The Plant Medicine Path
Jeroen
Not all those who wander are lostNetherlands Veteran
Lately I have been looking a lot at the plant medicine path of the curandero’s of the Amazon jungle. It seems to me there is a lot more to health than the Western medicine people believe. Western medicine has learned a lot about the body, in amazing detail, but often there is only so much they can do, basically they want to prescribe you pills.
The Plant Medicine Path is a whole different tradition, based on ceremonies and ingesting usually Ayahuasca mixed with other ‘helper’ plants. It is done together, in a group context, and it is meant to treat the whole human being - emotional, energetic, spiritual and body. It has an amazing track record in treating depression, anxiety, addiction and other psycho material conditions. There have been numerous cases of spontaneous remission of cancer, there are a lot of these mind-body effects that show up.
It makes me wonder whether a natural medicine that works with the body might not have been a better tradition…
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Not sure how much better and worse apply in this case. I've said previously that I had a pretty bad accident 15 years ago that would have left me dead or seriously disabled without the intervention of the hospital. While there they discovered I had very high cholesterol and prescribed a statin, I had a reaction to it as well as a subsequent more natural option. I wound up relying on diet to bring my cholesterol down.
In one way western medicine was better, in another it was worse.
In general though I think the better way to live is to focus on what brings health than what cures disease. But that probably depends somewhat on any individual's specific circumstance.
The thing is, there is a whole area of human experience which modern life has excised. Humans used to live in tribes or villages, small community groups where you worked with and knew people, where there were Elders and Curanderos as people in charge.
In a modern suburb, everybody goes off and does their own work, you hardly speak to the people you live next to, and you spend your evenings in front of the television too tired to do anything else. The only person you know who is in charge is your boss at work, and he hardly has your best interests at heart.
It strikes me that the original, tribal way of living was a lot more social, a lot more human, than the post Industrial Revolution setup designed for us by engineers.
The way its been put that I like that I've mentioned before is that humans are living with a brain evolved for world version 1.0 and we're living in world version 5.0.
I do think it could be said that it was a mistake for humans to have started agriculture and then "civilization". That said, we can't really go back and we've learned and developed a lot of things that do make life better. I think its more about learning the lessons of what sort of order suits human disposition best and developing new systems that can better integrate them. And scale them up, that might be the biggest challenge. Society is easy at the level of a few dozen and much harder at the scale of millions.
That is not a bad way of putting it. Cars and a city designed around them makes for a fundamentally different society than one in which the bullock cart is the primary mode of transport. But the thing is, it’s not impossible to design living arrangements today which are suitable for our brains… for example, if you start adding more public spaces to towns, you create more interactions between people and you have a more tightly integrated social fabric.
You of course also need the traditions for creating social interactions — if you have a communal hall for ceremonies and dances, but no tradition of these events then the space might remain empty. So in a way what I’d like to see is “community seeds” for activities which involve a subset of the people.
I just wanted to collect and link to a few other topics we’ve had about Ayahuasca in the past…
https://newbuddhist.com/discussion/27451/how-to-change-your-mind
https://newbuddhist.com/discussion/27405/gabor-mate-and-ayahuasca
https://newbuddhist.com/discussion/27333/about-mind-altering-experiences
There is also some even older posts on the forum going back to 2010 where they discuss whether Ayahuasca fits with the Fifth Precept. I found the argument that since dimethyltryptamine (DMT, the active ingredient in Ayahuasca) is native to the body it is not a drug but a natural function quite interesting.
The other thing that I find interesting from the plant medicine path is the training for curandero’s using dieta or diets, that you eat and drink a plant exclusively for a period of time to get to know it’s spirit.
I was just reading back the ‘Gabor Maté and Ayahuasca’ thread, there is a lot of interesting stuff discussed in it… here are a few points of what was discussed and what leads on to it:
I will have to go back to Gabor Maté’s book on trauma and the toxic culture, and possible ways of resolving it. I still have it at home.
