Our Power
Sunday Ramble
It struck me this week: I’m living in a region that produces most of the finest plant stimulants in the world — cacao (the basis for chocolate), tobacco, coffee, coca (the basis for cocaine), and ayahuasca. These are being grown in copious amounts within driving distance from Tarapoto. So why would the planet choose this little corner of the world to produce these items? I don’t know if anyone has good answers to that question, but it’s one I’ve been pondering.
Pondering life from the jungle is not something I’ve had a lot of time to do late. Bringing to market the only renewably-powered Bitcoin mining platform available to the masses has been more than a full-time pursuit. And I don’t anticipate that to slow in the months ahead. Bitcoin 2022 happens in 10 short days, and last month's soft launch has prepped us perfectly for meeting the masses. We’re just starting to turn the head of Mr. Market, and already I can feel its steely gaze telling me we’re not pedaling fast enough to keep up with the incoming deluge. Having too much business to manage is often considered a luxury until you’re swimming through the experience. Knowing it’s a good problem, and having a blast with the exciting momentum it brings, doesn’t make maintaining a grounded balance any easier.
Sazmining may be causing my mind to soar, but I’m simultaneously grounding myself in a plant-based therapeutic process with Takiwasi, the drug-addiction treatment clinic using Amazonian plant therapies where my wife is interning. It’s hard to understate the importance of this type of work in my life. Unfortunately, it’s also nearly impossible for me to convey it to folks coming from the context of western cultures. If I want to wax philosophical, I can blame Aristotle for planting the seed of separation in his mistaken worldview that an observer and subject model of the world is reality. The context of this belief has grown such deep cultural roots that you can read that last sentence, rationally know it’s wrong from a brief study of quantum physics, and still not recognize the iron-bound cage that belief has wrapped around you.
Indeed, if I hadn’t followed my instincts into the Amazon-based shamanic realm, I’d still be there myself. It’s not like I’ve gained some sage-like perspective on life due to unlocking that cage, but I can at least see the cell and recognize when I’m putting myself back into it. Seeing the cage and opening it has been my life’s most challenging work — weeks of swinging in a lonely hammock, days of vomiting out horrible tasting plants, and hours of talk therapy to make sense of it all. A decade into the continuing process, I see no end in sight, but I can see that I’ve managed to crawl my consciousness out of my head and into my body, where it belongs.
It’s no small feat for a western person to integrate his head and body — blending traditional knowledge with modern living is an all but forgotten pursuit in this fiat world. I’m bloody lucky to have found a lineage here at Takiwasi doing precisely that. And not in the new age mumbo-jumbo sense either — though I did try my hand at that for many years. No, the way it’s done here is with a nod to the human traditions of the past. For example, it takes nearly a decade for a person to become an initiated healer at Takiwasi — the traditional way. The path to becoming a healer is non-linear and chosen for you, not by you. That’s a tricky distinction for cultures coming from western freedoms — “what do you mean, I can’t choose to be a healer? How dare you limit me!”
The conflict comes from western cultures’ separation from basic spiritual understanding — the idea that we are a part of forces more significant than ourselves. Becoming a shamanic healer is a calling that comes from those greater forces, not a choice from the limited echo chamber of our minds, which we consider free will. Without the deep understanding that we are within the web of life touching all other life, we westerners cannot even acknowledge the shaman's calling and instead focus on the organic substances the shaman uses to put individuals into altered states of consciousness.
Unsurprisingly, our western culture becomes obsessed with the substances: ayahuasca, mushrooms, bufo, peyote, san pedro, etc. The object becomes our focus while we are the subjects experiencing the psychedelic. Sadly, this perspective misses the reality of reality — we are not separate from the plant we’ve ingested, but in a relationship with it, which the shaman oversees and orchestrates. Unfortunately, I suspect most of the words I’ve written in today’s Ramble make little sense unless you've had the audacity of spirit and luck of circumstance to experience it yourself. If you have, your body knows that it can’t be rationalized. Allowing the wisdom of the human experience to sublimate from the head into the heart must be lived — it’s in our hearts that we hold our power as human beings.
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Bitcoin Price Prediction
Weekly Range: $42.3k - $52k
The neverending range we’ve been stuck in for nine weeks finally broke — we closed the week over $46k. That means that we’re likely to see a new bullish trend emerge. Likely does not mean definitely, however. In markets, there's no such thing as certainty, just probability. So while the likelihood is high that we’ll continue to push higher from here, there’s also the chance that the break of $44.6k was a head fake. We won’t know for another week, but as long as we close this next week over $43k, the bulls will be in good shape. $52k is the next level to watch for a weekly close. If we manage to pull that off, we’ll be looking to challenge the previous all-time high of $69k again — but that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves. The good news is that price action has built a solid bottom in the low $30ks that looks unlikely to be breached anytime soon.
Bitcoin Q & A
Q: If nation-states heavily regulate Bitcoin, what are the consequences?
A: A closed-loop Bitcoin economy with more decentralized services.
At the moment, most Bitcoin is exchanged on centralized services. These services provide the means for governments worldwide to regulate the in and outflows of fiat currencies. If these in and outflows of fiat become over-regulated, the market will likely look to exchange goods and services for Bitcoin directly. Additionally, existing and new decentralized alternatives to centralized services will probably see increased adoption.
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