Operation Unfolding Flower: Deploying to the Ayahuascan Theater. 10 Veterans take the trip of a lifetime to Peru with 3 Shipibo Shaman Brothers for a 10-day medicinal plant therapy program to treat their PTSD
Category: Veterans
VICE correspondent Krishna Andavolu meets vets exploring and using weed to treat PTSD Source: “Stoned Vets” on Season 1 Episode 2 of Weediquette on HBO’s Viceland Channel.
Horizons are apparent boundaries that constantly shift and eventually disappear entirely through an enlightening vantage point. What the sacred visionary plants do is they show the culturally conditioned boundaries that we have constructed to be pretty flimsy, arbitrary, manipulated and as always sold to the highest bidder. It is a mass consensual hallucination that if not maintained with sufficient attention and participation falls apart like a stock market crash or a bank run. This is the reason that corporations and governments are afraid of the teacher plant. It is the red pill. Once you take it you can still go back to the Matrix, but you can not ever unsee the Truth that you saw while under the effects of the medicine.
As we prepare for a super technological future and the entire planet opens up to a globalized consciousness, our elders, the plants come to help us both save planet and prepare for operating in a future that will be all about safely and correctly navigating alternate states of consciousness delivered through high end technologies. If we really believe we will leave the planet some day we certainly have to explore our own internal universe of consciousness if we are going to go out and explore the Other.
I realized and understood lots of things that in Ayahuasca school made perfect sense when the teacher put them up on the blackboard which of course was just the now polished mirror of my heart. I understood that veterans are the moral conscience of the country because we have to exercise the will of the politicians and policy makers. We are sent to right or wrong to do the things that only God should do. This is why veterans need this healing. We as a sacred congregation have been an instrument of, a deliverer of and a witness to the most horrendous and impossible things a human being can experience and need to be reintegrated in to the matrix of nature if our society as a whole has any hope of healing itself.
In his late 20s, Benouis said he went through a series of things that shook him up pretty seriously. First, he almost drowned while body surfing near Santa Cruz, which he said was a big deal for a kid who grew up in Hawaii. Then, he was deployed to Panama for Operation: Just Cause. Next, Benouis said his house was robbed and burned to the ground. And finally, his wife left him.
“I was like, ‘OK, God. You’re trying to get my attention,’” he said with a guffaw. “You’ve got it!”
Benouis picked up a Bible and other books about religion and spirituality. Eventually, he started reading the Quran and it made an impression on him quickly. “It wasn’t some particular passage,” Benouis said. But his sense was that the book was “clearly true.”
“I guess that kind of makes me a Muslim,” he remembered thinking.
Ian Benouis, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot, has testified at the Capitol on behalf of patients with PTSD who use marijuana to treat symptoms. He admits he has been using marijuana for more than 20 years after trying prescription pills that he didn’t react well to.
“You can sleep through the night, that’s the biggest thing for me is that the nightmares and bad dreams, I don’t have them with cannabis,” said Benouis. “I’m using a plant that in my opinion God put here to help humanity whereas the government is saying ‘Oh, you can’t use that but you can use all these pharmaceuticals which the side effects are suicide and suicidal thoughts.'”
Ian Benouis 