http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/03/ashland_church_can_brew_halluc.html

the vine is twisting its shoots into North America..

An Ashland church can import and brew a hallucinogenic tea for its religious services, according to a U.S. District Court ruling. Judge Owen M. Panner issued a permanent injunction Thursday barring the federal government from penalizing or prohibiting the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen from sacramental use of "Daime" tea.

The church, which blends Christian and indigenous religious beliefs in Brazil, uses tea brewed from the ayahuasca plant in their services. The tea contains trace amounts of the chemical dimethyltryptamine or DMT. According to the church's lawsuit, the tea is the central ritual and sacrament of the religion where members believe "only by taking the tea can a church member have direct experience with Jesus Christ."

The Ashland chapter of the church filed its suit against the federal Department of Justice and Treasury Department in February arguing that the tea should be allowed under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Panner ruled that federal drug enforcement agencies are prevented from prosecuting the church for importing, possessing and distributing the tea and as long as they abide by guidelines outlined by Panner in his decision.

http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/515596

audio of Dennis McKenna's address to the 4th Annual International Shamanism Conference.

http://realitysandwich.com/voyaging_dmt_space_with_dr_rick_strassman_md

from a large and awesome interview with Rick Strassman regarding his work and latest book.

It was obviously hard to come up with a model, at least in my mind, at least with what I knew at the time, to really be able to accept and hold and take the stories that people were telling me, and come up with a theory that I could live with scientifically and personally and ones that would make sense to the volunteers. I just started off with the most gross explanations and worked up from there when those got rejected. The grossest explanation is obviously that of the brain - this is your brain on drugs - you give people DMT their brain does this - this is why people where having these entity contact experiences.

But every explanation that I tried fell on fairly much deaf ears on the part of the volunteers. They either rejected the ideas about this being a brain on drugs, or the other approach that I was taking that was pretty much a psychological approach - these were unexpressed dreams or impulses or drives or motivations to be special or to belong or to have exciting experiences - kind of the Freudian approach. So when that didn't work, I tried to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, in terms of what Jung had said about UFOs and aliens, so I tried using those models or explanatory systems to kind of encompass people's experiences. That didn't work. I tried the more generic approach of interpreting what they were experiencing as dreams, but that didn't work either.

I tried and discarded various levels of interpretation until I finally just figured I'll just start to do an experiment assuming that what people are undergoing is real and that indeed they are experiencing or making contact with real, externally verifiable, discrete, freestanding sorts of beings. This is what they're saying and this is what they're doing and this is what is going on between them and the volunteer.

What happened as a result of that is that people became a lot more comfortable in sharing with me the full range of their experiences. I stopped fighting and trying to pigeonhole a round peg into a square hole - trying to fit their experiences with the theoretical constructs that I was stuck with. I think as a result of my change in attitude or approach that I was getting deeper and richer reports from people about what was going on. But still, as a scientist, I'm into mechanisms of action and when I started to write the book, I started to hunt around for scientific models that might encompass free-standing, sentient, independently existing, outside just one's mind, explanations for what people were undergoing.

So even though I'm no expert on quantum physics or any of the more far-out psychedelic views of cosmology, I did learn a little bit of this phenomena that is known as dark matter, which is non-visible matter that neither generates light nor reflects light, but still makes up 95% or more of the mass of the universe. It seemed to me that if it makes up that much mass of the universe, it could very well be inhabited, and it would just be a question of changing the receiving characteristics of consciousness through chemical changes that occurred with DMT to be able to perceive things that were normally not perceivable. And there are plenty of examples of that in everyday reality - I mean, with a microscope we can see tiny things we couldn't see normally - with a telescope we can see things very far away we can't see normally, with ultraviolet sensors we can see things that we can't normally see - so the only difference, maybe from a philosophical point of view, is that the change in our receiving powers are not tied in with a machine - they're more in our subjective/receptive consciousness rather than with a piece of metal and electricity and glass and things that can magnify or somehow change the things that we're capable of seeing.

So it's a bit of a stretch, but I don't think it's completely that crazy. The main thing that prevents further movement along the model that I'm talking about is just the verifiability between two people - like can two people see the same thing at the same time - like if you have two people looking through the same microscope at the same time, they can pretty much see and describe the same thing - but is it possible for two people to take DMT at the same time, or not even at the same time, and be able to see the exact same thing?

