Is Ayahuasca Healing a Self-Delusion?
At a recent panel on ayahuasca at the conference of The Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness at U.C. Berkeley, I was intrigued to hear a social critic question the "inventive 'religious' mystifying of ayahuasca today in northern hemisphere circles," stating that "we need to acknowledge that, and question whether the elaboration of further mythology is really 'healing.'" Finally, he raised the serious question: Can healing arise from self-delusion?
That same day, returning home I found the following query, the sort that as a writer on Amazonian shamanism and a guide for groups down to the Peruvian rainforest I occasionally receive. With my ears still ringing from the critic's frontal assault on the most cherished tenet of work with ayahuasca, it struck me as particularly timely:
What are your feelings towards Americans who, without ever having traveled to visit a real Amazonian curandero, take it upon themselves to brew their own ayahuasca? I currently work with a gentleman who has been doing this for nearly a year now, I believe ... ordering the components of the brew and making it in his kitchen. He claims that the ayahuasca ally herself told him that he was doing a good job and that he should continue. But as an individual he seems to have a tenuous hold on reality and handles his day-to-day affairs and those around him with an almost frightening lack of compassion. As well, he always describes his experiences with ayahuasca as "tripping," and has even taken to mixing his hallucinogens (DMT with mushrooms, LSD with ayahuasca). I fear for him, because he does seem to possess a level of self-delusion I've never encountered before.
Just curious about your take on situations like that.
I wish to share my response with readers of Reality Sandwich by way of opening up a dialogue about this very important question.
Although I don't know the gentleman you are referring to, I share your concern about the portrait of spiritual narcissism you paint.
As the native America writer Vine Deloria Jr. put it, Western society is a culture of "rights" rather than "responsibility." Without an internal lodestone of instinctive veneration to guide us, it's all too easy in this consumerist culture to appropriate ayahuasca as just another personal spiritual trip.
In indigenous cultures -- our first teachers in approaching these sacred brews which were, after all, their discovery -- such plants are never done isolated from the guidance of a shaman and a larger communal context that tests and verifies experience. To some Westerners this regime may sound like an infringement upon their individual freedoms. But experience teaches that this tradition, like the toad, ugly and venomous, carries a precious stone in its head. There is a lineage, extending over millennia, that discovered and made allies of these plants, learned how to direct them toward healing, and who many mature shamans say continue to work "from the other side." Whether we like it or not, veneration of the ancestors is essential to enter that way.
For Western culture, so long cut off from the sustaining powers of the Earth, such guidance is, in my experience, particularly necessary. Otherwise, work with ayahuasca and other entheogens becomes a "head trip," a privileged vertical jaunt into other realms of consciousness without the horizontal work of embodiment. What good are transcendental insights if you behave like an asshole to your kids? Or make yourself insufferable due to the special privileges you give yourself because you've been "enlightened" by a sacred plant?
At the recent conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness at U.C. Berkeley, I was intrigued to hear the question, "Can we be healed by self-delusion?" posed about Western ayahuasca practices. This challenge to the status quo of the ayahuasca world was almost immediately followed by another presenter going forward and saying, "If the healing of my severe asthma, which had debilitated me from childhood, was a delusion, I'll take more of it, please!"
The real point for me, which may have gone unnoticed, was that latter presenter's healing occurred under the guidance of a female shaman in Iquitos who had prepared and administered his brew in a traditional way. It did not resolve the fundamental issue raised previously: How can we distinguish between self-delusion and healing, especially without the guidance of a mature practitioner in the beginning stages of our work?
Before attempting to answer that question, I should clarify I'm not a traditionalist in the narrow sense of privileging native spirituality as primary and entheogenic practices in the West as secondary, imitative offshoots. Many of us stumbled upon the healing effects of entheogens in quite non-traditional contexts. We know the taste of that experience, the gratitude that arose from it, and the freedom that the loving embrace of plant-sentience gave us.
Beginner's luck, if you like.
As in the practice of Buddhist meditation, however, the choice eventually arises whether to remain a dilettante kicking around at the entryway or to embark upon the path of the ancestors. Much like the arrival of Buddhism in the West, I believe that the resurgence of these shamanic traditions in our materialist culture is to be embraced and our work lies in receiving the best transmission we can, while adapting the practices to the needs of our present circumstances. Shamanism, like Buddhism, is evolving as it enters the West, but will lose its virtue if it is cut off from its origin.
