my own. I had to work through this down in Peru. After the 2nd ceremony I broke down in terror and in tears, stricken over the fact that it felt like I had just given up 12 years of hard-won sobriety. I could almost taste the alcohol on my tongue again.<br />
<br />
The facilitators explained to me that my body was letting go of the trauma I'd inflicted on myself with years of drug and alcohol abuse. They explained that ayahuasca was not an intoxicant, that she actually was cleaning my body of impurities, not adding them. One of them was a medical doctor. I believed them. I began to formulate a new conceptual category, distinct from booze and dope - <i>medicine</i>. <i>Plant medicine</i>.<br />
<br />
As I continued to drink ayahuasca with my community here in the States, I became more and more comfortable with this new category. And, as categories will do, it seeks new members. Recently it found one.<br />
<br />
I first began to reconsider my attitude towards marijuana when I learned that a number of people in my church use it as a sacrament as well, in addition to ayahuasca. As I've said, for a long time I closed it off as an option. It simply felt too dangerous, too much like a real relapse.<br />
<br />
And then something funny happened - I began to get messages from ayahuasca herself to resume smoking. I didn't want to listen to them at first, but gradually they became clearer and more compelling. There were two main factors that created my <i>need</i> for this additional plant medicine:<br />
<br />
1. The volume of trauma ayahuasca brought up in me was becoming overwhelming - seriously re-traumatizing itself and ultimately unsustainable.<br />
<br />
2. I was experiencing a return of major depression and becoming unable to function. It got so bad that I actually tried to get back on the same SSRI I had used for years - <i>and couldn't, because of the side effects</i>. Apparently ayahuasca has re-wired me so that those drugs will no longer work on my organism.<br />
<br />
I italicize the word "need" deliberately. Any successfully programmed AA member will react to this word the same way I used to - with disdain; proof that it's just another addiction. There is no arguing with this mindset, and I won't try. All I can relate is that my experience with marijuana today is completely different than what it was like many years ago when it was tied to active alcoholism.<br />
<br />
Because, obviously, that is where all of this is heading - my experience with marijuana today. But that can wait for the next post.<br />
<br />
<i>God bless you, whoever you are.</i><br />
<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-51831261212399984772015-08-21T20:42:00.000-07:002015-08-21T20:42:30.473-07:00Powerlessness [Graduation]At first I was loath to even say it out loud. I didn't want to face the full implications of it. A foundation of my self-image and my entire worldview had been shown to be false. I felt a deep fear at the change it would require in me.<br />
<br />
It happened during my first ayahuasca workshop, probably after the 2nd or 3rd ceremony. I realized that for over a dozen years I had built my whole life around a lie - the lie of powerlessness.<br />
<br />
Perhaps "lie" isn't even the right word. Perhaps "half-truth" would be better.<br />
<br />
A lot of people who come to Alcoholics Anonymous desperately resist the notion of powerlessness. They are too proud, too arrogant, too ensconced in their egos to even entertain the notion that they might not be all-powerful. Some of these people die. Others finally are "beaten into a state of reasonableness" after numerous relapses.<br />
<br />
Not me. When I showed up at my first AA meeting, I heard them read the steps and I looked at the wall and I felt tremendous relief at the idea that I could finally admit defeat and impotence. It let me off the hook for having tried, and failed, for so many years to control my drinking. It was a necessary <i>1st Step</i>.<br />
<br />
"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable."<br />
<br />
At that point in my life this was absolutely true. I was powerless in the face of alcohol. And, as 12-step communities told me countless times in meetings and in the literature I read, I was powerless over virtually every other aspect of my life as well - money, relationships, sex, career, you name it. The fabric of my existence assumed the form of an endless litany of things over which I could never hope to exert any influence.<br />
<br />
For me at least, that became pretty disempowering.<br />
<br />
Powerlessness is ultimately false, but it's often necessary as an intermediate step to demolish the addict self and its illusions of control. The problem is that what starts out as a useful, necessary 1st step in recovery from addiction and despair becomes a prison. It certainly did for me.<br />
<br />
Do I really want to make powerlessness and brokenness the cornerstones of my spiritual life? What if I grow tired of describing myself as an alcoholic? Of identifying with the problem? What if I instead choose to describe myself as a perfect and holy child of God? What if I am not separate from God? If that's true then I am, in fact, infinitely powerful. That's kind of scary. That's a lot of responsibility to assume.<br />
<br />
Powerlessness is a great way to stay small and not have to take responsibility for my own talents, abilities, decisions, life. Shitty as it is, that's the payoff that I got from clinging to powerlessness for so many years.<br />
<br />
My first encounters with the shamanic world tore a gaping hole in my belief in my own limitation, in my own <i>smallness</i>. I got to experience a visceral sense of my own strength during ceremony. At times my body seemed to pulse with energy and vigor and resilience. I felt like an oak tree, planted in the ground, channeling all of the divine terrestrial power that is my birthright as a man and as a living creature on Planet Earth.<br />
<br />
I got some perspective on the horrific experiences I'd had as a kid. I started to quit thinking "This terrible thing happened to me" and I started to begin understanding "I was strong enough to make it through this. Intact."<br />
<br />
My friend and facilitator revealed to me that the medicine showed him the red-tailed hawk is my spirit animal - a pretty powerful creature for a guy who'd gotten so used to thinking he didn't have any. The funny thing is that I'd always known it - he just mirrored it back to me. <i>He</i> wasn't afraid of my power.<br />
<br />
When I flew to Peru, I really had no sense of how 12-step programs would fit into my life when I returned. I certainly had no plan to completely remove them from my life - to "graduate". For so many years I had heard that word thrown about sarcastically, contemptuously even, to describe people who left the rooms for one reason or another - "Oh, I guess he <i>graduated</i>."<br />
<br />
But that's exactly what happened. I graduated from 12-step programs. Similarly to the way I graduated from high school. Why would I not? I have found a healing technology that completely supersedes them. It renders them obsolete in my life.<br />
<br />
The fact that so many people in AA are still so sick after so many years spent working the steps is sad, but it's not surprising. They refuse to acknowledge that, precisely as with grade school, 12 step programs must be graduated from in order to attain higher spiritual levels.<br />
<br />
A beloved friend down in Peru, the co-facilitator of my workshop, remarked that "It's tough for a therapist to keep up with a divine trans-dimensional being." I would submit that it's also tough for a bunch of self-described alcoholics in a shabby, smoke-stained church basement.<br />
<br />
I went to handful of meetings when I came back. I was repelled. Was it the tired words I heard spoken in them? Yes, in part. Was it the dingy surroundings? Yes, in part.<br />
<br />
But more than anything, it was the energy I felt in them. It was a much, much lower vibration than I had experienced among my fellow explorers in the Amazon. It was a much lower vibration than I felt in myself. <i>It depressed the living shit out of me.</i><br />
<br />
I realized that, frightening as it was to me, I was moving beyond powerlessness. Somewhere deep down I knew that I could never again have anything in common with people who clung to it like a life vest.<br />
<br />
I was finally stepping into my power. I continue to do so every day. Sometimes it's exhilarating and sometimes it's terrifying, but one thing is undeniable: there's no going back.<br />
<br />
To quote countless AA shares I heard over the years, for <i>that</i> I am truly grateful.<br />
<br />
God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-42937715255791841582015-07-21T14:24:00.003-07:002015-07-21T14:24:55.999-07:00Ayahuasca and Intention, Part 2I stated that my own intentions surrounding ayahuasca have been clean. I think that's a fair assessment. Unfortunately, until pretty recently they were also unrealistic and unsustainable.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
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I conceived of my present journey as being equivalent to draining a vast pool of trauma and the negative emotion surrounding it. In that process, my own experience of growing re-traumatization was to be ignored. It was the price demanded by this nebulous and ill-defined concept, "healing". I needed to be a dauntless spiritual warrior, limitless in my capacity to absorb pain.</div>