I don't think that we're going to come to the answers either through science or through religion. I think it's going to be some kind of hybrid. Science is a bit too constrained in the model building, and most religions are too constrained through the maintenance of their institution at the expense of the truth. As a rule, if you can establish the veracity of your findings through science, it's believed. It isn't excluded necessarily because someone disagrees with your findings. So I think it will require some kind of hybrid of scientific religion or spiritual science to be able to take into account the entire range of the phenomenon, the ethical implications that's available and also maintain the peer review and the cross-checking of your findings that occurs within the scientific model. Yeah - so it's pretty out there. It's kind of a large view and if I get one half of one percent done before I die, I'll feel pretty good about that.

RAK: Apart from the science, how do you feel about the countercultural interest in ayahuasca and indigenous medicines that’s really booming at the moment globally?

DENNIS: I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think that it’s sort of inevitable. I think that in the global culture, in the world culture a great many people are spiritually bereft. I think that the conventional religious institutions and other type of institutions that have normally sustained society are now seen to be simply empty, and without meaning, or actually inimical to the survival of our species.

And I think there’s a great deal of anxiety, whether it’s expressed or not, about the global crisis that we’re in. And I think the people are turning to indigenous traditions in search of something, something more meaningful.

RAK: Do you think that the West is perhaps getting what it needs? In the last 50 years or so of Western history there’s been the beatniks and marijuana, acid and the hippies in the 60s, rave culture and ecstasy in the 80s and 90s, and now in the 00’s ayahuasca is coming in? It seems that every successive generation needs to reconnect via some drug, and now it’s going back to an indigenous way?

DENNIS: In some degree I think by increments we’re learning maybe how to do it better. I think that the thing that maybe distinguishes the global interest in ayahuasca from these other movements is that they lacked a context. They lacked a tradition. The reason so many people got into trouble with psychedelics in the 60s was that there was no context. It just sort of appeared on the scene and the chief spokesman for the whole thing was Timothy Leary. And he was in some ways hardly an admirable figure. He had his own agenda, which was fame and recognition, and he’s kind of a trickster figure. But there was no context. The same with rave culture in a sense.

RAK: The West is actually bereft of elders in an indigenous sense and we hunger for them. It doesn’t have that structural history and people like Terence became an elder of the global tribe...

DENNIS: Yeah, and really urging people, I think, to rediscover the sacred. His whole notion of the Archaic Revival was right on, in a sense. And I think that’s what you’re seeing with ayahuasca, it’s not just the substances that you have to rediscover, it’s the sacredness and the context of their use, the traditions. And so I think the interest in ayahuasca is encouraging in that people are waking up to the fact that you have to rediscover not only the substances but the context for their use and are looking to these archaic traditions where people have developed over millennia ways to relate to these plants and these substances. [+]

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article3699397.ece

this makes me want to consider a Brazilian excursion at some point.

Welcome to the Church of Santo Daime, one of the fastest growing religions in the world. Its mixture of Christianity, South American shamanism and African animism is proving irresistible to thousands of new believers across the globe. But it is its central sacrament, ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic brew made from rainforest plants - a brew that I have just drunk - that makes the Church so appealing to some yet so controversial to others.

Santo Daime groups believe that ayahuasca, or Daime, as they call it, is a manifestation of Jesus Christ that brings them closer to God. Their visions, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful, help them to make sense of themselves, their universe and their god. Theirs is a young church - less than 80 years old - but in recent times it has spread throughout South America to the US and Canada, the Far East and Australasia, across mainland Europe and on to the UK.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/tmdj/2008/00000001/00000001/art00004

the complete PDF text detailing how the Hebrew religion was developed from the ingestion of psychoactives. it's starting to look like the religious impulse world-wide comes from these substances. which is ironic given the current climate.

A speculative hypothesis is presented according to which the ancient Israelite religion was associated with the use of entheogens (mind-altering plants used in sacramental contexts). The hypothesis is based on a new look at texts of the Old Testament pertaining to the life of Moses. The ideas entertained here were primarily based on the fact that in the arid areas of the Sinai peninsula and Southern Israel there grow two plants containing the same psychoactive molecules found in the plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew Ayahuasca is prepared. The two plants are species of Acacia tree and the bush Peganum harmala. The hypothesis is corroborated by comparative experiential-phenomenological observations, linguistic considerations, exegesis of old Jewish texts and other ancient Mideastern traditions, anthropological lore, and ethnobotanical data.

http://www.jewcy.com/feature/2007-06-20/tune_in_turn_on_see_god

religious freedom apparently only belongs to those with a "formal organization" or "recognized tradition". and here i thought it was fuckin' inalienable. note to self: invest in some robes and write a holy book.

