A session from an online course in which Pinchbeck hosts Adam Aronovich, a medical anthropologist who spent nearly five years doing fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon around Iquitos. Aronovich uses Iquitos, the largest city in the world unconnected by road, as a case study in cultural homogenization: local residents campaign election after election for the road that would bring McDonald's and Starbucks, while visiting Westerners romanticize the absence of global branding. Pinchbeck adds Helena Norberg-Hodge's account of Ladakh, where the arrival of Western consumer culture dissolved local practice like acid. Aronovich describes a friend in a rural village living in a wooden shack with a satellite dish for Champions League football as an image of what joining the global village actually means to people.
Guest: Adam Aronovich
In brief
- Aronovich argues that Iquitos's isolation produces a primacy of the local over the global, and that the felt difference of a large city without constant corporate advertising is striking.
- He rejects the romanticization of that isolation by outsiders, noting that the central political demand of local residents is the road that would connect them to the rest of Peru and to global consumer goods.
- Pinchbeck cites Helena Norberg-Hodge's work on Ladakh, where communal building, song and cultural practice gave way rapidly once Western culture arrived, and asks why people abandon local cultures so readily.
- Aronovich offers the satellite dish in a subsistence farmer's shack as an example of how selectively people enter global culture, prioritizing European football or Spotify over material improvements.
- Aronovich identifies the neoliberal entrepreneur of the self and its auto-exploitative drive as among the most damaging things people carry, describing the internal voice that makes presence with his daughter feel like a failure to be productive.
- He frames the orientation he wants toward the future of consciousness as decolonizing that anxiety, reprioritizing activities by their actual rather than culturally perceived importance.
Full text
I think one one of the things that I that came that came to mind when Alex was talking about homogeneity and how these cultural processes happen. I I did most of my research and my field work in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. I lived there for almost five years and the entry point to the Peruvian Amazon is a city called Iikitos, right? And I is a very unique place in the world because it's a pretty big city. It has a little bit over a half a million people. Uh but it's also a very isolated place. I think it's the biggest city in the world that is not connected by roads to the rest of the road infrastructure of the country.
So Iikits by by all means is an island. Uh but accessibility is even more complicated than an island because you don't even have the ocean. You're basically stuck in the middle of the rainforest and the only way in is through the rivers and by plane, right? So the rivers are like travel by rivers, commerce by rivers is even more complex than travel by ocean. So Iikkitos is one of those places for for me at least it was the second time in like the first time that that I arrived in Iikitos it was the second time in my life where I had a very eerie experience that I wasn't traveling across space as much as I was traveling across time.
The first time that happened was when I first arrived to Havana 15 years ago. But in Iikitos, right, um because it's so isolated, the there's a primacy of the local over the global. It's one of the only places in Peru where you won't find Mc Donald's, you won't find Starbucks, you won't find any chain restaurants. Like the only thing that exists is like the local cevicheras, the local chifas, the local things. And one of the primary political points for decades, right? like every political party that wants to gain power in Iikitos like the main point always is who is going to build a road that is going to connect Iikquitos to the rest of Peru so we can finally bring progress right and it's always kind of like this dialectic whereas the locals are always like oh like we really need to we really need to eat that Big Mac we really want to have that Starbucks coffee we really need to bring progress into the city because we want to join we want westernization to allow us to join the world in that sense and then there's always kind of like you know people like me or like other western people and facilitators that live there, they're always romanticizing and idealizing exactly that sense of the local like that lack of globalized slope, right?
Like you can walk in Iikitos in the street again like a big city have a million people and you won't be bombarded all the time by advertisements from big companies and corporations. I mean there's a Nike shoes shop and so on. So that homogenizing process, you know, when when when it's not there, it's something that is incredibly felt. It's something that is very very very evident and there's still a diversity that enriches you know so much the thing and yet there's still a hunger from the part of the local people like hey like I mean yeah we recognize I mean we love our culture we love our you know uniqueness but we really really really really just want Mc Donald's in downtown like that's the thing that we want that's the primary political point in the in the campaigns so yeah people people really want plug into the global brain for some reason. Maybe they feel it's like maybe it's evolutionary adaptive like you want to be part of the hive or part of the the whole or something.
