Psychedelics: Healing or Satori?

[sgurrman]

It has occurred to me, reading through the literature, that the purpose of psychedelics usage is generally different between traditional shamanic societies and modern western ones. Shamans have invariably used psychoactive plants primarily in the context of healing, especially physical healing (though this may include psychic imbalances etc). Western literature, however, is full of talk of ego-loss, cosmic consciousness, communicating with the godhead, and so on. Maria Sabina, the Mexican shaman who introduced Gordon Wasson to the sacred mushroom, said that he was the first person she had met who consumed the mushroom with the purpose of experiencing god. When healing is mentioned by westerners, it is generally psychological healing, as with LSD research in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before governments decided that LSD was an extremely nasty substance that should be eliminated at all costs.

I don't know what the significance of the different perspectives is - if I did, I wouldn't be opening this thread. But it must mean something. Folk such as Terence Mckenna have stated that shamans are the real experts in this field, but their use of psychedelic substances seems to some extent different. Are these dudes so wise that they can just take cosmic unity for granted, sort of super-Buddhas? Or is it just that they don't have modern medicines? Whatever, it seems a question worth asking, especially if folk in modern industrialised societies were to look to shamanic societies for guidance and example.

Reputation Comments on this post:

	great idea for a thread
	Interesting topic

[podge]

Generally the Shaman are raised in a culture which is already immersed in spirituality, the different aspects of psychedelics such as God experiences, Cosmic unity, Deep introspection/Life review etc are experienced first hand by the users.

While western society tends to be immersed in religous dogma's and has outlawed direct experience and replaced it with a class of intermediaries such as priests who are meant to be the custodians of such knowledge, most who have investigated the subject thoroughly will agree this is not a sufficient replacement.

So for the westerner to have such an extreme experiences it is generally a huge deal, they have so many programmed beliefs and preconceived idea's that many require such a profound and powerful experience to be able to break out of the limited box of perception which they have evaluated the world and reality from all their lives.

Things like Cosmic unity.... should be "standard" ( i use the term loosely here) experiences for everyone. In the sense that cosmic consciousness is our birth right, but swim doesnt believe that drug induced cosmic unity is the same as cosmic consciousness which is described by the yogi's of the east, it is merely a method to show one's mind what is possible within the range of human experience.

Entheogens should not be regarded as the only and especially not the best way to have such experiences. They are in swims opinion better used to help one see the path of possibilities, when the path/paths have been made visible one shouldnt require them anymore. Yes it may be useful for some to engage in further experiences if it helps one on the path, but it should be relied on.

Reputation Comments on this post:

	nice explanation. sy.
	interesting viewpoints

[sgurrman]

So, in shamanic societies, entheogen use is fully integrated into a wider approach to life, based upon experience of different planes of existence, unity of all phenomena etc etc? While in western societies, the 'spiritual' is split off from the everyday already. And, if entheogens are used by a person as their only means to access other dimensions, that split can become still more profound, since they are probably engaging in marginalised activities that they should keep pretty quiet about.

Were governments to permit it, a life devoted to cosmic consciousness with use of entheogens as an integrated aspect of that would be the most exciting thing. People I have known over the years have frequently adopted an either/or approach. More specifically, I have known quite a few people whose lives were deeply affected by experience with entheogens during the late 1960s and 1970s. This practice became, in time, either confusing or leading nowhere. They therefore renounced psychedelics and went off to do yoga, meditate or whatever in a pretty full-on way. I am not convinced that many of them (the people I know) have necessarily been all that successful in their entheogen-free lives. They have sort-of got their lives together, but they are now missing the depth charge which you might need from time to time to really keep you going (especially if you are from that generation, and with age increasingly prone to being slothful, just acting out old routines blah blah blah).

[podge]

Originally Posted by sgurrman

So, in shamanic societies, entheogen use is fully integrated into a wider approach to life, based upon experience of different planes of existence, unity of all phenomena etc etc? While in western societies, the 'spiritual' is split off from the everyday already.

Indeed this is how swim perceives it. On a general note of course, many within shamanic culture some may not really understand spirituality and many people in the west are indeed aware of a spiritual side to life, its a pity many people get caught up in a "misunderstood" religous dogma and lose out on this knowledge. Swim stresses "misunderstood" as he believes many religons were indeed based on very sacred knowledge, but have over time strayed from this. Be it by mistake or by purpose i leave to the investigator.

Originally Posted by sgurrman

Were governments to permit it, a life devoted to cosmic consciousness with use of entheogens as an integrated aspect of that would be the most exciting thing.

