Journeys to our origins
The impulse to transcend, to rise to a higher plane, was deeply engraved upon Western spirituality by Plato and later Neo-Platonic Christians such as Saint Augustine. Yet Humanity’s primordial mystical desire, artistically rendered in the art of the Paleolithic caves,
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Although Middle Earth could easily be characterized as a product of the intensified trajectory, J. R. R. Tolkien, staunch Catholic, Oxford don, one of the most brilliant philologists of his age, gives scant evidence of a shaman adventurer. “I am
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J.P. Harpignies, New York-based Associate Producer of the Bioneers Conference, and editor of Visionary Plant Consciousness recently corresponded with Robert Tindall, now located in the cacophonous mestizo wilds of the Peruvian Amazon, about his new book, The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer,
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I first encountered the Ashaninkan shaman Juan Flores within the Cinema de Indio, one of the magical* practices of the rainforest facilitated by the psychoactive brew ayahuasca. Even many years after that heady initial immersion in the vegetalista tradition of
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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
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“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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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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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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Roaming the Mind is the online home for the writing and work of Robert Tindall and Susana E. Bustos.
The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience is an exploration of the indigenous roots of Western literature, of the native mind lying in plain sight not only in the ancient epics of Homer, but also in the fantasy works of J.R.R. Tolkien. As such, the Odyssey as well as The Lord of the Rings can be seen as awakening and healing songs to return our disconnected souls back into harmony with the living cosmos.
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The Jaguar that Roams the Mind is a journey into the vanishing world of Amazonian shamanism. Robert Tindall travels through the churches of ayahuasca, with the Kaxinawa Indians in Brazil; to a Peruvian center for the treatment of addiction, Takiwasi; and reveals his studies with an Ashaninca shaman in the rainforest jungle. Moving beyond the scientific approach of reducing medicinal plants to their chemical constituents, Tindall illustrates the shamans' intimate relationships with plant spirits. He explores the three pillars of Amazonian shamanism: purging (drawing disease out of the body), psychoactive plants (including the use of ayahuasca), and diet (communing with teacher plants).
Please order your copy here.
