Non-Prophet

Postmodern Times

My web-bud Daniel Pinchbeck sent me a link to this short he is part of. Check it.

Reality Sandwich

Former Non-Prophet contributor and all around swell guy Daniel Pinchbeck has launched a new web-magazine named Reality Sandwich. There is already some pretty cool content, and it looks like it will be a place that I will be adding to my weekly round of readings. I love its broad approach to examining many different genres of progressive thought and spirituality. I for one can't get into a lot of what is discussed in some circles -- take Ramtha for example -- but here, unless you're some kind of a "heard it all, seen it all" bah-humbug kind-of a person, you'll probably find a thing or two that you'll dig.

Reality Sandwich:

Reality Sandwich is a web magazine for this time of intense transformation. Our subjects run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies. We hope to spark debate and engagement by offering a forum for voices ranging from the ecologically pragmatic to the wildly visionary (which, to our delight, sometimes turn out to be the one and the same). Counteracting the doom-and-gloom of the daily news, Reality Sandwich is a platform for voices conveying a different vision of the transformations we face. Our goal is to inspire psychic evolution and a kind of earth alchemy.

[Guest Blogger] Peter Gorman on Northwest Amazonian Shamanism

[Cries of jubilation and much hopping around was the result this morning when Peter Gorman sent the following piece for publication on Non-Prophet. Peter is a legendary writer, explorer and naturalist who for the last 20 years has explored the Amazon jungle and has been involved in research in botany, paleontology, anthropology and spirituality. Peter is like a real-life Indiana Jones. His writing credits span the world of print periodicals, having appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Newsday, The Boston Globe, Spy Magazine, Omni and Playboy (to name a few). He's even been editor-in-chief of High Times Magazine. He's consulted with National Geographic and lectured at the Boston Museum of Science and has collected relics for the American Museum of Natural History. This summer he will be a presenter at the 3rd International Amazonian Shamanism Conference. Check out his new blog and his personal website. (by all means go over to his blog and leave a comment or two. It is too great of a resource to pass up.) It is with angelic trumpet soundings and confetti cannons ablaze that I present to you this primer on the shamanic practices in the Northwest Amazon. Enjoy!]

A Primer on Shamanism in Northwest Amazonia in 2006

By Peter Gorman

This article is a long hand version of a talk I gave at the 2nd Shamanism Conference in Iquitos in July, 2006. I wanted to discuss several important, but often overlooked aspects of shamanic healing, particularly as it relates to ayahuasca healing, but also as it relates, at least in one instance, to San Pedro healing. There is also an important aspect of healing given by Bertha Grove, a Southern Ute elder from Durango, Colorado, which will help those involved in healing to deal with the disease-factor with which they are working.

With that in mind, this is more a primer on several little discussed aspects of Shamanism, as practiced primarily in northwest Amazonia today, but which might hold substance for plant medicine or shamanism elsewhere as well.

I’m going to begin with a supposition: that all matter has a life force. By that I mean that all matter—and probably anti-matter too for argument’s sake—is sentient, and has will, personality and the ability to make choices.

Now I’m going to add a second supposition: That all matter—and anti-matter for argument’s sake—dates from the first moment of time. That you and I can trace our lineage back to that moment, even if we were just cosmic dust balls billions of years from becoming slime creatures and millions of years further away from coming out of the primordial soup and clambering up onto land.

The same would hold true for a mountain, a rock, a flower. Everything we know and millions of things we don’t know trace back to that first moment when matter exists. If we were to look at a mountain, for instance, and apply my first supposition, imagine what that mountain has gone through since the dawn of time, imagine what it has experienced, and now imagine what it would be like to be able to communicate with that mountain about those experiences. It’s my belief that that’s doable; it’s my failure that I don’t know how to communicate with that being, its will, its personality. But that doesn’t mean it’s not doable, just that I fail at it.

Imagine the same for an ocean, for a fish that’s just been bitten by a predator, for a plant.

Plants, like everything else, are our co-dwellers in the universe. But man has a special relationship with plants. They provide, and have since the beginning of time, the bulk of our food, our clothing, our shelter. Some provide us with the loveliest scents; some with extraordinary color. They’re the source of our medicines, their roots work with soil and stone to keep the surface of the earth intact. They go so far as to take the poisonous carbon dioxide that humans exhale and turn it back into human-life-giving oxygen. That’s some relationship. Of course it may be that plants only invented us to distribute their seeds, so I’m not suggesting they live to cater to us. But they do provide us with much of what we need to exist on this planet.

Among the flora of the world as we know it, several plants are not just allies, they are considered Master Plant Teachers. You might extend that to read: Master Plant Teachers of Man. These plants might be considered gate keepers. These plants are the plants that allow us, we humans, to slow down enough to communicate with the mountains; to speed up enough to communicate with a hummingbird, to visit the other realms past and present and simultaneous that are here but that we don’t ordinarily see or hear within the band widths of our senses.

From Ego to We Go

Daniel Pinchbeck, friend of this blog and overall interesting dude, has started writing a monthly column column for Conscious Choice magazine. In the latest column he talks about ego, and how we live in a circular trap of pain and pleasure that leads us in an never-ending struggle to grab hold of the final carrot. He works toward supporting the argument that an evolution of consciousness will be required to allow us to graduate from, and rise above, the materialistic and sensually driven consumer culture in which we now live. Cool.

here:

For me personally, most contemporary fiction, like most current film, has an increasingly retrograde quality. In their efforts to make their audience identify with a particular drama or trauma or relationship saga, these products seem almost nostalgic. We live in a culture that continually seeks to entertain or at least distract us with an endless spew of personal narratives, whether paraded on lowbrow talk shows or parsed in literary novels. If you step outside of the cultural framing, you suddenly become aware of the mechanism that keeps us addicted to the spectacle — and, above all, hooked on ego. Our entire culture is dedicated to inciting and then placating the desires and fears of the individual ego — what the media critic Thomas De Zengotita calls “the flattered self.”

Although they use different language to define it, the various theorists on the evolution of the psyche all agree that the crux of our current crisis requires that we transcend the ego. They suggest that the stage of material progress and scientific discovery we attained in recent centuries is not the end of human development, but the launching pad for another stage in our growth. However, this next stage differs from previous phases in one essential way — it requires a “mutation in consciousness” that can only be self-willed and self-directed. According to this paradigm, it is as if physical evolution has done billions of years of work on our behalf, to get us to this point. Right now, it is our choice whether we would like to go forward, or fall by the wayside like untold millions of other species, who over-adapted to one set of conditions, and could not recreate themselves as their environment changed.

Jungle Trip AYAHUASCA

This is a very well made television show about ayahuasca. Interestingly, the reporter decided not to go home when filming was completed.