[www.highsnobiety.com]
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Bruce went home with a feeling of anxiety. He was fixed now. Right? Everything was better, no? The missing pieces of the puzzle were all in place, surely? Of course they were. That’s what happens when you drink ayahuasca. Except that Bruce quickly realized it wasn’t all better.
He felt fantastic for two weeks: light, airy, free of anxiety, his internal monologue had quietened. He felt at ease with himself, but going back into his everyday routine he encountered the same problems that drove him to drink ayahuasca in the first place. So he went back another dozen times searching for The Solution.
And he would encounter many of the same people again and again and again. New ones would come, then they would return. Probably because, like Bruce, they were chasing a blissed-out state of Nirvana that they had been promised by other ayahuasca acolytes.
And I’m not exaggerating here, aya devotees speak about the drug in the sort of absolutist hyperbole common to religious fundamentalists. Think Christian televangelists only softer, more hippy-like, less fire-and-brimstone and more infinite love. Yes, it’s fairly benign, but there’s a soft fanaticism to it that makes Bruce wary.
Now this is Bruce’s problem with the ayahuasca community: they so desperately want to believe in all this New Age spiritual nonsense, that they have to tell other people loudly and forcefully that yes, this is The Answer, just so they can drown out the sound of their own cognitive dissonance. There’s an unspoken fatwa among ayahuasca drinkers that denounces this sort of critical thinking. It’s very cultish and cults have little time for dissidents.
Bruce doesn’t think they’re bad people, they’re just misguided and desperate to validate something that gives them a feeling of security in a terrifying world. But by doing this they set other people up for disappointment. And there are some truly desperate people that seek out ayahuasca ceremonies.
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What’s often overlooked is that ayahuasca powers an entire micro-tourism industry
[www.theguardian.com]
that has sprung up in the Amazon. Opportunistic shaman prey on naive Westerners for cash and compete with each other by sometimes using dangerous ingredients to create ever-stronger brews that will reel in customers that want more bang for their buck. People have died as a result.
[www.mensjournal.com]
This isn’t magic, it’s capitalism at its crudest.
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The point of this whole rant isn’t to try to put people off of ayahuasca or insult the people who worship it – not at all. Bruce thinks it certainly has its benefits and would recommend it to everyone. Bruce just thinks that there’s a lot of vested interests out there trying to sell easy answers to complex problems, and too few people scrutinizing their hyperbolic claims.
Ayahuasca is almost certainly not going to magically make all of your problems go away. Neither are anti-depressants. Your psychiatrist is not your Fairy Godmother. We live in a transaction-oriented culture where we’re taught that if you buy this shoe you will feel cool. If you wear this perfume you will feel sexy. If you take Zoloft you will be fixed.
Life is much more complicated than that. That’s what they won’t tell you, because how do you sell someone an easy solution to complication? This is something that needs to be shouted loudly, clearly and often. Some problems can’t be solved, only managed. And accepting that is often the first step in moving forward.