Alberto Roman

Quito and Leyla (my mother's older sister and her husband)...they were my guardians and step parents. My father..Alberto Roman. My cats: llama, I had her 20 years.  woody, Mr. white (there is a guitar song I made for him and them), the other two cats of my friend Ruth: Chloe and V my childhood dog...Carlitos My aunt Gladys, her husband Uncle Phil...they showed me how to drink wine when I was 9 ( with moderation and reverence) My uncle Tonio, his wife Lia...salt  of the earth... My  sweet aunt Maria...and her husband...at 16 years of age on her deathbed I told her how to cross over...she listened to me! Juan Esquivel, my cousin Janet's husband... Jose, my cousin Marcos partner... Tom Burns...step dad to my austistic sister Maria...husband to my aunt Noemi, my dear cousin Patrick in Mexico,  aunt's Noemi's son, who would have been my same age now...he left two children and a wife behind...he died from an infection he got from the Mexican rain. He was a diabe...

My take on the "shamanic" is that it is fundamentally a constructivist ontology.  The status of the "Imaginal", to borrow that very potent term from Henri Corbin when outlining the mysticism of the Sufi Master Ibn' Arabi (archetypes, mythic structures, orders of being, and so forth )-that status of the "Imaginal" for me is dependent on various socio historical forces that shape the horizon of meaning to a particular group of people at a particular point in their evolving journey. So, for cultural creatives working within this indigenous intelligence paradigm, the art is combining the various transformational technologies available here and now in service of those who show up.  We are meaning making beings. We have been clearing for several hundred years now the legacy of a particular take on things. We have been deconstructing Western Metaphysics for a while now.  We are not done.  Far from it.  For those who are arriving into this momentum  I say bew...

The art of shamanism and many others transformational practices as well is gifted through the interaction of the following elements: Imagination. Causality. Faith. Death. These four elementals generate  a 5th which is the lived cosmology of an individual or a people. How these are arranged or constellated set up the horizon of meaning.  Science, mysticism, the arts, and so forth are  but contingent articulations of the transversal tension of these forces. Vectorial forces here imply multiple causal chains, diverse temporal sequences and tenses, distinct gradients of intensity, and variable space/habitats all occurring simultaneously and at various inter related levels of topology and recursive displacements. The body as an intelligent distributive actant. So for individuals and cultural creatives,  assorted artistic collectives, myth architects and others who in polemos set up the horizons of our age, how to dynamically constellate the aforementi...

In the film, The Shaman and Ayahuasca, there is a sequence where visionary artist Pablo Amaringo is featured. This part of the film is particularly rich since the visuals that accompany the narrative are striking in their vividness and hues.  The director scans the paintings carefully even up to the point of suggesting the realms and hiearchies depicted are like a sacred scrolls outlining a Mystical cartography. Of course, they are.   The realms, the hierachies, the hybrid beings, planes, palaces, on the other hand, are not permanent structures.  These configurations are tentative horizons of meaning in the service of Love and particular ways of understanding the world.  To affix status of invariance to the realms and chase their apparition in a certain ways eludes what the Ayahuasca shamanic tradition purports. From my own experience and practice in the work and after  many years of immersion with vegetalistas, shamans, baleans and many others who sustain a...

Sound magic. Icaro: a sonic transmission with several intents:  to heal, shift awareness, and encode.   Icaros can be representational:  songs that aim to elicit imagery and emotion through their content for the participants. Icaros can be non-representational:  sounds emitted vocally or through a variety of instruments aimed to shift the body/consciousness of the participants to another state during a journey.   Views among curanderos regarding icaros vary.  Some will say that icaros are medicinal and curative on their own and that icaros for specific maladies are a con.  Others will insist that icaros can be tailored to an ailment. Icaros can be gained through a journey,  learned from a curandero,  picked up from the web, or  through meditation.   Keep in mind that the effect of the icaro is the criteria.  Is one moved, altered, shifted in anyway that is ...