2/26/2023

Postcard from the Cure Machine (1)

 

Postcards From the cure machine. 1


 A while back, in shamanic circles a story went around about a legendary female healer.from Taiwan. Men from all over the world would go to her.for a session of her miraculous powers.


Her fame and notoriety came for the capacity to cure ailments in the sacral chackra/ genital area of many a brother.


Apparently, the patient would walk into her two room hut, disrobe, and lay nude on a flat wooden table.


 The old old woman would come out of the.other room through a beaded curtain waving holy smoke with one hand as she recited phrases from an unknown tongue.

She would stop at the edge of the table, scan you with her other senses, and suddenly grab a man's sack vigorously with her very strong hand and twist, turn, back and forth a man's package till he grimaced with an expression speaking of terror and exhilaration at the same time.


Her "cure" rate is reputed to be a hundred per cent since there were never any repeat customers.


2.

As I laid slightly flat on the medical table with my legs up and feet in stirrups waiting for the doctor to come in and inject micro gold seeds into my prostate, a necessary procedure to help the radiation beam have a compass, his Taiwanese assistant came in ( I had spoken to her before this moment when she took my vitals), asked if I was comfortable, I said "yes, enough," and surely, suddenly, she wrapped my sack in some sort of cloth and moved my apparatus back and forth twisted it till she had it in away that would make access to the steps that follow easy for the doc to accomplish. 


It was one of those Ayahuasca moments where the orders of the realms were reshuffled and time and space disengaged from their typical linearity and context. I did not know if the story about the old Taiwanese healer told to me way back was actually a prophecy for me,... was I in a strange entanglement of time lines, or I had just discovered on a new form of kink?


 


3. After playing my ocarina for the staff in the radiation therapy room (they were mesmerized, by the way) I pull down my knickers and proceed to lie on the table where the Giant Robot with its multiple parts and its cyclopic eye will dose me.


And you know, I gave this Monster robot my blessing and cleared the room with my ocarina and all of that before laying on the table. The technology is amazing. You lie down on this platform and the appendages of the Monster scan your body so the Cyclop eye through a variety of algorithms focuses on the targeted areas and through a thin green beam emits a high pitch sound that signals one is being dosed.


So there I am, this time doing a kind of Tantric visualization suggested to me by my friend Rick, visualizing Hecate, Kali, wrathful deities, in the form of a radiation beam, slowly destroying the aberrant mad cells when the radiation stops and I hear from the female pilot of the Monster behind the shielded glass : " Mr. Roman, please give me a sec. I need to reboot the computer."


Uh huh!...Apparently, the Monster was busy this day and when the coolant water hits a certain threshold the system shuts down as part of multiple fail safes.


4. After this day's treatment with my knickers pulled up I head out to the waiting area where either Shana or my friend Ruth are waiting for me. 

There is an old gentleman (early 70's maybe) on a wheel chair with a blanket on his legs presumably up next for treatment and I ask him about his amazing painted fingernails.


Each is painted in a different color. Brown, Yellow, Red, Black... He tells me he lives in an assisted living home and the staff likes to paint his nails differently each week.


I am thinking about painting one of my fingernails in his honor and of those yet to arrive at Curing Huts.


From the edges of the Cancer Fields at Emory Hospital in Atlanta,

2/25/2023

Postcards from the Cure Machine (2)

 

 


Postcards from the Cure Machine (2)

1. This is a "radiation dieta."  Yes, this is a "radiation dieta."  That is what this is.

2. At the waiting area for Kali therapy ( the young therapists conceded to my suggestion to name the Linear accelerator machine after the Goddess, can you believe it?) we applaud, cheer, as one of us has rung the bell at the reception desk meaning their treatment is over.The staff, friends and family holler up. I look over at Michelle who is with me this day as she tears up hearing the initiate praise and give thanks to Jesus and I, have tears running down my face behind my covid mask.  

3. "Improvise, adapt, overcome," the gracious gentleman from the West Coast transmits to me his motto.  He had been in remission for years but now Mistletoe Therapy is his last chance and last stand to live just a little longer. I am remembering him as I await my turn for another dose of the ionized green beam. It was a few months back when We met at one of the few places in the States that offers Mistletoe Cancer Therapy. He told me his journey as we sat in the waiting area. His is an odyssey filled with the support of his wife and children, multiple interventions and his affirmation of victory throughout the 15 something years of assimilating his situation. "Improvise, adapt, overcome." I, too, shared parts of my story but mainly listened. After I picked up my supply of Quercus, Helleborus, and Solum Aesculus body oil we parted ways, both of us knowing about a secret gift cancer can bring by the right yielding to death.

4. I leave the Radiation Chamber (Kali's cave), after all, the floor where treatment is held, is the subterranean part of the Winship Institute called the Tunnel,
and right away I see a young black man sitting upon a gurney as I head back to the waiting area.  The hallway is empty. He  has beautiful mocha skin and what we used to call a "Fro".  But his eyes are wide shut and his tongue is swollen red and curled sticking out of his mouth.  I am not sure I was supposed to see this.  I keep walking, astonished at his condition. I could not pick up any signal from his forehead. His stillness was absolute. His mother was on a chair behind him, her eyes shattered. She reminded me of my own mother. My mother's honey brown eyes were also shattered but had another kind of irrevocable  soul decimation as she bedridden grieved my brother's death from prostate cancer just a few hours before I stepped into her room..

This is a "radiation dieta."  This is  a " radiation dieta."  Yes, this is what this is.

5. The effects of the radiation are cumulative and now have psychoactive properties and disfigure me somatically.  Because these procedures are so invasive, past physical violence I experienced becomes part of my psychic phantasmagoria as i lay in bed. Yet, simultaneously, I experience the past trauma, the present one as well, with another perspective within myself. A location/perspective generated through the use of plant medicines, ritual, music, community. A deeper perspective and existential site. Unencumbered. Who is this Other witnessing multiple perspectives as my bones ache in pain, my stomach shot to smithereens? I think of my dad and what a fool he was to abuse me as a child. What a waste of love as a tear rolls down my face.

