Who doesn't like sipping on a chilled beer while watching their favorite team battle it out in a game of Football or any other team sport for that matter ? The mass consciousness is so well controlled by Television, Sports and the Media, all working in collusion to keep the masses in a perpetual state of trance, glued to their TV sets, while in another part of the world innocents are dying because someone decides to bomb another country. We do get to know of some of these horrific stories through the media, we do pay attention to all the bad shit happening in the world, perhaps feel sorry about the ongoing chaos for a while and then return to the game on TV, and life goes on as usual.

We have been desensitized to an extent where we no longer feel any compassion for our fellow beings who might be going through difficult times and seem powerless to do anything about it. Let's get back to the Football and bring out the beers ! With this kind of an attitude we will never be able to see the tyranny we're living under, while meekly succumbing to the craziness of modern day living. All it takes is a little courage to step outside one's own fears and inhibitions ... and reconnect with this aspect of our being which unites us with everything ! Once we feel the pain of another human being we can begin to understand the cause for human suffering on this planet and begin to take steps to take our power back from the system while building something better working as a community living in harmony with natural laws. There are more people now in the world who are awakening to the big picture, each passing day. The time for real change is now ... each small decision we take brings us closer to, or takes us further away from our 'Dharma', our mission, our purpose to be here in this lifetime.


Here is a brilliant North Korean documentary translated in English, which shows how citizens are turned into compliant workers feeding the very system that enslaves us, without us realizing it ! It does contain some raw and disturbing footage of violence ... the harsh realities of our planet some of us never get to see ...


Just in case the video above doesn't work (they keep removing it) ... try the link below !

Watch it on Youtube !

The real story behind Columbus reaching America and what happened when they made contact with the Native Americans living there. Thanks Giving isn't what they've made the world believe ... The Documentary shows us the true history of the Western World like never seen before ! The ugly truth about this manufactured reality we see as opposed to how it really is.

Some interesting quotes from Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) ...

"Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain... Now it's long been understood - very well - that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist - with whatever suffering and injustice it entails - as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history either... the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community issues guided by values of solidarity, and sympathy, and concern for others, or - alternatively - there will be no destiny for anyone to control."

"There's nothing more remote from what we have been discussing than a conspiracy theory. If I give an analysis of, say the economic system, and I point out that GM tries to maximize profit and market share - that's not a conspiracy theory; that's an institutional analysis. It has nothing to do with conspiracies. That's precisely the sense in which we've been talking about the media. The phrase "conspiracy theory" is one of those that's constantly brought up, and I think it's effect simply is to discourage institutional analysis."

"When I was in high school... I asked myself at one point: "Why do i care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports."



Lightworkers, Torchbearers ... Way showers ... The time has come for the Tribe to come together in joy, in celebration ... Let your light shine !



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The Ladakh Confluence is a festival of music, art, green living and culture showcasing an effective way towards growth without compromising our values for nature and sustainability ....

The Ladakh Confluence 2010 will take place in the scenic expanse of the trans-Himalayas this July. Mark your calendars, prep your backpack and gear up for four days of music, art, nature and culture in the highest mountains.

The second edition of the Confluence comes back bigger, stronger and greener between July 15-18. Musicians, artists and travelers from around the world will unite in the breathtaking mountain kingdom for an incredible cultural experience. We’re looking forward to having you there.

Over the next few weeks we’ll share with you details of all the acts we have in store, details of how you to get here and of course, ways in which you can get involved.

Stay tuned ! Join us on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates.

Woohoo!
The Confluence Family











Reference : The Ladakh Confluence Festival


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Rastamia is an hour long documentary introducing the cultural, historical and spiritual aspects of Rastafarianism as explained by a group of followers in the City of Miami. The film delivers a message of hope and reconciliation by systematically explaining away the myths behind Rastafarianism as viewed by outsiders, resulting in a clearer understanding of this hybrid culture.


Rastafari are monotheists, worshipping a singular God whom they call Jah. Rastas see Jah as being in the form of the Holy Trinity, that is, God being the God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Rastas say that Jah, in the form of the Holy Spirit (incarnate), lives within the human, and for this reason they often refer to themselves as "I and I". Furthermore, "I and I" is used instead of "We", and is used in this way to emphasise the equality between all people, in the recognition that the Holy Spirit within us all makes us essentially one and the same.

