Friday, December 30, 2005

Psychedelic Shaman Podcast #1

Psychedelic Shaman Podcast #1 is now online!!! Take a listen and then post a comment here to tell me what you think. Its a little rough but its my first attempt. I this podcast I talk a little about why I use psychedelics, and some of my ideas about what modern shamanism and how modern shamans differ from shamans in tribal societies. Anyway I hope you like it. And if you have any suggestions for future shows, just leave a comment.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Soon to be a Minor Motion Picture! and more musings

The adventures of The Psychedelic Shaman is going to be making its way into the world of film...sort of. I have been toying with the idea of podcasting for a few months now and I have decided to go ahead and start a podcast. In fact it should be posted within the next week or so, just in time for the new year. Anyway, I was looking around for some suitable tools to use for the podcast when I happened to come across a review of activisions new game The Movies. Apparently this game allows you to create 3d animated movies as a part of the game play. These movies can be saved and posted online. So, being a wannabe director, I thought why not use it to make my own little subversive movies about psychedelics, magick, reality hacking, etc. And post them on the web. In this way I can get some of my ideas across without worries of revealing my Secret Identity.

On to other topics...

I am currently ordering more mimosa hostillis and some Salvia divinorum for further experiments with cultural deprogramming. I have come to realize thru such experimentation that where psychedelics excel is in the realm of deprogramming the mind. Allowing the mind to suspend cultural programming, at least temporarily. I have had less consistent results with attemps at using psychedelics to create new programs. I feel that this is most likely because psychedelics inject a chaotic element into the otherwise stable reality construct that have been programmed into our psyche's. This chaos allows us to glimpse a larger reality, one free of culturally programmed interpretations. By contrast, creation of new programs requires fairly specific kinds of sensory information and while some psychoactive compounds may be beneficial to this end, psychedelics may not be the best ones for the job. While they do seem to increase the bandwidth of sensory information and can be used for metaprogramming, doing so is akin to painting a portrait with paint roller. In other words, though psychedelics can and have been used for programming the mind, to do so requires careful planning and strict attention to set, setting and dosage. Even with such careful preparations it is impossible to say with any certainty what kind of experience the subject will have. For this reason I have begun exploring the use of less intense substances for the reprogramming phase of my experiments. Plants such as cannabis, Kava, low dosages of mushrooms as well as Calea Zecatachichi have the effect of allowing for very intense visualizations without the sometimes overwhelming psychological effects of more powerful substances. Details of my experiments are to follow both in print and as part of my podcasts.