Submitted by sanjenjo on
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Here are my main thoughts on ayahuasca:
Undoubtedly there are cultists, ego-trippers, scammers / marketers / entrepreneurs who have jumped on the bandwagon and hijacked or corrupted the whole ayahuasca phenomenon. Those who have fallen victim to them are not in the best position to vouch for them since their judgment is compromised. You have to look at the things they are selectively skipping over, not telling you, or oblivious to.
Ayahuasca opens a window into your own soul, subconscious, and into the astral planes where beings positive, negative, and illusory may exist. To assume there is no deception or illusion there is a grave mistake.
Not everything witnessed, experienced, or told in an ayahuasca journey is the truth; and if the truth, there is no guarantee that everything is interpreted correctly without any dangerous missing pieces (“a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”). It’s very easy to jump to false conclusions that way.
Most people are not capable of going through such an experience without being irreversibly changed in unhealthy ways by any illusions, delusions, untruths, misinterpretations, or disinformation picked up from such trips.
Most people are susceptible to undergoing faulty religious conversion experiences during such trips simply because of the vividness, emotional intensity, and fantastic nature of it; if the same can be achieved via cult rituals, extreme trauma that causes them to crack, stage magic tricks, repetitive programming, etc. then that shows an impressive nature of an ayahuasca trip (“It felt so real! I was really there! These beings radiated love!”) isn’t proof of validity. Unless a person is able to withstand all that and not get affected by false impressions, they are not in a position of authority to vouch for ayahuasca.
Direct experience especially of subjective (nonphysical) realms is not always a guaranteed way to attain the truth, if the experience itself is counterfeit, corrupted, or not interpreted accurately. For example, if I hypnotized you and put you through a false memory of having been the king of England, you would directly experience some of that ‘life’ in vivid memory, but that doesn’t make it true. What you learn during the ayahuasca experience must be examined in a sober, lucid state of mind and in context of other research.
Hallucinogens open you psychically but in a forced way, which bypasses certain safeguards, meaning that if you have any negative / demonic entities attached to you or present around you, they can imitate positive forces and feed you disinformation. Worse, any trauma, dissociation, or fracturing of the psyche from a chemical experience will make it easier for them to sink roots into one’s soul in the following months.
From a Steiner point of view, ayahuasca involves a Luciferian influence. In small doses, when needed, the Luciferian principle can shake one out of a blind, rigid, materialistic “Ahrimanic” state and thus bring one toward balance… but beyond that point it only leads toward increasing mania / delusion / addiction. Therefore if a person becomes a habitual ayahuasca user, they are goners. It changes you in a way that is partially (not completely) divorced from objective reality.
Since it opens a window into your own soul, you only get out of it what you have within you to retrieve. A cold skeptic might fall into a black coma, which I think correlates with the lack of spiritual maturity and sentience evident in such an individual. Others who have something, but not enough, will experience something, but not enough to benefit in a completely positive way. That is, any inadequacies, deficiencies, errors, immaturities, etc. in their soul and intellect will influence the experience, which in turn may amplify the first and create a feedback loop; since people who go to take ayahuasca tend to be casuals, tourists, naive seekers, etc. without extensive shamanic or esoteric training and spiritual discipline, any flaws in them may end up getting amplified.
Prolonged use of ayahuasca makes you reliant on hanging out with illusions (and real entities too, the two being mixed together) and pulls you further and further away from being lucid, grounded, and able to think for yourself. Also, if you don’t differentiate between the true and the false, you will increasingly accumulate the false and pollute your understanding of reality.
So I think the main problem is that people who aren’t ready are using it too much and too often, and furthermore are being fleeced or misguided by predators (or self-deluded leaders) capitalizing on the ayahuasca trend. This also means that yes there are some who can handle it, who are hooked up with the right shamans, and who therefore come away with a net positive effect from it all, but I think they are in the minority and others may end up doing more harm than good.
My general advice to people doing it anyway is: do not become a perpetual user, don’t get permanently affiliated with the ayahuasca culture, and sort very carefully the gems from the garbage of what you experience from your trip.
It’s more for those who have trouble convincing themselves through observation, thinking, and putting together circumstantial evidence alone, those who need a sudden spoon feeding of “experience.” They might get something out of ayahuasca / DMT with the risk of getting the wrong things. But ideally it should only be a door opener, and once convinced, they should now resort to logic / reasoning to figure out the rest, or at least go towards esoteric training / meditation to reacquire more stable and safe forms of such states.
I emphasize logic / reasoning because without those, you misinterpret your perceptions, draw false conclusions from vague puzzle pieces, and generally just become an unstable, deluded, off-balance individual.
Generally speaking, while under the influence of drugs it’s also possible that you might acquire certain skewed conclusions or observations, and once the drug wears off those psychological patterns remain. In other words, something that was artificially induced is transferred over to the psychological domain, where it lives on long after the drug has worn off.
For example, some people get paranoid while on marijuana, maybe feeling like their roommate is putting poison in his milk or something. Then after the drug has worn off, he might remember that perception, and start watching his roommates behavior, and start nitpicking to the point of seeing what isn’t there, and becoming paranoid that the roommate is indeed trying to poison him. I’ve known individuals who ended up diagnosed schizophrenic due to this, not because they had a genetic predisposition to it, but because they adopted a delusional mindset that began during drug-induced experiences that corrupted their mental processes; so it goes back to some people not being able to handle psychedelics.
Logic / reasoning is the error-correction mechanism needed to filter, sort, clean up, and avoid becoming unbalanced by the fallible dream-like visions one gets. With logic and reason you can even just rely on the experiences of others. That’s what Steiner said, that one doesn’t have to see what a clairvoyant sees to benefit from a clairvoyant’s observations. He said that the logic / understanding itself was valid in anyone’s head, and if you understood it, it’s as good as having experienced it yourself.
Tom Montalk