On this episode, my guest is Adam Aronovich. Adam has a PhD in Anthropology and Communications and is an active member of the Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC-URV). A long-term student and researcher of various magico-medical systems around the world, he has facilitated workshops and retreats in the Amazon rainforest and the Mexican coast for almost a decade. He is the co-founder of Hidden Hand Media, a creative agency at the intersection of psychedelia, technology, and society, and the creator of Healing from Healing, a social media platform that casts a critical, skeptical, and humorous gaze at Healing and Transformation Culture.
Show Notes
Adam’s doctoral thesis and time in the Amazon
Iatrogenesis and Healing Culture
Epistemic Humility
Our Traumadelic Stories
Clash in Understandings of Causation
Disneyfication of Plant Medicine
Individual vs Relational Healing
Psychedelic Tourism’s Local Consequences
Spirit Realm Fallout
Animistic Perspective
Narrative, Cults, and Conspirituality
Homework
Adam Aronovich - Substack - Instagram: Healing From Healing
Transcript
Chris: Welcome to the End of Tourism Podcast, Adam. Thanks so much for being willing to speak with me today.
Adam: Oh no, my pleasure.
Chris: Hmm. So, to begin, Adam, maybe you could share with us where you find yourself today and what the world looks like where you are.
Adam: That’s a simple question, usually maybe with simpler answers, but right now, kind of the last year or two, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between Nayarit in Mexico and Los Angeles. So right now, I’m in LA for the next month or so, and then I’m back in Nayarit for a little bit. But right now, in Los Angeles.
Chris: Well, welcome this morning and I know you mentioned to me that you recently defended your PhD thesis, and I’d like to congratulate you on that alone. It’s a huge accomplishment. And I guess, you know, before we get into my questions, I’d like to ask you if there’s anything in terms of that you’d like to offer us a little glimpse of in terms of what you’ve been tending to and perhaps even slaving over, over the last few years or more?
Adam: Yeah, thank you. Basically, I wrote an ethnography. I mean, my field is medical anthropology, so I did, I wrote kind of a classical ethnography. I mean, it blends a few different genres within anthropological literature.
So, it has some aspects of classical ethnography, which is kind of a little like a travelogue, an observation of certain phenomena that I met on my path, a little bit of critical ethnography, problematizing the field with some context, with theoretical context. But I think like the most important thing for me was also bringing kind of the literary side of it. So, my goal from the beginning was to make something that was readable and enjoyable. Those were kind of like the two parameters.
You know, when I was writing the, the text kind, I constantly just kept thinking about what kind of public I wanted to appeal to. And you know, it is kind of an academic text, but also something that I hope that people can enjoy just for its literary merits. So, it kind of draws from that tradition of ethnographic literature that it’s also enjoyable and pleasurable and interesting. And I mean at least that was what I was aiming for. I don’t know if I succeeded. That’s not for me to judge, obviously that’s for the readers. And yeah, I mean, right now, the thesis is defended and everything is fine. And then, I guess the next step would be to find a publisher and an editor. It shouldn’t be a problem. I mean, it’s still an academic text, so to be publishable as a book for a wider audience, it still would need to be edited to some extent. But yeah, I mean that’s where it’s at.
And I mean that the whole text kind of draws from the years that I spent in Peru, in the Amazon Rainforest. I was working at an ayahuasca retreat centre in Peru for few years and observing and participating and trying to write an account of what it is that people from the Global North speak when they speak about medicine, when they speak about healing, when they speak about spiritual transformation. What is the world of meaning that we draw from? What are the things that we get from it? And, you know, what is the impact of all of that in the social envelope, in the cultural context in which it all happens? And I guess kind of trying to give a different perspective that is not necessarily just hype.
I think there’s a lot of hype in server surrounding psychedelics and psychedelic plant medicines in the so-called psychedelic renaissance. But I think, you know, you spend enough time in in the Amazon rainforest and you notice that things are more complex and there’s much more nuance, and there’s important things that need to be unpacked and problematized to some extent. So, you know, one of the goals was that he doesn’t read kind of like, as a pamphlet, just to like advertise the ayahuasca industry on one hand, but at the same time, also not to completely bash it, right?
Like, it was like trying to find a middle way, highlighting both the beautiful, but also the problematic, and kind of like trying to give a complete picture of the hope, the hype, the fervour, and also the darker sides of the whole enterprise.
So, yeah, I mean, it’s available. If anybody’s interested, they can reach out.
Chris: Oh, wonderful.
Adam: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. Well, congratulations on that. I mean, it sounds like, not just a lot of hard work, but really important work. And that’s in large part why you’ve been invited to speak with me today. there’s very few voices I think in the psychedelic subculture who are willing to take it to task, to do so in a way that honours the kinds of worlds that we’d like to live in and still recognizes the fault lines that we’ve created here in our time.
And so, I’d like to begin, I guess, creating a bit of context for our listeners in terms of a couple terms that sometimes show up in your writing and in your interviews. You know, I was elated when first reading your work, especially in the context of psychedelics to read the word “iatrogenic,” which I think was popularized by the philosopher Ivan Illich in the latter-half of the 20th century. And so I’m wondering if you could offer our listeners just a brief foray into “iatrogenesis” and why you think we might apply it to an analysis of psychedelic or healing culture.
Adam: Yeah. Well, I think in the most, simple term, “iatrogenic” basically means something that is caused by the medical intervention, right? So the iatrogenesis kind of would be, for example, a disease of an illness that is originated or caused by the medical intervention itself. So it’s a term that is oftentimes used to critique certain aspects of medical practice that are perceived to cause more harm than to heal or cure.
And you know, when applied to the psychedelic industry, I think iatrogenesis is something that is very important to understand because, of course, the promise of psychedelics is huge, while the potential risks and damage they can do to a person and also not negligible. And I think it’s something that oftentimes get overlooked.
I think in the last few years there’s been a lot of people that have made it a point to kind of highlight the actual dangers and risks of psychedelic practice, including the iatrogenic component of bad facilitation, for example or bad providers. Or not necessarily bad, like in an ontological way like unskilled or lacking experience or lacking a wide enough repertoire of epistemic frameworks to help people kind of like sense-make and meaning-make their experiences, which is I think something that for me is very important, and something that I focus a lot on, right? Like what kind of epistemic tools we’re providing for people to make sense of experiences that are inherently, oftentimes rocking the foundations of our epistemologies and ontologies, which is something that again not many facilitators are well equipped to deal with, particularly when we’re talking about, let’s say, ayahuasca in a traditional context, where the ontologies from which these medicines originate and feed from are extremely different to the worldviews and ways of understanding ourselves in the world that we’re accustomed to.
So, you know, we’re talking about the iatrogenic harm, I think. I talk about the role that facilitators, providers, supporting staff and cast have, in ensuring not only that the experience falls properly, but also again, just not causing harm, or avoiding risk and damage as much as we can, which is something, again, it’s something that we’re learning along the way, collectively, as this practice has become more globalized and more popularized.
Chris: Thank you for that. And there’s another term that you use, as well among, but almost as a kind of antidote, I think to iatrogenesis, which is “epistemic humility.” And on your Healing From Healing Instagram page, there’s a small post about it in which you write that
“Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue. It is grounded in the realization that our knowledge is always provisional and incomplete, and that it might require revision in the light of new evidence.”
