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What is it about this time of year that melts even the hardest disinfonaut scepticism? Sure, Santa Claus might be the old shamanic magic mushroom cult incarnate repackaged to dupe us all into developing a Pavlovian response to the Baron Samedi of consumerism that he has now become, but I’ve always suspected the rabbit hole went down deeper.

And then I came across this blog post by  paranormal researcher Jeff Belanger:

My friend Al told me he was struggling with telling his four-year-old daughter about Santa Claus. “It’s the only lie I’ve ever told her,” he said. I too have a four-year-old daughter and am currently in the thick of Santa Fever at my house, where we’ve been lauding Père Noël for the last three Christmases. He’s a legend I’m honored to propagate.

I study legends for a living. Monsters, ghosts, extraterrestrials, and ancient mysteries swirl around me like smoke from a smoldering campfire. If there’s one thing that’s certain: it’s that all legends have a solid foundation in someone’s reality. From there the story grows and evolves; it becomes part of a collective human experience. Legends are real. The point can’t be argued.

His bio page proclaims him to be “the founder of the new legend tripping movement” (www.legendtripping.com), so at first glance he might know something whereof he speaks. The post is full of high and cheerful Christmas strangeness – especially his theory that Old St Nick is a benevolent dybbuk, normally a malevalent type of spirit possession from Jewish folklore – so I recommend you read it in full.

For my part, I’m haunted by the slightly different possibility that Father Christmas might be what is known in the Himalayan shamanic and Buddhist traditions as a tulpa - a being or object created through willpower, visualisation, concerted intentionality and ritual; a materialized thought that has taken physical form.

This may seem even more far fetched, but I’d be in good company. Alvin Schwartz, the man synonymous with the creation of Superman comic strips in the 1940s and ‘50s, wrote in his 1997 autobiography An Unlikely Prophet (a book that according to Neil Gaiman, who no stranger to gods old, new and American, is “one of the great Odd Books of our time”, and again he should know) that Superman had become a tulpa and that a Hawaiian kahuna told him Superman once traveled 2,000 years back in time to keep the island chain from being destroyed by volcanic activity. Schwartz went on to tell of his own encounter with Superman in a New York taxi.

I’ll leave you with Belanger’s final thoughts on the subject:

Believe in Santa … His legend is real. He’s real. He’s you. He’s me. He’s a bit of all of us. And next year he’ll be back, because we’ll never stop needing him.

If that doesn’t sound like a job for a Superman, I’ll eat my mistletoe.

Alberto Villoldo

Disinformation’s sister video label True Mind has just released a documentary film featuring Alberto Villoldo, Amazonia: Healing With Sacred Plants. Dr. Alberto Villoldo writes for True Mind about his film:

I started out in the brain laboratory at San Francisco State University – literally surrounded by hundreds of formaldehyde preserved brains. We were studying how we develop psychosomatic disease, and how we could create psychosomatic health.

One day I realized that I had been looking out of the wrong end of the microscope, becoming caught in the minutiae of neurons and brain chemistry, and missing the larger picture of the mind. I decided to leave my lab and travelled to the Amazon, to work and study with medicine men who had no MRI’s and brain scans, only the power of the mind and local herbs to heal their patients.

For twenty-five years, I apprenticed with extraordinary shamans and healers, and learned the use of the fabled vine of the dead, ayahuasca. My new documentary film, Amazonia: Healing With Sacred Plants is the product of my decades of study among the jungle shamans, and explains the levels of non-ordinary reality that one enters during the heightened state of consciousness that ayahuasca affords. It presents the rigor and discipline that the shaman undergoes as part of his training, and the dangers and cautions westerners must have when exploring these domains.

Amazonia is also available to Watch Now and on DVD:

Photo: BDean (CC)

Nancy R writes on Care2:

Fourteen traditional healers have been brutally murdered in Peru in the past 20 months, allegedly at the urging of a local mayor. The Peruvian government has sent a team of investigators to look into the incidents. While 14 shaman have disappeared, the bodies of only seven have been retrieved so far; the indigenous healers were shot, stabbed or hacked to death by machete.

Protestant Sect Members Suspected: The prosecutor’s office of Alto Amazonas province stated that the alleged murders were carried out by a man known locally at the “witch hunter,” at the behest of his brother, the mayor of the town of Balsa Puerto. A Peruvian government adviser and expert on Amazon cultures alleges that both are members of a Protestant sect that claims shamans are possessed by demons and must be eliminated. The Peruvian Times reports that the shamans had been planning to form an association to share their knowledge.

Irrecoverable Loss: The shamans’ deaths go beyond a brutal crime to represent a loss of unrecoverable knowledge. NGO Amazon Watch’s Peru program director Gregor MacLennan is quoted in the Guardian: “The death of these shamans represents not just a tragic loss of life, but the loss of a huge body of knowledge about rainforest plants and the crucial role shamans play in traditional medicine and spiritual guidance in indigenous communities.”

