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Post by Admin on Sept 8, 2020 19:18:25 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 9, 2020 18:17:39 GMT
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (The MIT Press) by Erik Davis en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_DavisAn exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality-but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis-America's leading scholar of high strangeness-examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality. aquariumdrunkard.com/2019/10/04/erik-davis-on-high-weirdness-drugs-esoterica-and-visionary-experience-in-the-seventies/
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 23:32:47 GMT
The Great Power And Great Responsibility Of Using Psychedelic Medicine By KAIA FINDLAY & ANITA RAO • SEP 10, 2020 www.wunc.org/post/great-power-and-great-responsibility-using-psychedelic-medicineIn recent years, clinical trials have identified multiple psychedelics as treatments for mental health disorders ranging from depression and anxiety to obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted “Breakthrough Therapy Designation” to MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. The FDA gives this status to treatments that may have significant benefits over existing therapy. In 2018 and 2019, the organization granted the designation to two different treatments using psilocybin - one for treatment-resistant depression and one for major depressive disorder. Host Anita Rao talks with Ismail Ali, policy and advocacy counsel for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, about how psychedelic medicine came to be stigmatized and criminalized, the turn toward medicalization and what culturally responsible regulation and policy reform may look like in the future. Rao also speaks with psychiatrist Dr. Hani Elwafi and marriage and family therapist Leticia Brown about how they incorporate psychedelics into their therapeutic practices. And Dana Saxon joins to talk about her personal experience microdosing psilocybin to treat her depression. The Healing Trip Dana Saxon was diagnosed with depression in 2002. She tried Prozac. She tried therapy. For 15 years, nothing seemed to work. Finally, after living in the Netherlands for a few years, she decided to try an alternative therapy: magic mushrooms. She planned to microdose — taking one-twentieth to one-tenth the amount of a recreational dose, or just enough to feel benefits in the mind and body without taking a full trip. But the research she did recommended taking a full dosage to prepare for the microdosing sessions. It was an eye-opening experience. Saxon recorded herself over video, and as she did, she saw another person looking back at her. That person looked like a panicked monster. But as she continued to talk to herself about what she was seeing, she became more aware of issues that had been plaguing her mind below the surface. "This person inside of me that I was now seeing very clearly was not a monster," she said. "It was someone very scared, very lonely, feeling very unsafe in this world." By the time the trip ended, Saxon said she felt like she “had been through at least a couple of years of therapy.” Psychedelics, which translates from Greek to mean “mind-manifesting,” are a category of natural and synthetic substances that trigger altered states of consciousness. Psychedelics work for healing purposes by making the mind more able to process troublesome subjects that may be harming a person’s wellbeing, said Dr. Hani Elwafi, a psychiatrist in Chapel Hill. Elwafi works with an FDA-approved medication and hallucinogen called ketamine to practice psychedelic-assisted therapy. “Instead of taking a daily medication that reduces symptoms — much like Tylenol might reduce a fever but not necessarily get to the source of an infection — molecules of ketamine can help someone to relax in conditions ... and to feel safe in confronting sources of anxiety, sources of fear,” he said. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is not the best form of treatment for everyone, and the substances should be used in a responsible and educated way.
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Post by Admin on Sept 19, 2020 20:10:33 GMT
A TRIP BEGINS SCIENTISTS UNCOVER THE MOLECULAR ORIGINS OF AN LSD TRIP "Now we know how psychedelic drugs work – finally!" www.inverse.com/mind-body/how-lsd-binds-to-the-brain-studyTHE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE OF LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, is so expansive it encompasses our entire experience of consciousness. But it begins with a tiny invisible process: LSD binding to a receptor in the brain. After some "fair amount of trial and error" scientists now know how that binding happens and what it actually looks like, findings that help explain how the whole mind-altering process starts. Previously, scientists suspected that LSD creates a powerful psychedelic experience by binding to serotonin receptors in the brain, specifically 5-HT2A receptors. When receptors at a specific layer in the cortex are activated they fire in an unorganized way, and become unable to take inputs from the outside world. But scientists were still unsure of how LSD actually activates these receptors. Now, a research team shows that there's actually a single amino acid (a building block) that's unique to the receptor protein. When LSD binds to that protein, the trip begins. This finding was published Thursday in the journal Cell. Bryan Roth is the paper's lead author and a pharmacologist and psychiatrist at The University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He says the paper caps off 30 years of work in the field of psychedelics. "Now we know how psychedelic drugs work – finally!" he tells Inverse. "Now we can use this information to, hopefully, discover better medications for many psychiatric diseases."
