Raise your hand if you’ve ever attended a séance, sat in meditation, done yoga, consulted a psychic, read tarot cards, purged in a sweatlodge, prayed with tobacco, read esoteric literature, executed a karate chop, attempted tantric sex, shouted hallelujah at a revival, practiced astrology or alchemy, dropped a tab of acid, bought a book at Bodhi Tree bookstore, consulted an oracle, hearkened to an end-of-the-world prophecy, speculated about (or encountered) UFOs, worn a crystal, chanted a magic spell or mantra, or even dreamt of wandering in the Himalayas and encountering a Tibetan master or stumbling across Don Juan down in Mexico?

If so, welcome to the American Metaphysical Tradition! And if you haven’t, where have you been for the last 400 years?

While the study of “AMR” is a newly emerged academic specialization, author Ronnie Pontiac sees it more broadly as a “catchall metaphor for the esoteric beliefs and practices that have found a home in the melting pot of America,” and himself as a “tour guide to the rough-and-tumble world of spirituality American-style.” Pontiac’s 600-page American Metaphysical Tradition: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions in the New World spans “four centuries of America’s metaphysical saints, grifters, misfits, revolutionaries, visionaries, eccentrics, and some important thinkers who were far ahead of their time.”

As you can probably sense straight away, this is a racy historical narrative with a focus on remarkable, groundbreaking individuals and spiritual movements. Filled with fun, even lurid details and thought-provoking phenomena and events, it covers a vast terrain. Beginning with the initial encounters between Eastern and Western traditions (which have already been amply documented in numerous popular books), it goes on to explore the strains of Metaphysical Christianity, Native American traditions, Evil Geniuses, Pagan Pilgrims, the rise of mediumship and spiritualism, Platonism, and, best of all, “Scandalous Psychic Adventures in the Roaring Twenties” and “Willy Reichel’s Psychic Adventure Tour.”

While psychedelics are not a unique concern of the book, Pontiac traces the interaction between them and emerging metaphysical movements, giving a fresh perspective of their influence upon American occultism.

Pontiac is native to Los Angeles, and he writes with particular passion about the goings-on in his hometown. It turns out this is appropriate. Who would imagine so many spiritual movements could happen in LA? He also has a touch of the gossip columnist in his enthusiastic, loving depictions of a world he has been immersed in for decades (he was a close confidant and assistant of Manly P. Hall), especially when writing about the Wild West of Spiritualism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Details leap off his pages, seekers and charlatans flit by, institutes rise and fall along with the reputations of psychics and gurus and healers. Through it all, the picture emerges that he promised: a world rife with con-artistry through which profound, exquisite spiritual experience can still break through – and paradoxically often does.

To his credit, Pontiac works to hold the enigma intact, without attempting to offer rational explanations, apologies, or polemics. As he states, it is a “rough-and-tumble” world out there. His book does it justice!

Yet Pontiac’s hefty intention to capture so much history and spiritual practice within one catchall metaphor gets strained in his chapter on Turtle Island, when he attempts to encompass the indigenous worldviews encountered and co-opted by the early invaders and pilgrims to the Eastern seaboard of North America. Is it any longer justifiable, even in an Audubon guide to mostly obscure American metaphysicians, to use general terms such as “indigenous shamans” or “indigenous beliefs”? Such categorizations might give an impression of a native monoculture, when in fact Amerindian cultures from valley to valley were probably more diverse than modern day Americans are from coast to coast (in the year 1491 over 1,000 distinct languages, each embedded within their own unique cultural traditions, were spoken across the continent). Of course, Pontiac’s work is for the general reader, not academics or intelligentsia, but the absence of citations and quotations will be regrettable to some.

But more importantly, there is a big-ass question that goes begging in Pontiac’s rambling history: What the heck is Spiritualism? What does it really offer beyond the obvious special effects?