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This approach stopped working. A few months ago, as the intensity of my experience began to reach an unbearable level, I started considering the possibility that drinking ayahuasca was just too much for me. I considered stopping.<br />
<br />
I talked with some very wise and trusted friends in my community about this. They were unanimous: they told me to take a break. They told me to rest and take care of myself and assimilate the vast amount of material I'd already been given to work with.<br />
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They also told me to ask the spirit of Ayahuasca for what I want. <i>To set an intention.</i><br />
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This is the crucial point for me. In my life I have been an addict and alcoholic. I have gotten used to viewing substances as just that - substances; objects that I use to achieve a particular result. The notion of entering into a dialogue with the spirit contained within these plants has been a new one for me. At first it seemed strained, even false.<br />
<br />
As it turns out, my friends were right on both counts. Taking a two-month break from drinking ayahuasca was absolutely crucial, allowing me to absorb, process, and integrate the information I had already received. Setting a clear intention for what I wanted to get out of my next ceremony was also vital to my continuing on this path.<br />
<br />
"What I wanted" isn't even the correct phrase. I had asked for help with that before - "Give me guidance on this or that particular issue." What was different this last time was that I made requests regarding the "how" of it. Specifically, I asked that my next ceremony be as gentle as possible. That it not leave me broken afterwards. That it show me that this path I've chosen truly is manageable and sustainable in my life.<br />
<br />
I was delighted to find that I got my request. I've now had 3 ceremonies in a row that have been gentle and nurturing in a way I didn't know the medicine could be. This experience has been hugely illuminating for me.<br />
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Growing up in an abusive home conditioned me to think of myself as powerless - an object at the mercy of the whims of crazy people. 12 years in 12-step programs, though helpful in many ways, reenforced this notion of powerlessness drastically. More and more, I am coming to see it as incompatible with medicine work.<br />
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This idea of real, meaningful agency in my own life is a new one for me. Assimilating it is both exhilarating and scary. It forces me to examine the payoff I've always gotten from my distress - if I'm a victim, I don't have to take responsibility for my own life. <i>If I'm a victim, it doesn't matter what intention I set - the result will always be me getting hurt.</i><br />
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This fundamental lesson I learned as a child was a lie. Recovering from it is the central part of my healing at this point. The medicine will accept nothing less from me.<br />
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What then is my intention for working with ayahuasca? Today it sounds a little like the following prayer:<br />
<br />
<i>"Please gently clean and illuminate me so that I may live to my fullest potential and help show others how to do the same."</i><br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.</div>
Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-87862221659125611172015-06-14T11:16:00.000-07:002017-11-28T09:36:01.486-08:00Ayahuasca and Intention, Part 1I think it's natural to ascribe our own motives to other people. Unfortunately, it is also incorrect.<br />
<br />
My motives in approaching ayahuasca have been straightforward and clean: to heal trauma, gain direction in my life, and manifest the full potential that God has given to me. To fulfill my Destiny rather than succumb to my Fate. To harm none, and to help as many as possible.<br />
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I like to think that they are the motives of the curandero, the healer.<br />
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The overwhelming majority of people I encounter on this path are very similarly motivated. In fact, in the medicine community I have consistently met some of the most decent human beings I've had the privilege to know.<br />
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<i>With one or two exceptions.</i><br />
<br />
On occasion I have encountered someone in ceremony who just doesn't feel right. It's always a jarring experience: What is <i>he</i> doing here?<br />
<br />
I can't really know for sure. However, I have a guess.<br />
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There is another path opened up for us by these plant allies: that of the brujo, the witch. It's not a very nice one. It is an amoral path, one which seeks only one thing: power for its own sake, expressed primarily through domination over others.<br />
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It is the path my father chose. It is the path often celebrated throughout our society, from boardrooms to battlefields to street corners to cell blocks.<br />
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It is the way of the sociopath. On it, our fellow human beings are not other manifestations of the Divine who deserve care, consideration, and love in their own right. Instead, they are objects to be used and discarded as necessary in the pursuit of personal aggrandizement.<br />
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I flew to Peru last year with stars in my eyes. I was confident that I was headed to some spiritual Shangri-La, a rainforest Eden filled with light and beauty and devotion to the highest ideals known to our species.<br />
<br />
Then I landed in Iquitos. Those who have been there will know what I am talking about. For those who haven't, all I can say is that Iquitos is a cross between a Mexican border town and Telluride, Colorado, but with Rocky Mountain kind bud replaced by the most powerful psychedelics in the world. Untuned motorcycles roar down the streets at all hours of the day and night, unwashed street kids harangue you incessantly with cheap wares, hippies follow their ayahuasca diets at earth-toned cafes, and millennia-old indigenous sacraments are hawked right next to degenerate thrill-seeking.<br />
<br />
A friend at the workshop related that he was approached by a dealer on the street with the sales pitch, repeated over and over like a mantra, "Ayahuasca, girls, cocaine......ayahuasca, girls, cocaine....."<br />
<br />
Separately, or all at once?<br />
<br />
A good friend of mine has worked extensively at one of the ayahuasca centers outside of Iquitos. He describes how, in the Shipibo culture that is the basis of so much of ayahuasca shamanism, becoming a shaman is really just another trade, like becoming a carpenter or plumber. If we carry that analogy through, then ayahuasca itself is not something mystical or unknowable - it is simply another tool, like a saw or wrench or hammer.<br />
<br />
I think there's something to this view. I know that, as I have related in earlier posts, I first approached this path of plant medicine with a lot of misconceptions. Probably the biggest one was that ayahuasca would magically lift all of my spiritual sickness from me and suddenly fill me with light.<br />
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To again quote my friend, if that were true then all of these Amazonian shamans would be enlightened beings akin to Tibetan Lamas. A review of the literature surrounding ayahuasca tourism disproves that pretty quickly, what with the various allegations of shamanic rape, robbery, black magic, disposal of inconvenient tourist corpses, etc. My friend confirms this in more prosaic form, with his descriptions of the petty, ordinary back-biting and drama that many of the shamans apparently engage in as a matter of course.<br />
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It's easy to look at Westerners eager for spiritual awakening through the medicine and scoff at them as naive and foolish. Certainly there's an element of that in this whole pursuit. We must temper our enthusiasm with awareness of reality. But at the same time, I think there's something really beautiful in approaching ayahuasca with idealism and innocence and purity of heart. <i>Let us be wise as serpents but gentle as doves.</i><br />
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I think she responds well to it. The problem is that she seems to respond to darker motives, as well.<br />
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I am coming to view ayahuasca as one of the most powerful tools on the planet for manifesting human intention. Which brings me back to the title of my post. What intention are we bringing to our work with this tool, this sacrament, this divine being?<br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
<br />
<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-54197108368419027452015-05-21T14:06:00.002-07:002015-05-21T14:06:46.826-07:00#24Two weeks ago I had my twenty-fourth ayahuasca experience. It was almost exactly a year to the day since I drank for the first time. That makes pretty simple math: for the last year, on average, I have drunk ayahuasca twice a month.<br />
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For this man, that's a lot.<br />
