The Vaults of Erowid write of The Jaguar: “Reading this book is akin to being shrunk into one of Pablo Amaringo’s paintings, where every square inch is a fractal segment of shamanic jungle lore and imagery.”

Salud con Todos! We are grateful to once again be able to act as a bridge for a small group of people to journey into the depths of the vegetalista tradition in the Peruvian Amazon at Mayantuyacu with the maestro
Read More →

Susana is invited to present in the upcoming Evolver Intensive: Awakening The Cosmic Serpent II: Ayahuasca, Ancient Remedy For Modern Times, hosted by Jeremy Narby. As most of you may know, Jeremy is a Swiss anthropologist and a renowned author
Read More →

Some years ago in Argentina, a gaucho who loved the works of J.R.R. Tolkien politely inquired of me if there was actually a place like the Shire he could go to visit in England.

Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West. Rather, they are simply unrecognized. Native symbiosis in a living, sentient cosmos is found at the very origin of the European literary tradition.

Traditional people, and I think the people of the Paleolithic had, very probably, two concepts that change our vision of the world. The concept of fluidity and the concept of permeability,

You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers
Read More →

Readers of The Jaguar that Roams the Mind occasionally want to learn more about my experiences growing up on the streets, in shelters, and in group homes in California during the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, especially in the Skinnerian
Read More →

The healing power of icaros, the magic melodies of Amazonian shamanism, were the focus of Susana’s research in the Peruvian Amazon in 2004, where she participated in numerous ceremonies and conducted extensive interviews with healers and their clients in the
Read More →

I am sharing this letter from an earthquake survivor in Japan to illustrate the heart of the Hopi prophecy explored in my earlier posting, Awakening Our Indigenous Mind. Is this the road of the single hearted?

“My take is “salvation” or “obtaining liberation,” in the Western sense, is clearly an import into Amazonian culture. Their concern is in how to walk the way of life and death, how to understand their world in greater depth. Juan
Read More →

Between the underground kivas of the Hopi and the astronomical temples of the Maya where prophecy of world shaking events were received in ancient times, and contemporary apocalyptic fantasies such as the film 2012, lies a vast distance. Yet somehow
Read More →

Our society is well aware of the addictive siren song of drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and chemically-degraded tobacco, all derived from originally sacred, healing plants. Yet little is known of the power of psychoactive plants to heal addiction, especially
Read More →

A little known fact is one of the greatest breakthroughs in 20th century medical science came from a preparation used to shoot monkeys down from the tops of trees. Naked “primitives” running around the jungle with blowguns turned out to
Read More →

During the years that Susana and I have spent studying and training in the Peruvian vegetalismo, a mixed-race healing tradition that combines indigenous shamanism with Western elements such as Catholicism, we have come to appreciate the paradoxes that indigenous medicine
Read More →

I don’t know if this current generation of children is any different than those that came before, but I certainly know as a middle-aged Buddhist and practitioner of traditional shamanic medicine, the coming of our first child Maitreya was a
Read More →

At a recent panel on ayahuasca at the conference of The Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness at U.C. Berkeley, I was intrigued to hear a social critic question the “inventive ‘religious’ mystifying of ayahuasca today in northern hemisphere circles,”
Read More →

A meditation, in the heart of Ladakh, India, on the nature of art and culture undisturbed from its original dwelling place: The white of the stupas above Keylong, a Himalayan village located on the banks of the Bhaga river, 13,
Read More →

Robert’s new book, The Battle of the Soul in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an exploration of the inner struggle of pilgrimage as it was enshrined in this most beautiful of medieval English romances, is now available! Sir Gawain
Read More →

We are happy to share that Ayahuasca, Vegetalismo and Cultural Survival is now available for viewing below! Generations of shamans, mad poets and intrepid researchers labored to give birth to this event on the endangered practices of entheogenic plant shamanism
Read More →

As a writer on ayahuasca shamanism, and a leader of small groups down to the rainforest to encounter the practice of traditional medicine, I have watched the rising of the phenomena labeled “ayahuasca tourism” with apprehension. The dark spectre of
Read More →

Some years ago, The Sacramento Bee published an account of Robert’s pilgrimage along the Camino to Santiago in their Easter edition. Then, along with Nevada City’s premier Medieval music ensemble, Rossignol, he created a musical out his travel notes. He
Read More →

After my initial foray through the Ventana wilderness near Big Sur, California, I returned to Pine Valley to lie again beneath those soughing pines that sound like they have a river running through the tops of them. The week-long backpacking
Read More →

Notes of our pilgrimage to India It’s a humid, lethargic morning here in Auroville, after a sudden rain and a brilliant, solitary flash of lightening passed over rapidly in the night. Like a slowly settling blanket, the heat descends every
Read More →