If anyone seems qualified to go beyond the usual pat metaphysical or pseudo-scientific answers (i.e., is it live, or is it Memorex?) it might just be Ronnie Pontiac. As the eyelids begin to droop from the long parade of facts and juicy details, the reader can’t help but ask, “But what’s really going on here? Isn’t the real point of history to uncover the phenomenon lying at his heart? What are spirits phenomenologically? Why do they play such a central role in our lives, even getting up to such antics as are described in this book?”

Pontiac’s American Metaphysical Tradition is a lovingly written history bursting at its seams with details, and it feels like a prelude to an even deeper investigation. Perhaps he will be kind enough to write that sequel.

This review originally appeared in the webzine Lucid News:

A Tour Through the History of American Metaphysical Religion

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

As I gradually accustomed myself to seeing through the worldview of the pre-Colombian peoples of the Amazon and Andes, I began to perceive the lineaments of archaeological sites in ways I previously hadn’t been able to. At Ollantaytambo, for example, after ascending to the Sun Temple I found that the features of the severely defaced jaguars carved upon the Wall of the Six Monoliths were far clearer, lying just beneath the scars left by Spanish vandals.

This sudden seeing of what has long lain in plain sight is hardly a new experience. Yet, the revelation of the deep past is a cat and mouse game, our unseen inheritance a plaything in the hands of the industrial forces unleashed upon Peru.

This fact was driven home to me some time after my return from the ancient temple complex of Chavín when, in the darkness of the wee hours of the morning, I walked out of Takiwasi after an ayahuasca ceremony.

The jungle roads were utterly silent, the stars gleamed down, and I needed to get back to my home a couple of miles away across the Shilcayo river in the section of town called La Banda. The road passed through Tarapoto’s version of a red-light district (comprised of a couple of wooden shacks by the bridge) and I had been advised not to attempt the passage at night. I therefore called a friend of mine who drove a motocar and requested he come to pick me up. Restless, I had set off down the road beneath the palm trees in the direction I knew he would be approaching from when a voice said to me, “Slow down and pay attention!”

Arrested in my movement, I halted and looked. Across the road was a boulder, one that I and the other workers at Takiwasi passed by every day and which had never excited comment, yet this evening it seemed to fairly shout out at me. As I walked towards it across the road, I was electrified to see upon it the faintest, yet perfectly discernable, lineaments of a jaguar head. I stood before it musing when my local mestizo friend pulled up, a Tarapotino who had never drunk ayahuasca in his life. I asked him, “Do you see a jaguar head in this stone?” and pointed to the rock.

“Yup,” he said, nodding his head, conviction written all over his features.

I lay up until the early morning, turning over and over the implications of my “discovery” – should it turn out to be something other than an insubstantial pageant faded by the morning. Archaeological remains are few in the San Martin region of Peru, and there is no evidence for or memory of megalithic cultures that carved in stone, not in that region of the high Amazon. Was it reliably, physically real with a historical “aura,” or had I seen a spirit, a protector of the grounds of Takiwasi?

The next day, I avoided the stone. I wanted to digest the experience and was, moreover, afraid that when I approached it again my vision would turn out to be a “hallucination.” After all, a couple of days wouldn’t matter if the stone had sat there for centuries.

I was wrong. A couple of days later I could not find the stone in its usual setting. My pulse quickening, I cast about and spotted it turned upside down in a ditch, all vestiges of the jaguar head vanished from sight. A vehicle, no doubt a huge truck, had dislodged it from its position.

Whatever glimpse I may have been given of an unknown pre-Colombian people had dissolved, leaving not a rack behind.

From “The Servant and the Raven, “a fantasy novel I am writing inspired by the Brother Grimm’s old fairytale, “The White Snake.” In this excerpt, the two friends, Caedmon mac Cumhaill and Egil Skallagrimsson, resume an earlier conversation about the uncanny powers of ravens.