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I have been challenged and confronted with trauma and age-old patterns of dysfunction and despair. I have been shown the myriad ways in which I have sold myself short, ignored my soul's higher purpose, believed lies about my own powerlessness and insignificance.<br />
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It's the hardest thing I've ever done.<br />
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Lately it has been getting harder. I appear to be getting taken to the deepest levels of my soul's wounding - the wounds that were so enormous and cruel that they left me with a simple, brutal choice - leave my body and bury the hurt all the way down, or be utterly destroyed by it.<br />
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I took the first choice. Thank God I did. As a grown man, apparently strong enough to finally feel it in its entirety, I have felt almost completely overwhelmed by it. Some days I can barely function. As a child it would have, without question, either killed me or driven me insane. My little boy's container was simply not strong enough to withstand its full force.<br />
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Lately I've been seeing homeless mentally ill people in a new way. These days when I pass by a bearded, unwashed man on the corner, gibbering to himself and begging for enough money to silence his demons for a few precious hours of oblivion, the first thought that comes to mind is, "Oh you poor man. You poor lost soul. What happened to your precious, innocent little boy that drove him so completely out of himself?"<br />
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The only thing that separates me from those guys is my constitution: my resilience and my ingenuity and my will to survive. I was clever enough to figure out means of tolerating an intolerable situation, and strong enough to implement them without fail.<br />
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Believe me, I say this not by way of self-congratulation. Merely precision. Whatever gifts I have were God's to give, and they appear to be part of his plan for me, part of my soul's purpose. I feel only compassion for those subjected to severe trauma who do not possess them. These people are grist for the mill of our global DeathMachine. I'm glad that God loves them, because virtually no one else cares in the least.<br />
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I'm not ashamed to say it: <i>I pray with all of my broken heart for a world that cares for every single one of its precious children</i>. I take it on faith that our species neither can nor should survive if we refuse this challenge.<br />
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That's the terrible gift I was given by trauma and abuse and neglect: a long-dormant, finally-emerging, desperately resisted Christ consciousness. The birthright of all humanity. If it's happening to you it's happening to me. We <i>are</i> all God's children.<br />
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There is no longer any wall I can build that will separate me from this spiritual reality.<br />
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And then there's the question of the here and now. The job to perform; the mortgage to pay; the lights to keep turned on; the daughter to raise. Yes, by God, I am fortunate enough to have these burdens and these blessings. And being constantly torn apart by ayahuasca can make it nearly impossible to fulfill them.<br />
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Failing in my responsibilities and giving up is a dubious luxury I do not possess: even if I were willing to condemn my own soul to that fate, there's no way I'd do it to my daughter.<br />
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And so, again, I must find ways to tolerate an intolerable situation: discharging my duties as a father, a partner, an employee, and an adult in American society who does not want to be homeless, with as much Grace as I can muster, all in the midst of a complete dismantling of my ego.<br />
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Lately I've been getting creative. I've been exploring energetic healing work: there appear to be some truly gifted lightworkers on this planet who are capable of performing spiritual surgery on us when the need arises. I've also been very consciously making new friends and reaching out to old ones. It's a two-pronged weapon: it gives me help in the present moment and it contradicts my old pattern of isolation, that tool that used to serve me so well and now keeps me locked in darkness and despair. I've been exercising like crazy. I've been sitting in steam baths. I've been praying and meditating and reading spiritual texts.<br />
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In short, I've been doing every blessed thing possible to help me make it through this ordeal. Just like I did when I was little. The difference is that today the ordeal is taking me closer to the light, rather than pulling me away from it.<br />
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So that makes it especially ironic that today my coping strategies include drinking less ayahuasca. For most of the last year drinking large doses several times a month has seemed manageable and useful. In fact, it has seemed necessary. That appears to be changing.<br />
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A few days ago I did something I haven't done once in the last year - I passed on a chance to drink. I was just starting to feel some ground under my feet after the last ceremony 2 weeks before, and I got the message loud and clear - "Don't go this time. Take a rest." And so I did, and I know that it was the right choice.<br />
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I'm not totally sure when #25 will be. I'll know when it's time.<br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
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<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-73640520053435755592015-04-22T10:20:00.001-07:002015-04-22T10:20:57.997-07:00To Thine Own Self Be TrueOn every AA chip is inscribed this motto:<br />
<br />
"To thine own self be true."<br />
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In 12 and a half years of attending meetings, I never once heard this as the topic. That always struck me as strange. Or perhaps the reverse is true: what's really peculiar is that the saying found its way into the program at all.<br />
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The rest of the program is decidedly hostile to the self. "Relieve me of the bondage of self," says the third step prayer. "Selfishness - self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles," says the Big Book on page 62. Again on page 62, "...the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot..."<br />
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What could reconcile this seeming contradiction is more precise language, language that I have never encountered in the literature and only seldom in meetings. We must distinguish between the lower self, the addict self that brought us into the program to begin with, and the Higher Self, the manifestation of God within us.<br />
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Those of us who have struggled with addiction become painfully familiar with our lower selves. They get us loaded, make us act out shamefully, alienate friends and family, hurt our kids, lose our jobs, wind us up in hospital or jail. They demand more booze, more dope, more food, more sex, more attention, more glory, more possessions, more sympathy, more satisfaction. There is not enough of these things to satisfy them, ever. They transform us from balanced human beings into tyrants and gluttons and pariahs. Eventually they kill us.<br />
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The Higher Self is something different entirely. Before I drank ayahuasca, my awareness of mine was limited. I could gain access to him through prayer and meditation, playing music, connecting with loved ones, working the steps. But the connection was shaky and tenuous; the instructions I received were often unclear.<br />
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That changed when I drank the medicine. In contrast to many people, I do not usually receive visual data from other dimensions. I don't "hallucinate" (I find that word inaccurate, but it's a useful shorthand). Instead, my ayahuasca experiences tend to take the form of conversations with my Higher Self, conversations in which he gives me instruction and I try to take it all in. In my first few experiences with the medicine, this sensation of a dialogue was palpable. I had the feeling of a beam of light running through my body, aligning all the different parts of myself and putting me in touch with the God within, emanating from my crown chakra.<br />
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Sometimes his instruction has taken the form of a gentle prodding - a suggestion, a nudge, an intuition - "Have you thought of it this way before?" Sometimes it has felt more like a board across my head - "Quit doing this shit. Now."<br />
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Whatever form the instruction has taken, it has never been wrong. Not once. Whether or not I choose to follow it is another matter.<br />
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"To mine own self be true."<br />