6.In one dream that followed, I am together with all great aunts, uncles, grandparents, and family members from long ago it seemed. Some, I had never met! We are gathering just to be with one another by the ocean, innocent, mischievous. The vibe is luminous, warm, soothing, safe. There are so many of us. We are natural. Assured.  For a few seconds (?)  I thought I had a stroke and died during my sleep.  Was this some lovely shamanic buddha realm I am gonna dwell for a cosmic bit? Were they protectors and guardian spirits?

This is the radiation dieta.

7. I am being driven back to my house by my friend, Ralph, in his Mazda convertible, top down, through the side streets of Atlanta after my 14th dosing. Spring is teasing us with assorted bird songs, soft sunshine passing through clouds, and scattered blooms about the winding road.

It's a radiation dieta. Its radiation dieta, too. When I got to my house, a paperback edition of the Radiance Sutras arrived.
 
Alberto

 

1/17/2023

Microdeath stars in my body

 My beautiful, beautiful friends, Spiritual teachers, preachers, healers, mystics, shamans...all good people who keep the roads to the Sacred Fire open,

If you want to and can, for a little while, please open up your Fields of Virtue and Power and turn those high refined vibrations/frequencies my way.

You know how this goes: we are part of a Marvel that Renews itself and sends healing light, love and power all over this precious earth.

I am now in communion with my death song and listening closely how to sing it.

So far, an incredibly complex weave of emotions, insights, releases, and of course, gratitude for my life has surfaced through the arriving of this turning of the wheel.

Even though my inner light, my life force, has never been as free and the resolution of my awareness as keen, parts of my body are under siege by a cluster of fast and furious cells, micro death stars, that, if I want to live longer (and I do), I need the intervention of a variety of Medicines. Otherwise, a very painful exit from this world is the forecast from my medical team.

I am committed to move past this attack on my corporeal self and remain optimistic that with deep medicine from many fields, including your hearts, there is a through line to the Great Health as I walk the way of Integrative Oncology.

There are still so many songs to sing, sacred dances to invoke, Ceremonies to be held and shared stories to be heard. All, rituals for Beauty, Truth and Peace for worlds seen and unseen.

But as part of this communing with my departure song i am very aware that I may not survive. Though we can never control how we die, this lovely tropical size body of mine has been an incredible ally. It's just an incredible gift. So, if I can,  I want to give it as soft and sweet easing as possible if I am to pass on.

But first the healing: From the Ordeal to the Unknown thing. I will be inside a soulful orbit between cure and healing for a year or more from the look of the interventions underway and scheduled.

What a mystery! What revelations are ahead.

Thank you, companions near and far.  May all that you love thrive. See you soon with a red balloon. Remain sane on the love planes. Emanate. Elevate. Celebrate,

Alberto.

6/08/2021

Dispatch

 

 " I tell you how I am experiencing it...at least today. Shamanism is an evolving wisdom culture. I see this particular response to existence as a series of knowledge gathering practices and applications inside a habitat of varying degrees of agency and power. A shaman, though that term is more of a polemic and invention within Anthropology, we need another locator for all those who are healers, by the way, and, remember healing is different than cure... these kinds of folks that are ceremonialists, artists, leaders, healers, yes, warriors, teacher/students, story tellers, and so on, bring wholeness and vision to a community. There are a lot of ontological postures available in our century: Materialism, Idealism, Nihilism, Agnosticism, not to mention all the Metaphysical and religious takes on what having a pulse or not is all about, Mystery Schools, and their countless hybrids... For me, at least the way I understand it, the Ultimates remain mysterious and wild. Shamanism is a participatory stance rooted in love and open-ended knowledge as death/dying set horizons for how to respond to what gets co created within each unique life span and the culture one works with. A shaman or curandero, or exosentient ( i am hustling that alternate term)... is someone who brings "medicines" ("quickenings" into superlative locations of the heart and mind) to a collective and themselves. The Arts and Techniques of Relation vary according to what is needed in a specific context ... intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal. And, even more due to our inextricable embeddeness and interconnectedness not only to the Earth but to a shifting and expanding Cosmos at all levels of intelligence and organization the engagement is superb, complex, and at times demanding. But, as a great sorcerer once said, "it don't mean a thing if ain't got that swing." So, go forth and labor for the exquisite and delicate." 

Excerpt from a recent interview I did a few months ago soon to be out.

4/28/2021

Diamante

 

 

The nagual's subtle body:
weightless, real, we passed through to the other side...light had other properties the cosmologists forgot...Dark matter is but time not crystallized not yet a manifest of causal sequences...not mental not material this power...
 
I look out into the starry night. Jungle lightening bugs fly more like humming birds more like mischievous ancestors as I register what the Cave was telling me.
 
Maybe all of this homecoming was because i nearly died twice in the last week. First, that undertow in the ocean just took me and threw me against a volcanic reef...Left a gash on my knee and my right quadriceps traumatized. Then, this afternoon when I stepped off from a ledge into a water pool on the other side of the cave and up. 
 
I recall on the way down thinking that I was not yet touching water. Primal intense self reflexivity...Then, plunging into the water going down and down and down. I was aware that I needed to force myself to come back up if I was to live and not die. It took all my strength to reach the surface. My body more exhausted than I thought.
 
I cried early this morning surrounded by the jungle forest. I do not want to die I said to myself. This is all so beautiful. Outrageous bird songs coming from trees. Almost imperceptibly I felt the jungle envelop me again so lightly and I felt absolute comfort knowing she will take me back into her fold...into this Mystery...
 
 
journal notes.
ar.

 

3/30/2021

Quetzal

 

 


Friends,
I would like to change the name of this precious collective from Shamanic Meditations to just "Quetzal."
 
A few reasons guiding my vision, mi vista. is, one; the Quetzal is deemed by many as the most beautiful bird, and, after all, is that not the endeavor we take when walk the path called shamanic, refining who we are to that vibrating open spaciousness filled with the presence of love in co creation with all the realms?
 
