"the Western Ayahuasca community now finds itself in with these big corporate NGO trojan horses entering into the fray and breaching its walls on every side in order to represent the interests of Transatlantic plutocrats such as George Soros; 2) the direct dangers that such developments pose to the future of the Ayahuasca itself as well as to both Mestizo and indigenous communities alike within the Amazon; and 3) the manner in which the globalist Transatlantic polyarchy via organizations such as Soros’ Open Society Foundations is now overtly and quite brazenly positioning itself within the global Ayahuasca sub-culture in order to marshal and ultimately coopt the global Ayahuasca sub-culture en toto for the purposes of its larger Transatlantic economic and geopolitical agendas, whether in South America or beyond it."
Because of both the economic commodification of ayahuasca, and the regulatory systems that have stolen the rights of the individual to act as sovereign beings and make use of entheogens how they see fit, I really feel we need to return to more grass-roots, decentralized folk movements in our approach. It's the only way to avoid being co-opted.
In my article with Nen888 titled "Entheogenic Tryptamines, Past and Present: Folkways of Resilience" I wrote this, and it rally sums up how I feel about the whole issue..
"What entheogenic practice represents, for those within this culture of mounting economic insanity,is a system of folk knowledge reaching back to the earliest traceable evidence for spiritual and religious practice. In our state of disconnection, we suffer a sort of collective trauma, imprinted onto our very sense of identity and mirrored in the world we have created around us. This trauma is what we carry through the world as initiation into the cycle of adulthood. Lacking rites of passage to signify critical points of transformation in our lives, we are left only to express our trauma as
misguided emotional projections and hysteria, leading to profound disconnection that inevitably results in the pillaging of the body to which we owe our own animation—the Earth herself. Through the revival of entheogenic practices, we become like archaeologists of the soul, rediscovering the foundation of unity between the mind, the heart, and the spirit that exemplifies health and harmony in our lives. As we begin to peer into the depths of our own shadows, we see in their wake a trail of tears, shed by our former selves in a desperate cry for attention.
It was not merely the appropriation of imposed cultural ideologies and ways of being that led to the conservation of the traditional folkways of indigenous peoples such as the Mazatecs and Wixaritari(Huichol). It was the relative isolation of these peoples that kept them reliant on land-based ways of life, and the clever shrouding of these ways in the empty shell of the oppressors’ paradigms. Cultural modalities, when exported to exotic places and not integrated into the local ecology in ways
that are self-sustaining, tend to become nothing more than empty projections. In time, they are packaged and consumed by cultures growing ever more removed from the creative roots upon which all people through time have called upon for inspiration, guidance, and sustenance. The empty vessel of appropriated cultural ideologies—commercialized and packaged for increasing economic profit—in a system whose equity lies within an inarguably unsustainable future is, at most, nothing more than a front door out of the cultural paradigm we currently inhabit. Without the resilience of emerging neo-traditions with folk roots, that door can only lead us to a mirror of our own existentially and spiritually bankrupt reflection.
While such self-reflection is necessary to move beyond our current stage, we also require new paradigms to ground us and provide a renewed sense of self-reliance which individuals can draw upon, to then share with the larger community that surrounds them. With a return to our roots, as a currently evolving entheogenic culture rediscovering our past, we can once again find the seed of creation that has been the crux of humanity through the ages…a seed which germinates from the land, yet blossoms in the mind. In the current era of entheogenic revival, forced into the underground through the ongoing cultural genocide waged by dominator culture, a myriad of grassroots neo-folk movements should be considered as the most fertile and resilient modalities for such practices to flourish in a manner that empowers individuals, while still honoring the intact traditions of indigenous peoples."
Long live the unwoke.