Quantum Life Bodywork News

Help Free A Major Indigenous Leader Imprisoned in the U.S.

On Tuesday, October 19, 2010, indigenous Colombian healer Taita Juan Agreda Chindoy was detained in the Houston International Airport. He was formally arrested by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for possession of his traditional medicine Ayahuasca. He is now being charged as a federal criminal and is facing up to 20 years in federal prison.

[From Free Taita Juan]

On a not so positive note, and speaking of Indigenous leaders and holders of Traditional knowledge, some sad news from the US recently is detailed at the website above. It is heartening to see the explosion of support for Taita Juan in the social media networks and, I am sure, in the material realm.

Whilst the expression of outrage is understandable, Taita Juan’s arrest serves as a reminder to all who actively participate in ceremonial relationship with the Sacred Medicines. In most countries in the world these plant sacraments, absurdly in my own opinion, remain prohibited by law with extreme penalties for their possession and ingestion. It behooves all who have an interest or relationship with these plants to acquaint themselves with the local and federal legislations which pertain to the plants usage in their country. Whilst it is true that the Teacher Plants can offer protection to individuals and groups, there are aways opposing forces and as Steve Beyer highlights in his excellent Singing to the Plants, the realm of Curanderismo [at least in the regions from which Taita Juan hails] deals explicitly with both the light and the dark. Protection in this context is hard won and requires vigilance.

A recent arrest of Santo Daime members in the UK, arrests in Chile and less recently in Australia amongst others show that, although some jurisdictions have a more mature perspective, the brutality of the state can still be swiftly and unfortunately brought to bear on those whose aims and actions may be of great integrity.

Whilst personal work with the Sacred Medicines is imperative and civil disobedience, as Martin Luther King, Gandhi and others have shown, is at times a necessity, the only way we can prevent this kind of travesty from occurring is to work towards the change of legislation that makes it possible in the first first place. Overt public civil disobedience has historically shown to have a high cost for the individuals involved, forcing as it does, the hand of the imperial power of the time. Let us work towards a world in which we who revere the possibilities for healing afforded by these Sacred Medicines can sit down openly and peacefully throughout the world to celebrate our chosen spiritual expression.

My voice joins others in the cry for a rapid, gentle resolution to this terrible situation for Taita Juan. My prayers are with him.

As these things go, moments after posting my reference to Terrence McKenna, i discovered in my in tray, a link to this article by David Suzuki. It interested me as it spoke to a lot of the subjects I have been endeavouring to address of late. David speaks of perceptual filters, references a story told by Wade Davis [who's inspiring TED talk I referenced here] of the cultural and geographical landscape I am currently inhabiting, and articulates an experience with loggers very similar to a historical one of my own.

If presented with the autopsied brains of a diverse array of people, no expert would be able to distinguish from the brains’ anatomy or neurocircuitry the gender, religion, or socio-economic class of the cadavers. Because we are members of one species, our brains, neurons, and sensory organs are similar in structure and chemistry. But if you were to ask both men and women about love and family, Israelis and Palestinians about Gaza, Catholics and Protestants in Belfast about British occupation, Republicans and Democrats about Karl Rove, and Shia, Sunni, and Kurds about U.S. troops, you’d think the respondents came from different planets.

What this demonstrates is that we learn to see the world through perceptual lenses formed by heredity, upbringing, personal experiences, religion, socio-economic differences, and so on. Even though we detect our surroundings in the same way through eyes, ears, nose, skin, and tongue, our brains actively filter that incoming information so that it “makes sense” according to our individual values and beliefs. This creates huge dissonance between fossil-fuel executives, environmentalists, and politicians when we discuss an issue like climate change.

[From Our perceptual filters shape the world! | Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Causes: The Alternative Channel Blog]

Suzuki goes on to describe an experience with Davis which caused him to think about the profound manner in which a cultural perspective determines a people’s relationship with their environment. He contrasts the vast difference between the attitudes to environment between a resident of a Peruvian mountain village, and a Canadian logger. In his account of a confrontation with one such logger, he says;

The confrontation made for good television, but I was frustrated at our inability to find common ground. Finally I told them, “I worked as a carpenter for eight years, and to this day, I love working with wood. No environmentalist I know is against logging. We just want to be sure that your children and grandchildren will be able to log forests as rich as the ones you’re working in now.” Immediately, one of the men replied that he’d never let his kids to go into logging. “There won’t be any trees left!” he said. And there it was. Those men knew that they were cutting the trees down in a way that ensured there would be no harvestable timber for future generations of loggers, but they saw the trees as the way to put food on the table day after day and make the house and car payments at the end of the month.