When the young bard finally returned, the sun had just slid behind the Valley’s high wall and the land within taken on a cool rich emerald hue. Neither youth felt the need to speak. Sitting a little distance from Caedmon, his back against the wall, Egil drew a bone flute from an inner pocket and played meditatively upon it for a while. He then set it beside him, and, as if off-handedly, said, “Speaking of ravens…”

Caedmon turned and studied him. His new friend’s eyes were set in a distant gaze, as if he were about to launch into a tale that had to be gathered up from some far-away region.

“When I was a boy, I travelled much with my father. Those days the petty kings no longer dared stir out of their castles, so strong had the Volsung overlordship become, and so they contented themselves with hunting, whoring, and listening to songs from wandering bards such as my father. It didn’t hurt that my dad was a magician of the sleight-of-hand variety either. Making gold coins appear out of a lordling’s ear always went down well among the rustics.”

Egil laughed bitterly, the memory of those old days still strong within him. Caedmon listened with fascination – what had prompted the bard to share this story with him?

“Of my exiled father’s high art and lineage,” Egil continued, “the kinglets in their tankard thumping halls knew nothing, nor did they care. We eked out a living, and during winter the times got lean indeed.

One evening, my father sat with me before the stingy fire of a miserable inn, tossing our pouch of gold coins up and down in his hand. It was getting perilously light. Outside, an icy wind was gusting out of the North and the dark clouds blacking out the stars over the mountains promised another heavy fall of snow. Although my dad said nothing, I knew we’d need to make the shelter of the next castle soon or freeze in the land of the inhospitable Odin’s Folk.

Yet even in the worst of circumstances, my father never lost his ear for a tale.”

Egil paused and looked at Caedmon.

“You know how some men bear their exile on the surface with their accents and foreign ways? Other men carry it within them. They gaze out at the world as if from deep water, and their movements leave a faint sadness in their wake. The fellow who joined us at the fire was one such. Long-limbed and delicate featured, with a mop of brown hair on his head, it was clear his hands were shaped for a paint brush, not a battle ax, and the motley pattern of dried paint stains on his work clothes gave him away as an artisan.

My father and the man fell into conversation. Perhaps it was that sympathy that arises among exiles. Perhaps it was my father’s profession as a straddler of worlds. Perhaps it was the opportunity to confess to a wise, robed figure before a fire in an anonymous inn. Whatever it was, as the artisan gazed into the fire, he began to speak.

‘As a boy, I was visited by a raven, you know. It came in my sleep and took me out flying over the forest that surrounded my homestead. It showed me things that ravens know about. We had adventures together,’ he said, tears welling up in his eyes.

Glancing over, he scrutinized us for any hint of amusement, but my dad merely nodded, indicating for the story to continue.

‘The raven was my friend. My only friend. My home was cramped and violent, you see. There was little love in it, and many beatings, so as a lad I came to look forward to dreaming more than waking.’

Gazing into the fire fully lost in his memories, he told us how one night, the raven flew him into a rarely explored part of the forest. There the bird showed him an old chariot overgrown with vines, carved with wondrous designs, that had been part of the first wave of invasions. In the morning, leaping from his bed he ran into the deep woods, where sure enough he found it, exactly as the raven had shown him the night before.

One day, however, he made a mistake: he shared his dreams with his family. They laughed over their drinks, swatted him on the head, and called him a liar. Such things, they said, were only tales among the Chavin, those savages. Was he to grow up to be a useless dreamer? An idiot talking with dumb animals?”

Egil held a hand open to the Temple grounds, as if calling it in as witness to the injustice, and then shook his head. At that moment, Caedmon saw the bard was speaking as much of his own struggle as the distant traveler’s.

“The man looked away from the fire,” Egil continued, “downed his mead, and said in a croaking voice, ‘I doubted then and the raven ceased to appear. I never saw it again. I have been alone ever since.’

“I swear to you,” Egil said turning to look at Caedmon, “his eyes were sparkling coal black in the firelight.

‘Do you see?’ my father murmured.

From the protective outcropping of my dad’s side, I saw the raven plainly in the man’s face, gazing out at us.