Also, there is a conversation about the eagle and the condor flying together. North and South America and yet it is through that most abundant of corridors that the two Continents and civilizations are united. Meso America Central America. Anthropology bears out the ongoing exchange between civilizations through art, rituals, customs found in "Snake Island."
 
However, what makes this renaming a more salient recalibration for me is that the rich and complex history of Meso America is one where identity is based on Hybridity, Mestizaje, a glorious intercivilizational off spring of European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Indigenous Imaginariums ever fertile.
 
We, who participate in this group, are descendants of immense couplings both material and spiritual that continue to take place even now with our practices and offerings. We are one yet multiple in our various "bodies." We are part of a living lineage that we nourish and evolve and it with us.
 
So, philosophically and experientially, my sense is that the Quetzal is the exalted avian symbol of the passage between ancient wisdoms and emergent contemporary ones as well.
 
We represent that.
 
What sayeth, ye? 
 
So, if someone asks you about lineage or seeks authentication of your prowess, you can, if you so choose, to always truthfully say that your lineage is of the Great Quetzal and sing a flower song of the above.
 
This one given to me at night by a waterfall inside a cave.

2/08/2021

Curanderus Shamanical

 

 

shamanic intelligence is heterogeneous features in tension. 
 
Multiple Arts Practices (m.a.p/ co design your own cartography).
 
How to arrive at balance in a particular habitat, habitats... whether it is intra psychic. I mean, how you perceive think feel embodied...this is a love zone, una zona de poder... or whether the terrain is interpersonal (you and "others" ...you know, to reciprocate and be in mutuality or not, clearly, this is part of your agency as you dwell on the Mundi Mundi.
And, certainly, the transpersonal domain is part of the Plane for the Sane asking how goes it from the molecular to the cosmic? What is our original relation to what is?)
 
This above is the existential jam between all kinds of wilds.
 
Oigan, Oigan. The original science:
Experiment. Integrate. Experiment. Integrate
Its is about location. location. location.
Enjoy your participation in the Inter of things.
 
Ameegos y ameega this is a way of life, a choice. a camino, many of us live out across histories. This is Medicina.
Its about Beauty differentiations and constellations.
A Good way entails Right relation rituals abiding in an affirmative intensification of life. Medicina: To be healed, happy and free.
 
We are here. Sort of metamodern.  Shape shifters.  Excessive. Mystical. Lucid and Serene.
Dying well.
 

 


 

1/12/2021

Swamp Idol

 

Public
At the terrorsphere,
mutant republicans
Glow cannibal for one another at the steps of the skullcult.
Irredeemably lunar.
Wasted. Gone.
 
The swamp idol longs for ground.
 
Demonology Americana.
Ghost shards from a desolate history
Disappear and re appear.
Meanwhile, my animal eyes shift worlds.
 
ar

Shadow Hybrids

 

Public

A quick dispatch from the Sun Hut regarding Qanon shaman: 
 
Shamanism in many ways is about the production of novel forms of subjectivity and collectivity in skillful response to a habitat--- whether it be a forest or a city, a planet, a time period...who you are, how you go about in the world is an ongoing reciprocal exploration from evolving knowledge practices these lineages offer contemporary culture.
 Hybrids are an inherent feature of these kinds of maneuvers with la Vida, the self vivifying soul of the earth, Anima Mundi. So, as we all know, dosage is key in these metamorphic matters. How much of this, how little of that, is part of that transformational alchemy --should you choose to engage with what is possible for ongoing fundamental well being and its registers. 
Experiment, certainly, yet be vigilant of how you combine whatever ingredients you are fucking with. Psychedelics, politics, cosmology, psychology, spirituality, sex, science and personality are potent elements on the path as one constructs mutuality and benefit with what is given. One can blow up at the Medicine Lab. 
As in anything, quality matters. Range of both healing potency and Vista (Visionary horizon of meaning) varies as well but gives us ways to make distinctions. QAnon shaman, at the moment seems to me like a garden variety hallucinating brujo with a narrow bandwith to share with his locos y locas. Fuera Hucha. Fuera. Heee ooooh dee dee.

6/15/2020

Geode




I would like to do a Super Ritual at Stone Mountain. I have been talking about it to friends at private salons for a couple of years.

Basically, we re territorialize and re mythologize the Magnificent Stone by bringing in collectives (Native American, Black, Latino, Whte, Asian and variations) to occupy each of the directions (South West North East) and perform a ritual (dance, song, music, and so on) blessing the space with diversity.

These are preparations for the primary Ritual which is that after the intonations in the directions we as Artists, Healers, Ceremonialists, Warriors, Storytellers then sit in a meditative space and visualize an Invisible Pyramid that will float all over Atlanta (the South East even) bringing positive mana to all who connect with it through out their day wherever and whenever they are.

We make it a media event. Local TV. Social Platforms. We remove the power of the Confederacy by re mythologizing the value of the site.

The whole city is invited.

I see it. Stone Mountain used to be the place where female Shamans used to gather to communicate. We can have a woman (women) run up to the top to begin the ritual.

We can work the ley lines that connect quartz across the planet.
There are a lot of ways we can go.

The logistics are the main thing since this group is teething with talent. A license to get up there an do it. Electricity for lights and music. Maybe more funds to make it classy and document it well for posterity.
This will take coordination but most us of are seasoned. Please contact me for ideas or contribution to the staging of this event if you are interested.



Magia Metamodernista






Yes.Yes.
Yes.

Shamanism as: new thought scientists engaged in Higher Coherence Living.

More like artists of the soul and less technicians of ecstasy...
these new shamanic star people.

They are Psychomagicians seeking preferred future outcomes.

They are a consciousness medicine people that intensify life through the exquisite art of distances and proximities, you know, perpetual self distinguishings.

In their series of knowledge gathering practices, in multiple habitats, the act of inaugurating an always variable rule ensues.

Through their cartography of crossings liberations and productions of subjectivity abide.
They participate in the Superlative subtle from molecular to cosmic. They are co creators born from love.

