A lecture by Ralph Miller given to a group of new arrivals today, March 20th, 2007! on the morning of the first Ayahuasca ceremony.

"We are all here in a desire to explore a shamanic path, an experience with shamanism. By shamanism, specifically in a shamanic ceremony, we will be ingesting a shamanic plant medicine that has been used for thousands of years in indigenous cultures to bring us to a place of consciousness beyond what our normal daily awake experience is.

The recommendations that many of you have read about or heard about have to do with this concept of "letting go" as you enter into this shamanic ceremony. In many ways, the shamanic path has to do with letting go, it's a relaxing to a potential within yourself that you are not accustomed to, that you have not experienced in your day to day life."

Article by Ralph Miller

Life is uncertain and unpredictable. There are times in our lives when we experience difficulties or crisis. When we see chaos around us, our minds become uneasy. We think about all kinds of possibilities. Danger. Uncertainty. Actually this is the way that life is. To hope for anything else is to be endlessly projected into an idyllic future that will never arrive.

In other words, in the midst of everyday life, we still have to live our lives. We have to choose everyday a course that will guide us through our highest evolution. This is what life is all about. It was never about where we are eventually going. It has always been about the journey itself.

We are right in the middle of our individual heroic quests. Right now. Real time.

Article by Ralph Miller

All of us have a sense of what eternity is. We came from eternity and when we die, we will return to eternity. Our lifetime on earth is a chosen separation from eternity. We come to experience and learn.

Eternity can only be ‘remembered’ from the deep recesses of our hearts. It’s a feeling or knowing, not a ‘mind’ thing. It’s a nostalgia for eternity that resides in our hearts as a long-forgotten dream. It’s a resonance, an ancient tone.

Religions capitalize on this nostalgia with various concepts of heaven or redemption. Sadly, the mere ‘concept of heaven’ is not even close to what a heaven would be like. Heaven can never be just an intellectual concept. It is a deep inner feeling. Remembering this ancient feeling is clouded by darkness that exists in the ego. Our hearts exist in eternity while we live out our lives in a realm of forgetfulness.

I have great respect for the ayahuasca medicine because I saw through the shaman’s journey a way to transcend our forgetfulness. We are offered a way to heal our nostalgia. We remember what the deep feeling was about. It is heaven.

There really is no methodical or logical way of remembering eternity. Your waking mind has only been with you for a few decades. It has no idea how vast or wide, you and eternity actually are. When we walk through the sacred inner doorway, we experience the true initiation of the heart and we remember within the immensity of time, our infinite and immortal selves.

Article by Ralph Miller

Many people have asked me the question, "What is an Ayahuasca journey like?"

For certain each journey is completely an individual experience, and while there are similarities between journeys, each one is completely unique. The only universal advice that I have been able to come up with about Ayahuasca is that the master lesson of this incredible feminine teacher is fundamentally about, 'letting go'.

You are shown the beauty of nature; you are shown the infinite nature of everything. You are brought healing and understanding in a way that will humble you, and make you cry. But in order to get there, you first have to let go.

It seems simple. But in fact it is one of the most difficult things for some. We all tend to hold on to so much. We hold on to our egoist ideas of self. We identify with our jobs or our families, and loose a sense of who we really are. We want to hide and we can't bear to be exposed.

Article by Stuart Wilde

In two other articles here I talk about the illusion of claridad, which is a shaman’s term that describes the opposite of clarity. Claridad is an illusion that effects some spiritual travelers when they come in touch with the godhead or the primal source in all things. They start to believe that they have been divinely chosen, they imagine they are a great avatar or the returned Jesus, here to save humanity. It’s a narcissistic psychosis that usually effects men but women also suffer from claridad though they don’t usually get it as bad. The women can’t come back from a transdimensional journey pretending to be Jesus so they settle for other titles. Sometimes they decide they are Mary Magdalene, the kind-hearted whore, reputed to be the wife of Jesus. If you can’t be Jesus, Mrs. Jesus might be the next best thing.

Other times, they decide they are Temple Maidens, chosen to vector the celestial healing power to unfortunate men who are too daft to manage on their own. In simple terms it’s "licensed to bonk for god." Or in extreme cases, the female claridad sufferer decides she is a divine goddess, the embodiment of the feminine principal. She elevates herself to being the reincarnation of Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile. In her mind she is now the ‘Regina of the Sacred Vagina.’ A women of unparalleled divinity, beauty, sensuality and wonderfulness. A self-endorsed deity.

Article by Stuart Wilde

I talked last time about the term claridad, the Shaman's joke that describes a student's lack of clarity—his or her stupidity.

Claridad is a dysfunction, an anomaly, that comes about when people on an Aya' journey say, experience the vastness of the Primal Source in all things. At first they are over awed, then they believe themselves to be the Primal Source, or at the very least the embodiment of it, or they see themselves as the Chosen One, the message bringer. He or she that has been especially selected from six billion souls to carry back the energy or the power from its celestial resting place to enlighten and heal humanity. Of course, the shamans fall about laughing at all this but claridad is serious as some people go round the bend on it.

The process is more or less the same for each person depending on the degree of foolishness they need to expose from within themselves.

Article by Stuart Wilde

There is term in shamanism called claridad, it comes from the word clarity but in fact, it is the opposite of clarity. Often on an Ayahuasca journey the student will enter into the primal force in all things, it's like stumbling into the arms of God. At first they are overawed but when they return they imagine they are God, or the embodiment of God: Jesus, Buddha, whatever. That is what the shamans call claridad—the false prophet.

In the seminar business we call them 'the forty-fours'. In numerology the Christ Consciousness is 44. So our use of the term describes their pretense to a god-like status. The forty-fours are very grand and holy and chosen. They make a great show of loving others, while silently looking down their nose at people. They are always bad news. They cause trouble and sometimes they become angry when others don't see them in the same divine light.

The forty-fours are everywhere, some only have a mild form of the disquiet, they are pompous say, others buy claridad full-on and they are wearing diapers on their heads and wandering around in robes and so forth—good for a giggle but it's a bit deadly really.