posted November 04, 2007 11:15 AM            

The following is from the website
of the Church of the Santo Daime.
The Church has a branch in Washington D.C.,
where it is legal to ingest Ayahuasca.
The plant is prepared and offered for free.
Several of my friends have been there and had the experience.

From the website:

The Santo Daime religious movement started inside the Amazon forest, in the first decades of the 20th century with the slaves’ grandson Raimundo Irineu Serra. It was him that received the revelation of a doctrine of Christian characteristics, from the drink ayahuasca (souls’ wine), and to us denominated Santo Daime.

The drink, largely diffused by the indigenous people of the region, is obtained by the cooking of two plants - the vine Jagube (banesteriopsis caapi) and the leaf Rainha (psicotrya viridis) both native of the tropical forest. The drink has entheogenic properties (The word entheogen is derived from Greek. Literally, it translates to "giving birth to the divine within"), meaning that it produces an expansion of the conscience, responsible for the contact with the inner divinity, which is present in the mankind itself.

According to Mestre Irineu he received this Doctrine through an appearance of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception’s, in one of first times that he took the drink, in the region of Basiléia, Acre.

Mestre’s hymns, which he started to receive after the early 30’s, brought a strong emphasis in the Christian teachings and a new reading of the Gospels upon the light of the Santo Daime, to affirm, nowadays, the same principles of love, Charity and human fraternity.

Says the tradition that Ayahuasca is a ceremonial drink and known for millenniums by the priests' castes that came from since the old Oiamaras until the Inca empire formation. Ayahuasca was the name of a great and wise priest, Prince of the Inca Empire, and Atahualpa’s brother.

With the Spaniard conquest Atahualpa surrendered to the invaders, but Ayahuasca sought refuge in Machu Picchu, entering, through the Inca's secret paths, in the Amazon and preserving the wisdom of his people by diffusing in the forest the use of the sacred drink.

Several historians consider like certain the Incas’ presence in the region where today is the Acre state. Several migrant waves of the empire’s contingent arrived in the Brazilian Amazon, after the defeat of his people by the Spaniards, motivating the legends of Eldorado and other lost cities.

The Indian of the Amazon Forest already knew the drink secret, judging by the reports contained in the myths, but it is possible that the Incas' presence provoked a quality change in their knowledge about the ayahuasca's magic use. Several tribes located close to the border with Peru still today practice ayahuasca's worship in our country.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, in the cultural contacts among rubber tapers and the Indian, the ayahuasca started to be acknowledged and also used by the white communities that were opening rubber plantations in the forest. It is at this time that the figure of Mestre Raimundo Irineu Serra arises. Been born in Maranhão in 1892, he moved to Acre in 1912, at the age of 20, working on rubber plantations in the border with Bolivia.

Around this time he met in Brasiléia with Antônio Costa, connoisseur of the ayahuasca drink, and in the contact with this drink, originated from forest, he received the force and the revelation to found the Santo Daime doctrine. In 1930 he moved to Rio Branco and gathered the first disciples around his teachings. He was then 39 years old. In 1935 he started to receive hymns that coded the new doctrine foundations. Until the middle of 1971 he received the 129 hymns of his hinário “O CRUZEIRO” (The Cross), which narrates the doctrine’s appearance.

posted November 04, 2007 09:58 PM              

Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor, or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently Western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition, I mean, it isn't going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition, that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendance, is confirmed, it's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past of the universe, and the evolutionary egression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future, this is what shamanism is always been about, a shaman is someone who has been to the end, it's someone who knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture and learned and embedded language, into the domain of what Wittgenstein called "the unspeakable," the transcendental presense of the other, which can be absanctioned, in various ways, to yield systems of knowledge which can be brought back into ordinary social space for the good of the community, so in the context of ninety percent of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery I believe, and what shamans are, I believe, are people who have been able to de-condition themselves from the community's instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors and so forth and so on. Shamanism is not a religion, it's a set of techniques, and the principal technique is the use of psychedelic plants. What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female, and so forth and so on. So, what shamans have to do is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world. The planet has a kind of intelligence, that it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind, I mean I think it's fairly profound, it's fairly apocalyptic. History is ending. I mean, we are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the eschaton. History is the shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for those of us who will live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably since the birth of the universe. The twentieth century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept.

If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.

The emphasis in house music and rave culture on physiologically compatible rhythms and this sort of thing is really the rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, that sound, properly understood, especially percussive sound, can actually change neurological states, and large groups of people getting together in the presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic community of bonding that hopefully will be strong enough that it can carry the vision out into the mainstream of society. I think that the youth culture that is emerging in the nineties is an end of the millenium culture that is actually summing up Western civilization and pointing us in an entirely different direction, that we're going to arrive in the third millenium, in the middle of an archaic revival, which will mean a revival of these physiologically empowering rhythm signatures, a new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature, to feminism, to ego. All of these things are taking hold, and not a moment too soon.

http://deoxy.org/t_re-evo.htm

posted November 12, 2007 11:49 AM            

Terence McKenna
myspace profile:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=10584035

Ayahuasca myspace profile: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=122252751

DMT profile: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=52757638

posted August 12, 2012 08:34 PM            

I have never taken Ayahuasca but I have taken shrooms and salvia divinorum, which is used by shamans in southern Mexico.