XENA

THE MYTH OF PERPETUAL RETURN
Homosexuality and spirituality in Xena, the warrior princess

Abstract: The document analyzes the TV series ‘Xena, the warrior princess’, from which the author raises some up-to-date theoretical references on mythology and argues over the hyper-textual aspects of the narrative structure of sacred stories.

Our culture is full of stories. Each commercial we read or see is really a story – told in an intelligent, artistic and costly way. Consumerism is the main story of our civilization. It feeds our not-fulfilled appetites; it is nourished by the fact of us not being spiritually supplied, of existing inside of an emptiness that cannot be filled, no matter how much we spent in goods or treats.
Consumerism is a dangerous and debilitating story, but we can bring back - we need to recover - our strength in telling stories. We may deviate from those habits that we spend billions of dollar and hours with. We can recover wastefulness and recycle, creating more authentic stories. We can annul the toxic effect of our pseudo-history, replacing them for more rewarding stories that satisfy heart, mind, imagination and the quest of each one of us for justice and peace, and for the return of the blessings upon our daily life. (FOX, 2002, 252)

THE WARRIOR PRINCESS SAGA
Xena: Warrior Princess is a North American TV series that was produced in the New Zealander city of Auckland and its surroundings, and was broadcasted originally between 1995 and 2001. It premiered with the actresses Lucy Lawless and Renée O' Connor.

The series started in 1995, as one spin-off of the series ‘Hercules: The Mythical Trips’. The Saga of Xena in the American television started with a special participation of Xena in Hercules during three episodes, The Warrior Princess, The Gauntlet and Unchained Heart. In the two first episodes, Xena was a villain, but in third, she feels sorry for her past and ally with Hercules.
Xena had such success with the public that the producers of Hercules had decided to record an exclusive series with the warrior princess. The producers Robert Tapert and John Schulian had the idea, and together with Sam Raimi, signed an agreement with the Renaissance Pictures for 24 episodes of Xena, as audience test. From then on, the series had a huge success and it has been reported as a cultural phenomenon and a pop-feminist icon. In a short space of time, Xena became synonymous for feminine force and frequently appears in other contemporaneous works: video games, comics, other show series (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; Dark Angel; Alias), and as far as in Tarantino´s Kill Bill and others[2].

And while Hercules was a failure, lasting only two seasons, Xena endured for six years with a great international success. Besides the charisma of the two leading actresses, the success is mainly due to the conjunction of two apparently incompatible subjects: homosexuality and spirituality.

Homosexuality here is Greek, ‘saphic’ and not ‘lesbian', that is, the protagonists are not masculine, they actually sisterly share and stand up for the feminine values: they have children, partners, but the girlfriends keep one another as their main affective relation. Although without explicit erotic scenes, there are innumerable mentions to the homosexual relation between Xena, Gabrielle and other personages of the Saga – for the delight of great part of the GLS public[3].

But the great success of Xena does not lie simply in this bisexuality with feminine preferences, so old and yet so actual: in contrast to Hercules, that is a patriarchal hero fighting against the great goddess Hera; Xena is a matriarchal heroine fighting against Ares, the god of the war - what it is much more, let´s say… politically correct. She, in fact, aggregates and defends the feminine values. The macho and violent behaviors are constantly ridiculed through Joxer (Ted Raimi) and Ares (Kevin Tod Smith). A good example of this complete demoralization of the patriarchal values is the episode Here She Comes… Miss Amphipolis, in which Xena applies for a beauty contest as Miss Amphipolis to find out which of the sponsors want to kill the participants. The criminals discovered, after a hilarious feminist mockery where the main candidates give up the competition, a transvestite wins the contest. But, beyond the saphistic homosexuality, spirituality is another theme that passes by the whole series and one of the reasons for its success.

Are histories always sacred?

George Orwell says that when he was in the front of the Spanish civil war, a place where a human being would not give away even a used match for his best friend, he witnessed soldiers that would give half of its food to hear a story. By the way, many already had said that the list of the human necessities has only two items: bread (the food nourishes the body) and circus (the narrative feeds the soul). But would it be that our need for entertainment is that important? What would be the true importance of the narratives for our psychological balance? And still: would it be that all stories have the same merit?

The 11th annual conference of the Common Boundary - a North American NGO, headed toward the study and divulgation of experiences on the relation between psychotherapy, spirituality and creativity – it was entirely dedicated to the matter of the sacred histories. There were researchers of different areas and specialties participating: Edith Sullwold; Gioia Timpanelli; Robert Bly; Allan B. Chinen; Richard Lewis; Nancy J. Napier; Shaun McNiff; Meinrad Craighead; Walter Wink; James P. Carse; John McDargh; Matthew Fox; Richard Katz; Al Gore; Clarissa Pinkola Estes; Maya Angelou.

Among approaches on specific mythologies, I emphasize three: David Peat, that related the actual Chaos theory and the cosmovision of the North American natives; John L. Johnson, who spoke on the re-habilitation of drug abusers through the narration of African histories; and John Daido Loori, who presented a work on Zen koans.

With Peat, we learn that the mind (collective or individual) works as a map formed by narratives, through which we have access to the territories exterior to the cosmos. With Johnson, we discover that drug abuse is a history of social failure that can be told again. With Loori, we are introduced to the koans, mini-stories, usually absurd and paradoxical that aim to provoke an insight, a change in the perception state of the listener (and not to give to ethical advice or moral teachings through parabolas or allegories).
However, the center of the debates was the sacred characteristic of the narratives. Regarding this, it is possible to set three distinct and yet not conflicting positions: the ones that have nostalgia of the traditional stories; the ones that consider histories as cognitive narratives for the constitution of biographies; and the ones that understand sacred and profane narratives as parts of a complex game of identity.

Sam Keen, for instance, integrates the group of the eco-traditionalists. “In order to free ourselves from the destructive myth of progress, we have that to rediscover our familiar mythologies and personal history”. (KEEN, 2002, 43) In the traditional scenario, we believed in a myth that guided our life; in the modern scenario, history took the place of the mythical stories; and in post-modern times, there is not only one myth nor only one history that shapes our identity, but we are overwhelmed by many histories from various different places[4]. For Keen, this multiplicity of global narratives generates a discontinuous and fragmented culture, with space/time ruptures that deviates men from themselves and from nature.

Mary Catherine Bateson also considers the current culture discontinuous, but she believes there it has a spiritual continuity passing through the different discontinuities of our life history. Therefore, she emphasizes: the important thing is to live life as a creative process. It means to be the authors of our own history of life, to be the artists and the very work of art in evolution. The stories, in this context, are seen as connection between people and images, as a form of art therapy. Bateson has a special interest for the conversion narratives.

And, finally, there are the authors who believe that the “sacred narratives are constituted of symbols and metaphors of the profound truths about the mysteries of the life.” We live in a universe formed by histories - histories of the family, the school and the media. Histories inform, distract, and teach us. But, not every story is sacred. There are also histories that are silly, obscene and even immoral. The sacred ones are those that tells us who we are and what is our relation to the cosmos, those that “transforms us bring us closer to the others” (SIMPKINSON, 2002, 09).

But, what make a story to be sacred is its form and not its content. What matters is how one tells history and not on what it is about. There are religious histories that are not sacred. A sacred story is recognized by “meaning effects” it unchains in the receiver.
Or even better: profane histories say who you are, while sacred histories say what you are not.

Present not your profile
Forget thy side vision
All that is exterior
Search for your other half
Always by your side
And tend to be what you are not.
(Antonio Machado. BLY, 2002, 130)

THE PLACE OF THE NARRATOR
Initially the idea of the producers was that Gabrielle would die in the second episode, but as the charisma of Renee O' Connor conquered the public, they had decided to keep her. In the first season, Gabrielle is young, prattling and innocent and demonstrates her intelligence and diplomacy. It is she who writes the history of Xena. Although she does not fight, she proves her value next to Xena using sagacity. She becomes, then, the heroine who does not use of the brute force. In the third year, there are quarrels between the two heroines and Gabrielle becomes self-sufficient in the fights. Finally, in the fifth and sixth years of the series, Gabrielle is a complete warrior.

In many moments, not only the coadjuvant takes the place of the protagonist, but the narrator takes the place of the hero. In the episode The Titans, Gabrielle reads a magical parchment and resurrects three Titans; in Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards, she participates in a storytelling competition; in The Quill is Mightier, Aphrodite bewitches Gabrielle´s parchment, in such way that everything she writes turns into reality; The Play' s the Ting, Gabrielle directs a play based on the adventures of Xena, metalinguistically reflecting the series, aiming to conciliate the enjoyment of the public for sex and violence with the ethical and aesthetic intentions of the artists.

The pair Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, created by Cervantes, is a model to critically think the heroic narrative, in which the protagonist, idealist and dreamy, live submerse in the universe of the stories (of medieval gallantry) and the supporting role, has its critical conscience well rooted in the world of the material reality and its needs. The pair of heroines formed by Gabrielle and Xena is the inversion of this model, therefore while the warrior is pragmatic and realistic; the poetess constantly confuses reality with her narratives. By the way, this inversion of the perspectives allows not only the character to learn from someone inside other story, but, overall, to be a dynamic and transforming dialogue between who writes the story and who carries out the narrative. That is: the pair Xena/Gabrielle is a re-interpretation of the author-personage reflective model considered by Cervantes to think the journey of the hero.

And more: Walter Benjamin observes that, in modernity, there is been a change in the narrative way through which we tell stories. In the traditional environment, the stories were transmitted verbally; therefore, they were repeated always in the same way - as the children are told to do in their first years. Or yet, when having written versions, the narrators do not assume to be authors of the narrative: Homero, Hesiod, Virgilian, and Apuleius only repeated the narratives they had heard.