But ayahuasca was one point on that compass. I find it really interesting how many of the YouTube influencers have done an ayahuasca trip and made a video about it, usually saying that it was among the most important experiences of their lives.
Here is a short set of reports from Gabor Maté’s trip to Peru with a whole series of medical practitioners…
Of course, the other thing that modern life has excised is the respect for the invisible world. Most indigenous people hold that there are two worlds, a visible world and an invisible world. The invisible world is mediated by the shaman, but in Europe all the remaining shamanic practitioners and wise women were killed off by a thousand years of Roman imperialism and the subsequent Catholic Inquisition.
That led to an investment in the physical world, the European Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution which spread to North America, and has lately spread by successive phases of globalisation to much of the rest of the world. The understanding of the invisible world is a social stream that seems to be dying out, and with it a respect for the spirits of wild plants and animals.
Without a respect for the invisible world, can we truly understand our own mind and being? The mind affects the body profoundly, as Gabor Maté’s book on trauma also showed, so do not the spirits that we perceive also affect the mind and the body?
I read the article, and it doesn’t so much say that Maté is wrong, as that his take on things is too trauma-focussed where genetic and other factors also play a role. That might be fair comment, but the fact of the matter is that the current epidemic of mental ill-health is something relatively recent, and didn’t afflict past generations in say the seventies, eighties or nineties, although it started to build in those times.
Similarly, the diagnosis of ADHD didn’t exist when I was a child, and more to the point, the disease didn’t either. So it’s very unlikely genetic factors caused it, it’s more likely to be dietary or environmental. That is, if it isn’t the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual (Version V) over medicalising a normal condition for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry.
But I find Maté’s message overall to be resonant and full of meaning. Since I retired from commercial work, I have had a lot of time to examine myself, and I have definitely found traces of both trauma and extreme personal reactions to traumatic events in my life. To me, Maté’s book makes a lot of sense.
Not sure I get where you're coming from. I imagine people were more traumatized in the past than they are today, from wars and famine and physical abuse, etc, etc. So if the cause of mental illness is trauma why is it getting worse?
What I think you're saying is you think the main cause of the rise in mental illness is modern culture? If so, do we then wait until we fix all of society until people can be happy and fulfilled?
Edit: You're going through a lot right now, I don't want to be another source of stress in your life debating something. If Mate speaks to you and you find him helpful, that's good, dispositions vary and his approach probably is better for some than others. The medicine needs to fit the patient and all that.
I guess in general though I feel like his approach causes more suffering than it cures and feel a need to point out critiques and alternative approaches.
It’s hard to make any comments across generations, because of course we only have the context of our own generation. But from stories my mother has told, some of her trauma was due to poverty and lack of care, while much of the support she received was from her full-time stay-at-home mother. The trauma might be less now, but the support is also massively less, most mothers these days have a job.
I do think modern culture is to blame for much of the rise in mental illness. It’s not an accident that mental illness rates are highest in strongly capitalist countries such as the United States and Australia. The general mindset of the people is less forgiving, you’re more reminded that you are on your own to pay your way. It has a lot to do with the politics of a country as well — politics are inherently divisive, and the more emphasis is given to it the more there is an us-versus-them culture.
It’s all very different from an indigenous culture, where people follow a group of elders.
What would you propose as a solution to get there?
Also, small tight-knit communities is a very conservative principle. Think of the Amish. It reminds me of a couple TED talks, one was on radical self reliance, can't remember the other radical titled idea that reinvented the wheel. It was basically poor communities weren't getting the help they need from government so they should instead rely on community centered activation and reach out to support each other more. It was so left coded, but was 100% exactly what small town conservatives have been saying forever.
It’s interesting. When I was about nine years old someone asked me a similar question, and I answered, why don’t we limit companies to have a maximum size of about 200 people? Of course it is quite a drastic solution but it would immediately change how people approach living and working together.