I was too young to know the irony of it all, but it was then I determined to never stifle my perception, to never cease listening to the stories of the world – especially if I hear it from a raven.”

There’s an old Greek tale about a master craftsman named Daedalus who built a labyrinth to contain a monster, a half-man, half-beast who consumed offerings of human flesh. When the beast was slain, suspicion fell upon Daedalus as an accomplice and he was imprisoned in a tower along with his son, Icarus. There Daedalus turned his genius to fashioning wings, which he assembled with feathers, rags, and wax. As he fitted the wings to his son’s arms, he warned him: “Don’t fly too near to the sun, my boy, lest the wings melt and you plummet to your death.”

For Icarus, escaping the labyrinth and sailing into the empyrean was so enrapturing that he became reckless, flying closer and closer to the sun. Finally, the sinews of his wings melted in the searing heat, and he fell into the depths, leaving his father to grieve over his broken body.

Marc B. Aixalà’s Psychedelic Integration might be subtitled, “An Answer to Daedalus,” so sincere and thoroughgoing is its quest for answers to the grieving father holding the shattered ego of his youth in his arms.

How many readers of this review have sat unaccompanied after an ayahuasca retreat or psychedelic experience, Daedalus-like, grieving their fallen self without real hope of resurrection? And how many have, nonetheless, painstakingly (or miraculously) reintegrated their shattered being, and found their wings no longer quite so waxen in the aftermath? Most would, no doubt, say such deep work is not possible alone – and that finding someone skillful in the art of integration straight away could have spared them and others much suffering.

This is, and will be, the true litmus test of the unfolding Psychedelic Renaissance: do we have the skills and commitment to grieve and accompany the processes of those who’ve undergone abuse by shamans/facilitators and been subsequently rejected by the community of believers? Who’ve had emergence of traumatic memories? Who’ve suffered from lack of appropriate preparation/context by leaders? Who are caught in unresolved difficult experiences, or worse, traumatic dissociative experiences? Who are in a cycle of unending psychedelic experiences without resolution?

Aixalà’s answer is, “Yes.”

And that is what makes Psychedelic Integration required reading for veteran psychonauts and bright-eyed novices alike. Aixalà’s work is a groundbreaking exploration of how we may proceed after we’ve flown into the wild blue yonder, for as he reminds us, “Entheogens take back everything that they give you if a good integration doesn’t occur.”

It is, admittedly, a tome. Documentation in Psychedelic Integration is thorough, delving far back into the history of psychedelic research and citing what can be a mind-numbing number of studies (which suggests a streamlined version might be made available in the future), yet as his narrative picks up steam, moving from origins and evolution of integration to theoretical foundations of the clinical intervention, maximizing benefits, the cartography of adverse effects, and finally intervention in integration psychotherapy, it becomes a gripping read.

For example, how is one to sort out whether a memory of sexual abuse that arises in a psychedelic session is “real” or “symbolic”? And how to extract the real meaning that lies beyond the false dichotomy of the two?

Especially surprising, and delightful, is Aixalà’s skillful use of Viktor Frankl’s “paradoxical prescriptions” where we actively imagine for set periods of time “the worst that could happen, purposely including feelings of madness, fear, and vulnerability.” This technique, dubbed “reverse mindfulness” by one of his clients, turns out to be an effective antidote to the symptoms of fear, paranoia, shame, guilt, and the other incredible mind-f**kery that can plague us after a badly concluded psychedelic session. These are just a couple of the many highly relevant issues that Aixalà raises and addresses.

It should be noted that, despite the promise of the title, many of Aixalà’s case studies involve the Amazonian shamanic brew ayahuasca – not LSD or other Western psychedelics. If Aixalà had conducted interviews with native healers, it would have been fascinating to read his findings on their non-Western perspectives on the process of integration. But that is a much needed integration into our Western modalities that we still await!

Psychedelic Integration is a beautiful, timely book. May it be widely read.