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Post by Admin on Sept 29, 2020 16:57:46 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 6, 2020 15:08:09 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 6, 2020 15:12:21 GMT
The Way of the PsychonautOnline Screening 24 hours: Oct 17, 2020, 7pm-9:30pm ET Plus Live Panel . Recording on til 7am EST Sponsors: IMHU and PsychedelicsToday About this Event www.eventbrite.com/e/the-way-of-the-psychonaut-tickets-123113256063This exciting new 90 minute film released this month, The Way of the Psychonaut, documents the life and work of the pioneering psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during his last 60 years. See the 3 minute trailer below. We'll start at 7pm EST with the film, followed by LIVE panel with audience participation. This will be recorded and both film and panel can be watched all around the world until 7am, EST on October 18. Stan is both a pioneer in human consciousness research, and one of the primary psychiatrists who developed psychedelic psychotherapy. He also worked with Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich to become one of the founders and chief theoreticians of Transpersonal Psychology. While Scholar-in-Residence at The Esalen Institute for 14 years, he and his late wife, Christina, developed Holotropic Breathwork and started the Spiritual Emergency Network. Stan subsequently founded the International Transpersonal Association. The Way of the Psychonaut serves as a portal, through which viewers can also discover information and resources that can change their lives. The project’s website provides access to full interviews and in-depth explanations, letting the community dive deeper into the concepts explored. Viewers can thus connect with the visionaries that influenced Stan and supported his discoveries. Links to courses, documentaries, lectures, and more are available through the site. It is time to share Stan’s findings that reach well past cultural differences to the unity that sustains us all. We invite viewers to continue the journey after the final credits roll. Our collective future depends on it. www.thewayofthepsychonaut.com/
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Post by Admin on Oct 7, 2020 17:24:03 GMT
Fungi, Folklore, and FairylandBy Mike Jay From fairy-rings to Lewis Carroll's Alice, mushrooms have long been entwined with the supernatural in art and literature. What might this say about past knowledge of hallucinogenic fungi? Mike Jay looks at early reports of mushroom-induced trips and how one species in particular became established as a stock motif of Victorian fairyland. PUBLISHED October 7, 2020 publicdomainreview.org/essay/fungi-folklore-and-fairylandThe first recorded mushroom trip in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on October 3, 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man identified in the subsequent medical report as “J. S.” was in the habit of gathering small field mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished it, everything began to turn very strange. J. S. noticed black spots and odd flashes of colour interrupting his vision; he became disorientated and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help, but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering in a confused state. By chance a physician named Everard Brande was passing through this part of town, and he was summoned to treat J. S. and his family. The scene he witnessed was so unusual that he wrote it up at length and published it in The Medical and Physical Journal a few months later.1 The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses fluttering, and their breathing laboured, periodically returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. All were fixated on the fear that they were dying except for the youngest, the eight-year-old son named as “Edward S.”, whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was “attacked with fits of immoderate laughter” which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: “when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked”. Dr Brande diagnosed the family’s condition as the “deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous”. Today, we can be more specific: this was intoxication by liberty caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the “magic mushrooms” that grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses, and playing fields of Britain every autumn. The botanical illustrator James Sowerby, who was working on the third volume of his landmark Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms (1803), interrupted his schedule to visit J. S. and identify the species in question. Sowerby’s illustration includes a cluster of unmistakable liberty caps, together with a similar-looking species (now recognised as a roundhead of the Stropharia genus). In his accompanying note, Sowerby emphasises that it was the pointy-headed variety (“with the pileus acuminated”) that “nearly proved fatal to a poor family in Piccadilly, London, who were so indiscreet as to stew a quantity” for breakfast.
