“Tell Them about the Beauty of my World……….”

This post should have been written a few months ago. In a ceremony back then, just after I had started this blog, La Madre Ayahausca told me very explicitly in relation to my blog: “Tell them about the beauty of my world.”

It’s not for nothing I am in her remedial class. Most of my work with her seems to take a long time and so far I have spectacularly failed the only test she set me. Thankfully, she is very patient as well as demanding – a good combination of potentially opposing qualities.

Anyway, for whatever reason, now seems to be the right time to write the post she asked me to.

Seven Good Reasons to Drink Ayahuasca

Artist unknown

The other day I was talking to my friend Ian who like me lives in Pucallpa and writes an excellent blog about his experiences with La Madre Ayahuasca.

I was saying that four years ago, when I first researched blogging and started a blog, I read that people read differently on the internet – they have less attention span and tend to scan. I have to admit that is what I tend to do, no matter how interesting the content. The encouragement was to write shorter blogs and especially to include lists

As an experiment in my previous blog on the theme of living and working in Mexico, I wrote a blog based on listing “Seven Reasons to Live in Ciudad Guzman” . This turned out to be my most popular blog post, both in terms of number of readers and added comments – though I don’t think it was entirely due to its list format.

In the same spirit of experimentation and to see if I can drive up my blog ‘traffic’ via a list, I’m going to write this post entitled, “Seven Good Reasons to Drink Ayahuasca”

It’s just a word……..

Three examples from conversations I have had or overheard:

1. “Hey man, I had an awesome download in the ceremony last night.”

2. Question: “Can you lend me your flashlight”

Answer: ” Sure”

Response: “Awesome”

3. “Wow! This mall is awesome” (Overheard at Larcomar shopping center, Miraflores, Lima)

It seems that these days the word awesome (the A-word) can be used to describe anything good, noteworthy and/or pleasing – from a shopping mall to a fancy basketball move to a rock festival. It can even be used as a substitute for thank you, as in the second example above.

Apocalypse Now

In November 2012, I attended my first ten day dieta with PapaM. and PapaG. in a beautiful center near Tarapoto, located in one of the few private nature reserves in Peru. In a typical ten day dieta, there are five ceremonies with Madre Ayahuasca occurring every other day. The dieta plant is usually taken on the evening of the second and fourth days when there are no ceremonies.

This Path

I wrote the following poem whilst doing the ten-day dieta mentioned in my last blogpost.

The poem is dedicated to two Maestros and adept guides of the path – Maestro PapaG. and Maestro PapaM. They both have my (and others) deep gratitude.

This blog

I have recently returned from a ten-day plant dieta in an indigenous community ten-hours down river from Pucallpa. The return trip is fifteen hours – such is the force of the current.

I wrote about dietas in general in a previous entry. This time I did the dieta with both chiricsanango (a shrubby tree) and bobinsana (another shrubby tree normally found near streams and rivers). I have dieted these plants separately in the past and so have some familiarity with them.

In Memoriam: James Hillman

On Saturday May 5^th at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, just off Central Park, I attended a tribute celebration honoring James Hillman. The event was a beautiful and moving combination of short talks, music, memories, poems, artwork, animation, photographs, cartoons, films and videos – notably of James Hillman elegantly tap dancing on his 60^th birthday.

Mi amigo, ego – The Empire Strikes Back

The previous post, based on what I had picked up by attending the three-day MAPS (Multi-disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies) conference, offered a summary of some recent work in neuroscience about the effect of psychedelics on the brain and outlined some of the emerging ideas about the ego that are arising from this field of study.

In this post, I want to return to the theme of the ego – but this time by offering a more personal account of the images of my ego offered to me by Madre Ayahuasca.

Psychedelics and the “Default Mode Network”

One of the more interesting aspects of the MAPS (Multi-disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) conference held in Oakland over 19-21 April was attending sessions led by hard-core neuroscientists presenting their work about the effects of psychedelics on brain functioning.

This work by neuroscientists is part of the renaissance of clinical studies on psychedelics, which has undergone a long hiatus for three decades following the classifying of LSD and other psychedelics as illegal in the sixties. Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of MAPS, said in his opening address that: “there is now more psychedelic research than at any other time in last 40 years.”

Don’t ask what the Spirit World can do for you but what you can do for the Spirit World.

This post is prompted by attending Stephen Beyer’s recent session at the MAPS (Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) conference in Oakland, California on Friday April 19^th.

Stephen began his talk pointing out that the main thrust of much of what was being presented at the conference was looking at the benefits of man-made psychedelics and medicinal plants, notably ayahuasca, principally from the reductionist perspective of seeing them as a collection of molecules that can be used for human benefit. (And I would add largely for Westerners). This perspective, in my opinion, follows the well-worn path of Western science in seeing nature as an inanimate resource that can be expropriated for human use.