When I first drank Ayahuasca the effect descended after about 45 minutes as if a magical curtain were being raised on an enchanted mystery wonderland. The presiding shaman produced a masterfully evocative ambiance by alternately playing a Jew's harp and harmonica, seamlessly bridging the in-between-space that straddles the ayahuasca realm and the here and now of the 3-D world, softly playing first one and then the other as the spirit moved him, as he gauged the ebb and flow of the mood of the ayahuasca and its influence on the seekers sitting around him in the darkness, also integrating endless monotonous singing of his icaros, playing a variety of flutes and whistles, his necklaces making little clacking sounds as he moved around in the darkness, rhythmically swishing the air with his churipanga leaf brush.
Even now, more than a half year later, the rustling of palm leaves against each other, the sound of the wind in the trees, the roar of the ocean, the quiet little insect sounds of a sultry tropical evening, the rhythm of conversational patterns heard from the middle distance, the cracking, chainsaw spitting of a motor bike engine as it mounts a hill a mile away as heard above the roar of the surf, the preternatural, sinuous silence of a cat-eyed snake as it slips up the stairs to the kitchen and darts into a drain pipe downspout, etc. bring to mind the ayahuasca wonderland.
It always hits me hard – like a bag of sledge hammers. I can hardly walk for a solid day afterward. Especially the first few times, I practically lost all motor coordination, at the same time that I gained extraordinary insights into reality and had deep personal realizations, at a profound level of knowing. For the most part, these effects have been more physical and emotional for me than visual – as if my organism is being rewired, reprogrammed, harmonized for more synchronous communication with ayahuasca at a cellular, DNA level. The small snakes who come and quietly observe me bear mention – doing nothing more than calmly watching and waiting. I feel in them great patience and tremendous inscrutability.
And then there was the biggest “Aha!” moment of them all when I saw with a rush, at the very beginning, that it is all a vast send-up, like a huge, cosmic practical joke with me and everyone else as its punchline. I actually saw the cosmic trickster himself, a leering clown figure, a joker or prankster dressed in a uniform and colorful multi-pointed cap like a medieval court jester, organizing the merry mayhem according to his uniquely mad method.
I remonstrated inwardly, to myself: “You have got to be kidding me!! Are you telling me that it's all an elaborate, #@$%-ing joke??!!”
And maybe it is. Or maybe the apparent “joke” is but one more level of deceit in a near endlessly convoluted scheme of entrapment and illusion. Perhaps the “jester” is but a “tester” of levels of discernment, a kind of gatekeeper, a sorter of seekers into this tack or that.
And I can see his value, because there is no end of games. Therefore a merry master of mystery with a mischievous mind is just the thing to keep the whole circus from dissolving into chaos, or rather he becomes the essential player who chaotically organizes the circus into the mad dissolution that so much mindless mischief merits.
Be that as it may, I take The Joker with the utmost seriousness, because there is no practical option to not doing so. I'm kidding of course, because in reality he strikes me with such a sinking sensation of morbid dread that I try to keep a playful perspective on his formidably evasive trickery, otherwise, I have the sure conviction that he'll hoist me – and maybe you too – on his considerable petard – just for the sheer, jovial hell of it. He's a real wild card. I'm absolutely sure he's in cahoots with the snakes – and the most sobering part of it is that for sure both he and the snakes are more real, more real by far, than the Faux News that confronts you when you switch on your television set and watch the corporate manufactured, 24 hour, global news cycle.
Oh, Lord help us.
I feel like I'm in an insane asylum or locked up on some prison planet that's lost in space, both of which are probably tolerably close to the actual truth of the local reality here below.
As proof positive of that concept I have noticed of late that there are certain, alternative news websites that have taken to loudly and shrilly denouncing "sustainability."
Now, examining this position with care it is first of all important to clearly understand that for all practical human considerations – air, water, food,, etc. the Earth is a closed system. So if the closed system known as the Earth is run in an unsustainable manner, the system fails to sustain itself and will fail. The planet will become uninhabitable. Dead.
