A lecture given on March 17, 2010 to the Sydney cell of the Evolver network (www.evolver.net) as part of its community "spore" discussion on the future of psychedelics. In which experiential journalist Rak Razam discusses the state of psychedelic culture, where it came from in modern times with the advent of LSD in 1943, the legacy of alchemist Albert Hofmann, and why the psychedelic movement is so important to a sustainable future. Acid opened the mind in the 60s, ecstasy opened the heart in the 80s, and in the 21st century ayahuasca and entheogenic plant sacraments are opening the soul of the West, guiding us back to a cooperative Gaian partnership. As the "second wave of ayahuasca shamanism" sweeps the world in a slo-mo r-evolution, the psychedelic movement is reaching out to the elder indigenous cultures around the world to bridge the gap of our own psychic and spiritual understanding, and is becoming a global entheogenic movement. Can this new wave reach a critical mass of its own understanding, as well as a purity of intent to truly be ready to join the galactic community? Join Razam and the Evolver community to find out...

 to listen to the blog click here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

On the road to Burning Man in a Toyota Prius with Rak Razam and radical cyber anthropologist Jenny Ryan (aka Tuna Bananas), research assistant to media pundit Howard Rhinegold (The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs). Jenny discusses cyber literacy, smart mobs and virtual communities with experiential journalist Rak Razam... How do we use technology to form communities and conduct virtual everyday social interactions? Does social networking keep the drones sedate and make us good workers? Or does Super-poking and quiz sharing provide a social glue for online communities? Where does the drift towards hive mind collectivism in the human matrix being able to laterally recognize itself – an ambient awareness – lead us? What role does the ego play in blogging and lifestreaming? And as social tribes grow, does it increase our pool of knowledge and ability to draw upon the wisdom of the collective? Or is it all an Orwellian marketing wet dream? The intent behind technology makes all the difference... *warning* some scratchy wind muffles about 20 minutes in... the perils of experiential podcasting...

25: Virtual Networks and Social Media

In A Perfect World

For more information see: www.jennyryan.net/

Find more podcasts by Rak Razam here.

An illuminating interview into the world's first edible art...

In conversation with Mark McCloud, acid blotter art historian and 60s archivist in his home in the Mission district of San Francisco, August, 2009. In which experiential podcaster Rak Razam learns from the master about the colorful and mind-expanding history of blotter art, from the early acid chemist oufits like the "Ghost" and the underground crews that ran the business of enlightenment.

Discover who first put artwork on blotter and how the process of dipping the chemical on artwork was evolved. Acid was originally dipped on string, sugar cubes–even underwear, in the case of Michael Hollingshead (who wrote the book The Man Who Turned On the World) before blotter paper was hit on as a mode of transportation. And then the artform really took off, originally with the chemists themselves choosing the art that would grace the minds of a generation of trippers. But how does the art influence the trip? Did trips like the "Gorbies" with Mikail Gorbachov heads help tumble the Berlin Wall? Why did the infamous Mickey Mouse Sorceror's Apprentice tabs terrify the Disney corp? Like the host in the Catholic mass, is blotter art a holy artform?

Listen to the podcast here.

This talk was transcribed and printed in part in Juxtapose magazine online.

Join passionate plant heads sharing their experiences with psychoactive plants and their relationship to the Gaian matrix. Behind the chemistry are there active intelligences in the plant world, and if so how do we best interact with them? How can reclaiming our human-vegetal partnership help us become a sustainable culture? Why do we need to connect to the plant world? If plants can be teachers, can humans be students? What is our historical and bio-chemical relationship with plants? What does Nature have to teach us? What is the Australian plant kingdom’s place in the global entheo blossoming?

Panel discussion held at EntheoGenesis Australis Nov 7, 2009 (see entheo.net) moderated by Rak Razam, featuring speakers: Jewelli Dollman, Dan Schreiber, Margaret Cross, Michael Bock, Julian Palmer, Rob Bruce and Mulga.

WORDS ARE MAGICK PODCAST

Interview with magickal realist writer Levin Diatschenko, Australian author of "The Man who Never Sleeps" and the recent novella "Meta-Detective". Levin expounds on the act of writing about magical thought, the power of words themselves and the similarities between practising magic and writing with experiential podcaster Rak Razam. Conducted at the Rails Hotel, Byron Bay, mid-Oct 2009.

For more on Levin's work see:  www.levindiatschenko.com

Rak Razam, co-founder of Undergrowth.org and author of Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey hosts a regular series of "experiential journalism" podcasts exploring the changing world around us and the evolution of the global paradigm.

"In a Perfect World" will chart his meetings, musings and collective dreamings amongst the cultural creatives of the global tribe; the Ultraculture of the 21st century.

These recordings are raw snatches of Beatnikian immediatism, unedited downloads from the tribal journey of remembering...

Come anchor the vision and spark the new paradigm alight...

http://in-a-perfect-world.podomatic.com/

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.

Before I'd left Australia I'd watched a pirated DVD of the hard-to-find psychedelic Western Renegade, which shot Guillermo to fame, and a little of the Hollywood spin had rubbed off. In the Hollywood feature, co-written and directed by French filmmaker Jan Kounen, an ayahuasca drinker himself, Guillermo plays a master shaman who initiates the lead character, Mike Blueberry, a Civil-War cowboy, into the world of ayahuasca and spirits.

It cost US $34 million to make and flopped at the box office, mainly because of bad marketing. The special effects were as accurate a copy of Kounen's own ayahuasca journeys as the digital rendering could replicate, triggering "flashbacks" amongst many of the ayahuasqueros who watched it and unsettling revulsion in others.

When I'd interviewed Kounen last night, after the screening of his documentary Other Worlds, which tells the story of his own apprenticeship to Guillermo in over one hundred ayahuasca drinking sessions, he said that it was vital for him to make films about spiritual reality, and ayahuasca.