These Bright dwellers understand birthing as much as vanishing.

Look! A blue moth on a Temple bell.

Look! I am one...

5/31/2020

Impromptu Sunday Rant 1


Spiritual solidarity
Soul idarity
precedes and supersedes
tribalisms and necessary isms
for choices made on how we regulate, allocate, organize and distribute basics of survival on the Mother ship
though these gotta change if we are to remain sane on the love planes.

Any occasion we see some one as white, black, brown, yellow, with or without multiple sexes
we have diverged from relation to objectification obsfucation perpetrating abstract ideological categories that brings partial glory but not freedom.

Every time we locate some one as privileged, ignorant, unwoke, filthy rich or poor
we have been ensnared, flared, forced to care for a mirage of separation when respect, love, consideration of the one on one is the way to salvation, liberation, consecration.

Power. Power. Power. to do. to be done by. Always an on going relation.
Select judiciously your level of emancipation.

Spiritual solidarity
Soul idarity
precedes and supersedes the metaphysics of oppression institutionalized segregation that benefit ancient lineages of predatory formation.

We are each born in the middle of histories not of our making with distinct skills and brights. We will die as other histories play out their configurations. How, who, what do you love on your way to another mysterious destination is the choice.

Remember who on earth you are.

5/27/2020

Elusivity






Let us appreciate how strange and astonishing this communication platform/vehicle is.
A device extracts information from the environment, photons, sound waves, and so forth, then, converts them into its own recombinant codes which are relayed back to you through its specific architecture as a simulacrum of my self or you.
Sheer scientific sorcery.
Nevertheless, this tells us me that: We really do not know what else can "matter" do since the range of information conveyed is still an extraction from a larger Field of Powers and its horizon not absolute. Other "technologies" place us in different locations and streams whose content is Angelic/Blissful or Hellish/Absurd and of a different kind of experiential materiality outside of what the current empirical conjuring and designs provide. Also, how things change, I mean not that long ago other variants of our species would not allow themselves to be photographed for not wanting their souls to be ensnared in the image, now, multitudes are seeking capture by the Media Apparatus.
What sort of Demonology is this?
And yet, for all the attempts at Totalizing politics, Ideological Fixities, and Orthodox Economic decrees, there is an inherent realm of Elusivity permeating this Civilization for the reasons stated above.

Project: Pursue auspicious anonymities amidst delivered simulations of self.

From the Lost Journals of Tico Brujo. Date Unknown.

5/22/2020

Leap



My media feed is a cyber heterotopia.

I see posts from accelerationists, mystics, hard core materialists, skeptics of all stripes, Trumpeestas, lefties of all gradients, artists, brujos y brujas, cats, troll farms, post humans, transhumans, shamans, alchemists, dear friends and on.

I try not to be a frog  in a deep well who only hears my own steady croaks.  I have leapt out and surveyed the field where I hear the ensemble of the multitudes of other frogs entranced by their own enclosed sound under starry nights.

There is a glorious roar to it, no doubt.  A delicious wild rain of symphonic vibrancy filled with rhythms, timbres, and refrains.

Yet, I also know, that beyond the field of wells there is a vast and mighty Sea.

When I first saw this Mysterious Ocean after i leapt out of the sonorous valley following a hum in the distance, it was too much, my head exploded into smithereens.

Now,  I am a headless amphibian that wears multi plumed hats.

Templo Lindo


5/15/2020

NOT YET

Tico brujo







Beware of skull eaters who follow aberrant astral paths
reverse the invisible carnival
and call it good bones.

The face of Being...like a skeletal synthetic lightbeam is not a strand of language.

Once we hollow out through luminous veins
the living hour where flaming Carnations sing
then the wheels flash
and we get coded into stones.

So, it is true that I pour entheo elixirs with starry feet
ignite the lightways beyond the Master Sign.

They call me Ticobrujo...
the one that dipped in bioluminous time
emancipatory, like a creature that never speaks.

Smoking mIrror


A recent diddy:
Sort of neo cubist sonic take on the Aztec Oracle.



https://soundcloud.com/alberto-roman/smoking-mirror

Covid Grifting




Covid 19 Grifters
run hyper active nightmares
for desolation tourists
As armchair Guevaras
overcode an abyss from their own way back when.

I ain't having it shadow rabbit.

4/02/2020

Sars 2



A few days back I walked over to my friend Michelle's house about 10 minutes down the road from my mud hut. We talked about all kinds of matters. Somewhere, in the conversation I suggested we ought to get together with other friends and do that round of how tough we had it growing up. You know, kind of like a Monty Python sketch: " when I was your age we were so poor my father cut holes in my pants so I have something to play with." Then, the other person says: " I didn't have pants." Someone else replies: " I didn't have parents." And on. This got me thinking about the variety of Corona Virus experiences I have and am going through now. Let me introduce a distinction I created.

Coronacitis. Sars 2 is the virus. Covid 19 the disease. Coronacitis is the effect of the this zombie across all platforms and media. I say "zombie" because according to science Sars 2 does not meet the criteria of a living thing.
My sense of "agency" is at odds with the boundary drawn but that is philosophy for another time.

 In consistent ways, I remain serene and at ease with all the multiple responses and perspectives I encounter from friends and strangers managing the complexities of this 21st Century event. A whole lotta lightning in the atmosphere, for sure. First of all, Is not the humor circulating in the various media systems, the ingenious memes we see daily show up truly as sweet balms amidst deficits in leadership and vision?