This might be interesting for people, it’s not directly about plant medicine but it is about the ills of the Western society, which the indigenous cultures of South America do not suffer from to the same degree.
I find it shocking what Mate says about the Canadian indigenous populations:
“Back before colonisation they really knew how to parent. How to create an environment that leads to confident, energetic, socially-connected individuals. But they have been subjected to years and years of education in religious and governmental boarding schools, where they were physically and sexually abused. The result is that they now pass on this trauma to their own children, and it’s difficult to find an indigenous young girl or teen who hasn’t been abused.”
Back on the topic of plant medicine, I watched this docu about a group of Mormons who went to take ayahuasca with Hamilton Souther’s group Blue Morfo Tours. It’s interesting how the wording and the language around the medicine takes on a shape more palatable to Christianity — no mention of Mother Ayahuasca or spirits here.
I also think to a certain extent Enoch the narrator missed out on the full Aya experience, he talks about controlling his purging for instance, which doesn’t feel like the right approach to me.
This is a choice I still have. I have the money to do it, and the time. My father (who is still in Intensive Care) suggested Egypt to me, as a holiday for both of us some years back, and at the time I thought, a lot of these things are photographically well explored, do I really need to go? But I still find the question compelling.
My only exposure to 'plant medicine' was through a girl at a long-term group-therapy, who suffered from depression.
She did ayahuasca with some shamans, and reported tremendous benefits.
As these things go, then she wanted more and to my knowledge did it two more times. After the second time, she visibly deteriorated. I don't remember what happened the third time.
Personally, I firmly stay away from such things, prefering lifestyle solutions.
But if anyone does do it, then I agree with Shunryu Suzuki: 'when you get the message, put down the phone'.
It occurs to me that perhaps I should just be happy with what I’ve got, and not go chasing after big insights. There are a lot of things I can be grateful for in my life.
I’m somewhat fascinated with the ideas of an invisible world. Mainly because of my visions on the edge of sleep, which seem to me strong personal evidence for such a world. It is just my personal opinion of course, but to my mind the shamanistic view of the world makes a lot of sense.
Going by my experiences, the invisible world is not much like the visible world. It can be different each time, the way you see it is not constant, though you might revisit places.
Book (based on Tibetan Book of the Dead)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychedelic_Experience
Should be easy to get.
LSD still available? Most probably even though a class A drug in UK...
You might be able to find a friend who can guide you IF going ahead. A good idea.
Magic Mushrooms are currently treated the same as heroin or LSD and are class A drugs but very recently (Oct 2021) the government was looking to change this due to the apparent benefits from treating certain illnesses with psilocybin and psilocin, the active components of Magic Mushrooms. These include chronic depression and PTSD. The research is ongoing but they do seem to be proving useful in the medical field.
https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/liberty-caps/
You seem to be heading this way. Let us know how you get on...
May the Force Be with you
At the moment too busy with my dads cremation and my moms health. Will let you know if anything changes. Haha 😝
Interesting discussion between Rogan and Michael Pollan, touching on plants, diet, caffeine, psychedelics, legalisation, and other things.
I haven't heard much from Pollen in a few years, but I remember liking what he had to say back then. His guidelines for food is what I try to follow to this day.
Another form of Green Magick from a British artist
http://emcox.co.uk/
Plant power
I came across someone on another forum who was talking about “the well-crazy psychedelic shit that is going down in some places” and he posted this link…
https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/dmt-on-mega-yachts-inside-the-psychedelic
It struck me, to be combining psychedelics with other drugs like cocaine and amphetamines or to be doing the strongest substances like 5-meo-DMT weekly when it takes most people six months to a year to get over a single experience is crazy and self destructive.
You have to ask yourself what hole in your life are you trying to fill with that behaviour. What the modern science of addiction tells us is that for the most part addiction is a response to something crucial lacking in your daily life, that if you are happy and fulfilled you will not go looking for substances. And merely being wealthy does not lead to happiness or fulfilment.