Some years ago whilst endeavouring to assist in the halting of an illegal logging operation in Central Victoria’s increasingly scant state forest, I was greeted by the sight of an aging but virile, chainsaw wielding logger sprinting towards me with anger and frustration writ clear in his eyes and on his weathered face.

“Come ‘ere ya f***ing hippy f***ing c***”, he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth. He brandished his chainsaw maniacally, “I’ll give ya a f***ing haircut”

I adopted my best Aussie drawl and met him calmly.

“Ah yeah, hippies mate, don’t get me started! Look mate, I got no problem with logging mate, logging’s an honourable trade. Me, I’m from three generations of rice farmers, mate, out Deniliquin way. That mob can’t make a living any more because of the salt problem caused by too much clearing and over irrigation…”

Within 10 minutes we were sitting on a log, sharing a cup of tea and some organic chocolate donated by the local businesses, eager to protect their environment and the tourist trade it afforded them. George looked over his shoulder to see if any of the other loggers were within earshot and said to me sotto voce

“Yair mate, ya don’t need to tell me we’re killin’ the forest, we know it. 50 year ago mate we used to look after this forest, I could fell two trees over the river and go down half a mile and drink a glass ‘a water outta that stream, clear as crystal it were. This industrial loggin’ mate, it’s bullshit, but what am I gonna do? I’m 67 years old mate, and I got family to support.”

There were tears in his eyes.

The operation was found illegal in the courts and the logging process halted, until such time as the corporations found a loophole or a less publicly obvious forest to exploit..

Suzuki concludes his article;

How can we resolve such differences in perspective? I don’t know, but I am sure that the challenge has to do with what’s locked inside our skulls. I have spent more than 40 years trying to use the electronic media to inform and educate, but I continue to be flabbergasted by the strength of those perceptual filters.

We have to find ways of overcoming those blocks so that we can begin to agree on some basic principles. We are not outside or on top of the web of living things; we are deeply embedded in and utterly dependent on it for our survival and well-being. Without that understanding, we will continue on our destructive rampage.

My experiences about the world, with people of all different ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic situation has lent me to believe that our differences are largely illusory. Most people want to live happily, without fear or struggle. They want their children to be happy, to eat and be educated well. On the whole they want to be kind to their fellow humans. I believe few want consciously to destroy their environment or those with whom they inhabit it. Those that do, I feel have simply forgotten, or been taught by state or religion to see with a perspective too narrow to allow for the effect of their actions upon the web of life and consciousness around them.

My experience in working with the Sacred Medicines has consistently shown me the incredible power of these Teacher Plants to show each and every one of us that “we are not outside or on top of the web of living things; we are deeply embedded in and utterly dependent on it for our survival and well-being”.

If, as Suzuki suggests, “without that understanding, we will continue on our destructive rampage”, why, when we have the possibility of learning from teachers who can offer us precisely that understanding, are these plants outlawed in most countries in the world?

What cultural mechanism, especially in light of substantial scientific evidence that regular Ayahuasca drinking in the context of the UDV church leads to healthier, happier, more culturally cohesive individuals, can justify the continued prohibition of such substantially profound possibilities?

I will leave you to your own conclusions, and with a quote from a National Geographic article I referenced some time ago;

The taking of ayahuasca has been associated with a long list of documented cures: the disappearance of everything from metastasized colorectal cancer to cocaine addiction, even after just a ceremony or two. It has been medically proven to be nonaddictive and safe to ingest. Yet Western scientists have all but ignored it for decades, reluctant to risk their careers by researching a substance containing the outlawed DMT. Only in the past decade, and then only by a handful of researchers, has ayahuasca begun to be studied. At the vanguard of this research is Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA’s School of Medicine.

In 1993 Dr. Grob directed the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. He and his team went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to study members of a church, the União do Vegetal (UDV), who use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. Unlike most common anti-depressants, which Grob says can create such high levels of serotonin that cells may actually compensate by losing many of their serotonin receptors, the Hoasca Project showed that ayahuasca strongly enhances the body’s ability to absorb the serotonin that’s naturally there [4]. ‘Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs],’ Grob concludes, adding that the use of SSRIs is ‘a rather crude way’ of doing it. And ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution in maintaining abstinence.

In the course of my day many thoughts and ideas arise, most of which I would like to share and I mentally file these for later expression. As is evidenced by the paucity of posts by me in the last 12 months, this strategy has not been particularly effective. One result of the observation of this is the acknowledgement that I act most effectively in the moment, and that long term planning is definitively not my forte. To this end, I am experimenting with a strategy of posting as thoughts and ideas arise, or as near as possible as is practicable.