Sustainable environmental policies therefore "sustain" the Earth as a habitable planet. Likewise, unsustainable environmental policies logically mean that the environment becomes "un"-sustainable, and that the Earth as a whole becomes uninhabitable. Either the Earth "sustains" life or it "un"-sustains life.
An unsustainable environment results in failed ecology. Failed ecology means: DEATH.
Sustainable means: tree planting, green energy, not polluting, not fouling the seas, not spreading toxic chemicals, etc. Keep the Earth clean and we all live. That is "sustaining life", i.e., "sustainable" environmental policies. For that you need FORESTS -- millions and millions and millions of acres of them, free and WILD forests. For that you need wilderness, LOTS of it. Those who believe otherwise are simply deluded and not thinking clearly.
The life process on this planet is one, seamless whole. The global ecological order in its entirety is interconnected. If the planetary web of life is not "sustained" then the whole fabric of life becomes "un"-sustainable, it all unravels and we all die.
Simple.
Here we have the puzzling prospect of a planet brimful of human beings, 99% of whom have not the faintest grasp of fundamental ecology and their own place in it. For the most part, most human beings do not understand the vital importance of the wildlife and the wild forests, and jungles and vast open prairies that they are destroying. The available evidence strongly indicates that myriad millions of human beings have no sense at all of their connectedness with nature.
I am thinking in this instant of those many people who for years have been vociferously denouncing "tree huggers." By all lights these unfortunate individuals appear not to have even an inkling of a clue that the "tree" part of the phrase "tree hugger" makes the very oxygen that they so ignorantly waste when they raise their voices to stupidly denounce "tree huggers." In the immortal words of Forest Gump: “Stupid is as stupid does.”
Besides, what fool would not hug a tree with profound gratitude? Without trees and lots of them, we are all dead. Without uncontaminated, natural seas we are all dead. Without huge parts of the planet left wild, or nearly so, we are all dead. Take a look around, the planet is dying right now because our way of living is not sustainable, because we are killing a wild and living planet, because we have bred in our teeming billions way beyond the natural carrying capacity of the planet's natural ecology.
Note: this view I am espousing is a radically pro-life philosophy, the very thing that so-called "conservatives" say they favor. But do they really? Are they really "pro-life"?
This obstinate refusal to acknowledge the reality of the global ecological crisis succinctly epitomizes the impasse we face as a species. What to do when so many millions remain so willfully, so obstinately, even obdurately deaf, dumb and blind, even as the global ecology is rapidly crashing?
I don't see any way out of our conundrum on this planet other than for a lot of us, and I mean millions and millions to radically raise the level of our consciousness. I am talking about dramatic awakening of our higher spiritual faculties – the heart chakra, the third eye, the crown chakra.
And the the throat chakra as well, the better to advocate clearly and eloquently on behalf of the Earth herself and all of her creatures, large and small.
There are a number of ways to awaken higher spiritual faculties, such as the various yogas like hatha yoga or japa yoga, prayer, meditation, brain entrainment CDs (key word search for terms like mind sync, brain sync, brain entrainment, binaural CDs, holosync) some of the entheogenic plants such as ayahuasca brew or ibogaine, even pure focused, single-minded intent to have and to manifest a higher level of consciousness, all coupled with a deep gratitude to the Universe for life and breath itself. All of these things can and will nurture and promote expanded consciousness, if an overarching desire for greater awareness exists.
I can tell you that I have done most of these things myself, and, indeed, they have had the effect of expanding my awareness, albeit, not always in quite the way that I anticipated.
One of the things that has happened over the years is that I have found myself traveling out of body on numerous occasions, including as recently as last year when I was incarcerated in North Dakota, locked in a cell for weeks on end with a serial murderer, whose first words to me when he entered the cell were: “I'm a serial murderer. I kill without compunction or remorse.”
It was an outrageous, Hannibal Lecter style of self-promotion, but then not everyone has good social skills, though every word of it was unpleasantly true. So I tried to focus on other things. Like getting out of jail. (For more about that please see: The Minot Manifesto.)
