Monthly Archives for August 2002

PINCHBECK ON PSYCHEDELIC SHAMANISM

05 AUGUST 2002: PINCHBECK
ON PSYCHEDELIC SHAMANISM

From Daniel Pinchbeck’s website
http://www.breakingopenthehead.com/

 

“One must explore deep and
believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an
ocean of insignificance.”

– Joseph Conrad

“The reader, the thinker,
the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the
dreamer, the ecstatic. ? Not to mention that most terrible drug – ourselves
– which we take in solitude.” – Walter Benjamin

Welcome to Breaking
Open the Head, a companion website for my book, which includes a cultural
history of psychedelic use, philosophical and critical perspectives on
shamanism, and my personal explorations, ranging from transcendent to terrifying.

While researching, I visited
shamans in West Africa, Mexico, and the Ecuadorean Amazon – not to mention
the fabulous neo-shamanic Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. In
Gabon, a small country on the Equator, I went through a Bwiti initiation,
eating iboga, a psychedelic rootbark inducing a trance that lasts for thirty
hours. The bark powder temporarily releases the soul from the body, allowing
the initiate entry into the African spiritual cosmos, where he is shown
the outline of his fate.

Some of the Bwiti call this
ceremony, “breaking open the head.” The book describes how my own head
was broken open, and how I have gingerly attempted to put the pieces back
together again.

This website includes material
from the book and some sections left out of the published text. It also
expands into subjects ranging from the socio-political (corporate globalization,
new technologies) to the mystical (Western esotericism, Buddhism, gnosticism,
alchemy, 2012) that I hope to explore in future works. My perspective is
that all of these subjects are inextricably related, and that the contemporary
situation drastically confirms Andre Malraux’s dictum, “The 21st Century
will be mystical, or it will not be.”

I hope that people will use
the discussion forums to explore any of the issues raised by the book or
my other material, and they should feel free to ask me any questions that
occur to them.

MEXICAN PEASANTS TRIUMPH.

03 AUGUST 2002: MEXICAN
PEASANTS TRIUMPH.

From the Los
Angeles Times:

Farmers in San Salvador de
Atenco cheer the cancellation of the $2 billion airport project on their
lands Friday. The airport debacle was a major setback for the President
Vicente Foxs government, although some admire the government’s willingness
to change course.

By RICHARD BOUDREAUX , Times
Staff Writer

MEXICO CITY — When a few
thousand subsistence farmers vowed last fall to resist construction of
a $2.3-billion airport in their cornfields, it appeared to outsiders that
they might stand a better chance trying to stop Mexico’s next earthquake.

    But President
Vicente Fox’s government underestimated the value the farmers put on land
handed down to them over four generations, their willingness to shed blood
in its defense and their refusal to be bought off.

    Breaking
from what it called heavy-handed methods of the past, the government announced
late Thursday that it was canceling plans to build a six-runway airport
for Mexico City on the dried-up Texcoco lake bed 18 miles to the east and
would study alternative sites.

    As villagers
in San Salvador Atenco rang church bells Friday to celebrate their unlikely
victory, Mexicans weighed the costs and lessons of Fox’s humble retreat–in
the face of machete-wielding peasants who last month held 15 hostages–from
what would have been his administration’s biggest public works project.

    The backpedaling,
some Mexican commentators warned, will encourage any group with a grievance
and a weapon to resort to violence; will undermine the rule of law; will
diminish public confidence in Fox’s ability to complete projects; will
make investors reluctant to finance them; and, eventually, will leave North
America’s largest city with inadequate air service.

    Others
portrayed the triumph of the underdogs as a healthy product of the more
democratic–and less manageable–Mexico that Fox has led since ending,
with the 2000 elections, seven decades of authoritarian rule by the Institutional
Revolutionary Party. The decision came as a newly independent Supreme Court
was weighing the constitutionality of the law the government was using
to expropriate the farmers’ 13,300 acres of land.

   
“This is a positive precedent,” said Pedro Cerisola, minister of communications
and transport. “It’s not a sign of weakness or a fear of using force….
We are not going to impose decisions. The government is willing to take
no for an answer, and that is a sign of change.”

    One thing
is beyond dispute. Fox and his team of technocrats learned what the World
Bank and other development experts have found out the hard way in many
other countries: If you want to build an airport in a field, you’d first
better talk to the farmers.

    “The
government’s biggest error was not taking us into account,” said Ignacio
Yanez, a 48-year-old corn grower who was arrested last month when the farmers’
protest exploded in violence. “We own this land. They owe us respect. But
they were accustomed to imposing their will. Well, those times are finished.”

    Fox’s
government announced the project in October, ending a decades-long search
for an alternative to the capital’s hemmed-in Benito Juarez International
Airport. Officials simply decreed the takeover of land held by 5,600 farming
families in 13 villages, offering them a price fixed in the expropriation
law: $2,835 per acre.

    Most
farmers in the area own fewer than five acres, and many complained that
the payoff was insultingly low. Others recounted with pride that the land
they inherited had been seized from the rich seven decades ago and distributed
to the poor by the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata, and they weren’t
about to sell at any price.

    In any
case, few trusted the government to pay at all. It was only last fall,
Yanez said, that farmers got compensation for land seized more than 15
years ago for a highway.

    “What
would have happened to us?” he asked.

    It was
only after the farmers went to court to try to block the airport that government
negotiators began visiting Texcoco villages in February.

    And it
was only last month–after the bloody five-day hostage standoff in Atenco–that
Fox’s aides sweetened the offer, increasing it sevenfold. They also offered
land swaps, new housing, scholarships and vocational training for airport
jobs.