I will hold back my wicked, wicked tongue on celebrity culture except to observe how ordinary some of them seem. Are they really worthy of our money and adulation? As I examine my own inner world, I tune to a kind of experiential immunology to crisis and threats developed from circumstances I cleared long ago. Sure, I grieve as well yet the intimacy that uncomplicated grief delivers feels part of a Greater Health. Before the age of ten I had: Seen my younger brother (RIP)trip, fall, and split his lips in two on the sharp end of a rocking chair. All that blood. My dad rushing to the jeep carrying Greg in his arms. I watched Greg through an operation window vomit several times as a response to the anesthesia the surgeons were given him to sow his lips back on. It left him with a scar that fucked with his psyche till the very end of his life. I was 5. This took place in Nicaragua where I lived for a bit. We moved between Costa Rica and Nicaragua often. About a year later, my father took to whipping me with a belt till I passed out inside our garage. Asshole! Yet, A few days before my dad died (20 years ago?) I asked him to apologize to me for disrespecting me in such a way. At first he defended himself claiming that the violence made me the good man that I am. I replied that on the contrary, the violence created all kinds of inner turmoil in my life. Much to his credit and change of ways he apologized with all his heart. He said he wish he had love me more. I said he love me enough. He died a few days later in his home in Managua. Allow me to continue, We moved back to Costa Rica after the brutal whipping incident. The dynamic between my parents got more volatile. My sweet mom had a demonic jealousy in her and my dad was a terrible womanizer. There are all kinds of side stories to this but I wll skip them for a particular moment that happened. One night, I saw my Dad strangling my Mom dragging her head across a wall to the bed room trying to kill her (?), I wanted to jump on him but our "maid" grabbed me and my little brother, and tore ass out of the house as I heard her scream, I remember blue lights swirling, hiding in the bushes, my dad driving up telling us to get in the car, the "maid" pleading with him to let us go, to drive away, which he did after we sat with him for a minute in the car. I was terrified. My brother and I went to live with my aunt and uncle Quito and Leyla (RIP) who became our guardians from then on. My grandfather, who was living with them died not too long after they took us in. Abuelo, Rafael, who I am named after (middle name) was a sweet man. He told me on the eve before his death (he was having cataract surgery the following morning) how much he was looking forward to finally seeing "his little angels." I rememeber running to his room excited for the new day and his operation. He had his back to me in his jammies. A glass with his dentures in them on the night stand. He was not moving. There was a weird quiet cold vibe to the room. I walked out and a few minutes later my aunt came in to my room with blood shot eye and helped me get dressed telling me I had to go away for a few days. One detail from that story is that my Mom was so beat up from the assault that she could not come to the wake. And yet, she did. She was all dressed in black with a hat that veiled her face. I was outside playing acroos the street since I was staying at a neigbors house(they did not want me inside my own place) and saw her walk in. She waived. I crossed the street to peer through a window. I could see a circle of women all dressed in black. Candles. A coffin in the middle of the room. More life went on. My mom and dad still kept at it on and off till they did not. There is more to tell here about that but that was worked out in therapy aeos ago. My brother and I lived in a pension alone with our mom after dad left the country. (My mom is in Costa Rica at the moment with Dementia). I recall a dickehead from Honduras shot a kitten at the pension's inside courtyard in front of all the tenants because it kept him up at night. I remember watching from a stairwell while the kitten writhed and screamed his last breath. Tough stuff, you know. Eventually, for all kinds of reasons my brother and I, our guardians as well, ended up in the USA. The whole learning another language assimilate to not assimilate to integrate rediscover/reinvent my "identity" is another cup of sopa. I have gone through all kinds of Intitations here in the land of the Free (freaky and I like you a lot). Telenovelas got nothin on this vato hommie mae, ameeegas y amigos. My guardian, Quito, worked in Forensic psychiatry during our stay in Louisville, Kentucky. Sure enough, a band of patients escaped and walked right into our house. I was with my friend Corbin Seavers in the kitchen when they walked in. I kept my cool, broke loose just enough to get Quito up and have him call security. Not to long after that another band of criminals broke out and came looking for Quito and other docs who had sent them to prison. I recall hiding in the yard when their car lights came up to our driveway yet pulled back. I got in the house unseen by them and slept that night with my first communion crucifix under my pillow that in my 12 year old imagination could become a weapon if needed. I knew Jesus would understand if I poked an eye out or two in self defense. Amen y gracias a la Virgencita as well. Friends, I was in Nicargua during the Sandinista Revolution. While staying in Managua with my Dad and his new family. I would go to bed listening to gun battles up on the hills. I could hear the back and forth of AK47s. Somoza's guards had checkpoints everywhere and for these poor men fighting against their own brother to pull a trigger and waste us seemed inconsequential when I looked into their eyes . Someone, I was loving at the time got brutally assaulted by those fucking guards. Gather round children. Gather Round. I am many decades into my life. There are all kinds of entry points and exit ways to what I could share about duress. LOve Love Love ,in all its forms has been there accompanying my path. All kinds of medicines. All kinds of ways bring me to Wholeness:  Meditation, avoid catastrophic thinking, cognitive distortions, projections. Most of us will survive this.

 Grieving and Celebration can co exist in one soul. Yours, Mine I do not know your pain or the level of sorrow you are experiencing right now. What can be triggered will depend on your culture, ethnic group, financial well being and more importantly on your medicine bag, cognitive tools, and innate resilience. As you adapt and shift to our current episode keep in mind that others around the planet are experiencing warfare, destitution and loss to a level that what i share here is a fairy tale. Remember our companion species.
  
Do not forget that your resilience, your soul depth, your deep intelligence out shines the content of your mind (games).

This is not a species extinction event even though I know some of you think that we are the virus, a scab on the skin of the earth and thus welcome a new evolutionary line to emerge besides us.
The term "interdependence" is more nuanced and complicated than some had ever imagined

Tell me, when you were growing up you were so poor that...

 Stayin sane on the love plane. I am around if you want to talk. a

8/21/2018

The wild field.