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Post by Admin on Oct 10, 2020 11:42:19 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 20, 2020 15:40:07 GMT
PSYCHEDELICS IN TIMES OF DIVISION, CRISIS, AND COLLAPSEwww.innertraditions.com/blog/psychedelics-in-times-of-divisionINTERFACING WITH THE TOTALITY OF REALITY: EXAMINING THE BENEFITS OF PSYCHEDELICS IN TIMES OF DIVISION, CRISIS, AND COLLAPSE BY DANIEL GRAUER, AUTHOR OF PSYCHEDELIC CONSCIOUSNESS: PLANT INTELLIGENCE FOR HEALING OURSELVES AND OUR FRAGMENTED WORLD The other night I was sitting around a fire with a friend, discussing the influence of psychedelics on our lives, when she uttered this statement, “after three years of working with these mushrooms, I love life. I just want to be and do the best I can. All the time. Now. Urgently. For myself, for others, for Earth.” Is this not, in the simplest form, what we all hope for humanity? Such a statement and life orientation becomes all the more inspirational when you learn of her backstory. My friend, whom I'll call Janet for privacy, had a 23-year alcohol and drug addiction that was threatening both her physical and mental health. This was combined with—and in large parts caused by—complex, unprocessed trauma, abusive relationships, self-harm, isolation, and always feeling as if she was stuck. At the age of 33, Janet found herself in a hospital bed with a ruptured tubal pregnancy and near-fatal internal bleeding. She was four months pregnant but hadn’t recognized the symptoms due to her alcoholism; vomiting had already been a daily routine and her attitude on the weight gain was “my body is deteriorating and I don’t care. Drink, drink.” It was here—alone, ashamed, and facing death—that she resolved to change. The first year of her healing journey was spent "dry drunk,” no longer drinking but still maintaining the qualities or patterns of addiction, until, in her words, “joy started pushing at my seams.” This joy was found through a blend of psilocybin mushrooms (taken in group ceremonies, at home, and as microdoses), somatic experiences, multiple forms of therapy, and meditation. The mushrooms, which she highlights as the defining mechanism of healing and personal growth, allowed her to experience and develop a sense of community, confidence, surrender, magic, and meaning. Three years in, she is now experiencing a strengthening of her memory, increased acceptance, freedom from fear and mental traps, a sense of truth, and a revival of her senses—which she attributes to not being so distracted by cyclical or spiraling thoughts and the pulls of compulsive addictions. In her words, “bliss is attainable with the blink of an eye now that I remember where it comes from. And when it’s dark, I trust, love, and have faith. Mushrooms gave me the clarity to get here and an opportunity to reset my defaults.” Sometimes we get so bent on research as a society that the beautiful simplicity of a personal story gets pushed aside. We talk about how psychedelics can heal addiction, PTSD, depression, and anxiety related to terminal illness; that they lower the functioning of the default mode network in the brain, which leads to the formation of novel neural pathways, ego-dissolution, and shifts in cognition, perception, memory, and meaning; and that this results in increased well-being, empathy, openness, sociality, nature-relatedness, etc. But in story, we relate human to human. And here, we are talking about someone healing and regaining the fullness of their life as a result of psychedelics. Sometimes it’s that simple. It’s Janet’s belief, as well as mine, that natural psychedelics—when used safely with preparation, support, and integration—can help us become better humans and Earth inhabitants. A belief that is generated and supported by nearly every indigenous culture that has used these plants and mushrooms and is now finally being re-confirmed through modern research. This is not to say that psychedelics are for everyone or that they’re the only tool for the job, but as we continue to struggle with collective crises and trauma as a direct result of human activity and indecency, the healing and transformative potential of psychedelics takes on higher levels of relevancy and importance, amplifying our natural right to grow, possess, consume, and share these plants and mushrooms and the call for legalization in a way that provides access and information to all who seek it. So what, exactly, do psychedelics have to offer us in this moment of our collective story? I discuss this topic extensively in my book Psychedelic Consciousness: Plant Intelligence for Healing Ourselves and Our Fragmented World, but in light of current events, I’d like to provide some additional thoughts on the matter. In a time of so much polarization, inequality, racial injustice, and ecological destruction, their ability to provide experiences of unity through ego-dissolution can help us bridge the increasing divisions between each other and the natural world. While such experiences cannot solve these problems on their own, they can orient us in such a way that we desire to work through them, together—integrated empathy, openness, sociality, and nature-relatedness leads to respect, communication, cooperation, and pro-environmental behavior. On the specific topic of racism and psychedelics, a recently released documentary by Horizons Media called Covid-19, Black Lives & Psychedelics has been a great source of teaching for me. The two quotes below really stood out. “There’s an opportunity for a shift that can happen but that shift happens because both parts of the equation are