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English + French bellow<\/p>\n
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Interest in the topic of ayahuasca among populations of developed countries has increased over the last twenty years to the point that ayahuasca has become a fashionable phenomenon. This enthusiasm has widely exceeded the framework of the academic community and scientific laboratories. It has emerged following the expansion of self-exploration initiated in the 1960s \u2013 an exploration that sought to confront the lack of satisfying answers from churches, philosophical schools, and psychotherapeutic traditions.<\/p>\n
The search for an individual sense of life represents a typical Western project and is almost absent in tribal cultures who prioritize the survival and maintenance of collective cohesion. Indigenous peoples are endowed with a rich cosmogony and the mythical tools, legends, and stories that permit them to immediately reference their transpersonal experience and to integrate that experience within a coherent psychic and cultural framework, as much for themselves as for their group. The early submersion in a universe that can be grasped through metaphorical discourse, symbolic codes, analogical descriptions, makes it domesticable.<\/p>\n
Members of these ethnic communities have ritual spaces where they can learn how to enter into relationship with the invisible world, or the world of the spirits, in order to acquire answers and information of interest. Under the guidance of a master skilled in the control of the induction of altered states of consciousness, they undergo an initiation process that permits them to enrich their exploration of the beyond with the capacity to integrate into their lives the teachings acquired during their voyage. As they become aware of the danger surrounding a brave explorer, they also discover the considerable power of the archetypal forces, and consequently the respect that these forces merit.<\/p>\n
Systems of initiation and transmission of knowledge have been established in traditional medicines since ancient times. Schools have existed in jungles and sierras. Ayahuasquero Aquilino Chujandama from Chazuta, on the Huallaga River, told us how he spent nine months with a dozen other young people under the education of a teacher (Maestro) in the middle of the Amazon. He remembered the hard discipline of learning, moved to tears at over 80 years of age: fasts and diets, taking plants, isolation in huts, study of songs, and more. In all this, beyond the apparently \u2018folkloric\u2019 appearance there is an extremely rigorous practice that demands great personal commitment, strict obedience, and strong self-discipline. These external forms express a collective rigour of thought and inner attitude, and a principled ethics.<\/p>\n
Mistress plants, which induce altered states of consciousness, are used unscrupulously by false healers and \u2018shamans\u2019 with purely economic intentions (without ruling out other abuses such as the quest for power and the pursuit of sexual advantage). Opportunists, both Westerners and locals who have Indian features, disguise themselves, swell the self-proclaimed title of \u2018shaman\u2019, invent false genealogies, and exploit the growing market of anxious clients in search of healing, knowledge and existential meaning.<\/p>\n
The use of ayahuasca is only one example of the many rituals involved in this pursuit that are found in the practices of ancestral communities, which have maintained, across time, space, and culture, certain characteristics that are constants for the induction of altered states of consciousness.<\/p>\n
A person who drinks ayahuasca does not lose consciousness during the session and because of this, this person is at the same time observer and observed. He can actively intervene in his own internal processes and thus return as the direct protagonist of his treatment. Afterwards, he will notice an improvement in his self-esteem and experience a powerful sense of self-confidence over that which he has discovered, generating motivation to implement the changes necessary in his life. He can verify the certainty of the interpretive proposals of his therapist, and retake the reigns of his being.<\/p>\n