In the modern environment, however, the storyteller (writers, filmmakers, artists) must ‘be creative’, original and remarkable for the newness, not only telling the same story in different forms, but always telling new stories. Thus, with the technical reproductability and the disappearance of the ‘aura’ of art objects in general, originality would have been substituted by novelty also in the discursive field of the narratives.

But, within post-modernity, it became common place not only to retell classic histories with an authorial style, but also to combine histories from different cultures and times, relating them, mixing its characters and texts, making citations to be recognized. The classic A Midsummer Night's Dream, of Shakespeare, for example, is homaged in the episode A Comedy of Eros, in which Bliss, son of the Cupid and Psyche, steal the arrows of his father and makes Xena to fall in love for Draco, that falls in love with Gabrielle that falls for Joxer. Or in the episode The Furies, which is an interpretation of the tragedy Electra, from Sophocles. The episode A Solstice Carol is a parody of a Christmas Tale: Xena, Gabrielle and the toy manufacturer Senticles join and disguise as the Fates so that king Silvus won’t banish the children from an orphanage.

Beyond the interaction with several Greek gods (Ares, Aphrodite, Hades, Bacchus, etc), Hercules and other legendary characters from the Greek mythology (Ulysses, Helen of Troy, Prometheus), Xena also re-interpretates narratives from other cultures. In The Rheingold, the Nordic warrior Beowulf asks Xena for help; in Giant Killer, Xena decides to face her friend Goliath in order to defend the Israelis to be killed by the philistines; in Altered States, Xena saves the boy Ikus (in allusion to Isaac) from being sacrificed by his father Antheus (name given to Jacob) and finds out that the instigator of the crime was a single god. Many other examples could be given. But, the mythical approach most daring and most import for the narrative of Xena, is the history of Eli (or Jesus Christ). Initially Eli (Tim Omundson) is an Essenian mystic man that the heroines met during a peregrination to India, who preaches the philosophy of non-violence and universal love. Gabrielle is converted to these ideals. He reappears in Devi, episode where the poetess has her body possessed by the evil spirit of Tataka, in India, and is exorcized by Eli; and, in The Way, when Xena fights against Indrejit, the most powerful of all demons, who kidnapped Gabrielle and Eli. At the beginning of the fifth season, in Fallen Angel, the heroines are resurrected by Eli after a battle between heaven and hell. And, finally, in Motherhood, Eli appears once again, when granting to Xena the power to kill all gods from the Olympus.
Beyond re-interpret narratives of different cultures with its feminist-matriarchal framing, the stories of Xena are fractals, that is, each episode of the series will describe elements of the set of the Saga seen from a specific point, each story is full of details and subtitles that advance and explain what it is to happen or what happened in another story, inside of a gigantic time-puzzle. Thus, the first episode, when Xena comes back sorry to her native village to ask for her mother to forgive her after many years of slaughters and wars, is when we get to know how she left Amphipolis. Or in the episode Death Mask, Xena finds her older brother Toris to revenge the death of their youngest brother, Lyceus. Or yet in Orphan of War, Xena meets again her son Solan that had been educated by the centaurs for ten years.

In each new episode, the shady past of Xena is shown in flashbacks. At the same time that the narrative structures a gradual history of a warrior in search of redemption, it also constructs a regressive history of guilt and savagery, previous the conversion of Xena. This double narrative, regressive/progressive, leads to the construction of a time line in two directions, with characters, places and time very contradictory.

A good example is the episode Past Imperfect. While Xena revives her memories from the time of her pregnancy until the death of Borias and the birth of Solan, Xena confronts her former-servant, Satrina, which is attacking cities in the present with the same techniques used by her to destroy Corinth in the past. In fact, the complete Saga of the warrior princess can be subdivided in cultural cycles: the Roman Cycle (joint of episodes where Xena is crucified twice by Julius Cesar (Karl Urban); the Chinese Cycle (with two trips of Xena for China permeated with memories of her spiritual mentor Lao Ma); the Germanic cycle (in which Xena convinces Odin not to commit suicide and is transformed into a Walkiria); Cycle of the Amazon and the Centaurs; Japanese Cycle (where Xena, in the past, provokes a fire that kills 40,000 people to revenge the death of the princess Akemi and, in present time, dies decapitated by the samurais); etc.

Besides this simultaneous construction of the narrative in the past and the in the present, Xena and Gabrielle also travel, in its trans-cultural revision of mythologies, in other dimensions of the space-time: in Dreamworker, Gabrielle is abducted by the priests of Morpheus and Xena enters the world of dreams to rescue her; in The Bitter Suite, after dying, Xena and Gabrielle go to the kingdom Ilusia where they make up; in Paradise Found, Xena and Gabrielle fall in a hole and arrive in a paradise that is governed by Aidem, a sorcerer who feeds from people's kindness. Xena had been in hell many times, as in the remarkable episode where she kills Mephistopheles and becomes the ‘Queen of Hell’ (The Haunting of Amphipolis), and soon after, in Heart of Darkness, makes the archangel Lucifer to commit the seven deadly sins so that he would assume the place of ‘King of the Hell’ instead of her.

But, among the regressive cycles involving trips to the spiritual worlds, the episodes that tell the story of the Siberian witch Alti (Claire Stansfield) hold a special place. Gabrielle dies (for the first time) in the end of the third season. And in the first episode of the 4th year, Adventures in the Sin Trade, to have one last contact with her, Xena decides to go to the place “where Amazon goes when they die”, but finds out that Alti, her former ally and powerful shaman, imprisoned the old Amazon souls on a sort of ‘limbo'. Xena, then, remembers her agreement with Alti to become `the annihilator of nations' and of her betrayal to the amazon queen Cyane. Xena, once more, ransoms her debt with the past, freeing Gabrielle and the amazons, but she will also awake the anger of the witch that will haunt her from then ahead, during the whole series, in many dimensions, places and times.

Also there are displacements in the future time. By the way, Uberfic is the used term (created by Xena’s fan club in the Internet) to assign the stories where the personages are shown in some episodes in the future, usually incarnated in other bodies, and soon after acknowledging about their past lives. This kind of resource was used in the episode The Xena Scrolls, in the second season: in Macedonia 1940, anthropologists Melinda Pappas and Janice Covington, reincarnations of Xena and Gabrielle, look for scrolls that have the adventures of Xena. In Between the Lines, Xena and Gabrielle are sent to the future to fight the reincarnation of Alti. In Déjà Vu All Over Again, when, in present time, Harry, Anne and Matie, the reincarnations of Xena, Gabrielle and Joxer do regression therapy from past lives and when Xena and Gabrielle are interviewed by a TV reporter in You Are There.

There are still two episodes dedicated to the present time: Send in the Clones, in which Xena and Gabrielle are cloned by three fans obsessed by the series; and Soul Possession, which presents a Buddhist solution (body exchange) to the karmic conflicts of the three main personages of the series: the spirit of Xena reincarnates in the body of the actor Ted Raimi and the spirit of the foolish Joxer in the body of the actress Lucy Lawless. Thus, the union between the twin souls of Xena and Gabrielle would become ‘heterosexual' `- what many fans disliked.
In these episodes, the artists take their critical satire over themselves to the last consequences. The importance given by the fan clubs to the question of the protagonist’s homosexuality is brought inside the show. There is a hilarious scene with the Raimi brothers on the possibility to produce - from the lost scrolls of Xena (found by the switched reincarnations of the old heroes) – a low budget show for American TV “with neo-Zealand locations and casting”.

In a way that the narrative discontinuity of the episodes of the Saga always bring in the problem of the narrator, either through the relation author/actor, represented by the couple of protagonists, either through scenes of metalinguistics and the explicitation of many usually invisible aspects in the TV series, as the role of the producers, the show success, the characters homosexuality, the fan clubs, etc.

WARRIOR OF PEACE
The book Myth and Body (2001) is a resulted of the encounter of two great contemporary authors, deriving from different areas of psychology: Stanley Keleman – director of the Center for Energetic Studies of Berkeley, author of many books on somatic therapy and responsible for the approach of Reich ideas in the actual context - and Joseph Campbell, a well-known mythologist that took the postulates of Jung to the fields of archaeology, anthropology and history of the religions, elaborating a universal model for the archetypical journey of the hero.
The main argument of the book is that the Myth is a corporal experience; it keeps the somatic memory of the Body. And the Body, in its turn, is constructed by the Myth. Campbell’s ‘Journey of the Hero' corresponds to what Keleman calls `corporification', the history of our somatic nature, the individuation process (Jung). Thus, there is a resonance between the sacred histories and the personal biographies. The book still brings an interpretation of the medieval Legend of Parsifal as a symbolic script of initiation, rites of passage from youth (and the feeling of pride) towards maturity (and the feeling of compassion).

‘Xena’ tells the story of a cruel and sanguinary warrior who regrets from her violent and merciless behavior, converting herself to the spiritual path of the warriors and defending the weak and oppressed. But, in relation to the archetypical journey of the hero, she is a woman and, instead of the passage from pride to compassion, her story dramatizes the passage from revenge and rivalry feelings for ones of justice and fellowship. This - increased to the fact that the heroines are much more solitary and less competitive then the heroes in general – bring a special tone to the show.

But, with its feminine style, in the basics, Xena fulfills the two basic requirements of the Warrior Path: to be one own enemy (the others are adversaries that can be become allies) and to have death as companion.

Of Course Xena has enemies for which there is no reconciliation, that represented the absolute evil (as the witch Alti; the god Dahak; and Hope, the daughter of Gabrielle), but, during the whole series, the warrior princess fought to convert her adversaries into allies, a time she was a ‘converted' herself. That is particularly visible in the episodes that count with the participation of the warrior Callisto (Hudson Leick).