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Not my lower self, my addict self, my broken self. There's not enough booze or dope or porn in the world to glue that guy back together. He was on his last legs before I went down to Peru last May. Ayahuasca has finished the job. She's been like a wrecking ball, obliterating his last vestiges and clearing the way for the full emergence of my Higher Self.<br />
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This process is, by turns, agonizing and frightful and glorious. Sometimes it is even serene. It is definitely effective, and it is definitely real. I cannot urge it on anyone; I can only relate my own experience. I hope that is helpful to you.<br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-25453203162193074102015-04-10T08:54:00.000-07:002017-11-21T06:52:39.517-08:00ReintegrationI am coming up on my year anniversary of working with the vine and the leaf. It is a bittersweet memorial. To reflect on what compelled me to go to Peru last year and take the plunge into medicine space is to reflect on one of the darkest times in my life, a time I very nearly didn't survive. But I also remember the hope I felt in approaching this new discipline, a hope that was not in vain.<br />
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I had a tremendous misunderstanding of many aspects of the undertaking I faced. How could I not? Such a transformative and alien experience does not lend itself to communication through language. But there is one practical aspect that should have been emphasized far more clearly by those in a position to do so - reintegration. As I understand it, reintegration is the process of taking the insights and clarification that are granted by the medicine and putting them into practice in one's "real" life.<br />
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It is a crucial component of the process of learning from ayahuasca. In fact, I believe it is the central component. And as a rule it is given woefully short shrift.<br />
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It's easy to see why. It's not the exciting, flashy part. No serpent visions or rides on spaceships or trips to the rainforest. And, to be cynical, The Ayahuasca Adventure Fun Center™ is not going to make a buck from it.<br />
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Instead, it is the plodding, often grueling, ultimately beautiful effort to reconcile one's newfound clarity and knowledge with day-to-day realities. Or, sometimes, to change one's day-to-day reality so that it aligns more closely with received vision.<br />
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Reintegration literally means "making whole again." What does this suggest? It suggests that <i>we have been broken by the experience</i>.<br />
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I know that I have been. But the deeper truth is that I was broken long before I drank my first cup of ayahuasca. By a process of ego compensation and [mal]adaptation, I had tricked myself into believing my life was balanced. Ayahuasca continues to reveal to me just how wrong I was. It's not an easy thing to examine.<br />
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But in my view it's the true substance of the whole process: negotiating the tension between the delusions we have embraced and the truth revealed to us by the Queen of the Forest; between the fate to which we have resigned ourselves and the destiny shown to us by the light of the Astral; between the trauma and heartbreak of our past and the love and connectedness available right here, right now.<br />
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A good friend and advanced practitioner expresses it like this: sitting in ceremony is putting the oar in the water; actually moving towards our destination is what happens between the strokes.<br />
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I have related that my fondest wish for ayahuasca was that she would magically transform my life, with only secondary effort from me. That has not been my experience of her at all.<br />
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Just how far that was from true was revealed to me only weeks after I returned home from Peru. I left the States unemployed and almost completely broke, with a daughter to support. My fantasy was to go to South America, do the work, receive the wisdom and divine power, then return home and promptly land my dream job.<br />
<br />
Instead, two weeks after I was home I found myself working in June in Texas on a framing crew with some of the most degenerate drunks I'd ever had the misfortune to be around. One day one of them stole my lunch. And I was supposed to rely on these guys to safeguard my life 25 feet in the air above a concrete slab.<br />
<br />
Fortunately, I guess, my time with that outfit was limited: I got a hernia 4 weeks into it. As I prepared to go in for surgery, hoping that somehow my Obamacare insurance wouldn't leave me utterly destitute, I raged at God: "How can you do this to me? I'm trying to know you, to do the right thing! Why are you punishing me?" I felt even more despondent than I had before I left.<br />
<br />
The shock of having gone from my edenic, transformative experience at the workshop in the middle of the Amazon to this stark, brutal North American reality was almost more than I could bear or comprehend.<br />
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"<i>This</i>," I thought, "is <i>not</i> what the video testimonials promised."<br />
<br />
And yet it seems to have been precisely what I needed. Through it, I reached a place of surrender and trust in God around work and money that has culminated in a complete transformation of that area of my life. I have never been as prosperous as I am today.<br />
<br />
<i>And yet.....</i><br />
<br />
I find myself wondering if these things could not have been accomplished in a more gentle way. So many questions are raised by this. For instance:<br />
<br />
1. What is the real efficacy of flying to a foreign country thousands of miles away, immersing oneself in a completely alien and bewilderingly powerful transformative experience, then returning home and trying to manage or adapt to or abruptly leave one's previous life, a life that has remained unchanged in one's absence? Is this even wise to attempt?<br />
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2. If indeed a radical break from one's day-to-day life is necessary, can there really be no more provision in it for reintegration at the ayahuasca center itself? What if these centers abandoned all profit motive? How much more fully could they facilitate their patients' healing?<br />
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3. When can we finally and completely abandon this "wicked and evil enterprise", as Graham Hancock puts it, this "War on Drugs"? It has crippled mainstream thought so utterly that most Americans cannot make a moral or practical distinction between ayahuasca and crack cocaine. The limitless possibilities that will present themselves! Ayahuasca centers in Northern New Mexico, or the Texas Hill Country, or the redwoods of California! Plant medicine communities flourishing in the light of day! Such a vastly increased scope of healing work!<br />
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4. <i>Why must our society be so exploitive and cruel and barbaric and crass that returning to it after a spiritual awakening can feel like a death sentence?</i><br />
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This, to me, is the central question of all. Make no mistake: I do not see ayahuasca as some sort of lifestyle accoutrement for the affluent. She is a teacher, and she is the birthright of all humanity. I don't think it's any accident that she has appeared to teach so many at such a pivotal moment in the planet's history.<br />
<br />
She is calling us to heal first ourselves and then the world. Nothing less can possibly do.<br />
<br />
God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-28362905246456294342015-03-21T07:11:00.001-07:002015-03-21T07:11:11.901-07:00What the Medicine has Taken from Me<div>
<i>"Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of the truth."</i></div>
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- Ludwig Borne</div>
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Understandably, we tend to focus on the things that a spiritual path gives us. Peace. Centeredness. Compassion. Transcendence. Acceptance. Love. </div>
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We are less inclined to point out that which it takes away.<br />
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One of the hallmarks of humanity is our adaptability. We have settled almost everywhere on the planet: from Greenland to the Sahara; from the Andes to the rainforest; from neolithic villages to polluted cities with 20 million inhabitants. We have lived as hunter-gatherers, as subsistence farmers, as tradesmen, as artists, as factory workers, as computer programmers, as soldiers, as criminals. We have savored life lived in true spiritual community. We have resigned ourselves to guard duty at Auschwitz. Perhaps we have even enjoyed it.</div>
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<i>Given enough time and repetition, anything can come to seem normal.</i></div>
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This presents a terrible dilemma to those who have experienced severe trauma. Our natural state as human beings is freedom, love, joy, curiosity, connectedness. Sustained negative experience that we are powerless to stop, such as childhood abuse, incarceration, rape, and war, turns this basic reality on its head.<br />
