Dazed Digital, Daniel Pinchbeck: 4, 2012

Over the last decade, a bitter tasting drink that makes people vomit, shit, and shiver for hours has become increasingly trendy, even though it remains illegal in many countries. The drink is called ayahuasca, and it is a powerful visionary potion. All across the Amazon, from Brazil to Ecuador, tribal groups use ayahuasca, sometimes called “the vine of souls,” as part of their traditional spiritual practice. Ayahuasca is a concoction brewed from two plants: banisteriopsis caapi, the twisting, doublehelix-shaped ayahuasca vine, which contains beta carbolines, such as harmaline, that are natural MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors), like many prescription antidepressants; and psychotria viridis, a shrub with dark, shiny leaves that hold dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a potent hallucinogen. When you take it, you enter the liquid current of a waking dream, exploring shimmering realms of patterns, scenes, beings and insights.

Along with tribes that have used ayahuasca for perhaps thousands of years, a number of syncretic modern religions have developed that meld elements of Christianity with indigenous spirituality that sees the forest, and all of nature, as sacred. The most well-known of these sects, Santo Daime and Uniao do Vegetal, started in the 1930s, when Mestizo rubber tappers and border guards befriended local Indians in the Brazilian Amazon and joined their ceremonies. The Mestizos, brought up Catholic, had visions and received songs – from the spirits they encountered in their visions – that linked ayahuasca with Judeo-Christian images and archetypes.

DMT is one of a class of substances that were made illegal – given “schedule one” status in the US and elsewhere – in the late 1960s. The legality of ayahuasca use has long been in question around the world. While it is possible to restrict use of DMT, it is impossible to outlaw natural sources of it – not only because it is in many common plants, such as phalaris grass, but because it is also found in the human brain and in our spinal column. It is, therefore, unclear if any potion containing natural sources of DMT could or should be illegal.

In the 1980s, the Brazilian government decided to investigate whether there was any reason to outlaw or restrict ayahuasca use. The Ministry of Health in Brazil conducted a study, involving a team of doctors and professors, on the “sociological, anthropological, chemical, medical and general health aspects” of ayahuasca use in the União do Vegetal (UDV) Church. After months of study, the researchers deemed that ayahuasca was in no way harmful to its users’ physical or psychological health – if anything, they found it had a positive impact: “The ritual use of the tea does not appear to be disruptive or to have adverse effects upon the social interactions of the various sects’ followers,” they wrote. “On the contrary, it appears to orient them towards seeking social contentment in an orderly and productive manner.” Regular ayahuasca drinkers were law-abiding, hard-working and ethical in their conduct. Since they could find no evidence it caused harm, Brazil legalised use of the drug – since then, Gilberto Gil, former Minister of Culture in Brazil, has campaigned to have ayahuasca designated as part of the country’s cultural patrimony, following an example set by Peru.

In the United States, ayahuasca has been slowly edging toward legality since a 1996 US Supreme Court case declared that the UdV could use their tea as a sacrament. The decision was based on precedents set by the Native American Church, which uses peyote during ceremonies. More recently, a Federal court in Oregon ruled in favour of Santo  Daime’s use of their sacrament, following the Supreme Court precedent. Unfortunately, western Europe and the UK continue to prosecute and persecute users of this substance, which many people, including myself, consider to be a profound healing medicine. Europe lost connection with the native use of psychoactive plants when “wise women”, witches, were demonised during the Inquisition. In 2010, two members of the Santo Daime Church in England were arrested for narcotic possession. In 2009, Spanish police arrested two people for ayahuasca use. These arrests have had a chilling effect on ceremonial use of the drug in Europe.

Most people do not have to believe – as tribal shamans or the faithful in these ayahuascabased religions may – that ayahuasca is the spirit of nature or a manifestation of divinity, in order to support its legal use. There is abundant evidence that it functions as an effective anti-depressant with no lasting negative side-effects – unless receiving visions is somehow wrong. As this potion from the Amazon gains popularity, it is changing the way that many people conceive of drugs, or of the experience of getting high. As most people who have tried it will attest, ayahuasca is an extraordinary tool for self discovery, healing and insight. Hopefully, a time will soon come when people can explore this extraordinary medicine without fear of legal reprisal.