Lol. Swim would be very cautious about society "devoting" themselves to cosmic consciousness. I see it more as a society integrating practical spiritual techniques which help people develop onto themselves, like Hoffman said about LSD : it is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be. The same can be said about non drug induced spiritual practices.

Simply a fair and open society, so long as what you believe or do doesnt interfere with anybody else in a negative way then its all good. A society which helps those who in need , a society which respects its relationship with nature, a society which doesnt rely on non-renewable sources, a society where the arts and creativity are as important as academia, a society which keeps academic education and belief systems seperate. A society based on logic essentially. Ah.....maybe someday...!

[sgurrman]

Point taken about society and cosmic consciousness. I didn't want to suggest that we all just disapear into the bliss of the ether, or anything like that. I suppose, to return to the original question of psychedelics and healing, that is what the shamanic perspective is: from one perspective, practical. If a plant entheogen helps to treat a disease, then it has an immediate value. But that healing potential is accessed through non-ordinary dimensions of experience.

[podge]

Originally Posted by sgurrman

I suppose, to return to the original question of psychedelics and healing, that is what the shamanic perspective is: from one perspective, practical. If a plant entheogen helps to treat a disease, then it has an immediate value. But that healing potential is accessed through non-ordinary dimensions of experience.

It seems it varies between 1) some people have been cured of an illness during or as a result of psychedelic experience in a shamanic fashion. And 2) The shaman enters these realms and comes back with knowledge on what illness a person has, and also comes back also with the knowledge on how to heal it or help it.

[Panthers007]

The outcome of psychedelic usage, regards for opening up to shamanic methods and psychological knowledge, will likely be the same tomorrow as it is yesterday & today. Aside from zealots who will head for the hills and open "White Bears' Shamanic Meditation Center" - most will simply incorporate what they have learned and continue their travels down life's road.

This could be handled much better if research were allowed again, and those who understood how this works could step out of the shadows and explain directly what is happening when one ingests a psychedelic, and how to allow greater understanding to take root harmlessly. Without the fanfare and bluster of a Tim Leary. Life in the shadows sucks. Fortunately places like these forums exists where knowledge can be conveyed without risking being arrested and/or shot.

[Oneiros]

Maybe the ancient cultures understood the clear, feedbacking, give and take connection between the psychological and the physical. Heal one by healing the other.

[enquirewithin]

IMHO shamans, like priests, belong in the past. Lamas and shamans wanted and abused power. Not that they may not have useful knowledge about plants, medicines and the brain.

I don't think we need modern shamanism. Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head is an example of such pretentious ideas.

As for seeing God, don't believe in him (it's usually him)-- cosmic unity, ego-loss, etc, perhaps, but we need new terminology.

[lostmente]

if you get caught up in changing terminology, then theres something deeply flawed with the whole thing.

Some people still look upon evolution and think of neo-darwinism and being related to apes, being superior to one race, racism etc etc. It's not the word's fault that religions have acted so poorly and called it act's of God.

What would the difference between God and cosmic unity be? comsic=everything unity being connected?

everything, being everywhere and everywhen (space-time)

If all were connected, and at least parts of it were aware (consider yourself aware? consider yourself part of reality?) then all of it would be aware through the elements of the whole that are aware.

[sgurrman]

I have a theory. It's about how psychedelics might be especially significant for any folk born into modern western cultures who have any interest in satori, ego-loss, unity, pushing the envelope, that sort of thing. To put my provisional conclusion first, it is that our current sense of separate ego (I think it is only a 'sense', since fixed separate ego seems in reality extremely difficult to pin down) is, historically speaking, particularly hard and rigid and fixed, so may require correspondingly strong remedies to blast it out of its ignorance.

Some of my ideas developed as a result of the years that I spent acquainting myself with Buddhist meditation and other practices, done within a modern western context. When you read early Buddhist texts, not to mention later ones relating to the development of the different forms of Tibetan Buddhism, you enter a very different world to the one that most of us inhabit. Stories about the life of the Buddha are peopled with all all sorts of strange beings - yaksas, nagas (dragon-serpentine creatures), devas (godlike beings, who the Buddha taught during the night. To dismiss all this as 'mythological appendages' is a cultural prejudice. It's all real, part and parcel of the story. The background is pagan/shamanic; nonhuman beings and different realms were real, and apparently relatively easy to access. This is a fact ignored or sidestepped by most western scholars and academics, for obvious reasons. The few remaining shamanic societies are the closest we have to a modern equivalent; here, 'trance states' seem fairly commonplace, as is journeying to other realms/dimensions.