Um even when it destroys everything about it destroys the local culture like Hela Norbert Hajj is a anthropologist who studied the Liddaki people in India which are the Tibetan Buddhist culture and she went there with a kind of superiority around western culture. Then she was so moved by how they lived and how like they would you know build each other's houses or there was a fire and the the kids and the parents would come together and sing like the Tibetan songs or the you know the the folk songs and preserve every aspect of their culture. But then as soon as the um the western you know colonialist culture started to come in everybody just adapted to it so quickly and she said it was like an acid that ate through their whole society. uh kids started like sniffing glue and you know stabbing each other for Nikes and they didn't want to sing the songs anymore. They just all wanted to listen to you know Britney Spears or Taylor Swift.
So it it is this weird thing where people you know uh immediately give up you know in many cases their their local cultures the sort of when we see it so precious they don't even value them as soon as they see that they have to be part of the the global mind sphere or or newphere whatever it is you know yeah it's it's it's also like really interesting for example in the in the small royal villages where I where I spent most of my time they're they're they're very you know pretty poor communities like they don't really have access to many resources. They're mostly substance farmers, right? Like they they grow crops that they allow them to live within their communities. Sometimes they have an extra chakra or two of yuka or corn that they sell in the market and then with that money they buy other you know kind of like basic things. Um you know and you know they live in wooden shacks.
They don't really have uh a lot of appliances or space. And there was like one of my best friends there which I used to visit with uh twice a week to watch football precisely because he was the kind of guy that lived in a wooden shack have basically you know one rusty bed um no really no no mosquito nets in the house and yet this huge uh antenna like this huge satellite antenna that was able to catch the signal to watch the Champions League every Wednesday and every th every Tuesday in the afternoon because that was the priority that was you For him, it was like the priorities. Well, I want to be able to watch European football twice a week in the middle of the jungle in my, you know, shack even if we don't really have many other things or more access to food and more access to food or resources, but the most important thing for me is access to European football because that is the thing that I want to watch, right? So, you know, watching Messi, watching Dono once a week in the middle of the jungle, that was kind of like the goal. So that was at least the idea of what joining like the global village or what progress was for him in terms of the commodities that he was interested in.
And this is something that you find quite a lot in these sort of communities, right? Like people um don't really perhaps don't really have many other things, but yet there's like this one thing or these two things, right? Like they want to have access to Spotify, they want to have access to European football, and those are the things that they um orient towards. Uh Adam, do you want to take it over? I mean I mean it's your time now if you want to I don't know if Alex can stay with us. It'd be nice to have you guys engage a little bit more but I know Alex you said you might have a cut off.
I have to go pick up my daughter and then uh and then I'll I'll be back here hopefully. Uh she may beg me to take her to the park which I may I may relent. Well if you can join us that be great. Thank you so much for for your share. It's always wonderful to to get your perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you guys. I'll I'll I'll stay on and watch as you know as I go. So yeah, Adam, you want you want you want to uh take take us away? Yeah, sure. Um yeah, so I mean know like I started sharing like I did I did like most of my research and field work.
Right now I'm finishing the last edits of my dissertation based on the work that I that I did in the rainforest. Uh, a lot of that was a few years that I spent working and living in an Iawaska retreat center in the middle of the rainforest. And within that time, I was doing a few different research collaborations with different research groups, but also facilitating Ayawaska retreats and Ayawaska workshops. I mean like uh quite quite a good chunk of that time I actually spent full-time facilitating retreats and facilitating the ceremonies and so on. Um but one of the one of the things that I was really interested in the research part of it was to try and find out what is it that people actually get from those retreats.
Why why why do people fly you know thousands of miles oftent times maybe two or three planes to the heart of the rainforest which is not a very accessible place to go and drink psychoactive bruise for a week or two weeks you know five seven ceremonies and so on like what are what are the motivations behind it and it's interesting because many of these things kind of connect to many of the topics that Alex was talking about so in order to find out some of the questions that I have one of the things that I did is that I did many interviews right So I would I would interview people that had just finished the retreats um you know in on site. I probably have 120 130 interviews that I did with people that had just finished a retreat and basically asking them very basic questions about what was it that they got from the retreat, what did they learn, you know, and so on and so forth. And one of the thing that surprised me the most is that in the beginning I guess my assumptions were still very much attached to um something that I now have come to term healing culture. And healing culture is this con concept that I that I use now to define like the the cultural soup in which we all swim within these converging communities of western esotericism, new age spirituality, popular psychology, psychedelic culture. Um you know there there many overlaps in adjacent uh you know communities and s conspiracy culture right very adjacent still like one of these one of one of these words that people nowadays use a lot conspirituality to refer to that very interesting and very compatible convergence between cell spirituality or near spirituality and conspiracy culture.