having a moment where they are meeting each other, quite possibly for the first time, in a boundary dissolved space. But so long as we are all looking from the outside at the other sides, we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity for that which is organizing us to create a moment where we can be together in love, without all the cultural baggage.” —Sensei Kevon Simpson “As we press, as we move for more justice, more freedom, more peace, more love, more experiences of liberty and abundance for black lives, the most important thing that we can create is to get out of these concepts of black and white. These are concepts of oppression that actually don’t allow me to see your multifacetedness. They don’t allow me to see who you are. This is one of the most beautiful things that I believe the transgender movement is bringing in, a really fundamental understanding of how categories create trauma. When I talk about healing race related trauma it’s about healing a trauma of thinking of yourself in the categories of race and that includes for white people.” —Mellody Hayes, M.D. Mellody and Kevon help us realize that it’s not from the outside in, but from the inside out that this deep healing begins. That we must first see each other as primarily humans, without categorizing, in order to appreciate the fullness and diversity of every individual: our respective cultures, ancestries, and histories. And it is only from this place of fullness and heart that we can truly feel into and attempt to remedy the oppression, injustice, and trauma placed on groups of individuals as a result of societal categorization. Cultivating this ability to feel, especially when it is difficult to do so, is another area where psychedelics can help. The transcendent and sometimes challenging nature of the experience tends to imbue its practitioners with an increased capacity to work with and accept emotional fluctuations, the unknown, fear, and even death. In other words, an increased capacity to interface with the totality of reality without shying away from the more challenging or difficult aspects of life. Robin Carhart-Harris and a team of scientists recently conducted two studies of psychedelic use in ceremonial and non-ceremonial settings that support this claim. In both settings, they found a decrease in suicidal ideation, depression, and experiential avoidance—“thoughts or behaviors that are intended to avoid or suppress aversive states.” Their research article, published by Frontiers in Psychiatry, can be found here. As we move into deeper levels of societal and ecological collapse, decreasing experiential avoidance becomes increasingly important. We will need every tool possible to help us accept this troubling reality in its fullness, to not fall complacent as the world falls around us, and to help us realize that the systems that created this storm will not get us out of this storm. From here, we can begin to dream of a new world and act with the urgency and energy that is required. This is no easy feat, which leads us to our final mention of psychedelics. Their well-known ability to generate creativity, revelation, and thinking that transcends the status quo is the ultimate boon for a civilization in dire need of systemic change. To survive, we will need to reimagine every aspect of our collective existence—food systems, health and medical systems, economic systems, policing and prison systems, political systems, what we define as a good and meaningful life, and what it means to be individuals as a part of the whole—and begin to align it with the life-bearing and regenerative sustenance of the natural world, with heart and humanity, respect and dignity. The Earth is calling for this, every living being is calling for this, and our souls are calling for this. We all sense the immensity of what is happening, the challenges at hand, and what’s at stake. No longer can we turn a blind eye. The time has come to reach out to your neighbors and rebuild community resilience and adaptability; to grow your own food and medicine and sharpen your survival skills; to examine every single action of your day and make sure it aligns with your values; to live in integrity and move away from anything that’s not serving you, us, or Earth; to tap into your imaginative spirit; to re-wild yourself and our ecosystems; and to interrelate with authenticity, vulnerability, and radical honesty in order to see each other as fully human, appreciate our differences, and move through conflict when it arises. Who will have the will power and energy to give it a final shot, to dig deep and take action instead of letting complacency dig our collective grave? You will. We will. We must, in order to adapt and survive. This is the imperative of life, of existence. Find it in you, in all the living beings that surround you. Grasp it, breath it, savor it, revere it, and seek to protect it. Existence has never been guaranteed, though it has always been a gift. A gift that we get to experience so long as we appreciate, understand, and orient ourselves as an ever-changing part of it. Every single one of us bears a personal responsibility to perpetuate and protect this gift of life and we each have a sphere of influence that surrounds us. It will not be a single event, technology, or policy that solves this crisis. It will be an inner transformation that instigates a trillion acts and choices. A transformation that Janet expressed so clearly to me around that fire, “to love life, to be and do the best we can. All the time. Now. Urgently. For ourselves, for others, for Earth.” The time has come.
