4 2014 ~Colin Campbell, a sangoma and traditional African doctor from Botswana, tells the story of a villager in his country who fell seriously ill and called in a local traditional doctor for help. The healer examined the patient and then set off to consult with the mountains, waters, animals, and plants of the area. In a few days, he returned to announce his diagnosis: someone had cut down a tree without asking permission of the spirit of the tree itself. The disrespectful act of one person had created imbalance, which had showed up as someone else’s illness. The villagers understood very well that there would be consequences for everyone unless good relationship to the trees could be restored. A ritual was prescribed to remediate the offense; the whole village participated, and the patient and his community returned to health.
This is not a story about an evil spirit out to smite people. Plant spirits are part of a web woven of love and respect, giving and receiving. We humans are part of it too. When we tear the web, a messenger comes to town carrying a suitcase full of something designed to make sure we take the message to heart. The suitcase is labeled “misfortune.”
“For the sake of all creation, repair the web,” the messenger says. “Get back to what supports you, what supports others, what supports everything: love and respect, giving and receiving.”
This story should be remembered in any interaction with plants. If you are interested in engaging one of the sacred plant teachers, such as peyote, ayahuasca, or special mushrooms, you should remember the story as if your life depends on it. The power of these plants is beyond imagination; you don’t want to see their messenger arriving with his suitcase.
Some will say, “I have good intentions, and I am respectful. There won’t be any problems for me.” This is naïve. Yes, sometimes naïve engagements work out okay, but sometimes they don’t. If we wish to be blessed with knowledge, wisdom, or healing, what must we give in return? How must we demonstrate our respect? It is not for us to say. The spirit of the plant will make the call.
To understand respectful engagement with these great teachers, we have to go back to the time when the gods were singing a great story—the story of the world. Their singing brought the world and all its creatures into being, including, eventually, us humans...
Each of the animals was sung into the world with the equipment it needs: wings, gills, fur, pointy or hooked beak, claws, fast-running legs, a keen sense of smell or hearing, and so on. The special equipment given to us was the human mind with its unique ability to create the sensation of separateness: “This is me, and everything else is not me.” The mind goes on from this primal separation to make many more separations and distinctions: “This is a rock. That is a plant. That is a stick.”
Our mind, driven by a fearful concern for survival, comes up with creative interventions: “I am hungry, and the deer runs faster than I do. If I break the rock to make a sharp point and fasten it to the stick with plant fibers, I can throw it at the deer and have a meal.”
All this is fine, but a problem arises when we dwell too much in the mind. The mind creates the illusion of a separate self and then justifies any action it thinks will protect that self. Like the man who cut down the tree for his own selfish purposes, we tear the web of relatedness. This brings many misfortunes: illness, isolation, never-ending fear, personal and environmental catastrophe.
Human intelligence is amnesiac. It forgets that we are part of the web of being, and this forgetfulness is the source of illness and suffering. For this reason, when we were given this problematic gift, we were also given the ways to keep it in balance as a small, though important, part of our lives. All the original peoples were given teachings and practices to remind us that we are part of the web. Remembering produces healing, wisdom, a flourishing environment, and a sustainable way of life.
Some peoples were given sacred plant teachers as memory aids—doorways to sacred realms of knowledge, wisdom, and healing. Some of these plants, like peyote, are ingested; others, like the Wind Tree, are not. But not one of them was brought forth everywhere. This is because, as we have seen, peoples are different. The Inuit and the Amazonian, the Aborigine and the Celt, the Zulu and the Mongol each have different needs. Their souls are made of the ancestral stuff of different lands. The ways of remembering are different for each. None of the sacred plant teachers are for everybody...
When you consider working with a sacred plant teacher, do you consider whether the plant sees you as one of its people—the people it was brought into the world to help? Or do you consider only what you want? If it’s all about you, then the plant teacher will see you as disrespectful. It may ignore you, it may play a little trick on you, or it may send its messenger with a bulging suitcase.
These days, you always need the help of a trustworthy guide who can look into your soul to see whether you and the sacred plant teacher are soul mates and to help you walk the plant’s path; actually, the sacred plants insist on it. They were brought into the world to benefit us. They open into vastness we cannot navigate on our own. On our own, we easily get lost, and lost people are of no benefit to themselves or others, except as an example of what not to do...
When the moment arrives to invoke the medicine of the sacred plant teacher, ask yourself, what kind of situation is the sacred plant teacher invited into? Is it focused, respectful and safe, as the plant desires? Or is it scattered, contaminated by egotism—an invitation to misfortune? A trustworthy human guide follows the instructions given to the ancestors about how to build a proper ritual container, and he listens carefully for guidance on moment-to-moment adjustments.
