The Journey Book Project

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.

About Izwoz

Each Izwoz formation is created with intent to reflect the holographic quality of universal creativity and the twisted mystery within. From beyond the macrocosmic dimensions of space, down through to our DNA- the internal orbital coordinate system of im-possible self reflecting syntactical meta-system of light emitting nucleotide sequences that code our very existence. What we choose to create individually, affects everything collectively.

24 hours past zero? I seem to be talking differently today and not entirely sure why except that 24 hours ago everything was, different. This was my second ayahuasca journey.

It feels different to the last time. My first encounter was a completely serotonin fueled blissful awareness. She appeared so gentle and caring. But I feel her spirit stronger than before and already I can feel her knowing smile. Or is it a smirk, I can control the direction of this can’t I? She seems very serious tonight.

The DJ booth for the 95–6 New Year’s Eve Confest bash was a lean-to bark and stick humpy propped around the base of a glorious river gum tree . This was “back in the day”, when it was all still just dance music with a ‘trancey twisted feel’ to it. As long as the music worked in the moment anything could happen – and it usually did. Eight pm till ten am, with two DJ’s – Jet More (aka Special K in those days) and me, Krusty, plus one live act – Sugar, guiding the entire 14-hour journey. Two small speaker stacks and a few more speakers out the back was the entire sound system for the 1500 strong crowd.

And what a night it was! Robin Mutoid was in full force with a VW Bug sculpture in the middle of the dancefloor with flames jettisoning out over people as they let it all go. A huge Aboriginal Flag was at the back with a smiley face for the yellow sun with a naked aboriginal man playing didj underneath it… Whoosh… the flamethrower ignited the flag and up it went … Later it was settled with the indigenous crew that this was not an act of blasphemy but of prophecy, because society no longer needed to follow flags…

Photosynthesis

by Ahimsalove

digital photo collage 2005

http://www.ahimsalove.com

Journeybook is a collection of tales of altered states, essays, history and manifesto for psychedelic culture in the 21st century. It covers the modern usage of sacramental plants and offers insights into traditional and contemporary shamanism, as well as analysis of the current state of global psychedelic culture and its place in a sustainable future.

It features interviews with Terence McKenna (previously unpublished), Dennis McKenna, Daniel Pinchbeck, as well as articles by Rak Razam, Erik Davis, Graham St John, Tim Parish, Tim Boucher and a fresh selection of bold new writers from around Australia. At 280 pages, it is fully illustrated with dozens of colour paintings, photography and digital graphics from the Undergrowth art collective, including new works by Gerhard Hillmann, Oliver Dunlop, Izwoz, Ahimsa, Tim Parish and others.

Journeybook is an essential handbook for those interested in the subject of consciousness, spirituality and understanding the rich pharmacopia of thought that exists beyond the confines of mainstream cosmology.

Read on. Tune in. Discover.