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Post by Admin on Oct 23, 2020 9:59:29 GMT
DMT alters cortical travelling waveselifesciences.org/articles/59784Abstract Psychedelic drugs are potent modulators of conscious states and therefore powerful tools for investigating their neurobiology. N,N, Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) can rapidly induce an extremely immersive state of consciousness characterized by vivid and elaborate visual imagery. Here, we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of the DMT-induced altered state from a pool of participants receiving DMT and (separately) placebo (saline) while instructed to keep their eyes closed. Consistent with our hypotheses, results revealed a spatio-temporal pattern of cortical activation (i.e. travelling waves) similar to that elicited by visual stimulation. Moreover, the typical top-down alpha-band rhythms of closed-eyes rest were significantly decreased, while the bottom-up forward wave was significantly increased. These results support a recent model proposing that psychedelics reduce the ‘precision-weighting of priors’, thus altering the balance of top-down versus bottom-up information passing. The robust hypothesis-confirming nature of these findings imply the discovery of an important mechanistic principle underpinning psychedelic-induced altered states.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2020 23:07:47 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2020 20:26:52 GMT
Rapid and sustained decreases in suicidality following a single dose of ayahuasca among individuals with recurrent major depressive disorder: results from an open-label trial Richard J Zeifman 1, Nikhita Singhal 2, Rafael G Dos Santos 3 4, Rafael F Sanches 3 4, Flávia de Lima Osório 3 4, Jaime E C Hallak 3 4, Cory R Weissman 2 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33118052/Abstract Rationale: Suicidality is a major public health concern with limited treatment options. Accordingly, there is a need for innovative interventions for suicidality. Preliminary evidence indicates that treatment with the psychedelic ayahuasca may lead to decreases in depressive symptoms among individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD). However, there remains limited understanding of whether ayahuasca also leads to reductions in suicidality. Objective: To examine the acute and post-acute effect of ayahuasca on suicidality among individuals with MDD. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of an open-label trial in which individuals with recurrent MDD received a single dose of ayahuasca (N = 17). Suicidality was assessed at baseline; during the intervention; and 1, 7, 14, and 21 days after the intervention. Results: Among individuals with suicidality at baseline (n = 15), there were significant acute (i.e., 40, 80, 140, and 180 min after administration) and post-acute (1, 7, 14, and 21 days after administration) decreases in suicidality following administration of ayahuasca. Post-acute effect sizes for decreases in suicidality were large (Hedges' g = 1.31-1.75), with the largest effect size 21 days after the intervention (g = 1.75). Conclusions: When administered in the appropriate context, ayahuasca may lead to rapid and sustained reductions in suicidality among individuals with MDD. Randomized, double-blind studies with larger sample sizes are needed to confirm this early finding. Keywords: Ayahuasca; Intervention; Major depressive disorder; Suicidality.
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2020 15:21:22 GMT
Psychedelics, Madness, & Awakening: Harm Reduction and Future Visions Digital Conference, beginning January 2021 www.psychedelicsmadnessawakening.com/This event will rethink the contentious relationship between madness, psychedelics, and awakening. Difficult psychedelic trips and extreme emotional states can create profound opportunities for growth, but their healing and spiritual potential is often pathologized as psychotic or manic instead. Early research described psychedelics as “psychotomimetic” – imitating psychosis, suggesting complex possibilities now overlooked. Despite some people diagnosed with psychosis, bipolar, or schizophrenia using psychedelics for recovery, today madness is excluded from psychedelic therapy and left outside the emerging conversation. As psychedelics re-enter mainstream psychiatry, it is a timely moment to open a dialogue and critical examination of the relationship between psychedelics and madness. Join us to break open a vital multi-perspective conversation on psychedelics that questions the medicalization of madness and explores community harm reduction responses to spiritual awakening.
