Dogs Bark, Men Think

Deze blog is er ook in het Nederlands: hansvandergugten.nl/?p=5766

In the book Ayahuasca, Rituals, Potions and Visionary Art from the Amazon,

(https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/f/ayahuasca/9200000045818309/),

there is a paragraph that I especially liked, it is in the chapter Ayahuasca and Spirituality written by Arno Adelaars.

To make it easy to refer to, I’m making this blog with the text in it.

After this text I give the link to the website about a project where a zen teacher

experimented giving psilocybin to advanced Buddhist meditators.

They have a movie that I have seen on Dutch television several month ago.

Here we go, Arno Adelaars first:

Dogs Bark, Men Think

One big difference between the spiritual techniques of the East and the West is the way in which insight is sought. The goal of meditation in different Eastern traditions is to internalize silence. The human mind is not silent. There is always a voice to be heard inside. It is part of the hardware of being human. Just as dogs can’t stop themselves from barking, humans can’t stop themselves from thinking. It is very difficult not to think, and paradoxically it doesn’t help to think to stop thinking. Because that is a thought as well. Stopping the babbling inside, stopping the inner commentator in one’s head, is one of the goals of meditation. If a person manages through a long practice of meditation to stop the inner voice, another part of the personality appears. It looks at a distance to the inner commentator. This is also part of the “I”. And behind it is still another one. By diving deeper in oneself, and becoming quieter and quieter, it is possible to connect with the One, with the big everything, the source of life, the big mystery, the white light.

In the Amazon a completely different technique was developed to arrive at the same spot. It probably has to do with the fact that the Amazon hosts the largest variety of psychoactive plants in the world. Instead of going deeper into oneself to encounter wisdom, the wisdom comes from the forest.

The Amazonian technique to stop the babbling and chattering inner voice, to silence the never-ending commentator. is not to go more and more quiet. No, it is to throw oneself into a hurricane, in the dizzying vortex created by the ayahuasca effect. That all-encompassing experience shuts down the commentator as well, replacing it with another voice, the voice of ayahuasca, the voice of the jungle. Here, wisdom comes from outside.

The ayahuasca vine plays an important role in myths of origin of many indigenous Amazonian people. In some myths ayahuasca is the teacher that learned the most basic things in life, like the difference between day and night,  as is the case with the Tucamo in Colombia and Brazil. In other myths the very first ancestors arrived on earth on the back of a mythical anaconda, coming from the Pleiades. The ayahuasca vine is the anaconda. By drinking ayahuasca it is possible to cross the border between life and death, to meet the ancestors, to encounter the source of life. As we discussed earlier, one translation of the Quechua word ayahuasca is “vine of the soul”. Not just one or another soul, but the soul of the universe.

Ayahuasca is seen as the umbilical cord of the universe, as a Huitoto shaman explains. An embryo is fed by the mother through the umbilical cord, and that is cut off after birth. For a while there is no direct nutrition from the mother. Drinking ayahuasca reconnects that link because through the umbilical cord the ancestral Mother of the Universe feeds the drinker with wisdom.

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Article about the psilocybin project: https://tricycle.org/article/tripping-buddha/

Website of the project: https://descendingthemountain.org/

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To make the chosen picture fit, here the report of my one time peyote experience.

Peyote

 

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