"There is... a tremendous knowledge that we cannot imagine in our culture, you have to make a bridge to that to make people consider, just consider. The culture protects itself from these concepts. It's like a philosophical issue but it's also like a keeper that doesn't want you to go outside of your own culture."

Kounen has bright shining blue eyes and the calm and grounded nature of a man in his forties who has found inner peace. This French music video and feature film director has carved out a career specializing in bringing aspects of the spiritual world to the screen. As well as Renegade and Other Worlds, he has also filmed a series of one-hour documentaries for TV called Another Reality, and his latest docu-pic was on Amma, a modern day Hindu saint, who purportedly performs miracles.

"Cinema is a great tool to deal with modified states of consciousness and different perceptions, [just as] shamanism, or meditation, or other ways, help us to understand how the creatures that we are work," Kounen said. "If you start to think of [perception] as separate channels, then you start to know how to work the channels, all relative to the information." And if you shatter the channels, which is what he believes ayahuasca does, it can "reveal information... going to the deep meaning of what it is to be human."

In essence, media itself is an altered state of mind, Kounen said, where the director can close-up on an eye or change the sound, and thereby change the perception. This might explain his transition from Hollywood director to ayahuasca drinker, and also the synchronistic fit with the casting of Guillermo as a master shaman playing the master shaman, art mirroring life.

Bowman, Vance and I feel like media ayahuasqueros ourselves as we walk under the blue sky and marvel at the giant cumulonimbus clouds billowing overhead, and take some panoramic shots with our cameras, capturing everything but the spirit of this place. We're in a funny position here as Western media reporting on these spiritual realms -- no matter how many mediums we record in the essence of the ayahuasca experience can't be replicated, only approximated. And even then just crudely.

It's translinguistic, as Dennis McKenna would call it. The shamans say that nature speaks in signs, in the overlapping coincidences and resonances of the natural world and the beings in it. Walking down the dirt road through the cleared jungles, awash in a sea of grassland, it's speaking to me now.

After a few kilometers we reach a sign, which reads: Espiritu de Anaconda. Walking over wooden bridges we pass the lush cultured rainforest and enter into a sprawling multi-unit complex designed to cater to Western standards. The central maloca is about 30' in diameter with a conical roof that reaches almost as high again and houses over two dozen people.

It's booked full tonight with conference attendees wanting to drink ayahuasca in this Amazonian cathedral, fully mosquito-proofed, leave your shoes at the door, please. Add a dozen smaller malocas, guesthouses, the dining room and toilets with porcelain bowls and doors and this starts to feel like the "Club Med" of ayahuasca. I half expect Elle MacPherson to come out of the jungle clad in a leaf bikini, offering a selection of fruits and nuts.

Guillermo moved here from his native Pucallpa and built the center only two years ago, after money from Renegade gave him the capital to expand. "It's safer here, you know," says Carlos, a native Iquitian who works here and meets and greets us ayahuasca gringos. "We have the army here, and the police -- and there is nowhere to run. Pucallpa has the bus to Lima and many exits -- someone can kill you and never be caught, they could get out of town in any of a dozen ways."

It's an oft-repeated urban wisdom and there may be some truth it, but I imagine Guillermo might have been a target himself down in Pucallpa. Despite being a respected healer his expertise has also brought him fame and fortune that most locals can only dream of, and other curanderos have been targeted and blackmailed before.

We've arrived early but there's no sign of Guillermo himself as we have a look around and Vance sets up his photography equipment. Rama, a tall, beautiful black woman with a large afro introduces herself as an anthropology student from France, who has been studying with Guillermo as part of her work documenting indigenous cultures for her fellowship in neo-shamanism.

She films one of Guillermo's helpers who's boiling up crushed ayahuasca vine and other plants in a giant soot-blackened cauldron in a wall-less hut behind the main maloca. As the flames lick up and spray into the air it resembles a witches pot, with the attendant in his shorts, t-shirt and baseball cap looking like a mestizo Beverly Hills pool-boy.

A plume of thick gray smoke billows out, stinging my eyes, and when they clear I can see the jungle medicine, ayahuasca, brewing, bubbling, writhing with life in the boiling phlegm-like green brew. A giant witches cauldron full of snot, and around the thick, brown vine bark are chakroponga leaves that contain the active DMT.

I get a whiff of the brew and it makes me want to vomit. A surge memory of ayahuasca washes up -- the taste of my last experience catching in my throat. I struggle to force it down. They say it takes a few years for the ayahuasquero's body to get used to the brew and properly acclimatize. But the soul? That takes longer -- sometimes forever...

Ayahuasca is not a drug ­-- not in the Western sense. It cannot be abused like recreational chemicals because the taste and experience are so demanding, and the hallucinogenic effect is never the same twice. Rather, it develops a relationship with the drinker, sometimes healing the body, other times illuminating the mind, or deeper still, taking the soul on journeys beyond.

But it will do none of this without the participant putting effort in -- it's not just "pop the red pill and escape the Matrix." Serious students have to give up their Western ways and embrace a rigorous diet low in foods containing tyramine, a chemical which can react badly with the MAO -- inhibiting properties of the vine. No red meat, pork, salt, sugar, fat, caffeine, acidic foods, alcohol or sex, all of which affect the body's sensitivity to ayahuasca. But tell that to a bunch of Western thrillseekers looking for some jungle kicks.

The dark clouds that have been gathering on the horizon all afternoon finally break and a late downpour cleans the air as the other conference gringos start to rush in. They take off their coats and shoes and leave them by the door and pass into the main maloca. We all form a concentric circle hugging the wall, a spiderweb crisscross brace of poles supporting the high cone roof above.

