A "Dark" Picture of Santo Daime?

"Alex Constantine paints a dark picture (shocker)." Reality tends to be a dark picture, mein freund, and since I have been tortured by the CIA ... read and write about Nazis and death squads all day, and such, even write a little about murders, I guess "dark" is fairly difficult for a person like me to avoid.

Say: Knowledgeable researchers who have worked on the interaction of military intelligence and cult formation/mind control please explain to my light-hearted critic why his own post is, ironically enough, pretty damn "dark."

Even spiritual seekers shouldn't drug children, I guess (shocker) ...

- AC

PS: Please pull out a magnifying glass and look at the by-line of the article you cite. I DIDN"T WRITE IT. If you do a search, you'll find this story posted on multiple sites in North and South America - mine was but one of them. There are many "dark" people out there.

"Sweetness and light" ... this phrase has a history; Victorian fantasy. I'm not Victorian (except in my work load) but contemporary (Sartrean).

But would I do this awful, thankless, degrading, depressing, dangerous, self-flagellating work ... if I didn't revere human rights and mankind, even the potential of the species TO RISE ABOVE POLITICAL IRRATIONALITY?

- AC
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"The Eclectic Church of the Flowing Light”—they do start off strong in the name department. Alex Constantine paints a dark picture (shocker):
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-mind-control-cult-santo-daime-or.html
Wikipedia is cautious, superficial and mostly empty words (shocker) but full of dope links (shocker):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santo_Daime
Here’s the conclusion to a Telegraph article. As a side note, I see they were rated the #1 website in some division or other from January through March of this year. I do find myself reading articles at their site quite a bit—they seem to have a good template for online content going and they would be worth doing a structural-type study.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/20/nsanto20.xml&page=3
If you read espanol, here’s the wiki for the Santo Daime founder, Raimundo Irineu Serra:
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestre_Irineu
Here’s a hip young recruitment page a tribes dot net:
http://tribes.tribe.net/daime
1931 – The implantation of the Santo Daime doctrine
This period is marked by the decline of the Amazonian rubber market, which was losing to competition from Malaysia (whose plantations were founded with native seeds taken from Brazil). Hundreds of northeastern families started to abandon the rubber plantations in search of a better life in the city. Rio Branco began to suffer disorganization in the process of occupancy of its urban areas.
After his discharge from the Territorial Guard, Irineu Serra tried to live in a contested area close to the Army Headquarter, known at the time as the 4th Company. Not succeeding in the attempt, he participated alongside a group of rubber tappers taking possession of a land from the rubber tapper Barros, which was very close to the neighborhood known today as *Vila Ivonete in Rio Branco. As Mr. Luiz Mendes relates: “Through the strength of his companions they got him a colony at Vila Ivonete. It seems to be that Mestre was one of the first tenants.” From the start, in the very act of taking possession of the land, Irineu Serra started to organize his portion of the land with the intention of planting and making it productive. He built a small adobe house similar to the ones in his motherland, and began living in the area, alongside other rubber tappers.
It is in this region, after 20 years of total adaptation, self-discipline, and gaining knowledge of the deep secrets of nature, that Irineu Serra will organize and form a group of spiritual workers and implementing the doctrine of the Santo Daime. His first measure in this direction was the naturalization of the name of the drink, still known as ayahuasca, to Santo Daime. Daime, which comes from the divine verb to give. Give me strength, give me love, give me the bread of the Creator. “He used to say that we should ask to whom could give to us, and by that he chose the name of this drink, Daime, and through it we ask of God everything that is good for us and our fellow man,” comments Mr. Júlio Carioca.
--from this highly detailed page:
http://www.ceudomar2.magaweb.com.br/text_&_lectures/personal_accounts/jairo_carioca.htm
Totally unrelated but undeniably fresh: first person life story of the self-proclaimed “Luckiest Man on Earth”—like all amazing old folks, it takes a second to slow down enough to appreciate him.
http://www.orato.com/node/6/&page=1