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Grant Eaton's avatar

Great article! I found the AI video amusing and even reflective of the archetypal ayahuasca drinker or healing narrative you hear and see time and again. Kind of cringey to hear myself in my early part of ayahuasca journey in parts of that video when I felt that ayahuasca or DMT were inherently benevolent and beneficial. I used to be a talking parrot of the healing narrative for a time.

I don’t know if AI generated the spoken script for it, or whether a human wrote the narrative, but it seemed to me to also be a solid if subtle example of spiritual narcissism—I say “subtle,” because many people watching that video and listening to the story arc would not see anything wrong with who the AI Trump character evolved into by the end. By the end, he speaks in the same tropes and spiritual word salad as many shamans and ceremony-goers.

A lot of people in the spiritual and psychedelic space can’t see past superficial appearances—if the person looks like a guru, acts like a guru, and talks like a guru then it follows they must BE a real guru, right? Superficial appearances count for a lot in the ayahuasca/spiritual community, and are the reason so many predators operate in the space cosplaying as healers.

In the video, the AI Trump character was only superficially changed; his words were still tainted with spiritual narcissism instead of the overt malignant grandiose narcissism. The video felt like a trope or parody of many of the shamans and “light workers” actively operating the healing space.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit I sat 25 ceremonies on 3 continents with about 7 shamans over 6 years, and my take after all that “work” (looking in the magic mirror), is exactly what you and Grof stated: psychedelics are merely amplifiers. They don’t make people into better versions of themselves, they only dial up the volume on who they were all along. This is the reason there is so much drama, egotism, sexual and financial abuse, broken friendships and other dramas (including murder) in the ayahuasca space, because psychedelics don’t make those qualities go away in people who already possess them; the “medicines” often turn-up the volume on whatever was there all along.

Some of the least-healed, least reflective (or most vulnerable) people I’ve ever met talk a good game after a few ceremonies, and then rush into pouring medicine or life-coaching others. It’s almost like a mind-virus how often people sit a few ayahuasca ceremonies and then fall into the path (trap?) of trying to serve to others it in some fashion before they’re out of the woods themselves. The video hit that trope hard.

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Karen Effie's avatar

There’s a weird photo of the neo fascist group the Base where they pose with a sheep’s head. They all took LSD on a retreat, stormed around the countryside being idiots, and slaughtered this poor sheep. Julius Evola took psychedelics. I think you could make the argument that taking psychedelics doesn’t necessarily turn you into a fascist shitheel any more than it doesn’t necessarily turn you into a shaman saint guru. My few experiences with psychedelics have been very difficult but meaningful and useful, and they’ve had a lasting effect. But they didn’t turn me into anything I’m not already. I don’t think good people get good trips and bad people get bad trips. That’s a kind of simple religious fantasy. But subjects can be manipulated eg: a study induced a feeling of gratitude in subjects on LSD and those who felt gratitude were more likely to agree to doing something they would otherwise consider slightly unethical, in this case grinding worms in a blender.

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