The Journey Book Project

 “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.

Undergrowth & The Journeybook  presents the Melbourne Premiere  of “Entheogenesis: Awakening the Divine Within” film screening and discussion at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, Wednesday the 15th April, 2009. The screening will include a discussion of issues relating to topics covered, with speakers in conjunction from the Undergrowth collective followed by an afterparty at Loop Bar from 10pm till late.

Syndicate of Initiative presents THE BOHEMIAN MASQUERADE BALL, a grand carnivale of undergound culture; a debaucherous boiling pot of live music, theatre, circus, video and performance art. This MARCH 7TH we will be holding the event at our largest venue to date, the exquisite THORNBURY THEATRE, Australia's first talking cinema. With it's velour carpets, gold bannisters & ornate ceiling, the 100 year old theatre promises to be the perfect venue for this spectacular event.

With over 100 performers from as far and wide as Tasmania, Brisbane, Sydney & the best local acts from Melbourne, the Ball will feature an eclectic mixture of sounds, stunts, and spectacles, spread across 4 stages. The crowd will be whipped into a frenzy by;

 NOW FOR SALE AT THE JOURNEYBOOK WEBSITE:

 www.thejourneybook.com

Undergrowth #8: The Journeybook is an essential map of hyperspace for the contemporary psychonaut and the uninitiated alike. Travel through time and space and partake of mushrooms at Harvard, hemp in Nimbin, DMT in the Amazon and anti-depressents in the suburbs of the West, to name but a few of the experiences which await you. Dance at Dionysian festivals, meet alchemists in the laboratories of Switzerland, trippers in the corporate highrises of Brisvegas, and journey to the edge of the universe within our anthology’s pages...

 Click here for the full MP3 podcast from EGA 2008

and some further reading on the ongoing Resacralising Movement in Australia:

The Medicines of Transition  

 ”Invisible, indivisible unspeakable radiance that you are.”
                            -  From a song whose name is at present unknown to me.

This is an advance look at of one of the key presentations at the forthcoming  Entheogenesis Australis 2008 Symposium...

The Medical Marijuana Movement, alongside the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and others are doing great work to publicise the medical benefits of psychedelics, but greater effort is needed in promoting a return to the entheogenic foundations of religion and the spiritual arena. The time is right fort each of us advocate that organised religion reinstate the Earth/Ecological Sacraments, at least at special Earth Masses and Retreats.

'The Night Doctors'
by Tim Parish
ink on paper
Japan, 2008

from the exhibition 'Visions of Mu'.

Somewhere between midnight and dawn, in a small room on the border of Thailand and Laos my friend Cassandra told me about a vision she had had in the Amazonian jungle a few months earlier. 

'I felt as if all the creatures of the forest, the insects, the snakes, the creatures of the night were surrounding me and ripping my body to pieces" she told me matterof factly. "It wasn't painful, but there was no escaping the fact that my body had been torn to shreds and I had to confront the reality that I was no longer alive..." - and that was only the beginning of her eight hour long Ayahuasca journey.

art: Oli Dunlop

 

The use of psychedelic substances can be traced back for millennia, to the dawn of human history. Since time immemorial, plant materials containing powerful, consciousness-expanding compounds were used to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness or, more specifically, an important subgroup of them, which I call "holotropic" (Grof 2000). These plants have played an important role in shamanic practice, aboriginal healing ceremonies, rites of passage, mysteries of death and rebirth, and various other spiritual traditions. The ancient and native cultures using psychedelic materials held them in great esteem and considered them to be sacraments, "flesh of the gods" (Schultes, Hofmann, and Raetsch 2001).

Human groups, which had at their disposal psychedelic plants, took advantage of their entheogenic effects (entheogenic means literally "awakening the divine within") and made them the principal vehicles of their ritual and spiritual life. The preparations made from these plants mediated for these people experiential contact with the archetypal dimensions of reality--deities, mythological realms, power animals, and numinous forces and aspects of nature.

Another important area where states induced by psychedelics played a crucial role was diagnosing and healing of various disorders. Anthropological literature also contains many reports indicating that native cultures have used psychedelics for enhancement of intuition and extrasensory perception for a variety of divinatory, as well as practical purposes, such as finding lost persons and objects, obtaining information about people in remote locations, and following the movement of the game that these people hunted. In addition, psychedelic experiences served as important sources of artistic inspiration, providing ideas for rituals, paintings, sculptures, and songs.

Forget the war on terror: global military has been engaged in a decades-long campaign to find chemicals that can control the mind, and 50 years after their first experiments it seems the battlefield of the brain is once again front and centre, writes Rak Razam...



According to the US Centre for Strategic Command, the US is presently engaged in a campaign of "Full Spectrum Dominance" in all fields of existence – land, water, space, cyberspace, etc. – and now the realm of the mind itself. Yet the military's interest in psychoactives has been long and sustained. During the height of WWII the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA, began the search for a truth serum they could use in intelligence interrogations. In 1945 the US Navy Technical Mission reported that Nazi scientists experimented with mescaline on subjects at the Dachau concentration camp. After the war the U.S. Navy began investigating mescaline itself under the guise of Project Chatter, and for the next three decades they engaged in experiments with mind-altering drugs in an attempt to crack the secrets of the brain.