Shamanism is a species wide practice. No one group owns or has privilege to engage with the forces of the earth and the cosmos exclusively. No one owns, death, magic, healing, illumination. We have been shamanic longer than we have been "civilized" and cross cultural pollination has been going on for ages as we continue to do so now. We are natural born for wonder and knowledge. There is an investment by certain intellectuals to be unloving towards folks who practice this path without the credentials they think are required for validation in communing with the earth and supra sensible dimensions. Hilarious. There are all kinds of "concepts" out there that move beyond what these kinds of thinkers offer. Here are a few shamanic concepts : Heterotopia, Immanence, Inter-civilizational Dialogue, hybridity, geophilosophy, rhizome. These concepts offer novel ways to situate subjectivity, ecology, politics and the cosmic. Even with the aforementioned horizons the live wild goes on. Folks who attempt to restrict what genuine shamanic practices are have an agenda that, while admirable in attempting to protect certain groups from the perpetual predation humans inflict on each other and other sentient beings, nevertheless, miss the ontology of what controlled transcendence is pointing to.

3/13/2018

Entries from the Lord of Flowers Journal.


Transcultural entheo shamanic consciousness
is a very specific "event consciousness."
We call it
Hummingbird heavens.


Our original instructions unfold.

Flower songs. Ritual.
Sacred Medicine is carried.
 We are set of relations from the molecular to the Cosmic.
 It is a choice of relating experientially to the world:
 An open present awareness. An inner disposition.
We are made of "god stuff":  Spontaneous emergence of self ordering systems as a property of matter. Luminous. Dynamic. Animism.
Fire flower: A source transmission from one sequential moment that is timeless and spaceless. Open intelligence. Lineage.
 Jaguar love.
There is this boundless inner freedom where the quality of attention outshines its contents yet "feels" them.
This state already has a set of capacities that come on line: : tranquility. wonder. joy. awe. inspiration. majesty. stillness...Beauty, in other words.
There is "Confianza": a fundamental trust to find our own way. a remarkable wisdom knowing: Intuition. As if a dynamic energy from elsewhere is guiding us.

 Star serpents. Red frogs.

There is overflowing joy.
We are peaceful. Sovereign.
Incredibly present. Fully here. Not distracted. Beginner's mind. Non resistant. Wide open. Deeply at ease. An unimaginable sensitivity to the evolutionary needs of the moment or context abides.

Awake.
The world is ever fresh. A timeless spring. 
Evolvability. Adaptability.
We are serene.  Exalted.

 At home. In love with the Universe.
 
                                                                  ***********

The Cosmophysics of shamanism: 
Reality is in a process and dependent on who is looking at the spatio temporal context.
 A glorious shape shifting Super Being abides. 
Hybrid Novelty is inherent. The multiple in the moment is ever present. The plane of potentiality insists. Subjective openness to possibility and realization is cultural agency. 
Shamanism is subversive since it lives permanently between categories. Sensitivity to transformative ethics is ongoing new medicinal syntax. The participatory logic of rhizomes is magic. There is danger at the edge.







10/27/2017

Becoming chameleon


Become chameleon, says the Old one ( who in reality is a pack of many). Survive through adaptation. Blend with the forest.

So your mother thinks you have been kidnapped by guards at her door, that she is 7 months pregnant, that she attacked her caretaker from her bed with a cane accusing her of sleeping her with your dad, that she thinks you will arrive by a helicopter she paid for.

 There is humor in that in some way.  You don't have to carry her sorrow anymore or carry the guy who carries that.  

And this feral cat you have been taking care of for 12 years or so that the doctor says could be a vestibular infection as you watch Ms Grey shake her head spasmodically, tumble and fall, that you bring her food, that you bring indoors to hear her at times wail at full lungs in distress.

She lived to maximize her full feline wild thanks to your pack with the Jaguar clans.

Turn into dissolution, fragmentation, scattered flows, go with the undulating black mist, allow the pulsations from the unknown to take you in/out through..

Remember when you, your younger brother and newly born sister were staying in hostels and you saw that kitten be pumped full of bullets before breakfast in the middle of the courtyard because it was meowing too loud and it annoyed one of the tenants. At 9 years old you watched from the stairwell. Go with it. Surrender again.

Trust me, says the Old one who is not one but many.

You see the resonances between your feral, your childhood kitten and your derailed mother. What kind of archetype is this? What sort of assemblage?
And , the old one (who in reality is a pack) insists:

Don't forget how Dona Rosa found out about the killing and chased the tenant through the kitchen into the dining room where another tenant stuck his foot out to trip that hijo de puta. Yes, do not forget how Rosa, that big matron, straddled his chest and put the tip of that sharp kitchen knife on his chest and told him she would kill him if he ever did anything like that again. The tenant left the next day.

Remember Nietzsche, the Old one says :one must have chaos within to give birth do a dancing star.

I am just utterly amazed at this Strange Magic that leads me from sorrow to open ended intelligence.

So, I become a chameleon striped with multiple frequencies rotating perspectives with my lizard star eyes. I stick out my tongue and seize mana from the entropy and chasms. I let go of the branch and fall into the deep earth of my soul again changing this process to word colors that carry high wave luminosity where all of this mire of things shape shifts into novel forms of love.
















Good medicine typically prevails.

 
ar
sometime now

10/13/2016

Plant Medicine




We are told to lay low.  Not to draw attention to ourselves or DJ.  If there is an out pour of support for him then a deeper investigation might lead to harsher penalties from a  French judge.


The strategy is that even though, there is a documentary, a book, videos, and many, many folks who have sat with him in Ayahuasca Ceremonies through out the planet, maybe the judge will send DJ back to Peru to be with his family, if, somehow, evidence of his long history abroad of bringing the Amazonian brew can be dissimulated.
Perhaps so.

France is very anti-immigrant at the moment so the charges of importation and distribution of a controlled substance against DJ along with his host, Cyrillio, who apparently had been on the radar of French police for a bit is mired in complex sociopolitical dynamics.

Sadness, loss, disappointment, anger and hope  is what I am experiencing as I write this.

They each have separate lawyers, Cyrilio and Don Jose.  The Ayahuasca Defense Fund is involved.  I presume DJ will be presented as what he is: A traditional healer from Peru. Cyrilio and his operation will most likely get scoured for trafficking. Money needs to be raised. 10,000 Euros to begin with and no less than 40,000 euros as Jose's case moves through the court system for the next year and half or so.  Maybe, though unlikely, bond will be posted and he can stay with a French family awaiting trial instead of incarceration at Vesoul, France.