For Rastas, smoking cannabis, usually known as "herb", "weed", "sinsemilla" (spanish for "without seeds") or "ganja" (from the Sanskrit word, "Ganjika", created by the Hindus of India), is a spiritual act, often accompanied by Bible study; they consider it a sacrament that cleans the body and mind, heals the soul, exalts the consciousness, facilitates peacefulness, brings pleasure, and brings them closer to Jah. The burning of the herb is often said to be essential "for it will sting in the hearts of those that promote and perform evil and wrongs." By the 8th century, cannabis had been introduced by Arab traders to Central and Southern Africa, where it is known as "dagga" and many Rastas say it is a part of their African culture that they are reclaiming. It is sometimes also referred to as "the healing of the nation", a phraseology adapted from Revelation 22:2.

The migration of many thousands of Hindus from India to the Caribbean in the 20th century may have brought this culture to Jamaica. Many academics point to Indo-Caribbean origins for the ganjah sacrament resulting from the importation of Indian migrant workers in a post-abolition Jamaican landscape. "Large scale use of ganjah in Jamaica... dated from the importation of indentured Indians..."(Campbell 110). Dreadlocked mystics, often ascetic, known as sadhus, have smoked cannabis in India for centuries.

According to many Rastas, the illegality of cannabis in many nations is evidence that persecution of Rastafari is a reality. They are not surprised that it is illegal, seeing it as a powerful substance that opens people's minds to the truth — something the Babylon system, they reason, clearly does not want. They contrast their herb to alcohol and other drugs, which they feel destroy the mind.

Rastafari see cannabis as a sacramental and deeply beneficial plant that is the Tree of Life mentioned in the Bible. Bob Marley, amongst many others, said, "the herb ganja is the healing of the nations." The use of cannabis, and particularly of large pipes called chalices, is an integral part of what Rastafari call "reasoning sessions" where members join together to discuss life according to the Rasta perspective. They see cannabis as having the capacity to allow the user to penetrate the truth of how things are much more clearly, as if the wool had been pulled from one's eyes. Thus the Rastafari come together to smoke cannabis in order to discuss the truth with each other, reasoning it all out little by little through many sessions. They see the use of this plant as bringing them closer to nature.


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In these accelerated evolutionary times that we live in, we find ourselves adrift in the flow of unprecedented change. Birthing a new age of cosmic consciousness and a deep knowing of oneness of all creation. A Neo Human is emergent within each one of us, an evolved psychedelic thinker tuned into the Gaian Mind ... the Noosphere consciously co-creating a new earth through loving intent.

I came across an awesome podcast on Matrix Masters 'Psychedelic Thinking and the Dawn Of Homo Cyber by Lorenzo Hagerty' ...

Psychedelic Thinking and Entheospace

Before I explain what I mean by psychedelic thinking, I should make it clear that I do not consider everyone who ingests a psychedelic substance to be a psychedelic thinker. Just like reading the Bible doesn’t make you a Christian, taking a psychedelic substance does not automatically turn you into a psychedelic thinker. To develop the powers of psychedelic thinking you must first do some work in the mind space I call “entheospace”. I define entheospace as that sense of place you have at those special moments when, during an exploration of your inner landscape, you discover an entire universe. If you are technically inclined, you can think of entheospace as an operating environment in which many forms of consciousness exist and interact.

What I am not going to discuss today is how you get into entheospace. There are many ways. Some people use chemicals. Others use plants. Some people enter entheospace “on the natch” by means of deep meditation practices, and others are skilled enough to use trance dance or yoga to launch their minds into the alternate state of consciousness where psychedelic thinking can begin. Before long it will be common to enter entheospace using virtual reality devices. There simply is no right way to enter this realm. What is important, and what I will concentrate on today, is what you do after entering entheospace. It is important, however, that you continue to keep in mind the distinction between a psychedelic thinker and a psychedelic substance user. It requires discipline, intelligence, persistence, and an unwavering commitment to honesty for a psychedelic substance user to become a psychedelic thinker.


Here is an excerpt from a transcript of the podcast ....

Lorenzo's view of Psychedelic Thinking ...