In hers villainous times, Xena pillaged and destroyed the city of Cirra, killing the family of a innocent girl called Callisto, who, nourishing a mortal hate for the warrior princess, passed her whole life searching for revenge. She is defeated and imprisoned in the episode Callisto; in Return of Callisto, she scapes from prison and kills Perdicas, the husband of Gabrielle. In the episodes Intimate Stranger and Ten Little Warlords, Ares switch the bodies of Xena and Callisto - putting each one in the other´s shoes.

By the way, this resource (of the bodies exchange to demonstrate to the protagonists how others see the world) is used at other moments of the series: in Little Problems, Xena is placed in the body of the girl Daphne; in Succession, Ares join Xena and Gabrielle in a single body. But, let us come back to Callisto. In A Necessary Evil, Xena resurrected by Gabrielle, enters into an alliance with Callisto against Velasca, the goddess of chaos. To stop her, Xena helps in exchange for ambrosia. After Callisto become a goddess, Xena makes her and Velasca to fall in a well of lava. Callisto starts again to resurrect and join to the enemies of Xena (Hope, Dahak, and Julio Cesar) in the episodes Maternal Instincts, Sacrifice and The Ides of March; but, in Fallen Angel, at the beginning of the fifth season, she is redeemed and becomes a celestial angel after Xena save her from hell. In Seeds of Faith, Xena finds out that her future daughter, Eve, will be a reincarnation of the angel Callisto and will have an important role in ‘crepuscule of gods'. Callisto´s redemption is also Xena’s redemption!

The issue on the warrior ethics and non-violence is also set in the episodes Crusader and The Convert, when the heroines meet Najara, a warrior who says to be fighting in the good side, but actually she is religious fanatic, killing the ones that do not want to follow (her) the light path. The encounter with the fanatic warrior served to define that, although they follow their way together, Xena and Gabrielle follow different spirituals paths: Xena follows the Way of the Warrior, guided by Krisna; Gabrielle follows the Way of Love preached by Eli.

Here there is an important point: the love between women who follow different ways and respect each other (this love either being sexual or not) is the great distinguishing subject of Xena in relation to the warrior stories. The fraternity and love between men follow other parameters (it is ruled and competitive) and the women generally do not possess histories that exceed the feminine rivalry and establishes parameters of solidarity with different perspectives.
And if Xena differentiate from the traditional stories due to the feminine way she fights, she also surprises regarding death. In traditional legends, the hero defies his Destiny (and death) and conquers immortality. But, in Xena (and in other contemporaries narratives as we saw in Sandman), the protagonist prefers to die without fear. Altogether, during the whole series, Callisto dies five times, Gabrielle, eight times; and Xena, four – not mentioning the different reincarnations.

In the episode Death in Chains, king Sisyphus captures Celesta, the embodiment of death, taking death away from humanity. And Xena, in contrast to the traditional hero who aims immortality, decides to set death free, bringing humanity back to its ephemeral condition. In actual life, represented in the stories, it is necessary to always `be on the limit'. Death as permanent risk is a new form of producing existential meaning. As a constant presence, before an exclusive experience of a few mystics, death had became now, through the media, a way of mass subjection in the contemporary culture. And life became fragmented in many simulated micro-deaths, in many existential shocks of the body at risk, at many anticipated final moments of a single irreversible time. And the series just reproduces this reality.

In the episode Been There, Done That, Xena thinks constantly on how to break the Cupid charm, in a day that is always repeating itself. It is a homage to the movie 12:01, in which the protagonist live the same day many times until finding out what was going on. To each repeated day, depending on the options of the protagonist, many coadjuvants and the main characters die. But, as the day re-starts all come back to life without remembering they had already passed through those events. By the way, this film is very ‘honoured’ by TV series and even other films, as the Butterfly Effect, also adapt this specific model of secular paradox to its narratives and specific contexts.

It is as somebody once said: “in media, nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is copied.” Or: "One man's trash is another man's treasure". And as everyone copy the stories of everyone, it all starts to be a matter of who tells the story better. And the series itself also brings up this narrative relativism and this plurality of interpretations in the If episode If the Shoe Fits… Xena, Gabrielle, Joxer and Aphrodite take the princess Aesia home and tell her different versions of the story of Cinderella, called by them Cirela.

THE PERPETUAL RETURN
There are many similarities between the mythological series of Xena and other contemporaries works, such as, for example, the gigantic series of graphic novel Sandman, masterpiece of the English writer Neil Gaiman, telling the tragic epic of Morpheus, the master of dreams. Both narratives are hyper textual, filled with literary, artistic, scientific citations from multiple cultural scenarios; both understand death as a process of change in life, but, above all, the great similarity between Xena and Sandman is in the role played by the Three Fates (a young woman, another one of middle-age and an old one), that, in both histories, represent the past, the present and the future: the inflexible existence of the time above and beyond death and destiny.
In Sandman, Destiny and Death are endless, brothers of Dream, protagonist of the story. And the endless are not gods, but aspects of the human soul. The three witches appear many times in the stories of Sandman in the form of oracle for different characters and, in the penultimate arc, Dear Beings (2008) they are placed above the endless and represent the awakening of the conscience of time in dreaming.

In the Xena show the three Fates also appear many times. In Remember Nothing, in the second season, the three of them make Xena go back in time and never to be a warrior. And they warn that if Xena do not kill, she will not come back to normal. Also in the episode Looking Death in the Eye, in the fifth season, Joxer, already an old man, has a parchment with the story of Xena trying to deceive the three fates to save her daughter Eve from being killed by gods and ends up kidnapping Celesta, the goddess-death. In the end, Xena and Gabrielle forge their own death and Ares think that they had died and freezes them. In the sequence, the heroines are defrosted 25 years after and meet again Eve, with the name Livia that is now is a servant of Rome and lover of Ares. And in the end of the sixth season, in the episode When Fates Collide, they are imprisoned by Julius Cesar who runs away from hell and changes Xena’s string of life, modifying her future and transforming her into the Empress of Rome. But Xena meets Gabrielle, a famous poetess and Cesar get involved with Alti, a powerful priestess of Rome. In the end, Alti kills Cesar and the three fates helps Gabrielle recover the string of life of Xena.

In another occasion (GOMES, 2000), I defined `Hypertext' as being a text in which the reader interacts with the discourse, as an open structure of multiple meaning, edging polysemy and allowing the maximum interpretations. The written text is a linear system in relation to the continuous time that it tries to represent in many 'continuances': the succession of events, the order of the speech, the gradual accumulation of resultant information. The transmission context is different from the many possible contexts of reception, opposing to the single context of orality.

Now, the time of the Hypertext is at the same time continuous and simultaneous, sequential and parallel, historical and circular, successively and simultaneously - it is the re-unification of the contexts in a superior scale. In the text-scripture there is a relation between past and present, history and the social memory; in the Hypertext, the relation is between present and future, between what is prevailing and its virtual simulation.

From this optic, the Hypertext is not only an Internet matter, but actually a new standard of organization, that invaded the daily life creating the basis for another form of thinking and feeling, of a new and more democratic and participative sociability. And it is not only a tool and a product of the webs it engenders (in which the receivers awake from passivity towards the interactive construction of a referent), but, overall, it represents the cognitive integration between two distinct standards, verbal-mythical (one-one) and historical (one-many) to a new standard (many-many).

It is common to say that everyone that forget history, are doomed to repeat it. But not even Nietzsche (in Gaia Science and other writings) nor Mircea Eliade (in his book about the new year of the societies without history) had imagined the broad, pluralist, open, polyphonic, multiple and complex dimension that the Myth of the Perpetual Return gained to the contemporaries audio-visual narratives.

Sandman and Xena are different models of hyper textual structures (or “arch-textual” as the neobaroque critic says about Joyce and Guimarães Rosa) of the audiovisuals contemporaries narratives. If it was not its unexpected, multifaceted and chaotic character it could be compared them the time cycles of the Vedas or to the many conceptions of the simultaneous and immutable universe.

They are histories inside histories inside histories. In A thousand and one Nights, the stories tells one another to the infinite, but they are contained by the ‘real history’ of the Princess Sherazad. In Sandman, there is “a symphonic” narrative (as McConnell said), with a succession of outcomes from many initial narratives. The story of Xena has a narrative more circular. Its episodes are discontinuous and can be placed in any order, so that the general narrative is maintained. There is not a way to know which of her deaths was definitive or the last to occur in her biography.

Also it is necessary to say that the model of Xena has more audience and greater interactivity than Sandman. While, the Saga of the Master of the Dreams reaches a specific type of nerd (in which I am included), the history of international success of the warrior princess is not limited to the GLS public, reaching everyone that relate to the current feminine values. Besides, each season of Xena was written based on opinion pools with the public (a common procedure nowadays for shows and soap operas). Public and spectators appear sometimes inside the show. Because of all this, we choose the Saga of the warrior princess as an example of Hypertext.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
BATESON, Mary Catherine. História de uma vida. IN: SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. p. 47
BLY, Robert. Histórias que alimentam homens e mulheres. IN: SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. p. 109
ESTES, Clarissa Pinkola. A história como fonte terapêutica. IN: SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. p. 85
FOX, Matthew. Histórias que precisam ser contadas na época atual. IN: SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. p. 251
KEEN, Sam. História sobre nossos mitos. IN: SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. p. 35
KELEMAN, Stanley. Mito e Corpo – uma conversa com Josepf Campbell. Tradução: Denise Maria Bolanho. 2ª Edição. São Paulo: Summus Editorial, 2001.
JOHNSON, John L. Reabilitação de dependentes de drogas por meio da narração de histórias. IN: SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. p. 165
LOORI, John Daido. O Zen e seus koans: instrumentos de autoquestionamento. IN: SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. 199
PEAT, David. A ciência como fonte de histórias. IN: SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. p. 61
SIMPKINSON, Charles & Anne. Histórias Sagradas: uma exaltação do poder de cura e transformação; tradução: Ione Maria de Souza Ferreira. Coleção Arco do Tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002.