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Another defining feature of humanity is our need to make sense of our surroundings. If our world makes sense, then it is not accidental. If it is not accidental, then we can hope to exert some sort of control over it.<br />
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Thus, when we find ourselves trapped in an unbearable situation, the thought eventually takes root: somehow I must have caused this. <i>I deserve this</i>. And if I deserve <i>this</i>, I most certainly do <i>not</i> deserve freedom, love, joy, or connectedness.<br />
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Thought begets action.<br />
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I know that as a boy experiencing severe, full-spectrum abuse, I <i>explained</i> it by taking responsibility for it. I <i>coped</i> with it by finding ways of leaving my body: fantasy; refined sugar; violent imagery; pornography; rage; music; alcohol; street drugs. That these methods were usually shrouded in secrecy fit perfectly with my belief that I was a shameful creature who had no place in the light.<br />
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AA and the 12 Steps did a great job of removing the substances from my life. They were pretty easy, really: they were outside of me. I received a shock after a couple of years sober when I realized that my real addiction was to my own body chemistry: the hits of adrenaline and dopamine I received throughout the day from secret lust, or righteous judgment, or morbid preoccupation, or a fit of rage.<br />
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Just how deep the roots of that disease went were beyond my power to comprehend. Just how high a price they exacted from my soul was unknown to me.<br />
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They were also beyond the power of the Steps to heal. I worked the 12 Steps on my porn addiction for almost four years. I got a lot of value from it. Admitting my shame in a public forum reduced its power over me; hearing stories similar to my own let me know I was not alone; writing inventories and inviting God into my sexuality began the process of healing that part of my being.<br />
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Unfortunately, those things did not actually grant me sobriety from the behavior. Last May I flew down to Peru with about 3 weeks clean from pornography. After my last slip I felt a wild, superstitious terror engulf me: Mother Ayahuasca would see through me as a fraud and a charlatan and punish me horribly for demeaning the feminine principle in such a coarse, vulgar way. Sheer fright kept me clean those last weeks.<br />
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In Peru I drank ayahuasca 7 times. It had some really obvious results: all of the emotional catharsis and insight; the profound sense of healing in ways I'd never felt it; a self-love that I had been unable to imagine; a powerful new awareness of my own strength and resilience.<br />
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The things that left me took longer to notice. Pornography topped the list. A lifelong habit, or one that spanned back to at least puberty, was simply lifted from me. I still can't fully explain it. The closest I can come to articulating it is to say that its true cost was revealed to me, and I could finally see that that cost far outweighed the fleeting rush I had sought for so many years. My compulsion to use it has been removed.<br />
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Others were just as significant:<br />
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1. My (lifelong) preoccupation with warfare (books, movies, documentaries, museums, anything available) has left me. Within 2 weeks of my return, I got rid of a stack of books on World War II and the Holocaust. On the advice of my shaman, I picked one of the darkest ones and burned it. Again, I can't explain it. I just lost my taste for it.<br />
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2. I completely lost interest in firearms. For some dark, subterranean reason I had begun amassing a collection of them over the last few years. I'm no longer interested in expanding it. Sold one, haven't touched the rest in months, don't know if I will again.<br />
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3. I am far less likely to indulge anger and judgment in my daily life. From chance encounters with rude motorists to dealings with my ex-wife, I seldom feel inclined to give into rage. This one isn't completely gone yet, but it's a lot better than it was.<br />
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I could expand the list quite a bit, but you get the idea. The coping mechanisms that I cobbled together as a boy to survive my nightmarish circumstances no longer serve me as a grown man. I had known this for years, but before my encounters with the medicine I had had pretty poor luck in ridding myself of them.<br />
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Ayahuasca changed all that for me. Drastically. I can almost imagine her as a gardener, pulling out all of the weeds that have choked my blossoms for as long as I can remember. The process is painful and beautiful and magical and almost more than I can bear. The trouble is that these patterns became so ingrained in me that I thought they <i>were</i> me. Having them ripped out of me feels like losing parts of myself. In fact, it is: the lower self that I constructed in order to survive is being completely demolished, making room for a Higher Self that I can only dimly conceive.<br />
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I can't wait to meet him.<br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
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Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-78491236230500745792015-02-27T13:02:00.001-08:002015-02-27T13:02:22.383-08:00Ayahuasca and its ContainerI am a traditionalist. Not blindly; not slavishly. But I am inclined to respect the customs and forms of those who have followed a particular path long before I came across it. In my Tae Kwon Do practice I always address my instructors as "Sir" and "Ma'am", and I wouldn't dream of stepping onto the mat without bowing to the flags first. When I was a kid in the Episcopal church I took a lot of pride in being an acolyte and carrying the banners in the procession to the front of the church. When I learned carpentry I deliberately sought out skilled, old-fashioned journeymen who taught me the right way to do things. <i>The way their grandfathers did it</i>.<br />
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I feel the same instinct in my ayahuasca journey. To begin with, I don't think it's an accident that I was called by these two plants - they knew me before I ever met them. I was not called by ketamine, or MDMA, or LSD-25, or pure DMT. I believe it was Graham Hancock who gave a marvelous description of smoking DMT. Forgive my paraphrasing, but he likened it to being in a bright shiny new building with no one else in it. Its spiritual and metaphysical space is very recent in human history - it is not well-explored or well-known. The same is true of all of these synthetic compounds.<br />
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They hold no interest for me whatsoever.<br />
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I mean no disrespect towards those who <i>are</i> called by these substances. I firmly believe that one of the pillars of the entheogenic revolution must be respect for all demonstrably productive and healing paths towards God. If <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3DAI_n-PO4">your path</a> was first synthesized in a laboratory 100 years ago, so be it.<br />
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Mine has grown in the rainforest for millions of years, and has been brewed and drunk by human beings for millennia.<br />
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I like that.<br />
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When I enter the ayahuasca space I feel the warmth and love and wisdom of all of those shamans and curanderos and sufferers just like me who have sought its instruction and healing for thousands of years. It feels safe and well-defined and reassuring.<br />
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Nothing less could possibly work for me. One of the defining features of my abusive childhood was its endemic chaos: the palpable sense that any godawful, crazy thing could happen at any moment. When I was an adolescent it left me with a need to leave my body as frequently and thoroughly as possible. Now it leaves me with a need for gentleness and structure in my spiritual path.<br />
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I had a real revelation after one of my first <a href="http://templeofthewayoflight.org/retreats/our-12-day-ayahuasca-retreats-in-peru/">ceremonies down in Peru</a>. It was given to me by a friend, a lovely Australian man who had already done several dozen ceremonies before our workshop. It had to be: one of the peculiarities of my own experience with ayahuasca is that I never experience visions, in the sense of seeing things from other dimensions with my eyes. Strange but true.<br />