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Post by Admin on Nov 5, 2020 19:34:20 GMT
The Colonization of the Ayahuasca Experience“If someone is from the Amazon,” says Evgenia Fotiou, an anthropologist who studies Western ayahuasca usage, “they bring some legitimacy” to an ayahuasca ritual. daily.jstor.org/the-colonization-of-the-ayahuasca-experience/About a decade ago, popular interest in ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew, started taking off in Europe and North America, driven by high profile tales of its supposed mentally transformative healing powers. Lindsay Lohan, for example, notably claimed that it helped her let go of “the wreckage of [her] past life,” resolving old traumas and allowing her to move forward. Responding to these accounts—and building on the overall revival of scientific interest in the potential medicinal uses of psychedelics—researchers have started looking into ayahuasca’s potential to help treat everything from addiction to depression to eating disorders to post traumatic stress disorder. Although provisional, the results of this research have been promising enough that a few labs are exploring ways of isolating the psychedelics’ active compounds, turning them into medications with minimal side effects. Others are exploring ways of integrating ayahuasca and other psychedelics into mainstream Western therapy settings and practices. A few have even reportedly started to offer underground therapy sessions using psychedelic substances—which are, to be clear, illegal. Yet few people interested in ayahuasca see the value in pharmahuasca pills, or in tripping in therapists’ offices. Western medical approaches, most of them feel, are too sterile, too cut off from holistic views of world. Many want to take part in what they see as authentic, traditional ayahuasca rituals, whose structures they believe will give them the insight and guidance they need to unlock the brew’s true healing potential. That’s why thousands of Westerners visit Iquitos, Peru, the epicenter of ayahuasca ritual tourism, every year. It’s also why the people who organize regular ayahuasca rituals in major American and European cites often get a shaman from the Amazon, ayahuasca’s homeland, to run them. Shaman being a catch-all Western term for a broad variety of specialists, ranging from curanderos—folk healers steeped in highly local herbal and spiritual traditions—to ayahuasqueros—specialists in brewing and serving ayahuasca who are not necessarily healers—to vegetalistas—distinctly mestizo-syncretistic folk plant healers—and beyond. Peter Gorman, one of the first writers to cover ayahuasca in America, says enthusiasts have been touring Amazonian shamans around the country since at least 1994. (Gorman married into an Amazonian river tribe community and has done and run ayahuasca rituals many times.) “If someone is from the Amazon,” adds Evgenia Fotiou, an anthropologist who studies Western ayahuasca usage, “they bring some legitimacy” to an ayahuasca ritual, at least in the participants’ eyes. But the widespread belief in the power of authentic, traditional rituals and the shamans who led them is problematic at best, outright dangerous at worst. For starters, there is no true or authentic ayahuasca ritual, or even set of rituals. But more importantly, says Rubén Orellana, a Peruvian archaeologist and curanderof, ayahuasca traditions were developed for people coming from specific cultural backgrounds. As such, even though the brew itself, and even some of the ritual practices surrounding it, may have similar raw effects on anyone, they will likely generate very different overall experiences—different risks and benefits—for outsiders than for insiders. At best, this means that many of Westerners may be shelling out large sums for experiences they are not well situated to fully understand or benefit from. In the process, they contribute to the wanton commodification and fetishization of the cultures whose practices they wish to insinuate themselves into, or to coopt. At worst, it means that some individuals may expose themselves, through their misreadings of context and content, to serious physical or mental dangers. * * * Ayahuasca is just one of many names—the Quechua name, to be precise—for a concoction of Banisteriopsis caapi vines and leaves from the Psychotria viridis shrub or, at times, related plants. The former contains an inhibitor that allows humans to fully digest the psychedelic DMT contents of the latter, which produce powerful hallucinations, disorientation, and, in some, a sense of disembodiment or even ego death—a dissolution of the sense of a distinct self. Although researchers consider ayahuasca largely safe, many fear that taking it could exacerbate serious mental health issues, like schizophrenia. The psychedelic researcher Charles Grob notes its effects on drinkers’ serotonin levels also often interact poorly with any selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants in their systems. The resultant palpitations and seizures can be lethal. The brew also increases most drinkers’ blood pressure and heart rates, so ayahuasca is not always safe for people with cardiovascular issues. Doctors urge caution in approaching the brew among individuals with fat metabolism issues or glaucoma, as well pregnant people, and those on medications like dextromethorphan. Ayahuasca has been implicated in the deaths of almost a dozen Peruvian tourists, and in a rising number of calls to American poison control centers. These concerns have led many established providers to start screening potential drinkers for health issues before letting them take part in rituals, and in some cases to keep allopathic doctors on call during sessions to respond to any unexpected medical emergencies that develop. Dozens of Amazonian cultures from Bolivia to Colombia to Venezuela, both indigenous and mestizo, have used ayahuasca for centuries, even millennia. Recognition of this heritage has led to the piecemeal legalization of ayahuasca drinking rituals in countries