[2] In 2005, the team that discovered the dwarfed planet 2003 UB313 called it Xena in homage to the TV character. In October 1st of 2005, the team announced that 2003 UB313 had a moon, that they nicknamed Gabrielle. The objects officially had been called Eris and Dysnomia for the International Astronomical Union in September 13th of 2006. Although the official names have legitimate roots in Greek mythology, Dysnomia also means lawlessness or anarchy, perpetuating the connection with Lucy Lawless. (Source: Wikipedia)
[3] Among the fans, it is a matter of much interest to know if Xena and Gabrielle are lovers or not. Xena has being cultuated as icon for the lesbian community. There is also a lesbian group of activists called The Marching Xenas which participated of several gay events. The question is left ambiguous by the writers of the series on purpose.
[4] Keen still criticizes the non-political interpretation of the traditional thinkers who work with myths (Carl Gustav Jung, James Hilmann, Bruno Bettelleim), who reduce evil to the psychological shade and use the term archetype- that he considers to be a term culturally conservative. Actually, Keen literally reproduces the arguments of Paul Ricouer (without citing him) on the advantages using of the notion of metaphor instead the concepts of archetype in the symbolic narratives.

PRAYER FOR SELF-LOVE

Creator of the Universe, we ask you today to help us accept ourselves as we are. Help us to accept our mind as it is, with all its emotions, hopes and dreams, with our personality, our unique way of being. Help us to accept our body as it is, with all its beauty and perfection. Allow the love we feel for ourselves to be so strong that we will never more reject ourselves or sabotage our happiness, our freedom, our love.

From this moment on, allow our every action and reaction, our every thought and emotion, to be based in love. Help us, Creator, to increase the love we feel for ourselves, until the whole dream of our life transforms itself, changing fear and drama to love and happiness. Allow the power of our self-love to be great enough to squash all the lies we believe in because we were programmed to believe them, all the lies that we are told claiming that we will not be able to do what we want. Allow the power of our self- love to be so great that we no longer have to live according to the opinions of others. Permit us to trust in ourselves so completely that we can make the changes necessary to our lives. With our self-love, may we no longer be afraid of assuming responsibility for our lives, no longer afraid of facing our problems, whatever they may be, and solving them as they arise. Permit us to achieve whatever we wish to achieve with the power of our self-love.

Starting today, help us to love ourselves so much that we never create adverse circumstances. May we live our life being ourselves, without pretending to be otherwise just so that others will accept us or tell us we are fine, because we know who we are. With the power of our self-love, allow us to like the image we see of ourselves every time we look in the mirror. Put a big smile on our faces, lighting up our exterior and interior beauty. Permit us to feel such an intense love for ourselves that we always appreciate our own company.

Permit us to love ourselves without judgments because when we judge, we blame ourselves and then feel the necessity to be punished, thus losing from sight Your love. Strengthen in us this moment our desire to forgive ourselves. Cleanse our minds of emotional poisons and judgments, so that we may live in love and peace.

Allow our self-love to be the power which changes our life dream. Allow the power of self-love -- this new power in our hearts -- to transform all our relationships, beginning with the relationship we have with ourselves. Help us to free ourselves of all conflicts with others. Permit us to be happy because we have shared our time with our dear family and associates, and can forgive them for whatever injustice we feel they have committed against us. Help us to love ourselves so deeply that we can forgive anyone who may have hurt us.

Give us courage to love our family and friends unconditionally, and to change our relationships in a positive and loving way. Help us create new channels of communication in our relationships, so that there be no declared war, neither winner nor loser. Allow us to work together as a team with love, happiness and harmony.

May the relationship we have with acquaintances and friends be based on respect and joy, so that we no longer feel the necessity of telling them what they should think or be. May our love relationships be marvelous. May we feel happiness every time we give of ourselves to our partner. Help us to accept others as they are, without judging them, because when we reject them we reject ourselves; and when we reject ourselves, we reject You.

Today is a new beginning. Help us to restart our lives today, with the power of our self-love. Help us to appreciate the fact that we are alive, to appreciate our relationships, to explore life, to take risks and not be afraid of love. Permit us to open our hearts to the love which is our right since our birth. Help us to become Masters of Gratitude, Generosity and Love, so that we may rejoice in all Your creations, today and always.

PRAYER FOR AWARENESS

We ask you today, Creator of the Universe, to open our hearts, so that we may appreciate all of Your Creations and live in eternal love with You. Help us to see You in all that our eyes, ears, heart and senses perceive. Allow us to see with the eyes of love, so that we may find You wherever we go, and see You in all Your creations. Allow us to see You in every cell of our bodies, in every emotion of the mind, in every dream, in every flower, in every person we meet. You cannot hide from us because You are everywhere, because You are one with all of us. Allow us to be conscious of this truth.

Allow us to be conscious of our power to create a celestial dream, where all is possible. Help us use our imagination to direct our life dream, the magic of our creation, so that we may live without fear, anger, jealousy or envy. Give us a light to follow; make our search for love and happiness end today. Allow something extraordinary to happen today, changing our lives forever. Make everything we say and do be an expression of the beauty which exists in our hearts, always based in love.

Help us to be like You, to love as You love, to give as You give, to create a masterpiece of beauty and love equal to Your creations. Beginning today, and continuing gradually as time goes by, help us increase the power of our love, so that we may create the masterpiece of our own life. Today we offer to You, Creator, all our gratitude and love, because You gave us Life.

RUIZ, Don Miguel. O Domínio do Amor – O livro da filosofia tolteca, um guia prático para a arte do relacionamento. Rio de Janeiro: BestSeller, 2008. Páginas 153-157.

Fragments of Globalization

“In times immemorial, God without form, Brahman, the “oldest of all” the gods, bored with nothingness, created the goddess Maya for his enjoyment (In other versions of the story he creates the mirror universe in order to admire himself.).

And so he said: “Maya, shall we play?”

Maya answered: “Only if you create the world.”

So Brahman created the heavens, the earth, the sea, the sun, the moon, the stars, humankind and other animals.

“What shall we play now?” asked Brahman

“Hide and Seek,” said Maya, and taking Brahman by the hands, tore him into millions of pieces, placing the creator god in each of his creatures. And then she challenged him, “Now let’s see if you can find yourself, Brahman!”

There is a God trying to remember of Himself inside of each one of us, and we will only manage to have Him becoming conscientious in us, if we manage to see Him in others as well. “By the way that we came, that will have to be the way of coming back”. But, globalization is not, on itself, the re-unification of Brahmam´s cosmic conscience. Therefore, it is also argued here that different traditional fragments - the techniques of the Reiki, the Feng Shui, the Toltec shamanism, the Vipassana meditation - are simplified and distorted by the New Age consumerism. It interests us, over all, to think about the therapeutical possibilities of the Ayahuasca within the globalization scenario and the shock of different cultural identities.