I recently heard the Governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, define insanity as doing the same thing over and over while continuing to expect different results each time. According to that definition, it seems fair to say that our entire species is borderline insane. The cause of such self-destructive behavior can often be traced to our inability to see the larger picture. Our species sometimes acts as if it exists in the two-dimensional world of Flatland. As you recall the story, everyone in Flatland is a two-dimensional being. When they were visited by a three-dimensional sphere, what the Flatlanders saw was a circle that had the ability to change its diameter as it moved up and down within the constraints of Flatland’s two dimensions. It wasn’t until the Flatlanders were lifted to the higher third dimension that they could fully comprehend the reality in which they lived.

By altering our normal state of consciousness and moving to the higher dimension of entheospace we see how interconnected we are. It is this higher state of consciousness that brings us to the clear realization that our personal concerns are intimately entwined with the fate of the planet and of our species. It is in this dimension, where psychedelic thinking is considered baseline, that we will eventually uncover the truth about our existence and our reason for being. It is also from this higher dimension that we can begin the process of integrating psychedelic thinking into our daily lives. Psychedelic thinking is what brought all of us together this weekend. As the subtitle of the conference makes clear, we have come here to investigate further perspectives on altered states of consciousness. In essence, we have come together this weekend because we are explorers of consciousness, making our way through seas of insanity, searching for new ways of being.




The writer, Henry James, once said, “The most profound discovery of my generation is that, by changing one's thinking, one can change one's life.” Those words lie at the core of psychedelic thinking, for a psychedelic thinker is intimately aware of the unlimited power of the human mind. As psychedelic thinkers we are not only more fully conscious than others, we also are people of action. We are the people who travel deep into entheospace and return with a renewed commitment to live more sustainably and peacefully on this planet.


A psychedelic thinker is not only a skilled navigator of the deeper realms of consciousness, but also someone who has decided to actively participate in the evolution of consciousness itself. The work of a psychedelic thinker begins by asking the hard questions that seem to be unanswerable while in unaltered states. More importantly, psychedelic thinkers never assume that their current answers are final. People who believe they have uncovered the one and only answer to the eternal mystery of life form religions. Psychedelic thinkers have developed the ability to move beyond such earthly absolutes.

Every child born into this world arrives as a full fledged psychedelic thinker. A rare few, like the current Dalai Lama, never lose this perspective. For most of us, however, the universal consciousness with which we began life on Earth is gradually narrowed and boxed in until our view of existence conforms to that of our parents, teachers, friends, and family. By the time we have completed the first few years of schooling we are no longer creatures of the cosmos. We have become creatures of our culture, and psychedelic thinking has faded into the dim recesses of our minds. It is extremely difficult to break out of the mental prisons that are imposed upon us, largely as a result of the family into which we chose to incarnate. The reason we see so few adult psychedelic thinkers today is that the first step in restoring our cosmic identity is to ask a very difficult question. That question is, “Why do you believe what you believe?” Until you are able to understand why you believe a certain proposition, you are working in the dark.

Have you ever noticed how young children begin most of their sentences with the word “why?” “Why is the sky blue? Why are we going to church? Why do I have to go to school?” “Why, why, why” we hear until even the best parents one day lose their patience and say, “Because I said so, that’s why.” At that moment, the child’s cosmic world of psychedelic thinking begins to grow smaller. Culture has reared its ugly head, and another young human mind has learned that the best way to get along is to go along with the herd. Thus begins the process of applying mental filters on our thinking until it becomes second nature to believe that all of the answers lie outside of ourselves, and these answers, of course, are all carefully guarded by the keepers of our culture. Trust in personal experience eventually gives way to trust in the culture. Had only one human culture evolved on Earth, this survival strategy might have worked, but such is not the case.


Today we find ourselves awash in conflicting cultures. There are religious fundamentalist cultures that believe they are serving a higher purpose by destroying two-thousand-year-old works of art, which were created by believers in a competing religion. There are survivalist cultures that hoard supplies in preparation for Armageddon. We have spiritual cultures that attempt to rise above the trials and tribulations of earthly existence. And we have multinational corporate cultures that seek to control our minds by forcing us to submit to drug testing as a condition of employment. All of these cultures share a common element. They place someone else’s belief above your own personal experience.

This brings us face to face with one of the most fundamental aspects of psychedelic thinking. Psychedelic thinkers place their own experience above someone else’s beliefs. I once heard someone say, “Claim no knowledge for what you have not experienced.” What a different world this would be if we all followed that admonition. Most of us, myself included, are happy to give others our opinions on a wide range of issues about which we have little personal experience. No wonder our public debates over environmental issues are so chaotic. For example, those who hold the reins of power in Washington today believe that CO2 is not a pollutant. From my perspective, this seems akin to the Reagan administration’s classifying catsup as a vegetable.