We're an eclectic bunch -- I spot Jay, whom I drank with at Percy's, dressed in a one-piece vomit-proof ayahuasca jumpsuit, and Frank the professor and other familiar faces. Dennis McKenna's here holding court, his bald head gleaming in the late afternoon light as he sits on his mattress and puffs away on his pipe, chatting about altered states. "A lot of psychologists are into science fiction," he says, "it's the closest we can legally get in the West to other worlds..."

Next to him is his seventeen-year-old daughter Caitlin, who's going to college in the fall and is taking ayahuasca tonight for the first time. She's reading a fantasy novel in the dim light like she's in an airport departure lounge waiting for take-off. With her hair back in a bow, glasses and soft, mellow energy, she looks like she'd be more into ponies and horses, maybe some Christian rock.

"I haven't done any psychedelics before, I haven't felt it was time," she tells me with the honed nonchalance of someone who's father is one of the planet's most pre-eminent legal psychedelic researchers. "This is my first ayahuasca experience. I have no expectations, y'know. I'm keeping it open."

Everyone waits patiently and swaps ayahuasca stories and travelers tales, letting our collective energies mingle in the flesh before they meet in the spirit. After my previous problems letting go around the energy of a group, I wonder if this many people all in one maloca, on ayahuasca, will turn me into a psychic pressure cooker ready to explode?

"The word on the ayahuasca forums is that Guillermo's brew is one of the strongest in town," Bowman tells me with a wry smile as he sets up his recording gear down by the edge of his mattress. "And the crew who drank with him on Saturday night say he's definitely loaded the brew to kick gringos' butt!"

"I haven't really seen any spirits or anything of that sort," Alexis chips in excitedly beside us. "But it's really ... I've felt it, like, going through every crevasse, on a sub-atomic level of my body and my spirit... And anything it finds that's dead... or not life and movement... it gets rid of, or fixes or makes me vomit. I remember the first time I drank I vomited, and each time I vomited it would show me a picture of all my bad habits and my life that I was vomiting up and getting rid of."

Great. Everyone seems to vomit up easily but me; it's going to another interesting night. And as the rain keeps falling down and the sounds of the jungle come alive, I start to feel the fear. Fear of the real, of the deep ayahuasca experience and the madness it can bring.

When Jan Kounen apprenticed with Guillermo to make his documentary, Other Worlds on Shibipo shamanism, he went mad for a time, temporarily schizophrenic when he failed to respect the diet and ayahuasca. He says the difference between a madman and an ayahuasquero is that the madman can't communicate what he's seen. Trapped in a recursive psychic groove, the hapless psychonaut doesn't have the guidance, or the ability to escape, and sometimes when he does, not all of him returns.

The trained ayahuasquero, on the other hand, can navigate the abyss and integrate it, even bring a bit of it back and ground it in this realm. This, Kounen told the conference audience before the screening of his documentary, is the role of the artist and the magician. I guess that tonight will be the test of my magic.

There's still a while before the ceremony, so I meander out to the main dining room with the thatched roof and meet Kathleen, a fiftyish American woman from Denver with a blond bob, blue eyes and the warm, nurturing appearance of Carol Brady.

She looks like somebody's mum doing ayahuasca -- and in fact, she is, but she's also a clinical psychologist who's here for her own healing. Kat's drunk the brew once before, ten years ago, and the thought of going back into that raging dimensional flux has gotten her all nervy. She gets out her rosary beads and says prayers over the dining table as I fix us a cup of herbal tea.

There's a half dozen other ayahuasqueros milling about, and Guillermo himself walks in casually, followed by Sonia, his wife and Rama, who at six-foot-two towers over the others.

Guillermo's got a very down-to-earth air about him, and as heads turn and everyone looks he doesn't react, just sits down at the table. With his broad face, graying hair and mellow vibe, he looks like a Peruvian version of Lorne Green on the Ponderosa, tucking into his dinner of chicken, rice and vegetables. Apparently he's not worried about a strict diet before drinking, but I guess he writes the rules. Only the Timex watch hints at his affluence, and there's still no hint of the mystic who will lead the ceremony tonight.

One of the gringos asks about the mix of the ayahuasca brew, and Rama translates Guillermo's explanation that the DMT-containing chacruna that he usually uses still hasn't reached maturity in the new gardens. Instead he's using another plant analogue -- chacropanga, which is native to the Iquitos area, but is just as powerful, he promises. This worries Kat, who doesn't want an overwhelming experience.

"Will you help us, Guillermo, if it's too strong for us? Will you look after us?" she pleads with her big blue eyes. "Francisco said he would at Sachamama, but when I cried out for him he was overwhelmed helping others, and he wasn't there for me."

Guillermo assures her he will look after everyone, and because of the big size of the group tonight his wife Sonia, who has also been trained as a shamana, as well as another apprentice shaman, will be brought in to help facilitate the circle. In today's tourist market with different sizes and physiologies, the curanderos control undue effects by measuring the dose of the brew they give their customers, and they also claim to be able to psychically tune in and help control the journey while it's happening. Nobody wants to see Carol Brady freaking out on ayahuasca, nobody.

"I drank three times, then no more," Rama says as she tells me more about her own ayahuasca experiences. "The brain has the memory of the plants so I am still connected to the visions. After [ayahuasca] I had flashbacks in my dreams and when awake."

She's known Guillermo since she worked as a translator on Kounen's Renegade film, and tonight she will also help facilitate the ceremony. She's not the only French speaker here at the center -- probably because of the fame of Kounen's movie and documentary in his native France, there is a disproportionate number of French seekers here, and French Canadians. Perhaps to stave off the rapidly spreading interest by French front-runners, in 2005 France became one of the first countries in the world to ban ayahuasca usage outright, regardless of religious considerations.