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My friend does not experience ayahuasca in that way. One morning after a ceremony the night before, he revealed to me how he saw Jorge, the lead shaman and an absolute mountain of a man, casting a spell over our space at the beginning of the ceremony. He saw him spinning a web of protection over the entire maloka. He said it looked like a translucent seal, comprised of patterned blocks, spiraling out from the center of the room.<br />
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In that moment I gained a much greater understanding of the gravity of our undertaking. I came to understand that the shamans who guided us on our journey were the guarantors of our safety.<br />
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In drinking ayahuasca we are using an incredibly powerful tool. Like a table saw, or a firearm, or a bulldozer. Use a table saw improperly - chop a few fingers off. Use a firearm improperly - kill yourself or someone else. Use a bulldozer improperly - knock your house down.<br />
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The potential results of using ayahuasca improperly are easily as grave as these. A glance at the Iquitos Times last May informed me that about a dozen suicides in the region had been linked to ayahuasca over the preceding year. I have no trouble imagining why. I have seen enough instances of [controlled] mediumship at this point to know that spiritual entities certainly can enter us under its influence. With proper guidance, they leave before the ceremony is over. Without it is anyone's guess. For a description of my own experience with psychedelics and possession by a two-dimensional intelligence, see <a href="http://reset.me/personal-story/personal-story-ayahuasca-healed-beyond-alcoholics-anonymous-provide/">here</a>.<br />
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It takes an incredibly powerful and experienced shaman to maintain medicine space. I have had the good fortune to work with a number of them at this point. I know just enough about their craft to know that I have tremendous respect for it. I also know that, at this point in my journey, I wouldn't dare attempt to use the medicine by myself.<br />
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In drinking ayahuasca we journey to another world. It is a beautiful, strange, mysterious place. It is filled with the possibility of healing and transformation. It is filled with instruction. It is also filled with danger.<br />
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<i>Here be monsters</i>.<br />
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To enter this world without sufficient preparation and guidance is incredibly foolish. I wouldn't journey to another planet without a guide. For a Westerner like me, entering medicine space is just as foreign. For me, having a trusted and experienced practitioner showing me the way is mandatory.<br />
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As with a number of other issues, I must disagree with Terence McKenna on this point. He strongly recommended ingesting entheogens alone, so as to be free of the constricting effects of culture. Perhaps it sounds like a good idea: with the proper set and setting, simply dose sufficiently to open up the direct connection to source, making sure that no outside influences can interfere with the communication.<br />
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I have my questions about its usefulness in practice. Well, in <i>my</i> practice, at least. Forgive me if I overstep my bounds. Perhaps his advice is perfect for <i>you</i>.<br />
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The trouble is, you may not know until it's too late.<br />
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<i>God bless you, whoever you are.</i><br />
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<br />Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-34628989471443787072015-02-07T08:30:00.000-08:002015-02-07T08:40:51.125-08:00Is Ayahuasca Magic?<b>mag·ic</b><br />
ˈmajik<br />
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<i>The power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces [sic].</i><br />
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I did not come to ayahuasca on a winning streak. I was desperate: desperate enough to spend several thousand dollars I didn't have on a trip to Peru; desperate enough to drink a powerful psychoactive in the middle of the Amazon, despite the fact that my last psychedelic experience had been so traumatic that I swore off those substances for the rest of my life; desperate enough to "break" a dozen years' sobriety in the process and try a strange and stigmatized new spiritual path.<br />
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I made my decision based almost entirely on a gut feeling that it could help. But once I had booked my trip, I began to seek out confirmation that my choice was the right one. Naturally, I turned to the internet.</div>
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I found what I was looking for. Testimonials, documentaries, adventure stories, neurological analyses, sales pitches, rants, and a great deal more besides. Everyone, it seemed, had something glowing to say about this miracle brew from the Amazon: how one ayahuasca workshop <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0603/features/peru.html">lifted her depression for good</a>; how it can <a href="http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v08n3/08322top.html">cure cancer</a>; how veterans can <a href="http://exopermaculture.com/2013/01/07/vietnam-vet-who-suffered-from-ptsd-about-ayahuasca-its-an-eye-opener-it-makes-you-think-about-stuff-your-deepest-darkest-secrets-stuff-you-have-been-holding-on-to-since-you-were-eight/">completely transcend PTSD</a> with its aid.<br />
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In a particularly bizarre twist, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxdm4WBAgg4">lovely young ladies</a> rack up hundreds of thousands of page views as they detail their ayahuasca voyages, basking in the afterglow of their first experiences with the medicine.<br />
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I was pleasantly reassured, at the very least. Mother Ayahuasca seems to have inspired a decentralized, de facto Ministry of Propaganda, devoted to extolling her apparently limitless powers. Surely with that much smoke there must be some fire underneath.<br />
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And with the exception of the odd charlatan here and there, I have no doubt that the vast majority of this testimony is completely sincere. But is it true?<br />
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My own experience with the brew is still quite limited - the next time I drink will mark my 20th ceremony. However, my intention to know her is unshakeable, my motives are transparent, and I have been paying close attention the entire time.<br />
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And so, to the question "Is ayahuasca magic?" I must answer "Yes and no."<br />
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The question itself betrays how spiritually debased our thought has become, throttled as we are by our materialist chains. See the definition above - magic is "the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces". Could it drip with any more disdain? Events are not influenced, they are merely "apparently" influenced. The forces involved are not taken to have any reality - they are "mysterious or supernatural".<br />
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Only our tepid political correctness keeps the dictionary authors from making overt reference to the dark-skinned savages that still cling to such ignorant, superstitious beliefs. 100 years ago our ancestors were at least more honest in their chauvinism.<br />
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And so even the language we use to describe the experience is almost hopelessly compromised. Still, it helps to know where we stand, and that is here: in Western culture, basic spiritual realities, such as clairvoyance, intuitive communication, mediumship, and visions have been so forgotten and misunderstood that they assume magical proportions when they are made manifest. And, make no mistake, ayahuasca makes them manifest. Abundantly.<br />
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Thus we see a train of "magical" phenomena released close on the heels of ingesting ayahuasca. Where do our minds reflexively go? To our idea of "magic", in all of its Disney-esque splendor. Mother Ayahuasca as Fairy Godmother, biding her time in the astral plane until her supplicants appear and begin asking for things. "Poof!" goes her magic wand, and the rain of goodies begins.<br />
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"Poof!" - My lifelong depression has lifted!<br />
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"Poof!" - My PTSD went away!<br />
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"Poof!" - My relationship healed!<br />
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"Poof!" - I got my dream job!<br />
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Presumptuously, I use the first person plural. In truth, I can only speak for myself. I wanted all of these things. I needed them, desperately. And do you know what's really shocking? I got them, or am getting them. All of them. And a great deal more, besides.<br />
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Why my hesitation, then? Why am I not content to join the lovely young ladies in their unrestrained cheering?<br />
