When the old people tell you not to take the drugs, the problem is, dang, you know they took the drugs.
You hope they are saying, I took the drugs and I that is why I know it is not necessary for your spiritual development, and probably even bad for you, because I have experience of such things. But they never say that. They just say, don't take the drugs. And some of them smile mysteriously. Old times, heh heh heh.
So of course you take the drugs anyway.
Dr Michael Harner, anthropologist and founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, most certainly took the drugs. His first published book was Hallucinogens and Shamanism, published in 1973. He describes his ahayuasca experiences as shocking, overwhelming, meaningful, life threatening, and delightful.
Shamanic experiences using entheogens or psychedelics are often ordeals. They can involve hardship and terror. My previous post was about limit experiences. They are to be taken seriously, and they are undertaken not in the service of endless spiritual growth, but to save lives or to save communities.
Dr Harner also knew that the Madre Ahayuasca is a powerful being. In Ayahuasca ceremonies the human people thank her and praise her and propitiate her because they know she is powerful and she is not necessarily your friend. Dr Harner thought that she may even have her own agenda. There is a difference between a bad trip that teaches you what you most need to know, and a powerful being trying to harm you. You have to be wise enough to know the difference. This means context, and I don't just mean set and setting for the trip itself. I mean societal context. I mean history, ancestry, the internalizing of the stories, support, aftercare. As I have said, it is the job of the Shaman to turn into the bear. It is the job of the community to see the bear.
Where are our great stories about liminal spaces and ordeals and journeys? They are hidden in fairy tales and movies and academic texts. There is no community to see the bear. You take three hundred acid trips, and what you get is sludge metal. I actually quite like a bit of sludge, and I am pleased that its proponents have found meaning in a chaotic world. But it is not going to transform our communities and heal our collective souls.*
What if I told you (as the ancient meme goes) that Dr Harner discovered that it was possible to enter a Shamanic state of consciousness by drumming at a particular rhythm that sets up theta waves in the brain. You can find his drumming on YouTube, a lovely old double drum. Or you can download an app. And you can journey by yourself, in the privacy of your own home, with a drumming track and a black t shirt over your eyes, and instructions from Core Shamanic teachers, or other teachers who know the same things. You don't need limit experiences, the wonderful beings you meet in Non Ordinary Reality will help you with those. You don't need heroic doses of anything.
So, is this the pretty beige Insta version? Is this for yoga moms? Is this for the restless rich who can't commit and like a bit of Shamanism in their portfolio of endless self improvement and healing of god knows what?
A major point missed by some in the psychedelic renaissance, is that ecstatic experiences are value neutral. Psychedelics are a particularly good example of value neutral. The substance itself is amoral, and may or may not be interested in your welfare or that of humanity. Even the experience of union with all that is, which is experienced commonly within the psychedelic trip, is amoral. An experiment with LSD users illustrates this. They gave participants LSD and induced in them a feeling of gratitude. Those who felt gratitude were more likely to agree to the next part of the experiment: grinding up worms in a blender. I kinda imagine all these folks tripping their heads off, grinding up the worms and weeping with gratitude, and then I wonder how the hell this stuff got past the ethics committee. As an animist I am just yuck, the poor worms.
There is an anti-inspirational photo online which I won't link to because I don't want to give it more air time, but it is a photo of Neo Nazi organization The Base. It is a group photo taken after a ritual during which the members took LSD and wandered in a chaotic state around the countryside, and slaughtered a ram, whose messed up head features in the photo. The Base is not the only one on the far right to enjoy the odd trip. Julius Evola, the Italian Uber-Nazi who influenced Mussolini, enjoyed psychedelics. As for the appalling Sydney Gottlieb, who ran MKUltra for the CIA, he was a heavy LSD user himself, and had far right links, as did Albert Hoffman who was no saint despite being lionized by the psychedelic community.
Of course using psychedelics does not make you a Nazi, but my point is even the feelings of oneness and bliss you can get with them does not make you enlightened either. Psychedelics are value neutral. They are what they are. It is intention, and context as I express above, that make the trip meaningful, and helpful beyond just the holy fuck of it all.
Below is a Medium article by Jules Evans, which I recommend. I can't better it, so I have just copied the link here. He makes ten useful points about ecstatic experiences in general, in order to normalize them and help us out when we in the west have lost context and history.
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/we-need-better-cultural-resources-to-make-sense-of-ecstatic-experiences-d26a68dad47e
I look forward to the democratization of Shamanic journeying. I make this limited claim: most people can journey to the Upper and Lower Worlds, and meet helping spirits, and learn things and help themselves and others. There have been times in animist societies where every extended family has someone who knows enough Shamanic stuff to help out. Knowing these things does not 'make you a Shaman'. But neither does sustained use of psychedelics.
The photo is from an earth bank in Wellington. The circle with a dot in the middle, or the eye, is often the first layer of the psychedelic experience. I am thinking of the dot art of Aboriginal people in the place now called Australia. I am also thinking of Tool album covers.
*Recommended: Sanguisugabogg's very downtuned and grisly album Homicidal Ecstasy, if you like having your brain shredded
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