Back in the ceremonial maloca, Tobin from Denmark is tending the altar with a small Swiss/Peruvian boy with a bowl haircut who's in his pyjamas, while his mother rests nearby on a mattress near the door. The boy has a sweet, confident spirit as he melts the bottom of one candle and joins it on top of another, like he's at an adults' pyjama party and he knows the drill.

"Will you be drinking tonight?" I ask him, and he shakes his head calmly from side to side.

"No. Tonight I just watch," he says, and I wonder how old he is -- seven? Nine? It seems natural and right that he is here with his mother and family, participating in an ayahuasca ceremony, witnessing the healing that the medicine brings. It makes it feel more real, like the way native South Americans have been taking ayahuasca for millennia as part of their village life, no War on Drugs or war on consciousness, just plant medicines connecting to a greater spiritual whole. How can you hide this from your children, this secret from the jungle that unlocks the world?

At sunset, we drink. Yet again I learn that when you spend the night in pitch darkness with a large group of people and take ayahuasca, purging, sweating, dying and rebirthing together, you get to know each other pretty well. You might not remember their names, but afterwards you remember their face and the sound of their suffering, and they yours, and there is a special bond between you.

To my left, Bowman darts forward and crouches by the round plastic bowl placed at the end of his mattress. Gripping it with both hands he makes a swift, sharp gurgling sound and vomits quickly into the bowl. I can see his shape and the outline of his back in the diffuse moon light as it shines through the thick mosquito nets that surround the maloca, heaving over and over.

Around the circumference of the room another drinker scrabbles for their bucket, as if set off by Bowman's vomiting. Dry wracking heaves and the choking of dry bile reverberate through the dark as the drinker gets caught with nothing to bring up. The vomiting goes on in successive waves across the room and through the night, for three, four, six hours or more, and just when you think you've kept it down, or purged as much as you could, the spirit of ayahuasca finds another dark crevasse and helps bring it to the light.

I find I'm a bit lighter than the first time, but I still have blockages. I'm sitting cross-legged on my jaguar-spotted blanket with the heels of my feet tucked under me, spine straight, chakras aligned and my crown pointing up to the stars.

Ayahuasca is a fickle mistress -- she likes it when you put out for her, make a show of it and put some effort in. Ayahuasca is also a plant medicine, and as such she reads you and what you need, and that changes every time, both as you progress on the path and as new issues come to light. Like a high maintenance girlfriend, the relationship with 'aya' can be hard work, but the rewards far outweigh the sacrifices.

I'm starting to come on slow, a warm billowing headspace enlarging to take in the whole maloca and the spirit zones phasing in. My head is awash with the psychic detritus of my own mind: Past loves, mistakes, issues from my life all flash before my eyes, but I'm not sure if my brain's just hyperactive or if there's something deeper going on...

Like last time, there appears to be some subtle interspecies relationship in this fugue where ayahuasca is reading me as I re-experience my issues and my head pours out my subconscious into my conscious mind. The vision/ dreams don't stop, they plague me all night long in wave after wave of emotional torment, little things blown out of all proportion. Maybe this is part of the healing, that as I remember I also let go, for la purga, she is coming, I can feel her building...

In the Amazonian "cosmovision" everything on the earth has a spirit animating it and the bridge between the earth and the spirit world is us, the living things. Guillermo says that there is a unity between everyone and everything, an "ecological bridge between the living systems." And this extends beyond the material plane to a multi-dimensional universe, he believes, where the shaman has to work on a superior level to accomplish his will.

Working with the plants is the first level, he says, and the second is to "control the occult elements of the spiritual world." The third is a purely spiritual level that affects the physical, for example: The knowledge of how to become invisible, or how to travel in the innerworlds, the sub-aquatic world or the cosmic world. The other dimensions you go to depend on the person drinking ayahuasca and how they want to work, he says. Spoken like a true Jedi.

The candle goes out and it's pitch black. A heavy stillness hangs in the air like a burlap curtain -- maybe it's the spirits. Everyone is quiet, moving around slightly, the silence of the moment punctuated by the inevitable promeathean heave of another drinker vomiting. And as they vomit up come all their hurts, their pains, their suppressions and ills.

There's no point of focus in this darkness, no sense of time progressing. To the unprepared this could be hell. Possessed by a strange spirit, your body wracked by wave after wave of nausea, vomiting up green bile in crushing waves.

And in the darkness my mind is up to its old tricks, trying to imprint form on the primal chaos. I want to see the snakes, the alligators, the jaguar totem spirits, and I want it so much my mind is doing its best, grabbing at the shadows and seeing eyes, slithering obsidian dream snakes. It's as if the world of spirits is playing itself out as shadows on a black canvas, tantalisingly beyond reach. It must be the chacropanga Guillermo's using in this brew, it's less full-on visual than the chacruna after all.

The flash of mental thoughts continues and at times it's impossible to tell which bits are me thinking, which bits the ayahuasca speaking and which bits the ayahuasca making me think I'm speaking. The voice of aya is soft, subtle, and yet again it has the emotional nuances of a relationship. She speaks in concept-images, in that post-McCluhan symbology where you become what you see, and in the overlapping you know it, message/medium as one.

On the dark of my vision I see a flash of a seed snaking through the void of space, coming from beyond. The funny thing is, as I see it another bit of me is sifting through the mental dialogue and saying: "that's not one of your thoughts."

"Whoo hoo hoo" Guillermo's staccato breaths punctuate the dark, short, pitched breaths that strike like compressed air darts and cut through the heavy atmosphere around us. It is one of the most eclectic sounds I have ever heard. Distinctly sentient, with an intelligence behind it, but at the same time insect-like, alien and just beyond the reach of the conscious mind. The sound is his icaro, the first wave of his bag of tricks to piece the veils that separate the worlds.