This review originally appeared in the webzine Lucid News:

An Answer to Daedalus

Potawatomi elder and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer once reflected, “Had the new people (the Euro-American invaders) learned what Original Man was taught at a council of animals – never damage Creation, and never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being – the eagle would look down on a different world.”

Indeed, there would be eagles to look down on us now instead of pigeons.

Yet she reflects further, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “Maybe the task assigned to Second Man is to strive to become naturalized to place, to throw off the mind-set of the immigrant. Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in the ground, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend upon it. Because they do.”

Yet how are we to come home to this Earth, this Turtle Island, upon which most of us, children of invaders and immigrants as we are, have never truly walked? How are we to “go native” — except through our storytelling?

The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence is an eloquent and loving step in that direction.

Edited by John C. Ryan, Patricia Vieira and Monica Gagliano, with a forward by Dennis McKenna, The Mind of Plants is no dry scientific tome. Liberated from the confines of mere materialistic scientific discourse, its exploration of the profound awareness and intelligence of plants is exuberant, even mythopoeic.

And each of its 54 entries, arranged alphabetically from the Apple to the Yopo, can be “listened to” like icaros, the Amazonian songs that evoke the being of a plant – or are the plant in that mysterious conjunction of human and vegetal intelligence realized through the voice.

Weaving together deeply personal, hard scientific, historical, mythic, rhapsodic, and cultural narratives, the many authors of The Mind of Plants are as diverse as their subjects, which makes it hard to encapsulate. Indigenous voices are refreshingly strong in this book, and jostle in the pages with Oxford educated scholars, mystics, activists, plant researchers and artists (and all contributors seem to be a mix of everything, so you can’t separate them into convenient categories). Particularly notable are the female voices: Robin Kimmerer on the White Pine, Kristi Onzik on the Passionflower, and Esthela Calderón on Corn are extraordinary evocations of the power of plants to shape our lives. You’ll never munch on your morning croissant in the same way after reading Monica Gagliano on Wheat! And Rachel Gagen’s rhapsodic evocation of Iboga is worth the entire price of admission.

The great virtue of The Mind of Plants is its plantish straining towards the light, its striving to glimpse that rare beauty we walk past everyday unnoticing, and to capture it in song. It does have its occasional blips, however, such as Jeremy Narby’s contribution on Cannabis. Rather than evoking the plant, Narby dwells on how smoking it has contributed to his thought-processes, crediting it as a sort of “plant editor” and trickster muse. There’s nothing particularly new in this, of course, and the plant being itself makes no appearance on the page. That was a loss.

Finally, the lover of fungi will seek in vain for entries on Psilocybe Cubensis, Amanita Muscara, or any other mushroom. No doubt the editors had to draw a speciated frontier somewhere (fortunately, Coralline Algae slipped across the border).

Perhaps we await a sequel, The Mind of Fungi?

This review originally appeared as “Scholars, Mystics and Activists Explore the Profound Awareness of Plants” in the webzine Lucid News:

Scholars, Mystics and Activists Explore the Profound Awareness of Plants

My father used to tell me a story, a story that his father told him and his father had told him, about a time when animals were free. The story about how stars became. Father said that there was a time when, gazing up into the night sky, instead of the dark bluish sky dotted with stars you saw pure light. Heavenly, almost. One glance at it and you’d feel as if all your worries melted away, soothed by the light, its warmth sinking into your bones. Every night, all the animals would gaze up into the sky for hours on end, bathing in the radiant light.

But one day that all abruptly ended because of one grasshopper’s idea.

One night no different than any other, as all the animals were bathing in the golden light, Grasshopper had an idea. “I should fly up there. Being a winged creature, I’m sure I could do it. If the light is incredible from down here, it must be something of dreams up closer to it.” The words escaped his mouth before he had time to stop them. The whole forest went quiet for a few seconds, then, as if planned, all the birds exploded out of the trees. They had heard him. Feathers scattered everywhere for a chaotic few seconds, covering the sky with all different colors. Grasshopper, who had also taken flight, struggled in the midst of the chaos. After seconds that felt like hours, he dropped back to the ground, where he stayed hidden in the long grass. There he is to this day, not daring to fly above the grass for fear of being trampled by the ferocious flurry of feathers. Now, he only jumps above the grass in a feeble attempt to get a glimpse of the light.

