VISION
current projects in process:
impact
The mystical experience, the noesis of direct knowledge and transpersonal connection to mystery; is an essential element to transcend our main collective and individual challenges such as war, the ecological crisis, and life passages including birth, death, and spiritual emergence.
across unexplored shores of consciousness - across unexplored shores of consciousness - across unexplored shores of consciousness- across unexplored shores of consciousness
sacred, disruptive, empty
PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE
Psychedelic medicine has proved to be an outstanding agent for therapy and healing, consciousness research, and social change. We support community partnerships between traditional practitioners and existing therapeutic practitioners to make these experiences available in contexts where they have shown promise, including prisons, among homeless people, victims of violence, and social leaders. Our work so far bridges with traditional practitioners of ayahuasca in Colombia and Ecuador, iboga in Gabon, and peyote in Mexico.
In the paradigm of scientific materialism, death and birth are generally understood simply as mechanical processes. Perspectives within mystical traditions that have deep roots throughout human history have seen these as central rites of passage. Traditional cultures have developed supportive psychological, biological, social, and spiritual technologies to facilitate the spiritual journey inherent in these passages.
Throughout life people face many challenges. However, profound crises involving non-ordinary experiences are generally being perceived as pathological and treated with suppressive medications when in fact there may be important distinctions between genuinely psychotic reactions and other experiences, such as those that are part of normal human diversity or difficult passages involving spiritual emergence. Mystical traditions supported, and integrated these experiences in ways that could be more deeply beneficial for both the individual and society.
We seek for ways to support and defend traditional community perspectives around rites of passage, as well as to investigate the potential for reintroducing traditional perspectives within culture and the caring professions.
RITES OF PASSAGE
DEATH, BIRTH, & SPIRITUAL EMERGENCE
Mystical traditions in indigenous communities contain expressions of ancestral relationships with a living world, and with the ecology and history of specific places. These traditions also contain knowledge and wisdom that inform the structure of traditional forms of governance and the priorities and decisions of the community.
While native peoples only comprise some 4 or 5 percent of the world’s population, they maintain 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity in, or adjacent to, 85 percent of the world’s protected areas (Raygorodestsky, 2018).
At ONCA we assist indigenous communities in efforts to interface with government, modern consciousness researchers, social leaders, and those in a position to benefit most from traditional knowledge and practices. Primary to this work, ONCA seeks to empower the mystical traditions in indigenous communities. By supporting their spiritual traditions, we support the defense of their territories, and thus the sustainability of our human relationship with our planet.
SACRED TERRITORIES
WAKING COMMUNITIES
&MYSTICAL TRADITIONS
ECOLOGY AND PEACE
Our spacecraft - the earth - is going through an experience of biological crisis. Driven by unrealistic expectations of growth that are uninformed by local realities, political and industrial institutions have repeatedly transgressed important limits; exhausting resources and contaminating the environment..
Our ancestral cultures knew how to listen to the voices of the earth, living in small sustainable communities, physically and psychically connected with the environment. While debates about climate change happen within political arenas, these indigenous communities, those with the strongest and most direct connection to sensitive and biodiverse ecological zones, are the first to experience the severe effects of extractive industry and ecological exploitation.
We believe that this planetary crisis is a crisis of perspective. It presents, perhaps an opportunity for a collective spiritual emergence, an opportunity for initiation and rebirth into a more empathic and altruistic culture. At ONCA we believe that the direct mystical experience could play a key role in this shift of perspective, and investigate the contexts within which these experiences can be the most beneficial.
