non seasonal tropics

This topic caught my attention recently, as though living in the tropics (southern Mexico) at this time I am very aware of the change of seasons, and autumn is visable as the corn dies back and some of the leaves turn brown.  It has reminded me of Tony Wright's description of crucial human development in aseasonal forest where the highly active tropical fruits that nourish our brains in inextraordinary ways are available all year round.  He talks about this in his book The Brain of Eden.

Actually looking at the map he referred me to I realised that recently I went in the region of aseasonal forest in the Lacandon Jungle.

Aseasonal forest is marked here in dark blue.

from Tony Wright:

"Not a lot written about it [aseasonal tropical forest] and no exact boundaries as several factors involved. Also varies in time with changing climate, part of the Congo currently have little variation in rainfall etc.

Pulled this from an article (below), re perpetual fruiting you are mostly looking at equatorial (little variation in day-length) and significant rainfall fairly evenly distributed through year. Tend to be niches within more extensive rain forest.

'There are two major types of wet tropical forests: equatorial evergreen rainforests and moist forests, which includes monsoon forests and montane/cloud forests. Equatorial rainforests, often considered the "real rainforest," are characterized by more than 80 inches (2,000 mm) of rain annually spread evenly throughout the year. These forests have the highest biological diversity and have a well-developed canopy "tier" form of vegetation. Roughly two-thirds of the world's tropical wet forests can be considered the equatorial type. These forests are near the equator where there is very little seasonal variation and the solar day is a constant length all year round. The greatest expanses of equatorial rainforest are found in lowland Amazonia, the Congo Basin, the Southeast Asian islands of Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea."

"

taste of victory

How ayahuasca can break addiction's grip on the brain with Gabor Mate.

Being not seen, we cover up and lose connection.  Gabor Mate defines addictive behaviour as that which has negative consequences yet a person is compelled to pursue it. An addicted person is trying to get the feelings and sense of connection,that we all want, from a substance or damaging activity.

The part of brain whose job it is to provide pleasure and reward, pain relief and a sense of connection is stimulated by the substance or activity.  If you have never had these feelings satisfactorily in any other way, it will be very difficult to give it up.

Ayahuasca in context can help.  It shows you the psychological baggage you have carried all your life and you no longer see it as inevitable part of yourself. The interpretation you have made of world can drop away, you are shown your true potential.

People need this taste of victory.

neocortex or phytocortex

Tony Wright speaks with the legends...Rupert Sheldrake, Dennis  McKenna, Graham Hancock, Jeremy Narby, Rick Strassman at Entheogenic Plant Sentience Symposium.

"Neo-Cortex or Phyto-Cortex?
Tony Wright presents an illustrated exploration of evidence that supports the following proposal: The human neo-cortex is an emergent structure formed through our ancestral symbiotic association with the female reproductive organs of Angiosperms"

Angiosprems are flowering plants.

love of nine things

It is natural and innate to Humanity…
and essential to the preservation of Humanity to maintain…
The Love of 9 Things…

1. Freedom
2. Truth
3. Beauty
4. Innocence
5. Pleasure
Love Innocence and Love Pleasure because they go together…
We are a Playful Species.
6. Learning
7. Sharing
Love to Share… they go together.
8. Power
 Power through Others, Power with Others…
Never Power over Others.
Know Your Power; Love Your Power.
9. Mystery
Love the Mystery of Life  and You will always find Your Way.
Love the Mystery of Your Own Self…
How Mysterious it is that you even have a  Self.
The fact that you have a Self is a deep, deep Mystery.
When you Love the Mystery, you are drawn into the Mystery…
The Mystery invites you, and it guides you…
So Love the Mystery.
– JLL

iboga 101

"Ask a Bwiti tribesman to define iboga and he may talk of a super sentient being whose role is to guide humanity, accessibility to whom is threatened by the world’s increasing demand for its earthly expression.

Ask a recovering heroin addict the same question and they may describe a knockout punch from a velvet glove that renders dope sickness a bad memory. Answers from first world twenty-somethings seeking the latest kick may range from “something that just made me vomit for 15 hours” to “a life changing sacrament that smashed open my consciousness and lifted the veil on the true nature of existence.”

Nowadays, whether due to publicized celebrity rehab sessions, psychonauts seeking the latest thing, or simply the widening of mankind’s spiritual void, iboga is out of the closet. As iboga’s popularity grows, so does the confusion regarding what iboga is, what it is not, and what purpose the different products on the market best serve. The following information will attempt to address the latter while remaining mindful that the ineffable mysteries of it’s subject combined with the highly personal nature of the user experience render certain assertions herein to be subjective."

More here:
http://reset.me/story/iboga-a-complete-overview-of-the-addiction-interrupter/

For a free consultation on choosing ibogaine treatment (the most effective known treatment for serious addiction) for yourself or loved one, you can email me on at holly@foodforconsciousness.co.uk and we  can arrange a mutually convenient time to speak on phone.  Alternatively I can amswer your questions by email.

human flight instinct

The impulse to flee plays - neuro-physiologically and behaviourally - the same if not a larger role in animal behaviour than the impulse to fight. Neurophysiologically, both impulses are integrated in the same way, there is no basis for saying that aggression in more ‘natural’ than flight.