Daniel Pinchbeck is theauthor of Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl , and the just-published Notes from the Edge Times. He edits realitysandwich.com and is featured in the documentary, 2012: Time for Change. Follow Daniel on Twitter here @danielpinchbeck  

Dazed Digital, Daniel Pinchbeck: 5, 2011

5

In his monthly countdown to 2012, our resident Shaman Daniel Pinchbeck heralds the timely demise of the hipster

For quite a long time, the icon of postmodern cool known as the hipster – disaffected, stylish, cynical, in flight from responsibility – has been an exhausted construct that refuses to die. The hipster represents an empty rebellion – through disillusion or dissolution – that colludes in secret with the powers-that-be. In the image of the hipster, the media reflects our alienation back at us, turning it into a trend or style with which we identify. Once a new generation is fooled into adapting a style – no matter how “transgressive” or ironic it seems – the image has been successfully packaged into product, perpetuating the capitalist game.

The hipster is, perhaps, finally dying because this ruse of capitalism has become so painfully obvious. We can trace the history of “cool”, a concept that came with the slaves trafficked from Africa to the New World, later transferred from jazz musicians to white bohemians, rock’n’rollers, pop artists, models, and slavish followers of fashion and trends. For African-Americans, the removed stance of cool was a survival mechanism in a hostile culture. Over time, cool was adapted to serve a useful, even crucial, function in the economic engine of post-industrial capitalism.

The vitality of any form of authentic expression or popular rebellion organically expresses itself through personal style; through image and music. This energy is then vampirically absorbed by the culture of spectacle and sold back to the people. Consider Che Guevara t-shirts, or fashion influenced by Third World cultures, as the most obvious examples.

Today, an almost seamless mechanism transmutes any legitimate expression of resistance or authenticity into status symbol or mass-market kitsch. There is little gap between the original gesture and the mainstream regurgitation. In his book Mediated, Thomas de Zengotita calls the process by which our culture of ubiquitous representation absorbs anything that potentially threatens or challenges it into what he refers to as “the blob”. We know the blob has completed its work when we become indifferent and numb to whatever phenomenon it has covered – whether it’s nuclear meltdown in Japan, dire evidence of accelerating climate change, or the bizarre but legitimate prospect that a non-human intelligence might be weaving vast geometric patterns in English wheat fields.

The hipster culture of cool values indifference over passion – detachment over belief. The hipster believes he has attained a level of awareness above the mainstream herd. In fact, his “subjectivity” is produced by the media industry. Hipster detachment is an artificial construct, designed to support a system of corporate control. We find it hard to accept that our subjectivity – our identity and persona, the lens through which we see our world – is manufactured, like any widget made in a factory. One value of psychedelics is that they reveal this process to us, demystifying social practices. For instance, we tend to forget that money is nothing but a belief system, and that capital, as the political philosopher Antonio Negri likes to remind us, is only a “social relation”. We forget that the moment we are living in is the only moment that exists, getting lost in fantasies of the past or future that remove us from immediate experience.

As we realise there is no “outside” or escape from our planet-devouring culture – except by somehow confronting and superseding it – we find that previous forms of cultural rebellion no longer attract us. The pseudo-rebellion of the solipsistic rock star, heroin-sniffing poet, or sex-addicted celebrity has become puerile and infantile. The icon of the hipster has become meaningless and retrograde, yet the hipster persists, like a ghost in the machine, because the alternative is far too strange, too difficult, for many to accept. The alternative is passionate belief, fearless determination and unstinting devotion to the cause of human liberation. Rejecting the throwaway culture of today, we would fight to protect the earth for
future generations.

Over the last century, the varied forms of cultural and social rebellion were neutralized by being co-opted – yet in this process society also changed and adapted. Mass society integrated the human liberation movements of the last centuries into the fabric of daily life, on many levels. The romantic rebellions of the past remain the subliminal music and background wallpaper of the present; radical breakthroughs in defining new rhythms of perception and thought persist as underlying, invisible patterns. The next surprising, yet logical, phase in this dance is for the counterculture to define the desired alternative, co-opt the propaganda tools and financial instruments of the dominant culture, and redirect or reverse the momentum of the system as a whole. It is time for the hipster to lose his cool.

DANIEL PINCHBECK is the author of Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and the just-published Notes from the Edge Times. He edits realitysandwich.com and is featured in the documentary, 2012: Time for Change.