To return to our question, I think the key to distinguishing self-delusion lies in a correct definition of terms. The "self" the researcher was referring to is no doubt the Cartesian one that rules our modern sense of consciousness, a torturous epistemological "dualism" which is a good candidate for "delusion" itself. According to Richard Tarnas, from the Cartesian outlook, "rational man knows his own awareness to be certain, and entirely distinct from the external world of material substance, which is epistemologically less certain and perceptible only as an object. Thus res cogitans -- thinking substance, subjective experience, spirit, consciousness, that which man perceives as within -- was understood as fundamentally different and separate from res extensa -- extended substance, the objective world, matter, the physical body, plants and animals, stones and stars, the entire physical universe, everything that man perceives as outside his mind" (277-78).
From the indigenous perspective, which entheogenic work is reintroducing into the West, that very concept of the self is mad as a hatter. Where else does shamanic healing and knowledge arising from immersion in the greater sentience of the cosmos come from, except from plants and animals, stones and stars? We could even say our culture's metaphysical division of experience into a res cogitans and a res extensa is the delusion of our era, and that spiritual isolationism, masquerading as an individual right to exclusive, personal experience, is the trap that users of entheogens are most prone to fall into. Or worse. We have to admit that for some Westerners the voice of a psychoactive plant can be a siren's rapturous song, offering them a false intimacy with a plant consciousness that understands all their suffering and gives them a sense of meaningfulness such as they've been deprived of for their entire lives. Suddenly, they're the recipient of a special, privileged communication, as if from God. Without a mature practitioner around to kick their butt, they may never recover from such spiritual stink.
In my present literary endeavor, The Siren's Rapturous Song (to be published by Inner Traditions in the Fall of 2011), I explore the indigenous and shamanic roots of our Western tradition in Homer's The Odyssey and argue that Western society actually does have a touchstone by which to evaluate the legitimacy of our newly evolving shamanic practices. It lies in going native again.
As the poet Gary Snyder put it, "for non-Native Americans" (and we could throw in civilized Europeans in relation to Europe as well), "to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent" (43). We must rediscover "the passage into that myth time world that had been all but forgotten in Europe," crossing "an almost visible line out of history and into the perpetual present, a way of life attuned to the slower and steadier processes of nature"* (15).
Nature is our touchstone, in the same non-dual perception once declared by the Zen Buddhist master Dogen: "Clearly I know, the mind is mountains, rivers, and the great earth; sun, moon, and stars." Shamanism, as well is a communion with the larger sentience of the cosmos, an experience which can be verified and confirmed by a community of practitioners. Without that passage into "indigenous" experience, we will remain stuck in the epistemological prison cell bequeathed to us by Descartes, and our ayahuasca healing with be self-delusion indeed.
Works Cited
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. Washington D.C.: Shoemaker and Hoard, 1990.
Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991.
* For Native Americans as well, the rupture with the sentience of the cosmos has occurred as a consequence of the invasion of the Westerner Europeans. As I heard a Native American state ruefully in a tipi gathering, "Our ancestors could once speak with the animals, but we've lost that ability nowadays."
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- 4-11-10
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Delusional you say?
Ritual ... and Rites / rights
From the Stories one reads of several South American Ayuasca Shamans ... how their so-called traditional brews were "weak" ... and their Rituals ... not so sublime ...
Well, as is true throughout all existence, culture itself is never really standardized, and from dark shamans, to light shamans ... and all the watered down, "not so talented shamans" in between the extremes
... well just being local indigenous, and traditional doesn't stop the "fruits of good and evil" in all there variety of degrees from being tasted.
The cosmic synergy offered by any such Entheogenic substance can offer one a link, a yoke ... to anyone/anywhere ... to their inherent sense of "spirit" irregardless of ritual ... yet even in the most "authorized setting" the experience may not come.
Is one ready ... are we being called ... it being an "inherent" right for any one to try and apply their God given intuition in relation to any "Garden of Eden" substance.. preparation, ritual, interpretation
... all across the board one sees "experiments with intuition" Good musicians / bad musicians ... good politicians / bad politicians ... good priest / bad priest ... good business / bad business ... good charity / based charity
We promote these things all over these forums, and every version of opinion surfaces ... Mr Pinchbeck commented the other day how he was literally "over" the whole "Guru / Disciple "shtick" as he put it .. just give me the wisdom .. just give me the stuff
So, so many in this modern free world just want the freedom for freedoms sake "chance" to not be "kept from" any experience.