 DJ has very wealthy friends and associates who support him.  There is a good chance that the funds for his defense can be raised.  Character references, testimonies of the benefits of Ayahuasca and so on can be sent to his lawyer and so forth.   The French Court, along with with many who work the levers of justice, politics, medicine, and spirituality will benefit from being educated about the Vine of the Soul or so we hope.
In the meantime, letters of support, clothing, etc., can be sent to DJ.  A prisoner number is given.  All correspondence will be checked by the guards.
I am saddened, first of all, because DJ and I collaborated on a book and documentary together through MWP Divine Arts.  We also activated Ceremonies throughout many new places. I learned much from him as his shamanic musician, ally, and most of all friend for many years. We had a great time together.  I feel a sense of loss and concern for my brother who must be experiencing fear, loneliness, regret, and anger.

I am also, passingly, upset with him.  DJ had been declared personna non grata almost 5 years ago for violating the conditions of his tourist visa in the United States.   I had advised him not to venture out as he was planning but sure enough the rolls of cash, paintings, business cards and the acknowledgement of a friend he trusted that he was earning income while in the US were obvious violations of Immigration Law.

Those of you inside the world of Aya know how treacherous certain components of the practice can be.  From the outset Aya medicine has been deployed as a shamanic weapon against enemies in the Wilds of South America. The healing properties of the brew can be secondary to other interests. Fear, avarice, protection, and retaliation have motivated many of the indigenous people to use this amazing compound in the service of all kinds of power games.  Even though the Aya Diaspora has brought other traditions from the West such as yoga,  Buddhist brushtrokes, New age sympathies,  neuro-cognitive therapies, etc., to generate unique hybridities in the ritual use of Ayahuasca, shadow lines st permeate the Aya habitat.  Such dark features of the practice along with Ayahuasca's illegality throughout much of the planet create a culture that is riddled with players that are in it for the money,  fame, power over others, status, and the full spectrum of the human all too-human.

Shamans, curanderos, healers as we know are self shamanizing while in Ceremony.  It is not just about the participants.  The facilitators of Ayahuasca groups are involved in an experiment of psychological and spiritual transformation of their own through the songs, music, dance, prayers, cleansing and stories that occur in these circles.  DJ is no different and here is where I will allow myself to voice my upset.  Why do this, my dear amigo?  Why jeopardize your well being, the possible loss of longtime contact with your family, the distress this brings to many of us by taking such a chance in bringing medicine to France of all places and on the way to Bhutan? Do you need the money that much when you have a thriving legal spot in Pucallpa that brings you folks all year long at pricey admission fees? Is it to spread the medicine when it has already wound its way through the planet in the hands of many solid facilitators and shamans?  Who in your circle of associates is whispering to you to be so reckless with your life?  What is their agenda?  What drives you to say "Yes" to such risk taking?

Very well.  Done.  I cleared an intense aggressive edge around the bust.

We are told to lay low.  In whatever country you reside and if you are tied to DJ in some way morph into an owl, bizon, armadillo, worm.  Avoid the surveillance apparatus. There is much value in this advice even though French law and the USA where I currently reside have different legal and sociopolitical and juridical constellations. Risk for an encounter with the Law is always a concern.  In my own personal case,  I choose a different strategy. I will continue on my path which is one of affirmation of many new collectives emerging, of novel subjectivities and embodiments, of hybrid lineages and spacious intelligence.  I will continue to surround my self with folks who have left behind certain kinds of predilections and ambitions.

 We are exalted creatures of pure wisdom magic and of open ended knowledge creating benefit in all ways.  We will find ways to advance Shamanism as an evolving wisdom culture.


Certainly, there is "medicine"  to ponder besides my personal integration of the situation:  Who regulates what you put in your body, how, and why?  How can international law benignly accommodate alternate religious/socio/political/medicinal practices?  How to address the rampant mythologizing of Aya through out the globe? What are the ethical responsibilities of facilitators, guides, and participants when transgressing the laws of their respective countries?   What do "healing,"  "awakening," mean in Plant medicine practices? 

For now, I will send my friend, DJ, clothes, songs and money.   I look forward to swimming with him again in the Amazon streams.  I look ahead to practice Ceremony anywhere on the earth a free sentient being.

9/09/2016

THAT ART GALLERY

 
Xochigallo felt generous towards Rafasputin, at least that day. Amidst the clink and chatter surrounding their table at “Sun in Your Belly” café, a transmission occurred from Xochigallo to Rafasputin.  Acidhead Cannedy was there joining them at the table.  He was a witness to how it all got put in motion.

Rafasputin wanted many things, shamanic power, recognition, more money, more hair.  He wanted artistic notoriety.  He was seeking feedback as to how his spiritual work and practice was evolving.  Rafasputin respected Xochigallo and the Ritual Art Experiments conducted by him.  Performance events involving magic, theatre, dance, strange attractors and even ayahuasca Ceremonies were ancient medicine to the likes of Xochigallo, now an old mystic and provocateur.

Xochigallo was the one that suggested that Rafasputin stage a ritual performance to be streamed live with a small size audience from the Atlanta community of artists (sculptors, videographers, painters, rap wizards, a dancer, one musician), 5 women with shaved heads, 2 macaws, a mound of earth, a sheet of paper, candles.

Rafasputin was to perform a ritual to atone men for all their transgressions against women, nature, animals, each other, the mis use of technology, the general narcissism of men thinking they were the crown of creation (perhaps true) by enacting a Ceremonial bloodletting, like the Mayan priests used to do, as a way to appease their capricious deities.

And so, Rafasputin enervated by this cleansing spell of which he was the embodiment, the magical amulet itself, followed Xochigallo’s suggestion and pierced the base of his penis on stage at THAT ART GALLERY with a prismatic obsidian blade Xochigallo lent him and thus purified himself and malekind with crimson drops of blood.

The performance went viral on several media platforms.
We are now seeing the effects.

5/25/2016

Illuminations and Deep Art. On Richard Sudden.