Reiki and Feng Shui

Recently, I attended a course on Traditional Reiki (that is, on how this technique is known and used back in Japan) and I found out that everything or almost everything that I had learned of this technique was not true, or at least, that it had been re-invented by the western esoterism. The symbols, that many believed to come from Atlantis and Lemuria, do not really play an important role in the technique, There is truly a ritual (with chants and meditation) before the practice, and there are many procedures that had been left behind (scanning, cleaning, different usage of the hands: the left hand, directed upwards, catches energy; while the right hand applies the energy caught in the patient).
When I first got interested in Reiki, I was told that Dr. Mikao Usui was the main elaborator of the technique, transmitted, around 1930 return, to 16 teachers, among them the Dr Chujiro Hayashi. He opened a hospital in Tokyo and was responsible for the cure of a cancer on a Hawaiian lady, miss Hawayo Takata that brought Reiki to the Occident[1]. Today there is at least three international groups that dispute the legacy of Dr. Hayashi and Ms Takata: the Reiki Alliance[2], the American International Reiki Association (AIRA)[3] and the Usui System[4]. Osho also decided to open its own line of Reiki, the neo-reiki. One of its disciples, Frank Arjana Petter, in order to go further in his studies, decided to go to Japan to undertake a research on the origins of the technique. Then it was discovered a Reiki very different from what was known. The master Usui, not only passed his knowledge to Dr. Hayashi, but also created a secret society, the Gakkai, that counts on thousand of participants. Although the Buddhist origin, the traditional Reiki is inserted in a Shintoist context (a Japanese religion of cult to the ancestors, of extremely nationalistic characteristics): before the applications verses of the emperor Hiroito (ally of Hitler and Mussolini in II Great War) are recited, the Gassho meditation It is practiced (with the hands joined together) and the abdominal breathing plays a much more important role than the visualization of the symbols. The most interesting thing of this discovery, however, it is to notice what we made of a spiritual practice removing it from its cultural context. Transposed to the occident as a commodity, Reiki started be a `franchise' of spiritual work, in which the initiations (actually, symbols sales) had substituted rigorous procedures of moral and energy development.
And more: It is curious how we erect systems of proper beliefs over a cultural fragment out of context. But, as my deceased father used to say: “in the path of the spiritual life there is no deceivers only deceived”. Nobody have deceived me, it was me who deceived myself. Once more.
However, facing one more mistake, I see three different attitudes: the disillusioned (that had abandoned the use of the technique), the ones that had adhered to the traditional Reiki (but, not to Shintoism, I hope) and the ones that solemnly ignore the discovery of Petter, a time that the important thing is the practice of diffusion of the light and not the theories that support it. In certain form, I include myself in this last group. Although I always prefer to know the truth, it believes that Destiny writes right in askew lines and that all the mistakes are necessary so we can become conscientious.
Another example of trans-cultural deceit: the Feng Shui, the Chinese art of energy organization of the ambient, that studies the relation of man with its environment, based on the observation of the stars, the shape of the mountains, the form of the rivers, streets and buildings and the furniture disposal. This knowledge had its origin in old Taoist masters that studied the nature and understood how the energy around them behaved, and how it could affect a residence. They had evidenced that two basic forces influenced the environment: wind and water. In a second moment, also it was considered the stars of the date of the property foundation and the birth of its inhabitants (in general, by the method of the four pillars: hour, day, month and year). Beyond the study of the fundamental forces of the environment and the various astrological techniques, the Feng Shui guides the choice of the place where the building must be constructed; it determines the North Pole through an astrological compass, Lu Pan, associating it always to the entrance of the house; and, finally, it analyzes and considers changes in the internal organization of the environment in accordance with the harmony between the five Chinese elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water.
However, good part of the ‘New Age’ Feng Shui that is published in the media drift from the American School system, that is not properly of Taoist origin, but actually partisan of the Tantric Buddhism, the 'Black hat sect', School that simplifies considerably the traditional system of the Feng Shui, eliminating its macro-cosmic reference and giving more emphasis to the environment decoration then the construction of the houses. Then, there are no astrological influences, and a mirror (representing the element water) is always in the entrance, independently of its position in relation to the cardinal points.
Thus, the Feng Shui was reduced to the harmonization of the interior environment through the theory of the five elements and its two cycles: the cycle of the creation (in accordance with the clockwise rotation in the mandala) and the cycle of the control (formed by the interior arrows). In the cycle of the creation the wood is combustible for the fire, whose ashes vitalize the earth, that creates the metal, that mineralizes the water, that puts off the fire that in its turn melts the metal, that cuts the wood. The Feng Shui consultants analyze which is the dominant element or in disequilibrium, and, according to the two cycles, add or remove other elements thus harmonizing the environment.
However, this analysis and change of internal environments through the five elements out of the context of the astrological techniques is a simplification. There is an emphasis in the symbolic relation between the body of the inhabitant and its residence; while, in the traditional Chinese systems, the relation was between the Microenvironment Macro universe. In fact, there are many Feng Shui schools and different methods and emphases. The Taoist Society of Brazil[5] teaches traditionally the science of two important schools: the Eight Houses (Ba Zhai) School and the School of the Flying Stars (Fei Xin)[6].
Another controversial point in relation to this macrocosmic aspect of the traditional Feng Shui is the question of its applicability in the South hemisphere, a time that there are many symmetrical factors inverted in relation to the Chinese symbolic structure. For example, there is an analogy between the seasons of the year and the Pa Kua mandala that guides the construction of the property. Below the line of the equator, however, the seasons are symmetrical to the ones of the north hemisphere north, inverting the whole symbology of the system. Moreover, the gravity itself has its rotation in the contrary direction, determining the movements of the winds and maritime flows to develop inversely.
Taking these inversions in account, some authors present an adaptation of the Feng Shui to the south hemisphere; substituting the Pleiades of the Ursa Major (that represent the stellar North Pole to and the center of all Chinese astrology) for the constellation of the Southern Cross (and for the stellar South Pole as center of the sky). Also it is necessary to say that, currently, the Feng Shui evolved to new disciplines: the Radestesy, the Bio-geology and the Permaculture.
Another interesting case of esoteric self-deceit - that brings these same three attitudes - the person without illusions, the one who do not accept the truth and the one that coexists partially with disillusionment - is given by the followers Carlos Castaneda ideas, the great adapter and propagator of the Mexican Shamanism. What we want to stand out it is that, as well as the Reiki, the Toltec Shamanism was re-invented, forming a new system of beliefs, and very different of that originally intended to be followed. The important to us is to now stand out, with these three examples of simplifying appropriation of fragments of the traditional cultures by the New Age movement (the traditional Reiki made commercial, the `Toltecity' transformed into Tensegrity and the Feng Shui reduced to ambience decoration), that the globalization gave us a vast gamma of techniques and specific sciences directed toward self-knowledge, but that the desire of if being deceived continue to be dominant and universal[7].
But, there is also in this scenario, ‘successful adaptations’, traditional fragments that had revitalized with globalization, interacting with other cultures without losing its original force, as it is the case of the Vipassana meditation, revitalized for S.N. Goenka[8].
Out Mind with Buddha
In January 10th 2008 I made my first ten day reclusion of Vipassana meditation in Miguel Pereira, state of Rio De Janeiro[9].
Vipassanā (Pāli) or vipaśyanā (Sanskrit) means ‘insight’, to see things as they really are. Sidarta Gautama, 1º Buddha, elaborated it 26 centuries ago. It is the observation of the experience of direct perception. And the underlying principle is the investigation and understanding of the phenomena manifested in the 5 aggregated (skandhas), nominated as the attachment to the physical form (rūpa), to the sensations or feelings (vedanā), to the perception (saṃjñā, Pāli saññā), to the mental structures (saṃskāra, Pāli saṅkhāra) and to the conscience (vijñāna, Pāli viññāṇa). My interpretation: We become conscientious of the sensations of the body; of the individual affections; of the perception syntax; of the collective standards of thought cognition; and, finally, conscientious of our own conscience. However, due to social framing, most of the people are limited to the body-mind observation, and hardly ever gets to the conscience of the context of enunciation of conscience itself[10].
I had already done, in 1985, four days of Vipassana meditation in the Buddhist monastery in the Rio de Janeiro’s neighborhood of Santa Teresa, with Don, a former Theravada monk that had been direct disciple of the Krisnamurti. In this version, the Vipassana meditation had a part walking and mental notes to punctuate the observation. Moreover, he supervised the interior process of each one very closely; different from the Goenka method that is for 100 people each time (for at least ten days) and that the lectures are previously recorded in CDs.
The traditional technique is divided in two stages: Anapana, in which the person concentrates attention in a specific point of the body (usually it is the air entrance and exit from the nose), and Vipassana properly said, that consists of moving the attention through the body ascending and descending, as scanner - what it is sufficiently difficult and may take some days to achieve. There are no mantras, visualizations or specific breathing, but the observation of the breathing (whereas it is deep or fast). The Vipassana meditation focus the interconnection between mind and body, which can directly experimented through the disciplined attention to the physical sensations, that constitute the life of the body, and that are continuously interconnected with the life of the mind, at the same time that conditions it.
This meditation technique, done for ten consecutive days inside of the noble silence and a low calorie vegetarian diet, leads to the observation of the mind by the conscience as something objective, external to the perception. In the level of normal conscience, the conscience lives inside the mind. In others techniques that I practiced (taking Daime or with Osho´s dancing meditations), there was an expansion of this conscience that surpasses the limits of the ego, but remained inside the mind. The conscience, in state of extended perception, accessed deeper levels of the unconscious, but remained inside the limits of the mental-emotional structure. What happens with the Vipassana technique is different: through focusing the attention in the breath (sensorial border between intentional and the involuntary), without the use of any sounds or visualizations, the deep standards of the unconscious are accessed, seen from the outside. The sensations of pain and emotional suffering due to perceptive restrictions of the enormous cognitive effort directed toward the attention on the body and the breathing make to emerge desires aversion and the corporal well-being sensations bring desires of greed (not only sexual, but of repetition of pleasant situations). Normally, in others techniques or therapies with sensorial focus, these desires are seen as positive, but when seen objectively, with the conscience put outside the mental-emotional structure, it is revealed to be only deeper layer of the individual unconscious. And more: it is the speech that organizes the memory with its narrative. With `the noble silence', there is an increase of the memory and its reorganization out of the discursive standards. Not only we remember more things, as the form as we remember the events is not so ego-centered. With silence, the memory does not function with reminds anymore, but with remembrance.
The experience also brought me a cognitive paradox produced by meditation itself. The paradoxes are recurrent subjects, without solution, that, contradictorily and at the same time, are also a form of resistance and a form of deepening of the mind during the observation process. My paradox is related to a neo-Kantian suspicion that my efforts to concentrate my attention in the breathing and the physical sensations were, in fact, imaginary. I was really feeling or I imagined that I was feeling? Is there any difference between these two perceptions? Between observation and imagination? Is it possible that the conscience can observe the mind from the outside or I (or my mind) had created an imaginary observer exterior to the mind? This paradox of the being subject-object has many levels and has no solution. For example: the contradiction between acceptance and reaction/conscientious action. The practice of the Vipassana meditation brings the Buddhist hermeneutics inlaid in itself, its concepts and its values, its Metaphysical structure. The non-reaction idea per passes the whole Buddhist doctrine. To deepen the meditation we shall not react to pains and nor to the other cognitive manifestations (sensations, feelings, perceptions, etc) – just to observe. But, to me, the warlike spiritual ethics (the samurais, the toltec, the guarani, among so many others) are beyond the patterns of the Buddhist paradox of `reaction-acceptance'. Instead of reacting or not reacting, it is necessary to stalk; it is necessary to understand "to give the other one cheek" as conscientious creative action and not as acceptance of the suffered violence or as a reaction. Perhaps because of that in Kashmir, in the Tibet and in Burma, the Buddhism does not get to defend itself, while the American shamanism in general face the colonial violence as challenge of development. And it is necessary to behave in a way different than the Buddhism in relation to the tyrannies of the world. The Vipassana meditation consists exactly in domesticating oneself in order to not react to anything. Then, it came to me an interior fight between accepting the world as it is and the non-conformism of not acting to transform it, and also a consideration over the contrast between the Buddhist morality and the warrior ethics. The Bhagavad-Gita, the sublime chant, was introduced in the Vedas in century II A.D.[11] The birth of Sidarta Gautama was around 600 and 400 B.C. It is possible that the Gita is a reply of the Hinduism (mainly of the Kshatriyas, varna of the warriors) to the five principles of the Buddhist morality[12].
These paradoxes between observation/imagination and acceptance/rejection, lived inside of the meditation process as resistances/deepening, work as challenges of development, impediments that provoke us to overcome them. We will go back to them in the future, or better: they are the ones that always come back in my efforts to know me.
I would now like to establish some parameters for the therapeutical use of Ayahuasca as well as procedures to give to contingency to the spirituals emergencies; and to discuss the factors that determine the creative adaptation and the cultural dis-characterization of a determined religious tradition or spiritual technique of the global world, giving emphasis, evidently, to the process of international expansion of the Ayahuasca.
Umbanda, Brazilian proto-synthesis.
However, first I would like to advance my opinion on a point that I consider fundamental: the role of Umbanda in the Ayahuasca globalization. Umbanda cannot be deprived of its characteristics because it has no have well defined traditional characteristics of its own. It is anthropophagous. And it is this characteristic is that makes of it (and not of Santo Daime or other Christian cults of the Brazilian Shamanism) a form well adjusted for integration of the different traditional fragments in a global environment. It is not a matter of superiority or philosophical magnitude: the Umbanda is more resilient and adapts itself much better to the multicultural scene of the religious globalization. `Umbanda is charity' therefore it has no problems integrating the most diverse practices and techniques to help the human development.
Currently, there is three possible positions to see the relations between Umbanda and Santo Daime: the adepts of ‘Umbandaime’, that affirm a synthesis between the two doctrines; the ones that believe that `Umbanda is in Daime', that is, that the doctrine of the Daime Saint is more embracing and includes Umbanda - generally practitioners of the white table ritual; and, finally, the ones that prefer the perspective of the shamanism, in which Daime is seen as a cult or ritual to be preserved and the Umbanda as universalistic philosophy capable of multiple metamorphoses.
The spiritual chain in the Santo Daime is centrifugal (from the inside out) and ascending (from bottom to top) and the chain of the Umbanda is centripetal (from the outside in) and descending (from top to bottom).
Gê Marques[13] not only believes that a higher corporal conscience mark the great difference between the two religious proposals, but the reason of its recent approach.
‘We find then two distinct views towards the body: the one from Santo Daime and from Umbanda. In first contained, distrustful, moralized, ruled, threatening; the other is cathartic, free, accepted, reckless. It is questioning how they co-inhabit inside of one religious system, and there we come across again with this attitude so common within the popular religiosity, in which fragments apparently dispersed and disconnected glue together and coexist, composing an acceptable set for its adepts. (...) We live a moment in which the body cult became general, why not to say that it became fashionable, mainly to the individuals of the university average layers. Thus, innumerable ways to deal with the body had been introduced, created or yet revaluated in our society: gymnastics academies, dance, aerobics, anti-gymnastics, bio-energetic: the oriental practices, such as: Yoga, tai chi, kum nye, some of them even having a spiritual matrix. This was the environment of the time, when the fragmented contact of multiple traditions, knowledge and techniques, so keen to post-modernity, already was installed. In the Umbanda, for the alternative young person, nobody demanded rupture of his recently conquered relation with the body, more aired and less fearful. But in Santo Daime we can affirm that a tense hiatus was created between two distant positions; the fluid relations between the genders, the conquests of the feminine world, the experimentation of the sexuality in new clippings of relation, are some examples of attitudes of the world of illusion difficult to conciliate with the more severe behaviors assimilated by the daimist religious universe. In way that the Umbanda, inside Santo Daime, when bringing as possibilities that love for ecstasy so keen to the African religiosity, was presented as a more acceptable alternative to the egresses of modernity.’