This is what ultimately allows people to war upon each other ... as their "ideas of freedom" get challenged.
We will likely see every version under the sun emerge in relation to such things as they are indiscriminately promoted and commented upon from every angle of vision.
If we wanted it kept confidential we would act as if that were so ... yet so many post their most intimate "visions" for all the world to see ... promoting such as a possible "saving grace" experience for the whole world .. and then wonder at the neglect and even abuse in relation to the finer aesthetics ... what can be done
Then we wonder how the powers that be see our immaturity and attempt to regulate us away from such inherent potential with undue policy.
As the slogan reads ... we are the change we promote
I really can't agree with
http://www.bioregionalanimism.com/
Point Being ...
No matter how confidential and sacred ... or open and free to interpretation .... a substance / experience / or belief is ... there will always be others with variations on the theme
. Almost all atheism comes from "bad" or 3rd rate theism ... sheer reactionism. No existential reason for having such a belief.
So it is with all standardized ritual ... someone somewhere no longer wants to "wing it"
Whenever and where ever a ritual evolves ... over time, others begin to want to revert back to the "Tao" .. unwind, let go
.. as this gets spacey .. then again some will want to establish / re-establish ritual. An ongoing cultural cycle of infinite variation on theme {s}
I fully agree with and prefer a very indigenous and organic aesthetic sensibility in all human activity ... always and only leading to a sense of sacredness.
Yet In all my 50 years I have never experienced all of my brothers and sisters wanting this collectively.
Always are there variations on the good and evil apple themes ... "together" or "spaced" ... organized or chaotic ... convention or revolution
The only lesson I have ever learned from any/all this is that judgment itself is self-perpetuating ... from something as simply as offering a 5 dollar donation ... how many opinions ... how much discussion.
Media itself indirectly acts to exploit all of our more confidential flavors of communication ... in this information age all is seen as 'mere data for processing .. each of us our own opinion manufacturing machine.
Any of the deeper, more subtler humors, mellows, or rasas are very hard to communicate outside of one-on-one / in true time, face to face, guru to disciple, shaman to initiate, friend to friend, stranger to stranger type of exchange.
How is it not a "free for all" spree .. all said and done ... all ritual {s} come and go ... all culture {s} rise and fall
How is not the consciousness of the individual unto themselves not the only way of validation .. only when the consciousness of another is more attractive
"Without guidance, the
Whose Guidance?
"Without guidance, the maximum amount of journeying that can occur with ensophiagenic plants is mostly in the territory of the known - the egoic self."
I think this might be true to a certain extent - eating a plant and watching the colours mutate and mingle and make mad faces in the mirror is something any fool can do. To get more than that out of the journey, to get beyond the customary world and self, does I think require a certain amount of creative input from the traveller. Applying the principles of animism for example, to take Little Lightening Bolt's point. Guidance, in my opinion, can come from all sorts of sources, and can indeed be helpful (and of course sometimes not so helpful). I feel I've received powerful, life-changing guidance on deep journeys from internalised readings of kabbalah and also various poets and poems and mythologies and other random bits and pieces. Without that study, I'm really not sure I'd have been open to the grace and beauty and medicine that can occur. Certainly my school education didn't prepare me for encounters with sentient interdimensional plant consciousness.
But yeah, I don't think that it is absolutely necessary to have a designated driver as it were, a curandero or a shaman, but it is good to have a map at least. You can throw the map on the fire after you've got to know the territory for yourself if you like - or you might find a deepened appreciation for the efforts of those who have gone before you, and learn to cherish the maps that have been passed on to us from the ancestors, quaint as they may seem in retrospect.
Of course, human society has changed radically, and is continuing ot change at a bewildering rate - so while there is a huge amount to learn from the indigenous traditions, there is also a sense in which we are at the edge of the new and complex dilemmas of the 21stC - and dealing with, for example, questions of identity in an environment of total surveillance, are things we must negotiate for ourselves because we are the first to experience them.What does it mean to be unable to have a genuinely private life? To have vacation, anonymity etc etc.
