Modern Culture

Psychedelic communities, social justice, and kinship in the capitalocene

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”Australian Aboriginal activist and academic Lilla Watson’s well-known qualification for collaboration.

Ideology is always a background condition. We may find that we spend less time trying to legitimize psychedelics to the scientific/pharmaceutical complex, knowing this will hasten the commodification and privatization of sacred medicines. We may find ourselves reinvigorated by sitting in a medicine circle as an illegal, revolutionary act. We may find new purpose in collective prayer and communal shamanism, eschewing the old hero-based, patriarchal model of the single shaman. We may find that there will be access to deeper purpose than self-help. The binary idea that change starts within will give way to a more non-dualistic, discursive mode of simultaneous inner and outer change that will feed upon itself. We may find that the abolitionist’s truism that “none of us are free until all of us are free” may hold an antidote for the spiritual ennui of Western culture. We may also find that the existing power structure will not be able to so readily co-opt or consume an intersectional community, held together by numinous experiences, the sharing of sacraments and ancient knowledge, and deep spiritual-political practices. The merger of the social justice movement with psychedelic communities can serve as pillars for a global community of kinship: We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding. We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman. We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways. We may find ways to be the ancestors we hoped we would become.

Original Article (Kaphi.net):
Psychedelic communities, social justice, and kinship in the capitalocene
Artwork Fair Use: Chris 73, Luc Viatour, Dicklyon, Imwe

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