The Plant Medicine Path
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands 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.