Psychedelics and the Primacy of the Human Imagination
Amongst certain sectors of the plant medicine/psychedelic scenes, there’s a widespread idea that ayahuasca and other psychedelic plants and substances are inherently benevolent, that they “know how to work with us”, that we always “get the medicine that we need, not the one we want”.
This highly romanticized and idealized view of plant medicines draws all its clichés from Western spirituality and organized religion, dressing clerical and priestly theistic certainty with lush and exuberant plant metaphors and colourful, “awakened” New Age tropes.
“[Ayahuasca/the mushroom/the wood] will never test you beyond your limits” is one of the first phrases learnt by any plant medicine facilitator. Of course, if you replace “ayahuasca” with “God”, you can trace that cliché all the way back to 1 Corinthians in the New Testament: “All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; he’ll never let you be pushed past your limit; he’ll always be there to help you come through it.”
It’s hardly a surprise that the New Age resorts to Christian tropes so much, even as it intersects with radically different worlds and practices. Indigenous perspectives on plant medicine are rooted in cosmologies, ontologies and ways of being and knowing that are quite difficult for us to truly grasp. Amazonian worlds are rooted in a variety and diversity of animistic beliefs, peppered with infinite cultural and tribal idiosyncrasies about the kinds of beings that inhabit their worlds.
Amazonian ontologies ascribe agency, intelligence and intentionality to *certain* plants, animals, and even some natural phenomena like rivers, rain or rocks. Some plants have “mothers” or “owners”, some others don’t. Some trees and animals are fully intentional beings who hold grudges and get angry, making humans ill or sick, while others don’t. Some are perceived as sacred, friendly or dangerous, and many others are simply NPC’s (Non-playable characters), devoid of any medical, cultural or mythic importance.
Oftentimes, when asked about the different plants and trees of the rainforest, I have heard my Shipibo teachers say, dismissively: “oh, that’s just a weed”. No “mother”, no “owner”, no “power”, no agency. Just a random weed. Who gets to “have a spirit” or to be a fully intentional “non-human person” is context and culture-dependent, coded into nuanced and highly variable local mythologies and eco-social cosmologies.
Our worlds are made of stories, after all.
The idea that the world is made of language is not a trivial one, regardless of whether we gravitate towards animistic, Neo-animistic, panpsychist or purely physicalist ontologies. When it comes to non-ordinary and psychedelic states that leave us quite vulnerable to ideological manipulation through heightened suggestibility and openness to experience, how we frame things is not only important but crucial. We don’t need any more cults and cult-like thinking in our “medicine” spaces.
If set, setting and context are important, narrative and discourse are crucial. Psychedelics don’t do many things just “on their own”. Our experiences never happen in a vacuum. There’s always a fundamental interaction between pharmacology and context, chemistry and language, a molecule and the infinitely malleable realms of the human imagination (or “Spirit”).
Truth is, not much happens outside the realm of language. Spirits, molecules, entities or plants all fundamentally interact with the human imagination. The enchantment of the world resides precisely at the nexus between storytelling, our greatest human gift, and the alchemical power to dissolve and coagulate that *seems* inherent to the psychedelic experience.
Socially-meaningful ritual and ceremony allow the emergent meaning to crystallize in the human mind, to grow its roots into the realm of archetypes and symbols, to create a culturally coherent and ideologically aligned narrative that orders experience and prevents cognitive dissonance.
Whether some plants will make us feel more connected to nature, connect us to “Spirit”, enhance our creativity, heal our trauma or just provide us with a curious, interesting new experience depends on who we are, the stories we have heard and how the experience has been framed for us. Whether some substances will dissolve our political programming and turn us all into “progressive liberals”, ecosocial warriors, anti-racism activists, or, on the other hand, turn us into profit-minded venture capitalists, staunch hyper-individualistic libertarians or even fortify and consolidate racist and authoritarian views seems to be 100% contingent with our particular context, the information ecology around us and the stories that create our particular worlds.
Psychedelic plants and substances have been said to be “pluripotent”, a biological metaphor borrowed from the field of stem cell research. Pluripotency is a term that describes the ability of certain substances to produce several distinct biological responses. A psychedelic is pluripotent to the extent that it has no fixed developmental potential: just as a stem cell is able to differentiate into different cell types, psychedelics can catalyse the crystallization of all sorts of different ideas, political philosophies, moral codes and value systems.
Understanding these concepts is a crucial step towards a more grounded, less colonial, and less romanticized psychedelic culture that doesn’t trip itself over its own magical wishful thinking, that transcends its attachments to patriarchal religious dogmatism and New Age tropes, wary of the traps of psychedelic capitalism, medicalisation and Therapy Culture, self-aware and reflective of its own ideological shadows.
