Perhaps because we need it, desperately?
It’s fascinating to me how so many people are terrified of their own right brains. So sad, since were we all to open to this unlimited capacity within our own psyches we would reconfigure, right then and there, into wholeness, at-oneness, both within ourselves and within the mysterium tremendum that we call “the universe.”
This is a beautifully written post that plumbs epistemological and metaphysical mysteries with a rare, sure, metaphorical eye. Though I excerpt from the initial section, it’s the authors’ invocation of the “eye of the tornado” that sent me spinning into the welcome void.
Let the centripetal force of the eye of the tornado attract you and pull you into it. As the attraction to this wild, relentless spiraling force increases, simultaneously arises the sensation of feeling wrung out, as if you were put through the spin cycle in a washer.
Yep! Done. Thanks!
The Ayahuasca Mysteries: Wild Wisdom of the Divine Wine
March 5, 2015
By Dionisio Santos & Aubrey Bamdad
Excerpt:
Many would agree that imbibing this beverage opens a broad and variegated range of altered states of consciousness, which miraculously allow an individual to tap into a collective pool of experiences. Commonalties to participants’ experiences abound, including but not limited to: tapping into ancestral memories that may assist one to recognize familial behavioural conditioning, a profound feeling of interconnectivity with all living things, experiential metamorphosis: self-identification to specific plant or animal life forms, acute awareness regarding the ecological plight of the earth and our environment, visions of the supra-sensitive world, telepathy, clairvoyance and the perception of a new version of oneself; wild, radically empowered and liberated from the constraints of the above mentioned conditioning. Some may even penetrate deeper levels to experience a type of death, just as “real” as any physical demise. This death actually represents the cessation of out-dated belief programs and may result, depending on the level of awareness of the initiate, in a rebirth into the primordial Presence of eternal, unfettered consciousness.
Typically, a lengthy process of self-experimentation is necessary to transcend the visionary, changing and anecdotal themes characteristic of the ecstatic trance state that Ayahuasca is capable of producing, into a steady flow of unadulterated, non-visionary, unabated consciousness. This subtle, underlying tapestry of impersonal awareness which is our natural state of being, is usually neglected, misunderstood or unattainable to the majority of neophytes and shamanic apprentices who generally are captivated by the explosion of neuronal fireworks that DMT generates. Perhaps this psychedelic visionary sideshow is but a distraction, a slight-of-hand maneuver, created by our own consciousness as a protection mechanism to shield itself from that which it is not ready to experience nor cannot digest. However, once a certain threshold to the process is attained, an unswerving core conviction arises that the anecdotal and visionary effects of the plant are simply a release of the psyche’s pent-up personal and collective projections and what lies beyond that horizon is the living, vibratory field of consciousness from which all life is created and from which matter is a mere reflection.
This state is the result of a subtle and gradual extrication from the way we have been entrained by society to perceive ourselves, and the world around us. We are drawn ever closer to a drastic paradigm shift from the personal to the impersonal. With astonishing and increasing acuity, our recalibrated attention begins to take note that the observer and the observed meld irrepressibly together. Our individual consciousness begins to lose interest in identification to one’s body, especially to external minutiae such as fancy altarpieces, feathered earrings, white ceremonial clothes or any of the fashionable, spiritual accoutrements of today’s Western Neo-shamanic practitioner. There is a shift away from the personal story and egoic attachments that we inherit from our socio-cultural and religious programming towards an ontogenetic, morphogenetic or anthropomorphic way of being, primal and pantheistic in nature.
We may realize that this is a process of self-initiation leading to a rebirth, beyond handed-down beliefs and unsubstantiated convictions that conditioned and distorted our originally unencumbered perception. Without our essential awareness activated, we have been elaborating a map of illusory reality. It may dawn on us, as shocking as the very first time the rays of the sun cast down upon our faces, that we’ve learned to handle all of our physical and cognitive experiences from that fictional reality, without ever pausing to doubt its relevance and authenticity. Insidiously, we’ve become accustomed to favour certain interpretations and value judgements deemed inherently acceptable by the ruling society, thereby losing discernment of the evidence of the Real, as it is.
