Rudy Wurlitzer‘s Hard Travel to Sacred Places takes us to the depths of depression caused by death, amplified by the depression of middle-class travel and expensive hotels in S.E. Asia. A kind of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but take out the drugs and toss in Buddhism. Although it’s billed as travel writing, I found the actual locations and travelling to take a back seat to the author’s attempt to reconcile the loss of his step-son with his spiritual beliefs. Indeed, if one were to take out all the Buddhist quotes, the book would probably be halved in length.
I was first introduced to Jeff Vail (former Intelligence Officer for the US Air Force) last Winter by Anthropik – which will probably give you an idea of what he’s all about. His book, A Theory of Power, has been called “the most innovative approach to anarchist theory in a generation”. It has received praise from both John Zerzan and Noam Chomsky, and includes people such as Hakim Bey, Aldous Huxley, and Robert Anton Wilson in the bibliography. Impressed? I was. And I was right to be. It’s excellent.
The book is based, not surprisingly, on Vail’s theory of power, that “connections, not the parties connected, may best represent our world.” By analyzing the connections between genes and organisms, furthering this to the connections between memes and society, he “unravels the functioning of our world” and shows us the inevitable downfall of Civilization – but then he goes further.
Hakim Bey gives us the T.A.Z.. Jeff Vail gives us the Rhizome, a way to operate outside – and inside – of the T.A.Z.’s space in time.
Rhizome acts as a web-like structure of connected but independent nodes, borrowing its name from the structures of plants such as bamboo and other grasses. By its very nature, rhizome exhibits incompatibility with such critical hierarchal structures as domestication, monoculture-agriculture, division of labor and centralized government. Unlike hierarchy, rhizome cannot suffer exploitation from within because its structure remains incompatible with centralization of power. It provides a structural framework for our conscious organization of memes. Each node in a rhizome stands autonomous from the larger structure, but the nodes work together in a larger network that extends benefits to the node without creating dependence. The critical element of a world that focuses power at the level of the individual, that can meet the demands of our genome while providing the flexibility and potential to achieve greater goals, remains the small, connected and relatively self-sufficient node of this rhizome structure. In human terms, such a node represents an economic and a cultural unit at the size preferred by our genome: the household and the tribe. Functionally self-sufficient but not isolated, cooperating but not controlled, the rhizome economy, combined with a self-awareness of control structures, provides the real-world foundation of stability and freedom.
At only 50 pages, and freely available online, there is little excuse not to read this book. Go now. Forward, to Rhizome.
Robert Young Pelton’s The Wold’s Most Dangerous Places is worthy of being added to the “books that will make you a better human being” list. Different from RYP’s autobiography, DP is adrenaline-filled and hard-hitting. That I read its 1057 pages in little over a week is probably the highest praise I can give.
The bulk of DP acts as a guidebook to the countries profiled, but there are other sections included. When people asked me what I was reading, I found it great fun to read off a couple chapter titles to them: Bribes, Drugs, Getting Arrested, Guns, Kidnapping, Land Mines, and Mercenaries are just some of the more interesting ones.
This 5th edition, published in 2003, can at times feel extremely dated. For instance, the Iraq chapter is pre invasion of Baghdad. The Mercenaries chapter doesn’t mention Blackwater, I think one of the most prominent merc groups, but I guess few knew of them before Fallujah. Pre Ariel Sharon coma, pre Hamas victory. The U.S. chapter even has profiles of Powell and Ashcroft (and, of course, the profile of Cheney mentions nothing of his marksmanship).
The political analysis and history is single-minded and the humor dark, but that’s to be expected from someone who has experienced all that RYP and his contributors have. At times his more compassionate side comes through, making it evident that he’s still part human under that large, bushy mustache.
Despite its shortcomings, DP includes detailed information on locations that you’ll never hear about it in school or the news. Where journalists fear for their lives, RYP is admired and respected by rebel groups, dictators, and special forces groups alike.
Hard-core readers of DP... seek the stone-heavy truth of experience and the wisdom-inducing perspective of intense emotional experience, tempered by the cool intellectual framework of research.
Welcome to DP: No walls, no barriers, no bull.
