Change by Design: A Talk with João Amorim
"My work as a filmmaker tries to shine a spotlight on
good stuff happening around the world, pushing a positive agenda. But I
try to practice what I preach. I do agroforestry. We need to align our actions with our words, aiming for
coherence."
Sacred Economics: Chapter 22, Community and the Unquantifiable (pt. 23)
Despite being able to pay for everything we need, we do not feel like all our needs have actually been met. We feel
empty, hungry. Perhaps the things we need the most are absent from the products of mass production, cannot
be quantified or commoditized, and are therefore inherently outside the money realm.
DMT Milking: Is it Time to Stop Milking the Toad?
Indigenous cultures have used 5-MeO-DMT for centuries. With the surge in demand for psychedelic toad milk, is DMT Milking harming the frogs?
From the Black Market to the Boardroom: the Professionalization of Cannabis
What once was only found on the black market has now made its way into boardrooms. The professionalization of cannabis has created new trends in marketing.
An Encounter with Ayahuasca Sorcery
In the literature on South American indigenous and mestizo curanderismo, particularly in relation to ayahuasca, I found that harmful attacks by malevolent practitioners using invisible “darts” are widely reported. Perhaps as many as 50 percent of illnesses are said to be caused by such sorcery.
Feeding the Psi God: Precognitive Dreaming, Memory, and Ritual
Because of our natural ‘temporal bias,’ we seldom consider the possibility that our dreams (let alone our waking thoughts) refer to future events. This is the main reason precognitive dreams are so seldom reported. We simply don’t notice them.
Scarabs & the ‘Send’ Button: Synchronicity as Misrecognized Psi
Synchronicity may be a concept that actually neutralizes our psi by keeping us from too closely examining its disavowed libidinal logic. Jung may have broken from Freud too soon.
Revelation and Prophecy Without FM: William S. Burroughs’s War on Control
Burroughs’s transgressive prose works aimed at naming and defeating demons. Language is a form of magic that can triumph over control.
FOMO, Digital Dementia, and Our Dangerous Experiment
The couple thumbing their smartphones while ignoring one another, the moviegoer texting while his smartphone’s screen blinds us, and the person who can’t stop messaging long enough to keep the checkout line moving are all suffering from FOMO.
Love Magic & Holy Death: A Conversation with Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut
With Her many devotees among society's dispossessed, Santa Muerte, Saint or Holy
Death, has
drawn the ire of orthodoxies both religious and legal. Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut's new book is one of the first academic studies in
English of this complex and controversial figure. He was kind enough to provide some insight into this fast
growing devotional tradition.