    By then,
it was too late. The airport battle had become the cause of a combative
array of leftists, anarchists and anti-globalization activists who poured
into Atenco to protest alongside the farmers. Ten of the area’s 13 villages
were willing to negotiate, but a militant minority carried the day.

    In Mexico’s
more open political environment, the militants also took encouragement
from Fox’s political opponents. Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador,
of the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party, opposed the airport project.
On Friday, he called Fox’s decision “reasonable and brave.”

    Cerisola
said the government “accepted reality and decided to stop fighting” after
concluding that there was not enough time for legal battles and negotiations
with the farmers.

    Meeting
with reporters Friday, he noted that such disputes had delayed construction
of airports in Madrid and Vancouver by more than a decade.

    He also
cited Tokyo’s Narita Airport, where locals damaged the control tower in
1978, adding years more work and considerably more cost to the project.

    Cerisola
admitted that the government made “errors in human management” in Texcoco.
But he said that consulting the farmers before choosing the airport site
would have set off uncontrollable land speculation.

    And he
defended the initial financial offer to the farmers, saying legal limits
on such payments were designed to prevent corrupt and exorbitant deals
involving kickbacks to officials.

    Vincent
Abreu, a consultant to the World Bank on development issues, said Mexico’s
leaders should never have chosen the site without a full study of its potential
effect on the farmers.

    The World
Bank, under similar criticism in the early 1990s, adopted guidelines requiring
environmental and social impact studies before financing dams, roads and
other projects.

    Such
large-scale projects, according to a World Bank study, uproot about 10
million people from their homes worldwide each year–a higher figure, on
average, than the number displaced by armed conflict.

    “Governments
keep making the same mistake,” said Abreu, who teaches at the University
of Michigan. “In Mexico, where the capital has severe problems because
of migration from the countryside, they should know better.”

    Cerisola
said not all the alternative airport sites on the table are inhabited.
He declined to list the locations but said new technology could revive
some options rejected in the past, including an expansion of the capital’s
existing airport into a federally owned lake bed on its eastern edge.

    Tizayuca,
a strip of land in Hidalgo state that last fall was Texcoco’s principal
alternative, is apparently back in consideration. Officials have also proposed
sites in the states of Morelos and Puebla. All three are much farther from
the city than Texcoco.

    The current
airport can keep handling increasing volumes of air traffic for seven to
eight years, Cerisola said, adding that Fox was determined to launch an
alternative before his term ends in December 2006.

WORLD ON FIRE

02 AUGUST 2002: WORLD
ON FIRE

from Open
City:

“Hard to put down, stopping
no place for very long yet honed in on one . . . cathartic theme: how
to defeat social and political indifference when fear and self-loathing
are the engines of the economy itself. This is one of the most
eloquent recent poetic works to cover the downsides of ‘progress’ and to
cry out for a counterpunch against the manipulations of empire.” – (Starred
Review) Publishers Weekly

“Michael Brownstein’s text
(combination Jeremiah, Milton, Blake, and sci-fi horror movie) is either
the last possible book˜or else a blueprint for the first real revolution
since the Neolithic.” – Hakim Bey, author of  T.A.Z.: The Temporary
Autonomous Zone

“Outrageous and outraged,
this book challenges the fear and greed that are destroying our world.
Read it and respond.” – Joan Halifax, author of Shamanic Voices

“An epic, visionary, kaleidoscopic
treatise/poem that, amazingly, attempts to make sense of and show a way
through the rich madness of our time . . . Partly wail of pain, partly
ode to nature and human spirit, partly a last-ditch effort to consciously
click back to a sustainable pathway, this book will leave the reader simultaneously
exhausted, enlightened, depressed, and exhilarated.” -Jerry Mander, author
of In the Absence of the Sacred, and President, International Forum on
Globalization

 If Thoreau’s Walden,
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Ginsberg’s Howl share one thing, it is that
these revolutionary works of American literature arose, in part, to address
disillusionment with a dehumanized, materialistic, and rapidly industrializing
society.

Today, as we experience ceaseless
change in an increasingly fragile world, a powerful new American voice
is heard. Michael Brownstein’s World on Fire (Open City Books, May 22,
2002) is impossible to ignore.

An impassioned, prophetic
examination of transnational capitalism’s consequences, World on Fire moves
back and forth between the present and a vividly realized post-apocalyptic
future.

Brownstein asks about the
mindset that informs our culture, about unrestrained ego and ruinous competition.
He shows how self-aggrandizement has led to disturbing developments in
biotechnology and genetic engineering.

He dissects an addiction
to petroleum and petrochemicals that is poisoning the planet.

He examines the global financial
speculation that has become delinked from human values.

But the book carries a message
of hope, as well, asking us to reconnect to our humanity. It looks to tribal
models of community in order to understand the folly of defining ourselves
in terms of power relations.

World on Fire is a personal
book. It portrays the author’s own history of avoidance and drug use. His
father’s death from Alzheimer’s becomes a potent symbol for a society unable
to face its crimes or reckon with its history.

Combining narrative, poetry,
and social analysis into a new nonfiction form, World on Fire draws on
the work of many contemporary writers including Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano,
and Vandana Shiva.

Manifesto and call to arms,
Michael Brownstein’s World on Fire offers a new perspective, encouraging
us to move past ego’s limited agendas and create a new life.

Michael Brownstein is the
author of three novels, Country Cousins, Self-Reliance, and The Touch,
as well as several collections of stories and poetry. His fiction has appeared
in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other magazines. He taught at
the University of Colorado, Naropa Institute, and Columbia University.
In recent years, he has become involved in the worldwide anti-globalization
movement, traveling to Ecuador where he observed first-hand the petroleum
industry’s destruction of the environment and indigenous cultures. He lives
in New York City.