Tamarack Song‘s Journey to the Ancestral Self is an attempt to lay out a life philosophy that encompasses believes of all Native people. (It’s always strange, learning about stuff like this from a white guy.) I think the book fails in its goal, but succeeds in describing Tamarack’s own ideas – heavily influenced by Native thinking.
Much of the book is very similar to Hawkeen Training. I enjoyed it a good bit, and will probably continue reading more of his books (and reread this one).
Ayahuasca (which translates to either “vine of the dead” or “vine of the spirits”) is a hallucinogenic tea, native to South America and used there for shamanic healing purposes since pre-history. Also known as caapi, hoasca, yagé, natéma, mihi, kahi, pinde, and dapa, the brew is made of the bark of the vine Banisteriopsis caapi (which itself is also known as Ayahuasca) and (most commonly) the leaves of Psychotria viridis. Psychotria viridis is what contains the dimethyltryptamine (DMT), making the mixture hallucinogenic, but the DMT, when consumed orally, is made inactive by monamine oxidase (MOA). Thus the bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi is used for its MOA inhibiting property, allowing the DMT to take its course.
Most interestingly, DMT is almost identical in structure to Serotonin, a neurotransmitter produced throughout the brain and responsible for “higher functions of behavior, such as planning and other time-related events.” Serotonin is eventually deactived by the same thing that deactives DMT, MOA. So, one could consume only the bark of the Ayahuasca vine (or any other MOA inhibiter) and receive a similar psychoactive active to that produced by DMT. (Apparently some antidepressants take this route.)
Terence McKenna, in many of his recordings, fondly referred to the Ayahuasca brew as “brain soup”, since nothing in it is not naturally in your body.
As another interesting aside, there is DMT in your body right now (the human body naturally produces it), yet, in the United States, it is illegal to possess without a DEA license. Go to jail.
The first 100 pages or so of the book goes over the scientific, medical, and psychological properties of the tea, providing for more knowledge on the brew than I thought possible to know. The rest of the book is devoted to various first-hand experiences with Ayahuasca – all of which are excellent. I recommend the book highly for anyone remotely interested in Ayahuasca, psychology, or medicine.
When I first received Laurence Gonzales’ Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, I expected it to be a dry survival manual – specific solutions to specific situations. After the few few pages of the book, my expectations were quickly shot to the ground and the book managed to raise itself to the status of one of the best books I’ve ever read. Rather than dry disaster reports and analysis, I found the book to be part brain science, part stoic philosophy, and part zen teachings. It is a survival manual, but not like anything you expect. I highly recommend it to anyone, regardless of your interest in wilderness, as, more than anything, it’s a book about how to live.
I’ve finally finished reading Carlos Castaneda‘s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. The book documents Casteneda’s time with a Yaqui shaman named Juan Matus. In the book, Don Juan takes Casteneda, a then young anthropology student at UCLA, under his wing as an apprentice shaman, teaching him the ways of Mescalito, Devil’s Weed, and a smoke mixture containing mushroom. (During my reading, a number of people asked if the book served as a sort of manual for these entheogens. Spiritual, perhaps, but not practical.)
There’s plenty of controversy surrounding the series of books, of which The Teachings of Don Juan is the first, but I really don’t see why it matters if Don Juan was a real person, or whether he was created as a medium for the book’s message – or whether Castenada simply hallucinated the whole thing. The books explores many interesting ideas, many of which would do good to be considered by people today.
Don Juan’s personification of not only the plants mentioned in the book, but also non-living objects, such as his pipe, have been imprinted on my mind. Regardless of whether you honestly suscribe to the indigineous way of thinking – that, in Don Juan’s case, the peyote plant is actually a teacher named Mescalito with various human characteristics – it is undeniably a healthy way of living.
Try this: take one day, or one hour, out of your life and treat everything you come in contact with – from your underwear, to your boss(es)/teacher(s)/parent(s)/friend(s), to your food – not as an item to be exploited but as a being to enter into a relationship with.
If you look at a tree and see dollar bills, you’ll treat it one way. If you look at a tree and see a tree, you’ll treat it another.
Which way of thinking, do you think, children seven generations from now will thank you for?
(Those who listened to the Derrick Jenson interview I previously linked to will find this concept not so new.)