On another recent occasion I was listening to a brain entrainment mp-3 when suddenly I rotated out of my body, to find myself groggily kneeling on the floor in front of a small group of people, completely unsure of where I was and how I came to be there. The individuals that were regarding me were absolutely nonthreatening. They looked at me and I looked at them, and then, because I could not summon any conscious motor control, plopped right over before them like a big sack of potatoes, face first onto the floor. Fwooomp!!
I lay there with my nose down in the carpet, feeling like a fool, wondering where in the world I was. I could hear them, as if at the other end of a long drainpipe, calmly discussing what to do about “that man there.” Upon hearing this, I dreamily wondered what man they could possibly be discussing. It did not occur to me at the time that they were likely wondering what to do about me. Then I heard and felt someone walking around my prone body from one end to the other. I saw well-shined shoes out of the corner of my eye as they passed by my head. My wooziness at that point was so extreme that I could scarcely comprehend what was happening. I have no idea what happened next. I came to sometime later in my room. I chalked up the experience to a lesson in humility.
And then just a few weeks ago, I was meditating with a binaural CD that I bought over the Internet when I gradually became aware that someone was drilling into my brain, right through my skull. I was not overly alarmed, because I could not see the person, and, besides, it did not hurt. It felt like getting a haircut, rather pleasant, truth to be told. And then, the brain driller suddenly walked around in front of me. He held a portable drill in his hand, with a drill bit locked in place, like he was doing a Tim Allen, home improvement improvisation. He held it up in front of my face and gunned the drill. Gzzzung!! Gzzuuung!! He was no stranger to me. I immediately recognized him and also understood that within the next five seconds he was going to drill straight into my forehead, directly into my brain, and open up my third eye!! I was terrified at the prospect of having this man summarily drill into my brain, with an ordinary, handheld, portable drill!! I was stricken with an instant rush of blind, animal panic and immediately lost consciousness.
But I can tell you this much: that reality is every bit as real as this reality, perhaps even more so, and separated from this reality only by a slightly different brainwave frequency. Among other things, I suppose that means that I probably have a still pending rendezvous with an, uh, binaurally amped “handyman.,” who is even now awaiting my next visit to his Third Eye Opening Workshop.
Now, don't read this and think for one minute that what I'm discussing here could never possibly happen to you, because: “Oh, yes!” I am here to tell you that a lot of people are going to be experiencing mind boggling brainwave alteration in the coming months and years. We've been locked into one, extremely misleading mental frequency for much too long. Very large numbers of us are imminently going to tune all up and down the mental dial, in full waking consciousness, and you know what? A lot of people are going to be having all sorts of mind-and-reality-bending experiences that will make my humble little excursions look like the awkward, fumbling, kindergarten exercises that they are.
This is another way of observing that it's hyper-hard to keep them down on the Farm when they gain greater experience and full, waking control in Alpha, Theta, and dare we even say it, exotically Deepest, Eyes Wide Open, Walking & Talking Delta brainwave states.
To wit: The Minot Manifesto and every last little thing that that entails. Strumming the continental heart chakra, going out of body in the Heart of America, and so forth and so on.
Which, of course, is tantamount to saying: Can't Help Falling In Love
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p.s. A final note: if you are financially able to purchase property and would like to transition out of wherever you may be and relocate to South America, please e-mail me at your very earliest convenience: dr_samizdat1618 at yahoo.com Heavy events are going to be coming down in the coming months and if you are able to, and desire to establish a life in South America, right now is the propitious time to act. Available properties range from a beautiful, 1000 hectare working estancia with year-round water in Uruguay for $4 million, to a productive 23 acre farm in central Chile with new house and appliances, garden, orchard, animals and farm equipment for less than $500K, to a wide variety of wonderful houses and lots in Ecuador from less than $100K and up. Serious inquiries only. Please don't waste my time and yours if you are not financially able to purchase property, and prepared to act now.