truth is univisceral * ReWild Yourself !! * Dispatch 6
Welcome to Dispatch 6 of ReWild Yourself! This online magazine is designed to function as more than a source of information, entertainment, and education, it is a kind of natural solar calendar, and is released in accordance with the eight significant Earth/Sun events of the solar cycle. These are the Vernal Equinox, Beltane, Summer Solstice, Lammas, Autumn Equinox, Samhain, Winter Solstice, and Imbolc. This natural sine-wave rhythm of solar time was once the calendar that we humans lived our lives by, however today we are living on the Gregorian calendar, which is in reality nothing more than an artifice, having no real correlate to the events of the natural world. Conversely, the natural solar calendar is based on real, observable solar/planetary events, and is therefore a significant part of ReWilding Ourselves!
This Dispatch of ReWild Yourself! is about a chemical death, a method of dying without really dying. It is about the shamanic death, the simulated death. It is about crossing over and returning with knowledge of something more than the layer of reality most of us live our entire lives engrossed and embedded within. Since the earliest days of human experience we have consumed medicines from our environment that alter our consciousness and enhance our sensory input and cognitive processing abilities. They make explicit and laid plain the concept of animism, the natural — even universal — human religion, as, under the influence of such medicines, all things are seen and felt to pulse with the same omnipresent lifeforce. This is not an intellectual process, but a visceral, immersive, "I saw it with my own eyes" experience. It is difficult, once initiated, to be convinced otherwise.
These substances, which most often originate in plants, but are sometimes present in fungi and animals as well, offer us a unique opportunity to confront deep, archetypical forces that are at play just behind the curtain of our everyday conscious awareness. Principally these are the fear of — or aversion to — death and isolation, and the deeply held desire for mystical union and bliss. These drive us, unbeknownst, like cattle are driven by the wrangler, shaping our behaviors and causing us to play out ancient human dramas like automated, programmed machines. These medicines give us a glimpse into these heretofore unconscious (or semi-conscious at best) patterns and allow us to emancipate ourselves from them — taking charge of ourselves and the course of our lives in a way that most can not even perceive as possible, no less will ever experience.
We, in the shamanic trance, immerse ourselves in bliss and experience the benevolence of the universe, and we dare — sometimes fearlessly, other times fearfully — to confront our own mortality. Mystic union — merging with the universal mind — is ecstatic and makes all other possible experience appear pale and redundant by compare. Reaching such a place, requires one to let go, to release the force that holds us in the human form, that holds together the story of who we believe we are and what we think ourselves to be. Such experiences require we relinquish our lives, surrender our egos, and let ourselves "die". This is not a true death of the body, but feels at the time as though it is. Like the salivation that follows the visualization of eating a lemon, here too our bodies are thusly fooled by the ego's belief that it is in fact perishing. The body and the mind's fear of death — its supreme fear — are triggered and we become acutely aware of the power this fear holds over us, has held over us, and all the myriad ways that this has manifested itself in our lives until now.
The medicines give us a way to practice dying, to die without really passing away. It is a simulator, and each time we use it, we become more adept at crossing over, at passing through the veil, throughout the realm of hungry ghosts, and finding our way back to the source, to the universal mind. We merge again ecstatic. It becomes progressively easier to release ones grip on the mortal world, to perceive the illusory nature of this life, and to allow our "self" to dissolve away, revealing something more permanent and subtle lying there just beneath the surface veneer.
Upon returning from a journey such as this, things can never be the same, you can never be the same. Once you have seen, once you have known, there is no return to the lifeless mechanistic world that our civilization purports to be objectively real. Once you have died and come back, your true, inevitable bodily death cannot hold such sway over you, such power. You are freed, or at least are freer than before. And this lays the foundation for greater emancipation in the life ahead, still yet to be lived.
So it is that this Samhain Dispatch is dedicated to the secret chemical keys left hidden throughout the natural world. Concealed in the leaves and roots of plants, in the secretion of strange, otherworldly amphibians, in the phallic form of fungi that appear in a night and recede in the same. And, it is a celebration of the ancient human tradition, one we see literally throughout the entire world — that of humans altering their consciousness in order that they might experience the death that isn't really dying, and that subsequent ineffable merger with the divine.
