Pablo Amaringo – Visionary Art & Ayahuasca Workshop

A Visionary Art workshop and Ayahuasca Retreat in the Amazon Rainforest

THE AYAHUASCA VISIONS OF PABLO AMARINGO

July 25^th - August 5^th 2009

PABLO AMARINGO

Pablo Amaringo is one of the world’s great visionary artists. He is renowned for his highly complex, colourful and intricate paintings inspired by his visions from when he was an Ayahuasca shaman. He trained as a curandero or healer in the Amazon, healing himself and others from the age of ten, but gave this up in 1977 to become a full-time painter and art teacher at the Usko-Ayar school of Amazonian art which he founded. His book, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman, co-authored with Luis Eduardo Luna, brought his work and the rich mythology of the Amazon to a wide public in the West.

We are delighted to offer a rare opportunity to join Pablo Amaringo in a visionary art workshop with night time Ayahuasca Ceremonies

This special event consists of a ten day workshop and Ayahuasca retreat with Pablo Amaringo in the beautiful heart of the Amazon Rainforest at a dedicated Retreat Center in the Allpahuayo Mishana Nature reserve.

Each day, Pablo will hold a hands-on Art workshop; participants will enjoy the unique experience of learning the art of visionary and nature painting with Pablo. This workshop is suitable for beginners as well as experienced and proficient artists.

Each night we offer traditional Ayahuasca ceremonies with Shipibo Shamans, Enrique Lopez, and an elder maestro – Benjamín Ochavano or Leoncio Garcia (depending on the number of participants). Also we will have available shamanic plants, plantas maestras, which enhance dream intensity and visionary and sensory perception, such as Guayusa and Ajo Sacha.

This workshop-retreat is also a journey of self-exploration through the medium of Art and Ayahuasca, with guidance from Pablo Amaringo and our Maestro Shamans.

Click to view Pablo’s Video Invitation to this workshop.

PABLO ‘S WORDS ON THIS WORKSHOP – (transcribed from Video)

“Its a good idea because people would see something of Mishana as well as what lies ahead in their lives. In fact through drawing they can learn so much more from drinking the ayahuasca. It will help them to understand their environment and value it more, wherever they live”.

To learn to care for and respect plants, to look after the rivers, the water ….. as well as their homes and family. … we should value animals too. For me as an artist, my concentration in the Amazon is of great value because the truth is, without plants and animals, we couldn’t live”.

Question: “so its an invitation to anyone?”

So the invitation is for everyone who wants to appreciate more and know… in this case to learn how to learn.

Question: “how could the workshop help people in their creative process”?

“Ayahuasca teaches when people start to see colours and forms…… the motifs and composition of a plant, an animal or a person ….. or elements like the clouds…… they can learn to see the molecules of ayahuasca which themselves are based on colours”.

“When I do this work myself, I realise that every plant has leaves but they’re all different…. each one a style of its own, they can never be the same, nature is full of wisdom! Its divine, the roots too are all different, branches, flowers. That’s how I learned to paint – from nature – I never learned from books or teachers…. nature gives the structure”.

Pablo’s paintings represent a reliable testimony to how the indigenous people of the Amazon live in constant awareness of spiritual realms.

The Shipibo for example, have a strong presence in the region where Pablo lives and are one of the largest indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon having their own language, traditions and culture. Today they number about 20,000 and live in communities along the Ucayali River and around Yarinacocha, an oxbow lake near Pucullpa.

The Shipibo world is under laid by intricate geometric patterns of great complexity and is displayed in their art. This concept of an all pervading magical reality challenges the Western linguistic heritage and rational mind. The patterns are an expression of the oneness of creation, the inter-changeability of light and sound, the union or fusion of perceived opposites. It is an ongoing dialogue or communion with the spiritual world and powers of the Rainforest. The visionary art of the Shipibo brings this paradigm into a physical form.

Pablo’s painting classes are a creative form of entertainment. Like story telling, they bring Amazonian legends and fairy tales to life. These consider cosmic questions such as the origins of human consciousness and the power of the imagination. Many legends speak of a ‘time of the ancestors’ when humans regularly communicated with the spirits, and sensed and moved like animals and birds with whom they could converse. This era occurred before the rational mind separated us from the mysteries of the cosmos, a loss sorely lamented to this day but which – thanks to Ayahuasca – can be reversed. These are some of the themes of Pablo’s Amazonian School of Painting.