Now, I imagine you wouldn’t have posted this on an account dedicated to psychedelic healing culture if you thought that epistemic humility was already prevalent there. So my question is, where do you think the lack of epistemic humility among modern people comes from, and why might it be crucial for those in psychedelic or healing cultures?
Adam: These are complex, complex things. I mean, I can give my opinion, which is informed by my observations and my experience in these environments.
I think psychedelics are remarkable for many things. They’re remarkable in a variety of different ways, and one of the ways I think that they’re particularly remarkable, is you know, kind of like helping people widen or reconfigure our capacity to process information, to make sense of the world around us, to consider knowledge, how we acquire knowledge, how we make sense of that knowledge, and how we form belief systems based on that knowledge or how we form models of how the world works, you know, and what our place in the world is like.
I think psychedelics are very apt for allowing people to, at the very least, ask questions related to those domains of epistemology, ontology, and so on. At the same time, I think, for example, if a person Google goes on a psychedelic experience is very powerful and then that experience kind of catalyzes this process of deconstruction of our models of the world and what the world is like, and so and so forth, which happens quite often, then there is an interval in that person’s life of heightened vulnerability, in terms of what other models of the world are available, right? This is a moment where a person can very easily have their epistemology hijacked by, you know, malware. Let’s just call it “epistemic malware.”
Whereas the model of the world that they had prior to it maybe starts dissolving. But then, instead of kind of like staying in that space of uncertainty and non-determination, then it’s easy to kind of gravitate towards some other model that just provides easy answers. And then we get into the domain of conspiracy theory, for example, or conspirituality which is one of the words that became popular in the last five or six years since the pandemic, right? Like this intersection of conspiracy culture, conspiracy epistemics, and western self spirituality that. It is just kind of like this conjunction of conspiracy culture and self spirituality that is really at the heart of much of the contemporary transformation culture, right?
Like all this scene that I call really “healing culture.” I mean the hyper object that I use to kind of think about this thing is “healing culture,” which includes within it, you know, fragments of conspiracy culture, of New Age spirituality but mostly focused on self spirituality
I mean, I don’t know if it’s a religious movement, but it’s the kind of spirituality that really sacralizes the self over everything else, right? Like, I mean, “we’re our own Gods and Goddesses,” like “everything can be found inside,” “all the knowledge and wisdom that we need is already inside of us,” and so on and so forth.
And there are other aspects of healing culture. But so, this moment of epistemic vulnerability, when our epistemologies and our ontologies kind of get shaken or deconstructed is a moment where we’re very vulnerable to them being influenced, or being fed some other story that is not necessarily in our best interest, either.
And I think, facilitators (for example) or integration coaches or medicine providers, any person that is really working with psychedelics, I think there is a huge responsibility in terms of that epistemic vulnerability of the person, Like being super hyper-aware of what kind of stories we are reproducing, what kind of ideologies, what kind of spiritual precepts, what kind of belief systems we carry with us that then get maybe projected into somebody that is in a very vulnerable state.
And I think epistemic humility, to that extent, functions as a sort of cushion or sort of antidote. Like, “Hey, you know, like we don’t have to hurry to attach to beliefs quickly. we don’t have to attach, we don’t have to hurry to leap, to make a leap of faith into another belief system that requires from us that certainty.
I think for me at least when I’m working for myself or when I’m working with other people, I think one of the places where I feel most comfortable is actually in that indeterminacy of allowing myself and encouraging other people to feel comfortable with not knowing, with not making a choice, with the uncertainty of not having to put a finger on like, “oh this is exactly how the world works, this is exactly who is in charge, this is the structure of the new model of the world that I have.”
But rather like, “Hey, you know, like maybe let’s consider that there’s complexity, there’s a lot of nuance to these things.
In that moment, for example, when that epistemic kind of deconstruction happens, the person has choices. So on one choice, we can say “well, I want to learn more about the political economy of drugs,” or “I want to learn more about sociology,” “I want to learn more about the history of governance,” “I want to learn more about how the economic system actually works and how finance works,” and so on, which takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort, is a lifelong endeavour of trying to understand more and more and more about society and about culture and about politics to gain a wider understanding, a more precise model of how the world actually works.
Or on the other hand, we can say like, “fuck that, that’s too complex. Okay, it’s easier for me to just say ‘oh no, it’s actually the Jews or the Masons, or there’s actually like this huge conspiracy or a handful of people that are in charge of everything that happens. And then, I’m going to attach to that worldview, because it provides me a sense of certainty.”
It’s to say like, “well, actually I don’t want to learn about all of these complex things, I just want to attach to that easy answer that is providing me with a different structure that lessens that cognitive dissonance and so on.”
So, you know, conspiracy culture jumps in in those moments. Spirituality, oftentimes, jumps in in those moments, right? Like, both of them together jump in in those moments and hijack that impulse to actually learn and understand better, and just provide you some easy and perhaps comfortable framework that is not necessarily going to be better for the person, or society, or the community.
So that’s kind of been the main concern: how do we actually bring that epistemic humility to prevent that hijacking of all of those, not necessarily malicious, but you know, bad ideas that get people very riled up?
Chris: Yeah, that seems to be the question in our time, the “how.” Yeah, I mean it’s also just a lot of work, and not to simplify it because it is an incredible amount of work, but certainly when you have an ecology of oversimplification and reductionism as we do in our times, or at least in the way that I was raised in Toronto, Canada, it’s a constant battle to remind oneself that you were bombarded most of the time, and the bombardment of reductionism is largely unspoken because it’s so rooted in the culture, in the language of the culture. Yeah. And so, you mentioned also that the nuance and complexity that can come out of psychedelic experiences is also, I think, experienced when people travel to other cultures for example, from the global north or the global south to have psychedelic experiences.
And so, it’s my understanding that you spent several years in the Amazon working with a reputable retreat centre there. And generally speaking, tourists expectations and entitlement can often and easily lead to bad behaviour, the kind of sensationalism that often comes along in news about tourism, and while it’s easy to critique it from afar, I’d like to ask you, Adam, what you saw in your time there in the Amazon in terms of, what we might say or what we might call the lack or absence of epistemic or cultural humility. You know, I’m curious how this showed up either in your own experience or those of the people that arrived as pasajeros down there.
Adam: Yeah. I think none of these things are black or white. I think, you know, something that is important for me to say from the get-go, even though I do bring maybe a critical eye or a critical lens to many of these phenomena, I also have a lot of appreciation for the work that is done, even in retreat centres in the Amazon. I mean, I think there are a lot of complexities and a lot of sides to this. But by the end of the day, I think I do have a lot of appreciation for people who are seeking to heal, even people who are just experiencing the novelty of like different plant medicines, people that are exploring and traveling and wanting to connect with different mystical technologies or spiritual techniques or exploring other cultures, even if they’re not as well informed as they should be. I mean, there’s all sorts of different things, but at the end of the day, I think I do have respect and appreciation for the complex of beings as a whole.
That being said, I mean, yes, there are many things that can be done better, and for me, that’s kind of the approach. You know, it’s not necessarily like, oh, like all of the ayahuasca tourism sucks and we need to completely abolish and eradicate all of it, but rather like how can we actually benefit from it the most, while still contributing to a healthy culture and healthy social dynamics and diminishing the actual impact that this has on local populations, whether it’s economic or social or culture and so on and so forth.
