Podcast: The Dark Side of Amazonian Shamanism

BTW, I may have made a mistake by using the phrase "modern culture", that's probably bad word choice. I probably should have just said "Western culture", although I didn't mean to restrict my point to the West, either.

I think this is largely true, but I don't think it is limited to plant sacraments, or really anything: it is pervasive in all aspects of our lives and experience. Anything we do on a personal level we internalize, and I think this is true on a cultural level as well.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think that we need to be careful and remember that we filter everything we experience through ourselves (the good and the bad) and our culture (the good and the bad).

I don't necessarily think that you always end up with the same results (after all, there are cultural differences), but people are people, so one could reasonable expect to achieve similar results.

You see this happening with [i]curandismo[/i] all the time. Many people filter it through a cosmovision anchored in western ethical and religious systems, and they end up about where you would expect. Other people filter is through more "new age" colored beliefs, and they end up about where you would expect them to, too.

One particularly troubling aspect is when the new-agers engage with traditional or mestizo shamans (who come from a decidedly different perspective). They mistake the shaman for the guru, and they get freaking abused and/or at least disappointed/disillusioned almost every time.

Anyhow... to me, it seems like a good idea to avoid the 'sorcery' angle/mindset, and--while it might be sad for someone who has spent time studying down there, etc.--I think it is fine if Westerners move away from the negative uses, and if the younger generation of the Mestizos turn their ambitions to entirely different things, if they wish to.

I'm skeptical of the value of a modern culture involving sacrament with plants, sorcery, mystical teachers/healers, etc. I feel that it would all end up with the same mixed results that other spiritual control structures have had in our past (and present). Not to say there isn't *anything* there--just that I keep getting the impression that people wind up losing as much as they gain, whether they realize it or not.

Of course, within the Mestizo culture, there is a great variety (Beyer makes clear), but I think that, on the whole, people are better off with a more 'rational' and humanistic/human-based culture, with a side-order of psychedelic/Gaia consciousness. There are interesting concepts that get promoted in podcasts like this one (the phrase "right-relationship" has spread like wildfire these past few years, and it probably goes back further than that...) but I think that they are mostly ideas that also exist apart from the psychedelic community.

I appreciate that in some sense, maybe the plants "miss us" and want us to change (or at least stop destroying them)--but if they are quite likely to help out some dark magician cursing and plaguing some innocent person, then I say let's look more toward human-based solutions and values. I don't mean "Let's pave the planet." I mean, let's not make plants into teachers instead of tools.

To me, psychedelics seem most useful for creativity and problem-solving (which would include some trauma/end of life applications), and probably some other things too--but there are dangers of buying into cultures and cliques, and becoming a mere replication of an 'alluring' mindset, with these powerful mind-altering substances. The individual can become a mere tool of some pre-existing, and perhaps quite arbitrary constellation of cultural/ideological assertions. And the connection to the Psychedelic experience can make 'one' vantage seem like 'it', everything.

Because, despite persistent rumors to the contrary, psychedelics don't inherently open up a closed mind (and I say this as a big fan of them).

They can be incredibly useful tools, and in the hands of the creative and the intelligent they can be used to really good ends. But--pretty much by definition--any "community" regresses to the mean. If you put psychedelics into the hands of the mean, you end up with mediocre insights and mediocre thought. Over, and over, and over....

I don't understand why the psychedelic community asks itself the same questions over and over. We already learned from the Leary debacle that psychedelics are not a panacea, and can be used for good and bad. Why can't we move past this? The 60's are over. Time to learn new lessons.