"Whoo hoo hoo ooo" his icaros cut through the dark, tuning in my consciousness as something cracks along the back of my skull, some slight tweak as the muscles tighten and now I'm feeling lighter, different, but it's hard to place. Guillermo's tuning us in, sinking us into a shared phase space and voila: the curtain is pulled back and we're smeared across the invisible canvas. We've arrived.

Outside the maloca a wave of insect consciousness is resonating back a whoo hoo hoo pitch that matches Guillermo's icaros, and as the two meet and cancel each other out I feel as if I'm breathing in a dreaming universe...

By the moonlight I can see the wooden beams of the roof shimmering like a vast spiderweb, the central pole flashing with mythic resonance like the World Tree of Norse myth, connecting the axis mundi with the worlds above.

And suddenly around the circumference of the roof a billion, billion eyes come into view like a shimmering peacock tail, all veiled behind a dark lens. They drink me in, blink and stare again with a reptilian coolness, images warping one into another rapidly. I feel like I'm looking into some sort of hyper-dimensional mirror and that the thing on the other side is experiencing what it is to be human through my eyes, all our eyes...

Sometime in the dream Guillermo comes round and blows mapacho smoke down our necks and backs. He beckons me to lower my head, not out of respect, but to cleanse my crown chakra, and his touch has a gentleness and a collected strength. Then quite suddenly the darkness erupts with a thundering growl, bigger than us all, big enough to hold the world in its jaws. Snakes, crocodiles, writhing anaconda spirits and jaguar eyes imprint from my subconscious onto the canvas of the night, all my fears spewing forth with them.

The ayahuasca makes urgent rumbles in my belly and as a wave of nausea washes over me I muster the fortitude to stand and grope my way through the dark to the door. Mercifully, it opens as I push it and stumble out into the night, punch-drunk with the spirit of the vine in me and threatening to come up quick.

The silhouetted jungle is bathed in a silver spectral light as Peruvian helpers stationed outside the door point me towards the toilets, a shimmering ball of light only twenty metres away that seems to skip in my field of vision. My whole body feels like it's underwater, that the consciousness trying to drive it is doing so from very far away and under challenging circumstances.

After an eternity on the path, lost in the trees, I finally find my way to the toilets and an empty cubicle. The porcelain bowl and seat is a miracle, as is the fresh toilet paper, and as I am bathed in the bright artificial light the ayahuasca in me judges all is ready. With some secret psychic trigger I'm not in control of, a violent rush of vomit erupts from me and into the basin next to the toilet, then another and another, my whole body gripped with peristalsis and squeezing out sickness.

The lightness of my body post-vomit feels wonderful. As I cough and splutter over the sink and try to hang on to the shifting space-time coordinates around me, a trick of light draws my attention to the warm sick backed up in the sink.

It's still bubbling like a fizzy drink, this ayahuasca-cola, but it has a curious opalescent film to it, like oil rainbows on water, or the eyes from the other side of the mirror. A magic mirror, perhaps, created from my ayahuasca vomit. As I look into the magic mirror the eyes become spots, and the spots move with the shape of a large cat, a jaguar stalking the jungle.

He stops in front of a grandfather tree with thick snakes of flowering ayahuasca vine twining around its frame and looks back, as if he can see me. Suddenly he pounces, muscles rippling and claws extended, and shreds the thick vine into shards and starts nibbling on the leaves. Then he starts tripping out, rolling around with glazed eyes, and then he's vomiting too, and I realize it's me, me in the jaguar skin, and it's me who's vomiting once again into the sink.

I meet my fears and they devour me, and with another roar of the jaguar-god melts the realization -- it's the thunder of a jumbo jet overhead -- the 10:00pm flight back to Lima, back to civilization. And as the hallucinogenic jungle envelops me I start to wonder if I can ever come back from this, ever return to civilization as I left it, or if something inside me has now changed forever, and the jaguar is the one who stalks the world in my skin...

But there's no turning back now, no off switch, just me alone with the universe and the jaguar in the forest, two crazy cross-species trippers sharing a cosmovision that says we are both one.

Photo by John Bowman

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.

A 1994 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office says that between 1940 and 1974, the American Department of Defense and other national security agencies experimented on thousands of people with mind-altering substances. The CIA reportedly gave hallucinogens to "volunteer" soldiers in 149 projects throughout the 50s and 60s. Most of these experiments were part of the MK-ULTRA program, which was formed to counter supposed Communist advances in brainwashing on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea, as later dramatised in the film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. The Army was largely interested in using LSD as an incapacitating agent to disable enemy troops without bloodshed, but a bizarre culture of acid experimentation soon ensued as the game got out of control.

There's a video on YouTube: "LSD Military Experiment", which shows LSD being given to British troops in the 1950s. Around 25 minutes after ingestion signs of the drug become apparent. Whilst on a mock military exercise the men begin to relax and giggle, while others start to trip out. After 35 minutes the radio operator takes off his communications backpack and looks around with a huge grin. The efficiency of the rocket launcher is also under some doubt, and "ten minutes later the attacking section had lost all sense of urgency" the narrator decries. As well trained military soldiers roll around in fits of laughter and climb trees, the true power of the mind-altering drug becomes suddenly became apparent: here is something that can undermine the nature of the war machine itself.

LSD and mescaline were just two of a host of specific psychoactive substances experimented with; others included tetra hydro cannabinoids (agents injected highly-concentrated liquid THC onto cigarettes) and a wide array of pharmaceutical agents. In 1962 the U.S. Army added Quinuclidinyl benzilate, a "superhallucinogen" code-named BZ) to its neurochemical arsenal, after noticing very small doses produced stupor and delirium that lasted for days. By 1964 the Army was using BZ in Vietnam, and stockpiling huge quantities of the gas for anticipated use.