Like any state-supported fable, they both contain elements of reality. How then are you to gain the personal experience necessary to form an opinion about these issues without first signing on to the beliefs of one group of scientists over another? For those of you who are familiar with the realm of entheospace, the answer to that question is very simple. To gain the personal experience necessary to come to an understanding of sound ecological practices you only need to enter entheospace with an open mind.


Although seldom commented on in detail, it is becoming obvious that psychedelic substances often transform their users into more ecologically aware people. If you share my view that by entering entheospace you also gain the ability to enter into full Gaian awareness, this greening of psychedelic users is understandable. Of course, I am also aware that it is impossible to convince an oil company scientist to change his or her opinion about global warming with information someone discovered in entheospace. It just isn’t that simple.

My guess is that the majority of people in this audience know what it means to be in entheospace. If so, you will also understand what Tony Rich meant last year at the ayahuasca conference when he said, “We do know what we know.” Make no mistake about it, what we call altered states of consciousness are every bit as real and substantial as the consensus reality we are now experiencing in this auditorium. While in deep entheospace, there is seldom any doubt about what we know to be true, and this knowledge comes from the deepest levels of our being. The problem psychedelic thinkers face when returning from an altered state is how to translate this unspeakable knowledge into words and actions that will be understood by others.

Most of us have been in these interesting conversations where someone will say, “I can’t put words to it, but I can assure you that for an instant I truly understood it all.” And whenever someone in the tribe says that, we know exactly what they are talking about. This is where I see the first light of psychedelic thinking. It begins during that wonderful time in deep entheospace when you absolutely know the truth. From that first little spark can come a great flame. Whether or not you choose to nourish that flame is a decision that can determine your destiny. In times like these, however, your personal destiny may be more closely related to our species-destiny than at any other moment in human history. In addition to everything else that is going on right now, our culture has also begun an evolutionary transformation.



Josh Wickerham says ...

The war on drugs is not a war on substances; it's a war on states of mind. Entheogens(8) are not illegal because a loving government is concerned that you're going to hurt yourself by smoking pot or tripping in your bedroom. Entheogens are illegal because they make you question authority. They break down socially constructed fables and cleanse the doors of perception. They make you question the wrongs of society in a fundamental way, making you dangerous. You're like Neo in The Matrix when all of the illusions of reality have been irrevocably stripped away.


As Ray and Anderson point out ...

"Most of us change our worldview only once in our lifetime, if we do at all, because it changes virtually everything in our consciousness. When you make this shift, you change your sense of who you are and who you are related to, what you are willing to see and how you interpret it, your priorities for action and for the way you want to live. Regardless of whether you leave your home, change your job, or switch your career path, if your worldview changes, it changes everything."






"Every single peaceful person in the world contributes to the peace of the world !
~ Deepak Chopra"


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This year’s Boom festival compelled at least 25,000 people to make the long trek to a hot and dusty corner of Portugal near the Spanish border, where they decamped along the shores of a large lake whose presence mitigated the ferocity of the sun and the sear environs. The bi-annual festival has been running for over a decade, and it has long been recognized as one of the more underground and intentional of the larger festivals devoted to psytrance—that intensely trippy electronic dance genre whose ferocious metronomic beat sends dancers surging and stomping through interdimensional portals fringed with swirling sonic filigrees and creepy “lurker at the threshold” samples.

As befits the mind-melting aspirations of this potent and popular subgenre, Boom’s dominant subcultural tone is neotribal: a rave-inflected millennial florescence of hippie shit like long hair, dreads, feral fashion exotica, chai shops, massage booths, copious cannabis consumption, and paganish New Age tantric mysticism.

I gave a talk at the Liminal Village, one of half a dozen various stages and sound systems that defined the cultural ecology of the festival. A large tent surrounded by delightful gardens and bamboo temples that had been created in the weeks running up to the festival, the Liminal Village did the important work of injecting discourse, practices, workshops, discussions, and images—through both a visionary art gallery and a film series—into the festival environment. This learning center takes advantage of the fact that outdoor festivals are liminal zones, in-betwixt and in-between. With their peculiar blend of hedonic utopia and aimless refugee camp, the festival creates a space-time warp that allows people to glimpse new possibilities, to receive new map points, to reformat their expectations of themselves, and of the slippery dream of reality as well.