The rituals of engagement are not invented by an individual; they are not even invented by a culture. They were given to the peoples along with the plant; actually, they are part of the sacred presence of the plant...
read entire essay at: http://realitysandwich.com/218539/sacred-plant-teachers/
“Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”...“It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.” ... “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” ~Terence McKenna
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The War on Consciousness
by, Graham Hancock
Consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science perhaps the greatest mystery. We all know we have it, when we think, when we dream, when we savour tastes and aromas, when we hear a great symphony, when we fall in love, and it is surely the most intimate, the most sapient, the most personal part of ourselves. Yet no one can really claim to have understood and explained it completely. Theres no doubt its associated with the brain in some way but the nature of that association is far from clear. In particular how do these three pounds of material stuff inside our skulls allow us to have experiences?
Professor David Chalmers of the Australian National University has dubbed this the hard problem of consciousness; but many scientists, particularly those (still in the majority) who are philosophically inclined to believe that all phenomena can be reduced to material interactions, deny that any problem exists. To them it seems self-evident that physical processes within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a generator produces electricity i.e. consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain activity. And they see it as equally obvious that there cannot be such things as conscious survival of death or out-of-body experiences since both consciousness and experience are confined to the brain and must die when the brain dies.
Yet other scientists with equally impressive credentials are not so sure and are increasingly willing to consider a very different analogy namely that the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the relationship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set. In that case when the TV set is destroyed dead the signal still continues. Nothing in the present state of knowledge of neuroscience rules this revolutionary possibility out. True, if you damage certain areas of the brain certain areas of consciousness are compromised, but this does not prove that those areas of the brain generate the relevant areas of consciousness. If you were to damage certain areas of your TV set the picture would deteriorate or vanish but the TV signal would remain intact.
We are, in other words, confronted by at least as much mystery as fact around the subject of consciousness and this being the case we should remember that what seems obvious and self-evident to one generation may not seem at all obvious or self-evident to the next. For hundreds of years it was obvious and self-evident to the greatest human minds that the sun moved around the earth one need only look to the sky, they said, to see the truth of this proposition. Indeed those who maintained the revolutionary view that the earth moved around the sun faced the Inquisition and death by burning at the stake. Yet as it turned out the revolutionaries were right and orthodoxy was terribly, ridiculously wrong.
The same may well prove to be true with the mystery of consciousness. Yes, it does seem obvious and self-evident that the brain produces it (the generator analogy), but this is a deduction from incomplete data and categorically NOT yet an established and irrefutable fact. New discoveries may force materialist science to rescind this theory in favour of something more like the TV analogy in which the brain comes to be understood as a transceiver rather than as a generator of consciousness and in which consciousness is recognized as fundamentally non-local in nature perhaps even as one of the basic driving forces of the universe. At the very least we should withhold judgment on this hard problem until more evidence is in and view with suspicion those who hold dogmatic and ideological views about the nature of consciousness.
Its at this point that the whole seemingly academic issue becomes intensely political and current because modern technological society idealises and is monopolistically focused on only one state of consciousness the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that makes us efficient producers and consumers of material goods and services. At the same time our society seeks to police and control a wide range of other altered states of consciousness on the basis of the unproven proposition that consciousness is generated by the brain.
I refer here to the so-called war on drugs which is really better understood as a war on consciousness and which maintains, supposedly in the interests of society, that we as adults do not have the right or maturity to make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness and about the states of consciousness we wish to explore and embrace. This extraordinary imposition on adult cognitive liberty is justified by the idea that our brain activity, disturbed by drugs, will adversely impact our behaviour towards others. Yet anyone who pauses to think seriously for even a moment must realize that we already have adequate laws that govern adverse behaviour towards others and that the real purpose of the war on drugs must therefore be to bear down on consciousness itself.
Confirmation that this is so came from the last British Labour government. It declared that its drug policy would be based on scientific evidence yet in 2009 it sacked Professor David Nutt, Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, for stating the simple statistical fact that cannabis is less dangerous (in terms of measured harms) than tobacco and alcohol and that ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding. Clearly what was at play here were ideological issues of great importance to the powers that be. And this is an ideology that sticks stubbornly in place regardless of changes in the complexion of the government of the day. The present Conservative-Liberal coalition remains just as adamant in its enforcement of the so-called war on drugs as its Labour predecessor, and continues in the name of this war to pour public money our money into large, armed, drug-enforcement bureaucracies which are entitled to break down our doors at dead of night, invade our homes, ruin our reputations and put us behind bars.
All of this, we have been persuaded, is in our own interests. Yet if we as adults are not free to make sovereign decisions right or wrong about our own consciousness, that most intimate, that most sapient, that most personal part of ourselves, then in what useful sense can we be said to be free at all? And how are we to begin to take real and meaningful responsibility for all the other aspects of our lives when our governments seek to disenfranchise us from this most fundamental of all human rights and responsibilities?
