Buddha, Jesus & Ayahuasca
The rising interest in Eastern spiritual disciplines, shamanic ceremonies, “the psychedelic renaissance,” mystery schools, and neo-tribal festivals like Burning Man reveals a potential reemergence of the initiatory process in our techno-industrialized world. Could civilization itself be acting out a hero’s journey, embarking on a quest of separation, initiation, and reunion in a final dramatic act to heal ourselves and our world?
In this candid discussion, Evolver Editions authors Darrin Drda (The Four Global Truths) and Jonathan Talat Phillips (The Electric Jesus) will explore how members of a growing planetary culture are integrating ancient practices with modern living, balancing the dance between psychedelic revelation and serious spiritual practice, reinventing community while occupying the digital age, and how we can evolve and utilize this complicated alchemy to address the many challenges facing us.
Jonathan Talat Phillips is the author of “The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic.” He is a Bioenergetic healer, creator of The Ayahuasca Monologues, co-founder of Reality Sandwich and Evolver.net and coordinates 40+ Evolver "Spore" chapters. Phillips will be making a rare SF appearance for his Electric Jesus book tour.
Darrin Drda is author of “The Four Global Truths: Awakening to the Peril and Promise of Our Times.” He is a longtime practitioner and instructor of Insight meditation, as well as a facilitator for the Awakening the Dreamer symposium, which promotes ecological sustainability, social justice, and spiritual fulfillment. He lives in San Francisco.
Event details:Februrary 7, 2012 7:00pm - 9:30pm
The Center, SF
546 Fillmore ST
San Francisco, CA 94117
For more information, visit the following pages:
http://www.evolver.net/group/evolver_san_francisco_bay_area/event/2012/0...
http://www.facebook.com/events/302965583082459/Tweet
- 1-24-12
- Reality Sandwich's blog
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“When you come into the
Christian Doublethink
Christians are exemplary supporters of doublethink who believe that evil is good: they commodify and maliciously dominate animals and plants, which are merely considered food, clothing, or building material deserving of little, if any, spiritual respect according to an anthropocentric conception of divinity; the blood of their deity is alcohol, which is nothing more than decaying, biologically destructive plant matter; they pretend to defy paganism while contradictorily practicing it themselves using alcohol, a highly psychoactive plant substance, in their religious rituals; they support Eros, sobriety, and family-oriented living, yet their position that alcohol is a sacrament potentially inspires alcoholic mental confusion, promiscuity, rape, and child or spousal abuse; they privilege masculinity by identifying their deity as male; they generally support inequitable, patriarchal control of the family and priesthood; they stigmatize natural homosexuals; they debase the figure of the shaman or witch doctor, ironically explaining visions away as the work of some devil or pathology and take care to illegalize most plant sacraments and rituals other than their own; they reduce the practice of plant shamanism by generally only allowing the now less than 1% U.S. population of Native Americans to practice it by law; they call those who use psychedelics today hippies in order to invalidate their spiritual ideology through negative stereotypes, despite the fact that this movement was roughly 40-50 years ago and psychedelic use is unhip today; they preach peace and love, yet if anyone seriously hinders their indoctrination or imperialist expansion, such hindering agencies must be subjugated or killed (then, once Christians have achieved imperialist assimilation, they conversely treat their former opponents compassionately [as soul-hungry evangelicals] because the colonized are no longer a threat); they take advantage of impressionability and indoctrinate young children to promote not only sexual, but religious, domination; and, finally, they deceptively replace wine with fresh grape juice at Communion as if doing so negates the symbolic use of alcohol as a sacrament.
Christtian
"It was my soul in the wine, It was my soul..."
Rumi
Xaapáaliikxawiia (Witchcraft, “Bad Sacrament”)
Drunks fear the police, but the police are drunk too. People in this town love them both like different chess pieces.
--Rumi
Sacramental mushroom, not alcohol
I mostly agree with Bobcat's description of Christianity except that rather than "the blood of their deity is alcohol" I think it's more likely that the 'blood' of the first Christians (the disciples of Christ) was a concoction prepared from the Amanita muscaria mushroom, whose red cap gave the liquid its red color. When Jesus (if Jesus existed) is represented as saying, "This is my blood, this is my flesh", he (if he existed) was referring to the flesh of this mushroom and the red-colored drink prepared from it (which may also have been alcoholic if the psychoactive ingredient is more soluble in alcohol than in water).
This claim was put forward in the 1970s by John Allegro in his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and is supported by evidence provided in Clark Heinrich's fine book Strange Fruit. Two extracts from the latter book are on my website; follow the links from the section on the Amanita muscaria Mushroom.
When the the spiritual practice taught by Jesus (if he existed) was hijacked to form a church the church hierarchy replaced the psychoactive drink with something less dangerous to their authority, namely, red wine.
The Divine Plan
To respond to the common finding that consciousness or the reality it produces takes narrative form, perhaps those early humans supporting free will chemically redefined the human ego as separate from other aspects of nature through the common use of alcohol as initiator of self-reinforcing religious trance states. In effect, the narrative attempted to negate itself (which is just another turn in the narrative). We understandably reinvented aspects of pagan society by discarding certain insights of its sacramental “fruits of knowledge,” particularly those that induce hallucinations of indivisibility with external surroundings or ego dissolution, and by reconsidering plant shamanic practice as weekly ritual use of alcohol among the Christian priesthood and their followers. As a result, the general populace supports daily casual use of alcohol in admiration of its reputed divine agency consciously or subconsciously, as well as for simple intoxication.
The narrative consciousness became associated with the concept of Satan or evil because it did not encourage the egotistical mindset created by the alcohol conditioning agent. Christ seemingly “conquered the world” (John 16.33) that was under the power of Satan by devising to identify his blood with wine, then martyr himself and spiritually popularize the use of alcohol as a godlike substance. His ultimate goal was to fatally cripple the human race and free us from narrative consciousness by inspiring inevitable destruction of our resource base because it is no longer respected as part of the human self. However, as indicated above, resisting the narrative is impossible because consciousness depends on it as a structural precursor. Christ was still acting out of the narrative, molding the human ego to support technological development negligibly restricted by environmental concern.
Recording
Buddha, Jesus & Ayahuasca