In the new documentary The Shaman and Ayahuasca, filmmaker Michael Wiese takes an introspective journey into the heart of Amazonian shamanism. (more)

I saw the same pattern of interchange in everything, a fundamental quantum mechanism that we had not yet learned how to measure.  Either I was crazy or I was a pioneer — a philosopher in the truest sense, a lover of wisdom who follows the goddess wherever she goes, simultaneously creating and discovering concepts along the way.  (more)

We have come seeking the healing the earth offers through her sacred medicines. These mushrooms are legal for a 30-kilometer radius around the village of Huautla. Baskets of mushrooms are painted on the outside walls of the church. Here the mushroom is another image for Christ. (more)

[The Ayahuasca Monologues] • In the years since I first was brought to her, bent and broken, wanting to die, needing to exit the pain of this world, I have struggled to express my appreciation and reverence for her, The Great Mother, Aya Spirit, Gaia, Grandmother of All Creation. How can you properly thank that which gave you life, rebirth, a fresh start? (more)

We have monitored the brains of chanting monks, praying nuns, yogis buried alive, even shaman in drug-induced states. They all light up a portion of their brains called the Orientation Association Area (OAA), which is responsible for telling us where we are in space. Trance states intensify input into this area, which moves you beyond your actual physical boundaries; it's as if you float in another time and space. (more)

In my 20's I was part of a second wave of Buddhist transmission to America. I knew two generations of artists with Buddhist inclinations, and in interviews with them, all roads led back to the Japanese scholar, Dr. D.T. Suzuki. Who was this unassuming person who had helped change the direction of American culture?  (more)

Almost nine years have passed since the epoch-making event universally known as "9/11." Who was really responsible for this horrifically audacious act of terror? What is presented here is not another "9/11 hypothesis" -- rather, it is my interpretation of what appears to be a communication about 9/11 that has been placed within the event itself.  (more)

Dreams are a river flowing from the unconscious reservoir of un-thought thoughts and un-noticed perceptions, revealing the distant past, and sometimes, the distant future. Here's my understanding of how to approach dreams and how dreams approach us. (more)

It's instructive to see how the 2012 prophecies have been ma­nipulated by mass culture. Nearly all of the 2012 visionaries see the date as a harbinger of a new and enlightened consciousness for humanity, but the wizards of televi­sion have transmogrified this vision into something that looks very much like a fundamentalist's Last Judgment. (more)

It has been over 53 years since Ayahuasca's introduction to western entheogen enthusiasts, and in that time Ayahuasca has evolved. What began as a synergistic plant combo among specific cultures of the Amazon rain forest has evolved and become something new. The sacred medicine that has historically provided incredible transformations in those who drink it, has itself transformed. It has become Changa. (more)

Two great directions in human thought and activity have recently been coming into sharper focus. Interest in Buddhism has not been greater since it was first introduced to China where it proceeded to grow steadily for 500 years, and the serious and thoughtful use of psychedelics is making a resurgence, perhaps more profoundly than in the Sixties. (more)

The shaman is the pure embodiment of Love. He spent every waking moment giving of himself and healing our spirits, as the true embodiment of self-sacrifice. I understand now why the Peruvian shamans had no issue with adopting the Christ story into the Pachakúti Mesa tradition.  (more)

The actual lesson provided by hallucinogens seems relatively simple: let go. Hey look, the walls are bleeding. Let go. I'm fifty and my life is a wreck. Let go. That hawk headed God has giant tits and it's starting to unnerve me. Let go. If you hold on, it can become a demon, and if you let go, it becomes bliss.  (more)

For centuries, even millennia, humans have believed that a conflict exists in the human mind -- a conflict between good and evil. But this isn't true. Good and evil are just the result of the conflict, because the real conflict is between the truth and lies.  (more)

A modern myth is a living myth, it cannot help but borrow inspiration from historical sources -- the lives and thoughts, myths and images of those who have come before -- but it is transformed, re-forged we might say, in the heat of our personal experience, and may come out looking quite different from any of those original sources. (more)

Each planet and sign rule or have affinity with certain elements of the weather or nature. Capricorn rules the mountains and Pluto rules volcanoes. The Earth's rumbling intensity of 2010 in Haiti, Indonesia, Chile, Los Angeles, Tibet, and Iceland signify the beginnings of many transformational, tectonic shifts over the next decade. (more)

As a physician, a Western-trained scientist, I believed everything could be explained. In Indian Country I got to meet some traditional healers. When I saw what the medicine man did, I thought that was magical, but they saw their practice as perfectly logical and explainable. Working with American Indians changed my life; they challenged my medical school assumptions about how people got sick and how they got well. Part 1 of the memoir Kindling Spirit: Healing from Within. (more)

Storytellers need to find new fireplaces around which to tell the tale, and Reality Sandwich is one; a community of kindred spirits who share a mythology about how to sustain ourselves (and the planet) in a civil society. Kindling Spirit: Healing from Within, is my story about ordinary triumphs, tragedies, miracles, indigenous wisdom, radical self-acceptance, shamanic healing, and altered states of consciousness; they all reveal how, if we are willing to look at the familiar in new ways, we can create new endings to old stories. (more)