Mishana Private Retreat Centre

This programme will take place in the Mishana Private Retreat Centre. We have 57 Hectares (140 acres) of land with a lodge in the Allpahuayo Mishana National Reserve in the department of Loreto, Peru. Our lodge is located directly on the river, which is part of the 58,070 hectare nature reserve.

Due to a combination of geological factors and diverse soil types, the reserve supports a unique community of plant and animal species. It is the ‘jewel’ in the crown for bird watchers and contains dozens of species, which are unique to this area. The Reserve contains one of the highest biodiversities known in the Amazon basin. Our Lodge is located directly on the Rio Nanay, a tributary of the Amazon River. The mild acidity of its black waters are not popular with mosquito larvae and this means there are virtually no mosquitoes.

The journey to our lodge from Iquitos takes two hours in our power boat. We are situated in-between two bends of the river giving an amazing panoramic view. The boat is always available so trips can be made to some interesting, and extraordinarily beautiful places along the river.

We work with maestro Shipibo shamans Benjamin Ochavano, Enrique Lopez, and Leoncio Garcia. We will work with two of the shamans listed above on this programme.

Included in the program are individual personal healing or consultative sessions with our shamans, based upon your personal needs. The maestros will also provide teachings about the fascinating medicinal and psycho-spiritual properties of the local plants.

For full details and a 22 page downloadable PDF programme, visit our website;

http://www.shamanism.co.uk

The Visionary Art Workshop with Pablo Amaringo is a post event workshop of the 5th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: July 11th – 18th 2009.

Cl.ick to Visit the Conference website:

Art and Crafts of the Shipibo

The Shipibo people of the Upper Amazon in Peru, have a unique and complex form of visionary art. Underlying the intricate geometric patterns of great complexity displayed in the art of the Shipibo people is a concept of an all pervading magical reality which can challenge the Western linguistic heritage and rational mind.

To view a photo gallery of their beautiful art;

To read an article about the Shipibo:

Ayahuasca and Yoga Retreat – Amazon Rainforest, Mishana, Peru. March 2008

Ayahuasca Retreat – Amazon Rainforest, Mishana, Peru. March 2008

A video collage of Eagle’s Wing Ayahuasca Retreat at our dedicated centre in Mishana.

Click to visit our website for info on our Ayahuasca Retreat Programme.

Ayahuasca Retreat – Shipibo Shaman Video

Shipibo Shaman Enrique Lopez blesses and invokes Ayahuasca after brewing. Video taken at Eagle’s Wing Ayahuasca Retreat March 2008.

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Moses, Ayahuasca, and the Ten Commandments – Biblical Entheogens: Speculative Hypothesis- Original Text

Biblical Entheogens: Speculative Hypothesis

Paper originally published in:

Time and Mind:
The Journal of Archaeology Consciousness and Culture
Volume I—Issue I, March 2008, pp. 51–74

Biblical Entheogens: Speculative Hypothesis- Original Paper

Benny Shanon is Professor of psychology at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem (Israel). His main foci of research are the phenomenology of human consciousness and the philosophy of psychology. His publications include The representational and the Presentational (1993) and The Antipodes of the Mind (2002). At present, he is working on book devoted to a general psychological theory of human consciousness.

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Ayahuasca, Moses, and the Ten Commandments – Plant Spirit Shamanism of the Bible

Moses was high on drugs: Israeli researcher

The world wide media interest in Benny Shanon’s paper about Moses and entheogens, is encouraging us to take a good and hard look at the roots of religions and the notion that they were based on fertility cults, and shamanic practices such as Entheogens (or hallucinogenic) plants as a source of spiritual communion with the universal consciousness, or the mind of God.

John Allegro, in his book “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East”, postulated through the etymology of words and relates how the development of language indicated that the roots of the religions emanating from the Middle East were based on fertility cults, and shamanic practices such as Entheogens (or hallucinogenic) plants as a source of spiritual communion with the universal consciousness, or the mind of God..

Back in the 1970’s the reaction against these ideas was so strong that it destroyed Allegro’s career, the book was not published in the UK as it was regarded as blasphemous, and blasphemy was still a crime. It’s good to think that we have made some progress in recent years.

Allegro’s theory was visionary and ground-breaking. He was the first to propose in some detail that two major religions Christianity and by extension Judaism were entheogen-oriented and that the entheogen was Amanita Muscaria. His book was published at a time when there was little or no awareness about the use of entheogens, and was indeed a courageous act to publish this book.

