“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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¡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
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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,”
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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,
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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
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