Talking with the sacred psychedelic personality.
I like to play with this idea that we can build a relationship with some substances in a way that we are able to mentally manipulate the knowledge contained in the substance by projecting the effects in the shape of characters.
And then we are able to talk with the substance, ask questions, and even negotiate with it.
Maybe I can illustrate better:
We can ask the psychedelic for power.
First, it’s important to learn how to stand up for yourself during the trip and mentalize a question.
The answer will be presented to you in the shape of the patterns that your cognitive system highlights to your awareness.
To stand up for yourself means to be sure of the fundamentals of reality (even during the effects of the substance) in a way that nothing can make you doubt your ground.
Basically: practice navigating the psychedelic landscape.
This takes training.
Find whatever mental representation of the psychedelic substance makes sense to you.
Maybe your approach to interacting with the substance will be a scientific one, but it’s common that during the psychedelic experience we mentally explore parts of our minds that are not easily expressed with words or by using scientifically language, and our subconscious automatically projects the mental patterns in the form of characters in a story, like how it happens when we dream.
Humans have an easy time manipulating characters and stories. I believe that this is why the most complex religious ideas are presented in the form of stories.
Many Religious Stories are Projections of Higher Ideas
Create your own psychedelic mythology.
Explore the mental landscape like you are mapping a new environment in another planet (or dimension, if you will) until you are familiar with it like you are with the back of your hand.
If you have a choice, during a psychedelic trip it’s beneficial to navigate the mental abstractions in a way that is:
- Easy to understand;
- Easy to manipulate;
For most people, this means that they must give a personality to non-living beings (ideas).
I understand spirit as being the name that we give to patterns.
The spirit of Christmas, for example, is all the patterns that are related to Christmas, if this makes sense.
Once you understand this you will be able to talk and even negotiate with the substance (or the patterns of the effects projected in the form of a character).
“Imagine that it’s your privilege to have a brief interview with God. What would you ask?
Knowing how to conduct yourself when you encounter a mental representation of the psychedelic substance is fundamental.
The encounter must be honest and straight forward.
Respect yourself before asking for respect.
Ask for what you want and be prepared to negotiate.
All this “negotiation” process with the substance is a mental conversation with the self in which you decide how to go about taking advantage of the power (lessons, mindsets, epiphanies, etc…) that the substance can offer you.
To illustrate,
there is the story of a man approximately 100 years ago in Brazil who used to work extracting latex from trees in the rain forests of the Amazon.
This man got in contact with an indigenous tribe that introduced him to ayahuasca.
He learned so much from taking ayahuasca that he was convinced that he had more to learn and every day for 30 days the man would prepare and drink the ayahuasca brew.
By the end of the experience, he managed to get a deeper grip on the reality of the trip in such a way that he managed to mentally keep his ground and finally met a humanoid representation of the spirit of the Ayahuasca.
This spirit manifested itself in his mind in the shape of a feminine personality who offered him all the knowledge of the universe if he agreed to share ayahuasca with the world.
This legendary psychonaut was named Ramundo Irineu Serra, also called Mestre Irineu and after this sacred encounter, he founded the religious ayahuasca-based group called
Santo Daime. Today Santo Daime is present in almost every continent in the world.
In the same way that Mestre Irineu asked for power and supposedly received it after committing to the mission assigned to him by a mental representation of the effects of ayahuasca, I believe that it is possible that we can accomplish the same with nearly everything that changes our perception, especially if it induces a deep mental journey.
Of course, all of this is just a mere play with ideas and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Nevertheless, I’d like to hear more opinions about this.
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I grew up avoiding personifications of things that I didn’t consider living. As a matter of fact, even people I used to break down and try to have a materialistic approach. Science is a great tool to support this approach.
But recently I started revisiting religious stories and other secular stories and I have been able to make parallels between the characters of the stories and major archetypes and ideas of life.
What I realized is that once I understood how the character would react within the scope of the narrative, I would simultaneously understand the behavior of the external phenomenon that that character represents.
In such stories, the important is that the characters act and react in a way that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the literal description of reality but still is True.
My point is,
if you have a story with characters that behave like their real-life counterparts, you can understand reality by manipulating the characters within the context of the story.
And for many ideas, especially the big-picture ones, it’s much easier to manipulate a humanoid character than it is to handle the idea in its descriptive shape.
For example, in Greek mythology, the idea of Time is manipulated in the form of Chronos, and by having him interact with other characters and describing the dynamics between them we can make parallels with reality and manipulate complex super-big-picture concepts with ease within the scope of the story.
In the Orphic tradition, the unaging Chronos was “engendered” by “earth and water”, and produced Aether and Chaos, and an egg.[9] The egg produced the hermaphroditic god Phanes who gave birth to the first generation of gods and is the ultimate creator of the cosmos.
By the way, while writing this response I came across this wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_mythology maybe it is related to what I’m saying.
In the same way that Plutarch wrote about Chronos, we can create our own mythology to represent psychedelic ideas that are hard to grip.
In this case, it might be useful to give personalities to the mental characteristics of the trip.
Doing this, you might get to a point where you can have full-on conversations with the “characters” you created, and maybe you can extract the knowledge of the substance in a more verbal and logical way than what is ordinarily available to the psychonaut, which is easier for your conscious mind to process and manipulate.
Makes sense?
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