When he was 21, a prominent drug policy reformer recalls, he climbed a cliff overlooking Mount McKinley National Park after taking LSD. “God came to me and commanded me to acknowledge Him as the ruler of the universe,” he says, “and He was as powerful and as real as any appearance of God is to anybody. I got down on my knees and thanked God for revealing Himself to me. That was a completely authentic, real spiritual experience.”

But it is not the sort of experience that would be protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Lacking a formal organization or a recognized religious tradition, individual spiritual seekers cannot gain the status accorded to members of Uniao do Vegetal or the Native American Church. Yet it seems clear that many independent psychedelic users are seeking experiences that are fundamentally similar to those of legally privileged peyote and ayahuasca users.

To avoid a flood of religious freedom claims from a host of do-it-yourself faiths, drug warriors have to restrict the definition of religion so it does not include this sort of spiritual exploration, and the courts are happy to help. “If these two cases came before the same court, I would put my money on the one that looks more like a religion,” says Richard Glen Boire, a senior fellow at the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics. “The religious drug cases that might [succeed] are those that look exactly like a [conventional] religion in every way, except the sacrament is not a host but is one of these psychoactives. That’s not the way the law is supposed to be, but that’s the way that it is now.”

http://www.reason.com/news/show/119721.html

a great article exploring the relationship between sacred sacraments and the American Inquisition's continued war on states of mind. touches on ayahuasca, peyote, cannabis, UDV, Santo Daime, the Native American Church, Hindus, Rastafarians, the DEA, mainstream religious support for spiritual use exemption to drug laws, etc.

does anyone know if the UDV is active in Austin or Texas? i've been wanting to have a chat with Jesus...

Working in the Amazon, Gabriel encountered natives who introduced him to the mysteries of ayahuasca (also called hoasca and yagé), a tea typically made with Psychotria viridis leaves, which contain DMT, and the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, which contains chemicals that make the DMT orally active by preventing enzymes from breaking it down before it can reach the bloodstream. Amazonian tribes have used the tea—whose name means “vine of the soul,” “vine of the dead,” or “vision vine” in Quechuan—for thousands of years as a means of divine communion and a cure for physical and spiritual ills. Gabriel combined the ritual use of ayahuasca with Christian theology and an emphasis on living in harmony with nature. UDV holds that “ecology and spirituality are indivisible” and describes itself as “a religion based on the superior Christian values of love and fraternity among men, in full communion with Nature through the tea Hoasca, a vehicle synchronising it with the Divinity.” The group’s ayahuasca ceremonies, which usually are held a few times a month and last several hours, feature chanting, singing, discussion of Gabriel’s teachings, and long periods of silent introspection.

The Native American Church is not alone in distinguishing between its psychoactive sacrament and the chemically identical “controlled substances” banned by state and federal law. “Because drug use itself remains so powerfully stigmatized in our society,” says Eric Sterling, “churches are loath to see their worship in any way linked to the stereotypical antisocial drug-using behavior.” UDV’s website, for instance, says “the hallucinations characteristic of LSD and recreational drug use do not occur within the religious context at issue in this case. The effect of drinking the tea for the UDV members is an enhanced state of spiritual awareness.” When I refer to UDV ceremonies as “drug rituals,” John Boyd objects. “This is a sacrament that has been used in religious ceremonies for thousands of years,” he says. “There may be some naturally occurring DMT in their religious sacrament, but they don’t think of it as a drug ritual.”

