Reclaiming the psychedelic community back from the boring academics.

In my opinion a lot of podcasts in the psychedelic community, and a few of the forums have become stuffy with academia. Not all of them obviously. But I've been trying to get a point over that seems too leftfield even for the psychedelic community, resulting in defensiveness. That point is that what got me into shamanism was totally primal, totally primeval.

I'd even go as far as to say the childhood fear I had in 1979 took me into prehistoric parts of my mind, or the collective archives. Play the embedded player below, which is episode 1 of ShamanicFreedomRadio podcast, and hear how my childhood fear manifested itself.



As a result, when I learned to use psychedelics to help me get through this, I did it totally my own way, free of ideology, dogma and academia. This was my own autonomous path. And rather than study shamanism antropologically, or plagiarize someone elses culture, I feel that this is about my own inward journey to evolve forward by going back to the primal level and simulating a parallel version of evolution from the beginning of civilisation.

It seems to me we have too many ingrained habits of mind (Rupert would certainly have a thing or two to say about this) that we can't break.

All the institutions we have are staid, old, dusty and stagnant hangovers from the post enlightenment era, and we're living in a world where God has become Abrahamic, neurotic and vengeful, and scientism has excluded God. That means that psychedelic culture will either become a science based lofty academic antropological 'case study', or a Santo Daime type religion a bit too close to Christianity. My take on it is that if we could break free from the post enlightenment habits we could take it to a Buddhist like middle way level.

When people become fixed and dogmatic in academia they get stuck in their debates which contract rather than unfold, they get stuck in rituals like exams, coursework, debating, debunking, model fixing, towing the party line, etc and it gets stuck in the left brain, and in circuit 3 of the Leary model, the time binding circuit. This compromises a lot.

Now I may have been referring to a few academics for the purposes of my argument, and fair enough, that goes to show that I feel academia does have its place in this - building of the models so that we can convey it in language. But I think we have to remember to be humble, understated, spontaneous, and in touch with the heart. Compulsive academia puts people too much in the head, and psychedelic people are trying to do what? Exactly - get OUT of their heads!

So the moral of the story is, if anyone has listened to a few podcasts here and there, and have got fed up with some of them being too scholarly, and you want a 'bloke down the pub' or a 'silly naughty boy' or a 'mad avant garde anarchist' instead, these are the qualities I focus on in my podcasts. With childlike enthusiasm I'll invite people on to 'bang the world to rights' whether I've researched them or not. That may seem unprofessional to compulsive academics, but I'll end up with guests, and if they're distinguished guests and they like my approach, all the better for it. To me it's worth the gamble. I'll live with having dissenters as some of the best people on Earth have enormous armies of dissenters.

Our culture needs reshamanising and we're attempting to do it, but it seems it'll take longer than we can imagine, but if we can find it in ourselves to see ourselves as pioneers of a future model, and now we're just 'picking and eating' as we fumble over stuff, this childlike fluidity will benefit us so much more than any allegiance to any textbooks.

You may agree, you may not, but I think this is definitely a subject the psychedelic community really needs to address. If we could amalgamate the primal and the academic so that both sides know their place, and unify it into a new model of post modern shamanism, we could really be on our way to the most significant evolution in history and prehistory combined. We are not living in a native society, but do we ever think to find what they have in our own? I believe that we are at the beginning of an age now, rather than at the end of one.