Bear with me in this.

So, today I am inspired by the magnitude of possibility. Yesteday I attended to some clients that a friend in the Sacred Valley asked me to see. The actuality of their situations may be told at a later date, but suffice to say that both had been pronounced incurable by the medical systems available here to them and, whilst for many Peruvians the quality of medical treatment available is poor, the same diagnosis would probably have been made in Australia.

One of these clients has been resigned to her fate for some 10 years, and yet in 2 short visits over the course of a couple of weeks those around her have witnessed more change than in the prior decade. I am not offering this for the purpose of self aggrandisement, as I firmly believe such healings are a matter of grace, a confluence of events and people, a matter of right place and time. Nonetheless I feel that there are mechanisms at play which, if explored from a variety of perspectives, would offer much to our develpment of a more sophisticated language with which to point towards healing.

In both of these instances it is obvious that a large part of the capacity to effect change came about by virtue of my capacity to communicate non verbally, as neither of these individuals had, at that time, the capacity to communicate verbally. Probably the most common explanation of this manner of communication would be to refer to words such as clairaudience or telepathy, which may or may not be the case, but I find the common language available in this instance limiting and divisive because both have a pejorative weighting and are not seen as particularly applicable to “real world” curing.

Now obviously the real world is a culturally bound perspective, but there is quite obviously a weight given to the cultural perspective that we in modern western “democracies” adhere to. That this is so was clearly evidenced to me yesterday as I arrived at the small Peruvian town in which my clients lived. Just past the adobe gate to the town was a monstrous billboard which announced, in English, “Cash Available, ATM next left”. Said ATM dispenses US dollars in a region where many live on two or three such dollars a day. US consumer culture is blatantly obvious here, and even by those who cannot afford to participate in it is considered some kind of natural progression. The cultural, economic and environmental cost of this is pronounced.

Here is Wade Davis‘ perspective on such matters.

I can say that the healing afforded these people was a result of grace, and the assistance and direction of the Apus and Pachamamas, the spirits of nature, and celestial sentient beings, which indeed it was, and those who were witness to the events would concur that the winds assisted and the material realm was demonstrably altered by the processes of consciousness enacted therin, but that will not afford me much credibility if I want the cooperation of a mental health research institute in Florida. Nor in fact should it, because I am not Q’ero, am not Chinchero. My genes come from different continents, and my cultural antecedents are worlds apart from those who have for centuries cultivated relationships with the spirits of the mountains and of the elements. I cannot don the intricate weavings of a Q’ero p’aqo, take an initiation and expect to have mystical powers conferred upon me, but I am not so chauvenistic in the house [as it were] of these spirits to suggest that they are a fiction and because I do not believe in them, that they do not exist.

What I am suggesting, however, is that the suffering of two people people was alleviated by seemingly inexplicable means, the whistling of haunting tunes, waving of feathers and blowing of tobacco. In my view this has to be a good thing, and we could afford to spend more time and effort examining how to do this on a much broader scale than I am able to as one individual. In fact, it may be as Davis suggests, that the thoughtful (as opposed to romantic or fanciful) examination of the wisdom of other cultures that, along with our own culture’s technological wizardry, offers us a way through the rather dire mess we as a species find ourselves in on a planetary scale.

My remuneration for my day’s work was a small bottle of water offered by a grateful father [and produced by Coca Cola] and, as I say, the resulting joy and inspiration that such results offered me. I came home and, in the course of subsequent communications stumbled upon this statistic.

I am not suggesting that indigenous cultures are perfect, far from it, nor am I denying my enjoyment of the health and material prosperity which my modern culture offers me, but I am suggesting, as the picture above shows in no uncertain terms, that something is completely and utterly out of whack! If this is representative of a Darwinian evolution of cultural process, if modern western culture is, as Fukuyama suggested some time back, the end of history, then I think perhaps it will be.

I have seen many people come to disappointing realisations about the motivations and idealogies of mestizo curanderos in the last months, and I myself am under no illusions about the nature in which much old knowledge is applied today in Peru. Nor am I under any illusions about my own frailties or limitations, but equally I am not limiting my capacities to conform to a particular cultural framework. Whilst it is so that the old people, the carriers of wisdom in indigenous cultures have much to offer we in the West, so too have we much to offer their cultures insofar as manners in which they can limit the destructive elements of this culture which now touches every inch of the planet, and at an ever increasing pace. Rather than suggest that we can do nothing about the inexorable onslaught of totalitarianism, social surveillance and control, war and ecological and cultural destruction, let us set about building new cultural identities, new languages that reflect our experiences of possibility, not of limitation.