The Liminal Village formalized this process, advancing global countercultural concepts, practices, and politics in a subcultural space that is geared to the experience and desires of hundreds of thousands of predominantly young people around the planet. Much of this material was too woo for my tastes, with too much fuzzy talk of “the coming shift” and the “emerging culture” (as my friend Zariat pointed out, culture is always emerging). The calendrical fetish of 2012—the shamanic Y2K that even wacky Christian end-times preachers are now starting to invoke—reared its literalist head. At the same, though, I believe we need to work with the meta-consciousness implied by these urgent and millennialist memes, and was happy to lend my voice on a talk about the origins and character of apocalypse consciousness that remained, as far as I know, unrecorded (doh!). The basic message? Wake up and dream.


I am not a big psytrance fan, and found the main stage this year even less dance-inducing than usual, thought that may have been due to a decision to restrict my psychoactive diet (almost) to hash spliffs and caffeine. Properly off your face, and especially with eyes closed, the electronic precision and charka tweaking techniques of a good psytrance set can rewire a psychedelicized nervous system as powerfully as, say, a fat balloon of nitrous oxide—and for a much longer stretch of time. But I find it all too insistent, machinic, and alienating, perhaps because my trance dance body was shaped by the far more organic slop of the Grateful Dead. Boom provided some of that live band energy with the Sacred Fire stage, though every time I swung by, it just sounded like dorky world fusion. I preferred the Groovy Beach stage, which a wide range of electronic booty music ranging from stanky breaks to dubstep to minimal techno laced with Boards-of-Canada melancholy, as well as some impressively dreadful pop cheese to boot. My favorite set, from a DJ whose name I was too time-damaged to ever track down, was devoted to witty and sinuous tech funk, a playfully polyrhythmic splice of techno, electro, and breaks that resurrected some old school disco moves—including the deeply charming handclap—in a spirit not so much of irony as innocent exuberance.


Boom features a lot of visible consumerism. Attendees were confronted with a long line of reasonably good food-stalls, dozens of vendors providing the latest twists and turns of neotribal fashion’s feral mutations, and lots of beer stands. Given that Burning Man is just around the bend, I could not resist noting how much the alternative mall undercut the self- and clan-reliance that makes playaspace feel so much farther away from conventional reality. Though Burning Man encourages its own breed of mindlessness, and though vending allows many travelers to escape the empire of conventional work, a lot of Boom attendees were clearly coasting on the usual urban logic of consumption and distraction.

Perhaps this explains the depressing fact that there was litter everywhere, a pervasive and ugly webwork of crap that undermined the rhetoric and practice of environmental awareness that otherwise sets the Boom apart from most corporate festivals. The festival organizers provided compost toilets, recycling stations, and generators powered with veggie oil recycled from the previous festival. There were problems of course—the compost toilets were unclean, a nasty bug attacked many a GI tract, while other low impact strategies seemed to have principally reflected a need to cut costs. Still, the Boom folks were clearly set on making a difference. But the trash skeins of beer cans, plastic water bottles, cigarette butts and other moop—which the far larger and more chaotic Burning Man manages to largely avoid—reflected how much work it takes to draw festival-goers out of engrained and thoughtless behaviors.


There were a few other obvious differences from the West Coast freak festivals I know best. On the plus side, there was hardly any visible police presence, and, given that the consumption of drugs has been effectively decriminalized in Portugal, this made for the refreshingly free and open consumption of cannabis. On the other hand—and somewhat surprisingly—the crowd seemed a bit more uptight with their bodies and physical display. The freak costumes were more generic, there was less body modification, and there was nary an exposed bosom or hairy ass to be found, even though hundreds of people were swimming in the lake every hot afternoon. I got the sense that young Europeans were more distant from their hippie forebears than we are in the West Coast.

Of course, Europe has exceptional performers, and hoopers, jugglers, and fire dancers all performed at the Theatroom, a large stage devoted to alternative performance arts. There were also a number of interactive art pieces and inventive, low-cost structures, many created from recycled materials. Near the Liminal Village stood one flower-shaped device around twelve feet high, which my pal Spoon dubbed the “trance machine.” Cords attached to each of its “petals” could be yanked on, triggering a single track that the collective crowd of cord-yankers could mix into a thumping tune.