More on Care2

Next up we have Erin Shaw talking with Naada Guerra. Naada holds workshops on the power of language and how to change our realities by changing the way we use it. In this interview Erin and Naada get into some of the ways we can move towards Empowering Language and more towards the next evolutionary shift.

If you would like to hear more from Jeremy Narby, you can check out his book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. If you would like to gain more knowledge from Kat Harrison you can look into taking one of her classes at the California School of Herbal Studies.

You can get a lot deeper with empowered languaging by checking out Naada Guerra’s website bodyintention.com and her partner’s website wordsrmatter.blogspot.com.

Thanks for listening, until next time its our world to change.

— Chris

The man who allegedly stabbed former Fergus Falls mayoral candidate Ivan “Skip” Mallas early Sunday morning was charged on Tuesday with second degree attempted murder.

Mallas had been approached by Timothy Eugene Peterson while working in his garage. Peterson allegedly began chanting and called himself a “soul collector” and a “medicine man” while trying first to cut off some of Mallas’ toes. Mallas said that Peterson then tried to slit his throat, scalp him and stab him in the chest, all the while telling Mallas that he needed to kill him and “collect his soul.”

During the struggle, the complaint stated, Mallas allegedly had to grab the knife several times to keep it from mortally wounding him. These actions caused deep cuts to both hands, and his attempt to keep Peterson from scalping him caused him to wound his cheek.

The complaint reported that Mallas said that Peterson eventually stopped his assault and appeared to consider coming after him again before finally leaving. After Peterson left, Mallas allegedly fled to a neighbor’s house for safety and help.

No doubt as this Advent comm­ences, I, and many others, will be re-reading Charles Dickens’s 1843 seasonal classic  “A Christmas Carol” for the umpteenth time. Those of us who have fallen under its spell will doubtless continue to do so every year, even if we live to be as old as the oldest Biblical patriarch, and each time with the same degree of emotion – whether it be delight, wonder or sadness -– as the times before.

In any other context, such behaviour might be interpreted as borderline obsessive, but that simply doesn’t apply here. Ponder this for a moment: there are few other works in Western literat­ure that have enjoyed such a breadth and variety of adaptations across all media. The tale continually reinvents itself, the same and yet different; yet by any reasonable measure the work is slim, compact – by Dickens’s own expans­ive standards positively Lilliput­ian. So what is its secret?

It was only a short while ago, after completing and contemplating Patrick Harpur’s alchemical masterpiece The Philosopher’s Secret Fire,  that I grasped consciously what my unconscious (or higher self; call it what you will), had presumably known all along – that Dickens, an unwitting Victorian shaman, had created a ‘hermetically’ compact yet multifaceted transformative initiation myth for our times. All other cultures and periods, from the Eleusinian Greeks to the Dreamtime Aborigines, needed and originated such myths, and Dickens has done the same for us.”

Read more. ]]> http://www.disinfo.com/2010/12/charles-dickens-scrooge-a-victorian-shaman/feed/ 1 http://www.disinfo.com/2010/12/daniel-pinchbecks-business-shamanism/ http://www.disinfo.com/2010/12/daniel-pinchbecks-business-shamanism/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:39:59 +0000 majestic http://www.disinfo.com/?p=42346

Daniel Pinchbeck. Photo: Herwig Maurer (CC)

I wonder if this essay by Daniel Pinchbeck will, years hence, be looked upon as a seminal point in the transition of the “consciousness” movement, for lack of a better term, from an idealistic remove from the mainstream a la Burning Man (which of course is completely unsustainable despite it’s worthy goals), to a pragmatic vision of how to change the world. From his Reality Sandwich blog:

Now that the Evolver network and brand have established themselves to a certain extent, I want to look ahead to developments I hope to see in the near future, with this organization and other initiatives. For the next phase of development, I propose the term “business shamanism.” “Corporate alchemy” would be a viable alternative.

First, some context: As I write this, the ruling regime in our rotten republic of Obama-stan is seeking to ignore the pain of the sheeple and extend…

Daniel Pinchbeck. Photo: Herwig Maurer (CC)

I wonder if this essay by Daniel Pinchbeck will, years hence, be looked upon as a seminal point in the transition of the “consciousness” movement, for lack of a better term, from an idealistic remove from the mainstream a la Burning Man (which of course is completely unsustainable despite it’s worthy goals), to a pragmatic vision of how to change the world. From his Reality Sandwich blog:

Now that the Evolver network and brand have established themselves to a certain extent, I want to look ahead to developments I hope to see in the near future, with this organization and other initiatives. For the next phase of development, I propose the term “business shamanism.” “Corporate alchemy” would be a viable alternative.