There’s all sort of different angles to it, I think the ones that for me are more interesting... again, we were talking about epistemology. For me, the more interesting angles: of course, there are social concerns, political concerns, there’s all sorts of cultural issues that comes with the arrival of large groups of people from the global north seeking particular things in places that are poor, places that are to some extent destitute, places that are to some extent under the weight of exploitation for many, many, many years and so on. So, there’s a lot to be said about cycles of exploitation resources, whether it’s the history of the Amazon, from rubber to wood to now wisdom and knowledge.
But for me, one of the things that are most salient has to do with what are the stories that we tell people. I mean, this is something that I have focused on a lot, because for me it’s very important. I think in the last decade or fifteen years, we made out of progress, thinking about set and setting, right? This idea that psychedelic experiences don’t really happen in a vacuum, but there’s a whole lot of context and things to take care of when it comes to both our personal inner state and landscape. But at the same time, also kind of like the context in which the experiences happen, the physical spaces, the music, but there’s components to the setting, particularly that I think are not necessarily spoken about enough, and they’re definitely not curated or thought about in that way. And that part has to do more with kind of like the narrative or discursive dimensions. So what are the stories that we tell ourselves? And what are the stories that we tell people? What are the ideas that are floating out there in the culture about what ayahuasca is for, for example? Or what is plant medicine?
These are interesting questions. I mean, for example, if you open the internet and you go to ayahuasca retreat centres, there’s very, very specific narratives that you’re going to see over and over and over, right?
“Ayahuasca pretty much is a panacea for treating trauma.” You know, a very, very, very, a common story that we have nowadays. Like ayahuasca is kind of like this antidote for the root source of all Western affliction, which is trauma. I’m not saying this is true. I’m saying this is the story, right? This kind of like this cultural moment where trauma has been posited in this way through the work of Peter Levine and Gabor Mate and Bessel Van Der Kolk and all sorts of different things. Kind of like “see trauma - childhood trauma, in particular - as kind of like the source of everything that we suffer from in adulthood, from anxiety, depression, to addiction, to all sort different physical ailments, right? This idea that there’s a psychogenic theory of physical illnesses that manifest in our lives, because of things that happened to us when we were children. I mean, all these things are kind of like very, very much well-rooted in healing culture as a whole and the psychedelic world in particular.
So, if you go to the website, then you will see that. You’ll see, oftentimes, kind of those stories, appealing to a public that has been fed that story, that we’re all traumatized, that we’re all suffering we’re all suffering from all sorts of different things, and that the way out of it is to work on our childhood trauma, and the way to work with our childhood trauma is to come and drink ayahuasca in the jungle, because that’s the panacea, or at least the very best medicine that we found for it.
I’m not saying this is not necessarily true. It can be true, in some instances, for some people. There’s nuance to it, but those are the stories that are floating in the culture and, you know, in order to tell those stories, basically, which in other words, in order to attract clients to retreat centres in the rainforest. There is a need to... There’s a few things that need to be done, but one of the things that needs to be done is that there’s a need for translating an incredibly complex world of meaning, let’s say the local worlds of what ayahuasca is, how it is embedded in animistic ontologies, the worldviews of the people in the Amazon rainforest that have worked with Ayahuasca, right? There’s a need to kind of translate those worlds and sell them to potential clients, right? In order to do so, there’s the marketing piece of the thing that they need to appeal to our sensibilities, the things that Western client is looking for in these experiences. So you can’t really quite talk about things that are part of the local world, right?
I’m generalizing a lot, but talking more specifically, for example, let’s say you’re working in a, in a retreat centre that works with Shipibo people, right? And the Shipibo people, as many Amazonian people, their medical systems are medical systems that are rooted in a particular worldview. The medical systems, their theories of disease, the theories of illness, the theories of diagnosis, their theories of cures are rooted in a particular ontology, are emerging from that ontology, an ontology that is animistic, an ontology that is relational, an ontology that is based on a very different understanding of what the world is, than what most people in the global North would recognize as their own ontology, as our own ontology, which is more materialistic, more individualistic in that sense. And that has a lot of implications because, for example, for the Shipibo people, medicine and warfare or medicine and spiritual warfare are not separate domains. They’re one and the same thing. In the Shipibo worldview, again, as in many other Amazonian animistic systems, disease, for example, never really happens in a vacuum. People don’t get ill just because they get they get ill. From malaria to the flu to grave, life-threatening disease, nothing happens “just because.”
The theory of causation in these medical systems is relational. If you get sick, it’s because somebody made you sick. If you experience illness, it’s because somebody in the community of being that you’re a part of wanted you to be ill, wanted you to be And that reason can be all sorts of different reasons. I mean, there’s all sorts of different, domains of disease in Shipibo culture from cutipados to sustos to daños, But basically all of these things are relational. And what that means basically for the medic, right, for the Shipibo medical practitioner who is singing the disease out of your body, is that he’s not only cleaning you or emptying you from affliction, but is actively also engaged in combat against the afflicting entity.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Adam: Every act of curing, every act of healing is also an act of battle, of warfare against some agent that is because of your illness, because everything is relational. And for you to get better, there’s a need to restore that reciprocity, which oftentimes means we need to get rid of the afflicting agent, and then kind of figure out what happens that that agent wanted you ill.
So, for example, I mean, you know, this can be pure sorcery or pure magic or pure brujeria in the sense of like there’s somebody who is jealous of you or somebody who doesn’t like you for whatever reason, and it’s just like sending you magic darts and making you ill, but it can be also more subtle ways that are embedded within a ecosocial way of understanding the world of how reciprocity actually is enacted in real life, in the sense that you cannot hunt in places where you’re not allowed to hunt, for whatever reason, because it’s not the right season of the year to hunt a particular animal because there needs to be a replenishment of females within a particular species, or you’re not allowed to fish in a particular cocha in a particular time of the year, because there’s a very acute awareness of the cycles of nature. And people know when to fish and who to fish and how to fish. And remembering that an animistic worldview like the fish and the deer and the bird, they’re all persons, right? They’re not just resources to be extracted, mindlessly from the rainforest. They’re people that you engage with, like people, like equals, right? So the fish and the tree and the lupuna tree or the gamitana fish or the deer or the mahaz or the huangana, like there’s a need for engagement in a horizontal person-to-person, equal-to-equal way. So if a person goes and walks under the wrong tree at the wrong time of the day, then there’s an understanding that that person might fall ill, because the tree is enforcing that illness as a result or as a manifestation of that breach in reciprocity and disrespecting an equal.
Hunting the wrong people at the wrong time of the year is a cause of illness, because there’s a breach in that understanding of reciprocity, of you are my equal and I have to respect you in that sense. And if not, then I might fall ill.
Anyway, there’s all sorts of different reasons why a person might fall ill, but all of those reasons are relational, so the healing is also relational. The curing is also relational. The singing is also relational, but to the point, you cannot really say that in the copy of a retreat centre, because you don’t want to scare people away. You can’t say, “oh, like, you’re going to be working with shamans who are also brujos. You’re going to be working in a medical system that is both wonderful but also incredibly dark. At the root of it, there’s like this understanding of reciprocity that entails constant spiritual battle spiritual battle.”