There are better ways to handle a psychoactive substance, and that is to learn and to cure. The shamanic path that the Peruvian curanderos follow is to learn a plant substance, to diet it, and in that way to learn to handle its spirit, for the purposes of learning and curing. It is a spiritual path, of curing those who are spiritually ill.
It’s quite interesting why these kinds of chemicals occur in the plant world. Pollan’s speculation is that there must be some evolutionary advantage. His first impulse was to see if it would serve as a defense mechanism, but then what to make of psilocybin mushrooms, where the substance is concentrated in the fruiting body of the fungus, meant to be eaten, and not in the mycelium network, which would need to be defended.
I came across this wonderful short docu by a team at The Guardian, about the indigenous people of the Amazon in Ecuador. Ayahuasca is part of their people’s heritage, and the docu talks about how taking the medicine out of the rainforest makes it more self centred and less able to heal. It talks about how western ayahuasqueros don’t really maintain the connection with nature when they go back to their country and to the cities.
Just wondering what your takeaway from this path has been in your life so far?
A question worth asking. It’s been a few years since I first heard of ayahuasca, the curanderos who make it, and the indigenous traditions connected to it. I approached it at first with curiosity, and later with reverence for its medicinal properties.
The thing is, I am ‘medically advised not to partake’, otherwise I might have tried taking the tea myself. So you could say I am still ignorant of the core experience of the plant medicine path. I have informed myself as well as possible about it, from videos and books.
Just that much has brought me to realise how divorced I am from nature. I live in a concrete box. I get food from the supermarket. I buy clothes online. At most I bicycle through the park, passing the place where the trees feel welcoming.
One thing I hear is that the experience of ayahuasca has brought many who drink it to believe in a spirit world, and my own experience of occasional visions has inclined me likewise. So there are certain correspondences between those who have walked this path and myself.
Our modern world has been stripped of its visionary influences, its mythological components, by science and the tendency to investigate and disassemble. Those of us who do still have those experiences are not helped by modern mental health institutions, which encourage us to see these as hallucinations only and stick to a medical and materialist view of the world.
I find in the indigenous traditions a different wisdom, a rich tapestry of story and meaning linked to a much older world, where there were bards and storytellers and shamans and elders. These kinds of people are not found so much anymore in modern cities.
In short, it has given me a framework of understanding with which to approach my visions which was absent from Buddhism. The concepts of spirits and how the curanderos work with them fits my experience of the metaphysical model better than any other belief I have come across.
The idea of singing to them, for example… the curanderos of the Shipibo people sing short songs called icaro’s to the spirits and to the people, and with this they come to manipulate the trance states that affect people who drink ayahuasca.
I had a friend here in the states for a few years who was into shamanism. I think he had some formal training, but our friendship wasn't about that so we never talked much about it. My point is maybe there is someone in your area that practices something similar to connect with?
I’ve done some searches and came up with a practitioner couple called The White Feather giving sessions in Belgium. Not exactly my area then, but better than nothing. I followed their newsletter for a while.
I liked this… Alan Watts on psychedelics - the most interesting parts are at the end.
Have you heard of the sound ‘aum’? Apparently it is the sound the universe makes, and if you can hear it in your innermost silence, then it means that you are accepted, that you have found the door. Then all you have to do is listen and relax, be quite passive.
I was looking into Shinto and animism today, fascinating beliefs. Animism was a core facet of most indigenous beliefs around the world — the idea that the world was ensouled with spirit and alive. That rocks, mountains, rivers all housed spirits.
Indeed. I believe we can find value in ideas of even rocks having 'medicine', teaching. Everything becomes sacred. Special. In vajrayana, blessing the river nagas (dragons) is one of many, some including me have participated in.
