Biography/Memoir

…On the popularization of ayahuasca and the climate crisis

What transformations are those? How do ayahuasca and psychedelics figure into them?

Women going from the kitchen to the board room. People of color from the woodshed to the White House. Gay people from the closet to the altar. Environmentalism becoming quite legitimately a new religion. Fifty years ago, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was an environmental victory. Nobody spoke of the biosphere or biodiversity. Now those terms are a part of the vernacular of school children. As we look at this wave of luminosity that has swept over the world in just a generation or two, it’s fascinating how the one ingredient in the recipe that has been completely expunged from the record is the fact that millions have laid prostrate before the gates of awe having taken a psychedelic … I think that all people who take a sacred plant like that should be cognizant of its origins and its cultural context. At the same time, just as those of us from the western industrial world are free and encouraged to embrace, for example, the Buddhist Dharma, we have every right to seek insights and illumination through the use of entheogenic plants, even if this implies the use of sacred substances that remain of fundamental importance to other cultures, indigenous peoples in particular. In doing so, I would certainly encourage everyone to treat these substances with the respect and reverence they deserve. And to follow the lead of those with very deep experience of such medicines. Indigenous peoples always take such substances in natural forms, which are always pharmacologically the most benign way to ingest any psychoactive drug. They recognize that the use of such sacraments is a proper thing to do, if done judiciously. They know as well that these powerful preparations have a completely ambivalent potential for good or evil, which is one reason they always envelop the participant with a protective cloak of ritual that insulates the user from the potentially challenging pharmacological and psychological impacts of the drugs.

Original Article (Reality Sandwhich):
Wade Davis on the popularization of ayahuasca and the climate crisis
Artwork Fair Use: Mr. Wonderful

Politics

Colorado SB23-290

Politics

…practical guide…

Politics

…groundbreaking…

Politics

First, it was weed…