So you're kind like identifying that cultural soup of healing culture. What are the different aspects? So, you know, coming from coming from that place of not really having examined yet what healing culture was and still just kind like blindly following many of the precepts of it, I assumed that most of the people most of the people that I interviewed would uh report back that the most important things that they got from the retreat had to do with one or one of two things. either their healing journey or their personal growth and personal development, right? There's kind like this these are kind of like the two main narrative strands that conform the discourse of modern plant medicine uh the plant medicine world like when we when we ask a person hey what is Iaska for then most of the time we will say well Iawaska is a tool that can help you heal or I is a tool that can help you grow as a person develop in different ways and I mean these things obviously are present you and people do use those terms to refer to the things that they got from their retreat experiences you know healing in some ways and growing in some ways And yet there was something very surprising for me because as I continued to interview people right like these assumptions kind like starting to dissolve and I started realizing that there was one particular topic that people were almost almost always referring to that was also surprising for them that it wasn't necessarily about their own healing journey or their own personal process or you know kind like their own development or their own metaphysical realization.
it was something that was inherently uh relational, right? So, they started identifying like, hey, what are the things that were the most interesting or most more important or more healing for you during your retreat? And it wasn't so much like, oh, like the medicine showed me this, you know, childhood trauma and then I managed to heal it or um you know like I grew in these ways. It was like well actually I you know I really I one of the things that was most important for me was the connections that I made during my experience, right? like the people that I was with during my retreat, the relationships that I forged during the whole experience, like those are the things that were really the most meaningful for me, right?
And this wasn't just like, you know, one or two people. It was very overwhelmingly uh common to find these sorts of narratives where people really pinpointed uh as a primary point of benefit to the relationships that they made during the retreat. And if not the relationships that they made then other parts of relational healing that they experience right a lot of people for example would go into the ceremonies um you know setting an intention hey like you know moawaska or spirit plants or whatever the whatever the a perceived agency was like hey like I want to you know I need you to help me heal from this trauma or I want to work on my own sense of insecurity or I want to work on self-love and then during the ceremony they ended up having this experience were um they end you know they ended up having visions of their family members whether father or mother or sister or brother or ex partners or even sometimes like strange high school friends and they're like you know like the most unexpected thing because I never really expected to go there but I had a whole ceremony surrounding uh this girlfriend that I had in high school and I I haven't really thought about her for many many years and years I had this beautiful experience where I sort of kind of went back into that relationship and you know had this beautiful relational healing. So the relational component started taking a lot of primacy in the narratives of people. And one of the things that then I started kind of trying to isolate was something that I hadn't really paid my attent much much attention to before that I also found that it wasn't really being very much talked about or discussed within you know psychedelic meu where there's a such a high emphasis on integration right like integration is kind of this buzz word or has been for many many years like integr like everybody's talking about integration but nobody really knows what it means uh integration this integration that right but what's what is what is integ integration really means and a part of integration right like it's kind of trying to define trying to define uh the different components of what a psychedelic experience can be like including of course what is our orientation right during those experiences well what is it you know we are integrating something but what is it we want to integrate based on what there is a lot of emphasis on set and setting right like we kind like know well yeah I mean we should be paying attention a lot to our inner states we want to be paying attention to our emotional present like how are we feeling we want to you know the the context of where the experience is happening, the physical space, the facilitation that is available and so on and so forth.
But there's one crucial component to the certain setting that I felt wasn't really being discussed a lot and was and that's kind like the the discursive the discursive component of the certain setting the narrative behind even before we go into ceremony even before we join the retreat. There's already a world of information that is already being fed into our minds and our intentions and our think because there's a story behind it of what it is that Iaska is for what it is that psychedelics are for what it is that this retreat is supposed to be helping me with. There is a massive amount already of story right of this discourse that is already influencing a lot the experiences that people are having. And this you know this discourse is everywhere. It's in the in the in the copy of the retreat centers, right?