I was cycling to the Albert Heijn (our nearest supermarket) a few days ago, it was a sunny day and I had taken the bicycle path through the park. I came across a stand of trees whose shadows crossed the path, and as I went from the light to the shadowed I felt a wonderful coolness, accompanied by a sense of gladness and welcoming.
These trees had spirit, consciousness, and in that moment they and me were connected.
In my earliest formal Buddhist Path... Food/nutrition was medicine.
https://elissagoodman.com/lifestyle/eating-for-spiritual-connection/
Now as I eat the best I can (time for a late breakfast soon), I remind everyone:
https://buddhaweekly.com/who-is-medicine-buddha-king-of-lapis-lazuli-light-and-how-can-we-attain-healing-blessings/
Many years ago, a medicine man from an American Indiginous tribe realized that traditional medicine did not work on what he called the "White Man's deseases". His answer was to use traditional medicine on the traditional deseases and maladies and "White Man's medicine" on "White Man's deseases". The approach worked, of course.
I feel that a mixture of natural, plant based medicines and "Modern Medicine" is a valid approach.
Of course, maintaining a well bala nced dietary and good exercise program fitting your goals and needs also helps greatly.
The key, aswith almost everything, is finding a healthy balance.
The Middle Way, the easiest yet most difficult path, the path of the open mind seeking without prejudging, observing with clear eyes. Set aside the facade.
Peace to all
I thought this might be a valid addition to this topic…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02800-5
It’s a study called “Reconsidering evidence for psychedelic-induced psychosis: an overview of reviews, a systematic review, and meta-analysis of human studies”.
This is about those with pre-existing psychotic disorders being excluded from psychedelic studies on the basis of drug induced psychosis risks, but it’s also an indication of the prevalence of drug-induced psychosis overall, which seems to be a very low risk at 0.6% in randomly controlled trials.
This was good, about the plant medicine path…
I recently came across something called a ‘cacao ceremony’, which is a ceremonial partaking of pure raw cacao, which stimulates the heart centres.
I still find this a fascinating idea. It basically means that everything is like a human, from the trees in the forest to the grasses in the delta. And that the difference is not one of soul or luminous quality or spirit, but mostly mind and the capacity to express.
The idea that man was unique and superior came first from Christian religion, I was taught in school that it was they who said God created man in his image and that he had a soul. By extension this meant that animals did not have a soul. I find this absurd, perverted.
The Buddhist approach is close to the animist one, that animals and perhaps things have souls which are reincarnated across the Six Realms. Buddhism and Shinto have co-existed in Japan for a long time, as an example that such co-existence is possible.
Listened to an interview of Paul Kingsnorth today. You may find him interesting, he's not talking about plant medicine but he is critical of modernity, using an archetype of "the machine" to frame the ways of thinking that has robbed us of human things along the way to the present world. He's hard to pin down, I don't think he has a particularly ideological perspective and seemed to have a unique perspective.
Thank you for that, I ended up watching most of the interview. He is an interesting character, he says he is a Christian and therefore he believes in external beings of evil, which they call the antichrist and which they say is trying to manifest as ‘the machine’. But then he says his literary style is one of exaggeration, which is what makes him hard to grasp, he talks a lot in archetypes and fragments of memes.
His book appears to be an attempt to understand the modern age. It puts me in mind of something that Terence McKenna used to say, that mankind as a species “extrudes technology”, as a kind of matrix within which we exist. There is an extensive discussion of AI, as a kind of ultimate manifestation of that matrix.
This is very much about a way of looking at Western civilisation as a kind of agent of creating the machine, and so in a way his book “Against the Machine” is a critique of Western civilisation.
This turned out to be not Alan Watts. It’s scary how good AI imitation of voices is getting, but there is now a disclaimer under these videos which says:
“The voice used is a synthesized voice and does not belong to Alan Watts. Our goal is to respectfully share his timeless insights in an inspiring way, with no intention to deceive or misrepresent. All opinions and interpretations expressed are solely those of the creator and do not represent the official views of Alan Watts or his family.”