Does the full body scanner have "person-ality" as it grabs an image of your unclothed form? Maybe it does. Should we sing to it, submit humbly to it, make friends with it, own it, or just kill it? Loads and loads of such questions for the future all around us.
The Value of the True Inner Tradition.
Excellent article, Robert, very harmonious with my current journey, explorations, and discoveries. Ayahuasca by itself does not seem to be a magic cure all. Although it potentially can be enlightening and healing on it's own, it's nature lies in proper relationship found within it's environment.The true 'inner tradition', which is likely to be found whispered by the spirit of nature herself in many cultures, does seem to find it's fullest exaltation in amazonian practices, where it lays both hidden and exposed for those willing, brave, and honest enough to face it.
Tim Leary, sort of a mentor to me, made the naive mistake of opening up LSD to millions in a hopeful attempt to raise national and global awareness, following a similar mantra of 'just get the stuff'. But he also realized the folly of this haphazard approach later in his life, and by introducing a hopeful futuristic model (S.M.I2.L.E.) to replace the delusions of Western leaps into delusional mysticism, redeemed this approach.
However, we must also consider, Ayahausca may be the fastest growing sub culture in the world, and with social media exploiting it's profound potential, there also may simply not be enough proper curanderos to keep up.
So with that in mind, we might also wish to surrender our understanding a bit, there may be a larger arc being shaped by Gaia, and similar to what happened with LSD, a few minds may have to be sacrificed to fulfill this larger goal which may be impossible for us to frame or understand in any proper context.
All we can do is deliver the message, it's not about the ayahuasca, it is about the true inner tradition, and if we are lucky, we can make contact with her.
I had a really good friend
I had a really good friend that pointed out to me in a time when i needed it that the teacher was within... after I learned that I was able to learn a great deal the guidance that we need can come from within, and through that we can find guidance through the world.
I agree elders are important and really wonderful. many of us do not have spirtual elders to learn and be guided by that are human. So we learn from the elders in the natural world, the trees and plants are our elders, the animal people, the wind, the soil beneath our feet is our elders. We should think that we can seek their teaching and guidance instead of seeking it else where, or thinking that it souly comes from a human. Most animist elders will teach you the same thing.
Your heart, your gut, your higher self, these will teach you and guide you as well. In ways that a tradition cannot and an elder cannot. Most good teaches and elders will just try to stear you back to that, unless they themselves have an ego trip that they are trying to fuel.
It helps to have good people, a community to work with that can help you when you need it. but we forget that we are a part of a much larger community that includes other than human persons, which we can gain guidance and teachings from.
the author of this post speaks about ancestors quite a bit... the amazonian tribes that work with this medicine are not my ancestors... and my ancestors would not know how to work with any amazonian medicines... but they would be able to give some advice when it comes to working with what is happening to me in a session with one of these medicines and they have... and that guidance is worth much more to me because it is intimate and comprehensible. The grand parents and great grandparents of OUR own family are there for us in spirit as well and can be communicated with.
I have given up tryign to learn another peoples way and have found that by listening to the plants and spirits and inner guidance helps me form a more intigratable and workable out come, which is more meaningful because I KNOW WHAT IT MEANS! lol
I have learned from ayahuasceros... and I have learned from the local bears and eagles and herons and cedar trees, the winds and what they have taught me is infinitely more meaningful, effective and of more value then learning from anothers relational dynamic.
http://www.bioregionalanimism.com/
About Ancestors
You know its interesting
You know its interesting towards the end of the fourth year of working with my teacher all of his teachers and their teachers showed up and told me that I needed lineage. they showed me how each one of them had their own unique way of doing things and how each of them embodied the ones before in ceremony, like a living (or spirit) library of attributes that could be carried on and worked with in ceremony. I could see these spirits and some still living teachers faces and bodies manifesting in the man i was studying with in the ceremony. There was somthing there however that I did not really wish to bring into myself. A commitment to that lineage did not seem my path. I thought that they where right though I could see the power in having that.
Having learned to embody different spirits and work synergisticly with them (which is what most folks do whether they are aware of it or not though most of the time not to synergisticly) I could see the value of this greatly! But instead I felt a deep compulsion to resist that and instead shift my awareness to an even older and stronger lineage, the lineage of the first shamans, all of them, the ones who begin traditions, the ones who started it all, all over the world, the first, primordial shamans who have never stopped their work and continue learning growing and devloping their knowledge. I began to embody that lineage. And you know what we all can.