Why then, do instinctivists talk about the intensity of the innate impulses of aggression, rather than the innate impulse  of flight?…

Man is driven by an innate impulse to flee; he may try to control this impulse by his reason, yet this control will prove to be relatively inefficient, even though some means can be found that may serve to curb the power of the ‘flight instinct’…….

flight serves self-preservation better than fight…history has been determined not so much by instinctive aggression as by the attempt to suppress man’s ‘flight instinct’. ..a large part of man’s social arrangements and ideological efforts have beed devoted to this aim

from The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm

supermoon rising

Moonrise in Britain tonight.

from Earthsky facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/EarthSky

http://earthsky.org/

wifi :)

humans are teleological

Humans are teleological: we are designed to be working towards goals on a regular basis. We also have a particular purpose...to connect to the source of our lives and our life stories...

at Mayan City at Palenque

supermoon eclipse

On the night of 27th to 28th September there is a total supermoon lunar eclipse, supermoon because the moon is nearest it's closest to the Earth (perigee) in the monthly cycle of movement of the moon moving closer to and further away from the Earth.  This means the moon appears particularly large.

There is more about when you can see it here:
http://www.space.com/30607-supermoon-lunar-eclipse-time-place-guide.html

About a 'blood moon'

The full moon nearly always appears coppery red during a total lunar eclipse. Although it sounds dramatic, the term blood moon can be applied to any and all total lunar eclipses.
During a lunar eclipse, you’ll see the Earth’s shadow creeping across the moon’s face. The shadow will appear dark, like a bite taken out of a cookie, until the shadow completely covers the moon. Then, during the breathtaking time of totality, the shadow on the moon’s face often suddenly changes. Instead of dark, it appears red. Why?
 During a total lunar eclipse, the Earth lies directly between the sun and the moon, causing the Earth to cast its shadow on the moon. If Earth didn’t have an atmosphere, then, when the moon was entirely within Earth’s shadow, the moon would would appear black, perhaps even invisible.
Thanks to Earth’s atmosphere, what actually happens is much more subtle and beautiful.
Earth’s atmosphere extends about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. During a total lunar eclipse, when the moon is submerged in Earth’s shadow, there is circular ring around Earth – the ring of our atmosphere – through which the sun’s rays pass.
Sunlight is composed of a range of frequencies. As sunlight passes through our atmosphere, the green to violet portion of the light spectrum is, essentially, filtered out. This same effect, by the way, is what makes our sky blue during the day. Meanwhile, the reddish portion of the spectrum is least affected.
What’s more, when this reddish light first entered the atmosphere, it was bent (refracted) toward the Earth’s surface. It’s bent again when it exits on the other side of Earth. This double bending sends the reddish light onto the moon during a total lunar eclipse.

http://earthsky.org/space/why-does-the-moon-look-red-during-a-total-lunar-eclipse

About a harvest moon

In traditional skylore, the Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox, and depending on the year, the Harvest Moon can come anywhere from two weeks before to two weeks after the autumnal equinox. For us in the Northern Hemisphere, the 2015 autumnal equinox comes on September 23, so the September 27-28 full moon counts as the Northern Hemisphere’s Harvest Moon.
By the way, this year’s Harvest Moon will present the closest and largest full moon of the year. It’ll also stage a total eclipse of the moon on the night of September 27-28.
However, the Harvest Moon isn’t always the biggest full moon of the year or more pumpkin-colored than other full moons. It’s special because, at this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, the time between successive moonrises – from one night to the next – is shorter than usual. But this year, 2015, the Harvest Moon is a bit bigger than usual … because it’s a supermoon.
This year’s Harvest Moon qualifies as a supermoon because the moon turns full about one hour after reaching lunar perigee – the moon’s closest point to Earth for the month. Read more about the 2015 supermoons here.

Will you notice the extra-large size of this full September Harvest Moon using just your eye?
http://earthsky.org/space/harvest-moon-2#what

More about the supermoon eclipse here:
http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/facts-lunar-eclipse.html

intelligence in nature

“In this mesmerizing talk, Jeremy Narby shares the findings from his groundbreaking book Intelligence in Nature.”

“Plants and animals have intention and we can communicate with them in dreams. The is a view long held by indigenous peoples.

Bees can handle abstract concepts.  This has been shown at the Toulouse Laboratory of Animal Cognition at the National Centre for Scientific Research.

“Bees have minds of their own, which enable them to extract the logical structure of the world. Bees are sentient minded beings.

