Non-Prophet

[Guest Blogger] Peter Gorman: 25 Years of Shamanism (Part 3)

[My web pal Peter Gorman has asked me to run a quite lengthy series he has been working on that covers a quarter century of adventure in the Peruvian Amazon. For those of you who don't know of Peter, he is a journalist, explorer and an adventurer. He's the man Penthouse magazine called the "Real Life Indiana Jones" and once you read about his adventures I'm sure you'll agree. His writing has appeared in over 100 well known magazines and newspapers, he's collected artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History and worked on consulting assignments for National Geographic Explorer and BBC's Natural World. This series will be run in at least five parts, and its length and subject matter may be a delight to some and a challenge to others. No matter what you believe or where you come from though, Gorman's writing is incredibly entertaining and this work is the telling of an adventure, the equal of which few are able to utter. I am proud to bring you this tale of Peter Gorman's 25 years of shamanism in the jungles of Peru. Visit his website at pgorman.com and read his blog here. -NP]

This is part 3 of 5 in the series. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Couple of months ago John S from Non-Prophet ran a piece of mine dealing with shamanism in Peru, from my experience. I think it was a good piece and I'm happy he put it up. Right now I'm in the middle of a series called--maybe lamely--25 Years of Shamanism--which was the name of a talk I was to give in July in Iquitos, Peru at the 3rd Annual Shaman Conference there. Unfortunatly, I fell pretty ill the day I was to speak and after an emergency and life-saving operation, couldn't. So I've begun writing a series on what I meant to speak about. John S has graciously agreed to run it on his Non-Prophet site, which gets a lot more hits than my 80 hits per day on my site. And us writers like to be read. So read this thing. It may not answer all the questions you have about South American Ayahuasca curanderos or ayahuasca as a medicine, but it might answer a few. And I'm thrilled that someone thinks it's worth picking up.

25 Years of Shamanism (Part 3)
By Peter Gorman

In 1988, I had another extraordinary shamanic experience. I spent another month with Moises, this time walking across a good section of the jungle from the Tamischaku River to the Rio Midi, which emptied into the Jivari about 100 bird-flight miles north of where the Galvez did. We’d made our way down to Letecia—the point where the Jivari joins the Amazon—by raft and small motor boat (which we’d commandeered at gunpoint and later returned to the owner with many thanks, but that’s another story), then took a riverboat back to Iquitos. On board was a fellow named Roberto whom I’d know for a couple of years in Iquitos, As his game was bilking tourists for phony environmental causes we weren’t close. Still, we talked occasionally.
"Hello, Peter," he said when we both found ourselves at the ferry’s refreshment stand. "Have you done any ayahuasca lately?"
"No."
"There’s a fantastic curandero now living in Pevas you should see. I’ve taken lots of tourists. What visions they have! Much better than that old man you see. Maybe I’ll take you."
"Thanks, Roberto. No need."
"Well, then, have you heard about the ayahuasquero fight?"
"No."
"You probably don’t know anything about them."
I told him I didn’t, and he explained that many ayahuasqueros used their spirit connections to accumulate personal power or wealth, frequently by making bad things happen to people at the behest of their enemies—what is called brujeria. The brujeria needed to be countered by a curandero working for the good, which supposedly led to great battles between good and evil ayahuasqueros. Those battles were said to be fought with invisible darts called virotes, which could inflict great physical harm or even death. I’d heard something about those battles somewhere but had never believed they were taken seriously.
"Well," Roberto said, drinking a beer I’d bought him in exchange for his story. "One ayahuasquero in Santa Clara has been slowly poisoning another in Iquitos. Very well done. By the time the man in Iquitos realized his illness came from virotes it was almost too late.
Fortunately, one of his sons has been studying with him and now he too is in the fight. Everyone says that all three of them will be dead before long."
While I acted skeptical at the time, when we reached Iquitos I decided to see Julio to ask him about this aspect of the medicine. I had no real intention of asking him to make ayahuasca for me, but while I was still in Iquitos I had a dream which changed my mind. It was about my father, who had been dead for nearly 16-years at that time. In the dream he told me that he could no longer see my mother—also dead several years—and asked me to find her and find out why. It was an eerie dream and I decided to use ayahuasca to try to discover what it meant. I don’t know what I expected, or whether it was just an excuse to use ayahuasca again, but it made sense to me that that was what I should do.

[Guest Blogger] Peter Gorman: 25 Years of Shamanism (Part 2)

[My web pal Peter Gorman has asked me to run a quite lengthy series he has been working on that covers a quarter century of adventure in the Peruvian Amazon. For those of you who don't know of Peter, he is a journalist, explorer and an adventurer. He's the man Penthouse magazine called the "Real Life Indiana Jones" and once you read about his adventures I'm sure you'll agree. His writing has appeared in over 100 well known magazines and newspapers, he's collected artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History and worked on consulting assignments for National Geographic Explorer and BBC's Natural World. This series will be run in at least five parts, and its length and subject matter may be a delight to some and a challenge to others. No matter what you believe or where you come from though, Gorman's writing is incredibly entertaining and this work is the telling of an adventure, the equal of which few are able to utter. I am proud to bring you this tale of Peter Gorman's 25 years of shamanism in the jungles of Peru. Visit his website at pgorman.com and read his blog here. -NP]

This is part 2 of 5 in the series. Read part 1 here.