In the communications, in the emails that the retreat center is already sending. Uh it's in the testimonials that people record in video and then the retreat centers can like put out there that people can find on You Tube. It's in the popular discourse of books, popular books, you know. Um and actually like one of the you know whenever the whenever the people actually arrived to the retreat center and they were uh before their first ceremonies the shapivo healers I mean we we we we worked with um not shamans but they are they are uh self-described as ona right onaya or onaya in the plural which is a ship word that drives derives from the word uni the word uni is a ship word for aka and it translates to something like wisdom or knowledge depends, right? So uni is uh knowledge and the onaya is the person that knows the person who knows how to work with uni with knowledge.
Yeah. Like something that we would kind of like put into the cultural social role of the shaman. So Shepivo and Io would sit on the on the Maloka in the circle with the participants and the first thing that they would say to them, right? The first thing that I would say to them will always be everything that you think that you know about what Ayawaska is or what Ayawaskka is for, we are asking you please forget about it. Like we don't want you to come into ceremony with any preconceived notions of anything. This is a medicine. This is supposed to work on my trauma. This is supposed to work on my personal development.
This is supposed to be there's already this whole even people who never done psychedelics which is the majority of people who arrive to these retreats by the way people who have never smoked a joint in their lives and then suddenly they're signed up for seven Iaska ceremonies I don't know how that happens I think it's insane but that's the reality right like there's a bunch of different people who they never done psychedelics they never tried to join and they're there signed up seven Iawaska ceremonies they don't have any idea what they're into but they actually do have an idea because they have again gone through the copy of the website maybe read a booker book to maybe you know watch Mike Poland show on Netflix and so on and then they already have like a whole priming towards experiencing certain things based on the discourse and the narrative that they have been fed uh before that. Hence the first thing that they will say like hey you know we know you're here we know we watch you know you we know you watch the testimonials and you read these books and you have all of these different things but please forget everything that you think you know try to come into ceremony as clear as possible so we can actually so you can actually you know experience whatever the ceremony can be like for you and this is something that is impossible to do right because the we I mean we cannot really go into any experience with a clean in a clean slate there's already going to be that expectation based on the knowledge and the narrative and the discourse that we had absorbed throughout you know our research before that. So, so there is there is that you know the discursive dimension of it that I always find to be very interesting right like we nowadays I think most of us can recognize that even though we do tend to assign agency to plants and well not all of us but you know many of us do have that uh tendency to assign agency and intentionality and intelligence and sentience to plants or plant spirits or different you know social actors with that network of interdependent relationships. That is, you know, the forest in particular, but life in a much broader sense. Um there is still uh that's not that's never going to be the whole picture.
Yeah. Like we there's a lot of facilitation cliches that I oftentimes make fun of, right? Like you know, mother never gives you what you want, but she always gives you what you need, right? Which is straight out of the Bible by the way. I I kind of made a comparison in in my dissertation between all these different facilitation cliches in plant medicine and psychedelic world and their origins which are almost always exclusively religious, right? So you know God never God never tests you beyond your own limits which is another facilitation cliche right like the spirits of the plants will never test you beyond your own limits and so on.
Um you have to surrender to the medicine right surrender you have to surrender to the medicine. So you know all of these cliches what they pointing out too of course is that there's that agency right like the Ayawaska has that agency and she's going to deliver the experience that you need not the one that you want but she's going to deliver it right and I think nowadays we understand enough to at least at least acknowledge right that there is an interplay both between perhaps the external agency or some other mysterious factors that we don't fully understand but at the same time yeah setting the discourse the narrative the intention all sorts of different things that are not necessarily driven by an external agency but actually part right of that priming that we carry with us that is both you know our emotional state but also the discourse and the and the narrative. So this these facilitation cliches are something that I always find very interesting in that sense to illuminate kind of like this tension right between um the different aspects that create or can create the experience. So regardless of what it is, yeah, regardless of what it is, actually talking to the people, doing the interviews and so on and so forth, that started to illuminate. I mean, I'm just going back to the to that to that point because I think that was the the the interesting part of it, right?
Um started realizing that actually even when people arrive with narratives that are very very uh specific, right? Like most people most people who I mean I won't say most people but a big amount of people who arrive in the jungle to drink Iawaska and so on and so forth do so right because they absorb these ideas for example um Iawaska will help you resolve your traumas or Iawaska is very good for dealing with your depression. So people who come there, right, it's like, hey, you know, I I've been feeling depressed for a very long time and I I'm here because I want Iaska to help me uh depression, right? Or anxiety or trauma or addiction or all sorts of different diagnostic constructs that come from a very specific culture that are not necessarily part of the way that AASA is perceived to be working there. And yet when they're already there, right, and after they have these experiences, it's, you know, most of the time people start to realize that that depression or that anxiety or all the different things that they're they bring with them as expressions of affliction, right, have sources obviously that are much deeper than just, you know, certain deficiencies in the brain or at the interplay of different um neurotransmitters and so on, but something that is in a very real way rooted on deep social, cultural, and political issues that they're not necessarily exclusive to them, but actually are pretty common and widespread in the sorts of societies that we come from.
