11037 :: Yawanawa Project Fundraiser :: 08.11.11

Date :: 08.11.11
Time :: 7:00-9:30pm
Location :: PB Loft | 821 Traction Ave. #108 LA, CA 90013
Donation :: $20 in Advance | $25 at the door
Registration :: Click Here

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Yawanawa Project Fundraiser
with Paulo Roberto Silva e Souza
an Introduction by Hartmut Neven
& an Opening Invocation by Sunny Solwind

The Yawanawa Project presents an innovative approach to preserve an indigenous culture and the Amazonian rain forests it depends on. The project was started by a group of people who look at indigenous entheogenic medicines with diverse neurobiological, pharmacological, anthropological or spiritual interests but who share the conviction that the knowledge of how to safely provide for entheogenic experiences ought to be regarded as world cultural heritage. This shared appreciation allows participants with very different backgrounds, indigenous or urban and from various countries, to find common ground in working together towards the preservation of this heritage. We have the hope that this expertise can be monetized and form a revenue stream for the Yawanawa in a way that will allow the tribe to continue a lifestyle that sustains their environment. In part we arrived at this approach by studying various alternative models of aid that have been tried before but that failed. An important aspect of this project will be to entice at least a few members of the tribe's younger generation to devote themselves to learn the "profession" of a shaman because otherwise the tribe will lose this living tradition that has survived millennia.

The presentations will address the various aspects of the project, talk about the Yawanawa tribe and their homeland, the most important medicinal and sacramental plants, make the case why this knowledge is worth preserving, how it has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the working of the human mind and report on the progress the project has made so far.


Paulo Roberto Silva e Souza received his degree in psychology from the University Gama Filho in Rio de Janeiro and began his professional carrier as a psychologist at the Pinel Hospital Suicide Prevention Center and the Ana Freud Clinic and Health Center Saint Romain in Rio de Janeiro. In 1976 he had first experiences with Santo Daime in Amazonia and was initiated by Padrinho Sebastiao. In 1982 he founded the first Santo Daime church outside of the Amazon in Rio de Janeiro which he still leads today. In 1985 he organized and led a multidisciplinary commission for the Brazilian government that conducted scientific research on the use of sacramental plants in the Acre and Amazonas states which led to the legalization of the church of Santo Daime in Brazil. As psychotherapist and shaman he introduced Daime ceremonies to 14 countries.
In 1989 Paulo worked with IBAMA, the Brazilian Environmental Protection Agency, to preserve 1.6 million acres of national forests in the state of Amazonas, now the National Forests Mapiá, Inauini, and Purus. In conjunction with the UNEP-United Nations Environmental Program he implemented projects of environmental protection, forest extension and development for the Amazon. In 1994 he created the first National Heritage Private Reservation in Rio de Janeiro. He was a guest lecturer at Harvard University on environmental problems and solutions in Amazonia. Since 2008 he has been working on the project Eco Park Topo da Mata in the Natural Heritage Private Reservation.


Hartmut Neven studied Physics and Economics in Köln, Paris, Tübingen, Aachen, Jerusalem and Brazil. He wrote his Master thesis on a neuronal model of object recognition at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. In 1996 he received his Ph.D. from the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, for a thesis on "Dynamics for vision-guided autonomous mobile robots". Dr. Neven was assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California at the Laboratory for Biological and Computational Vision. Later he returned as the head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces at USC’s Information Sciences Institute. Neven co-founded two companies, Eyematic for which he served as CTO and Neven Vision which he initially led as CEO. Today he is director of engineering at Google where he manages a team responsible for advancing Google’s visual search technologies. Teams led by Neven have repeatedly won top scores in government sponsored tests designed to determine the most accurate face recognition software. In collaboration with D-Wave he developed the first image recognition system based on quantum algorithms which was demonstrated at SuperComputing07.


Sunny Solwind is an artist and a musician. His work echoes universal and archetypal themes that celebrate our connections to nature, the Divine and each other. He focuses on shamanic & ritualistic traditional and contemporary music, utilizing sound as a tool for transformation and honoring the Sacred. His offerings are reminders, perhaps portals that connect us to the Divine within ourselves, and that touch, awaken and heal that place within each person that wants to shine. www.solwindfeather.com