Since the effective doses of ayahuasca at cerebral levels are close to toxic doses, the ortho-sympathetic phase can be accompanied by digestive evacuation in the form of vomiting and diarrhea. This has earned ayahuasca the deserved name \u2018purga, <\/em>purge, by the local population. At the time of vomiting the subject experiences a concomitant elimination of emotional charges linked to recovered memories, while living the purge subjectively as an expulsion of fear, anger, and negative feelings. It\u2019s because of this link that the purgative effects do not constitute an undesirable secondary effect from drinking ayahuasca, rather, they represent an essential, cathartic, curative function.<\/p>\n Ayahuasca is a natural beverage which respects the physiological barriers and natural mechanisms of self-regulation through the functions of evacuation (diarrhea, vomiting, sweat, and urine) when the patient reaches the limits of his capacity of resistance. Because of this, there is no risk of toxicity to the drinker. We are reminded that studies on rats by Dr Mitras Costa of the University of Campinas in Brazil, indicated that the lethal dose for a 75kg man would be 7.8 liters of ayahuasca \u2013 this represents approximately fifty times the usual therapeutic doses. The extremely disagreeable taste of the beverage makes it effectively impossible to reach this dose, and no cases of death following the ingestion of ayahuasca have been reported. Clinical studies of the Hoasca project carried out by James Callaway and his team in the 1990s clearly indicate that the correct, long-term usage of ayahuasca could not negatively affecting the drinker. In fact, the study found, taking ayahuasca actually improved the physical and psychological health of the participants, when compared to a control group. We have noted the same salubrious effects among ourselves, as well as among the Ayahuasqueros<\/em>, master healers trained in ayahuasca preparation and use, who are healthy at advanced ages. As with any medicine, however, the indications must to take into account the patient’s anamnesis, previous pathologies, the use of medication or drugs: the dangers result more from these omissions than from the potion itself.<\/p>\n Observations of animals have also implied the existence of an instinct in all species to almost compulsively seek experiences that modify consciousness through the ingestion of natural intoxicating substances. An appetite to acquire superior levels of consciousness appears to manifest as an intrinsic impulse of all living beings. This self-exploration of consciousness, through the modification of perceptions, includes much more than the use of psychoactive substances. There are infinite methods for inducing these states through hypo- or hyper-stimulation of the senses. Indeed, in everyday life, human beings constantly modify their state of consciousness and sometimes achieve very powerful and spontaneous alterations of consciousness without the ingestion of any substances at all (for example, through orgasm, dream, trauma, extreme physical exercise, extreme pain, fasting, prayer, or meditation). Given that modifications induced in human consciousness are at once natural and indispensable (you cannot live without dreaming), and furthermore that they represent a necessity for the realization of one\u2019s spirituality, these modified states of consciousness must be protected as an inalienable right of people.<\/p>\n The Takiwasi Center was co-founded in 1992 to address this necessity. Located in the Peruvian high-Amazon, it was created by French physician Jacques Mabit as a centre for the treatment of addiction and mental health and for research into traditional Amazonian medicine. Takiwasi has pioneered the construction of an intercultural therapeutic model. A multidisciplinary team of doctors, psychologists, and healers work together to restore the health of the patients who are welcomed into its therapeutic community.<\/p>\n Where Western people have an awkward and tentative relationship with modified states of consciousness, ancestral medicines have a confident and very sophisticated knowledge. When controlled by the latter, non-ordinary states of consciousness do no damage, while creating opportunities to face the recent development of addictions. Drawing on the experience of the High Peruvian Amazonian forest, Takiwasi therapeutically prescribes wisely chosen medicinal plants, including psychoactives such as ayahuasca. This therapeutic system, elaborated within an institutional framework which combines traditional practices and modern psychotherapy, is efficient, as is demonstrated by the very encouraging outcomes: the experience is positive for two out of three patients. It works outside the cultural environment that creates drug addicts and therapists, inviting Westerners to expand our notion of initiation. This experience, largely forgotten in the Western modern context, seems to be the purpose of the spiritual quest embarked on by drug addicts.<\/p>\n In sum, the current state of medicine in a globalized world in crisis invites us to reflect on the differences and convergences between tradition and modernity in the field of health. Traditional indigenous medicine, in which shamanism often plays a key role, appears at this juncture as a privileged environment for research, and for the production of new models of wellness and good living. The main elements of these new models will be epistemological reflections; the analysis of social realities and the power relations they imply; ethics; the logic of articulation; and an openness to the complexity of the human being and to life in general.<\/p>\n Takiwasi, March 2020.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n