For every person who tries mushrooms at a treatment center, there’s another who ends up in a poorly run mockery of a psilocybin ceremony. False shamans have mass-marketed ayahuasca retreats, where they not only take business from the indigenous people who have inherited these practices but also cause untoward spiritual harm to patrons. Peyote is now a vulnerable species due to over-harvesting.
Furthermore, many psychedelics have now been far removed from their deeply spiritual context. What was once a highly sacred, interconnected act is now promoted as a way to work more efficiently or line the pockets of pharmaceutical companies.
Those of us born and raised in Western cultures simply can’t access the generational knowledge on these plants possessed by indigenous cultures. And while that’s not to say we shouldn’t do them, it does mean we should approach them with more reverence, appreciation, and respect. Failing to do so has already led to missteps that are only becoming harder to rectify.
Indigenous people have been largely left in the dust in psychedelic spaces. They are missing from conferences, retreats, studies, therapy centers, and – most notably – the profits from this booming industry. They have to fight harder for their right to practice their traditions, and they are at a higher risk of cartel violence due to their access to coveted plants.
There’s a stark disconnect between indigenous and Western perspectives of psychedelic use, as well. Indigenous cultures viewed plant medicines as a way to deepen ties to the community and planet, in societies that were free of capitalism and materialism. They had “shamans,” or guides, who trained their entire lives to facilitate such experiences and help other tribe members integrate them into their lives.
At its core, indigenous psychedelic practice is rooted in community, ecology, ancestry, and tradition.
In Western society, however, psychedelic use tends to be very individualistic. We may indulge as a way to fix ourselves, but we lack the shared communal encounters. We typically take them on our own or with a few friends, who likely don’t have much more knowledge on these substances than we do. It can make trying them confusing, or worse, frightening and harmful. Even mushroom therapy facilitators in the United States only have a couple of years of training (which comes with a very Western point of view) before getting licensed to oversee patient use.
Indigenous researcher Yuria Celidwen spoke on the subject to the BBC last year, stating
It’s not the molecule itself, it is the larger constellation of relationships that are created that brings the healing. In the West, we often observe a peak of well-being right after the initial exposure to the medicine, but it isn’t sustained because there is no collective context to the hallucinogenic experience. And because of that, you just risk creating another addiction because people keep going back to get the same sense of magic or wonder.
That sense of magic, as life-changing as it can be, can have vast impacts on the human soul. Indigenous people have already mastered it – and Western civilization is playing catch-up. Jules Evans, who runs the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, notes:
Some indigenous American tribes have been using psychedelic plants for centuries. They have maps, guides, a deep familiarity with altered states of consciousness. Secular people, on the whole, do not. As a result, people can be bewildered by the experience and confused as to how to integrate it into a materialistic worldview. This existential confusion can last months or years, and the person who comes out on the other side may be very different to the person before.
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