Couple of months ago John S from Non-Prophet ran a piece of mine dealing with shamanism in Peru, from my experience. I think it was a good piece and I'm happy he put it up. Right now I'm in the middle of a series called--maybe lamely--25 Years of Shamanism--which was the name of a talk I was to give in July in Iquitos, Peru at the 3rd Annual Shaman Conference there. Unfortunatly, I fell pretty ill the day I was to speak and after an emergency and life-saving operation, couldn't. So I've begun writing a series on what I meant to speak about. John S has graciously agreed to run it on his Non-Prophet site, which gets a lot more hits than my 80 hits per day on my site. And us writers like to be read. So read this thing. It may not answer all the questions you have about South American Ayahuasca curanderos or ayahuasca as a medicine, but it might answer a few. And I'm thrilled that someone thinks it's worth picking up.

25 Years of Shamanism (Part 2)
By Peter Gorman

My second extraordinary experience with shamanism occurred just two years later. Before I get to that I should mention that after the trip with Chuck and Larry I really did seem to have the jungle in my blood and so the following year arranged to study jungle survival with Moises Torres Vienna. It was just the two of us.
I’d asked him to take me back to Alphonso’s before we went into the jungle to study, but he said Alphonse had moved away and he didn’t know where. On the other hand, he said, he’d learned of a very good curandero named Julio Jerena that we would visit as he was on the same river we’d use for the survival course. I was disappointed but said okay.
We traveled on a large flat-bottomed riverboat that was wildly over-crowded to a small town called Genero Herrera, just a couple of hours short of Requena. We then spent some hours arranging for a smaller boat—a peque-peque, an oversized canoe with a small motor notable for its long propeller shaft that allowed it to maneuver in very shallow water—that took us up a little river called the Auchyacu. That river would become my jungle home for a quarter of a century.

[Guest Blogger] Jaime O. Perez on How To Win the War in Iraq.

[When it comes to our role in Iraq everyone is a critic. The job that the Bush administration has done is so easy to find fault with that few can resist. When it comes to proposing an alternate plan things get significantly more difficult. Stay and fix things? Who has the guts to propose such a thing in a public forum these days? Jaime O. Perez is a political analyst who has studied at Brandeis, UC Berkeley and UT Austin. He currently resides in El Paso, TX where he is the editor of The Border Observer and he recently opened up a thought space gallery named HusH. It is my pleasure to present Jaime's plan for the future of the effort in Iraq. I found his ideas to be both courageous and enlightening. For more opinion from Jaime check out his website.]

Surrender Is Not An Option
by
Jaime O. Perez

Sunnis, Shi'as and Kurds all want the same thing: Freedom And Security; The US should Guarantee It To Them In Exchange For A United Iraq with A Strong Central Iraqi Government.
Many Americans would want for things to be different. The Iraq Study Group has worked diligently, it seems, to provide a new approach to an ill-advised war and occupation of Iraq. There is enough blame to go around. Many Americans are angry at the so-called neocons for getting us into this mess.

Do we need to change course? Absolutely. Should we withdraw sooner than later. Absolutely Not. President Bush is correct when he says that failure is not an option. The major flaw in of the Iraq Study Group Report is that no real solution is offered to address the challenge of a wider Middle East conflict. America cannot withdraw until a resolution to the problem has been found.

A week before the Study Group issued its recommendations, I wrote that many political analysts understood that in any given organized group, when a strongman is removed, a vacuum of authority is created that leads to conflict among the subjects until another alternative central authority is reestablished or a power sharing arrangement is negotiated. Yet, among the strategic objectives of the war, waged by this administration, were the removal of Saddam Hussein and the dismantling of the army as well as the infrastructure of leaders that held it together.

In other words, among the objectives of the invasion was the complete removal of any central authority. The "coalition of the willing" led by America was certainly capable of providing the force necessary to support a central government in the interim but there was no way it could provide the authority it required to substitute for the previous regime's legitimacy nor did it put in place the mechanism for the sharing of power among competing interests. Anarchy was assured and any mechanism that might avoid it was excised.

Now, it is recognized that a military solution is not possible. But is there a political solution possible?

Yes. But, it is not to be found in the Iraq Study Group recommendations because the analysis underlying them is fundamentally flawed. The Study Group continues to attach to Iraq a definition that is not sound. There is no "nation" underlying its political structure. There is no hierarchy of institutions. We destroyed them and encouraged sectarian ideologues to finish the job. There is a realm comprised of three major competing groups wanting self-rule.

Majority rule as a political method will not work in Iraq at the national level but they can work at the village and district levels. This is a good thing. But Iraq needs a national structure that shares power and resources.

A Political Solution

Washington must change course:

* Recommendation 1 - Implement the Study Group recommendations except three: a. The U.S. should negotiate with a legitimate Iraqi government the reconstruction of the country; b. There should be no immediate reduction of U.S. military and civilian presence; and c. The U.S. must retain a permanent military base in Iraq to guarantee the long term viability of the new government and keep neighbors at bay.

* Recommendation 2 - The U.S. with international help shall forge a power sharing agreement: a triumvirate - Council of Presidents including a Kurd, Sunni and Shi'ite to rule a unity government, share Iraqi oil and other resource revenue on the basis of population, and administer the governmental bureaucracies; The Council shall be elected every three years; The position of Speaker of the Presidential Triumvirate shall rotate each year.

* Recommendation 3 - The government shall conduct provincial elections at the village level to ensure democratic and legitimate representation of their group interest.

* Recommendation 4 - Require national leaders and administrators at the local and district level to be comprised of an equal number of men and women.

* Recommendation 5 - Allow each group to establish and control its own police force.

* Recommendation 6 - All Sunni, Kurd and Shi'ite elected leaders shall each establish a Congress and select their respective President.

* Recommendation 7 - The U.S. shall provide guarantee of security to each of the three groups/Presidents against internal threat.

* Recommendation 8 - Only after these steps are implemented, shall U.S. begin substantial withdrawal of military units from service in Iraq.