Many compounds were unknowingly tested not just on soldiers, but on the civilian populace as well. Perhaps the most infamous was an intelligence project wryly named "Midnight Climax", where prostitutes were enlisted to give their unwitting clients LSD. The CIA also seems to have partly-funded and promoted the use of LSD throughout the 1950s and 60s, in part to do to the burgeoning anti-war movement what it had done to soldiers both in England and America.

Now in the 21st century, in a growing climate of urban unrest and resource scarcity, military officials have been funding an increasing number of projects exploring non-lethal weaponry for crowd control. But restraining an unruly populace on a physical level is redundant if you can control their mind, which might explain the current resurgence in medical and military interest in hallucinogens.

The lesson learned from their Cold War mind experiments wasn’t, it seems, that testing drugs on unsuspecting people is ethically wrong. Instead it appears to be that the level of scientific knowledge back then made the drugs administered unpredictable. But since the 1990s modern assay techniques have allowed greater understanding of the workings of the brain and how chemicals bind to neuro-receptors there. And now, as the war on terror funds an unprecedented military budget, neuroscience can finish what was started all those years ago.

If you think civilians are protected from such experimentation, think again. The 1925 Geneva Protocol was the first international treaty to ban the use of chemical weapons, and it was backed up by the 1975 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention and the 1995 Chemical Weapons Convention. While all modern nations say they are against such neurochemical warfare, loopholes exist for use in cases of "law enforcement, including domestic riot control". And the development of calmative agents, dissociatives and "equilibrium agents" by military scientists for urban use, is on the rise.

In 2002 during the Russian theatre seige at Breslen, the Russian army used a knockout agent – most likely the opiate derivative fentanyl – against Chechen rebels that also killed 120 hostages. Not long after, in 2003 as the US went to war in Iraq, the then US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, announced the US was interested in (bio)chemical weapons. Rumsfeld charged the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) and the US Army's Soldier Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM) to lead research into drugs that affect things like the sense of pain, consciousness itself and emotive states like anxiety and fear. Fentanyl, ketamine, diazepam and a swath of other anaesthetics and anti-depressants were on their list of drugs of interest.

As the pharmaceutical companies line up for the growing military budgets to explore these new wave of mind weapons, a whole new market is opening up for the military-industrial complex that threatens to change the way we think – one way or another.

For as William Burroughs said in 'Nova Express': "This is a game planet. All games are hostile and basically there is only one game, and that game is war. Research into altered states of consciousness – which might result in a viewpoint from which the game itself could be called into question – is inexorably drawn into the game."

It's your move.

* this article first appeared in Australian Penthouse magazine, July 2008 

As they begin their magick rite, the sky clouds over and darkens. A cold wind sweeps the top of Glastonbury Tor, the legendary British power spot where ley lines converge and primal dragon energy is concentrated. Four altars are set up with wooden poles forming triangular spaces, littered with talismans. Inside the circle between the altars step 12 people, a ragtag collection of pagans, gypsies and travellers that represent the source races of humanity. As a brilliant zig-zag flash of lightning breaks the clouds, Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule steps into the circle followed closely by two others, their six arms waving like a spider, spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of life. The initiates are pierced through their chest and sewn together with a string web, then anointed as they sing a range of tones to activate their chakras, the energy centres running up their spines. This was the ‘13th Tribe’ weaving, a boggling ritual to unite the warring races of humanity and connect to the earth, and you haven’t seen anything yet…

What the fuck, you’re probably thinking? Here’s the deal: the world is stranger than you believe. And one of the strangest of the strange is Australia’s own Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule. He’s a ‘chaorder magickian’ who dabbles in invoking Godforms, mutating his own body, travelling the astral realm, and manifesting his will in any number of exotic rituals across the world, from Uluru to the pyramids in Egypt. But tonight we’re sitting round an open fire in a concrete backyard in a dilapidated share house in Brunswick, in the suburbs of Melbourne. There are ley lines here too, but the power lines overhead are more evident. A life-sized, hand-carved clay statue of the Goddess Kali is here with us, terrifying Kali with her eight limbs and long rolling tongue, adorned with skulls round her neck and a belt of human hands.

But wait, let’s step back a second and take all this in. If you can suspend your cultural disbelief, this is all about magick – and it’s heavy stuff, indeed. None of that garden variety smoke and mirrors that celebrity magicians like Harry Houdini practised, this is the real deal, the ancient deal for a new age. This is the knowledge that witches and warlocks, medieval magickians, alchemists, and generations of occultists have kept alive, and one of its leading modern practicioners is sitting opposite me now. A lean man in his 30s, Orryelle’s got a long face with a broad nose, his hairline shaved back into a sharp triangle at the crown. It makes his head seem elongated, like it’s been stretched. There’s a collection of esoteric jewellery and charms around his neck and dangling from his ears, which have an elfin tweak to them. His blue eyes are piercing, mischievous, matching the cheeky smile he radiates.

“Magick is … a direction and focusing of will and intent,” Orryelle says, handing me a cup of coffee he’s just made. I can’t help but notice the serpent head tattooed along his thumb and forefinger, jaws open wide and about to strike. “To do a ritual or a spell is to manifest your desired intent or result… [But] magick isn’t necessarily all about spell casting and looking for deliberate results. Magick is something that's alive in our existence.” He sits down cross-legged by the fire and gazes deeply into the flames, flickering shadows dancing across his face.