Meanwhile, far from grasshopper swarmed the birds. The smaller, less powerful birds fell back down to earth, their wings tattered by the sharp talons and ferocious wings of the bigger birds. As soon as the remaining birds touched the light, they were set afire. Shrieking and squawking in pain, the panicked birds began flapping their wings in a desperate attempt to stop the flames from swallowing their bodies. After a few agonizing minutes, the flames died down. The large brown birds that had touched the light were no more. In their place loomed scaly creatures flapping their huge wings. Spikes ran along their necks and backs, their beaks were painfully twisted into scaly snouts, and sharp teeth lined the inside of their gaping mouths. Dragons!

Doomed they were to seek darkness in the depths of caves hiding from the light, yet greedily they stowed away gold coins in a feeble attempt to replace the heavenly light. The smaller birds, on the other hand, had been transformed into phoenixes: large birds with the tips of their feathers still in flames, glowing a radiant reddish orange hue. Cursed to live on in this forsaken world for all of eternity, unable to die, they would burst into flames whenever their bodies became too old. Once more, they were born in scathing flames.

For they had angered God. The light is a holy thing, a blessing to the animals, and the birds had greedily gone up seeking for more bliss. For this God punished them. And to stop other birds from trying to fly to the light, he covered the sky in an endless cape of darkness. Every night instead of the accelerating light there would only be shadow. Though other birds continued to try to reach the light, desperately poking holes in the infinite cape, trying to get through was pointless. Like bugs to a bulb, they banged desperately, all their efforts in vain. And to this day, every night all the birds flock up to the cape, poking holes in the night sky, in hope to once more bathe themselves in the heavenly light. And those are the stars we see today.

Jeremy Narby’s Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge is an elegant little tome (minus the endnotes it weighs in at 87 pages) that richly deserves a close reading and rereading. It’s a work you want to put on your bookshelf and keep there. For what it does is a rare commodity in the hyped-up world of the psychedelic goldrush: it slows down and listens.

And who would have imagined there is still so much to learn about tobacco and ayahuasca?

Narby’s work among the indigenous peoples of South America, particularly the Ashaninka, led to his initial exposure to the plant medicines of the Amazon. The result was the publication in 1998 of his pioneering book, The Cosmic Serpent, which offered some bold speculations about molecules and visionary experience. Since that initial salvo, Narby has published other work, but Plant Teachers, for sheer richness of content, may be his finest.

Why? For starters, Narby hews closely to the dictum of anthropologist Viveireos de Castro: “taking native thought seriously is to refuse to neutralize it.”

Narby’s book is evenly divided between his interviews with Rafael Chanchari Pizuri, an elder of the Shawi people and an inheritor of a long tradition of healing with tobacco and ayahuasca, and his exploration of the contemporary scientific understanding of tobacco and ayahuasca, especially their remarkable biochemical synergy with the human organism.

Chanchari, who speaks his native tongue and Spanish, consults the internet, and understands and speaks the language of molecules, opens with a statement one hears over and over again among indigenous and mestizo shamans: “Tobacco has a soul, it has a spirit, which is of two sorts, medicine and malice [maldad], or what we call in Spanish sorcery [brujería]. It has two spirits… All the plants that have power – in other words, the teacher plants: ayahuasca, tobacco, toé, catahua, chambira palm – have two spirits or two souls. So the person who works with these plants must choose to learn medicine or malice.”

As Narby points out, whether we choose to hold such statements as metaphors (or superstitions) or inquire into them more deeply by learning a multi-cultural perspective, there is a fundamental point here. As with the ancient Greek word pharmakon, which describes both remedy and poison, Amazonian medicine walks a similar razor’s edge.