Right? Right. And this is the interesting thing when people start making that steps towards a vision of healing that is not exclusively based on a hyper individualistic superpersonal healing journey that is only mine some sort of hero's journey but actually something that is more collective something that is more interdependent right like the the the way that people would express as I said before right like hey you know I came here thinking that I was just depressed because ABC but actually right like the most meaningful experience that I had weren't necessarily in the ceremony where I was showing me you know this particular thing that happened in my past but after the ceremony where I was able to connect with this person and laugh with them and then the day after when we all had lunch together and I felt that sense of belonging that I hadn't felt in 20 years right and that sense of uh real intimacy with a group of people that perhaps were strangers three days ago and yet now it feels like you know we're bonded forever is that there's a term in the anthropological literature communas right this is Victor Turner it kind like talks about how this sense of communities emerges in all sorts of different scenarios that is a there is a is a very unique experience of feeling that you are in true real community with somebody and that's an experience that emerges after very specific scenarios such as for example awaska ceremonies where people go through really difficult or at least really intense emotional experiences together and there's something about the togetherness of those experiences that share the togetherness of those experiences that bonds people together in a very powerful way. Right? So people would say, well, yes, I mean, you know, the depression is real, but the sources of it or the things that were fueling that depression.
Now I'm starting to understand that the the genesis of it or the way that it unfolded was very different for me. And it was actually, you know, because I hadn't really felt that sense of intimacy and connectedness to a group of people before or, you know, something that I missed for a long long long time, which was that sense of true communion or friendship or reciprocity or mutual responsibility for each other that oftentimes arises in these groups even if it's temporary, which it is, right? I mean, this this is a 10 10day or 12 day container and yet people are able to experience very powerful what that means, right? like that sense of mutual responsibility of understanding that you know um it's a very different system in which people are not necessarily in a hierarchical dynamic whereas there's an expert looking at them and diagnosing them and then providing a treatment and then they're becoming passive consumers of whatever treatment is being provided or dispensed to them which again this works perfectly in some situations uh but it's a very different dynamic in which make an, you know, once you join a retreat or a ceremony in a general sense, you're also kind of like making an implicit commitment, right? That you're not there as a passive participant or consumer of anything, but an active co-creator and co-articipant in an experience that is both deeply deeply personal individual, but at the same time very powerfully shared and communal, right?
And and that entails also that powerful sense of mutual responsibility of understanding like hey you know in a in the greater scheme of things it starts becoming visible for people that being healthy and being happy is never going to be a purely individualistic pursuit that there's layers and relationships right that individual health is always going to be intrinsically connected and linked to collective health and that we can't be happy individuals if we're not living within healthy communities and then expanding those layers, right? That healthy individuals and healthy communities exist within healthy societies which exist within healthy cultures which exist within healthy environments. And a lot of these different layers are 100% uh non-negotiable if we're really aiming towards you know what we would term healing in that sense, right? like nobody can be fully healthy and happy. if the c if we don't have a community or if the societies that we live in are completely dysfunctional or if the culture in which we all feed from is the kind of slope that we've been talking about in some ways um you know if the environment is dying it's very very I mean you know when people come with anxiety there's so many different layers to anxiety right but now I mean nowadays there's a term actually that is kind of being used also in clinical situations of, you know, environmental anxiety, right?