Maybe you need some one to teach you how... but its even stonger if you figure it out your self.
http://www.bioregionalanimism.com/
Ayahuasca in the UK
to Traveller Al
Thanks
I'm with Little Lightening Bolt
exactly agent of
exactly agent of chaos!!
TRUST THE TEACHER WITHIN!!!
if you need help dont be afriad to ask or seek that help... but it is all within your totally right!
p.s.
'true' is a woodworking
'true' is a woodworking term.
8D
http://www.infiniteeureka.com
Inner reflections
I've never had any psychedelics, except some sporadic experimenting with marijuana over the years. I have spent a great deal of time and effort though, discovering all that I can about transcendence from the less psychedelic sources, such as books, videos, lectures, talks and meditation.
I intend to experiment with mushrooms at some point in the near future, but this experimentation will be done with the benefit of many years of introspection and self inquiry. I already have as a benefit, a fairly good understanding as to my own nature, physical, psychological and spiritual.
I think then, if anything at all, the nature of psychedelics is as such, that it ought to be treated with this sort of respect. It ought to be ritualised, so that the psychedelic experience becomes adopted within western society as a naturally progressive passage, gained through years of diligent preparation. This preparation is done in such a way, that the guru is cultivated from within. At the moment though, the psychedelic is still largely perceived as an escapists recreational mind trip.
Western man, and largely all of humanity, is still ever so immature and juvenile. The immaturity of man and his juvenile behaviour, will continue until all of that state of existence is used up. This time is coming quickly now, as the world he inhabits is becoming a dark reflection of his own inner hostility. Whether or not man is able to awaken from this dream though, before he annihilates himself, is still yet to be seen.
"I think then, if anything
"I think then, if anything at all, the nature of psychedelics is as such, that it ought to be treated with this sort of respect. It ought to be ritualised, so that the psychedelic experience becomes adopted within western society as a naturally progressive passage, gained through years of diligent preparation. This preparation is done in such a way, that the guru is cultivated from within."
Definitely!
It is interesting right now a friend is working with the vine and other harmalas currently on his own with out any teacher or tradition based on aya to follow. The vine is teaching him. He can hear its voice very clearly, even when he is not working with it he is hearing its voice now... it is guiding his life now in such an incredible way... and this has been what I have seen in many people...
http://www.bioregionalanimism.com/
Teachers/Shamans
Please. Never take ayahuasca alone.
Please. Never take ayahuasca alone.
Kinda random and off topic
Kinda random and off topic with the other warnings there bunny kisses...
Once again there is an issues of projecting your own personal experiences and process onto others... what may be true to you may not be true to another...and that goes with what I have said as well...
Some people may need a whole supportive network such as a church for these experiences to really be benifical... some may just need a cedar tree to sit under...
You never take ayahuasca alone... no matter what though... no matter what.
Your right.
Attacking Molly will never be popular. It made it so I cant trip on aya anymore, so I feel the need to say somthing about it.
Hi Zezt,It's true, there's a
Hi Zezt,
It's true, there's a lot of brujeria and abuse of power going on in the Amazon, and there's a whole chapter of my own book that deals with it. Curious thing is, encountering it fairly head on as we did during our year of immersion in the culture of Vegetalismo, we learned to distinguish fairly easily between the curanderos and the brujos. It just gets obvious, and there's a network of people down there who know the responsible healers.
As well, I felt my conscience twinge as I read your quite justified critique of ayahuasca jet-setting culture and the jacked-up costs of visiting healers there. Our own maestro has significantly raised the costs of visiting his center -- but what isn't known is he is in legal battles all around his land to protect it from incursions by oil and timber extraction companies. As you know, legal battles against corporations aren't cheap. He also has a family to support. At the same time, when my wife and I arrived with our research projects, we were penniless, and they "put more water in the soup" so we could stay.
Once you've lived in these cultures for a while, you sort out the good and bad aspects of the tradition, just like in any other setting. And like in all traditions, the bad doesn't invalidate the good. Part of what familiarity with these traditions brings is an ability to hold the curanderos (I don't like the word shaman either, much, but use it because the meaning of curandero is far less known) to account. Like all humans, they need support to stay on the straight and narrow as well.