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A couple of reasons come to mind:<br />
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1. The price has been almost more than I could afford. Yes, ayahuasca has brought me clarity, improved life circumstances, and a measure of peace. But only after taking me to hell. Sometimes quite literally. And not just during ceremony: for me, the aftershocks can and do linger for weeks, particularly as decades-old dysfunctional patterns are subtly, lovingly, and yet ruthlessly revealed to me by the Queen of the Forest. Letting go of them is like torture.<br />
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2. I have no idea where she is taking me. It's not so difficult to talk about surrender: doing it is another thing entirely. I am a man. I am flesh and blood. I am a biological entity on Planet Earth. Every facet of my wiring tells me to control, to understand, to dominate, to predict. All of that goes out the window under the force of the ayahuasca experience. Will I be broken by the experience? Will I be forced to abandon my ego's most deeply cherished ambitions? Will I lose my bare toehold in consensus reality? Yes and yes and yes. And doubtlessly a host of other trials and purifications I have not even conceived of yet.<br />
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What I'm saying, I think, is that ayahuasca demands the utmost respect and devotion from us. She is not a prostitute on a corner; she is a queen on a throne. She is not a product in a supermarket; she is a sacrament from the astral plane. She is not an experience to be had; she is a path to be followed. She is not a cheerleader; she is a teacher.<br />
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I admit that I came to her hoping that she would simply erase all of the heartbreak and hurt that has defined my life in so many dark and destructive ways. I was looking for a panacea. I was looking for magic, in the most childish understanding of the word. I have not found that, not really.<br />
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I have found instruction. I have found guidance and connection to the highest spiritual forces in the Universe. I have found purpose. I have found discipline. I have found comfort, at least occasionally. I have found illumination of the darkest corners of my soul. I <i>have</i> found magic, at least in the sense of a new understanding of reality that completely transcends the materialist spiritual poverty my upbringing burdened me with.<br />
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<i>I have found a call to action.</i><br />
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That's really the crux of the matter. Ayahuasca does not <i>do</i> anything for me - she simply shows me what <i>I</i> must do. That can be a difficult reality to embrace. A part of my consciousness is stuck in my abusive, neglected childhood - desperately wanting and needing to be taken care of, and not receiving it. Grieving that loss is an integral part of my journey. So is moving beyond it.<br />
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In ayahuasca and the beautiful community I find surrounding it, I find the most powerful means I know of to do just that. I can't adequately express my gratitude for that.<br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.<br />
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Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-55873069093120274972015-01-10T11:20:00.002-08:002016-06-17T08:29:44.185-07:00Sacrament, Part 2<b style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">sac·ra·ment</b><br />
<span style="background-color: #deec94; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">ˈsakrəmənt/</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" />
<i style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Religious action or symbol in which spiritual power is believed to be transmitted through material elements or the performance of ritual.</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">I sobered up in Richmond, California. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Anyone who has ever spent any time at all in Richmond knows that it is not a place you go because you are on a winning streak.</span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">It is poor and neglected. It is filled with refineries, projects, bars, barbecue, and drug dealers. Lots of drug dealers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">The meeting I went to there was multi-cultural in the truest sense of the word. Struggling crackheads from the projects mixed with affluent professionals from neighboring El Cerrito. All had a common purpose: to cast out the dark spirit of addiction and let in the light and love of God. To recover.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">As soon as I came to my first meeting, I sensed the importance of ritual and sacrament to the program: the reading of "How it works" and the "Promises" at the beginning; the passing of the basket; the confessional introduction ("I'm X, and I'm an alcoholic"); the closing prayer. It was close enough to my Anglican roots to be familiar and comforting. It resonated deeply with me.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I took my two-week chip at a Southern Baptist church there on a Saturday night. The ceremony was held outside under a tent. <i>It</i> felt archaic and weird, like an old-fashioned revival meeting. I can remember thinking "My God, is this what my life has come to? Praise meetings on Saturday night?"</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I had always imagined myself as one of the cool kids. This was definitely </span><i style="line-height: 18px;">not</i><span style="line-height: 18px;"> cool. And yet there was no denying the power of this strange new sacrament. It bonded me with the group, and with the program. And I needed it. If Saturday night praise meetings were necessary to lift me up from addiction and despair, then so be it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">The sacraments of AA worked for me for a long time. Then, eventually, they didn't any more. I won't tell that story, since I have already written it <a href="http://reset.me/personal-story/personal-story-ayahuasca-healed-beyond-alcoholics-anonymous-provide/">here</a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Today I am blessed to have access to the highest form of sacrament I have yet experienced: ayahuasca. I cannot discuss the details of the ritual and ceremony surrounding how we drink the brew and process its revelations, since that could compromise the anonymity of the group I belong to. I will simply write about the holy beverage itself.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I am paraphrasing, but I recall that <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Food-Gods-Original-Knowledge-Evolution/dp/0553371304">Terence McKenna</a> theorized that at the root of all religions lies a true sacrament: a plant medicine that puts us in direct contact with the divine essence. An <i>entheogen</i>: that which generates the divine within. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this theory, but I can </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">certainly attest to the divine power of this sacred brew. When I first drank in Peru, I can recall the visceral sense I had of plunging into the archaic depths of human consciousness. I was entering an actual space: well-defined and well-used, explored and celebrated by the countless shamans and practitioners who had gone before me over untold thousands of years.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">There was one moment when I felt as though I were inside of a huge, ancient rainforest tree, as if a dwelling had been lovingly hollowed out from its depths. It was green and brown and woody and warm. It felt like family.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">At another moment, ayahuasca felt like an enormously powerful energetic river running through my whole being, cleansing me of shame and rage and grief and despair. Where did it take all of this? Through its tributaries, to the Amazon itself and the sea beyond? Down to the depths of our earth? To other galaxies and dimensions? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I have no idea. I'm not supposed to. That's the point of true sacrament: it confronts us with the overwhelming experience of divine mystery.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Confrontation is the correct word. At times it can be gentle and loving and subtle, as tender as a mother's caress. At others it can be horrific and savage: one of my fellow pasajeros in the workshop experienced Mother Ayahuasca as a cruel sorceress who told him "I am here to make you suffer. This will never end." It turned out to be one of the most profound healing experiences of his life, rooting out horrific abuse he had experienced at the hands of his own mother. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">As with all deep, real truth, it is a paradox: it is both conduit and mirror, simultaneously channeling divine essence from without and illuminating truth within.</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Today, w</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">hen I walk up to drink my cup of ayahuasca I feel nervous and expectant, and more than a little scared. My guts churn in anticipation. I do my best to focus my mind and breathe. I know something big is coming, but I don't know what it is. I also know that, whatever it is, I won't be in charge of it. As soon as I drain the cup I make the sign of the cross and walk back to my seat, opening myself as fully as possible to the experience.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">In drinking ayahuasca I surrender myself to the Divine. It is scary and humbling and magnificent and precious. Incrementally, it is changing me in ways I never imagined possible.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">The other day a man roared past me in traffic, enraged that I had delayed his progress to the next red light by 3 seconds. As he passed, I could see his face distorted in anger through his closed window, screaming curses at me and making an obscene gesture with his hand.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">What astonished me was my reaction: I didn't even begin to join him in his fury and resentment, as I would have even a year ago. I immediately thought "You poor man. You must be so unhappy. Please, God, help him heal."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I don't know who did that, but it wasn't me. And that is precisely the point.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">God bless you, whoever you are.</span></span><br />