Another great explorer and pathfinder in human consciousness was Terence Mckenna, in his book “Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution”, proposed that hallucinogenic plants, in this case Psilocybin mushrooms, were the cause of the astounding and unexplained rapid evolution and development of the human brain within the evolutionary time scale (just 500,000 years from the hominids). In other words how we developed from our ape relatives . His theory also encompasses the development of linguistics , and human civilisation itself.

JERUSALEM (AFP) – High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.

Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

“As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics,” Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.

Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the “burning bush,” suggested Shanon, who said he himself has dabbled with such substances.

“The Bible says people see sounds, and that is a clasic phenomenon,” he said citing the example of religious ceremonies in the Amazon in which drugs are used that induce people to “see music.”

He mentioned his own experience when he used ayahuasca, a powerful psychotropic plant, during a religious ceremony in Brazil’s Amazon forest in 1991. “I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations,” Shanon said.

He said the psychedelic effects of ayahuasca were comparable to those produced by concoctions based on bark of the acacia tree, that is frequently mentioned in the Bible.

source: Yahoo News.

Paper originally published in:

Time and Mind:
The Journal of Archaeology Consciousness and Culture
Volume I—Issue I, March 2008

Biblical Entheogens: Speculative Hypothesis

pp. 51–74

Benny Shanon is Professor of psychology at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem (Israel). His main foci of research are the phenomenology of human consciousness and the philosophy of psychology. His publications include The representational and the Presentational (1993) and The Antipodes of the Mind (2002). At present, he is working on book devoted to a general psychological theory of human consciousness.

Original Paper by Benny Shanon

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The 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: Magic, Myths, and Miracles

The 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: Magic, Myths, and MiraclesIquitos, Peru; July 19th – 27th

This 4th Amazonian Shamanism Conference will be opened by the illustrious visionary scientist, Dr.Dennis Mckenna. Other Presenters (with more confirming soon are – That master of sound healing- Dr. Richard Grossman, the brilliant entheo-scientist and lecturer, Ananda, the Indiana Jones of Amazon Shamanism and noted journalist – Peter Gorman, the most excellent scientfic researcher on brain states while taking ayahuasca- Dr. Frank Echenhofer, the Amazon’s most famous visionary painter- Pablo Amaringo, the filmmaker and director Jan Kounen who brought us the documentary Other Worlds about ayahuasca and the Shipibo tribes and Renegade (Blueberry), specialist in Entheo-Religion and compiler of the book: Entheogens and the Future of Religion – Robert Forte, the intrepid Victoria Alexander speaking on her research of Medieval Mysticism and Its Empirical Kinship to Ayahuasca, the very profound Melvin Morse (invited but not yet confirmed) and his research into childrens near death experiences as well as his research on Myths, the renowned Dr. John Alexander (invited but not yet confirmed) and his years of training and research on Remote Viewing, one of the Director’s of Eagle’s Wing and author Howard G Charing, Conference Organizer Alan Shoemaker speaking on 15 years in shamanism, the visionary artists Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffman two curanderas specializing in Huachuma (San Pedro) Wendy Luckey and Mary Ann Endowes Presenting as well as holding ceremonies, Elisa Vargas Fernandez, the Shipibo curandera who works magic with her incredible icaros, and many more to be confirmed.The list of shamans (curanderos) is coming next and they are the most powerful we can find. There will be approximately 15 different curanderos/shamans giving presentations (all are translated into English).During the Conference Presentations you will have ample opportunities to hear the many shamans speaking alone as well as in panel discussions. It is during this time that you will get a sense of which healer you would like to be in Ceremony with, especially during the question and answer times.

There are three evenings set aside for you to be in Ceremony with the shaman – curandero or your choice. All Ceremonies are held outside of Iquitos, either up or downriver or way out on the Iquitos to Nauta highway and then a short 15 minute walk into the various Compounds. Transport is provided both to the location and returning to Iquitos the following morning.

For those that have never been in Ceremony before, a workshop will be held by Dr. Richard Grossman and Alan Shoemaker so that all of your questions can be adequately answered. The Ceremonies offered are completely voluntary and not in any way a prerequisite of attending the Conference.

Pre-Conference Tune-Up. Those wishing a program for a week before the Conference can come to the Pre-Conference Tune-Up. This is for more experienced Ceremonial persons. It begins one week before the Conference and will be held at the Soga Del Alma compound just outside of Iquitos. You will be able to make your own medicina and hold your own Ceremony without a curandero being present. Total price: $200 USDs This includes everything from the time you arrive at the maloca/compound.