So, in the end I am trying to say that like the toad, ugly and venomous, Vegetalismo yet carries a very precious stone in its head. I hope that our culture can receive it.
Well said robert... I have
Well said robert...
I have had brujeria placed on me in the past and have fought a handful as well... a good friend of mine was killed by his tribes "shaman" for lack of a better word, using what we would call sorcery. Nature appears rather morally ambivilant at times... and I think shamans tend to fall under that same catagory of moral ambivilance.
A jaguar may come to you in your visions and offer you healing... but if a jaguar met you on the trail it might just as well eat you. ; )
I agree that vegetalismo and curanderismo has both light and dark qualities. However.... when one looks at them closly one sees a relational dynamic that can be applied to healing and such from many different world views and practices. More then anything they are animist based techniques, and methods for doing particular things... The rational of which can be applied in many ways, and indeed is! Curanderismo is much the same around all of latin america from the maya to the shipibo.
Can healing arise from self-delusion?
The funny thing is when we
The funny thing is when we talk about shamanry is that we are talking about something really vague. So many animist cultures have something that resembles what we have anthropologicaly labeled shamanry, and each as unique as a flower, even from the same species of plant.
It is really hard to speak of shamans, animists, and such from a broad point of view. But we have noticed enough similarities that we do so any way. Just as I am about to here.
In central asia where we get the coinage shaman from in the first place they have shaman duels where shamans from all over the area come to duel each other. Some one dies every years so they say. A nice german movie was made on the subject that has yet to be translated. The literature of first hand accounts of westerners studying or visiting with animist peoples and their shamans paint interesting pictures. Some very dramatic and many of them very biased, napolean changnons work with the yamomami really set the precedance for anthropological reporting and its relationship to personal perception and biase. He precieved them as a war like people " the hells angels of the rain forest" doing drugs and dueling each other and beating their women. A woman anthropologist went and visited them and reported quite the opposite. Changnon was the son of a military man and his past and present views shaped his experience with them.
We now in the west have a vision of what we "need" shamans to be for us, and very rarely what they are or "need" to be for themselves. For people who live very close to nature they have pretty pragmatic practices, beliefs and world views that allow them to live and fulfill their immediate needs and life functions. I for one will not judge that... not that I am a cultural relativist by any means.
We need to face that this romanticism or even criticism of animist cultures and their shamans are based off of what we project onto them, which is more of a glimps of what we need as individuals and as members of particular cultures and societies in the western world. Our perceptions of them tells us more about our selves then it does of them honestly.
I think we seek them out and their knowledge and cast them into certain molds because we have a need that we might do well to be more aware of and clear about. I think we can find inspiration from these traditional peoples, but we need to claim that inspiration as our own and use it to understand and fulfill our own needs and the needs of our larger biotic communities then in criticising and romanticisning them as well as devoting ourselves to their traditions, ways and practices. We can in that respect form ways that are culturally and socially relevant to our own needs, co-creating with life a path that suits us, and hopfully allow others to do the same undisturbed. If we do not do this, we run the risk of perpetuating current pathways in paths that are full of ungrounded, disconnected and unintigrated fantasys and dellusions.
http://www.bioregionalanimism.com/
We are out of practice with psychedlics
We all need to keep in mind that, as a culture, we have been denied entheogens for so long that we don't know how to use them properly.
As a result, many people who are starting to use these very important plant teachers are reinventing the wheel, as it were, and probably making mistakes along the way. However, it is vitally important that we reintegrate psychedelics into our modern world, and it is unavoidable, given the current state of our ignorance, that some people are "doing it wrong" or that the very people who it would appear should not be using them are (i.e. those with a tenuous grasp on reality for whom it may be questionable if these psychedelic substances are really good for them).
I would reframe the issue and say that, rather than the users of these substances being at fault, the problem is that these substances have been unavailable and we don't know how to use them correctly. The answer is to develop a healthy culture around their use, which I realize is easier said than done.
Perhaps if we know of someone taking these substances, we can encourage them to do so in a safe set and setting where they take them in a restful manner and in a peaceful setting and that they write up a trip report to help both themselves and others navigate these other dimensions of reality.
who are we to judge?
"We all need to keep in mind that, as a culture, we have been denied entheogens for so long that we don't know how to use them properly. "
maybe you don not know how to "use" them properly...
