Thread by @StewartalsopIII

A #stablethread on Ayahuasca with an attempt to blend the pharmacology, history and experience of it into one entertaining and educational thread.

For more on this from past writings check out this thread:

https://twitter.com/StewartalsopIII/status/1335927619376852993

In the same way that people find a drug of choice like Heroin or Religion or Sports, we each also have a different plant medicine that draws us into its machinations. For me that is Iboga, not ayahuasca. More on Iboga here:

https://twitter.com/StewartalsopIII/status/1324346973173014531

That being said, I'm fascinated by ayahuasca and its rapid ascension to most known of the very intense transformative psychedelics and I want to try to piece together the pharmacology and signficance of it even though the US federal government makes that incredibly hard.

I have had one experience with Ayahuasca in an extremely non-traditional format in a hotel in Thailand led by my best friend who is an anti-shaman (like an anti-hero). It was quite mysterious and still integrating it many years later. I was gifted a yoga pose by the plant.

For those of you that don't know Ayahuasca is mediated by the 5HT2A receptor (a subtype of Serotonin). It shares this receptor with other psychedelics like Mescaline, Psilocybin, LSD, and other classical hallucinogens. It shares a lot chemical similarities with 5-MEO-DMT

Back to my learnings from Thatiana in Floripa, Brazil.

The main place that she learned how to serve the medicine was in the jungles that surround the border between Peru and Brazil near the Brazilian state of Accre.

https://twitter.com/StewartalsopIII/status/1335927619376852993

This is the border between Brazil and Peru here.

She said that when she first started working on the Peruvian side there were very few foreigners looking for Aya. Now there are ALOT!

The economics of the western seeking of Aya is fascinating and sad.

Rich westerners descend on jungle regions which had been completely ignored except by logging and petroleum interests. They start asking everyone they can find about the jungle brew and carry lots of cash. All of a sudden a lot of the locals start calling themselves "Shamans"

I've seen this niche and novel tourism economy in a lot of places including in Thailand and Brazil. I actually founded a company in the sector in Rio De Janiero (although it was more educational and tried to reverse the nastier side of this trend): ottrio.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/fav…

This ideological capture (and transformation) of traditional knowledge has been a byproduct of both Colonization and Globalization. It happened with Yoga and I believe it happened with Chinese Medicine. It is currently happening with Ayahuasca and will probably happen with Iboga.

Seeing as I have an affinity for Iboga and I'm also a westerner seeped in the same godless tradition of scientific rationalism that is doing this, I can't help but reflect on my own part in this and hope that by not putting these traditions on a pedestal, I can be in integrity.

You see one of the main issues I have identified with the negative parts of this trend is that the westerner who has lost his connection with God and tradition, seeks in vain for a more pure, authentic version of what was lost and tries to copy it, there in destroying it.

We project our own mythologies and our own perceived lack of tradition onto a bunch of people who have been also been recently smashed by the shock of colonization (where their cultures also got melded, many shamans speak Spanish), we create a false impression which influences.

You can see it India a lot with the Gurus who prey on rich westerners looking desperately to fill the void and these gurus, many of whom are poverty-stricken, are more than happy to play to the image for some cash. I'm not sure if I have a solution to this.

The solution, at least the way I see it, is to recognize that nothing will fill the void because the void is the whole reason the ego exists, the only thing the ego fears is its own death or nothingness (the void). These medicines are guides, as are the authentic providers.

We use them so that eventually we can see that we never needed them in the first place.

Back to Ayahuasca specifically and my learnings from Thatiana. She told me about the opposite side of this trend which I was already well aware of. She provides the medicine in San Francisco

If you aren't in the tech world (and maybe even if you are) you probably have little insight into how psychedelics have infiltrated the highest levels of wealth and power in Silicon Valley and San Francisco:

https://twitter.com/StewartalsopIII/status/1330984737742188550

Ayahuasca, having the most well-known brand of the very intense transformative medicines, is in high demand among the top performers in San Francisco. It's not too hard to imagine once you walk yourself through it.

Imagine that you had won all of the games that society offers:

You made millions of dollars in an exit, you have the adulation of your peers and thousands of people who want to get next to you. Everything a human could ever want.

AND NONE OF IT FILLS THE VOID

What is next?

Transformation.

God is dead so we can't go the traditional way

Only one option left.

Plant Medicines that irreversibly screw with your perception of reality and experientially make you understand that everything you thought was rock-solid, is in fact malleable and open to interpretation.

All this to say that Thatiana leads her retreats in the Bay Area and charges a significant amount of money for the service. She fits the image that techies in SF desire as well. She is charismatic, brown and from the forests of Bahia. She actually grew up poor and ran away to Rio

I could tell that Thatiana had processed an insane amount of trauma in her connection with presence and the things she told me and its easy to see the connection with her dedicated study of these medicines. This is another mistake beginners make, looking for perfected masters.

Looking for perfected masters makes us look for people who give off the image of perfection. The people who can project the image of perfection are not people that we want to learn from. We want to learn from people who have been to hell and back and have the scars to prove it.

Usually, that journey into the underworld leaves someone humbled and with great gratitude for life. Very often accompanied by lots of joking and smiles, both taking things absolutely serious as well as making a joke out of everything. Thatiana seems like she has this.

Back to this specific point about levels of experience with Aya in Brazil. I would say that Brazil has the highest percentage of people who have taken Ayahuasca because of Santo Daime

https://twitter.com/StewartalsopIII/status/1335929195357233153?s=20

There is an oft-stated maxim from psychonauts that most of society's problems would be solved if only more people took psychedelics. I think it would be hard to test for this statement, but it probably has some truth. This is a question I will be studying while here in Brazil.

In Gabon, the birthplace of the religion of Bwiti which uses Iboga as its sacrament, the president himself is part of the Bwiti and has done the 3 days long intense Iboga journey where you sit on a rock and they just hand you Iboga the whole time.