Please contact us for more details.Visit the Conference website:

Shipibo – Conibo Art Exhibition, Lima Peru 2002 – ‘Una Ventana hacia el Infinito’

In 2002 the ICPNA held an exhibition called;

‘Una Ventana hacia el Infinito’ (A window into the infinite). This was a display of Shipibo – Conibo art in Lima.

This is a video collage of photos I took at the exhibition.

Soundtrack, Shipibo shaman Enrique Lopez chanting an Ayahuasca Icaro.

 click for info on our Ayahuasca and Yoga Retreats working with the Shipibo

 

Ayahuasca Shipibo Shaman Leoncio Garcia

The Shipibo are one of the largest ethnic groups in the Peruvian Amazon. These ethnic groups each have their own languages, traditions and culture. The Shipibo which currently number about 20,000 are spread out in communities through the Pucallpa / Ucayali river region. They are highly regarded in the Amazon as being masters of Ayahuasca, and many aspiring shamans and Ayahuasqueros from the region study with the Shipibo to learn their language, chants, and plant medicine knowledge.

Interviewed at Mishana Private Retreat Centre, Amazon Rainforest with Peter Cloudsley and Howard G Charing August 2005.

We interviewed Shipibo maestro Leoncio Garcia, a man in his mid seventies but with the appearance of a man twenty years younger. Again a testimonial to the youth giving qualities of Ayahuasca and the plant medicines of the Amazon Rainforest.

Leoncio Garcia
I didn’t become a shaman until I was 50, I am now 74. I was always so busy working in the chacra, or cutting wood, it was only when I began to get a bit older. Until then I had taken Ayahuasca for all the usual reasons of health, but that was all. After deciding to do the diet I drank Ayahuasca seriously but I didn’t see anything and didn’t think I would learn anything but still I kept on drinking every night and didn’t sleep. With just one day to go before completing three months’ diet, I had a tremendous vision and I began to chant and continued all night until dawn. I saw under the earth, under the water, and into the skies, everything. Probably I was learning from the sprits during the diet but I didn’t understand. After that I could see what the matter was with people. I dieted pinon Colorado and tobacco first and then tried all the other plants.

This was in San Francisco, a Shipibo community on Yarinacocha, Pucullpa where I was born. After this I went to Huancayo for six months to try my medicine. Then I went to Ayacucho and then a Senor took me to Lima to heal his wife. After two months I was taken to Trujillo and then Arequipa, Cusco, Juliaca, Puno. Everything worked out well and I worked with a doctor once who was not very successful and soon there were people queuing outside her consultancy. Eventually I came to Iquitos in 2000 and I haven’t had time to return to my family since then, I just send them money.

When I go round to people blowing tobacco smoke it is to give them arcanas, to protect them so that when things happen around them it doesn’t hurt them or make them ill.

Leoncio tells a Shipibo (cautionary) myth. There was once a wise man called Oni who knew what each and every healing plant could be used for. He knew all their names and one day he saw a liana and recognized it as Ayahuasca and he learned to mix it with Chacruna. One night he tried it and learned so many things that he carried on drinking it. But because he went on drinking so long and often he stopped eating and drinking, and just chanted day and night. Now he had two sons and they said ‘come and have breakfast Papa’, but he carried on drinking Ayahuasca and when they tried to pick him up, he was stuck to the ground and couldn’t be moved. So they left him chanting to all the plants everyday and night and they noticed that Ayahuasca was growing out from his fingers. So the sons went back to their chacras and after a month came back again, to see their father. Everywhere Ayahuasca ropes had tangled around him and still he continued chanting day after day and the forest carried on growing around him. After a few more months, he had merged with the forest itself and that is why its called Ayahuasca, rope of the dead and in Shipibo Oni.

visit our website www.shamanism.co.uk  for details  on our Ayahuasca Retreats in the Amazon

The Pusanga – Plant Spirit Shamanism of the Amazon Video www.shamanism.co.uk

The Western rational mind can only struggle, to take as an example the famed ‘love potion’ of the Amazon known as the Pusanga. In rational terms it makes no sense whatsoever, how can a concoction of leaves, roots, and seeds attract a lover, or good luck to you?

Soundtrack of Ayahuasca Mestizo Shaman Artidoro chanting a beautiful Icaro.

Visit our website www.shamanism.co.uk for info on our Ayahuasca and Yoga Retreats in the Amazon