First, some context: As I write this, the ruling regime in our rotten republic of Obama-stan is seeking to ignore the pain of the sheeple and extend lavish tax breaks for the wealthy.The financial elite engineered a massive transfer of assets over the last decades, and they are now completing the procedure of creating a two-tier society resembling a serfdom. Champagne glasses are no doubt clinking in fancy hotel rooms and private clubs to celebrate the selling out of the people, as the unemployed and dispossessed roam the streets. We witness, as spectacle,the slow-motion dismantling of the American republic — though nobody can say how the story will play out this time.

We tend to forget that Roosevelt’s New Deal was not a good-hearted gift to the working classes but a compromise to stave off mass uprising. The current oligarchy has determined that it will make no such deal this time around. I suspect they assume that the pulverizing of the populace with mind-numbing media, psychotropic drugs, police state tactics, and poison food had the desired effect. And they may be right.

From the viewpoint of those seeking a deeper level of transformation, however, the political gridlock, social polarization, and extremism of the right wing are all positive signs. The increasing rigidity of the system suggests it is soon going to crack. Perhaps the spirit of insurrection and liberty will reawaken in the people as it does so. But perhaps not.

We don’t know when or if we will reach the critical threshold where a current of rebellion becomes a wave and then a mass movement…

[continues at Reality Sandwich]

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Outsider Art • Discordia • SubGenius
The Occult • Satanism • Conspiracy Analysis
Life Extension • Intelligence Enhancement
Space Migration • Psychedelic Futurism
Consciousness Expansion • R/evolutionary Living
Renegade Metaphysics • Radical Psychotherapy
Aliens • Neo-Shamanism • Temporary Autonomous Zones
Body Modification • Alternative Sexuality • Fringe Culture
Human-Dolphin Communication • DIY Media
Cybernetics and Systems Theory • Pranks
Atheism • Zen • Martial Arts • Recession Hacking

There will also be performances by artists such as Cult of Zir and Ogo Eion and Psychetect in the evenings.

iTunes • Direct Download • RSS

This episode features an interview with Adam Elenbaas, author of Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest. Adam discusses his experiences in the Peruvian jungle with a psychedelic tea called Ayahuasca, and explains how it changed his spiritual outlook.

Stay tuned after the interview for details on Raymond & Joe’s upcoming appearances at Dragon*Con 2010 in Atlanta. The guys will be supporting events and lectures by Disinfo favorite Graham Hancock.

Jodorowsky giving a speech on spirituality. Photo: Ana Bolívar (www.anabolivar.com)

Psychomagic is the newest book by the legendary surrealist filmmaker, comics author, Tarot expert and therapist, Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy is the brand new English translation of Jodorowsky’s poetic-action therapy techniques. The book  first appeared in Spanish in 2008.  It’s published by Inner Traditions and was released on June 18, 2010.

The book is separated into 3 sections, keeping Jodorowsky’s wide-ranging ramblings carefully collected.  Writer Gilles Farcet interacts with the author in the book’s first chapters which are written in a Q&A format.

An introductory essay by Farcet makes it clear that their “interview” consisted of his enduring an expansive, multi-layered monologue from Jodorowsky which was only later recast in the Q&A structure. The “knowing teacher vs. baffled student” feel of this section is absolutely delightful, and the disarming approach allows the deeper implications of Jodorowsky’s ideas to take the reader by surprise. In the second section, the author is matched more evenly with another interviewer – Javie Esteban. The pair interact as peers with Esteban teasing and tugging Jodorowsky into more-deeply-illuminating his ideas and techniques. This interview format was surprising at first, but the conversational progression, covering many complex artistic, magical and therapeutic ideas, never gets confusing or frustrating. One feels privileged to join in on such a lively, engaging discussion.

Read more here…

Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS

In podcast episode 85, we’re joined by Jeremy Vaeni. Jeremy is a writer, director, podcaster, and experiencer of high-strangeness. He hosts and produces the successful and popular Culture of Contact and Paratopia podcasts.

Jeremy’s unique perspective on UFOlogy and the paranormal have earned him fans as well as critics, but he speaks his mind with frankness and a sense of humor that’s refreshing. We begin the interview hearing about his early experiences with UFOs and alien abduction. Based on these contacts, he’s led to understand that UFOs and aliens are not necessarily what many may believe, in that they serve to try to rouse humanity from its waking dream.

From there, we delve into what Jeremy calls his “I AM” experience. I think you’ll agree that his story is quite compelling, rather extreme, absolutely fascinating, brutally honest, and undoubtedly controversial.

Don’t miss the second half of the interview with Jeremy Vaeni in the Occult of Personality Membership Section.

