In visions and visionary art we often witness a sensibility that is not really a conventional beauty. It may be elegant, enchanting, intricate, but it challenges rather than succours us, it does not key into sentimentalised or strictly culture bound notions of beauty, but touches upon the ‘full cycle’.
Outside the Amazon, artists not born into or raised in indigenous or mestizo ayahuasca-using cultures, including such well-known visionary artists as Alex Grey, Robert Venosa, and Martina Hoffmann, have rendered visual experiences attributed to the ingestion of ayahuasca or DMT. For want of a better term, I will call this body of work DMT art…
Jay Michaelson discusses his views of the Ayahuasca experience and its relationship to Kabbalah – “…journeys of the soul to other realm and in the sense of a transformation of the self. They yield information, prophecy, revelation, theophany.”
By Flore Singer Aaslid
Fragmentation ultimately leads to pathology both individually and collectively, whereas integration promotes health. Fortunately, there is integrative potential in many fields of experience; art, myth, dreams and ritual all have this effect, as do many Eastern introspective techniques.
An interview with Juan Navarro by Howard Charing
Juan is a descendant of a long lineage of healers and shamans working with the magical powers and plants of his bio-region.
Benny Shanon, Ph.D.
AYAHUASCA IS FAMOUS for the visions it generates. Commonalities appear in the visions of individuals from different personal and cultural backgrounds. This essay explores these commonalities from a phenomenological viewpoint.
By Morgan Brent
Plant-inspired religions can be understood as acts of guidance by an elder community of species to a younger one, the human. They are concerned with successful co-creative relations within the community of nature and the organismic and spiritual growth that these bring about.
In the beginning, the sun created various beings to serve as intermediaries between Him and the earth. He created hallucinogenic snuff powder so that man could contact Supernatural beings. The sun had kept this powder in his navel, but the Daughter of the Sun found it. Thus it became available to man-a vegetal product acquired directly from the gods.