When you get to actually experience the work of a Shipibo onaya... I mean, “onaya” is a emic term, the local term that the Shipibo name themselves - the person who knows how to work with ayahuasca, what we probably would call a “shaman” in a less than ideal way. But when you get to see the work that they actually do, not in the maloca with 25 tourists from the global north, but in smaller settings in their own communities, amongst their own people, then you can really see the toll that it takes on the person, the actual damage from the spiritual warfare.
I mean, again, I’m not making an ontological assertion here that these things are ontologically real in the sense of like... you know, this is always tricky to talk about, right? Like you kind of have, finding the balance between being respectful and openminded about the understanding of the world of different cultures, but at the same time, this is where the epistemic humility comes in very handy for facilitators, right?
For example, the last thing that you want to do as a facilitator is allow a person who came to an ayahuasca retreat to leave the retreat, now convinced that their illness is due to them being haunted by a spirit or something. This is something that I’ve seen many times happen where a facilitator takes a pasajero, takes one of the participants in the ceremony to talk to the Shipibo. There’s a mistranslation of whatever the Shipibo was saying, and then the person is communicated back that their depression, or their anxiety, or their cancer, or whatever it is that they’re ailing from is actually stemming from a curse that somebody put on them, or some sort of jealousy or envy.
There’s a clash in understandings of causation. There’s a clash in understanding of how things happen and what is needed to get rid of them [illnesses]. And there’s a lot of room for iatrogenic damage in those interactions if we’re not able to navigate properly, not only the translation, but also the cultural translation and also the space for epistemic ambiguity in explaining to the person, like, “hey, this is a particular worldview, this is a particular way of understanding things. We’re working within this system, yes, but that doesn’t mean that every person has to completely attach themselves now to that belief system, which is something that happens quite a lot, right? Many of the facilitators in the Amazon Rainforest learn and study with Shipibo healers within a Shipibo framework, and then they become extremely religious, extremely attached to those particular belief systems, and then they reproduce those things in a way that perhaps is not ideal either.
There’s something that I write about a lot in my book - ontological caricatures. This idea that, as much as we would like to try and translate worldviews that are as foreign as, let’s say, a Shipibo, animistic, relational framework can be for me, that translation is always going to be reductive. It’s always going to be incomplete. It’s always going to be a caricature or something that I may approximate an understanding of, but I can’t quite articulate in the same way that an actual Shipibo person who was born in the rainforest, who was raised within that framework, who train their brain with the perception of this jungle life and relationality and so on. I mean, there’s always going to be a massive distance, even between the most observant and well-intentioned, external researcher trying to understand that world. There’s always going to be a distance between him or her and an actual person that grew up within that worldview, and trained within the worldview all the time. So our best attempts at translations are always going to be caricatures. And what we’re selling people are always going to be those caricatures.
And they’re caricatures, not only because they’re incomplete or low-resolution, the caricatures also, because when the incentives of marketing kick in, we’re also stripping away those caricatures from all their complexity, because we’re basically sanitizing them, we want to wash away all the darker sides of it. We don’t want to put the word “brujeria“ on our website. We don’t want to talk about a soul sorcery that is inherent to those interactions, right? We want to kind of sell a sanitized version where the spirits of the plants and the Shipibo healers are basically omni benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, like faint figures that are only working for our benefit for some reason. Like, “the plants of the Amazon really have it as their main goal to heal every foreigner that comes to the jungle because they’re just omnibenevolent” and so on. So, this is something that pretty much every website or every Instagram account of every retreat centre, or the email copy of the people who are working there sells.
This is one version of another, extremely reductive, extremely sanitized, extremely hygienic sort of caricature that sells a product that is meant to appeal to a very wide audience. There’s little resemblance to what actually is the belief system, the worldview, the epistemology of the local communities that are working with those plants, that are offering those services, that are being impacted by this meeting of cultures, whose culture, whose belief systems, whose ontologies and epistemologies are being reduced to something that is mostly used as a marketing ploy to attract people to them. But again, like it bears little resemblance to the actual thing.
So you know, this ontological caricature is something that I also have called the Disneyfication of plant medicine. This Disney-fying process, in which the whole industry becomes a Disneyfied version. And what I mean by Disneyfied is when we say the attributes of Disneyland. Again, “this happy place, omnibenevolent, omnibenevolent we try to hide as much as possible the darker aspects of it. The ugly sides of it kind of get tucked away, and we just kind of offer this fantasy wonderland of omnibenevolence. And you’re just coming here to heal and to transform and everything is fine. And there’s no risk. There’s no danger. There’s, there’s just a promise, right? We’re selling kind of like this aspirational promise of healing trauma.”
Yeah, it’s a very Disneyfied thing to that extent, that it’s very sanitized, very hygenized, a very incomplete version that we’re selling people in order to attract them. them And I mean, in this era of globalized psychotics, it’s inevitable, because for example, you have to have a unique selling point if you’re competing against an increasingly large number of people offering ceremonies worldwide. So they say like, “Hey, how do I draw people from Brooklyn or from London or from Sydney in Australia? How do I sell them the idea that it’s very important for them to actually come to the source of it, to work in the jungle with actual Shipibo who are very authentic, instead of just joining an ayahuasca circle in their hometown?”
I mean, there’s a lot of competition nowadays. The ayahuasca industry is global, and it’s massive.
There’s thousands of ceremonies happening in every big city, over the world every week. So, So there’s kind of like this, this need to create this Disneyfied version to keep the competitive edge. Does that make sense to you?
Chris: It makes, it makes a lot of sense. And that was incredible. I have no doubt that you defended your thesis with precision and beauty. Wow. You know, I want to ask about this, note that you suggested. When someone who spends maybe not enough time, but enough time in, for example, in a place like the Amazon, with a culture like the Shipibo, for example, to gather in the dynamics and even specificities of their culture perhaps superficially or otherwise, and then applies them to their own life or experience or illness or health, or even takes it back home with them, for example, to the global North. wherein there’s, you know no cultural framework to support that kind of thing, or just people who would even understand at the very least, what the person is referring to or talking about.
I mean, there’s definitely this sense of iatrogenesis that you mentioned. And I’m wondering as well within, I guess a more fundamental and less specific level, if this notion of health and illness as inherently relational, as inherently social, as affecting or even afflicting a “social body” as opposed to an individual or, or personal body.
You know, I mean I’ve lived here in Oaxaca, Mexico for the last 10 years. I’ve spent a lot of time in indigenous villages and peered into the indigenous systems are understandings of health and illness here. And they definitely mirror what you’re saying in terms of this relational notion.
And I’m curious, you know. Leaving the specificities of spiritual warfare that exists in the Amazon aside, how do you think that the understanding or the, the possibility of conceiving of health and illness in a relational context might be a kind of sobering, reconfiguring of our understanding of health illness in the global north or in the West, or among modern people to the extent that, well, maybe this might help us not have to pry and ply the unconsidered and maybe even incoherent concepts of other people, and I want to say incoherent - incoherent in the sense that you were referring to in the example that you gave about someone trying to apply it cross-culturally in a way that doesn’t fit. Do you think that a relational model might help us to reconfigure the ways in which we come to health and illness, and the ways in which we are healthy in the world or not?