I do not know what to do, other than that which I do, but I am interested in mature, collective discussion about what to do, and I hold great hope for the bringing to the fore the noblest aspects of the human spirit.

I have had much experience of late of the manner in which indigenous shamanism is appropriated and subsumed into the Judeo Christian framework of the western “practitioner” and reinvented as a pale approximation of it’s actual living experience. There’s plenty to say on that subject, and many wiser, more erudite folks than I have done so.

“Shamanism has thus come to connote an alternative form of therapy; the emphasis, among these new practitioners of popular shamanism, is on personal insight and curing. These are noble aims, to be sure, yet they are secondary to, and derivative from, the primary role of the indigenous shaman, a role that cannot be fulfilled without long and sustained exposure to wild nature, to it’s patterns and vicissitudes. Mimicking the indigenous shaman’s curative methods without his intimate knowledge of the wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the locus of disease from place to place within the community. The source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the natural landscape“The Spell of the Sensuous

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a Bön master who now lives and teaches in the West says

“If we relate to the natural world as a collection of lifeless mechanical processes, it is lifeless for us. If we relate to our bodies as machines, they are machines to us. If we relate to religion as a fantasy, it is fantasy to us. But if we relate to the natural world as alive, full of spirits and elemental beings, the natural world speaks to us. Generally, shamanism deals with forces and entities understood as being external to the practitioner. Practitioners work with the raw natural elements and their energy, and they also work with spirits, deities, healing goddesses, ancestral spirits and other non physical beings…The shamanic vehicles are not primarily concerned with enlightenment but with the removal of obstacles in life, the enhancement of positive qualities, and the lessening of the suffering we experience through interaction with external forces.”

Even further debased, “Shamanism” the word has been applied to any number of imaginative flights of fancy of the manner which Israel Regardie (who’s Middle Pillar exercise has been widely adopted in the New Age movement) referred to as “New Age cosmic foo-foo”.

“What the modern world calls Shamanism is not at all Shamanism…..the westerners have this idea that a shaman is a guru, but shamans are technicians. They are lovers of the sacred, but are no way looked upon as being exemplary. They are not ‘holy men’. They are technicians of the holy You’d never say to your kids: ‘Grow up and become a shaman’, like you might say: ‘Grow up and become a farmer’. It’s like telling someone to be like a fighter pilot!…People say: ‘You want to be a shaman? I want to be a shaman!’ And it’s like, ‘Oh no you dont!””….

Shamanism is not to be confused with entertainment – like people taking drugs and getting high. Shamanism says everything is alive. The spirits are alive. You really can’t be naive about this. The problem with people that are dabbling around with so-called ‘Shamanism’ is that they think they can sit there on some hill that was used long ago or ceremonies, and take flowers and go up there and say to some unhappy spirit ‘I love you’, and that that will make things OK. It’s like going back to an old girlfriend and saying; ‘I’ve decided you are the most beautiful after all.’ Well, the girlfriend you have abandoned a long time ago, she is not going to say; ‘I knew you would come back’. It will be like – ‘Well! Hey sucker!’ And then BAM! You get hit. And you have to be awake about this. This is what the shaman does. He is not naive.”Martin Prechtel, Tzutujil Mayan Tradition

Anthropology professor Michael F Brown says;

“When in my role as curious ethnographer, I’ve asked Santa Feans about their interest in this exotic form of healing, they have expressed their admiration for the beauty of the shamanistic tradition, the ability of shamans to “get in touch with their inner healing powers”, and the superiority of spiritual treatments over the impersonal medical practice of our own society. Fifteen years ago I would have sympathised with these romantic ideas. Two years of fieldwork in an Amazonian society, however, taught me there is peril in the shaman’s craft…New Age enthusiasts are right to admire the shamanistic tradition, but while advancing it as an alternative to our own healing practices, they brush aside it’s stark truths. For throughout the world, shamans see themselves as warriors in a struggle against the shadows of the human heart. Shamanism affirms life but also spawns violence and death. The beauty of shamanism is matched by it’s power-and like all forms of power found in society, it inspires it’s share of discontent.”Michael F Brown

As there are more than enough words in the datasphere I have maintained a silence of sorts of late regarding this issue, but the most recent example of this to come to my attention has prompted a public utterance.

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