Some of us work WITH them instead of using them... a fine point of difference...
Honestly this is true for perhaps some people that they do not know how to "use" them properly... but carful with projecting that opinion onto those that do.
From what I have seen there are quite a few people doing just fine regardless of what culture they belong to...
reinventing the wheel... I totally disagree... people are developing and discovering, as people around the world always have, their own unique ways of relating, their own unique relationships with psychedelics... and this is a good thing.
Embracing delusion as a process in spiritual evolution
A good curandero can definitely be helpful and may be a requirement for some individuals to feel comfortable. But I feel that if I were an entheogenic plant and I were approached by someone with an open mind, heart, and sacred intention, though without a curandero's accompionment, I feel that I would work with them. I have had the experience of drinking the tea with a friend and the voice of a curandero came to me across space and time to sing an icaro, and, according to my friend, perform healing work.
I deeply agree that it is best to respect ayahuasca. To those who use it to see trippy visuals or whatnot, I guess hey, it's their universe, but I think if they understood it better they would have more reverance for it. And perhaps taking it in a "trippy" way is their path to doing so.
"I fear for him, because he does seem to possess a level of self-delusion I've never encountered before." I feel that insanity, delusion, death, possession, negative spirits, etc. are all possibilities in the death-rebirth process because those states are all parts of life and entheogens heighten the life process. I feel that in the earth realm one ultimately learns how to traverse the mountains of insanity, the pitfalls of the ego, and the threat of death. Perhaps the man in question may be going through a heightened process of losing touch with reality for a deep purpose on his evolutionary soul journey. Maybe if he continues pursuing the route he thinks is best for him he will one day rebirth into a new being with newfound clarity, understanding, and compassion. But maybe instead he'll go further into a state of "delusion," perhaps even escalating to being completely out of touch with reality. To my view, it would be worse if he didn't listen to his inner drive to drink ayahuasca and instead sat around checking in with consensus reality to make sure those around him didn't think him too much this way or that way. I think experiencing delusion can be an important step in solidifying one's grasp of reality because delusion is a journey of learning how to align your own inner reality with consensus reality. Ultimately, the tribal traditions I would like to have in our society would be to have places where people are supported (housed, fed, loved, provided responsible entheogenic sessions) to have their reality break down, to go into delusions, to go insane... because I think that process is the psyche's way to heal.
Presenter Present
Greetings, I am a latecomer to this discussion, but I thought I would chime in because I am the anonymously invoked presenter who welcomes his continued healing. If my healing is due to placebo, it is odd that none of the pharmaceuticals I was dosed with since the age of five worked as placebo, and my first relief from asthma via ayahuasca happened without any knowledge on my part that asthma was treated locally ( in mestizo Peru) with ayahuasca. I was prepared to trip my gourd out, but instead I learned to breathe. I would welcome a controlled study of ayahuasca as a treatment of asthma.
Also, I think it is fair to point out that the context of the social critic's question about 'self delusion" was precisely ayahuasca tourism, wherein a local healer administers ayahuasca from within that syncretic tradition. He was invoking understandable skepticism about "westerners" deluding themselves with ayahuasca tourism. So I do indeed think my response - "If this be delusion, I'll take it!" - was answering the question, and that the question was rooted in a wide spread insistence that psychedelic and other non dual experiences are "merely" cultural constructs. Consructivism is like an article of faith among most academics, and the costs of disputing it are difficult to fathom. This is a delusion we could do without. Indeed, in some ways one of the disorders ayahuasca helped heal me of was constructivism...
That said, I completely agree with Robert that the key to the question and the experience is that "our" conventional post Cartesian notion of a self is "mad as a hatter" ( to continue the "tea" metaphor), and that a practiced inhabitation of a non dual perspective is necessary for most of us if the healing potential of ecodelic experiences is to be actualized. Ecodelics are neither necessary nor sufficient to awakening from our Cartesian slumber, but for some of us they are an incredible grace - what the Buddhist tradition might dub "skillful means" - that help us along the path, even as they do not complete it.
The aforementioned Anthropology of Consciousness conference has yielded a special issue on ayahuasca studies: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anoc.2012.23.issue-1/issuetoc
The original talk I gave can be heard here; http://www.sacaaa.org/audio/Richard%20Doyle.mp3
http://mobiused.wordpress.com/