Where All of This is Pointing, Part II

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.

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.

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.

When I stopped to consider why that was, the answer felt obvious: my relationship with Jesus Christ has become exclusive.

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.

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.

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.

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:

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the Father, except by me.

A lot of "modern Christians" (heretics) are totally incapable of handling this exclusivity. I had a similar mindset for a long time: the Coexist bumper sticker used 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.

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: his hinário is entirely devoted to God the Father, Jesus, John, Mary, the Holy Spirit and the other Christian fundaments.** The other stuff about Yoruba and Amazonian deities was added after his death.

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. 

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.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide and spacious is the path that leads to destruction, and many find it.

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.

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? Antichrist. What's the opposite of that?

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:

• No holding onto anger
• No revenge 
• No moral grandstanding
• No fornication 
• No sexual deviance of any kind
• No "chosenness" (for anyone)
• No domination (no empire)

No wonder they killed him! People love that stuff!

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.

It's long and it's not very lifestyle-centric. 

"Oh my God that is like so inconvenient"

"Is he even thinking about my needs at all?"

"You know, my therapist said I really need to start prioritizing myself"

"But it's supposed to be all about me -- the marketing all told me so"

"Oh how dare you"

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.

I mean, really, it's like a JP Sears bit:

"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...."

LOL

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.

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.

Not one of those ET rape-os could give a shit about us. All they ever wanted to do was fuck us and eat us and make us mine gold.

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.

Sooner or later, every knee shall bend. Easy or hard, Christ is King.

God bless you, whoever you are.

* 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.

** Those familiar with Mestre Irineu'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.

*** 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.

Where All of This is Pointing, Part I

I 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.

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?"

It was chilling and stark. 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.

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.

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.

That was in the Spring of 2022, and I've not had medicine since then.

The reason I'm writing this now is that I feel a need to convey a warning to people about this entire undertaking: things are different now.

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.

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.

I mean, really: if this doesn't make it plain to you then nothing will. Brought to you by Pfizer.

  

I discussed these things in my last piece.

  

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.

  

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). That process, 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.....

  

Do you see the problem? If the brew is made by confused and mind-controlled individuals, how can it produce good results?

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.

  

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.

  

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.

  

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.

  

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.

  

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.

  

It's a joke. It's an obvious oligarchic swindle. If you've fallen for it, shame on you.

  

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.

  

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. 

  

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).

  

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.

  

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.

There is a solution to all of this. I will cover it in Part II.

Medicine is Only a Tool

I 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.

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. 

Too many refuse to trust in God.

All of this has to go. It has to go. That means it's going, whether we like it or not. Easy or hard - that's our only choice.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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?

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. 

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.

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.

So draw the conclusions.

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.

We don't even need to get into questions of outright intelligence community bribery and manipulation of news media (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.

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. 

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. 

I wanted to hold onto the indoctrination I'd received as a child: that our world essentially resembles a Richard Scarry book, 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.

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. 

I can give you a small list of people I've found illuminating; you can see if they help you:

• Neil Kramer
• Dr. Steven Greer
• Tiffany Fitzhenry (mostly when she's talking about Hollywood)
• Mark Passio
• Tony Rodrigues (SSP)
• Jay Parker (SRA)
• Dave McGowan

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:

"Please, God, show me the whole truth."

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 have longed for it. There's no getting it back.

I invite you to join me in my discomfort. It is the first step towards real freedom. For all of us.

God bless you, whoever you are.

Reckoning

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like they hadn't done a fifth step.

Like they hadn't done any of the steps.

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.

I never stopped being a good AA.

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.

Hah!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It works if you work it.

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.

Once more I am issuing a call to action to those of you who feel compelled to read this blog*:

Let's integrate these two things.

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. To heal trauma.

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.

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.

What a miserable joke. It's time to right this twisted state of affairs.

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.

How this will come about is not for me to say. That is for you people to work out. I am but a messenger.

God bless you, whoever you are.


* 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. 

On the Antidepressant Qualities of Ayahuasca

This 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.

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.

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a really gorgeous poem describing a "world of lament" that featured "ein Klage-Himmel mit entstellten Sternen" - "a lament-heaven with disfigured stars".

This poem has always spoken to me, particularly this stanza:

        "....a whole world of lament arose, in which
        all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
        road and village, field and stream and animal;
        and ... around this lament-world, even as
        around the other earth, a sun revolved
        and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
        heaven, with its own, disfigured stars...."

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.

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.

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."

I was, louvado seja Deus nas alturas, 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.

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.

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.

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, I've already done that.

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 1 ayahuasca workshop had permanently rid her of depression. What the hell was wrong with me? I felt broken beyond repair.

Again, I've already described 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.

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.

I can sleep at night.

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.

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.

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.

God bless you, whoever you are.

On 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.

I am serving notice to this delusion right here, right now.

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.

This is patently, demonstrably false. How do I know? Because I have had intimate experience of sociopaths. 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!

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 lesson? 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?

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.

As wise as adders and as gentle as doves - 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.

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?

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.

Do we feed them plant medicine? Maybe. I read a fascinating article 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.

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.

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.

And yet where are we as a species? On the edge of the abyss, that's where. Why?

"It's the sociopaths, stupid."

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 run by a cult of sociopaths. 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 out there - 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God bless you, whoever you are.

The Incredibly Messy Reality of Healing from Trauma

I'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?

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.

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 really amazing author wrote a really amazing book 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.

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.

In comparison to those guys I was lucky. Pay it forward.

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.

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.

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. Letting it out. 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.

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.

I've talked about this before, my preparation and final journey to ayahuasca. 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.

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.

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 one man 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.

What a load of bullshit. And make no mistake - this is some costly bullshit. And some engineered 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 men 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.

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.

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:

1. One person expresses a "negative" emotion such as anger, fear, or grief.
2. The other person resonates on the same frequency because of some unresolved trauma in their own life, manifesting as an uncomfortable feeling.
3. To minimize their own discomfort, the second person makes the first bad and wrong.

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.

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."

There's only one way out - we have to let it all out. 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.

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.

Embrace it. Revel in the agony. Give the Devil his due.

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.

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.

I truly wish this experience for you, too.

God bless you, whoever you are.