Part of the nature of the human animal is a need to transcend its normal conscious awareness. This need for humans to alter perception and awareness has led us to experiment with everything from fasting and self flagellation to the consumption of exotic plants and animals. All in an effort to change our perceptions. Why? That question has many different answers and perhaps has as many answers as there are people. My suspicion is that expanded awareness and our quest as a species to transcend normal waking awareness function as a kind of instinctual internal compass meant to direct us towards a more evolutionary adaptive method of perceiving the world.
This line of thinking leads me to contemplate the role of plants in human diet. It is widely believed that our earliest human ancestors were primarily vegetarian, but were opportunistically omnivorous, meaning that we would occasionally scavenge kills from predictors to supplement our diet with the much more calorie dense meat. I for one find this hard to believe. Personally I think that the earliest humans were most likely like chimps in that we ate bugs for protein and fruits and vegetables when we could find them and would hunt small animals occasionally. I know this sounds like I am going off on a tangent here but bare with me. So you see, as far as plants go, humans would go for fruits and vegetables, roots, tubers etc. However, how ever did we develop some of the sophisticated forms of plant medicines that ancient peoples had access to?
This is where magic and altered states go hand and hand. Dreams are the one altered state that can be said to be common to all humans. The dream state has for all of mankind's history been seen as a direct path to communication with gods, spirits, ghosts and all the other denizens of the spirit world. Theses spirits in many times are helpful and act as teachers to those who seek out knowledge and guidance. In cultures that view the world as pantheistic (spirit exists in everything) plants are seen as conscious beings that humans can communicate with. In fact in many shamanic traditions, psychoactive plants are called Teacher Plants. Shamans in these traditions report that they are taught how to use the plants in different ways by the plants themselves, or rather the spirits of the plants. These communications may start as rituals of communion months or years before the plants themselves are consumed. By building a relationship with the plant spirit, the shaman learns all he needs to know about how to use the plant and how to navigate the altered states that the plants produce.
In this way, modern shamans differ greatly with those of generations past. Today, you can buy all the ingredients for Ayahuasca by mail, mix it up in your kitchen and be tripping and barfing by that evening. There is no perceived need to commune with the plant. I think this is a mistake and a missed opportunity for modern psychedelic shamans. By personifying the plant spirits and by addressing them, we can build relationships with these plants and maybe develop new techniques and new practices based on knowledge given by the plants themselves. This is the approach that our ancestors took and it seemed to work pretty damn good, considering that they were about to discover plant combinations that would take millions of years to happen upon by mere chance.
Coming Soon!
A full modern ayahuasca ritual to invoke the spirit of yage and begin the process of making yage your spirit ally.
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