Adventures in Inner Space: Meet the Psychonauts

techgnosis.com

Let's say you're a buttoned-down organic-chemistry jockey at Merck. One day you tweak a molecule ripped off from a Peruvian native medicine, and you wind up with a powerfully psychoactive compound. Instead of squelching anxiety, instilling a reliable boner, or giving young minds that magic amphetamine edge, the drug helps you touch the hem of God -- or at least something a lot like the hem of God. At times it hurtles you into a blazing hieroglyphic phantasmagoria more sublime and gorgeously bizarre than anything on the demo reels of Hollywood FX shops. On other occasions it leads you to the lip of a fundamental insight into the dance of form and emptiness. And though later attempts to communicate your insight founder on the shoals of coherence, the experience still leaves you centered and convinced that ordinary life is fed by deeper springs.


Originally ran in Feed's Drugs Issue, November 6, 2000

Black Holes Are The Rhythm At The Heart Of Galaxies

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081118161603.htm#

ScienceDaily (2008-11-19) -- The powerful black holes at the center of massive galaxies and galaxy clusters act as hearts to the systems, pumping energy out at regular intervals to regulate the growth of the black holes themselves, as well as star formation, according to new data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The insight gained by this new research shows that black holes can pump energy in a gentler and rhythmic fashion, rather then violently.

Breathing Light

I was contemplating the resistance of ordinary reality to transcendence as I was early into the circular breath of my Rebirthing session. This led to thoughts of the joys of non-ordinary states from previous experiences and I was on my way. I've noticed recently as I reconstruct and heal my past the true power of thought as creative force. It is permeating force with the thrust of the evolutionary principle of all life behind it. So I journeyed on backward through this life with a healing impulse releasing the decayed stuck illusory failures and sufferings. I saw a rainbow that connected my now time to my time in the womb, and beneath flowed the polluted stream of my current incarnation.

I began to reflect upon the movement of golden spirit energy through my body and enjoyed the warmth of it in my hands. I reflected upon the still ascendant spiritual experience of my life that occurred twenty years ago when I ingested a powerful dose of psilocybin containing mushrooms and had to be carried out of the Boston Museum to my friends pickup truck. In the front seat of that small blue pickup I took the most extraordinary journey of my life while my friend stood outside playing his guitar.

As I connected to this I was emerged into a cartoon like other world where neon orange mushrooms formed a mohawk on my head, similar to the ancient cave art of the mushroom shaman. I took a tunnel to the underworld in the form of an umbilical cord and met the Bear spirit who has been my guide in this life. I asked him to take the lead and he brought me to the great black womb in the center of the galaxy. While journeying in the galactic center I remembered a vision I had when I was 21. It was of the distant past and was journeying upon a camel with a companion beside me. We were in a desert and there were two small pyramids. The whole seen was illuminated with a supernatural light and the colors were extremely vivid. We were covered in rich cloaks and clothes and everything seemed to burn from within with intense power.

There was a pole coming out of the desert sand and as we left it behind a serpent also left this pole and slithered away across the sand. I had never understood the meaning of this until today when I realized it symbolized the poles of the Earth at the time of a previous shift when the natural energy dynamic of the Earth was disrupted and the consequently the Garden lost. It all seemed to make sense as I journeyed out into the future where the Garden was restored, where thought created spontaneously, and the crushing weight of density was lifted. The garden and the poles, the serpent and the energy, the realignment, the mushroom and the Tree of Life.

Reiki Shamanism

Reiki (ray-kee) translates to mean universal life force energy. It is the subtle spiritual energy permeating all aspects of creation. It is the elixir of life bringing all things into unity, harmony, and wholeness. Reiki healing is as ancient as humanity and as universal as the quest for understanding. It is the original shaman’s fire. It is also as simple and natural as a mother coddling her child and as a sprout-ling being coaxed toward the Sun. Reiki predates religion but can be found in the workings of all the great healers and teachers. In fact Reiki supplants the need and exposes the weakness of organized religion by awakening the divine connection within the individual and accentuating the unity and interdependence of all life.

Reiki is shamanic in origin. Shamanism, which means “seeing that which was unseen”, is the most ancient science of healing and understanding. The shaman employs whatever techniques she knows, trance, sacred plants, fasting, drumming, and chanting, rattling. etc., in order to connect with sublime energy in creation for the healing of the community. The shaman seeks knowledge and healing by moving energy, through herself and the afflicted. She first is drawn to the energy, the energy teaches and transforms her, and then she works with the energy to transform and heal others. The path of the modern Reiki practitioner is the same.

The traditional system of Usui Reiki is named after its founder Mikao Usui of Japan (8/15/1862 – 3/9/1926). Like the shamans of all ages have done, Mikao Usui developed a system of passing on his connection with energy to his students. He developed his own connection to Reiki in the shamanic way of the vision quest. He went to a high and sacred place where he fasted for 21 days, having brought along 21 stones to count the days. He returned from his quest attuned to the healing power of Reiki. From that time on he continued to heal and work with the energy establishing his Reiki system. With the process of attunement Reiki then began to be passed on. The Reiki system spread to Hawaii from Japan and then on to the continental United States in the late 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century Reiki is now a world wide phenomenon.

Reiki is a relationship and initiation into higher consciousness that can begin long before our first attunement. I became aware of higher energies that were working with me and healing me on a personal level at least fifteen years before I received my first Reiki attunement. This healing occurred at different times and in different ways on several levels of my being: dense material/physical, emotional, mental and spiritual/soul levels. My relationship with healing energy prior to my attunement and subsequent Reiki practice included visions and experiences that transferred light and energy, healing dreams, the tangible movement of energy through my body (especially my hands), intense feeling of well being and “oneness”, and the healing of gastritis, stress, anxiety, and depression.

Having a previous connection to healing energy and other energetic modalities in no way devalues the system of Reiki as it has come to be taught or the process of attunement. I only wish to share that Reiki is not the sole domain of Reiki practitioners; by definition Reiki means universal life force energy. My purpose is to not only teach and pass on the system of Reiki. I also seek to explain my understanding of Reiki in the broader perspective of human evolution at this critical time in history. I understand this as the path of the Reiki Shaman.

I have found that Reiki Shamanism is the beginning of a extremely rewarding journey at this crucial period in our collective experience. What does this mean? For some, just a broadening of their own enlightening journey, for others an opportunity of transformation to begin a new relationship with themselves, humanity, and the Earth, as well as with subtler energies, higher dimensions and the guides that inhabit them.