Joe Rogan and Derren Brown: Shamanism and the Psychedelic Revolution

Dialogue with with ecology with nature is interesting. There's some that like our view of like what what the kind of indigenous peoples What like the idea of the shaman our view of what the shaman is is so skewed by our kind of Western mode than the app what the The tapping into is not like it isn't the supernatural. That's not sort of the that's not really the mode what you have and you still have it in these indigenous peoples that sort of say live like um rural Asia and so on that where these these These ways of living are still Going on is what's what's clear is it's not the supernatural. It isn't the spirits. It's it's all about a really easy Relationship with the natural world so an example of this is a great book called the spell of the sensuous By David Abrams who actually was a magician originally who went out and lived amongst his people and he he talks about this and he said there was a he was staying in this compound the shaman's compound and the Shaman's wife would bring him some fruit every morning But she also had these little like Banana leaves with rice in and she would she was going off and doing something else with those and he asked where they were going And she said all those are for the spirits of the house, right? So But what and then she'd come back and without them He was just wondering kind of what that meant and what he was doing So one day he just kind of followed and watched her and she was placing these little pockets of these little things of rice out around the perimeter of this compound and he was watching it and From a distance and he saw the rice start to move and he had a moment of like Well, this is the spirit. What is this and then the rice moved along the ground and you've oh, it's ants It's ants. So what she's actually doing she's putting out Rice for the ants so then he had the thought of oh, it isn't spirits It's just ants and then he realized no, of course the ants kind of are the spirits, right? So this is a house where food is prepared where they have a lot of fun of big events and An ant infestation would be just disastrous for them So the spirit that the offering to the spirits of the house is a kind of a dialogue with the ants is gonna If we we're gonna put this rice out. Can you just if you just have the rice if we do this every day? Will you leave us alone? And and then? You know, that's it like it's the it's kind of that's it's quite simple Dialogue and a sort of this lovely kind of embodied relationship with with nature that of course we're so far from here So interestingly we do tend to pack a lot of ideas into the you know, the supernatural even like the unconscious and Depth psychology and so much I'm a big fan of but we can take all this the unknown stuff and shove it into these kind of bottomless pits Whereas actually interestingly if you trace it back Whereas actually interestingly if you trace it back it seems like it just wasn't like that it was this very Well, doesn't it depend on what they're doing is particularly with shamans if a shaman is Concentrating on psychedelic drugs. They're an ayahuasca church and they're giving people Dymethyl tryptamine like this is they are dealing with the supernatural. That's a very bizarre and intense Transformative experience they're putting people through yeah, and there's Different like that term shaman it really it kind of was very rare Very rare to be discussed up until about maybe 20 plus years ago Yeah And it seems like there's been some sort of a psychedelic revolution over the last couple of decades and it's almost become a little Bit too popular here where a bunch of people are profiting from it or they're they're opportunists and they're they're labeling themselves as shaman I think the term that they use in Peru they call them plastic shaman and they're setting up shop and putting together this Ayahuasca brew and having all these Americans come in flying in Europeans are looking for some other You know air quote spiritual experience and these are not necessarily Pure shaman in the greatest sense of the word. It's a different This is what we think of when we think of shaman today. We think of someone who conducts a psychedelic ritual