Sunday, April 3, 2011

Ayahuasca Monologues: I Think I’m Dying, But It’s Okay

Natural Medicine Ayahuasca
Wikimedia Commons image
Bill Kennedy
Reality Sandwich

Three years ago I moved to New York from St. Louis.  A week later I went to the subway at four in the morning and the platform was empty except for a book. It was a sci-fi choose-your-own-adventure book. I still have it. A year later I found a room in a loft space with fourteen other people. Outside the front door, painted on a gas pipe were the words "choose your own adventure." I knew I was in the right place.

The fourteen people that lived there ranged from raw foodists and foot fetishists to message therapists and yoga teachers to numerologists and astrologers, hailing from places like Korea, Australia, Chile, and Canada. Then there was me, the Midwesterner who's into baseball, red meat, money and partying. The loft's website coined the space "a holistic multi-cultural center dedicated to spirit, healing arts, and community" next to a picture of the founder in some Indian-style chi-like pose. My dad called me after seeing the website to make sure I hadn't joined a cult.

A couple of months later the founder told me about the ayahuasca ceremonies that were held at the space and that if I wanted to try this hallucinogen for free, I could volunteer to be a guardian. He said that the guardians help bring people to the bathroom during ceremony, that twenty people would sit in a circle and a shaman would play music as people vomited and shat for six to eight hours.  I signed up right on the spot.

I showed up to the ceremony with four other roommates/guardians all dressed in white. Twenty other white-clad strangers entered our house, gathering in a circle on mattresses around the shaman.  It looked like a scene straight out of The Twilight Zone. If this shit happened in Missouri, it was way beyond my circle.

The shaman was an American "body psychologist" and self-proclaimed "neo shaman," who said he'd found ayahuasca to be a useful "tool." His intro was brief and included a single warning about taking a "death dose" that many encounter in ceremony.  "You may experience a feeling of dying," he told us. When he broke out an i-Book and put on some low, tonal trance music, I named him Shaman Macintosh. As people came to Shaman Macintosh, they would kneel and drink. After the last person drank and returned to his mattress, the circle was complete -- people blindfolded, music on, and plants of various sorts giving the subtle illusion of a rainforest-like atmosphere. We turned off the lights and covered the windows with dark curtains but the car alarms and people chatting in the street were frequent reminders that this was the concrete jungle of NYC.

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Thursday, March 31, 2011

URGENT: A Call To Prayer For Fukushima

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Editor's Note:  In the absence of truth from the mainstream media or the Japanese government as to the seriousness of the Fukushima meltdown, we are going beyond the pale with this post.  We are familiar with the claims made here about the power of mind over water.  It seems the magnitude of the situation simply requires that each of us has good intent.  We believe that this post aims to help -- something that we can't say about the sympathizers for a New World Order, or those who are covering up the disaster to preserve their corporate bottom line.  

Posted by Zen Gardner at Before It's News

Dr. Masaru Emoto is a researcher and author known for his remarkable claim that human thought has a direct observable effect on the structural formation of ice crystals. For example, if human speech or thoughts are directed at water droplets before they are frozen, images of the resulting water crystals will be "beautiful" or "ugly" depending upon whether the words or thoughts were positive or negative.

Dr. Emoto claims this can be achieved through prayer, music, or by attaching written words to a container of water.  What’s amazing is these effects are demonstrable.

Those of you who may have watched the movie, “What the bleep do we know” would already have been introduced to some of Dr. Emoto’s “science”-defying discoveries. In a quantum universe where Consciousness reigns supreme, this really should come as no big surprise, yet it invariably does. Our thoughts are the most powerful force in the Universe. Concentrated thoughts, collectively focused towards a given objective — especially one of human compassion — can achieve the “impossible.”

This isn’t a theory -- it is The Law.

What follows is a call for prayer by Emoto San for the people of Fukushima — tomorrow, at Noon (your local time, wherever in the world you are).

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