The Iraq Study Group interviewed hundreds of think tanks, Iraqis, experts and academics but seemingly absent was the opinion of Americans of Hispanic heritage. America speaks to the world about the virtue of Democracy and inclusiveness but the ommission of large segments of our population from the debate regarding Iraq creates doubt about our sincerity. Preaching is a lot more credible when we practice what we preach. The blood being shed in Iraq is American: equally Anglo, Black, Asian and Hispanic, male and female. We must all be at the table when making these momentous decisions.

[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.

[Guest Blogger] Dr. Richard Grossman on Ayahuasca Healing

[Richard Grossman is the founder of Heart Feather, a healing travel experience. He is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine with over 30 years of professional experience. He is also a sound healer and the creator of soundJourney, a multi-instrumental sound healing experience. He has lived and traveled in China, India, Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador, and has worked and studied with healers and shamans from many diverse backgrounds. More about Dr. Grossman and his work can be found at www.acudoc.com, www.soundjourney.com or www.heartfeather.com.]

"Para Curar, Solamente Para Curar"

Richard Grossman, L.Ac., O.M.D., Ph.D.

We are all gathered in a large outdoor circular building called the "maloca". It's 9:00, time for the evening ceremony to start, and G., our leader, is snoring. But it's okay. Somehow the snores blend into the music of the jungle: the frogs, crickets, cicadas, night birds, and other sound that are beyond my ability to recognize. It's beautiful.

Like G., we are all lying on thin mats on the ground. At the center of the room, next to the large ceramic pot containing a roll of mapacho, jungle tobacco, three candles are waxed to flat stones. Above us, the beams and posts that support the palm frond roof move with the flickering light. Sometimes it seems like the beams all move along with the night music. Occasionally a mosquito buzzes by, its harsh whine interrupting the tapestry of the night creatures music. Occasionally a few whispers break the silence, punctuated by gentle laughter. The night is warm and humid, as are most nights here in the center of the Peruvian Amazon. Occasionally a breeze moves through the trees and a branch falls. I close my eyes to rest, knowing that soon G. will wake up, or one of his assistants will wake him, and we will begin another ceremony.

Fifteen years ago I had my first experience with such a ceremony. Not in the jungle, but at a house in the Santa Monica Mountains, overlooking the ocean. Then night music was only crickets and the sound of an occasional car or airplane going by. And I was afraid. Terrified, really. The unknown does that. And this was to be a journey into the unknown. I had watched as my friend and guide carefully measured out a dose of the ceremonial medicina. He handed it to me, and I gulped it down: a one-way act of complete commitment. Now, whether I wanted to or not, I was going to enter a deep, and totally new, healing space.

I lay down on the floor, on a comfortable mattress in the center of the room, flanked by tall speakers playing soft and soothing music. And I waited. And waited. Eyes closed, I began to see things: patterns of light and energy moving in time with the music. The fear dissolved. Multi-colored and multi-dimensional swirls of light/sound all blended together. It was almost seductive, drawing me in deeper and deeper. This continued for about half hour, and then a thought came to my mind: "This is too much."
I felt a tightening in my stomach. Fear. It was too much. Too strong. Sucking me into a world, a dimension I didn't know. But there was a strange familiarity to it all, as though, illogically, I had gone through this before. I could have stopped it with my will, but there was no choice. Not if I was there to heal. So I went into that world though I could have stopped it with my will had I let my fear control me. Though really I had no choice because I was there to heal, and stopping it would have stopped the healing.

I felt a tightening in my stomach. Fear. It was too much. Too strong. Sucking me into a world, a dimension I didn't know. But there was a strange familiarity too it all, as though, illogically, I had gone through this many times before. So I went into Memories rose up. Childhood pain. Traumas, both remembered and forgotten. The day my dog died. I was six. I had never cried. Never even realized then what it meant for death to come to something I loved. Now the tears came. My beloved uncle, who had a heart attack and died while showering. More tears. The bicycle accident that caused the loss of my index finger at five. Ambulance sirens. Pain. Fear. Terror. More memories and pain than I could handle.

And then, something miraculous. I heard, as though from outside myself and within myself at once, a soft voice. "Trust and Forgive," it said, over and over. "Trust and Forgive." So I trusted. I forgave. And I felt those wounds and memories relax and lose their emotional charge. Then…back further. Through birth into . . . what to call it? Past lifetimes? Collective memories? Imagination? But real…oh, so real. A concentration camp in Germany. Walking with others to the gas chamber. The smell of burning bodies permeating the air I was and wasn't breathing. I wanted to run away, but there was no where to go. There was nothing I could do. My fate was to walk into those showers, to breathe in the poison gas, to become one of those burning bodies. A small part of me knew that this wasn't really happening. I could still feel the mattress under my back, still hear the music and crickets, still knew that I wouldn't be gassed and burned. And it was still so real.

I thought I would open my eyes. End the experience. Talk to R., who was guiding me in this ceremony. But I knew that there was more to learn and to heal. And then I was back there again. And again I heard it: "Trust and Forgive." No, I thought, I can't. This is too horrible. "Trust and Forgive." It's impossible; no one can forgive this. "Trust and Forgive." But I don't know how to do that. Or maybe I do. Maybe I have to. So I did. I forgave and let go. And trust? Trust what? Trust this insane vision? Trust myself? Trust my ideas? Trust my religion? Trust God? "Just Trust. And Forgive."

