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You’ll notice things are looking a bit different around here. I’ve rewritten the whole thing, from the ground up, using only vim. I’m still fiddling with things here and there, but figured it was mostly decent looking enough to move it over. As time allows, I’ll move all the other pages over to this template. Hopefully this next weekend.
I’m not sure I like the text wrapping around the sidebar. That may change.
Last night was my first time NightWalking since the Redwoods. It seemed much darker than it ever was in California and I was afraid I’d fall off the ridge I was walking on, but, as always, my feet found the path.
It really does work.
I just got back from hearing Ward Churchill (who’s a registered Republican) speak. He was amazing. The lecture wasn’t really on anything in particular – he went all over the place. He doesn’t use notes, powerpoint, any of that, but you can really feel the passion in him. He shakes, cries, laughs, everything.
He also invited one his friends from the audience, a member of the Black Panther party, to come up and speak for a bit. Among a few other things, he described the morning he was walking around the sand-bagged Seattle Panther office with a riot shotgun and got the call that Fred Hampton had been assassinated. Not something you hear everyday…
Churchill is going to be speaking again tomorrow morning on a panel. If I wake up early enough (doubtful), I’ll go.
Oh, and he’s even larger in person.
...lighten up. It's only death. We all get to meet him (or her?) at some point. Why not get to know death a little earlier, buy him a drink, slap him on the back, and fake him out? There are things worse than death, such as a full-compliance tax audit by a dyslexic IRS agent or maybe even discount prostate surgery in Monrovia. It helps to look at the big picture when understanding just what might kill you and what won't. It is the baby boomers' slow descent into gray hair, brand-name drugs, reading glasses, and a general sense of not quite being as fast as they used to be that drives this whole survival thing. Relax: You're gonna die. Enjoy life, don't fear it.
-Robert Young Pelton
Yesterday, for my Anthropology class, I read a short excerpt from Mark Plotkin‘s book Medicine Quest, meant as a brief introduction to entheogen use in indigenous cultures. In it, the author gives a small introduction to Ayahuasca and documents a trip he took in the Amazon. I was happy that this was assigned reading – that information like this is getting out to people other than us crazies who pursue it on our own – but the professor’s lecture on entheogens today reversed my mood into depression. At times she just annoyed me, attributing Aldous Huxley quotes to Allan Watts, mispronouncing Ayahuasca, etc. But at other times, her misrepresentation of facts (and including opiates in the same lecture) was insulting.
People should be required, at the bare minimum, to at least read a well-informed book on the subject before they’re allowed to lecture on it. It makes me shutter to think that today’s lecture may have been someone’s first introduction to entheogens.
On the other hand, I never thought I’d be given a college lecture with photos provided by Erowid.
For American Indians, the important explanations of the world are spiritual ones. In their view, there is a deeper reality than the here-and-now. The real essence or wisdom occurs when one finally gives up trying to explain events in terms of "logic" and "reality". Many confusing aspects of existence can better be explained by actions of a multiplicity of spirits. Instead of a concept of a single god, there is an awareness of "that which we do not understand." In Lakota religion, for example, the term Wakan Tanka is often translated as "god." But a more proper translation, according to the medicine people who taught me, is "The Great Mystery." While rationality can explain much, there are limits to human capabilities of understanding. The English language is structured to account for cause and effect. For example, English speakers say, "It is raining," with the implication that there is a cause "it" that leads to rain. Many Indian languages, on the other hand, merely note what is most accurately translated as "raining" as an observable fact. Such an approach brings a freedom to stop worrying about causes of things, and merely to relax and accept that our human insights can go only so far. By not taking ourselves too seriously, or over inflating human importance, we can get beyond the logical world. The emphasis of American Indian religions, then, is on the spiritual nature of all things. To understand the physical world, one must appreciate the underlying spiritual essence. Then one can begin to see that the physical is only a faint shadow, a partial reflection, of a supernatural and extrarational world. By the Indian view, everything that exists is spiritual. Every object -- plants, rocks, water, air, the moon, animals, humans, the earth itself -- has a spirit. The spirit of one thing (including a human) is not superior to the spirit of any other. Such a view promotes a sophisticated ecological awareness of the place that humans have in the larger environment. The function of religion is not to try to condemn or to change what exists, but to accept the realities of the world and to appreciate their contributions to life. Everything that exists has a purpose.
For the past couple weeks I’ve been listening to Didgeridoo Dreaming: Aboriginal Spiritual Music. It’s an excellent two-disc set of didgeridoo, clapping sticks, and chanting. I think it’s much more conductive to inducing trance than any modern electronic music I’ve heard, even Shpongle.
(And the guy on the cover is hardcore.)
When we look at life and death from a broader perspective, then dyhing is just like changing our clothes! When this body becomes old and useless, we die and take on a new body, which is fresh, healthy and full of engery! This need not be so bad!
Pippin: I didn't think it would end this way. Gandalf: End? No, it doesn't end here. Death is just another path . . . one which we must all take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glans... Gandalf: ...And then you see it. Pippin: What, Gandalf? See what? Gandalf: White shores . . . and beyond. A far green country, under a swift sunrise. Pippin: Well, that isn't so bad. Gandalf: [Softly:] No... No it isn't.