Like people come with an undefined sense of dread and doom and deep deep anxiety and well, you know, it kind of like makes sense that you're that you're anxious. Like it doesn't have to be seen through the lens of pathology if you're a person who is minimally aware of what's happening and you're sensitive enough and you know the world that you live in, right? I mean who who who is not who who who would not be anxious knowing the predicament that we're in collectively right and people start realizing hey you know what yeah I mean I am anxious perhaps uh on one hand because I'm working two or three jobs you know and barely able to pay rent and I don't have any sort of housing security and so on but at the same time I'm also anxious because we have no idea what kind of world we're going to leave to our kids in 20 years or 10 years uh from here now like we don't know what kind of environment I mean we don't know what the collapse of the Gulf Stream is going to be like in five years. We I mean we are starting more and more and more to feel that in our bones in the western you know privileged world things that you know um I think Terrence Mc Kenna used to say the apocalypse is already here it's been here for many many decades just in less privileged pockets of the world you like people in Kashmir you know this these are the kind of places where people have failed the things that we're just starting to feel in many ways so you know when people start making those connections between their own internal struggles or their own expressions of afflictions and what depression and anxiety mean beyond just a purely clinical individualistic lens and making those connections between individual and society, individual and culture, individual and environment. That's where the real gold is.
And this is also what people start realizing that I have, you know, in my interviews. Those are the moments when I say, you know, like, hey, great. You know, like I mean that is progress. Like allowing yourself to or yanking yourself out of this neverending loop of self-referential healing process of more therapy, more retreats, more you know, whatever it is that we consume as spiritual or therapeutically minded individuals, right? and actually starting to look at the picture from a wider lens. Yeah. Like, well, it it will never be enough if we're just stuck in this healing loop as long as we're not also expanding that gaze outwards into the different uh layers of relation that exists between the individual and the other forms of organization.
So, that's kind of like the thing that I was mostly interested in, right? like not necessarily a yawaska as an individual technology but actually as a collective l maybe I don't even have to call it as a relational medicine like a medicine that focuses primarily on allowing the person to illuminate the relationship but tying that back into the first thing right like this is not a given like I think now we're also I mean Iaska I think is different than other psychedelics because I does seem to have a innate orientation that is independent from human narrative. I'm saying this out loud and sort of maybe um trying to see how that feels for me, but I mean I I do think that that's true. I think that mushrooms natural natural enthogens perhaps do have an innate orientation that is not necessarily completely tied to our own expectations or our own priming. Um and yet yet the narrative aspect still is important right if we send people to the retreat center saying which is what happens by the way nowadays.
I mean the primary orientation is the trauma narrative right what my friend my friend James called a tramadelic culture which is kind of like fed by all directions from you know influential figures Gabber Mate and Peter Levvin Bessel Vander Kulk and so on which has become kind of like the primary psychedelic orientation for the last decade or so is the tramadelic lens of it right like anything other than using psychedelics for clearing out trauma and working through trauma is kind like a a waste of time or at the very least you know uh uh uh what is the opposite of the sacred a profane a profane use of psychedelics so I mean it's fine I think it's great I think definitely psychedelics can help can help a lot with you know clearing out trauma but also the narrative has to be uh the discour the discursive and I think this is one of the things that I personally would like to contribute and would like to see emerge from a more mature psychedelic culture in the in the next few years. Yeah. that we're able to pay much more attention collectively to the stories that we tell about what these things are and what they are for and that we're able to provide better directions that aren't as narcissistically inclined or aren't as um you know is like insulated from the reality of the world around us but rather you know oriented towards the real predicaments that we're collectively facing. I mean what you know and I've seen this multiple multiple times with people who live in the rainforest people who you know have spent maybe a decade or two decades drinking awesome. mental.
A lot of that is framed within this conspiritual, you know, u bubble that pro, you know, that also kind of inflicts all sorts of different um streams of misinformation. I mean, you know, like it's not a it's not a big secret that there's a huge problem of climate denialism within spiritual and psychedelic and um you know, cultures nowadays. So, you know, if you're drinking aaska, you know, for five years or 10 years and you're, you know, embiving this precious brew that is, by the way, endangered in his native range and it's a resource that needs to be protected. And yet, we're still unable to actually make that simple leap into understanding that perhaps there is a environmental component to the healing that we need to be minded towards. And it seems to me like we're not really honoring that.
And I think you know part of the responsibility and I think you know something that Alex said before of you know the recognizing that there's a problem and then trying to solve that problem and then creating more problems. Yes. I mean we do that all the time. I think by pro by problematizing stuff oftent times we do end up creating more and more problems. But I think you know at least from my personal perspective and I think Daniel this is probably something that we we share in common. I do feel there's a sense of urgency. I think if we don't actually orient towards the real existential predicaments that we're facing then I mean what's the point of it you know and I think like part of part of that discoursive aspect part of that um narrative component of the set and setting is something that definitely is being shaped and reshaped all the time and something we do have we do have a responsibility towards.