Adam: Well, I mean, I think that’s my hope. That’s what I hope to achieve also as a facilitator in the rainforest. Every retreat I facilitate to every group that I had the opportunity to talk to when I was there, I always made one session, which was basically based on understanding health, not necessarily as a purely individual process, but as a relational process, not necessarily within the framework of animistic agency and so on, but like just very basic things, right? It was surprising in the beginning that people were not aware of these ideas as much as I would like them to be, but also like the reception was very good all the time, because there were things that just clicked in people’s minds. Again, when you’re selling a story of individual transformation and individual healing... I mean, all the healing culture is extremely individualistic in the sense that it kind of like pretends to form communities in the world. But all the interventions, all the understanding of what it means to be happy and healthy with spirituality, are extremely hyper-individualistic because they’re emergent from overarching kind of like neoliberal culture, that very much takes the individual as the main and only unit of analysis, most of the time.
So, for the most part, what it means to be happy and healthy is an individual process, right? Like, “I have my trauma, I go, I drink ayahuasca, I process my trauma, I develop better habits and so on.” But it’s always kind of like individual transformation, individual healing, individual transformation.
There was a mantra at the place where I worked. A mantra that was repeated pretty much by every facilitator to everybody that came: your individual healing and transformation is the best gift that you can offer the world. You know, that kind of sounds right and sounds true, and it may be in that sense. It is very important for each individual to do our own work as it were. We have to do our work so we can actually heal, transform and then have an impact, but there is also a very navel-gazing culture around that thing where the only thing that matters at the end of the day... I mean, you can very easily interpret that saying “your individual healing and transformation is the best gift that you can offer in the world,” that can very easily be skewed towards what actually happens in the field most of the time, which is complete devaluation of any sort of approach to health, wellbeing, happiness that is not rooted in my own individual process, that is not encapsulated within my own individual psyche. So we kind of just become passive consumers, of retreats, of techniques, of supplements, of classes. But it’s kind of like we’re once again, falling into the cycle of individual consumption, whereas we at some point hope that we’ll escape the matrix just by putting ourselves through the proverbial dishwasher, just like once more and once more, and once again another retreat and another workshop, and another class, and this is a supplement that is going to help, or this is the thing.
So, when I had a group, I would very explicitly try to deconstruct that idea and illuminate the way in which actually health is inherently relational, right? The individual health is inherently connected or related to the health of our communities, and how my individual health is inherently connected to the health of the society that I live in and the culture from which I feel, and the environment which sustains me in all sorts of ways.
And when you talk about these connections and you make them explicit, a lot of people say, “oh yeah, well that’s pretty obvious.” But the truth is that it’s not that obvious in the day-to-day when a person is still self absorbed into this vortex of individualized interventions, right? When you go to a place like the Amazon, for example, and you dig a little bit into what’s actually happening there, and you contemplate the ecological catastrophe that the Amazon is nowadays, right? Like the rivers... there’s all sorts of different things that are happening that are really catastrophic ecological processes that are having a massive impact in the health of communities and individuals.
If the rivers are polluted with oil, because of the oil companies that are extracting oil in the Amazon and then just dumping the pipes or never ever really fixing the pipes in the rivers, the rivers are polluted beyond any practical use for indigenous and mestizo riverine people that live alongside the banks of those rivers are using that water to drink from it and cultivate crops and so on, and they’re getting sick and they’re dying. Then, it’s very easy to illuminate the intrinsic link between environmental health and individual health. If we’re drinking polluted water, then we’re going to be sick.
We, for the most part, in the developed, global north, have the privilege of not having to think about these things all the time, because we’re not drinking water from polluted rivers most of the time. I mean, some of us are, of course. There’s all sorts of massive problems in the north, global north as well, but they’re not as immediate and they’re not as acute as for a lot of people in the global south, including many Amazonian communities that are actually dying all the time just because of the pollution in the rivers.
So, illuminating the link between environmental health and individual health is one way that we can actually yank the person out of the self-absorbed individual healing process and endless process of doing the internal work of changing the locus of healing and transformation from the internal to the external.
Sometimes. It’s fine, it’s okay to have one eye inwards and maybe one eye outwards, right? So, what I tried to encourage people was, as they underwent seven ayahuasca ceremonies and did all of this personal work and all of this healing work and transformation work, and digging out traumas and whatever it is that they we’re there to do...
I’m not saying this with contempt, I’m saying this maybe with a little bit of irony, but a lot of respect for every single person that actually does this work because it’s not easy work.
We can keep that one eye inwards and do all of that heavy, shitty, emotional, psychological, self-absorbed work, but at the same time one eye outwards. Well, actually, it’s actually becoming much, much clearer that community health impacts individual health in all sorts of different ways. I mean, we know, for example, in the West, we’re going through massive epidemics of loneliness, massive epidemics of alienation. We know that loneliness is a massive problem, that is not only a social problem, it’s an individual problem. I’m speaking of men in particular. When men are lonely, when men are alienated, when men don’t have a strong community that binds them to degrees of accountability or reciprocity of being a productive member of a community that is encompassing, then we’re very easily radicalized. It’s very easy to radicalize people who are lonely. It’s very easy to radicalize people who are alienated. It’s very easy to radicalize people who have lost any semblance of community, who are not in balance, who are not accountable by people who love them. And there’s reciprocity in those interactions. It’s very easy to hijack those minds and say like, “Hey, you know, like all of your problems are because of immigrants, all of your problems are because of Jews, all your problems are because of somebody that becomes a scapegoat for an incredibly important socio-cultural problem that then gets individualized in the person.
Or cultural issues that are very important. I mean, political issues are very impactful of individual health. This is one of the examples that I always gave people, because it’s easy to connect with: if we live in a consumerist culture where everywhere we go, whether we’re on the street or we’re in the car listening to the radio, or just trying to watch TV and unwind, and we’re being bombarded thousands of times a day with the same messaging that is meant to get us to buy shit that we don’t want or we don’t really need. I mean, advertising kind of like relies on one assumption, which is like we have to make that person feel incomplete. We have to make that person feel insecure. We want to sell you the shit that you don’t really need. We want to create that artificial sense of scarcity or that artificial sense of insecurity.
So there’s a whole culture that thrives on you feeling insecure with yourself, right? So, when a person goes on the street, and we see these ads all the time of these beautiful people drinking a glass of wine, or we hear these things telling us that we’re not good enough, we’re not pretty enough, we’re not rich enough, we’re not something enough, then that cultural malware is going to have an impact in our individual health, because we’re not only going to feel more insecure, we’re also going to feel anxious, we’re going to feel depressed. Our self-esteem is going to suffer. There’s all sorts of things that are cultural issues that are actually also very impactful to our individual sense of health.
So what happens when we individualize everything is that we lose sight of those things, right? We lose sight of the need for community as an inherent part of our happiness. We lose sight of the damage that consumerist culture does to our wellbeing by producing this artificial sense of not being enough. We lose sight of like the massive damage that social media, perverse incentives, are having on how we are. They keep us trapped into these doom-scrolling traps just by hijacking our dopaminergic systems. Say, “Hey, we’re going to fill you with rage-bait forever and ever to keep you engaged in our platforms. That’s a technological problem that’s also a social problem, but it’s also a cultural problem that manifests as a massive, massive, massive individual issue for a lot of people, right?
I mean, I definitely feel that. I mean, I’m definitely suffering a lot from social media addictions that are structural issues with how these technologies are designed. So, illuminating those links between individual health and community health; individual health, society, culture, technology, environment and so on, is a very, very important step forward into a healing culture that is able to stop navel-gazing and stop that self-absorption into our individual.