So I did. I let go, at the deepest cellular level, of the pain and the fear; of the hatred and the anger. And I somehow recognized these memories and feelings. They were subtle, almost invisible, always in the background of my life, like glasses you wear daily and forget you have on, or the distant highway sounds that you no longer hear. Yet always there, always coloring, like an invisible shadow, the way I had interacted with and seen my world, perhaps since my birth into this life. I opened my eyes to talk about what I was experiencing. Or tried to. Only a mumble came out. I managed to ask, "How long?" It had not yet been an hour. I closed my eyes again; back into the vision, into that all too real vision. And I let go, relaxing completely into the unfamiliar feeling. Breathe. Relax. Trust. Forgive.

And suddenly, with the forgiveness, I was out of the death camp. But the Journey was just beginning. Rome. I was a woman. Tortured. At the bottom of a latrine. Tied down, slowly being covered with feces. Screaming. Though no screams came out of my mouth there in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was horrible. Smelled horrible. And then, again: "Trust and Forgive." And when I did, it was over; there was peace. But there was so much more: Tortured in the Inquisition. A slave about to be locked, alive, into a tomb in Egypt. Places and times I didn't even know or recognize from the history I had studied. So many times humans have tortured and killed one another. All of it locked, somehow, deep within me. I could tell that the medicina didn't create these visions; it just shined its light into those inner corners, crannies and hidden caves -- where I didn't want to go -- so that I could see what was already, what was always there. So I could let it heal, help me heal.

"Richard".

I am back in Peru, in the maloca, G. softly calling my name. I go and sit on the mat in front of him. He carefully measures a small cup of the medicina and hands it to me. I hold it to my heart, as I always do, and voice a silent prayer: May this Journey show me what I need to see. May this help me heal that in me which needs healing. May this ceremony be not only for myself, but may it be for all who are suffering, all who have suffered, all who may suffer in the future. I drink the earthy, bitter tasting brew in one fast gulp, return to my place in the maloca, rinse my mouth out with a sip of water, and wait. Each person in turn is called up to receive the medicina. Each in turn returns to their mat and sits, listening to the magical sounds of the jungle creatures, tuning into their inner worlds.

Then, unexpectedly, I have a strong bout of coughing. I've been doing that for about a week, probably a combination of breathing in the diesel fumes that are so common in third world cities, and sleeping in the Andes without enough blankets. Tonight this one spasm of coughing continues and multiplies, painful and deep in my lungs.

I scan the other people in the maloca, especially those who have traveled to be with me in the jungle. Eight in all, all so different, all who trusted me enough to come on this Journey: a yoga teacher, a psychotherapist, a photographer, a nutritionist, a woman who has suffered from chemical sensitivity and fibromyalgia for 10 years, and others, all different walks of life. Some have had difficult times in the last two ceremonies, as repressed areas of their pasts began to come into awareness. It is to them that I send out a silent prayer of good intention, for their healing and deepest good.

Time passes. L., the woman with the fibromyalgia, is having a tough time. "I'm dying, I'm dying" she keeps moaning. Others are affected by this. One shouts out to me, "Please, do something for her. Help her." Yet I knew that she has to go through whatever she is going through, that she isn't dying, at least her physical body isn't dying, just the part of her that holds onto her illness. And that this is the medicina taking her to a place where she can go through the cause of her illness to find real healing.

A few weeks ago, during a ceremony with an elderly Shipibo shaman in San Francisco Pucallpa, another woman, D., was struggling. A long-time healer, experienced with medicina, she was surprised to find an area of deep darkness and suffering still within herself, and it frightened her deeply. The shaman worked with her for at least an hour, mostly comforting her as the medicine did its work. Finally she got into a better state. "Porqué tomo? (Why do I take this?)", she asked after a few minutes. "Para curar" (to heal), he said, softness, love, experience and understanding in his voice. "Solamente para curar (only to cause healing)"

Here in the ceremony, I am coughing strongly and regularly. Breathing is beginning to be difficult, and I wonder if all of the fumes I have breathed in are trigging an allergic asthma; not a comforting thought to have when I am hours away from the nearest hospital or doctor. From very far away I hear "Richard", very softly. I think I am imagining it, but then again, even softer, "Richard". It is G. calling me to come to him for healing. Again, I sit in front of him. He starts singing. His song lasts about 10 minutes. Then he blows mapacho smoke from his pipe over me in an ancient ritual of cleansing. After he is done I go back to my mat, sit down and take a deep breath. No congestion, no cough. I try it again, still no coughing, not then nor for the rest of the evening.

The next morning I notice that L. is glowing, a large smile on her face. I start laughing, one of those laughs that comes from deep within the heart. I ask her to tell me everything. I can't go into details here due to confidentiality, but essentially she says that she was able to let go of an issue that has been bothering her for 10 years. That she realized that her illness was a direct result of her inability to forgive someone from her past. And that the night before, in the midst of all of her suffering, she understood that the suffering was her own creation. That no one and nothing else had created it. This allowed her to forgive and begin the process of true healing. This healing path is not for everyone. It is a path for those who are willing to heal, to look at and confront their deepest wounds, and to forgive themselves and others for everything. To let go of that, even of those cherished wounds, pains, and injustices which makes us who we think we are, blinding us from who we really are.

In a meeting with G. the next day, I ask him what he had done to me. Very simply, very humbly, he says that he had sung an icaro (healing song) to my lungs, and my lungs heard the song and let go of their illness.

Weeks after we return to the U.S., L. comes to see me. Her fibromyalgia and chemical sensitivity are not fully gone, she says, but they bother her less than they have in years.

Why do I do this? Why do I take people into a foreign country, into the jungle, to be bitten by mosquitoes, to live in an environment that can be uncomfortable and challenging, to take strange herbs, to confront their most fearsome inner demons, to work with shamans who embody an ancient healing tradition? And why do they come with me?

