Journeys to our origins
The president of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, like a gadfly Socrates, lets the truth all hang out about the reality of economic progress in a recent meeting of world leaders in Rio:
For more info on this most remarkable of world leaders, who donates 90% of his income to the poor and chooses to live on his wife’s ramshackle farm instead of in the luxurious presidential palace in Montevideo, check out this BBC article:
Our first visit to Takiwasi, the center for the treatment of addiction that utilizes the methods of Amazonian shamanism along with Western psychotherapy, and its host town, Tarapoto, was many years ago, in a quieter age.
Susana had arrived long before me, and developed a strong affinity with the work of the center – its compassionate approach to treating addicts, its commitment to the study of the native, traditional medicine of the rainforest, and the unique character of its founders, the doctors Jacques Mabit and Rosa Giove. When I had joined her there some years after her first visit, she was working as a therapist in the ample, tree shaded grounds of the center, doing her dissertation research, and soaking up the accumulated knowledge of traditional plant medicines and shamanic techniques utilized at Takiwasi to heal.
Back then, we rented a rustic, but very cargado (i.e., spirit-filled), house, around the corner from Takiwasi for a hundred bucks a month, and slept on borrowed mattresses, cooked on a borrowed stovetop, and invested in a few pots and spoons. We were on pilgrimage, then. When we left the center to continue on to Mayantuyacu, we simply put all our accumulated possessions in the back of a pickup truck and drove into the entrance at Takiwasi, where we gave them away to the staff.
Yet even then, Tarapoto could be loud. Even very loud, both with the chainsaw grind of the constant motorcars (rickshaws drawn by motorcycles) and the blasting of the rhythms of Peruvian dance music late into the night.
Peruvians, like aggressive teenagers, seemed to live by the motto, “I make noise, therefore, I am.” But no taste for silence appeared to develop in them with age (We have observed this conditioning to extreme noise begins very early in this culture, and have the theory Peruvians in the jungle towns are, if not physically, psychologically deaf.).
Yet all these factors, and a hundred other details which we had thought we knew about the mestizo (“mixed blood,” i.e. European/indigenous) culture of Tarapoto, were sadly out of date upon our arrival. On the economic front alone, the Peruvian economy had gone through a boom since our last stay in 2004. Prices are far higher, and the dollar now trades for substantially less.
I had also not fully factored in our own change in status. By virtue of arriving with a three year old girl with the intention of staying in one place for an extended time – involving schooling, decent housing, local community and friends, language issues, reckoning with local diseases such as parasites, etc. – we were no longer pilgrims, skimming lightly over the landscape. We had become immigrants, putting down roots. Continue reading “Tarapoto Mestizo Blues”
We are honored that John Perkins, founder of the Pachamama Alliance and author of the New York Times Bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hitman, has penned a preface for our forthcoming book, The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience.
Here is John’s preface, which reveals his own early intuitions that Homer’s Odyssey is far more indigenous — and contemporary in relevance — than is recognized.
My dad taught Latin. I was raised on the classics. Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey was bedtime reading in our house.
When a Shuar shaman, deep in the Amazon, saved my life not long after I graduated from college, he demanded that I repay him by becoming his apprentice. “It will be a tough journey,” he warned, “but you’ll connect with sacred plants and powerful spirit guides. . . just like Etsaa.” His description of the adventures of this legendary rain forest hero astounded me. Etsaa so resembled Odysseus that I puzzled over how two cultures so far removed in time and space could share such similar myths.
Later, as an economic hit man, I traveled the world, coercing governments to subjugate their people to a new form of empire led by multi-national corporations. During long flights I re-read Homer. I was struck by how little we humans have changed. We had traded sailing ships for airplanes and swords for AK-47s, but we were still hell-bent on exploiting others. I knew that Odysseus would admire the wily tricks-of-trade – the Trojan horses – I and my cohorts employed to conquer other lands.
So, was Odysseus Western literature’s first full portrait of a practicing shaman and shapeshifter? What about Odysseus, that ancient Greek raider of cities, as Western literature’s first economic hit man?
Sound implausible? All I can say is: “Read on!” Prepare to be amazed by the confluence of Ancient and indigenous ways with ruthless modern capitalism, as realized in the character of Odysseus. You may even find yourself agreeing with Tindall and Bustos that the origin of our current global financial meltdown is far older than contemporary predatory capitalism – it can be found in Odysseus’ dolos, his renowned spirit of trickery and cunning deception.