I adhere to the view that Art can be revelatory, transformative, and healing.  That art can possess such powers points to the way of a different kind of wisdom and practice in all manners Aesthetic.  For me, the mystery of say something like the experience of beauty is that, unlike a strict Platonic eidos, beauty is in itself is a shifting admixture of joy, serenity, awe, wonder, majesty. Beauty is of multiple design. The degree of power in an artwork  is in how the elements above are arranged according to varying degrees of intensity and inflection.

Liquid Modernity is a term used to denote art in flux. Our time. Signifiers, symbols, icons, are seen to be dislodged from their source horizon of meaning into a vacuous stream of images circulating the multiple media platforms of our age as mere surface fascination in the service of late capital interests. We are impoverished by this lack of substance and depth many would argue.

Calls are made for Artists to engage in novel productions of collective and subjective formations as a counter intelligence to market interests and the vacuity of current aesthetic production.  If there is a crisis in defining who we are or what we are about in part it is because we live in a post metaphysical age.  Each artist is an island unto themselves.  The impact of their work is limited to a few supporters who understand the private semiotic of their ouvre. We do not have a cosmological constant any more as in previous epochs.

What to do then if you are a contemporary artist sifting through hyper swarms of information, images, and divergent views on art, life, and death?  How does one become sane when Capitalism and Schizophrenia in a Deleuzian sense produce not affirmative liberation but more subjugated and emptied bodies?

One way through, I found,  is in the current exhibit of Richard Sudden titled "Illuminations" on display at the Madison Morgan Cultural Center.

The exhibit is divided into three separate Gallery rooms.  Respectively,  Gallery one: Timeline.  Gallery Two: Particle and Wave. Gallery 3: On the Nature of Things.

Unlike Physics, Art can show a particle and wave occurring simultaneously.  Using perforated cardboard and paint, the works in Gallery Two, where I started the viewing, manage to locate not only physical properties of matter but their ensuing metaphorical value. That matter, light, and energy differentiate into individuated particulars is a wondrous event, a marvel that Sudden treats with a quiet elegance that glimmers through out the space.  We are invited to experiment with grand themes such as speed and stillness, the unique and universal, the palpable and unseen, as well as the complexities of emergence as a property of nature. Hetero optics.  One can not help but appreciate how the very materials used to situate these observations are in themselves articulations of light and matter which are here a Univocity, nevertheless.

Whether you are gazing at Red Oculus 3, White Orb 2, Penelope and Telemachus,  or any of the other 11 "paintings" one can not help but be provoked into deeper intimations about processes which subsist, insist and persist as sources of our own embodied cognitions.

Before I go too far into my study of the exhibit I want to point out that much of the voltage in "Illuminations" is the  refined sensibility by which Mr. Sudden maps out his endeavor.  There is a luminous, serene, refined, and meditative quality that evokes higher contemplative registers, say of Taoist Masters, yet executed through a very modern technical sophistication.

Gallery One named "Timeline" is a study on a small scale of larger Cosmological processes.  As you enter  an already darkened room where a deceleration of light appears to occur, on a table, there  is a fossil  artifact with jagged edges at both ends dimly lit by an small overhead lamp. I took this private moment to be an observation not only about my own finitude/continuation but also about the nature of Time-Light-Matter as well:  As you move in further into the room there is an amazing installation piece revealing, as if from some Mystery School Initiation inside a hallowed cave, the Order of the Cosmos. Continuity. Discontinuity. Light. Shadow. Polarities. Intensity.  Distance. Immediacy. Gravity. Lightness.  Openness.  Closure.  Patterns.  And, unlike the rigid mathematical fixity of fractal patterns navigating the Popular Imaginarium, the regularity of what nature constructs has a more organic temperament through Mr. Sudden's lenses.  A sculptural piece on the corner of the gallery called Alabaster Brain suggests an animating intelligence to the Meso Cosmos we are embedded in.  Key to the "effect" of Gallery One's ecology is a black and white video stream embedded on the wall above the fossil artifact.  The video shows silhoutted tree branches waving slowly as clouds pass above us.  The architecture of the World has permutation and fluidity.

We move onto"On the Nature of Things"  at Gallery 3.  There are several large sized canvasses hanging from the ceiling as if they were Potent Scrolls/Palimpsests for a people yet to arrive or a people that came and went and, or, more likely, myself,  a dweller of the Deep Art Ecology the entire exhibit explores.

 Here are some titles from Gallery 3:  Cosmos, Geometry of the Egg, Graviton, Bees, The Leaf, Seed, Mudra, and there are two sculptural pieces completing this habitat: Meditation and Hive.

For now,  I will mention the piece called Mudra since it allowed me to more keenly see how the materiality of the canvass paradoxically disappears making transparent developmental forces not readily seen that interweave with human agency ( Sun, plants, cells, gravity, language,  concepts themselves, electricity, death and on).  A Mudra is a Sacred Gesture.  Like Art can be.

If thought is a form of light itself, as Sudden  implicitly demonstrates in his work, and art is material for its many adumbrations, then Liquid Modernities' unhinged proliferation of fascinating optics without a pause  can be reflected through Bio cosmic sensibilities, where without converting into existential mystics (and yet that too is allowed), art morphs into affirmative declarations of interdependence and emergence. 

Sudden's "Illumination"  is a steady study in Bio-cosmology shown to us with the masterful craftsmanship, patience and the "simplicity" of a Zen Culture Creative: Graceful. Curious. Trusting. Knowledgeable. Warm. He shows us a living Universe from which we emerge, respond, and co design with. The materials he works with evoke intimate atmospherics as well as super subtle luminosities.

The very first and last piece you see in this exhibit is called Neurons.  This complex system of self arising cells which are conduits for our experience and seen under steely microscopes mirror the Canvass piece called Cosmos. A cosmos we also explore but through massive telescopes.  Densities of Light and Shadow.
 
To see with "both eyes" is to see both the local and the global.  A rare attainment in this age of the Anthropocene.

Thank you, Richard.