Para curar, solamente para curar.

[Guest Blogger] Jay Fawcett on Iraq and the Republicans Running For the Fifth CD.

[The following is a guest editorial from Jay Fawcett. He is a Democrat running for the fifth congressional District. With all of the garbage going on in the Pub's camp these days Jay's message is one of real and badly needed change. We need to restore balance to the legislative branch. We need to clean out the dank stale smell in the halls and replace it with something sweet... like the smell of fresh baked bread. Non-Prophet is happy to endorse Jay Fawcett for CD5.]

What I learned at the Republican Debate
By Jay Fawcett

As some of you may know, we were asked at the beginning of June if I would debate Jeff Crank one on one regarding the War in Iraq. We accepted, on the record with a press release, because I feel it is important for all the candidates to be involved in any forum prior to the primary. Last week we found out that the Republicans were having their own debate on the War in Iraq. Since I am the only candidate with ground combat experience, to include being part of the first invasion of Iraq, I felt I should be included and said so. The debate was on the evening of 5 July at VFW Post 101 and according to the Gazette, open to the public, so I attended. Three of the Republican candidates were in favor of including me, one was neutral, and two, Jeff Crank and Lionel Rivera were opposed. I was offered two minutes prior to the debate to address the crowd, which I did and encouraged the candidates to address the following questions based on current US military doctrine:

* How does the War in Iraq support the Global War on Terrorism?
* What are the President’s Goals and Objectives in Iraq?
* How do we know when these Goals and Objectives have been achieved?
* What do we want Iraq to look like when we leave?
* Is the area of Southwest Asia more or less stable today than in 2003?

None of these questions were answered in the course of the evening, and, since the forum was closed to questions from the floor, I didn’t have a chance to ask them again.

What I did hear was some of the most tortured constitutional assertions that I have ever heard in my life and I now know why Jeff Crank and Lionel Rivera did not want me involved.

Jeff Crank keeps talking about how Congress agreed to support the President and should now shut off any further discussion of the war. I have some news for Jeff; only Congress can declare war, its in that pesky Constitution. In this case the President did not ask for or get a declaration of war; he received a resolution which he signed into law. On October 16, 2002 President Bush signed into law Resolution 114. This legislation was an authorization for the use of force against Iraq. This was not a declaration of war and it did not give the President unlimited authority in using the military in Iraq and specifically referenced requirements under the War Powers Act.

“(a) Authorization.--The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to--

(1) defend the national security of the United States

against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and

(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council

resolutions regarding Iraq.”

Jeff presents himself as an expert on Congressional staffing; obviously that doesn’t include reading the Constitution.

I refer him to Article I, Section 8, “The Congress shall have Power To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;”. Federalist 24 and 25 provide amplification of who wages and who declares war.

Lionel was similarly confused about the role of Congress as one of three branches of government with a responsibility to address national issues.

In short what I heard was a dangerous tendency to blindly support the President in matters of military force. I wonder if they would have said the same thing about Nixon, or Clinton.

[Guest Blogger] Dr. Ralph Metzner on the Collapse of Civilization

[Ralph Metzner has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Harvard University (1962) and a B.A. from Oxford University. He has been exploring states of consciousness and transformational practices for over thirty years. Ralph is the author of several books, including The Psychedelic Experience (with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, 1964), Maps of Consciousness (1971), Know Your Type (1978), Opening to Inner Light (1986) and Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth (1999). He is co-founder and president of the Green Earth Foundation. It is a great honor here at Non-Prophet to host this piece by such an important, pivotal and visionary figure as Dr. Metzner.]

“Is it possible that global civilisation might collapse within our lifetime or that of our children? Until recently, such an idea was the preserve of lunatics and cults. In the past few years, however, an increasing number of intelligent and credible people have been warning that global collapse is a genuine possibility. And many of these are sober scientists, including Lord May, David King and Jared Diamond - people not usually given to exaggeration or drama.” - Dylan Evans Wednesday December 21, 2005 Guardian

Ralph Metzner on the Collapse of Civilization

Well, it now appears that I can count myself among the “intelligent and credible people”, who have been saying that the collapse of our global civilization is a distinct possibility. The article [linked] below, from the Guardian, spells out the interlocking scenarios that have led to the collapse of previous, more localized, civilizations.  In one respect,  though,  I have already left the company of the “intelligent and credible”, since I don’t think civilizational collapse is possible — I say it is happening now.  Even as we read each other’s e-mail, and drink to the New Year.  That deadly duo of monsters — resource depletion and overpopulation  -- are killing off vast areas of biosphere. And our  leaders (the biggest gangsters), instead of focussing on searching for ways to cooperate and to mitigate the lethal consequences of the collapse, have chosen to apply their technological skills in increasingly violent military actions to support the organized predation of the multinational energy corporations, while skilfully weaving a stupefying hypnotic fog of denial into their subject populations and keeping them in mindless robotic consumerist trance.  I also have to depart from my “intelligent and credible” fellow observers in their rather sanguine assessment that the collapse of industrial civilization will just entail the return to a pre-industrial life-style. In other words, like the horse-and-buggy days of colonial America — doesn’t sound too bad. Perhaps this will be the final new social equilibrium, .. but in the meantime, what happens when civilization collapses, as Uncle Karl pointed out, is barbarism. I think we can all agree that the images emerging from the worldwide military prison gulag, and the fact that the possible ethical and legal justification of torture has become a topic of debate and discussion in politics and academics, is one sign of a civilization that is collapsing into barbarism. This barbarism is sometimes (falsely I believe) called the “law of the jungle”: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. But that notion is not a “law of the jungle” -- it is a false choice, a rigid, fear-based survival program. There are many other, healthier and more productive ways for us to expend our energy and direct our intention, besides killing or being killed, eating or being eaten. What are these ways? We can start by “turning our swords into ploughshares”, demilitarizing society and committing ourselves to the non-violent ways of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and Jesus of Nazareth.  We can sit down and talk:  talk about what is really needed for every one, --  all human and non-human beings,  inhabiting this planet, or this place where we happen to find ourselves; — and how we can best meet those needs.  What a fantastic challenge and beautiful opportunity for our collective creativity and ingenuity, our powers of design and imagination.  As far as I can tell, humans don’t really need that much — food, water, shelter, health, safety of course, the basics; the opportunity to raise their children in peace,  to engage in meaningful work, to practice their creativity, to pursue their spiritual and religious values — don’t they all flow from basic respect for another’s integrity? The Golden Rule is still the Golden Rule.
I have to report I feel neither gloomy nor doomy. I’ve found that letting go of denial and accepting what is happening, is tremendously liberating.
“To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose..” and this is a time of collapse,  and renewal.  
So, my friends, be of good cheer, and laugh and make music