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Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-17333519984887012052014-12-24T06:36:00.000-08:002014-12-24T06:36:04.007-08:00Sacrament, Part 1<b>sac·ra·ment</b><br />
ˈsakrəmənt/<br />
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<i>Religious action or symbol in which spiritual power is believed to be transmitted through material elements or the performance of ritual.</i><br />
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I grew up Episcopalian. That means I didn't grow up afraid of God so much as I did bored by him. To me, God was not a terrible judge wielding thunderbolts and cauldrons of fire; he was a balding middle-aged man in a tweed jacket sipping on a cocktail and milling about a dinner party. He never had anything interesting to say, but people pretended like they were listening. To do otherwise would have been bad form.<br />
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Our sacrament mirrored our deity. Communion wafers and fruity wine, mumbled over by the priest to effect the miracle of transubstantiation. To me they seemed like styrofoam and fortified grape juice, nothing more. I never tasted them before the ritual, but afterwards I never sensed any power emanating from them. </div>
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I wanted to. I was a devout little kid, hungry for some kind of spiritual connection that would soothe me and heal the dreadful wounds being inflicted by the people who were supposed to guide and nurture and protect me.</div>
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By the time I hit adolescence, that child-like yearning had been replaced by a hard, desperate cynicism and a recognition that church could never provide me the comfort and instruction I needed. I turned in other directions. Pornography, hardcore punk, drugs, and alcohol were clearly a lower path, but that seemed to suit the person I thought I was - dirty and bad and wrong. And very, very angry. I embraced them with fervor.<br />
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When I was 13 I was confirmed. My mother insisted on it, and that was that. She had her appearances to keep up - being on the faculty of the local seminary placed certain demands on her, demands that would not be denied. To secure my living space, I acquiesced. But after that, I drew a line - no more. Sunday morning church attendance interfered with staying up all night on acid Saturday night, so one of them had to go. And that one was certainly not going to be my new sacrament.<br />
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Because that is exactly what drugs and alcohol were to me. It occurred to me some years ago -- after a friend in AA committed suicide, drunk, in a ghastly manner -- that it was no accident that we refer to liquor as "spirits". I know that the first few times I got loaded, I felt the spirit move through me. At the time, I thought it was the first time in my life that I had experienced it.<br />
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What sort of spirit was it? Hard and arrogant and lustful and numb, and delightfully unafraid. The feeling of being an outcast and a reject and a victim that had plagued me since early childhood disappeared completely. I felt confident. I could talk to girls. I felt as though I belonged.<br />
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My list of sacraments grew. Marijuana, magic mushrooms, LSD-25, methamphetamine, nitrous oxide, cocaine, pain killers, muscle relaxants. I wasn't too picky - if they helped me to leave my body, to become someone else for a time, that was enough. They worked for quite a while.<br />
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And then one day they stopped working. I can't put an exact time on it, but I know it happened. Maybe it was around the time that I felt myself pulled into a corner store and compelled, literally compelled in spite of my wishes, to buy a quart of beer and finish at it lunchtime.<br />
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The spirits had turned on me, and they were far more powerful than I was.<br />
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And so the first step was no stretch for me at all:<br />
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<i>"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable."</i><br />
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I took that step immediately and without reservation.<br />
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The early part of my story may perhaps contain elements so unusual that they mark me as unique. From here, though, it becomes painfully, tediously, wonderfully, blessedly common:<br />
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<i>"Hopeless alcoholic and addict stumbles into a meeting, asks for help, gets it. Never has to drink again."</i><br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.</div>
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Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6170705158457793341.post-47297660069763607282014-11-27T11:03:00.000-08:002014-11-27T11:03:08.430-08:00Giving ThanksHappy Thanksgiving!<br />
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To my overseas friends, this may not mean much, but for me this is a special day. To me, it approaches what a holy day should truly be - a day of feasting, rest, and gratitude. Coming as it does 4 weeks before Christmas, our capitalist perversion of the redeemer's birthday, I have always found Thanksgiving to be far less contrived and free-market totalitarian than its December relative.<br />
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How could it be? The very notion of a holiday devoted to giving thanks for our blessings is antithetical to the foundations of free-market capitalism - fear, greed, envy, and lust for domination. There's a reason we don't have Thanksgiving carols and decorations shoved down our throat starting in August - the culture doesn't really know how to process the holiday.<br />
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Which is ironic, since it is essentially a celebration of the American creation myth. You know, the one in which the naive dark-skinned savages foolishly sustain the white-skinned bearers of civilization in their funny black hats. How often must their descendants have regretted that decision!<br />
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During one of my first ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, I had a profound insight and healing around my family's involvement in indigenous American genocide. On my father's side, I am the direct descendant of Spanish conquistadores. My family owned an estancia in central Mexico about the size of a county. I'm pretty sure they didn't get it by being nice to the natives.<br />
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During the ceremony, I was overwhelmed that these same people that my forebears had murdered, robbed, and enslaved were sharing their most sacred medicine with me. I felt a weight of guilt and shame lift from me, amid a flood of wrenching sobs.<br />
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The motives of the Amazonian shamans and their communities for sharing this medicine with the world are surely complex. At their most base, they likely contain a desire for profit and spiritual control. But what I experienced down there, and continue to experience in my healing community here in the US, cannot be reduced to that.<br />
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"You shall know the tree by its fruit."<br />
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For me, the fruits of this work have been spiritual cleansing and healing at a level I wanted to believe was possible, but had come to doubt.<br />
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So today, in addition to the more traditional objects of family, health, and prosperity, I stop and give thanks for this sacred medicine and the incredibly wise and profound healing traditions that steward it. It is truly a gift from God, and I do my best not to forget that.<br />
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God bless you, whoever you are.Romulushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05889312413917699288noreply@blogger.com1