worldwide—including the U.S., which issued religious exemptions to its draconian drug control laws for a couple of Amazonian-rooted churches. However, these cultures do not all brew ayahuasca in the same way. Some spike it with additional hallucinogens like Brugmansia suaveolens, for example. “There are a dozen, two dozen, three dozen ways to make and consume it,” Gorman explains. Variations hinge on factors as minute and particular as “whether the leaves are cooked, whether it’s cold infusion, whether it’s steeped for 12 or 20 hours, or whatever. Different groups use it differently.” Nor do they all consume it in the same concentrations or dosages, or for the same reasons. On a trip up the Purus River in 1968, the scientists Jan-Erik Lindgren and Laurent Rivier noted that in most of the Pano-speaking indigenous communities they visited, only healers consumed the brew to interface with a spiritual plane of existence, to figure out the metaphysical causes of, and to help resolve, patients’ illnesses. But in two communities, one Pano-speaking, one non-Pano-speaking, average men (and very rarely women) just drank ayahuasca together in casual settings, with little ritual, to bond socially through their visionary experiences. Two years earlier, the botanist Melvin L. Bristol noted that healers in some Sibundoy communities in Colombia used ayahuasca for spiritual diagnoses. But he also observed that both healers and everyday men and women used the brew to learn more about nature and the spirits within it, or even to psychically visit family while out on long trips and feeling lonely. The reasons for using ayahuasca, the rituals surrounding that usage, and the frequency of usage seem to change over time in many communities to fit the needs of the moment. Some groups likely even gave up and later re-adopted ayahuasca drinking over the centuries. The ethnobotanist Glenn H. Shepard points out that anthropologists actually observed at least two indigenous communities (of Matsigenka and Yora peoples, respectively) developing novel ayahuasca traditions in the twentieth century. This constant evolution—an apparently situational change in rituals—anthropologists argue, is a hallmark of traditional Amazonian beliefs and cultural practices. When people describe authentic, traditional ayahuasca rituals in the West today, they are usually actually describing something like the rituals practiced by indigenous and mestizo communities in and around Iquitos, which the medical anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios and others observed in the late 1960s, and documented extensively in Western journals and media outlets in the ‘70s and ‘80s: Groups of people who often did not know each other met up in clearings or at the homes of local curanderos, and they all drank ayahuasca together. They abstained from eating certain foods, like fats and salts, for one or more days beforehand. The curanderos often lightly hit them with a branch right before they drank. Once the brew hit, the curanderos sang icaros, special songs, and often shook a leaf-bundle chakapa rattle. The curanderos also at times smoked, and let participants smoke, narcoticized tobacco and sucked at points of symbolic or literal pain on their bodies. The trip itself could last anywhere from two to ten straight hours. “There was, and still is, an ayahuasca curandero on every couple of blocks in Iquitos,” Gorman says. After ayahuasca tourism started to take off in the late 90s—and especially in the mid-aughts—upwards of 100 tourist-focused ayahuasca centers sprung up on the edges or just outside of town as well. Alan Shoemaker, an American who visited Iquitos in the 90s, organized one of the first shaman’s tours in the U.S., trained as a curandero, and now runs a center near Iquitos, says that local police tell him “they believe that on any given Friday night 10 percent of the population is in a ceremony.” That’s out of a metro area population of about 500,000 Peruvians. * * * Most people who take ayahuasca, regardless of their background or the particular ritual context in which they take it, report similar basic experiences: Soon after drinking the brew, they get nauseous and often vomit and void their bowels. Many users view this as a beneficial purge of one’s system. They may start to sweat and shake and feel their heartbeat race. They may even get agitated, feeling tense, dizzy, or uncoordinated. Then they usually see colors and geometric shapes for a few minutes (although it may seem like much longer) before gradually moving on to witness varied hallucinations, often of humanoid and animal figures. They may also get a sense of being visited or inhabited by an alien consciousness, of moving beyond their bodies, of flying through diverse and fantastical landscapes, or any other number of hallucinatory experiences. “But the way we interpret” these experiences, says Fotiou, “the way we talk about them, the story we tell about them, is definitely shaped by our cultures,” our distinctive backgrounds. Since the 1960s, Western scientists have recognized that one’s mindset and physical setting play a major role in shaping one’s experiences on psychedelics. The psychologist Timothy Leary and his LSD acolytes did a lot to popularize this notion, as well as to popularize and liberate psychedelics more genrally. To wit, the unwitting victims of the American Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-Ultra studies in the 50s and 60s on the potential of LSD and other drugs for use in mind control, interrogation, and torture projects, were hit by unexpected hallucinations, often in distressing environments. They usually had terrible experiences, at times leading to lifelong trauma. Meanwhile, artists who volunteer for studies on LSD’s effects on creativity, are prepped for their experiences, and undergo them in calm and pleasant contexts, often have positive experiences of the same raw physiological effects, and maybe even the same basic hallucination patterns. [Rest in Link]
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