[Read the article from the Guardian HERE:

[Guest Blogger] Ray Kurzweil on The Singularity

[Ray Kurzweil sent the following self interview for publication on Non-Prophet. He is a world renowned inventor, with the CCD Flatbed Scanner, OCR (optical character recognition) and the first computer generated music to his credit. He is a pioneer in speech synthesis and recognition, virtual reality and in 2005 Bill Gates called him, "the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence". It is with great pleasure that I present this piece which introduces the ideas explored in his latest best-selling book: The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology.]

Questions and Answers on the Singularity
by Ray Kurzweil

So what is the Singularity?

Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like “The Matrix”), "experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.

And that’s the Singularity?

No, that’s just the precursor. Nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle. We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity.

When will that occur?

I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

Why is this called the Singularity?

The term “Singularity” in my book is comparable to the use of this term by the physics community. Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our limited biological brains, imagine what our future civilization, with its intelligence multiplied trillions-fold, be capable of thinking and doing? Nevertheless, just as we can draw conclusions about the nature of black holes through our conceptual thinking, despite never having actually been inside one, our thinking today is powerful enough to have meaningful insights into the implications of the Singularity. That’s what I’ve tried to do in this book.

Okay, let’s break this down. It seems a key part of your thesis is that we will be able to capture the intelligence of our brains in a machine.

Indeed.

So how are we going to achieve that?

We can break this down further into hardware and software requirements. In the book, I show how we need about 10 quadrillion (1016) calculations per second (cps) to provide a functional equivalent to all the regions of the brain. Some estimates are lower than this by a factor of 100. Supercomputers are already at 100 trillion (1014) cps, and will hit 1016 cps around the end of this decade. Several supercomputers with 1 quadrillion cps are already on the drawing board, with two Japanese efforts targeting 10 quadrillion cps around the end of the decade. By 2020, 10 quadrillion cps will be available for around $1,000. Achieving the hardware requirement was controversial when my last book on this topic, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out in 1999, but is now pretty much of a mainstream view among informed observers. Now the controversy is focused on the algorithms.

And how will we recreate the algorithms of human intelligence?

To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. Here, progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and temporal (time) resolution of brain scanning is also progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year, like most everything else having to do with information. Just recently, scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections, and watch them fire in real time. Already, we have mathematical models and simulations of a couple dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons in the brain. IBM is now creating a simulation of about 10,000 cortical neurons, including tens of millions of connections. The first version will simulate the electrical activity, and a future version will also simulate the relevant chemical activity. By the mid 2020s, it’s conservative to conclude that we will have effective models for all of the brain.

So at that point we’ll just copy a human brain into a supercomputer?

I would rather put it this way: At that point, we’ll have a full understanding of the methods of the human brain. One benefit will be a deep understanding of ourselves, but the key implication is that it will expand the toolkit of techniques we can apply to create artificial intelligence. We will then be able to create nonbiological systems that match human intelligence in the ways that humans are now superior, for example, our pattern- recognition abilities. These superintelligent computers will be able to do things we are not able to do, such as share knowledge and skills at electronic speeds.

By 2030, a thousand dollars of computation will be about a thousand times more powerful than a human brain. Keep in mind also that computers will not be organized as discrete objects as they are today. There will be a web of computing deeply integrated into the environment, our bodies and brains.

[Guest Blogger] Scot Aaron on Milky Way Model Cosmology

[Scot Aaron has three published books. With academic degrees in World Religions, he then researched Earth Sciences and Astrophysics at institutes in Munich. His last book God’s Science (ISBN 1-58916-001-0) first presents the Milky Way Model. This model of creation spiritually describes our physical universe in terms of Relativity Ratios. Currently he is writing some plays ("Planetary Discoveries" will be performed in Feb. 06), along with developing a generic "Tree of Light Meditation" to assist individuals on their spiritual paths.]

Science, Religion, Responsibility
(an introductory article for the Milky Way Model cosmology)

Step back for a moment, and like Socrates, examine life. Major world religions claim millions to a billion + adherents. Science apparently makes life easier with helpful products and intelligent individuals explaining details of “existence.” Here we are in the 21st Century making sense of it all for our individual lives. In other words, “what is life about,” moreover, “what’s it matter, to me individually?”
The Milky Way Model cosmology (that I developed) examines reality from the core spiritual/religious understandings with scientific data, especially of celestial/stellar activities. I hope this Model can strengthen connections with fellow humans and God/Existence. Simply put, may we live fruitful lives, may we transform negativity into positives, may we responsibly celebrate shared sweetness.
Before getting to Einstein’s relativity (a breakthrough for 20th century science), let’s examine/interpret what ancient religions say about God and Humans.
Unas' Pyramid Text, Earth’s oldest liturgy about 4400 years ago, clearly presents physical life as preparation for an afterlife. Afterlife can be glorious. Everybody can connect to the tip of the pyramids, i.e. tips being like guiding stars.

