Grandmother Ayahuasca by Christian Funder

Author:Christian Funder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Entheogens/Shamanism
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2021-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

A SELF-CONTRADICTORY PROPOSITION

The Amazonian region is like no other place on Earth in terms of wildlife. Scientists have found more species of birds in a single Peruvian valley than in all of North America. One single tree harbors more species of ants than have been found in all of the British Isles. A twenty-five-acre plot of rain forest may contain up to seven hundred species of trees—a number that is far greater than the total tree diversity in all of Europe. As of now, rain forests occupy only 2 percent of the surface of Earth, yet these remaining rain forests supply more than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen and support more than half of the wild trees and plants and half of the wildlife of this planet.18 While 25 percent of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less than 1 percent of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists.19

In the early 1980s, international agencies claimed that to develop the Amazon, indigenous inhabitants had to be removed and the trees cut down. They justified this by saying that the indigenous “savages” did not know how to use their resources rationally, and therefore it was justifiable to seize their lands. Uncontrolled deforestation has swallowed up a great part of the Amazonian rain forest to make room for corn to feed cattle. As Luna remarks: “We have transformed extraordinary forests into hamburgers.”20 These indigenous “neurotic savages” of the Peruvian Amazon have for millennia lived in harmony with nature and have a connection to it that we could only dream of in the pretentious, constipated technocratic enterprise that is Western civilization, where nature is mostly seen as ornaments for decoration or a resource to extract. The indigenous people revere the forests and its inhabitants and possess a vast ethnobotanical knowledge gathered over millennia. On the other hand, Westerners view nature as nothing but an exploitable resource. One might be tempted to ask who the ignorant savages actually are.

Curanderos of the Upper Amazon have conjured numerous variants of plant medicine with different medicinal properties for thousands of years. When asked how they learned of these, they answer that the spirits taught them through visions induced by plants such as ayahuasca. This can seem rather hard to believe. In fact, to consider that there is verifiable information in one’s hallucination is the modern definition of psychosis. A rather interesting contradiction on the view of illness is found in shamanic cultures, throughout the Amazon in particular. A person is for them considered ill not when they hear voices or experience hallucinations, but exactly the opposite. Disease is when he or she is disconnected from the numinous energies of the forests. To them one is considered sick when he or she is incapable of tuning in to the web of organic and spiritual life or unable to feel the energies surging everywhere around them. For example, when a hmeno’ob, or “shaman,” has lost his ah-kanul (protector spirits), fellow shamans deem this a serious problem.

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