Since the last peak of magickal interest back in the Victorian era, when the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had wealthy and famous initiates like the poet W.B. Yeats, the idea of magick has been on the decline. Reduced in the public mind to Harry Potter special effects and Hollywood glam, or stage magic, illusion and sleight-of-hand tricks, magic has become a pale shadow of its true origin. That’s why Orryelle and many other ‘Chaos Magickians’ have upheld the tradition of spelling ‘magick’ with a ‘k’, which was originated by the infamous Aleister Crowley in the early 20th century to set it apart from the sanitised version. As they see it, everything is magick, and life itself is a spell we’re all under. When you have the eyes to see and the will to connect, it’s like reaching out and plucking ripe fruit off a tree.

“You have to look at things differently and see the magick in things, hear it, be aware of the flow of synchronicity. You need to be aware of the patterns of fate, of the Gods and spirits that are around us all the time, and be tuned into them,” says Orryelle , the Trickster-magickian in the moonlight. The fire swirls around and casts light on the Kali statue to my right, as if on cue. Kali’s one of the allies that Orryelle works with in his magickal rituals, along with the Egyptian lioness-headed Sekhmet, the ‘demon’ Choronzon and others, an astral posse handpicked from the religions and mythologies of the world. Orryelle made the Kali statue himself and has used it in his ritual performances that he and his band of magickians in Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co. have conducted to take theatre beyond its usual bounds of ‘acting’ into the realm of Becoming. You see, in their modern blend of ancient magick ritual and public performance, they don’t just act out their characters, they become them, invoking Gods and archetypes of many mythologies and grounding their attributes.

"Sometimes it can feel quite strange, like you're not yourself, you're possessed or whatever,” Orryelle explains. “But a lot of the time I feel like it's all something within me anyway, something within us all. Even scientists acknowledge this now with the whole DNA thing, that everything we've all experienced is within us as a potential, it's just a matter of accessing it. If it was completely outside us then how could we experience or know it? [So] invoking different deities or archetypes is like expressing different parts of us that we might not normally acknowledge or tap into, a more complete awareness.” Sounds all above board, doesn’t it? Just slip into a nice, comfortable Godform, take on its attributes and use them to enact your will. Well try this on:

“The spirit of Black Eagle came as a great black silhouette - a living shadow of sorts – and alighted on my chest, where its talons sank deep into my flesh, melding into my skin, until I had absorbed the entire shadowy bird within. Then the wings burst out my back, as my head morphed into that of a goat, great horns spiralling up and out from my hairy black forehead.” That’s how Orryelle described the time he ritually invoked the Templar deity Baphomet a few years back. The transformations might all be on the astral level, but the results are reputed to bring forth material from both the subconscious, and the supra-conscious beyond the individual. Knowledge of events and people, ideas, secrets; glimpses of beyond. As Orryelle explains: “Fantasies and astral journeys, or dreams are magickal in their way, but real magick is bringing those fantasies or visions to the physical world so you can then share them with other people. It's all about manifesting things in this world.”

And what better way to ground the realm of ideas than in the canvas of the flesh? Orryelle has been pushing his body to new forms of magickal expression, using it like any artist would a tool. As part of his performance art, which has taken him from the streets of Fitzroy to the Edinburgh Fringe and the world stage, he’s had small bird’s wings sewn on his ears, and wedge-tailed eagle wings sewn onto his back, sutured into the skin and a dozen other bodily mutations each more shocking than the one before. “It's all about focusing on yourself to go beyond the pain for temporary transformations. It's focusing of the will to demonstrate your mutability,” Orryelle tells me. “The [eagle wings] were so large and heavy and were sewn in quite deeply; it really felt like they were part of me,” he sighs. They only lasted 48 hours before decomposition, pain and the logistics of having real wings embedded in his back made it too difficult to continue, but it started a phase of extreme body modification as a magickal act. “The actual body, the human form, is more mutable then we may think,” Orryelle laughs with an impish grin, stoking the fire with a stick.

Ha, it sure is. I remember when my English mate, Tom, first met Orryelle in the middle of Australia back in 2000, on an eco-activist convoy celebrating the Winter Solstice out back of Alice Springs. He’d just conducted another one of his group chakra workings, this time at Uluru, ‘the solar plexus of the world’. He was also taking estrogen, the female growth hormone, as a magickal act, and as he came over the lip of the dusty claypan where we were camped and walked towards us, his top off, a pair of small, pert girl-breasts jiggled on his chest. Tom tried to keep his eyes off his puckish man-woman’s assets, but understandably, his jaw dropped.

“I've always been attracted to the hermaphroditic [both sex organs] Gods/Goddess forms and I love the idea of becoming more feminine in an actual physical, manifest way – but without becoming less masculine,” Orryelle explains when I ask him about his man-boobs, which have receded since he stopped the hormones, although an increased sensitivity has been retained. “But then I found, as I have with any kind of physical transformation that I've done, that… the physical journey began to create spiritual changes. I went further into recognising aspects of my femininity on emotional as well as physiological levels. [Then] nine months or so of taking the estrogen and invoking this inner hermaphroditism, to become as female as I could without becoming any less male, I began to realise I was getting to the end of that process... I couldn't keep doing this without it affecting my masculinity.”

The ‘Crying Game’ maneouver culminated in his own ‘Alchymical Wedding’, where he married himself, first dressed as a bridegroom, then bridesmaid. Then in combined regalia s/he threw a bone boquet with flowers attached and engaged in some spontaneous glossalalia, or speaking in tongues. It was just perfect. Oh sure, so you can imagine him possessed by Baphomet, all tails and horns, but not a wee pair of boobies? Get a grip. No door must go unexplored for the serious magickan. “What we think of as our identity or what we present as our identity is just the surface, and underneath is a more central essence. And that's a scary thing for a lot of people in itself because they identify with the social masks,” Orryelle says.