[Guest Blogger] Daniel Pinchbeck: The Mayan Apocalypse

[It is with great pleasure that I present to you a guest post by one of the great progressive thinkers of our time: Daniel Pinchbeck. Please check out breakingopoenthehead.com, The Evolver Project and look for his new book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, to be released in April by Viking-Penguin. As always, you are encouraged to comment on this forum regardless of your experience with the subject matter. You could end up learning something. -NP]

The Mayan Apocalypse
Daniel Pinchbeck

Over the past decade, I have engaged in an intellectual and spiritual odyssey that began when I was in my late twenties, in the depths of an existential crisis. At that time I was a journalist whose work had appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, among others, and the editor of a New York-based literary magazine, Open City. I was brought up as an atheist in a countercultural milieu – my mother was a novelist, book editor, and former member of the Beat Generation; my father was an abstract painter living in SoHo. I had internalized the modern scientific view of a world lacking a sacred or transcendent dimension – the “universe in ruins” described by Bertrand Russell. Suffering from nihilism, I found that I desperately needed to interrogate my world view, and to see if there were any other options.

The only events in my life that suggested the possibility of other forms of consciousness or other realms of being were my psychedelic journeys on mushrooms and LSD, back in college. I decided to return to psychedelics and systematically study this culturally suppressed and forbidden area. I explored the substances I had known, and learned about many I had never heard of before. I tried ayahuasca, the sacred “medicine” of the Amazon basin, brewed from two jungle plants, in a ceremony in downtown Manhattan. I also took an assignment from a music magazine to go through a tribal initiation in Gabon, on the West African equator, using a psychedelic rootbark, iboga, that sent me on a long trip back through my childhood, also featuring prophetic hints and telepathic views. I wrote about these experiences, and many others, in my first book, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, published by Random House, in 2002.

The upshot of my study – which included doing shamanic work with the Mazatec Indians in Mexico and the Secoya tribe in the Ecuadorean Amazon, visiting the Burning Man festival in Nevada, and exploring synthetic compounds invented in the last decades – was that I became convinced, through my experiences, that the shamanic, occult, or mystical worldview was more accurate than the materialist worldview I had inherited. I transferred my allegiances from Freud to Jung, whose acceptance of synchronicity, of archetypes belonging to a collective unconscious, and the “reality of the psyche,” seemed to support the shamanic worldview through the prism of modern depth psychology. Over the course of my research, I encountered extraordinary numbers of synchronicities and various forms of psychic phenomena in which I had no “belief” beforehand. My world view was forced to expand to allow for this new data.

Among the substances I tried was the superpotent fast-acting psychedelic, dimethyltryptamine, known as DMT. DMT was the subject of a 1990s study by Doctor Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico, the results compiled in his book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Strassman noted that DMT was an endogamous chemical in human beings, naturally occurring in our brains (perhaps produced by the pineal gland) and spinal column. Strassman was a Buddhist, and he had noted that Buddhist texts described the soul reincarnating seven weeks after death. The pineal gland appeared in fetal development exactly forty-nine days after conception. Strassman wondered if this was a more than accidental conjunction – if DMT, or some other compound produced by the pineal gland could be the “spirit molecule,” a kind of conductive medium drawing the soul down into the body and releasing it at death. When I smoked DMT, I found that I completely lost contact with this reality, and entered another dimension or realm that seemed fully convincing, yet almost overwhelming in its otherness. The best I could describe this other realm was “Tibetan mandalas meets Disney World in the Twenty-Fifth Century” – it seemed simultaneously geometric, hyper-organic, hyperreal. I had the sensation of much higher levels of consciousness watching over this realm, and inspecting me as I passed through it – the entire trip lasted less than ten minutes. Although DMT is a naturally occurring compound in the human body and in many plants, it was made illegal by the US Government in the late 1960s.

I was left wondering why Western culture found it necessary to drastically repress not only psychedelic chemicals, but the entire worldview of shamanism with its focus on intuitive and magical aspects of reality, represented by the burning of witches in the Inquisition, and the destruction of native traditions during Colonialism. It seemed to me that this suppression masked some deep ontological threat to the modern mind. Since I had validated the precepts of shamanism for myself, I also began to wonder about the prophecies that many indigenous cultures hold about the time we are in right now – from the Hopi Indians of New Mexico, who believe we are on the verge of transitioning from one “world” to another, to the Classical Mayan civilization of the Yucatan, obsessed with time and astronomy, who seemed to predict that the imminently approaching year of 2012 represented a transformational threshold for human consciousness. I began to realize that prophecy was more than specious prediction – as Armin Geertz, a Hopi anthropologist, noted, “Prophecy is a thread in the total fabric of meaning, in the total worldview. In this way it can be seen as a way of life and of being.”

My investigation of prophecy became the core of my new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, to be released in April by Viking-Penguin. Four years in the making, it synthesizes a vast range of philosophical ideas and approaches, outsider scholarship about the Mayan Calendar, and my own personal investigation of a range of phenomena that fall utterly outside the current mainstream paradigm, including the bizarre narratives of alien abductions, the UK-based evolution of the crop circles over the last thirty years, and the Santo Daime, a Brazilian religion that mixes Christian and indigenous elements and uses ayahuasca as its sacrament. For the book, I absorbed ideas from Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, the psychedelic pundit Terence McKenna, and the German philosopher Jean Gebser, author of The Ever-Present Origin, a study of the evolution of consciousness that influenced Ken Wilber and William Irwin Thompson, among others. I also evaluated the recent wave of mystical interpretations of the discoveries of quantum physics, including Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and books by the Indian physicist Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe and Physics of the Soul.