Next door was a long, low-slung tent that concealed the Kaleidoscopic Creature, a theatrical experience which I had caught the previous year at the UK’s notoriously muddy Glade festival. After entering and sitting down at one end of the tent, the small audience is treated to an interdimensional rocket-ride produced by a ingenious and decidedly analog blend of mirrors and puppetry. Despite (or because of) the low tech, the Creature conjures up more cosmic awe, organic metamorphosis, and mythopoetic sentience than any festival art I have ever seen. A big fat gold star to the French crew. Given that Boom is essentially a week-long trip-party for young people, I was most interested in checking out how different crews with somewhat different agendas created cultural spaces and cognitive feedback loops designed to raise and clarify the consciousness, intentionality, and environmental awareness of these budding hedonists.

The Liminal Village and the Healing Center did this through talks and workshops and films, while the harm reduction crew who staffed Cosmic Care created a safe space staffed with experienced crisis managers able to care for most of the psychoactive casualties without calling in the heavy guns. Free publications and a variety of gardens introduced attendees to the philosophy and practice of permaculture, hopefully focusing the often nebulous rhetoric about “planetary consciousness” into practical expressions. But as the litter proved, there is still a large gap between attendees who are tuned into these intentional processes and the ones who are there to party and feel no compulsion to open their ears to the good news/very bad news that in-your-face environmental consciousness demands. Again I thought of Burning Man, which, for all the faults and fuck-ups and toxic trash, does a great job of inculcating a basic ethic of personal responsibility, and at the very least programs people to pick up their trash.



The most bid for sanity in the swirling dynamics of the Boom was a drug-testing unit set up by Energy Control, a dynamite Spanish harm reduction crew centered in Barcelona. Inside a teepee at the edge of a spit of land, where a somewhat dodgy bridge made of empty metal barrels led to the Sacred Fire stage and yet another healing center, Energy Control set up a simple and inexpensive thin layer chromatography lab. Using only a very small amount of materials dropped off by attendees, Energy Control could set brand claims against chemical reality. Tiny red stars sold as mescaline (an impossibility given the weight of an effective mescaline dose) were revealed to be LSD, while a lot of the Ecstasy sold featured mixtures of caffeine and other bunk rather than MDMA. As an advisory board member for Erowid—which had a booth alongside Energy Control—I was tickled pink with this direct injection of rational data into the psychoactive feedback loops of desire and consumption that characterize this offline, down-and-dirty festival.

Look for an extensive interview with the Energy Control crew in the next edition of Erowid Extracts. Finally, all this talk of drugs would be incomplete if I did not relate an experience I had with a substance that came my way through the happenstance that festivals breed—what the visionary artist Luke Brown called “syncronnections.” Changa is a DMT-containing smoking mixture developed in Australia that is being touted, with fair reason, as “smokable ayahuasca.” Unlike freebase DMT, changa is a dried plant mixture containing crushed leaves from the ayahuasca vine Banisteriopsis Caapi, along with other herbs, which were not identified on the colorful sticker of my plastic baggy but that sometimes include the Mexican dream herb Calea Zacatechichi and the South American Justicia Pectoralis. A solution of DMT is then most likely enfused into this smoking mixture. As with the ayahuasca brew, the vine provides the MAO inhibitor that modifies and extends the sometimes beautiful and always bizarre flash of DMT, which, given changa’s Oz origins, is most likely sourced from acacia.



Along with a friend, I said hello to changa on the last night of the festival. We sat on a small hill facing away from the sound systems and towards the lake, where the bulbous moon—which had been almost entirely eclipsed the night before—glittered on the water like a quicksilver mist. In the distance glowed the lights of a medieval mountain town with the somewhat ominous name of Monsanto. The smoke was sweet, and the entrance into the vestibule of the tryptamine palace was smooth but strong, and I slid gently along DMT’s inside-outside Mobius strips of sentient energy with more clarity and with less anxiety than usual. My fingers folded into spontaneous mudras and the breath of fire sparked without will. Then the vibrating weave of nature’s alien mind fluttered and unfolded us and set us gently back on the scraggly hillside, where the crickets and their ambient chirp-track trumped the distant thump of machines.


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