We have to start looking also at structure because if we’re not at looking structure. If we’re not looking structures, if we’re not creating better structures, then we’re going to keep having the same results, right? Individuals, as much as we want to think that we’re kind of like these semi-divine Gods and Goddesses who are all powerful and so on, I mean, by the end of the day, we are results of the structures that we inhabit. And Unless we actually do the work to change structures, then we’re always going to be spiraling like a hamster wheel, chasing our own healing and transformation while the structures that we inhabit are completely broken.
There are, in the west, have been, always, very deep awareness of those things.
It’s called public health. The pandemic destroyed it forever. I mean, I don’t know, “forever.” Let’s not say “forever,” but the pandemic did massive damage to the public trust in expertise, right? Like the response to the pandemic now created boogie, a monster kind of like this, I Dunno what the expression is, but public health.
Public health, right? Epidemiologist and public health professionals and so on and so forth are now, kind of the enemy of a lot of people. Public health interventions are now seen as fascism. Social determinants of health, which is something, that should be at the forefront of any medical understanding anywhere in the world, are now just “woke garbage.”
So this understanding that class has an impact in individual health. The poverty is one of the most important things to consider when we’re trying to make an intervention to make people healthier. It’s not only about whether people have access to food that doesn’t have red dyes, but the quality of the food that people are able to purchase. I mean, there’s all sorts of different things that fall within that rubric of public health, of social determinants, of health, of health interventions that are not designed just for individual people, but to like really strengthen the health of communities and societies and cultures. So we have different individual results, but all of those things nowadays are kind of like being completely demonized since the response to the pandemic created a boogie monster and like the anti-woke backlash really saw any sort of attempt to bring forth things about class or race and so on and so forth.
I mean, it’s going to take a while for that to rebound, I guess. But nowadays we’re in a moment in time where all those things are very easily chucked to the side, demonized and increasingly even criminalized. Public health.
Chris: Wow. Wow. Thank you, Adam. In terms of this through line around ecological or social health, I’m curious if whether in your time in the Amazon, or elsewhere, or in your studies, if the people, now I guess this question kind of runs in two parallel directions.
We could speak of the people who operate and own and administer psychedelic retreat centres, and then also the indigenous communities that are employed by them. In your time there before or since, was there any consideration as to the consequences of social health for the indigenous communities there as a result of tourism?
I’ve seen it, I’ve read it. There’s a kind of back and forth debate about whether tourism is now causing more sorcerous attacks or spiritual warfare between, curanderos or shamans or villages, or whether it’s lessening. There’s also the question of the diaspora: the amount of healers from the Amazon who essentially take their skills on the road and spend most of their time in the global north, treating modern people as opposed to those in the villages. There can be, in some places, might be in other places, perhaps is a degree of inequality that is growing, either within the villages or between the villages as a result of this tourism.
So, I’d love to hear your opinion on it, but I’m also curious, if you saw any willingness to consider that, not just among the retreat centre owners, but also the indigenous communities there in the Amazon.
Adam: I really cannot speak to either retreat centre owners or operators, or indigenous people per se. But I mean, I can give some observations in terms of this phenomena. When talking about indigenous people, I think also is very important, when talking about the Shipibo people, for example, I think it’s very important to note that this is not a monolithic voice. There’s no consensus about any of these things. Every person has their own opinions. There’s all sorts of different ideas, opinions and feelings about it. Some people are more radical to either side of it. I mean, I definitely met Shipibo people who were extremely appalled by the whole thing, and they were very conservative and very protective of their own things and very reticent to give knowledge to gringos.
And I met others who were all over the place, like free-for-all, you know, like, “just come, pay us money and we’ll give it.” And I think it’s important to note not only is it not a monolithic set of beliefs or ideas, but also that Shipibo people have of agency within this construct. I mean, it is very asymmetric in the sense that of course, people from the global north do come with much more resources, money, power, decision-making, and so on and so forth, which means that the incentives for the Shipibo populations are fairly strong. I mean, it’s very difficult. For example, if a Shipibo healer or onaya gets hired, or he gets the opportunity to be hired by a leading retreat centre and go work there for three months, I mean the payment or the amount of money that he would make in three months working in a retreat centre away from home is something that will be difficult to say no to, even if that means leaving their communities and their families without their work, which happens all the time.
So my cats are jumping around. I think it’s zoomies time.
So, it is true, for example, that many trained onayas are not serving their communities anymore, both because the majority of the time they’re working with us in, whether it’s in ayahuasca retreat centres, or just traveling around the world, or operating their own retreat centres. This is something that has happened quite a lot in the last 5-7 years, is that many Shipibo families who were on the first waves of employment in Western-owned retreat centres, they figure it out like, “Hey, we don’t have to be employees of anyone. The knowledge, the skills, the resources are ours.” The only thing that we need is our own physical environment, and the know-how, how to run a business. And to the credit of ayahuasca retreat owners, such as in the place where I worked at, there’s a lot of help that is being given to the Shipibo families.
Like, “Hey, you worked for us for many years, and now we’re gonna reciprocate by helping you to create your own dieta centres, whether it’s logistically, knowledge-wise, consulting economically, and now many of the Shipibo onaya bo that I met in the beginning of my time in the Amazon as salaried labourers, as employees or retreat centres, nowadays they have their own centres. They attract their own public, which is mostly made out of people that they met working at retreat centres. They created their own clientele. They came up with their own model of how to give plant dietas. You know, they get a lot of help in marketing by previous guests, they get a lot of social media training by previous guests. I mean all, there’s a lot of gaps that are bridged just by this intercultural, cross-cultural fertilization that happens all the time.
And, it’s neither negative or positive. I think that really depends who you’re talking to. I mean, I think as a whole, there’s a lot of Shipibo families, a lot of Shipibo practitioners that are now retreat centre owners that travel the world, offering medicine to people that love the work that they do.
Has that increased jealousy in the Amazon?
Of course. I mean, it’s completely ripped apart many Shipibo communities for obvious reasons. I mean, if you’re living a lifestyle that is 4, 5, 6, 7 steps upward from the median income, from a median lifestyle, then of course there’s gonna be people opening eyes on “what are you doing” and “how are you doing it?” And so on and so forth.
So there’s many internal frictions. There’s also been some attempts to regulate those internal frictions in some, in different sort of ways. Shipibo associations of onaya bo got together for the first time a few years ago, trying to provide some guidelines of internal regulations for Shipibo shamans on how to work, where to work you know, what kind of conditions...
I mean, I don’t know where they’re at now, to be honest. I haven’t really followed up on it, but back in the day, we were kind of trying to come up with ideas, that at least some of the money that is sunk into retreat centres comes back to Shipibo communities, whether it’s in forms of school, to train younger generations, which is a massive problem for the Shipibo, still today.
The vast majority of apprentices of Shipibo medical systems are not Shipibo. They’re Westerners like you and I that come to the jungle. They fall in love, they fall in love with the medicine, and they want to become shamans themselves, Where Shipibo youth are not so inclined. They have the opposite drive. They want to go to the city. They want to go to university. They want to join the western world, because that’s what they see as the best path forward. So it’s kind of like these Westerners coming to the jungle to learn ayahuasca, to practice ayahuasca, to eventually provide ayahuasca, whereas most Shipibo people, youth are in the opposite direction, getting as far away as from it as possible, going to university, becoming accountants or lawyers or anything that kind of brings them closer to mainstream Peruvian society. I mean, things are changing all the time. With the people that I, that I spend time with, the families that I spend time with in the Ucayali in Peru, seeing that in the last 10-15 years there has been such an influx of foreigners, maybe people do rethink whether actually learning from the grandparents and practicing the crafts of the families are a better idea. You know, both there’s an economic future in it.
