Psychedelics: Intolerance with ayahuasca – 09/23/2023 – Marcelo Leite

Raise your hands and stretch if you have never gotten out of bed with the feeling that your dreams were more real than your newly achieved wakefulness. Our minds create strange, vivid worlds, and poor people who don’t pay attention to them.

The less interesting debate about them seeks to establish whether they have their own reality. A metaphysical quarrel, by definition with no possible empirical solution.

Are there other realities than what is made known? Does anything survive after death? Boredom.

Much more exciting is to embark on one of the paths that humanity has, or has created, to explore these dizzying gaps. Abysses that make ordinary consciousness tremble.

Dream interpretation is one of them. Mythologies and cosmogonies, another. Religion, yet another. Western Cartesian atheists, however, without the will to undertake the arduous psychoanalytic work, may resort to psychedelics.

Consciousness modifiers such as mescaline, psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine (DMT, present in ayahuasca) have been used for centuries or millennia by various peoples to probe the depths. Fool of those who refuse to learn about these technologies.

In the last ceremony with ayahuasca, more spiritual than religious, the purpose was to test the hardened skepticism that does not accept the existence of gods and quetals. At the height of his strength, arms and hands open to receive whatever presented himself, nothing appeared.

The cosmic loneliness in which each person is born, lives and dies has once again been witnessed. No longer, however, as a vortex of helplessness, but as the gift of being alive and aware of it, immersed in the presence of so many beings, when I could not be.

This oceanic feeling is experienced by many as a mystical experience. The presence of God, divine love or light. No one is obliged to fit into this framework, but it is important not to ignore it.

There are religions that use ayahuasca to achieve this state, such as Santo Daime, Barquinha and União do Vegetal. They believe in the power and sanctity of plants such as the chacrona and the jagube vine, or mariri; In some temples, marijuana is included among the natural sacraments, named after Saint Mary.

Other confessions, such as Pentecostalist churches, dare direct contact with the fire of the Holy Spirit. They seek the encounter through prayers, songs and the gift of the charismatic word.

There are also those who use music and dance, such as Muslim dervishes. Or the visceral force of percussion, voice and animal offerings, like some African-based rituals. Still others, the subtlety of maracas and smoke, such as the jurema cults.

Seen from the outside, these religions look very similar. Some stand out for their inability to recognize this common source of transcendence. They go on the attack, attacking, like the devil’s works, practices that only differ from their own in terms of their form.

The consideration came to light when reading the Datafolha survey this Saturday (23) on marijuana and psychedelics. The difference between those who declare themselves without religion, who are more tolerant, and those who are religious, of whom around two-thirds condemn even the religious use — get this — of psychedelics such as ayahuasca is striking.

And it’s not just evangelicals. They and Catholics abhor the religious use of these substances in similar proportions, 69% to 62% respectively.

Marx said that religion is the opium of the people, but he was unfair to opium, a narcotic that induces prostration. Some, despite being Christian, compare themselves more to the cachaça or cocaine of a people always ready to extinguish the lights they don’t want to see.

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