But, is not only a matter of the body. The Umbanda more absorving as well as it has multiple relations with other segments of the Brazilian contemporary culture: aesthetically, it has relation with the current neo-baroque movement (therefore share the alegorical overlappings of different immanent universes in opposition to the representation of a single transcendent symbolic universe); theoretically, it has relation with the theory of complexity (because comprehends that the multiplicity inside of each part and the plurality of interpretation of the whole); and, culturally, Umbanda is anthropophagic.
In the literal sense, anthropophagy is cannibalism; in the symbolic sense, it is to acquire the qualities of the enemy. Oswald de Andrade will give a cultural interpretation to the term, as a form of creative resistance to the colonizing cultural impositions. For Darcy Ribeiro, this is a singular trace of our cultural identity , resultant from the ethnic miscegenation between indians, blacks and white latins. This identity is singular in relation to the colonized people, as the testimonial ones (Andean and Mexican) that keep the distinctive traces of old pre-Columbian civilizations (in Bolivia, for example, the elites turned globalized and the people was culturally excluded), and among the people where the cultural characteristics of the colonists had started to be dominant (as the Argentines and Canadians, for example). That is: the Brazilian culture do not accepted nor reject the cultural colonization, it integrates contents and values of its tyrants, re-interpreting the imposed foreign culture inside its own intentions. And, in this direction, Umbanda is the spiritual “proto-synthesis” of the Brazilian culture.
On the other hand, we cannot say that the Umbanda is `integral', in the sense pointed by Ken Wilber, that is, of a knowledge transversally holistic that selects different objects and aspects of diverse universes in a single specific focus. The Umbanda does not have a specific focus. Also in this perspective it could be said that the Santo Daime, Reiki, Feng Shui and other the religious fragments would be `hólons' (wholes/parts), irreducible and perfect in itself, but the Umbanda (or the donward philosophy of the shamanism) as well as the Vipassana (or the upward philosophy of the Buddhism) are more general interpretative approaches, able to contain and to explain the relation of several holons and its hierarchies.
And this for two reasons in special: 1) to Umbanda, the change of the conscience states is collective and is coordinated by spirits of the deceased and other entities; 2) who is the cogniscent subject? I (the conscience), as it thinks the Buddhism and the integral philosophy; or the Deity in me awaken as it is believed in the Umbanda? And would this be only a difference of approach?
Perhaps due to its intellectual development to be originated in the theoretical reflection of psychology and in the practice of the Buddhist meditation, Wilber works mainly in the two first quadrants: subjective individual and the objective individual. He even admits this emphasis and this limitation and hopes to others to complete and re-interpret its analytical model. Good, maybe to my intellectual development through the anthropological reflection and mine main spiritual practice to be the work with ayahuasca, in which the trance is a collective process, my main perspective in the study of changes in the states of conscience is inter-subjective and trans-objective, placing itself in the two inferior quadrants of the model of Wilber.
I recognize four overlapping and simultaneous different paradigms in the spiritual service: the paradigm of the fight of good against evil; the paradigm of aid to the suffering spirits deed and living; the paradigm of the dialogue/conflict between I and the Other; and, finally, the paradigm of the Conscience of the Deity (or of the recapitulation of the biography by the conscience/identification with mythical and symbolic narratives). For the Umbanda, the process of formation of these paradigms is collective and, even in the last two, is co-ordinated by spiritual entities, according to the progress f the subject , in counterpoint to the philosophies that emphasize the ascension of the individual conscience.
The bio-cinema
The mystic Ramana Maharshi, for example, emphasizes the self-inquiry idea as a form of self-knowledge able to lead to the construction of a new spiritual identity. “Who am I? Who is this that asks? E this third that it questions about the first nosey parker” God, reality and everything else are illusions, there is only the superior I (in a meaning of Self, or I constructed by the self-inquiry). He has an analogy between the cinema and the human perception that illustrates well this neuron-linguistic process of emphasis in the cogniscent subject.
At a first moment, conscience is the perception. It represents the light that will be projected over different objects. If we give attention to what we see, the eyes will illuminate; if we try to perceive the sounds, the conscience will be focus in our auditory capacity; and so on. In this analogy, the conscience is a shine that dislocates according to our selective perception. But, who is conscientious?
Thus, as the light is produced by a light bulb, conscience is produced by a luminous sphere, also called in other traditions Self, superior I or divine sparkle. And this is the second moment of Maharshi comparison: in order to perpetuate itself, instead of only shining alternatively over different objects, the conscience needs to construct its support: the superior I.
The third moment of this analogy consists of the lens that the light of the light bulb trespass in the projection of a film and the collective and external mind for where the conscience of the self passes when noticing the different dimensions (rational, sentimental, sensorial) of the reality. The mind here is not individual here, but a social filter, culturally constructed.
The photograms of the film projected in the movies correspond to the varied mental forms (archetypes, memories, images) that form the thought - in the fourth stage of the analogy. Also here there is no individuality: the thought is collective and external to the cognitive process.
In the fifth step of the analogy, however, appears the comparison between the projection of the film and the "Observer", that is, a I-focus formed to observe the thought, the mind and the perceptions of the conscience. This observer is one determined framing selfconcient that we create in order to deal with ourselves as third person and exists in various meditations. In the system of Castaneda, observer corresponds to the distinction between stalker and prey. The reality that we perceive is similar to the projection of the images in the movie screen.
Or simply: the screen is the reality that we see in this sixth moment of perception. The difference is only in the form of representation: in the cinema the images are bi-dimensional and reality is holographic (and solid). But, also, in the cinema as in perception, there are many types of images according to a variety of factors. The images of external references (sensorial, mental, emotional); There are images produced by the memory, others by the imagination.
The seventh level of perception, then, is this selective interpretation of the images, the ego, a determined subjective description of reality where we involuntarily classify the different items of our perception. It is the responsible mechanism for the projection of the images, the machine or Inferior I. This mechanism receives the images automatically and it does not have full conscience of its meaning. But through the gradual des-mechanization and of the unfolding of its attention in different levels of conscience we will be able to understand the images emanated from the light source and which is our role regarding the whole process.
Clearly that is no contradiction between the ascending process of the ego towards spiritual conscience and the descending process of the light towards cold and shady land where we inhabit. We choose the example of the analogy between cinema and perception of Maharshi because, contrasting with the complex model elaborated by Wilber, describes the process of individual subjectivation in a merely formal way, without degrees of moral or cognitive development, without scenarios, contents or interference of the systems of beliefs. Also it is clear that there is no have incompatibility between the individual, collective, subjective and objective perspectives. But, it is necessary to recognize that there are two distinct forms to conceive the cognitive symmetry: the scientific or the hypothetical that thinks the quadrants of the left trhough the ones on the right; e the traditional one that believes that the material world was emanated from interior universes. And the Umbanda, in this direction, is the dialetic counterpoint of the integral philosophy of Wilber.