What about plants? Plants lack brains entirely. In 2002 Professor Anthony Travis, professor of biology at Edinburgh University found that plants have intent, make decisions, and compute complex aspects of their environment.  Plants use molecular and electrical some of which are identical to those of our own neurons.  Plants don’t have brains, so much as act like them. Just being a plant involves sensing a wide variety of conditions, sending down roots in a branching structure and deploying leaves so as to gather a maximum amount of sunlight, computing complex conditions then acting.”

depersonalisation disorder

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/04/depersonalisation-disorder-the-condition-youve-never-heard-of-that-affects-millions?CMP=fb_gu

“It was a feeling of being fundamentally wrong in your own body,” Charlton says, attempting to describe what has remained largely indescribable: the symptoms of depersonalisation disorder, the condition that swallowed a huge chunk of her life.
“It was a constant, continuous otherworldly experience,” she says. “It’s a feeling that, if you’re feeling this way, you shouldn’t be existing at the same time. The feeling was of having left myself completely, constantly trying to grasp on to reality, trying to claw back what I’d had a few days ago. Yesterday I had a life, and now I’ve got nothing.”
Depersonalisation disorder, or DPD, is among the most common yet under-recognised psychiatric conditions in the world. According to studies in both Britain and the US, DPD could affect up to 2% of the population – that is, around 1.3 million people in the UK, and 6.4 million in the US.
People with depersonalisation disorder describe a sense of complete detachment, a life lived as an automaton or on autopilot, characterised by an absence of emotions, either good or bad. (You might think of Channel 4’s recent hit Humans, which featured an intelligence trapped, powerless, in the body of a robot.) They feel as though they are observing their life through a plate of glass or a dense fog, or as if it is appearing in a film. Their bodies and their beings have separated; their limbs are no longer their own."

holy tree of the mayas

Ceiba Tree, Holy Tree of the Mayas, one of the largest trees in tropical Caducifolia (leaves fall in autumn) America — at La Selva Lacandona Chiapas.

eyes of humanity

“Act as if all humanity had its eyes upon you, and were guiding itself by what you do”

Jean-Paul Sartre

tomato wisdom

"Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." 

Miles Kington

cafe gratitude

Travelling back from Britain to Chiapas, Mexico, via Los Angeles, at last had the chance to eat at Cafe Gratitude, in Larchmont Boulevard.  I have made dishes from the Cafe Gratitude raw recipe book, I am Grateful, which are amazing.  The food at their cafe and how i felt afterwards (wonderful) were amazing too. Probably the best raw cafe food I have had other than Pete's Rawgeous Cafe in southern England. Happily sitting looking out at the hills i had:

I am adventerus, corn soup

I am fabulous, vegetable lasagne

I am irrestistable, coconut chocolate cream pie

I am carefree, latte with almond milk

Question of the day: What fulfils you?  

early bird at ibogaine conference

This is the last week to save $60 for the Global Ibogaine Conference in Tepoztlan, Mexico on March 14-16th, 2016! Register before September 15th at the early bird rate!
http://www.ibogaineconference.org/
http://foodforconsciousness.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/more-about-global-ibogaine-conference.html

sustainable iboga

All species are sacred but there are some plants such as iboga which vividly represent the special symbiotic connection between humans and plants.

It has been interesting how the ibogaine culture has been constellating in Mexico, a land where many psychoactive plants grow, but not, until now iboga. I was remarking on this recently and within days was invited to participate in a project to grow iboga plants in Mexico.

This is a very exciting world to be involved in. It seems that there is an epidemic amongst humanity right now, namely chemical addiction, which can only be truly healed with the use of natural psychoactive plants. I have felt for a long time that enthaegenic nutrition is a necessary part of our future, in order to thrive on this planet; indeed it was part of our past. This situation currently developing is an epic part of the unfolding of the human story.

"Keystone species have the potential to teach us so much about whole ecosystems. And there are not so many examples of species like this that are also so central to human cultures, and provide such a gateway to point at how deeply inseparable we are from nature. I think that this issue is more complex than what I could write in this short article, but I hope that it continues to push for this discussion and for action in the ibogaine community.
With ibogaine we have such a rich opportunity to apply the all sorts of transformation ideas, like the overlap between deep ecology and psychology, permaculture design for healing spaces, and the ideas that Charles Eisenstein lays out in Sacred Economics. I hope that more people become involved in this discussion so we can use this opportunity to keep putting these principles directly into practice. "- Jonathan Dickinson, Director, Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance

http://realitysandwich.com/318253/toward-sustainable-use-iboga/

polynesians in america

Polynesians were expert seafarers and may have got to South America and even North America long before the Europeans.  An interesting thought.

paradise on earth

 We truly are living in  a a sacred paradise...it's just knowing how to look at it....

where flowers bloom another way

"On  Andromeda, the mirror world of human experience, aesthetic laws work like natural laws on earth.  This is the physics of beauty.  Plants grow there otherwise and flowers bloom in another way, mirroring how the Gaian habitat would look were it beheld ecstatically in the rush of beautiful looking, without identification.  Van Gogh’s sunflower grow on M31 as they appear in his paintings, gelatinously puckered into the translucent gel of the atmosphere."

Translations from the Andromedan, John Lamb Lash

puivert lake

A small lake and  sandy beach; the magic is that as you swim out into the surprisingly warm water, Puivert Castle appears on your left, transporting you into an atmosphere evocative of Medieval days.

I love swimming in natural water almost as much as I love walking, this kind of circular movement does something wonderful to your mind. I always feel very inspired afterwards.