My perspective also takes the Judeo-Christian tradition into account, especially focusing on the Gnostic Christianity revealed by the “Gospel of Thomas,” discovered in the Naj Hammadi desert in 1945, but potentially dating from the same era as the canonical gospels. Over the last decades, there has been a great wave of interest, in progressive cultural circles, in spirituality and mysticism, but almost entirely of the Eastern and non-Western variety, from Hinduism and yoga to Buddhism, and now shamanism. For people in my secular world, the hardest tradition to examine or assimilate has been our own – partially, this is because of the destructive effects and blood-soaked character of this tradition, which proclaimed Christian values while committing genocide against indigenous populations across the world, and whose missionaries still seek to impose Christianity on tribal and non-Western cultures, even today.

Steiner and Jung gave me access to my own tradition. I consider Jung’s essay, "Answer to Job," one of the most important texts of the Twentieth Century, providing a psychoanalytic portrait of the Western "god-image," Jahweh, as he developed, in a dialectical relationship with his chosen people, the Jews, through the Old and the New Testaments. Jung notes that the Western god-image has been undergoing his own evolution – in the earlier works of the Old Testament, Jahweh often seems to have the personality of a primitive war-lord or despotic king, inciting increased consciousness by inflicting suffering on the Jews. Job is the first human being to recognize that the god-image is not simply beyond judgment and understanding, but contains antinomies, schisms within his own nature, that make him the "dark god" of the unconscious as well as a benevolent life-giving deity. According to Jung, Job’s realization forces a concomitant realization on the part of the god-image; the creator fears the skeptical gaze of his creature, and he is forced to incarnate as Christ, a manifestation of the "good god," as a dialectical compensation for his previous amorality. Jung realized that the incarnation of Christ was preparation – that the god-image intended to incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this event was approaching quickly. Jung saw the flying saucer phenomenon of the 1950s as a sign of an imminent transformation in the nature of the psyche.

Jung’s follower Edward Edinger thought we had entered the archetypal frame of the Judeo-Christian Apocalypse, which he interpreted as, essentially, a momentous psychic event – the “coming of the Self” into conscious realization. I agree with this interpretation, which also fits the understanding of the Mayan Calendar developed by the visionary thinker Jose Arguelles (The Mayan Factor) and the Swedish biologist Carl Johan Calleman (The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness). According to Edinger, the “Book of Revelation” is a text of oppositions, suggesting the extraordinarily difficult task facing the Western psyche, of reconciling, and bringing to consciousness, the negative and positive poles of the psyche. He notes that the “Whore of Babylon” in the Book of Revelation drinks the “disgusting filth of her fornication” out of a “golden cup,” which is a symbol of the precious vessel of the higher self. We are being forced to recognize, and assimilate, all of the suppressed contents of the psyche, in order to evolve to a higher state of consciousness – Apocalypse literally means “uncovering” or “revealing.”

The process of Apocalypse involves a realization that Western civilization is founded on a fundamentally flawed conception of time. Through our solar calendars, desynchronized from natural cycles, and our technological projections, we have reified a conception of time as an unvarying linear extension akin to space, in which ultimate fulfillment or completion lies in a far-distant and undefined future condition. We are constantly projecting our hopes, dreams, and desires onto the future – acting as though the present moment is somehow insufficient, founded upon a lack or failure of being. Part of Christ’s mission on the earth was to directly challenge this misconception through his parables and elegant paradoxes. He said, for instance, “The hour is coming, and now is.” Christ spoke and acted from the perspective of what Gebser calls “origin,” the transcendent domain, outside of space and time, given rigorous formulation by quantum physics.

Indigenous groups such as the Hopi or the Australian Aboriginals live in a form of time that is vastly different from our modern conception of it. The Hopi have a “continuum consciousness” in which “all time is present now,” and events follow a pre-set pattern. `For the Aboriginals, there was never a “fall of man” into a degraded state. Every day is the “first day,” the origin point, and the purpose of their rituals and ceremonies is to maintain the perfection of creation.

I consider this revelation of the existence of other orders of time to be one of the great values of the psychedelic experience, as Aldous Huxley described it in his classic work on mescaline, The Doors of Perception: Psychedelics have the potential to act as tremendous deconditioning agents, revealing the numinous and eternal quality of the present moment, scrubbing away the accumulation of mental habits and conditioned responses that keep us wired into a delusory social reality based on perpetual postponement. This may be the main reason they are perceived as a threat – they threaten the value system of mainstream society, not peripherally, but directly and ontologically. They are, as Ralph Metzner noted, “Gnostic catalysts.”

While Christianity is certainly opposed to direct experience of non-ordinary states produced by psychedelic compounds found in plants, it is far less certain that Christ would have shared this perspective. “Open the doors for yourself, so you will know what is,” he proclaims in the “Gospel of Thomas.” I believe that Christ, as a revolutionary Gnostic figure, can be reclaimed for a progressive and contemporary spirituality that does not believe Christ somehow “saved our souls” through the crucifixion. Instead, by acting from the transcendent domain, he provided a model for the selfless action required in an Apocalyptic age. Christ only “saves our souls” if we follow his lead, which requires a tireless engagement with contemporary social and spiritual reality. His “doctrine” is one of immanence instead of transcendence.