There’s definitely prestige in it. There’s definitely the opportunity for travel. I mean, there’s all sorts of different things that are changing very quickly. Again, it’s not a very monolithic thing. I think different people think different things. I mean for sure, there are things that are pretty universal within contemporary Shipibo criticism again, which is like, “how can we channel more resources into communities? How can we ensure that there’s a future for Shipibo youth within the system, that is not only gringos.” All these things get talked about all the time. And I’m sure that there’s also sort of new developments that I’m unaware of that touch on many of these things, emically from their part.
Chris: Hmm. Wow. Wow. Fascinating. Thank you, Adam. So I have a strange question.
Adam: Sure.
Chris: I have a very left field question that I’ve been wondering about for a few years. So when modern people show up in places like the Amazon or Oaxaca, for example, searching out psychedelic medicines or healing, when they do so as tourists dropping in and flying out, they often come and go with little to no understanding of their level of consequence on a place, consequence that is often lost on them because of the short term duration of their stays, and often because the politics of such things are kept from visitors as you mentioned a little bit earlier. so there’s this kind of touristic element that appears perhaps inherent in psychedelic retreat centres and weekend, weekend warrior ceremonies.
So if we take this, these notions of hypermobility, of temporariness and relative ignorance of, for example, the local culture and history, and if we consider the immense consequence that we have in the places that we visit do you think that we as humans have the same consequence in the psychedelic realm?
Do you think we show up as tourists in the psychedelic realm? And if so, what do you think are the consequences for the psychedelic realm or the medicine or the spirits of the medicine?
Adam: Oh, okay. So you, you’re talking about astral the psychedelic, realms.
Chris: Right. And the context kind of kind of boils down to a degree of hospitality.
If we arrive in a place and we have no invitation, if we have no understanding of the language that the people speak, if we bring no gifts with us, if we just walk in expecting to be fed. If this is sometimes a part of what psychedelic tourism is like, do you think there’s a possibility that we also have some adverse effect on the psychedelic realm when we go there in the same way, or in similar ways?
Adam: Huh. Well, I mean, this is really a conversation for maybe a post-rave state when we’re both on mushrooms and smoking a joint. I think speculating about psychedelic realms is very tricky. I think there’s so many assumptions about what those spaces are, who we are interacting with. This is, maybe again, where epistemic humidity comes into it. I think, my own ideas about what this means have changed quite radically and keep changing all the time, you know, from being a true believer about this space of objectivity when I’m interacting with real, essential beings or ontologically real in front of me all the time, that there’s a knowable dimension of relationships that I can cultivate by coming back to these places and meeting these real people as if they were my family.
You know, I’ve “dieted” quite a lot . I mean, “dieting,” if anybody hasn’t heard about this concept, it’s kind of like the way that many Amazonian cultures, including the Shipibo, can forge these relationships with plant helpers and plant spirits and different medicines through a dieting process that basically entails isolation, social isolation and fasting, and a lot of meditation and creating kind of the right container for focusing on crafting a relationship with one particular plant or one particular plant spirit. And I mean, I’ve done that multiple over the course of weeks or months, sometimes. I’ve done a few diets and every time that I do it, I’m kind of very much drawn into this world of relationships of like objective, ontological beings that I’m in contact with and forging relationships with and then that kind of fades away, and I fall back into like, “well, maybe there’s an ontological primacy to my imagination, as opposed to an actual realm that is objectively real out there.”
I mean, these are very tricky things and I think this is where epistemic humility comes in. maybe it’s a cop out, maybe just my lack of courage to take a stand, but I mean, I feel comfortable saying like, “you know, I don’t fucking know what’s going on in those spaces.” Every time that I visit, I’m blown away. Every time that I visit, I end up in the state of awe and reverence. But at the same time, I’m not gonna tell you, like, “this is real,” “this is not,” “this is what is,” “this is what it’s not.” I think we’re very, very, very far from being able to even approximate any sort of certainty about these states, about these places.
For me, it may be that a lot of that is projection from my imagination. It may be that a lot of that is an actual space that I enter while I’m in contact with actual intelligences that are external to me. I think, a lot of people will resonate with both of those things.
Maybe people have other ideas that are there. For me, I don’t feel that I need to convince myself that there’s anything particularly that any belief system is better. I think I’m very comfortable just visiting the spaces without any sort of certainty and dwelling with it that uncertainty is fine.
But you know, to your question, I’ve had experiences, when I dieted of chiricsanango, I thought it was killing me. In the last ceremony that I did. Chiricsanango is a plant, one of the master plants in the Shipibo pharmacopeia, considered like a very strong, stern but loving teacher in many ways. I mean, you’re not supposed to diet chiricsanango early on your path. It’s something that you do after many years, many diets, many incarnations of all sorts of different practices. I went into chiricsanango fairly early and during my last day with... I mean, I dieted it for one month. And during the last ceremony, like the closing ceremony of my diet with that plant, I just had an experience where I felt like something just strangling me, and a very stern entity was speaking to me and basically telling me, “you don’t have the respect that you need for this experience.” Like, basically, “you didn’t go into this wholeheartedly and you’re gonna pay the price for it.” And then, it just kind of started strangling me. I felt all of my body breaking and compressing. I felt different parts of my body starting to shut down one by one, until it basically just came out to my lungs and my heart. And then just having this voice of like, “there’s nothing left for you to do. You fucked up. Just let go.” You know?
And I did. I thought, “well, you know, I fucked up. I went into this experience unprepared, and now I’m paying the price and it’s gonna kill me, and I’m gonna die.” And I did die. And then of course, I reemerged from the other side with this massive amount of reverence and a newfound respect for this path.
I mean, I tell this story just kind of a personal anecdote of going into something that I wasn’t really prepared for, or that at least I thought I wasn’t prepared for. What happened there, I don’t know. I mean, it was a dead and river experience for sure.
Was the spirit lecturing me? Was the spirit kicking my ass about being unserious? A projection of my own fears? A projection of my own unconscious? An actual encounter with a chiricsanango entity that was just...? I don’t know. Do I have to know?
It probably would be good for me to take a stand. As far as I can tell both of those possibilities are true, or possible and maybe there’s many other possibilities.
When I was younger, I had a friend. Well, I mean, I had many friends. We also did a lot of reckless stuff with plants and so on. And I remember one time, we smoked salvia. You know, back in the day you could buy that in the gas station in different countries. I don’t know what the status is today. I think you can’t anymore, because it’s a fucking scary thing to do. And I remember one of my friends just taking a big hit of salvia from a bong, and then going into this state and then just coming out of it with the most terrified expression that I ever seen in a living person, and the only thing that he said is, he said, “the spirit of salvia appeared to me and she told me, if you do this ever again, I will kill you.”
Chris: Wow. Wow.
Adam: Yeah. And we were like, “you know what, maybe, maybe we don’t want to mess with this thing again.” Like all of us. So, I don’t know. You know? I mean, again, was that really the spirit of salvia just warning him? Was it his own projection of fear? I don’t know.
