Speaking my mind on changing your mind
Psychedelics are, or can be at least, a doorway to a land of wonder and revelation. I’m not confident that in the hands of the medical bureaucracy and the commercial establishment they will stay unblemished. The deeper genius of psychedelics is their ability to totally undermine materialism and comfortable categories by blasting us into ridiculously remote realities. The medical model and the commercial model will never tolerate that. They will find a way to restrict, contain and sanitize. Exactly how, I don’t know, but no system will deliberately destroy itself, it would rather consume and digest the systems around it.
Today’s psychedelic cottage industry is one of shamans, would-be shamans, white coats, professional sitters, and decidedly unprofessional ones. Once psychedelics become even quasi-legal, the floodgates will open and the forces of medicalization, bureaucratization and monetization will bear down on us full force. Now is the time to watch out, as various commercial enterprises are already preparing the future for us. Having conquered and tamed the external wildernesses, the internal wild lands may be the next for the chopping block. Some will say that the spirit realms are way too enormous for us to ruin, but we humans have developed a remarkable capacity to get things twisted in almost any dimension. The model I like best is the one quietly in use in underground treatment right now, where the sitter makes the environment as home-like as possible (like doing it in someone’s home for instance) and then be the one to gladly hold space. Being present, not promoting your own ideas and theories, and seeing to the every need one someone who is quietly tripping behind an eye mask is a demanding task and it goes on for six or seven hours. It’s probably not the cup of tea of psychologists bent on fixing symptoms and having clever insights.
Original Article (After The Medicine):
Speaking my mind on changing your mind
Artwork Fair Use: Madeira Santana