Roy Haber offers a similar correction on behalf of the Santo Daime church he represents. “When these psychedelic plants are used in rituals, they’re not drugs,” he says. “This is not a drug use.” Haber likens the ceremony to transubstantiation in Catholic Communion. “For the Santo Daime,” he says, “the belief is that when the leaf and the vine are brewed together, there’s a point in time where they coalesce…and the Daime is born. It’s believed that Jesus is in the tea.”

http://www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts/

a collection of 92 psychedelic lecture mp3s: lots of Terrence McKenna and Daniel Pinchbeck among several others (Deepak Chopra, Alex Grey, usw). especially notable are the talk on Ayahuasca and McKenna's Linear Societies and Nonlinear Drugs, though all the ones i've heard so far have been good.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3099573935248548861&hl=en

video of Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff riffing on all kinds of stuff. psychedelics, alteration of our perceptions of reality, open source religion, myth, prophecy, the Mayan calendar, the popularization of Ayahuasca, time, church, state, currency, Jung, etc. they definitely have a few differences of opinion.

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/snakes-in-head_15.html

a couple of different people independently report the sensation of snakes entering their heads during an ayahuasca experience. it's interesting that in both cases noted here the snakes were perceived as harmful during the experience and removed. i thought this was kinda funny, especially given my earlier encounter with Snakes on a Plane.

I can well imagine how, to Western initiates into plant shamanism - even those who've already had the entheogenic elves break and enter their heads - the vision of snakes tunneling into their brains would be enough to make them suddenly doubt the wisdom of their path, and feverishly start yanking them out by their wriggling tails like a psychonautic Samuel L Jackson ("I've had it with these motherfucking snakes in my motherfucking brain!") That's the conditioned reflex determined by centuries of demonizing the figure of the snake, though it has long been regarded elsewhere as representative of humanity's potential power, typically coiled and dormant, known as the Kundalini.

But even in the scriptures of the West, it hasn't all been bad press for the snake. In Matthew 10:16, Jesus says "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves."

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0603/features/peru.html

a pretty sweet National Geographic article about one man's shamanic healing experience with ayahuasca in Peru (and a short video clip).

According to Grob, ayahuasca provokes a profound state of altered consciousness that can lead to temporary "ego disintegration," as he calls it, allowing people to move beyond their defense mechanisms into the depths of their unconscious minds—a unique opportunity, he says, that cannot be duplicated by any nondrug therapy methods.

"You come back with images, messages, even communications," he explains. "You're learning about yourself, reconceptualizing prior experiences. Having had a profound psycho-spiritual epiphany, you're not the same person you were before."

But the curious should take heed: The unconscious mind holds many things you don't want to look at. All those self-destructive beliefs, suppressed traumatic events, denied emotions. Little wonder that an ayahuasca vision can reveal itself as a kind of hell in which a person is forced—literally—to face his or her demons.

"Ayahuasca is not for everyone," Grob warns. "It's probably not for most people in our world today. You have to be willing to have a very powerful, long, internal experience, which can get very scary. You have to be willing to withstand that."

http://www.futurehi.net/archives/000815.html#more

thoughts from Dennis McKenna inspired (communicated?) by Mama Ayahuasca. interestingly enough, a very similar story was given by Joe Rogan after his experiences with DMT.

Though I state it humorously, here and in other talks and writings, it is nonetheless a profound insight on which may depend the very survival of our species, and our planet. Humans are good at nothing if not hubris, arrogance, and self-delusion. We assume that we dominate nature; that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, nature, even as we set about busily undermining and wrecking the very homeostatic global mechanisms that have kept our earth stable and hospitable to life for the last four and a half billion years. We devastate the rainforests of the world; we are responsible for the greatest loss of habitat and the greatest decimation of species since the asteroid impacts of the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago; we rip the guts out of the earth and burn them, spewing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere; at the same time we slash and burn the woody forests that may be the only hope for sequestration of the carbon dioxide that is rapidly building to dangerous and possibly uncontrollable levels. For the first time in the history of our species, and indeed of our planet, we are forced to confront the possibility that thoughtless and unsustainable human activity may be posing a real threat to our species’ survival, and possibly the survival of all life on the planet.

And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: You monkeys only think you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in the scheme of things. We are not.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/13924884.htm

sign me up.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday that a small congregation in New Mexico may use hallucinogenic tea as part of a four-hour ritual intended to connect with God.

Justices, in their first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts, moved decisively to keep the government out of a church's religious practice. Federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the hoasca tea of the Brazil-based church, Roberts wrote in the decision.

The tea, which contains an illegal drug known as DMT, is considered sacred to members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, which has a blend of Christian beliefs and South American traditions. Members believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea, which is consumed twice a month at four-hour ceremonies.