The Shamanic Odyssey is more than just an exploration of ancient texts, native cultures, and shamanic practices. Like the bards of old, Tindall and Bustos sing the Odyssey for our time; this modern version is a warning for a world threatened with ecological collapse and economic injustice. The prophetic voices of our indigenous relatives – the Shuar, Hopi, Kogi, Quechua, Maya, and so many others – have now penetrated the iron bubble of our exploitative society; they expose the causes of its likely collapse. Their voices remind us of our humble, and probably brief, span on this glorious planet. The message we are advised to hear in the Odyssey is one that calls us to reconciliation with and respect for the remaining indigenous cultures. Even as I write these words, Wirakuta, the ancient site of pilgrimage for the Huichol peoples of Northern Mexico, is threatened by corporate raiders, who seek to enter the sacred ground and strip mine it. The message that echoes through the ages urges us to protect those lands and the cultures that have honored them for millennia.
Tindall and Bustos demonstrate that the Odyssey’s oral tradition summons us to heal the break with our own native self, with the indigenous experience of a vital, meaningful cosmos – the ultimate resolution to rapacious capitalism.
We do not need to live in oblivion, cut off from the voices of our ancestors and wild nature. As a nostos, a homecoming song, the Odyssey can call us back again – to a home we recognize and our offspring will want to inhabit.
The prophecy of the Eagle and Condor is remarkable in that it marks the first truly international indigenous prophecy widely embraced by both Native and European-descended peoples, yet in approaching it, we need to be wary of the word “prophecy.” Anthropologist Adine Gavazzi reminds us that prophecy in the West involves a diachronic historical process, which among the peoples of the Andes and Amazon does not exist. Rather, there is the experience of cyclical and synchronic time, where different levels of perception of reality occur simultaneously. In other words, people do not witness prophecies unfolding in the linear progression of historical time. They live and experience the reality of myth – and in post-colonial America, such revitalization of the mythic core is a potent means of cultural and political resistance. Continue reading “Unravelling Some Strands: Seeking the Origin of the Eagle and Condor Prophecy”
A reader, Elina, wrote this response to my posting Indigenize Yourself!:
“How lucky for you to have become Indigenous without ever having to have experienced colonization, racism, etc. How miraculous for you to have received “the seed of an indigenous, native intelligence within me`,`without having been part of an Indigenous family. “I believe that day I became the first of those in my English and Danish lineage to set foot in the sacred topography of the New World, receiving the seed of an indigenous, native intelligence within me.“ – yes, I`m sure your English and Danish ancestors were more interested in “receiving“ other things – the land itself, resources, etc – laying the ground for their future generations to have the good fortune to eventually be able to miraculously `receive` the knowledge and understanding you are getting in life. I`m not sure if you realize how exploitative and ignorant this post comes off as.”
Well, it’s certain I’m walking a fine line in claiming that, even for the ancestors of Euro-Americans, our indigenous souls can still be reclaimed. Perhaps she is right to accuse me of hubris. Continue reading “Have Euro-Americans Any Right (Or Hope) to Lay Claim to Indigenosity?”
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.
I was rendered speechless by the sheer audacity of the question — Tolkien’s work is fantasy, right?
Now I know there is such a place.
About this passage into myth-time the poet Gary Snyder wrote, “There is an almost visible line that a person could walk across: out of history and into the perpetual present, a way of life attuned to the slower and steadier processes of nature. The possibility of passage into that myth-time world had been all but forgotten in Europe [by the Renaissance]. Its rediscovery — the unsettling vision of a natural self — has haunted the Euro-American peoples.”
In short, the passage involves reawakening to our indigenous, native perception of the cosmos. It involves communion with our wild nature and our ancestors who knew that way, from whatever place on Earth we originally sprang from. Continue reading “How to Cross the Mythic Line”
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. Continue reading “Shamanic Song among the Ancient Celts”
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,
French Prehistorian Jean Clottes, interviewed in Werner Herzog’s recent exquisite film, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” continues describing the creators of the art of Chauvet Cave, whose works dates from 32,000 B.C.E., thus:
Fluidity means the categories that we have, man, woman, horse, tree, etc., can shift. A tree may speak. A man can get transformed into an animal and the other way around, given certain circumstances. The concept of permeability is that there are no barriers, so to speak, between the world where we are and the world of spirits. A shaman, for example, can send his or her spirit to the world of the supernatural or can receive the visit of supernatural spirits. When you put those two concepts together, you realize how different life must have been for those people from the way we live now. Continue reading “On Paleolithic Dreamtime”
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 behaviorist modification program of Learning House. Continue reading “The Minotaur of the Behaviorist Maze: Surviving Stanford’s Learning House in the 1970’s”
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 vegetalista tradition.