Indeed, the flattening effect of “neutralizing” native thought may have led to a certain naivete in the West’s enthusiastic adoption of ayahuasca, for whom all ayahuasca vines are created equal and are of one species. Not so, according to Chanchari, who distinguishes among many varieties of ayahuasca: “sky, thunder, mariri [“magical phlegm”], lightening… broadly speaking, there is black and yellow ayahuasca… Yellow ayahuasca is called ‘sky’ [cielo]. ‘Cielo ayahuasca’ is for medicine, for vision. That’s what I drink, and in my garden I only plant sky, and not the other varieties, which teach malice and sorcery and all that.”

Hmmmmm. What kind of ayahuasca will you be drinking in ceremony this weekend? What kind of additives are in it (it turns out neo-shamans add significantly more DMT to their brews to guarantee a bigger kick)? And by the way, how are you relating with the tobacco in your life?

According to Narby, another common ground shared now emerging between Western science and Indigenous wisdom is awareness of the healing capacity of the ayahuasca vine itself, which previous DMT-centered explanations of the brew tended to treat as a delivery vehicle and little more.

Yet it turns out that the harmala alkaloids contained in the ayahuasca vine have significant health enhancing properties. “All three harmala alkaloids induce the formation of new neurons; harmine, in particular, also has anti-inflammatory, analgesic, antimicrobial, antioxidative, antiaddictive, antidepressive, and possibly anti-Parkinson’s and antitumor properties.”

This is in keeping with the reports of indigenous peoples that additives such as chacruna, which provide the so-called “active principle” of DMT to the brew, are mainly for the benefit of beginners: experienced practitioners don’t require the added illumination to see the visions induced by and experience the health benefits of the vine alone!

This is deeply encouraging. There has long been an imbalance between the Western psychonaut’s thirst for visionary experience and the indigenous focus upon prayer and healing – even as we consumed the same plant medicines and even sat side-by-side in the same tipi or maloca.

Narby’s work shows us the way forward, a way to open to “the validity of indigenous knowledge as a second way of knowing and a compliment to science… I think the key to integrating two different ways of knowing is to go back and forth between the two often enough and over a long period of time. Practice makes perfect.”

As T.H. White’s Merlin once said to young Arthur, “There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

Plant Teachers is written in that kind of spirit. Look how much remains to be learned about our plant allies tobacco and ayahuasca!

This review originally appeared as “Tobacco, Like Ayahuasca, Is a Shamanic Teacher Plant” in the webzine Lucid News:

Tobacco, Like Ayahuasca, Is a Shamanic Teacher Plant

On August 2nd in the early afternoon, we were gathered in the meadow on my land in Mendocino singing “Happy Birthday” to my daughter, Maitreya. She had just turned 12. As the cake was being sliced, one of the children in attendance spoke up: “Is that fog?”

I took one glance into our ancient redwood forest and broke into a run. “That’s smoke!” I cried out. “We’ve got a fire!” Drawing closer, I saw the interior of one of the towering old trees, already hollowed out by a long-ago conflagration, blazing. Whipping my phone from my back pocket and calling 911, I raced over to the neighbors and banged on their door crying out, “Fire!”, and then plunged down into the woods. By the time I got there, the flames were ascending the interior of the tree like a snake and were aggressively climbing upwards. Our whole forest was threatened. Our whole neighborhood was threatened.

Through my daze of adrenalin, I tried to do my bit in rallying our response, but garden hoses were useless. It was only when our friends from the local volunteer fire department pulled up in their 4,000-gallon tanker that the fire could be extinguished.

We were lucky that day. There was no wind to spread the fire, we caught sight of the smoke in time, and the fire department was swift in their response, but I was in an adrenalin haze for a couple of days afterward. Our forest is our life – six acres of redwood trees, some of whom were already sailing aloft when the stones of the Norman cathedrals were being laid in England. Without them, how would I live?