Culture of Contact

Paratopia

“I Know Why the Aliens Don’t Land” by Jeremy Vaeni

“No One’s Watching: An Alien Abductee’s Story” DVD

Outro music by Dan-O

Master Shaman Vargas is a shaman in the tradition of the ancient Chavin civilization, one of the oldest of South America. The interview took place at the Chimbre Retreat Center in March of 2009. Vargas is the resident Shaman of the Chimbre Retreat Center, currently under construction in the jungle outside Puerto Maldonado, in southern Peru, where he leads Ayahuasca and Guachuma (San Pedro cactus) ceremonies for participants from all over the world.

Set to be completed in early Spring, the Chimbre Retreat Center will offer visitors the opportunity to participate in Ayahuasca and Guachuma rituals under the guidance of Maestro Jose Vargas in a pristine jungle setting.  

Join RS editorial director Daniel Pinchbeck at the inaugural Reality Sandwich Ayahuasca Retreat at Chimbre, featuring ceremonies led by Master Shaman Vargas, from April 22 to May 2nd. 

This video was recorded at the Third Annual Ayahuasca Monologues, held at Webster Hall in New York City, on November 5, 2009.

“Not pagan Samhain celebrations or the like,” to quote Chiropteran, “but bright-orange, screaming-pumpkin, Trick-or-Treating Halloween.” It’s all about doing magic with the wild, pop mystery explosion that Halloween has become. The Universal Monsters (Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein, Mummy) as the spirits of the North, South, East, and West; invocations of Jack Skellington; Jack-o-lanterns as the undead spirit servants we all carve every year to protect our homes from evil.

Halloween and Black (and Orange) Magick

Chiropteran – Well, yesterday was October 1st, the official opening day (by my reckoning) of the Halloween season.

This year, as part of my overarching goal to get my magickal butt in gear, I’ve decided to do a nightly meditation/devotion/working to hammer my Halloween Magick system into shape.

(I don’t know if anyone’s interested in the particulars, but here goes anyway, for any of you who are…)

I started last night by turning the lights down and reading some H. P. Lovecraft (”The Moon-bog”). Cheesy, maybe, but it set the mood nicely. I’ll probably do this with a different horror short story or novel excerpt every night.

Then I got things rolling with the quasi-improvised Four Monsters Banishing. Basically “calling the quarters,” with Dracula to the North (air), The Mummy to the South (earth), The Wolfman to the East (water) and Frankenstein’s Monster to the West (fire). (I’ve spent a while trying out different combinations of associations, and this seems to work out best, for now.) Then I read aloud a short passage from Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (the bit about the Autumn People).

As silly as it might sound, I have never had a more powerful opening to a ritual, whether solo or group. As I finished the final “call,” the air in the room charged up with an almost audible *thunk*, and my hands positively swarmed with gathered energy.

The feeling was so powerful that I almost considered charging a spontaneous working, but I decided to stick with the original plan, which was the “skull mask” meditation, the first step toward a full-blown Pumpkin King invokation.

Sobek – Yes, I think of the trick-or-treating as being the “Rade” of the fey. So I load the candy up with lots of goblin energy.

Original article. . .

Within around thirty seconds of smoking the dark herbal extract the effects rapidly began, and I felt my entire sense of identity suddenly shift. I was instantly transformed from a human being into a tiny disembodied speck of consciousness — completely bewildered as to what I was and amnesic of my former identity. I was suspended in a hyperspatial dimension, a crystalline network of pulsing energies, that was filled with countless other miniature beings like me. I found myself inside of a kind of space within space, that appeared to transcend the whole three-dimensional universe. Suddenly, my identity shifted again, as a portion of the space and beings around me folded and twisted into me, becoming a part of me. More and more layers of the space around me continued folding in and becoming a part of my expanding sense of identity — until, finally, I was my familiar human self again. This strange and somewhat unsettling experience was the result of my smoking an extract made from the hallucinogenic leaves of the Salvia divinorum plant.

Although the Latin name for the Mexican sage Salvia divinorum literally translates as “sage of the seers,” this powerful hallucinogenic plant goes by a number of other names, such as Shka Pastora (”Leaves of the Shepherdess”), Diviner’s Sage, ska María Pastora, yerba de Maria, Magic Mint, Sally-D, and salvia. Until fairly recently, this innocent-looking member of the mint family — whose hallucinogenic powers can dwarf those of magic mushrooms and LSD — was virtually unknown outside of a small region of Central Mexico, where it has been used as a shamanic healing tool by the Mazatec Indians in Oaxaca for at least hundreds of years. The Mazatec shamans use salvia to facilitate divinatory or visionary states of consciousness during their spiritual healing sessions when psilocybin mushrooms aren’t in season. According to ethnobotanist Daniel Siebert, “The Mazatec shamans primarily take it ceremonially as a tool for gaining access to the supernatural world or what they believe to be the realm of divine beings and supernatural entities.” …

[read more at Reality Sandwich]