This is an expansion on an earlier article I wrote several years ago. I’ve since had a lot more experience in the medicine world and after a rough count, I estimate I’ve witnessed around 2000 individual processes in a wide variety of people from all walks of life, mostly with Ayahuasca, but also with Kambo, Iboga, San pedro and psilocybin mushrooms. I’ve also been able to follow the healing paths of many of these individuals across several years, not to mention discussing these ideas with associates in the field who work intensively with these plant medicines in a wide variety of ways.
As these medicines are still relatively new to modern Western society on a mass level, we’re still grappling with how to best use them effectively and how to integrate them into our modern lives. Some of this is happening in very slow but careful clinical trials, but I’d say the bulk of it is still happening in the underground, where things are being worked out through trial and error in real time, as we feel our way towards finding a safer way to incorporate these powerful medicines into our existing culture.
Due to where we’re at on a mass consciousness level, I really do think some collateral is inevitable and perhaps unavoidable. We are throwing the equivalent of psychic dynamite into the Western collective mind, a consciousness that is for the most part extremely out of balance and disconnected from itself and it’s place in nature and the cosmos. Fallout is to be expected. Most of this is not serious collateral, but a significant fraction of people can really lose their shit out there on the frontier of consciousness change. Some of these people are able to find their way back, sometimes bringing back important maps charting undiscovered or long-forgotten territory. A small percentage of unlucky or unwise ones never make it back, and remain casualties. Some aren’t even aware that they got lost somewhere along the way. Having said that, the benefits and healings that I’ve seen people receive from these plants far outweigh the dangers by a million miles, but we are still working it out. As we navigate our way through this process, missteps can and will happen.
Below are some observations I’ve made both in my own process and those around me. A lot of these observations are deeper expansions of some of the ideas in the first article or are related to one another, like…