Based on her findings, Susana gave this presentation on the therapeutic use of icaros in ceremonies with ayahuasca at the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) conference “Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century” in April, 2011.
Susana Bustos- Icaros: Song and Healing in Ayahuasca Ceremonies from MAPS: Psychedelic Science on Vimeo.
“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 Flores instructed us, “ayahuasca teaches you how to die and be reborn.” It’s important to bear in mind that for traditional people, this world and the next world interpenetrate, and as Juan put it, “Death is a door you pass through, nothing else.”
Read Robert’s interview with Ivar Verploegh of the website A General Introduction to Ayahuasca here, for an exploration of the interface between the practices of Amazonian vegetalismo and modern Western society in search of itself.
As well, a second interview with DoseNation’s is available here, which is worth checking out for the balance of grudging respect and skepticism brought by James Kent to the interview!
Finally, listen to a rocking interview, The Jaguar and the Pilgrim, with KMO, whose C-realm podcasts are gems of intelligent, humorous inquiry, here.
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 those indigenous visions have migrated through the time depths to ignite our contemporary imagination.
Perhaps this is because, like other beings of myth, prophecy roams from mind to mind. One of the further flung components of a culture’s cosmovision (or what we call, from a safe distance, a mythological system), prophecy arises from a confluence of visions, dreams, trance-states, and artistic inspiration. It is also, like a dream, curiously elusive to pin down – official, priestly versions may eventually be engraved upon calendrical stones at the feet of pyramids and jungle astronomical observatories, but only after the prophecy has simmered among the people, in many local variations, for many passing moons. Continue reading “Awakening Our Indigenous Mind: Hopi Prophecy on the Coming Great Purification”
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 as mediated by shamanic song. We would like to share with you how one Westerner, a French doctor named Jacques Mabit who trained in the Amazonian tradition of vegetalismo, uses icaros, songs that embody and transmit the healing power of plants, to guide his patients into realms of healing and self exploration.
The House that Sings:
The Therapeutic Use of Icaros at Takiwasi by Susana Bustos, Ph.D.
This article originally appeared in Shaman’s Drum, Number 73, 2006.
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 be master chemists whose curare, a paralyzing muscle relaxant, revolutionized the practice of anaesthesiology, making possible the open heart, organ transplant and hundreds of other surgeries now performed daily in hospitals around the world.
Many experts claim the teeming life of the rainforests continues to promise cures – to AIDS, cancer, diabetes, auto-immune disorders. Yet where are these miracle drugs? Have we exhausted Nature’s cornucopia? Or are we wearing blinders that prevent us from seeing them?
We decided to pose this question to Dr. Mark Plotkin. One of the generation of swashbuckling ethnobotanists trained by the legendary Amazonian explorer Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard, Plotkin is as intimate with the shamans of the jungle and their healing practices as any Westerner now alive – and he claims the cures are there. He’s seen them. Continue reading “Shamanism is the Technology of the Spirit — an Interview with Dr. Mark Plotkin”
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 comes wrapped in for Westerners. Among them is the distinction between curing and healing of disease, concepts which, as in Venn diagrams, overlap yet remain experientially distinct. The thrust of modern Western medicine is to “cure,” from Latin cura “to care, concern, trouble,” by either managing disease within, or excising it from, the body, and disease is usually considered cured when symptoms abate. In indigenous styles of medicine, which give equal importance to curing as the West, healing, from Old English hælan “to make whole, sound and well,” may also involve searching out the hidden origin of the disease in the body/mind. In this healing quest, a cure may be found, and may not. The valence of the disease, however, will change. In such cases, it is the entire self that is engaged in unraveling a disease’s enigma, and the body is the laboratory wherein the cure can be found. As a consequence, such healing is often idiosyncratic, because each body’s laboratory is unique. Continue reading “Assessing a Quest to Heal HIV with Ayahuasca Shamanism”
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 far greater event than my arrival signified for my folks in the 1960s. During my daughter’s first months, our house seemed to be swimming in divine pheromones, and I often quipped that if we were in India we’d be carrying about my daughter on an altar, offering incense, and singing to her throughout the day.
All joking aside, our spiritual practice did quickly change as we became aware of how important a task we had been given: to not pass on the mechanical ways of being that caused such suffering in our families, as well as our culture at large, to our newly come child. Continue reading “Cultivating Maitri: Parenting in the Native American Church”
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, 871 feet above sea level, reflect the rays of the sun in the early morning light. Intent on visiting the medieval monasteries, or gompas, as they are called in Tibetan, perched high above them on the mountainous slope, we set our course by the stupa’s bone bleached whiteness. Just a few minute’s hike above the dust-choked highway and its endless parade of military transports and garishly decorated tanker trucks, we entered not only a different landscape, but a different ecology of mind.