The therapeutical use of the Ayahuasca

A first necessary distinction is about the ideas of ‘religious use' and ‘therapeutical use' of chemical substances that promote the expansion of the conscience. In my perspective, the religious use is characterized mainly for being vertical, emphasizing the relation between the Ego and Superior I (or the deity); while the therapeutical use is horizontal, focused in the relation between `I' and `Other'. Although this is a theoretical distinction, therefore in practice this two aspects are unseparable, there are intentions and environments (sets and settings) well different in the two proposals. And this difference bring up many questions.
For example: Would it be that a drugs abuser does not have greater possibilities of recovery in a religious paradigm (= surrounding + intention), where its dependence trans-mutates in spiritual autonomy, than in a psychological paradigm where it could be transferred to the therapist or to other horizontal objects? Or yet: would it be that Ayahuasca facilitates or amplifies emotional catarsis? Why the exposition of negative feelings and emotions (such as anger and sadness) so appropriate in the therapeutical process can generate psychic and spirituals obsessions, when carried through in states of altered conscience? The worship to the sacred cures due its gratuitousness, already to give supported to the development of resiliences (therapeutical work) is a professional remunerated activity - how to conciliate these questions?
The religious use in general has for objective the ethical and moral development of the participants of the cult, while the therapeutical use suposes a specific problem to be solved by someone in particular. But, it is necessary to define better how one can (or should not) use the DMT and its entheogenic beverages to deal with a specific resisrtence to the individual development. And not to establish a ‘new use' for the drink.
The daimist tradition rigorously prescribes the not-intervention, either as corporal touch, corporal massage or verbal attempt of communication, when a participant of the cult has a `passage', that is, face some resistance in its process of development and suffers some type of illness. In this perspective, it is advisable that `the drink and the person to get along' or that psychic process unchained is decided through a self-adaptation of the person to the emergent situation without interferences. Such perscription is extremely valid, mainly in the scope of the churches and religious temples where people without preparation (without specific professional formation) can want to help others at a circumstantial critical moment, through a corporal touch.
On the other hand, the use of ayahuasca joined with some experiences with changes in the corporal standards proved to be really productive, due to the muscular relaxation propitiated by the ingestion of the beerage, as the successive applications of the massage technique developed for Ida Roofing. The process of postural alignment can be potentialized through stretching and of daily regular exercises (of Pilates, RPG or of Iso-stretching), without the ingestion of any chemical additive. The exercises would prepare for a deep and permanent postural and behavioral realignment, made in altered state of conscience. In this in case, the ayahuasca is used inside of a long period process, with objectives and other therapeutical practices.
Nevertheless the use of the Ayahuasca joined to the cathartic practices of the bioenergy and the dancing meditations of Osho had not presented to me any visible benefit and certainly they can strengthen, instead of dissolving, the psychological resistances, whereas they are` energetic harnesses' or behavioral complexes. That is: the spiritual tradition dissuades the practice of the therapeutical intervention in the religious paradigm, but the psychological experience stimulates the use of entheogens as form of spiritual intervention in the therapeutical paradigm.
Therefore, it is not a matter of using practices and techniques and from other places to `complete' or to `percfecten' the rituals associate to Ayahuasca and the Brazilian plants of power, but yes learn to use these rituals and these plants in therapeutical processes. And, inside the therapeutical processes, inside of the experiences that I organized and witnessed, the Ayahuasca has shown to be bettet adjusted to the techniques of biographical regression through hypnotic suggestion than, directly, to the corporal movements and the massages.
But, there are also other possibilities of integration, as the circle techniques, the exercises of breathing and the methodologies of reorganization of the memory and the present life. Besides these discussions on the adjusted techniques, the question of the therapeutical use of the Ayahuasca still raises some parallel issues, as of the emergency of psychotic surts and the possibility of recovering from chemical dependence.
Ayahuasca has the effect of aggravation of the symptoms, it promotes and develops existential changes, taking the contradictory situations to critical levels. Thus, another related subject to the therapeutical use of ayahuasca, is that it unchains psychic crises and spirituals emergencies. The experience certifies that such cases can be seen as an overcoming of psychotic tendencies and also it can cause irreversible damages, in the case that the subject of the crisis does not find the support and the understanding necessary to understand the situation where he is. The role of the family, of the religious community and the professional environment seems to be preponderant for the recovery and the overcoming of the crises.
From there the need of establishing criteria and parameters to propitiate the spiritual emergency of psychic contents to not become a psychosis or a irreversible schizophrenia.
Many religious institutions believe to defend themselves from these situations through a rigorous interview (incorrectly called anamnese), that carried through of bureaucratically by unprepared people makes a prejudicial selection and of low quality. A preliminary interview with the people that are taking ayahuasca for the first time is fundamental for the adequate joy of the experience, but one shall not have to try to fit the interviewed in categories of risk, therefore this practice, more than moralist and politically incorrect is inefficacious in the sense of identifying problematic behaviors or possible spirituals emergencies. The truth is that nothing substitutes a frank and comprehensive conversation.
In relation to the cure of chemical dependence through therapeutical processes using the Ayahuasca, there are many successful initiatives in course, but also many mistakes. We cannot deal with this subject here deeply, but it would like to point two frequent mistakes that I have observed: a) The substitution of the consumption of drugs for the consumption of the Ayahuasca; and b) the substitution of the appropriate medication for the Ayahuasca. These two `substitutions' are mistake interpretations. The Ayahuasca can help in the recovery of chemical dependents in case it is understood as a `sacrament' and not as a drug or medication. And, of course, the sacramental use of ayahuasca is useless without a therapeutical process that includes the confinement in an appropriate environment, the change of alimentary habits and, essentially, the emotional motivation of the person in recuperation through different types of practice. We prescribe, therefore, such actions together with the sacramental use, and not its double substitution.
The debate involving the cultural globalization of the traditional religious techniques, the therapeutical use of Ayahuasca and the catalytic role of Umbanda in relation to Santo Daime and others to spirituals knowledges are just starting[14]. However, the basic aspect in this tornado of events is the fact of the current society - the post-modern culture yet under construction – to be creating the necessary social conditions to a new use of ayahuasca, that allows us (or will allow us in a mass scale) to try the death and existential transformation in a more accented form.

