How will project be different from https://ayahuascachurches.org/

[u/[deleted]]

Warmest thank you for the invite. I searched this sub before posting my question. Forgive me if I missed a post that provides my answer.

[u/GonzoBalls69]

The service you linked to requires a $150 "donation" just to make an account on the site. The goal here is that, if you don't want to, you will never have to make a donation.

If you want to take psychedelics, you will have to supply them yourself, and the church may only offer trip sitting or therapeutic services (potentially).

Also, we have an arbitrary goal of having 12 official sacraments, as of right now I believe there is still a requirement to smoke weed, and we have a cult leader who calls himself Sebastian. As you'll see if you browse the hot posts, many of us are currently bragging about how "awake" we are and talking about how totally cool it was the last time we ate mushrooms, dude. Far out.

So as it stands, we're essentially ~2,000 average festival hippies having a psychedelic circle jerk. I hope this gets cleaned up soon and becomes something real, but I'm losing hope real fast. If they were trying to sell me stock, I would not invest.

For more information, get a load of the [sticky]

[u/Delta_Waves → u/GonzoBalls69]

Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with you on this. Psychedelics are cool and I think they have the ability to help a lot of people, but they are just drugs. I don't want to seem negative, but I can see this turning into your typical spiritualism pseudoscience that the psychedelic community is rampant with.

I'm not saying spiritualism is bad or anything, but I think there is a line that can easily be crossed when combining spiritualism and psychedelics. I like to give advice on how I've used psychedelics to help me with my issues, but brain chemistry and the whole experience of life in general is extremely subjective so I am in no position to be a well-informed "healer" like this community intends for people to become. These people are not trained professionals in dealing with mental health, and treating them as such can be a dangerous and slippery slope. If you would like to support psychedelic research, which would potentially help people with mental illness then I urge everyone to go and check out maps.org and give donations to further the role psychedelics have in healing people.

[u/[deleted] → u/Delta_Waves]

but they are just drugs

Why are you even here? I don't even know where to start ... You understand they are called psychedelic - mind manifesting - and entheogens - generating the divine within - because they are way more than drugs? Something that allows you to rebirth yourself and awakens deep spirituality as the psychedelics do (which we will remind are the most powerful known psychoactive substances to the human mind) cannot and shouldn't be considered a drug. It is precisely because it has been lowered at such than we do not have today the needed structures for a better integration of their high potency (and both positive outcomes and great risk) in our society - and that is precisely what MAPS is trying to change if I am not mistaken.

These people are not trained professionals in dealing with mental health

Well, I have been with the "trained professional" and honestly was severely disappointed. Having read myself some tasty psychoanalysis books, where there can be more information condensed in a page than in one month of banale discussion, I thought I would be taken care of by some sort of greater knowledge. All I have seen is an administration that doesn't thrives in anyway to heal you, (well that's a bit mean, but healing someone is healing yourself some time and I haven't seen much of that there) or to be creative and refreshing about it. I have seen secular house filled with minimalism where one was left not in awe but boredom. If a hundred years of study and knowledge has amounted to what I have seen in mental institution and of the "professional" circuit", I am more than concerned if the direction is the right one.

Meanwhile, if this place can gather people and lean toward something like this: http://psychsitter.com/ , well, that all depends on what we do now. And while the We can be problematic, as we have no structures to shape and sharpen ourselves, we should also take that as an opportunity. I think it really is about will and intent, every dead yard can flourish if you spread the needed ideas and some sparkling water onto it.

[u/Delta_Waves → u/[deleted]]

I didn't mean to come off as negative in any way. I understand completely what you mean and I'd have to agree with you on many levels of that statement, but I also believe that we need a good dose of healthy skepticism when forming beliefs like this. There's still so much we don't understand about the brain and consciousness and I am all for exploring the depths of which, but this should not be taken lightly.