Rising on a flight of steps, we entered a colonnade of overarching trees lined by walls of meticulously placed stones. Along the path, dried dung cakes impressed with hand prints sat in little piles, and bright orange apricots dried in the sun. Gardens lay before whitewashed houses with brilliantly-colored prayer wheels. Crooked, home-fashioned ladders leaned against haystacks. Higher up, the silvery-bell sound of children’s voices testing out the word “hello” reached us. The handful of workers harvesting one of the terraced fields looked up and greeted us with namaste – “I bow to the divine in you.” Continue reading “Reinventing the Wheel: Riffing off of Walter Benjamin in Ladakh”
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 and the Green Knight, written in the late 1380’s by a cleric immersed both in Arthurian and Celtic mythology as well as the mystical traditions of his epoch, has fascinated scholars and translators from J.R.R. Tolkien to W.S Merwin. Robert’s book is the first to draw the connection between the courtly narrative of the poem and the “entry into unknowing” of the mystical tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius.
For more info, click here,
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 and the Amazonian ecosystem at City Lights, the literary mecca of San Francisco, with
Robert Tindall, author of The Jaguar that Roams the Mind
Lou Dematteis, author of Crude Reflections, which documents the environmental and cultural devastation left behind by Chevron in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Ralph Metzner, author of numerous works, including The Psychedelic Experience with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, as well as the more recent Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca, and Sacred Mushroom of Visions: Teonanacatl
Dale Pendell, author of the trilogy Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path
We were fortunate to have this historic evening — City Lights was the publisher of The Yage Letters between Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs 25 years ago — captured on video. This video is the first in a series — please find the subsequent sequences on YouTube!
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 ayahuasca tourism is dealt with in only one chapter of my book, The Jaguar that Roams the Mind, and tangentially at that. I confess when I first began my pilgrimages to the Amazon, the concept of an ayahuasca tourist hadn’t even occurred to me, nor did I know the effect of this sham industry on indigenous culture. Continue reading “Ayahuasca Pilgrimage?”
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 has never published his full work, however, which explores the origins of the Santiago pilgrimage and the nature of pilgrimage for medieval and modern people. He would like to offer it to those who wish to take up the Way of St. James, or are interested in the practice of pilgrimage.
There’s a Pilgrim Sleeping Inside Every Tourist
The cathedral of Le Puy, located in the rocky terrain of France’s Massif Central, has been a launching site since the Dark Ages for pilgrims to the tomb of the apostle St. James, better known as Santiago, in the distant Spanish terrain of Galicia. The saint’s figure can be seen sculpted throughout the town: staff in hand, wide brimmed hat with a scallop-shell, flowing beard and hand raised in gesture of benediction to those passing to and fro.
Wandering through the maze of cobblestone streets, I had another goal, however: a little church, set high upon a pinnacle of volcanic rock in the center of the town, named Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe.
This shrine to St. Michael, built in 967 by the Bishop Godescalc upon his return from Santiago, has stood sentinel for over a thousand years for the dragon to come at the end of time.
I had chosen the craggy site to mark the beginning of my own 400-mile trek, not merely to arrive in Santiago, but to see if it were still possible to enter into the experience of a medieval pilgrim. Continue reading “Ultreya! Pilgrimage upon the Camino to Santiago”
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 trip had been marked by endless crawling and clambering with full packs over the fallen trees that lined the switchbacks of the backcountry (“No money for trail maintenance” we were told. “It’s the war”), but no one complained. The practice was rich, accompanied by yucca sending up their yellow blooms like skyrockets, horny toads, owls hooting to one another across the river, and terrain which in a single day’s hike rose from shady redwoods at the valley floor to cactus chaparral at the crests of valleys, sparkling in the baking sun.
One of the features in the landscape that drew me back was Jack English, who we were introduced to by our trip leader. An octogenarian who lives in a simple cabin in the wilderness, Jack makes finely crafted bows for stringed instruments with fingers twisted like branches from arthritis. Like many oldsters, Jack tends to repeat himself, but I noticed whatever he says gets truer every time he says it. Continue reading “Ventana Jack”
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 morning in Southern India, until the cloud-cover breaks and the sun beams through. Finally a breeze begins to arise, cooling the layer of sweat that coats your body day and night. Continue reading “In Auroville”