Though with some exceptions, I have been not generally overimpressed with western-type Buddhism and what has been achieved by folk spiritually (I include myself here...). A daily dose of yoga and meditation conduces to a certain mental health, a level of self awareness, maybe, but in terms of bursting into satori....????? The contrast with what you read about the Buddha's life, when folk bump into him, are mightily impressed, and become enlightened pretty swiftly, is enormous. I began to wonder whether there was some significant difference, normally ignored, betwen the mentality of folk around the time of the Buddha and folk in modern western cultures, and this is it. The sense of an isolated separate ego has increased as the centuries have passed by. Human mentality has lost contact with nature, with non-human realms, with everything 'other', instead retreating into scientific rationalism and taking its own separate being increasingly literally.

My theory has support from several quarters. Our notion of 'ego' owes much to Freud, whose theories arose at a time when they could make sense, when people's sense of self was becoming more complex and sophisticated. Float Freud's ideas in front of a bunch of medeival people, and they would be completely baffled, since their sense of ego had not reached that degree of sophistication. There is also a book, mentioned by Terence Mckenna, called 'The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' by Julian Jaynes. I have ploughed through this tome, which is not an easy read. It was originally dismissed by various academics, but appears to be making a comeback nowadays (there is a Julian Jaynes society). The main gist of the book is that human consciousness has not been a fixed thing over many thousands of years, but underwent a radical change around 3000 years ago. It was only then that a sense of an interior self really began to emerge. Before that time, instead of referring to ourself in times of trouble or conflict, human beings would hallucinate gods, who would give us advice. In other words, the modern ego is only 3000 years old - and, I would add, continuing to become harder.

So I am saying that modern voyagers through the different levels that the cosmos has to offer need all the help that they can get. Seeing through the basic fiction of the fixed separate ego, removed and isolated from the rest of the cosmos, is the number one thing for anyone trying to get a handle on what's really going on. Psychedelic allies, plant or non-plant, might provide the depth-charge that other practices etc are not reliably able to do. I know folk out there who, by spending an afternoon in the company of a psychedelic ally, might open up more doorways than years of other 'spiritual practice' have done. Crazy or what??

Reputation Comments on this post:

Very interesting

[humdroid]

Psychedelics: Healing or Satori?

Psychedelics are a tool for healing.
the cat used to use them and has grown emotionally and psychologically in leaps and bounds

Reputation Comments on this post:

Please read site rule #19: "Explain yourself. Your opinion is of no use if you do not explain why."

[sgurrman]

I suppose that the 'Healing or Satori?' quesdtion can also be looked at through the lens of the classic 'set and setting' model. Psychedelics appear to open a doorway to a state of heightened suggestibility. Hence, if healing is your intention (part of the set), a place of healing is where you are more likely to end up. Conversely, if you have been brought up in a world of godless scientific materialism, and you have a sense that there may be more to life than all this crap, you are more likely to find yourself exactly there, ego-loss, unity, etc etc. Which is pretty much what Podge was saying in reply no. 2.....

Mind you, this doesn't quite explain why so many pimply godless characters have, over the last 50 years, taken some LSD or similar not really knowing what they are doing, and find themselves talking to the Creator of the Universe or similar before they know what's going on. Maybe we could get a bit Jungian about it, and extend the idea of 'intention' to unconscious areas of the mind. Jung posited a religious instinct. Given that western uncivilisation generally conspires to repress this instinct, it is natural that, with the floodgates opened by some psychedelic, that's what is going to rush out - a lifetime of repressed religious instinct. Difficult to prove or disprove, but an interesting angle.

I suspect that the potential value of psychedelics for healing is generally unrecognised in western uncivilisation, but that the value is great. I bumped into this dude in the supermarket recently. We got talking after he mistook the cucumber in my shpping trolley for a piece of San Pedro cactus. He told me that he had suffered on and off for many years from irritable bowel syndrome-type symptoms (don't read this before breakfast, Drugs Forum people...). A while ago he enjoyed a refreshing cactus drink. A ball of white light appeared in his body. He directed this ball of light towards his stomach-intestine area, where it seemed to function as a great healing/calming/loving agent. A pair of hands then appeared which likewise brought love to this area of his body, gently massaging it. Since then, this dude's symptoms have been greatly improved, and it has enabled him to start developing a more positive attitude towards this part of his body. He suspects that his local GP would not accept this as a valid health-giving procedure, but he feels that the curing professions are all the poorer for this.

This dude was also wondering whether any other folk had met people in supermarkets, doctor's waiting rooms, on the bus, or elsewhere, who had health-affirming stories to tell.