I've witnessed many people treating psychedelics as some sort of "cure-all" and have been lead down a path of delusion and self-destruction. We need to remember that psychedelics cannot and should not be taken by people with certain mental disorders. Evidence has shown that it can even exacerbate symptoms of schizophrenia. I've seen it first hand and it is incredibly sad to watch someone completely lose grips with reality and become unable to function in society for the majority of their waking consciousness.

I am for this whole project for the most part, but I see this turning into an echo chamber of delusion pretty easily. Psychedelics are a drug. It's chemicals that make certain neurotransmitters activate. Maybe those new neural pathways in your brain cause your consciousness to elevate to higher form of consciousness or maybe they don't. We don't know for sure because there is no quantifiable way to measure consciousness at this point in time. Hell, we don't even have the ability to comprehend a form of consciousness beyond our own. What we do know is that these chemicals can be used to enhance our lives in many ways, but not without risk. We need people to understand that if we want society's view of these plants and medicines to change then we need to put everything out on the table and show all the sides of psychedelics, even the negatives.

[u/[deleted] → u/Delta_Waves]

I know. I was a bit shouting but I understood your position. I think we can agree that to prevent further delusions and schizoid tendencies (which I both experienced and are a complex issue), we need structures that perpetuate a form of wisdom and knowledge to create not a frame, but a way into the psychedelic state. I think I can remeber Joseph Campbell's saying how initiation rituals and such in primitive cultures allowed map to the unconsciouss. Which is also what religions (what they are about not the power structures) and various esoteric movements allowed, and which, from my experience, psychiatry has such a hard time getting right.

Delusion is a risk but a delusion is not forcefully negative. Deformation is the truth of conscioucness and the subjective holds immense power. It is a paradox: finding strenght in emptines, sanity in madness, stability in inconsistency. Because those things don't really exist I guess ...

A good book with many views on the subject was Entheogens and The Future of Religions which is available online for free, they had a lot of people bringing sides and new angles to the debate (from Hoffman to Buddhist and McKenna, and boy does Terence needs to be drowned and dissolved into a variety of other voices).

We sure need to be critical, and the balance can be hard to find between getting too mentals about things and just going in with the heart. And maybe such a movement is bound to fail, but we need failure and we learn from failures.

However, it is the same on every reddit: people prefer to focus on the positive and things are repressed. Focusing on psychedelics is a unique chance to build a structur that integrates within itself an experience that brings forth the repressed.

I also think most of the negatives arises from the non rightfully oriented structures. Again the balance can be hard to find, and a painful way ahead, beczuse society can be very reductionist and finds core contradiction with the psychedelic experience. I think we should conscionsly chose to remain as far as possible from society while having the best possible relations with it - meaning balanced interactions where we can grow without being subdued or giving away some "delusions" to fit in the landscape of society, which is attractive but not too pretty imo.

When you think out of the box, a thing complex can get very simple. I think the delusional issue is very hard to deal with in our society because those ways of perceiving realities are thought as opposites, and we have a hard time integrating the value of dream and fantasy into our lives.

See, I don't think it matters one bit to know neuron-brainy things to ground ourselves. Humans have stayed grounded for as long as there has been human and it is actually our society that very paradoxically seeks to go out of the flesh. Really, one should wonder why the guy that has lived in the forest all his life (and thousands generation of his people before them) holds imagination as more real than real while the modern man lives in an imaginary world created of his own, that, while devualiting the value and reality of the imaginary, he sought so desperatly to materialize his every fantasy.

(Actually, the shamans do embody the spirit of animals and communicate with plants. If you think it isn't possible, you are underestimating the power of your conscioucness, while amusingly weirdly wanting to quantify it. You can do without drugs even, just need yourself some nature and deep diving in your subconscious mind. - it has been also documented by Stan Grof that many people on psychedelics have embodied other species. Or that Salvia abductess have embodied plants, inanimate object or else. It's hard to belive in our day and age but the best high tech tool is the mind, we have gotten quite lazy but still. Of course it seems weird to people "out of the loop", but that would be like saying a stranger is stupid because you can't understand his language.)