Tag Archives for DMT

ECSTATIC UPHEAVAL: A conversation with artist David Chaim Smith (Arthur, 2013)

Originally published in Arthur No. 34 (April 2013)….

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DIAGRAMMING THE DIVINE SPARK
Is there a way to examine the nature of existence at its very foundation? Esoteric mapmaker DAVID CHAIM SMITH say yes—but there’s a price.
by Jay Babcock

I first encountered David Chaim Smith’s remarkable, bewildering work through Pam Grossman’s Phantasmaphile newsletter, a daily email bulletin spotlighting a contemporary or historic personage up to something witchy and beautiful, usually in the visual arts. Smith’s work was particularly striking in its unusual combination of diagrammatic composition, simple media (pencil!?!) and unapologetically rarefied Kabbalistic-Gnostic content. Generally that would be more than enough to warrant further investigation, but it was the work’s difficult-to-grok provenance that intrigued me the most: these pieces looked like plates that could have been included in Alexander Roob’s Taschen compendium of dazzling Medieval alchemical artwork, The Hermetic Museum (alternative title, courtesy of Adam Egypt Mortimer: The Original Face Melter Times A Thousand). They seemed like the kind of work that’s usually brought to light by accident, decades after the a recluse’s death or disappearance (or committal to a mental ward): strange, highly charged devotional work rescued from a trashbin, the details of its artist’s life and practice gone to dust, Iain Sinclair on the case.

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And yet, the author of these stupefying drawings is alive and well—David Chaim Smith [above] is a contemporary New York artist with an MFA, a publisher and (until recently) a gallery. Despite living a semi-monastic life, Smith seems eager to engage with a curious public. He has a website. He’s on Facebook. Dig a little and you’ll find a few occultist-oriented podcast interviews and accounts of public talks he’s given in the last few years around the publication of his two books—2010’s esoteric exegesis The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis: Commentary on Genesis 1-3 (Daat Press) and 2012’s massive art/text collection The Sacrificial Universe (Fulgur)—and a 2010 gallery show. And now, here he is on the other end of the telephone line in late January, just days after completing his new book, Blazing Dew of Stars, set for publication this springOctober 23, 2013 by Fulgur. A surprisingly garrulous fellow, Smith spoke frankly about who he is, where he comes from and how his day-to-day life and spiritual practice generates such artwork. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation.

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"There is a head that is inside of another head and we all walk outside of a pair of eyes that is the backdrop to a theater's stage…"

A press release from The Unit Breed‘s Joseph Demaree that we thought merited posting:

joeunitbreed

I paint things – www.josephdemaree.com
I make music – www.theunitbreed.com
I myspace – www.myspace.com/theunitbreed
I like to share – www.idiomism.com

Top 3 dreams this month
1. Swimming with my dad while he explains how he will be island-hopping by holding onto a rope tied to a cruse ship. While he starts his journey I float off in my sleeping bag across the water to a suburban island. A friend of mine joins me and breaks into a house where two little kids live. Their father comes out and thinks I’m there to purchase porn. The real porn buyer shows up behind me and I back away and join the blacks down by the docks where we dance and drink while a live band plays the blues.

2. While walking along the sidewalk of a large city, possibly New York, I am with three beautiful women. A carnival is passing by. The carnival consists mostly of rocker kids in punk get-ups on top of burned-out cars playing trashy music and showing off their peacock feathers. One of the cars makes a harsh turn and the band on the roof falls to the street but continue to play.

3. There is a head that is inside of another head and we all walk outside of a pair of eyes that is the backdrop to a theater’s stage. The audience are in penguin suits. Everything empties out and I am standing alone in what once was an active beautiful theater but now looks as if it has burned down in the 1920s.

Top 3 brain foods
1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! – 2008
2. Terry Gilliam – Brazil – 1985
3. Carlos Castaneda – The Art of Dreaming – 1993

Top 3 life-changing experiences
1. Smoking DMT
2. The death of my father
3. Losing the hearing in my right ear

Top 3 recent visions
1. There is a man who is following me. He is not part of this world. I’ve most recently seen him in my basement, at a close friend’s house in Portland, and the most pronounced appearance was at 4 am at the Gingerbread House in San Jose CA the day after Halloween where he walked up to me and vanished.

2. There is a doorway inside of my basement. I’ve only seen it once. It opened in the center of my room and someone’s shadow closed it.

3. The week following my DMT experience a white-haired goat creature began peeking into my window. He has not been seen since I spoke about him.

Top 3 stupid tricks imagination drugs lights shadows and mirrors can play on you
1. Dimensional non-understanding
2. The beginning and end of all things
3. Perfection’s simple wonder

Excellent article on AYAHUASCA in National Geographic

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Click here: “Peru: Hell and Back”
Deep in the Amazon jungle, writer Kira Salak tests ayahuasca, a shamanistic medicinal ritual, and finds a terrifying—but enlightening—world within.

Major praise to National Geographic for putting together the best single article on ayahuasca-as-medicine that I’ve ever seen, anywhere. Lengthy article features a first-person account of two ayahuasca treatments by courageous reporter Kira Salak, as well as commentary/information/insights from leading, sensible Western ayahuasca researchers (Charles Grob at UCLA; Benny Shanon at Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and psychologist/author Ralph Metzner) and footage of the beginning of an ayahuasca session.

Excerpt:

At the vanguard of this research is Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA’s School of Medicine. In 1993 Dr. Grob launched the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. His team went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to study members of a native church, the União do Vegetal (UDV), who use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. In addition, blood samples revealed a startling discovery: Ayahuasca seems to give users a greater sensitivity to serotonin—one of the mood-regulating chemicals produced by the body—by increasing the number of serotonin receptors on nerve cells.

Unlike most common antidepressants, which Grob says can create such high levels of serotonin that cells may actually compensate by losing many of their serotonin receptors, the Hoasca Project showed that ayahuasca strongly enhances the body’s ability to absorb the serotonin that’s naturally there.

“Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs],” Grob concludes, adding that the use of SSRIs is “a rather crude way” of doing it. And ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution.

According to Grob, ayahuasca provokes a profound state of altered consciousness that can lead to temporary “ego disintegration,” as he calls it, allowing people to move beyond their defense mechanisms into the depths of their unconscious minds—a unique opportunity, he says, that cannot be duplicated by any nondrug therapy methods.

“Ayahuasca is not for everyone,” Grob warns. “It’s probably not for most people in our world today. You have to be willing to have a very powerful, long, internal experience, which can get very scary. You have to be willing to withstand that.”

Read the whole article here…