My honest per my honest appraisal of these things: anyone who professes any degree of certainty about ontological and epistemic matters related to the psychedelic experience is either self-deluded or a charlatan. My personal opinion.
Chris: Anyone from modern culture or the global north?
Adam: Yeah. I’m going to exclude indigenous people, because their worldviews match those experiences to some extent, and I think when you grow up with that sort of programming or cultural programming, with that sort of ontological priming, I mean it’s impossible for me to say it’s impossible.
I very much respect the animistic perspective. I think the world as a whole would be much better off if all of us were animistic to some extent, at the very least, if we had that understanding of reciprocity, of personhood, of respect as equals.
Who was it that said this? I think David Thomas Berry I think, framed it as an understanding of the world as a community of subjects to be in relationship with, as opposed to a collection of objects to extract from personal benefit, right?
if all of us approach the world in that way, as a community of subjects, as a thou. I mean Martin Buber gave a distinction, right? Like “I and Thou” versus “I and It.” The world, not as an “it,” but as a “thou,” as a “you,” as an equal.
I mean, I think we would be much better off everybody. So I have a lot of respect and appreciation for animism. I think animism is a much better framework for relating to the world than whatever it’s that we have.
Chris: Hmm, amazing. Yeah. Thank you for being willing to share those rather trepidatious stories with us. But from time to time you’ll hear people in the psychedelic subculture use these experiences or similar experiences or the quote unquote “bad trip” as a kind of metaphor for the psychedelic subculture at large that, you know, whether it was in the centuries that followed eradication of indigenous wisdom on the European continent and elsewhere as a result of the inquisitions or the witch hunts, or whether it was after the madness and destruction of World War II, there seems to be an unwillingness to approach these plants and certainly even other cultures, with a degree of reverence and awe that would properly sit on the throne, I think of the kind of worlds that we’d otherwise wish to live in.
Adam: Yeah, totally.
Chris: And, you know, you answered my final question, which was, what kind of steps do you think we take going forward in terms of the psychedelic subculture and, and this is something you’ve done for the last almost hour and a half, is proceed with a degree of epistemic humility practicing it, speaking it.
And, you know, I’m deeply, deeply grateful for that. I would just say, people are gonna seek these things out and there’s a degree of respect and courage even that’s inherent in the willingness to do so still, in a time of War on D rugs.
Adam: I mean, you know, again, like honestly, these things are going away.
I mean, retreat centres are gonna keep popping up. People are gonna keep going to the Amazon. They’re gonna keep going to the Mazatec mountains, they’re gonna keep going to the Zapotec mountains in Oaxaca. They’re gonna keep going to Costa Rica. I mean, a lot of things gonna continue happening and probably going to increase more and more as entropy increases. As our social and cultural frameworks continue to collapse to some extent, I think people are gonna keep seeking for answers and seeking for all sorts of different ideas and inspirations.
I think it is very important that we do pay more attention to story, narrative and discourse. I think it’s very important that we get a lot more critical voices involved in these things, not only highlighting risks of iatrogenic damage and so on and so forth, but also, I think there’s many dogmas that have been at the heart of healing culture for a very long time, very individualistic approaches to what it means to be happy and healthy, discourses on root cause and so on.
I mean, one thing that I do, I teach a lot of classes and different training courses and all sorts of different things that they invite me to say. One of the things that I oftentimes say to students is, “If there’s one thing that I would like to transmit or the one thing that I would like not to see is any of you becoming cult leaders. I don’t want any of you to be cult leaders. I don’t want in the future to see that you’re own running a cult with your own preconceived ideas and a high degree of certainty about ideas that you have no business being certain about.”
And, you know, conspirituality as a whole is very prone to cultish dynamics. Psychedelics are very inducive towards cult dynamics if they’re not properly integrated and there’s not a proper process of apprenticeship, apprenticeship that requires a very high degree of epistemic humility, but also that willingness to constantly revisit our own assumptions, our own stories, own belief systems, and so on and so forth. Then, not only that, but constantly revisioning and acknowledging how our own stories, our own beliefs, our own frameworks affect the people that we work with.
So, you know, first of all, when we talk about the iatrogenic damage in the context of psychedelics, healing culture, conspirituality, don’t become a cult leader, most importantly. Secondly, always kind of like be aware and self-critical and self-aware of all the different stories that you carry with you. How do we project that when we work with people? How do we project that in our own experiences? For practitioners, for medicine providers, for retreat centre operators, like a constant, constant, constant, process of self-awareness about those things.
What I would like to see personally, I would like to see a much less emphasis on individual healing and transformation, and much more emphasis on how can we actually approach structure? How can we actually approach structural issues? How can we actually use psychedelics, not necessarily as you know, tools of endless self-absorption and self-contemplation, but actually as catalysts for catalysts for change, like real change that has material impact on a lot of people, bringing back to the forefront social determinants of health, bringing back to the forefront public health, maybe in a revisited way that doesn’t create as much animosity and antagonism with people, but at the same time just that understanding that actually being happy and healthy is a collective project, and by the end of the day, nobody can be fully happy and healthy unless we’re all happy and healthy to some extent.
Those are the most important things. You know, I mean if the Oracle Delphi have scribed on the lintel “know thyself,” I think that’s very important. Know thyself. But I think in modern times, “know thyself” is not enough. I think modern times it’s know thyself, but also know how embedded you are in all different layers of being, and how you’re impacted by them and impact them in turn. And how can we always keep one eye looking inwards, doing our work, doing what it is that we need to be better people, but at the same time, one eye outward. We’re not ignoring structure, we’re not ignoring structural issues. We’re not ignoring social, cultural, political, environmental things that affect all of us and how we can actually have that impact.
I think that would be what I would like to see.
Chris: Hmm. Well count me in. Count me in, brother. Thank you, Adam. On behalf of those listening, I’d like to offer you a deep bow for your work and your contemplations and your critiques and for your time with me today. It’s been a great honour to be able to speak with you, to be able to listen to, what I can see is, someone who is clearly, walking the walk, and talking the talk of epistemic humility.
And, so I’d like to ask finally for our listeners, how might they find out more about your work, whether on social media, Substack or elsewhere?
Adam: Yeah, I mean I think the starting point for most people would be the Healing From Healing Instagram, which nowadays... it changed a lot throughout the last three or four years.
I mean, now it’s really more focused on humour than critique, even though it’s still very critical and skeptical about many of the things. But for a more nuance and a little bit more in depth take on the things that I like to showcase in the Instagram page, then definitely the Substack also called “Healing From Healing.”
And you can follow me both on Instagram and the Substack and the thesis I think is gonna be available soonish, so you can just Google my name and it’s probably gonna pop up. Yeah, so Instagram page Healing From Healing. Like, follow, comment. And then, the Substack really is the project that I’m more interested in now. I haven’t really written anything new in a couple of months, because I was focused on finishing the doctoral dissertation, but I think that’s going to become the platform where mostly I’m going to put up my writings in the future.
Chris: Hmm. Fantastic. Yeah. I look forward to reading your dissertation, Adam.
And hopefully by the time the episode is up on the internet, that’ll be available and I’ll be putting it in the homework section along with the links to your Instagram and Substack.
So once again, Adam, thank you so much deeply for your time today.
Adam: My pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