LIVE DEATH!
Denial, anger, negotiation, sorrow and acceptance. By observing terminal patients, the doctors[15] came to the conclusion that there are five emotional reactions regarding death. In the period of denial and Isolation, we don’t believe: "That cannot be happening to me". In the period of Wrath (Rage), we claim: "why me? That is not fair." Afterwards we negotiate: "Let me live until my children grow up." Right away, one comes to depression: "I am so sad. Why to care about anything?" And, finally, we understand the situation and we accept it: "Everything will end up just fine." Originally these periods were applied for any form of catastrophic personal loss, from the death of a dear one or divorce and detachments between family and old friends. With time, however, it was noticed that any significant personal change can lead to these periods. For example, experienced defense criminologists lawyers are aware that culprits who are facing the possibility of severe punishments with little possibility of appealing, frequently experience these stages, and it is desirable that reach the acceptance level before they declare themselves guilty. Also, one can observed that these stages do not always occur in this order, neither are all of them experienced by all of the patients, but usually a person always will present at least two of them. There are persons that defeat their mortal illnesses through insisting denial. Others are defeated by precautious acceptance, still, some are victims of their own selfcomiseration during the period of sorrow or succumb, drowned in their own rage. The periods are progressive, but not hierarchical. And no one is better that another.
Actually, anger and sadness are, in my opinion of a living creature before death, intervals between more organized mental periods, they are emotional discharges more than stages in itself: the anger transforms denial into negotiation, sadness permits negotiation to become acceptance. Osho, in ‘Pharmacy of the Soul’[16]says that they are polar moods and advises to use them one against the other, to mutually neutralize them: when you are angry, try to get sad with what enrages you; on the other hand, when you are sad try to be infuriated with the things that depress that you. That is particularly valid if one remembers that there are people with a higher propensity for sadness (that generally have difficulties fighting for their goals) and also people with a predominantly fiery-tempered character, little sensible in recognizing their own flaws as resultant from their action. Anger and sadness are contrary emotional reactions that we all have in greater or minor ratio before our irreversible losses and the perpetual impermanency of life time.
By the way, the maniac-depressive cycle, discovered by Willis and Freud and reinvented currently as bipolar perturbation, is a proof that these periods must be seen as opposing moments of emotional re-balance of the body and not as specific reactions before death and loss. Therefore, excluded anger and sadness from our model of the emotional periods of grief, three genuine reactions towards death remain: the denial, the negotiation and the acceptance. Perhaps it is only a matter of correlation between forces: when we have a lot of energy, we deny death; when we don’t we accept it; in doubt, we negotiate.
Universal stages, truth, but with infinite variations reflecting a great diversity of people and reactions. In a general ternary typology, as the typology of the Naranjo’s Eneagram, for example, one can say that the more mental people are more inclined to fear, while the people of the sentimental kind are more anxious and the people with emphasis in motricity are the ones who have, mainly, this polar oscillation of the Aggressive and depressed temperaments. Furthermore, one could recognize a ternary typology based on the different kinds of early reaction to one’s own death: the neurotic ‘denialist’ (or refuters), the compulsive negotiators (or the dominators) and the professional consenters (or submissive)[17]
It happens that the moment of confrontation with death is a moment of overcoming of the neuroses and of psychological recurrences. And many automated behavior standards are recognized, accepted and dissolved. All of the ways lead to acceptance (even the neurotic acceptance, that believes to be able to forgive before suffering, after others dramatic periods, take to true acceptance). There are many diferent persons and forms of reaction to catastrophe, but the death and its acceptance grade everything to two common points: the end of time and the need for change.
In that context, conscience plays the central role. Formerly, doctors avoided to tell their patients their situation because they believed that it would accelerate the process. Afterwards, in a humanistic wave, people invested on the contrary attitude, telling their patients their real chances (or not) of recuperation and how much time of life they have left. Today, both procedures are used depending on the maturity of the people involved, of the ethical principles of the doctor and, mainly, of the private interest of the families involved (what, in many times, is 'iparticularly' cruel).
Conscience being as much the sense of having access to information (consciousness), as the sense of straight perception (conscience); affectionate and effective, of his state terminal. One thing is the information ("smoke is bad for your health" - by example), something else is perception. By the way, the very definition of the 'moment of death' is a complex issue[18]. Generally, we perceive unconsciously that we are dying, or that (since everybody is dying since we are born) we are close to leave the material world. It is about mentally assuming what already we perceive involuntarily through the body.
The great mammals (elephants, whales), not only know the moment of their death but also accept their destination with a wisdom that we, human beings, hardly reach. This because there are (had been and will be) rare the men who knows the day of his own death and several are the traditions consider the ' knowledge and the acceptance of the predestined day' as one undisputed proof of human spiritualization. There is, also, some legendary and literary narratives on the subject of knowing and to accepting ones destination.
This is the first point that would like to firm: the flower already exists in the seed, the death is imanent to life, and not its transcendency to another plan. And, in this imanent sense, it is not only is a mechanism of genetic improvement of the biological evolution, but, above all, a mechanism of ethical improvement and spiritual evolution of the conscience. That is: the death is not only refers to life but also to conscience.
Thus, the true question is not if there is life after death, but if there is conscience after death. E this is the second question I would like to approach. The concept of Death Proximity Experience (DPE)[19] that refers to a set of sensations associated to the situations of death imminence, associated the cerebral hipoxis, as the effect ' tunnel of light' e ' experience of being out of the body' (autoscope). The term was coined by Dr. Raymond Moody in its book written in 1975, "Life After Life”[20]
For us, the important thing is that after the DPE, patients seem to modify their point of view in relation to the world and to other people. The behavior changes are significantly positive. The main reason for the change is losing the fear of death; they start to give more value to their lives and of the others; they reevaluate their usual values, ethics and priorities; they become calmer, confident and… conscientious.
In others times, those DPE´s were rituals of initiation. The confrontation with death was a social mechanism for qualification of the conscience and was part of the 'civic traditions of the tribe'. In fact, our society did not abolish completely that mechanism but sprayed that rite of passage in diverse micro-deaths, in diverse losses and frustrations by the which we remember life and we sharpen our conscience. We 'almost-die' several times in an only life.
And this leads us to a third point: the post-modern life and the death of death. Edgar Morin, in the mat of the death of God (requested by Nietzsche) and the death of the Man (maintained by Foucault) tried to assassinate death itself, with the notion of 'scientific amortality' (in opposition to the traditional 'immortality').
Medicine and the present sciences wish to extend the time of life to the maximum, wish to defeat the death. Tradition as much Science aim to defeat death, but while the first one, romantic, aspire the immortality of the gods in eternity, the last one, more realistic, studies ways of increase longevity and of ease the pain, the sorrow and the effects of the ageing in the material world. And to this neurotic and not wise scientific project of the modernity, Morin called 'amortality'.
Another one big difference between the traditional societies and ours is that, while previously we faced mainly dangers and external threats, presently we create artificially our risks for optimize our life in society. "Our time is not more or less risky than that of preceding generations, but the equilibrium between risks and dangers had alternate". (GIDDENS, 2003, p. 44) And more: now we are our biggest threat: today the risk of an ecological catastrophe provoked by the industrial growth; yesterday, we lived the risk of a thermonuclear war; tomorrow, we will live the risk of having a life of growing uncertainty (and uncertainty is a risk that cannot be calculated). The reasons that afflicts us are real, but are also artificial.
The experience of death is immanent to life. It is, simultaneously, a goal and a limit: It is not a matter of an eventual threat or an unconscious fear, but of a presence that is constant in every each second that keeps everybody internally submissive to the social nets. It is as if life was a marathon, in which, in order to get to the end, it is necessary to balance your breath, take care of your posture and hydration so you wont be injuried or sick. In contemporary life is necessary to always 'be on the edge' and maintain an obsessive care with the body.
The notion of death as permanent risk is a new form of producing existential significance. The death is like a constant companion, which used to be an exclusive experience of few mystics, it is now a way of subjection of the elites in the contemporary culture. And a way fragmented into many simulated micro-deaths, into some existential shocks of the body at risk, in many antecipated ends of one only irreversible instant.
Is no longer a matter of ‘living death’ but of surviving to the many deaths. And there is no use in denial or to negotiation, to be angry or to be sad, it is necessary to accept changes and adapt to the transformation.
Thus, these are the three points I wanted to stand out on contemporary death and dying: the immanence of death in life; it exists due to the development of the conscience; and, currently, was (or is) fragmented and dramatized in many smaller partial events, at the same time that life is artificially is extended by current science and culture.
And what about Ayahuasca?
Certainly it plays a very important role in this entire process. Not only because it allows a glimpse to these relations we described, but above all, but because it can propitiate this new experience of death on account to a great number of people, or even better, it may potentialize a social process in course, in the direction of turning the experience of death into a more intense and more and secure one.

[1]Reiki´s history at http://reikibr.dataek.net/digo-rs/reikibr/Reiki_I_05082003.pdf
[2]Graduated in 1983, leadead by the Takata ´s grandoughter, Gran Mestre Phyllis Lei Furumonto.
[3]Organized by dr Bárbara Weber Ray in 1982.

[4]Created in 1988 by William L. Rand. Michigan, USA.
[5]
[6] Due to the great difusion of this simplyfied Feng Shui, many traditional participants headed towards the promotion of the “real” Feng Shui. Internacionally, the writer Eva Wong is the main defender of the Taoist Feng Shui <http://www.shambhala.com/fengshui>; in Brazil the work of Lucyane Campos stands out.
[7] I approached this simplyfing tendency of the globalization in Jurema Rainha - a planta sagrada do sertão nordestino. Revista A ARCA DA UNIÃO, ano 01, número, 01. <http://arcadauniao.org/artigo.php?idEdicao=6&idArtigo=33>, 2005.
[8]S.N. Goenka, was Born and raised in Birmany (Myanmar). After fourteen years of practice , started to teach Vipassana in 1969. In 1982 he started to name assistant teachers in many countries to help him answer the increasing international demand for the Vipassana courses.
[9]http://www.dhamma.org/pt/schedules/schsanti.shtml
[10] See Ken Wilber critics on Budhism in the Occident.
[11]ELIADE, M. O Dicionário das Religiões. p. 178. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999.
[12]The Gita is the conclusion of a great mythic epic, the Mahabarata or the fight of the five Pandava brothers (descendent from the princes from Nortrhen India) against their cousins, the kauravas, for the kingdom of Bharata. The Pandavas had been exiled, spending tem years passing by the magic kingdoms od ancient India, where they make frinships. When they come back home, their cousin forbid them to get in, an a great battkle is anunciated. The Gita tells how Arjuna refuses to fight (with budists arguments) when Krisna comes and teaches the three kinds of yoga: Jnana for the mind, Bhakti devotional, and karma Yoga, or the art of warrior action without assuming karma. It is not the action itself that produces karma, but the feeling aggregated to it. One may kill, steal, lie – but with no hate, anger or resentenment.
[13]([13]) ALVES JUNIOR, Antonio Marques. Tambores para a Rainha da Floresta: a inserção da Umbanda no Santo Daime. Máster in Religious Sciences. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC/SP). São Paulo, 2007. p. 253-259.
[14] One of or goal in the AYAHUASCA REUNION is to discuss the factor that determine the creative adaptation and the cultural discharacterization of a determined religious tradition or spiritual tecnhique in the globalized world, emphasizing , evidently, the process of international expansion of ayahuasca, as well as stablishing parameters for the therapeutical use and to give contingence for the spiritual emergencies http://br.geocities.com/encantador_de_serpentes/ayahuasca/index.htm
[15]The model was proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in its book On Death and Dying, published in 1969. The stages were popularized and are known as The Five Stages of the Mourning (or about Pain of Death, or the Perspective of the Death).

[16]Reprint of the book orange, rewritten by the Saniashi after death of Rajnessh.
[17]LEWIN defined these three behaviors from the study of several animal groups (bugs, mammals, reptiles). In others works, I redefined them as "shepherds, sheep and wolves".
[18]There is the apparent death, the cellular death, the cerebral death, the death of the vital functions, the organic decomposition. In fact, death is a process and not a an instant.
[19]Article with scientific literature review http://www.hcnet.usp.br/ipq/revista/vol34/s1/116.html
Videos with interviews with persons that experienced DPE. http://youtube.com/watch?v=XPzTa-HDV3A
[20] Despite these sensations being frequently associated to a mystical experience, they could be scientifically explained as a secondary physiological response of the brain to the hypothesis. In the majority of the cases the clinical death of the patient was atested, but in none of there was the corroboration of cerebral death.