Beneath our land runs a stream, an underground watercourse that feeds these soaring pillars and keeps our woods emerald-green, even in the heart of summer. As I watch the water levels (I can literally gaze down into our well) drop inch by inch during this drought, I wonder if we’ll make it through. I look up at the sky every day. Check the weather report. We’ve ordered huge capacity water tanks and are preparing to drill far deeper than the mere 30 feet of our present well.

Some days I’m seized by a low-grade panic. What happens to us, to our forest, if the rain ceases to come?

Stalking just over the horizon are war and disease, refugees and the homeless. Economic, social, and ecological systems evidence their slow-motion collapse. Dictatorship looms on the Right, and the Left becomes progressively fanatical and silly.

What to do? Having grown up on the streets with no family, one of my primary motivations in moving to this remote area of the coast was to provide a safe haven for my daughter, a “paradise” in its old Indo-European meaning of a “walled garden or fortification.” Indeed, the name of the land when we purchased it was already “Saranam.” “Refuge” in Pali, the language of safety in the Buddhist tradition.

Yet the world’s on fire everywhere.

Nowadays, I find my practice of zazen and ceremonial work with plant medicine revolving even more around the Four Limitless Vows. Our vows to carry over all beings, overcome all obstacles, master all good paths, and follow through on awakening all distill down, for me, to my commitment to stay radically open to change – to move in the most fluid, adaptive way I can for the sake of my daughter’s, and all being’s, future.

And yet between myself and that hopeful grace all too often lies a heavy veil of fear, grief, anger, depression, and fatigue. At such times, my left brain will rear its ugly head and my thinking lose its nuance and flexibility. Instead of perceiving the richness and hope that lies in the next inch of ground to be covered, I seem to get caught up in eschatological visions, as if I were already a victim of the Anthropocene extinction.

This is when I go to ground. In recent decades, an important element in my practice has become my ceremonial work in the Native American Church and the vegetalista tradition of the Amazon rainforest. These shamanic traditions, although historically and culturally distinct from Buddhism, in my experience have deep affinities with Zen practice (and vice-versa). In fact, in ceremonies of ayahuasca I sing sutras – which my friends in the rainforest call “the icaros of the Buddha.” They love them!

Although this “animistic” way of prayer, which holds the entire cosmos as sentient, alive, responsive, and aware is not commonly held, at least explicitly, among Western Buddhists (my first teacher, Robert Aitken Roshi, was a secular Humanist in outlook), it is evidenced throughout our Buddhist texts, including the koans that we study. Mountain spirits come to visit, old teachers transform into foxes, etc.

For me, it is a fruitful way. Sitting in ceremony this weekend, I sang an icaro to the waters that I learned from my teacher Juan Flores, whose home sits alongside a wonder of the world: a boiling river that erupts from deep within the earth like an open vein. As I sang, I felt my connection with the waters of my own land, and reaching deep down I sang to them, loving them, calling them to burst forth.

Is this magical thinking? No, I don’t think so. Instead, I hold it as a part of my Bodhisattva Vows: to nurture the land as well as sink deeper wells, build catchment systems, and purchase huge water tanks. Indigenous peoples have been trying to teach us to sing to Creation for generations now. It’s part of that deep instinct of reciprocity that our Western society has lost and is, for me, the root cause of our ecological woes.

The Hopi have a prophecy stone that, for them, depicts the time of Great Purification. Upon it is seen a two-forked road. Those who follow the upper road are “two-hearted,” seek self-gratification, and treat the world as a commodity to be exploited: a dead, mechanical thing. One sees their bodies fragmenting and drifting off into space. On the lower road are those who are “single-hearted.” They remain whole, following a deity, a master of prayer, who plants corn with digging stick.

In my zazen and prayer, I have chosen to follow that way, to work towards a fusion of Western scientific understanding and the “forgetting of self in the act of becoming one with all things” that Yamada Koun Roshi described as the practice of Zen.

This practice sustains me as we inch forward into a radically destabilized world. And it is my only hope for my daughter’s future.

Written for the Ring of Bone Zendo newsletter
Robert Tindall, Mendocino, Turtle Island