In this connection it is interesting to note that our society has no objection to altering consciousness per se. On the contrary many consciousness-altering drugs, such as Prozac, Seroxat, Ritalin and alcohol, are either massively over-prescribed or freely available today, and make huge fortunes for their manufacturers, but remain entirely legal despite causing obvious harms. Could this be because such legal drugs do not alter consciousness in ways that threaten the monopolistic dominance of the alert problem-solving state of consciousness, while a good number of illegal drugs, such as cannabis, LSD, DMT and psilocybin, do?
There is a revolution in the making here, and what is at stake transcends the case for cognitive liberty as an essential and inalienable adult human right. If it turns out that the brain is not a generator but a transceiver of consciousness then we must consider some little-known scientific research that points to a seemingly outlandish possibility, namely that a particular category of illegal drugs, the hallucinogens such as LSD, DMT and psilocybin, may alter the receiver wavelength of the brain and allow us to gain contact with intelligent non-material entities, light beings, spirits, machine elves (as Terence McKenna called them) perhaps even the inhabitants of other dimensions. This possibility is regarded as plain fact by shamans in hunter-gatherer societies who for thousands of years have made use of visionary plants and fungi to enter and interact with what they construe as the spirit world. Intriguingly it was also specifically envisaged by Dr Rick Strassman, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, following his ground-breaking research with human volunteers and DMT carried out in the 1990s a project that produced findings with shattering implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. For further information on Strassmans revolutionary work see his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. http://realitysandwich.com/180984/war_consciousness_0/
Another Green World: Psychedelics & Ecology
by Daniel Pinchbeck
I tend to view the naturally occurring psychedelics as emissaries from the larger community of life, bearing elder-species wisdom. As the herbalist Morgan Brent has proposed, it is almost as if the vegetal world assigned certain plants to be the diplomats and teachers to our young and confused species, to help put us on a different path than the one we have chosen, racing to ecological decimation and self-extinction. How else to explain the consistent messages received in mushroom, ayahuasca, iboga, and peyote visions of a world out of balance, of the need to take responsibility, of the vast empathic sentience of the Gaian mind?
In the same way that we garden plants, teacher plants like ayahuasca seem to garden us when we ingest them. During shamanic sessions, people often get direct messages about how to transform their lives. Sometimes, their explorations lead to radical revelations of their attachment to mediocre diets, relationships, jobs, and so on. In many cases, they eventually take the advice and purge these negative influences from their lives.
There seems to be a link between the loss of shamanism and initiatory experience in the West and the genesis of a human culture able to treat nature as something alienated, outside of itself. The recovery of psychedelic awareness in the 1960s coincided with the birth of the environmental movement, and perhaps helped to inspire it. Believing in an objective world of material facts whose apparent reality was constantly reiterated by mass media and science, modernizing humanity lost access to the primordial and participatory modes of awareness known to indigenous cultures. We denied our innate knowledge of our reciprocal relationship with the natural world that not only surrounds but also constitutes us, as even our bodies are dense microbial environments.
My first mushroom trips in college helped to decondition me from my socialized personality and called into question my naïve assumptions that the civilization surrounding me was enduring and inevitable, that the air-conditioned nightmare of the American empire would continue forever. Later journeys confirmed this understanding, stripping away layers of acculturation. In West Africa I underwent initiation into the Bwiti spiritual discipline, taking iboga, their visionary sacrament. I was taken through a life review during that trip. It seemed as if a benevolent spiritual intelligence was guiding me, revealing how my negative and compulsive behavior patterns were formed by patterns set in my childhood.
I was also given the faith that these patterns could be changed, that the splinters in my soul could be removed one by one, if I found the will to do so.
Gregory Bateson famously coined the phrase “ecology of mind.” Along with the outer ecology we see in nature, there is an inner ecology that consists of our thinking process and emotional tendencies. It seems that our inner and outer ecology reflect and reinforce one another. On the macro level, our current society is a projection of the collective thoughts and ideas developed by past generations.
In order to change our society from imminent doom, we need to clear out the old garbage and evolve new pathways of thinking and feeling as quickly as we can—to revamp our mental and emotional ecology. Psychedelic substances—visionary plant teachers—seem to play a crucial role in this process. Several books have come out recently revealing the importance of psychedelics in the development of the personal computer and the internet. Many crucial insights in biology and physics were psychedelically inspired. The almost stereotypical psychedelic gnosis of interconnectivity, unity of all being, and infinite fractal unfoldings may indicate the potential for a quantum leap in human consciousness, to a new stage of awareness that transcends and includes previous levels, or what the philosopher Jean Gebser called “consciousness structures.”
I suspect that psychedelics play a part in the process of our species evolution—a movement from one structure of consciousness to the next. One hypothesis is that we might be on the threshold of a shift from the biological and physical phase of our evolution to the psychic phase. Whatever comes next, any future for our species will be ecologically strict, and the gnosis we gain from communing with our botanical elders can provide us with crucial insights.
The above article appears in Manifesting Minds: An Anthology from the Multidisciplinary Associat...
http://realitysandwich.com/181669/psychedelics_and_ecology/