I mean somebody in the comments saying not to mention Trumpism in psychedelic cultures. I mean yes like this constant uh there are you know this constant flow of kind like psychedelic spiritual culture towards rightwing minification. I mean this is a real thing and with it go all the things um that are very common in those spheres such as climate denialism and yeah I mean I think maybe maybe maybe I maybe I shut up for a while and we can and we can have have a dialogue you can you can pick it up. I I was reflecting on um I think the first time I wrote about Iawaska was like 98 or something that 99 and then you know then there was a spate of kind of rediscovery of psychedelia in the mainstream media but at that point it was kind of like um some of the articles were positive some of them were very negative you know like the Vanity Fair article and you know people would sort of like absorb some of Terrence Mc Kenna's kind of ideas they'd like talk about the elves or whatever and but And but then they didn't quite know how to handle it. People were just like overwhelmed.
And then over time a sort of the sort of narrative structure of the meaning of what it was became more and more solidified and then as you say with the tramodolic culture it became completely fixed is that you do this for certain kinds of healing and uh reconnection and so on. Um and then for me it became kind of like yeah kind of like like a a static new kind of culture in a way. uh where I kind of started to lose interest. Um I don't I'm kind of curious if you have any idea since you're studying it like anthropologically. Is it still building or is it kind of like crested and is it I mean sort of like Burning Man seems to have kind of like crested and is now a little bit on the downward slope like there were like lots of tickets available.
It wasn't like sold out last year. Uh yeah, I I I think the psychedelic hype definitely picked somewhere around maybe I think I think that the crest of the wave was the maps conference in Denver uh 2023. I think from then onwards is definitely is definitely mellowing down. I think you know like that that was probably that was probably an all-time high in terms of the crest of the wave of the hype which I mean I don't think it's necessarily a a good thing or a bad thing. I think again like you know we're talking a lot about dialectic processes. I think there was a there was maybe five years before the before the convergence in Denver where psychedelic culture was definitely of the rails in terms of the hype that was being created in terms of the monetization and commodification of it in terms of like you know um not really problematizing a lot of the real problems that exist within psychedelic culture when it comes to real dangers and risks that are involved.
And um you know I think now in the last few years there's definitely a wave of new lenses that are trying to not necessarily you know he you know healing from healing for example sometimes sometimes I get called out for being a little bit too cynical which I completely understand but at the at the end of the day I think the goal always is to not necessarily criticize just for the sake of criticizing but again to try and bring that pendulum back into balance into a cultural momentum that is not necessarily built on hype and prophetic vision. I mean, I don't I don't know if you anybody here was at that conference in Denver, but that was an incredible event for me. I mean, I remember the the closing session of the psychedelic science 2023, uh, you know, Rick Dublin getting into that stage all dressed in white, um, with this huge image on the back of saying like, uh, a tra, you know, living in a traumafree world by 201770. There was kind of like this incredible energy uh of like a true prophetic culty, you know, something something that was kind like already pointing out that the bubble was just about to break because it was not sustainable in terms of the messaging that it was putting outwards. Yeah.
What have you seen? I think you who's the name who's the name of the guy who came up with the tramodelic uh framing? Uh Brian James. He has a he has a podcast. Um, how in the wild I think I can point I can put it in the message. We have a few we made a few podcasts together exactly talking about these topics. I enjoyed it. Um, so what what have you seen? So we were talking about and that's kind of like yeah when I wrote breaking up in the head I wasn't so focused on the personal healing perhaps to my detriment because I probably needed to do more work in that area.
Um but I was more interested in yeah what do these you know how do these become tools for like thinking and for like sort of deconstructing you know western society and then kind of like trying to like rebuild or redesign um you know which is something I still think about all the time but you know what about you like what are you seeing like what what for you seems more like proper use or like um exciting inspiring use is it you know what what what for you is on like the cutting edge in terms of you know particularly as we're talking about the future future of consciousness you know the future of these kinds of investigations. I I mean I I you know for me I think one of the things that I that I felt very strongly and this is maybe I mean this is obviously based on a very deep personal bias because of my own experiences working in an extremely medicalized and psychologized environment for many years. I mean as a WA retreat center that was extremely focused on the you know paratha therapeutic kind of like line of working with it in a very healing kind of way. But I think the temple of light one or yeah but you know for for me I think one thing that I would be very excited about is to recover the the true power of the recreational. you know, to recover to recover the true power of using substances in joyful celebratory recreational manners that are not necessarily geared towards utilitarian purposes or with a planned benefit in mind.
