Ayahuasca Matters: an Interview with Robert Tindall

Ayahuasca Matters: an Interview with Robert Tindall

“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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Rediscovering our Clans: Hopi Prophecy on the Great Purification

Rediscovering our Clans: Hopi Prophecy on the Great Purification

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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Shamanic Song in the Treatment of Addiction

Shamanic Song in the Treatment of Addiction

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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Shamanism is the Technology of the Spirit — an Interview with Dr. Mark Plotkin

Shamanism is the Technology of the Spirit — an Interview with Dr. Mark Plotkin

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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Assessing a Quest to Heal HIV with Ayahuasca Shamanism

Assessing a Quest to Heal HIV with Ayahuasca Shamanism

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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Even the Divine Ones Cannot Fathom This: Parenting in the Native American Church

Even the Divine Ones Cannot Fathom This: Parenting in the Native American Church

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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Upcoming Mayantuyacu Pilgrimages

Upcoming Mayantuyacu Pilgrimages

¡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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Is Ayahuasca Healing a Self-Delusion? And If Not, How Can We Know?

Is Ayahuasca Healing a Self-Delusion? And If Not, How Can We Know?

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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Reinventing the Wheel: Riffing off of Walter Benjamin in Ladakh

Reinventing the Wheel: Riffing off of Walter Benjamin in Ladakh

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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New Book Release!

New Book Release!

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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