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Plants with Soul

by Matthew Warlick | Nov 30, 2006 | Blog

An very interesting article about Ayahuasca and how Amazonian Shaman use it to learn, heal and communicate.

In 1984, a young Ph.D. student at Stanford University named Jeremy Narby traveled to the Peruvian Amazon to conduct field research for his thesis in anthropology. Raised in Canada and Switzerland, Narby lived for two years with Peru’s Ashaninca tribes, and had read accounts of the remarkable healing abilities of their shamans. When he told the shamans about his chronic back problem, they offered him a plant-based cure, a sanango tea consumed when the moon was new. It would, they cautioned, leave him debilitated for two days, at first chilled and then unable to walk; afterward, he would be fine. Their forecast proved accurate; Narby drank the tea and felt chilled to the bone. When the cold abated, he found he could not stand. By the third day, the pain in his back was gone. Twenty years later, it has not returned.

Curious to learn more, Narby questioned the shamans about the source of their knowledge. They told him something that he—trained in the materialist, rationalist ethos of Western science—could scarcely comprehend: that their wisdom derived from spirits within the plants themselves. In other words, they said, the plants of the Amazonian rainforest spoke to them, giving precise instructions in the art of healing and a great deal more. Narby initially thought this claim was a kind of shamanic joke. He quickly learned otherwise.

Read on – Plants with Soul

Grant Morrison at Disinfocon.

by Matthew Warlick | Nov 28, 2006 | Blog, Videos

Comics writer Grant Morrison talks about DMT, alien (but not extraterrestrial) entities, the nature of observer based and created reality, social change and the nature of the ego.

I seriously have an entirely new respect for Grant Morrison. And only partly so thanks to countless synchronicities between comics, art, hallucination, alien entities, consciousness, metaphysics, the occult and more.

Surface Gassing May Be Evidence of Volcanically Active Moon

by Matthew Warlick | Nov 14, 2006 | Blog

Surface Gassing May Be Evidence of Volcanically Active Moon

SCIENCE NEWS
November 08, 2006

Evidently, the moon has recently been letting slip gases, like carbon dioxide and steam, indicating that the rock’s reputation
as a cold, inactive orb is undeserved. Previous estimates proclaimed that the moon has been volcanically inactive for the past one billion to three billion years. Researchers studying features of the Ina structure, a 15-kilometer-wide lunar crater first imaged during the Apollo missions, found that volcanic gaseous emissions likely occurred sometime in the last one million to 10 million years and that parts of the Ina crater may have formed in that time or even more recently.

The researchers–Peter Schultz and Carlé Pieters, both geologists at Brown University, and Matthew Staid of the Planetary Science Institute–report three different lines of evidence for their theory in tomorrow’s issue of Nature. First, using photographs taken by a panoramic camera on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, the team noticed that the features inside the crater were very crisp and clear, which indicates that they must be relatively young. “‘Gardening’ impact bombardment will wear down features on the moon, where they become much more subdued,” Schultz explains of impacts that erode the lunar surface. “The structures are unusually well-preserved: steep cliffs only a few meters high surrounding a rough, blocky floor. These features could not stand the test of time.”

In support of that finding, the researchers also noticed the general absence of impact craters from asteroids. The team could only make out two impact sites larger than 30 meters on the Ina structure’s floor–they say this appearance is roughly equivalent to that of the South Ray Crater, which is located near the landing site of Apollo 16 and is thought to be two million years old. However, Ina holds evidence of other impacts that may have been rounded out over time, so the researchers increased their estimate of the structure’s age to no more than 10 million years old. The third piece of evidence came from spectral data gathered by the Clementine satellite in 1994. “You can see that the band depths from minerals that were in reflection; they were deep,” Schultz explains. “Typically, mineral band depths are smeared out with time.”

Paul Lowman, a geophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says he is sure that Schultz’s team is right in their assessment of the Ina structure’s age. In fact, he is in the process of writing up a paper supporting the theory of recent volcanic activity on the moon. “There is very good evidence that the moon is either wholly or partly molten from about 1,000 kilometers down,” he explains about his group’s work. “When you look at the old data on the moon, in light of what we now know about the moon, it is pretty clear that there is magma generation going on, that there is magma in the moon right now, only 200 to 300 kilometers down, or even shallower.”

Schultz says the results show that the moon still has some surprises for its observers, and that even if it turns out that volcanism on the orb has ceased, its by-products are still bubbling up to the surface. Lowman hedges less on his belief, “The moon, although it’s cold and dead on the outside,” he says, “is still warm on the inside and probably still active.”

—Nikhil Swaminathan