Features

Image: The Shaman, by Amanda Sage

Deep within the concrete heart of downtown Los Angeles, I recently met Jimmy Bleyer, a wizard in the form of an art curator who is behind the Temple Of Visions, a new multi-arts space that opened January 9th. It will be the first gallery dedicated totally to the emerging contemporary Visionary Art culture here in the City of Angels.

"Unless you quarantine the birds

for their seeds of shit,

or the flowers for consorting with the wind-

you have no right to waste my time,

for time does waste the gypsy."

 -Passport, by Ben J. Wild

Undergrowth.org is proud to present the first anthology of poetics by vagabond wordsmith Benjamin J. Wild, now available online and through bookstores around Melbourne, Australia. 

The following is an excerpt from Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey now available from Icaro Publishing.

"The vine has spread her tendrils across the world and a genuine archaic revival was underway. My bags were packed; South America beckoned, and the ancient mysteries of the rainforest awaited. I wanted in on it..."

Iquitos, Wednesday July 5th., 2006

IQUITOS IS ELECTRIC WITH NOONDAY HUMIDITY as Vance, John and I wade through the horde of locals hustling trinkets outside the Parthenon gates and join the other ayahuasca gringos amassing by the pool. It's Bowman's birthday -- he's twenty-four today -- and drinking with Guillermo is going to be his present.

We're waiting for Alexis, a blond, twenty-ish dude from Washington D.C. who's going to help translate the interview with Guillermo I've lined up. Alexis is a Princeton dropout who's backpacking around on a spiritual path, drinking ayahuasca with shamans and asking critical questions to deepen his own understanding. He's drunk with Guillermo four times now, and calls him "a fucking Jedi." When he turns up an hour late, wearing a Corey Feldman School of the Arts t-shirt, I know he'll fit right in with our media crew.

Vance wants to get out to the Espiritu de Anaconda, Guillermo's ayahuasca retreat to take some shots before we lose the afternoon light, so we pile into two motorcarros and speed away from the front of the Hotel Parthenon before the touristos bus has even arrived. But our motorcarros get bogged down on the dirt road turnoff from Km 14, a long undulating strip of mud from recent rains, and we get out to walk. The local villagers are busy building a concrete footpath to run from the highway past their village and towards the ayahuasca retreat a few miles in, and part of me wonders if this will facilitate t-shirt and refreshment stalls springing up wherever the gringos go, like mushrooms after a fresh rain.

COGNITION FACTOR: THE SMART MOVIE


written and directed by Mike Kawitzky, who answers some questions with Undergrowth at the bottom of this article. Photo by Louise Goddard.

The plot takes place in a stream of consciousness as a cyberpunk quests for enlightenment in the digital age.

The viewer is transported to a narrated virtual world in search of answers to the " Big Five" questions. It's a totally human experience as Cognition Factor stitches live conversations with Terence Mckenna, brother Dennis Mckenna, along with Ralph Abrahams, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Metzner, Alex Grey, and twenty more of the top thinkers of our times.

The Cognition Factor is a narrated gonzo documentary, showcast inside a 3D landscape backed by original compositions from top musicians like Dr. Lx Paterson, Dom Beken and Phil Le Gonedic, of The ORB, Merv Pepler (EatStatic/Ozrik Tentacles), Colin Angus& Matt Catt (The Shamen/Pablo_Sandoz), Steve Hillage (System 7), all brought together by ambient composer, performer and originator, Mike Martin (Indidginus).

The Cognition Factor poses Five Big Questions in order of appearance:

   1. What is consciousness/cognition?
   2.  Are we evolving as a species, or are we going extinct?
   3. What do you understand as G-D?
   4. Can the fusion of science and technology occur?
   5. What happens when we die?


"What we're going to do is we're going to all wire ourselves together, linking ourselves together at higher and higher bandwidth, with greater and greater understanding"

– Terence Mckenna - the Cognition Factor

for more info and to buy the DVD visit:

http://www.cognitionfactor.net

UNDERGROWTH is proud to preview an excerpt from the new novella META-DETECTIVE by regular contributor LEVIN A. DIATSCHENKO.author of The Man Who Never Sleeps, comes another surreal adventure that experiments with reality.

META-DETECTIVE is a new illustrated novella is a cross between pulp fiction detective classics and Greek mythology. 

 “The vine has spread her tendrils across the world and a genuine archaic revival was underway. My bags were packed; South America beckoned, and the ancient mysteries of the rainforest awaited. I wanted in on it…”

What is Amazonian shamanism and why is it important to the world today, as we stand on the brink of environmental change and global transformation? Traveling on a magazine assignment to Peru, Rak Razam - editor and co-founder of Undergrowth.org, sets out to discover the answers. He joins a growing movement of Western tourists coming for the legal experience of ayahuasca – the “vine of souls” – a South American hallucinogenic plant that is said to heal, and connect to the divine.

'Mercury' is an excerpt form the new Undergrowth anthology of poems by Melbourne slam poet Si, winner of the 2008 Victorian Poetry Slam.

'Mercury' will be launched at the Emerging Writer's Festival in Melbourne's Thorbury Theatre - Friday May 29th.

The second issue of the national independent quarterly newspaper, Wai is out on the streets next week.

It covers a range of national issues not seen in the mainstream media; from the visual spectacle of the Florentine Valley, Tasmania to the proposed expansion of BHP Billiton Roxby Downs; the hills of canberra and the demand to end the NT Intervention now to the streets of Mparntwe- Alice Springs and the fight to stop the Angela Pamela Uranium mine; from riding around Victoria for six weeks on an Otesha bike tour teaching school children about climate change and sustainability to guerilla gardens, food forests and grey water systems. The March issue of Wai has it all plus more.