something that kind like breaks out from this neoliberal mindset of if you're not using this to grow or to heal or to produce or to advance your productive life in some ways and it's use but actually kind like more like really taking that step back and you know in in the Amazon rainforest it's really funny because there's so many different ways in which Iaska and other psychedelics are used in traditional communities there's a huge diversity of different ways in which people engage with these things. People don't necessarily know these things all the time because again like the narratives the dominant narratives are so centralized. We think oh no Awaska is a medicine and it's a medicine always and it's only used in within medical magical but no I mean there's you know there's many occasions in many different communities iawaska is used um in celebration right as a as a tool for social cohesion as a tool for bringing people together the santo may do this I think very well for example right as a as a way that is not necessarily built on this introspective shamanic healing but something that is more outwardly more dancing more celebratory more recreational and so on. And you know, I I got my I got my initiations again like my my personal bias, but I got my initiations in the in the sitr European scenes of the early 2000s and so on. And my first the exper the most powerful experiences that I ever had with psychedelics by far having experiences of you know being glued to the speaker for 12 hours with friends with community dancing our asses off like that experiencing the extreme points of joy and communion and fun fun but like the fun how much fun can a person have you know with an environment that um that supports that fun and I Think isn't that what the festival culture is?
That's what Burning Man is. Like people go I think I think it's what it was. I think it is. I think it is what it was. I think there's a difference between between honoring fun and joy and then kind of just unrestrained hedonism perhaps. Um maybe maybe there there there has to be a balance there that is better like a tinged tinged into sort of just abandoned or something like that. But I think you know like our like I think culturally culturally we have we are already drowning in all sorts of different anxieties of how to be better how to earn more money how to heal this thing how to grow as a person how to you know a person has to be doing therapy and has to be doing there's all sort and oftent times I mean this is something by the way maybe maybe to close to close just with this it was kind like a personal insight but you know when my when my daughter was born there was something that hit me really hard and that thing was that um I started noticing that you know she would wake up early in the morning earlier than earlier than me and my wife and and I you know I would kind of wake up with her and go to go to her and kind of hold her and look look you know look at her and incredibly precious being that I love more than anything in the world and just you know be in that moment with my daughter in the early morning when there's nothing to do and then slowly you know after three minutes four minutes five minutes we start this you hearing this creeping voice in the back of my head that is kind of like telling me like hey like this is this is this is beautiful but you know there's that needs to be done you there's coffee that needs to be made there's work that needs to be done and kind of taking me out of that moment of dash with this being and I started noticing that all the time there wasn't really a moment where I could actually be at peace relaxed like just enjoying the presence of my daughter playing with her doing something with her without constantly having that knowing voice in the back of my head that says basically you should be doing something else.
there's something more important all the time that needs to be done right now because ABC whether it's financial or work or you know school there's always kind of like that autoexploitative drive that drives I think the neoliberal entrepreneur of the self to use fost terminology and that drive that autoexploitative drive I think is one of the most damaging things that we that we carry with us and when I say recreational when I say fun I mean it as an antidote to that knowing voice in the back of my head that doesn't allow me to be present with my daughter for more than five minutes without having that sense of guilt and shame that I'm not doing something else that is more important when in reality there's nothing more important in the world nothing more important in the world than being there with my daughter in that present moment and be with my full presence without that knowing voice in the back of my head that wants to take me out of the situation so joy recreation presence I these things that I want to orient towards are more about like really being able to decolonize our mindset from this hyperproductive auto exploitative drive. I think that is you know driving me crazy and I imagine driving many of us as well uh crazy. So I guess that would be sort of your orientation towards a possible future of consciousness is kind of using what we're what we figured out to kind of decolonize our own perceptions or something like that. Yeah. I mean I I guess like decolonize our own anxieties when it comes to how should we be spending our time and what are the things that really matter like rep prioritizing like being able to rep prioritize things according to their actual level of importance and not according to their uh perceived level of importance based on cultural or social or economic um strains.
Okay everybody, thank you so much. Thank you Adam for joining us. It's great to great to hang out with you uh and everybody else. And we'll have one wrap-up session. I'll figure out when. I'll let you guys know. And um yeah, maybe we'll send a little survey about the course, too. And thank you so much for for being with us. And um yeah, let's um let's keep that that evolution going.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.