It makes sense then, that he called his magickal group the ‘Hermaphroditic Order of the Silver Dusk’, both as a counterpoint to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and his own mutational experiments. Orryelle describes it as “an art movement [in which] we totally immerse ourselves in magick. We plunge ourselves into the abyss if need be and see what's really there in the deeper recesses of the subconscious. We use art to do that and to explore the deep self. We don’t just explore a bit of magick symbolism in our artwork. We actually use art to fully explore magick and the untapped and unknown – that's the true meaning of the occult, the hidden.”

The Silver Dusk is the hidden face of his Metamorphic Ritual Theatre public performance troupe, which became famous for their ‘Labyrinth’ art-installation pieces at Confest in the mid-90s. Rather than just being a performance in a theatre, the Labyrinth installations were large mazes woven through the forest, creating paths with string and rope in-between trees. People got totally lost in them in more ways than one. Within the space was a whole world where the Metamorphs took on the roles of different characters and archetypes, mixed in with performers invited in to do their own thing, and punters who were drawn into the act, totally blurring the line between performer and audience. “A lot of people received some kind of transformation or initiation from it, by wandering into another world and becoming absorbed by it. It gave them a realisation of the possibility of creating their own world,” Orryelle says, poking at the embers of the fire.

Indeed. One of my fondest memories of the whole thing is getting zapped on the nipple by a raven-haired beauty with an electric cattle prod. Very arousing, and that’s all part of the magickal theatre, to enagage the senses. Which might be where Hollywood has gotten confused about magickal groups being all some type of Satanic sex orgy. That isn’t always accurate – the truth is that sexuality itself is a very powerful magick force and it can sometimes be used in a group setting if the participants agree. “Kundalini energy is a raw creative fire that can go into sexuality or other types of creativity and expression, arts or ritual,” Orryelle says. “Or it can go into several or all of those things at once. Why not use it for all simultaneously? It's the same basic energy. They can fuel each other.”

That same kundalini energy is also what Orryelle’s been helping raise with his global chakra workings on both a personal and global level. These group rituals “help activate the kundalini of participants and open their chakras at the corresponding sacred sites which are the Earth's charkas in ritual microcosmic resonance with it’s own rising Kundalini,” the magick man explains. He’s led five group workings so far: The first working was at Mt Shasta in California – the base chakra; Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia, is the navel chakra; the solar plexus chakra is Uluru in the centre of Australia, and Glastonbury Tor, in England is the heart chakra. And most recently, just last year, he performed a group throat chakra working in Giza, Egypt that took him deep within the pyramids themselves for an amazing ritual. “Vissudha is the chakra of sound, vibration and communication so the emphasis was upon harmonic chanting and Words of Power, rooted in Ancient Egyptian magick and mythology to resonate with the site of activation,” he says. Just imagine:

The colourful troupe rides across the desert sands on decorated camels and horses, bells jangling and magickal garments blowing in the wind. The Great Pyramid of Giza crests the horizon, they disembark their rides and enter. Cutting through the herd of tourists, the magickians ascend the long, dark, narrow shaft up to the King’s Chamber in a somber silence. Taking deep breaths together, the crew begins chanting the tone of the base chakra, which grows and resonates through the ancient chamber. “When we reached the throat chakra tone itself, the volume and power of its open-mouthed 'Eeeee...' resonance set the guard off again, but his now high-pitched cries were barely audible, and soon ceased. This was the Vissudha Chakra wide open:unsupressed, unstoppable,” Orryelle recollects.

“[We] continued this primary Vissudha tone for as long as possible, wave upon wave of it resonating throughout the pyramid and beyond until we felt to finally shift on up to the third eye's more inward 'mmmmm' humming vibration, then the wyrd harmonics of the tongue-turned-back 'nnng' of the Bindu chakra in the back of the head. The subtleties of this then blasted up into our crowns, voices and spirits exultant in the ecstatic high 'Ohhh' tone of the Sahasrara. We were open to and at one with the Universe, even the guard's last futile and wavering barks now just a speck in this all-pervasive bliss. Grounding back to the low base chakra tone, we paused for a few moments silence, released each others hands and turned to leave, our work there complete.”

Wow. Heavy. Duty. Shit. What strikes me most about Orryelle is the sheer audacity of what he’s doing, of the magickal life he’s living, beyond the realms of everyday perception. He’s brought his magickal self to the internet via his extensive 'Mutation Parlour' site and now his myspace page, which he uses to network the global magickal community for future ritual performances, and is the editor of a printed magickal journal, SilKMilK MagiZain. He’s also a prolific visual and sonic artist, and has recently launched the second edition of his BOOK of KAOS Tarot Deck. His artwork on the tarot cards revels in a raw, elemental energy that captures the images of the Gods and spirits he works with on the astral level and grounds them with ink and paper, often with erotic imagery. "A lot of erotic art touches upon the realms of esoterica, since 'occult' means 'hidden' and there are many realms of sexuality still taboo.” Orryelle calls his art ‘Esoterotica', as it “displays the inner kundalini energy which propels eroticism, rather than just the exoteric or outer play of forms.”

Orryelle’s ultimate goal with the global chakra workings is to culminate the work at the crown chakra (in Tibet) by Solstice, 2012, because there's a large collective vision that there's going to be some kind of mass transformation in or by that year. And transformation is what he thrives on. “It feels like the planet’s kundalini, her fire, her collective energy as an organism is transforming and awakening as a natural progression, perhaps as a response to what's going on in the world,” Orryelle muses. And as she wakes, the magick is returning, or maybe it’s just that more of us are able to see it once again.

Finally, our audience is over. Orryelle stands up and stabs at the dying embers of the fire with his stick, sending a skinny plume of smoke trailing up, stinging my eyes. And when I open them again, he’s gone...

Just like magick.

* A truncated version of this story first appeared in Australian Penthouse Nov 2007. Photos courtesy Orryelle and co.