Spirits, reality and the lost art of listening

What’s most alive for me right now is a clash between two paradigms.

The clash is between the way of experiencing reality in traditional Shipibo communities I work with in the Peruvian Amazon, and the way that we understand the world and the universe in the Western scientific world, my own cultural background. This has been on my mind for a while now.

Originally, I trained in Western medicine as a psychiatrist. When I first arrived in the Peruvian Amazon and heard these notions about plant spirits, like many other Westerners, especially those from a scientific background, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that I knew better. ‘These indigenous people are talking about plant spirits, but, you know, it must be metaphor or it must be theology.’

That was 2015. Over the last nine years, as I continued conducting research and spending increasing amounts of time with the Shipibo in the rainforest and started training in Shipibo Curanderismo, I was quite painfully faced with the possibility that maybe it’s not theology, maybe it’s not metaphor.

I had a good four years of going back to the jungle, and having these experiences and then explaining it away through neuroscience and the brain being a highly advanced predictive mechanism, until it just became more and more difficult to explain it through that lens. And I ended up just shifting my viewpoint, mainly at the time to help protect my own mental health, because I was just almost becoming more and more confused.

At the time I was working at King’s College London, and I would have these experiences in the jungle where I would try and explain my experiences through the lens of neuroscience. The people around me were kind of look at me and say, ‘Well, you know, maybe you’re just ignoring what’s actually happening right in front of you’. Then I would leave and I would go back to working as a psychiatrist in London and working at King’s and think, ‘Well, maybe we could explain some of these things through energy and entity encounters’. The few times I did mention that there were a lot of raised eyebrows, obviously. 

But personally, the way that I would summarise my take on this question would be to say that maybe my perspective on reality and what is real has changed. What do you define as real? I don’t think it’s necessarily that helpful to think of what’s inside and what’s outside. Is there a plant spirit that’s as real as a human that exists outside of us?

I think of things now to be more one. It’s all consciousness. Is it inside our mind? Is it outside of our mind? Does that really matter? 

But I think the most pressing and interesting point is that, in a time when everyone — especially in the so-called psychedelic renaissance — talks about ethics and reciprocity, we are so bad at doing this in the most basic manner: listening. Listen to what people have to say, as carefully and sincerely as possible.

In other words, what’s alive for me right now is giving indigenous people that we work with the respect of not assuming what they say is metaphor.

That means contemplating the idea that what they might be talking about in terms of spirituality and in terms of spirits could in some way potentially be true.

And when we begin to think like that, that changes everything. It changes the way that we approach research; which changes the way that we potentially approach healing. Of course, it also changes the ways we go about preparing for, heading into and integrating experiences with sacred plant medicines.

And that has the potential to change the way that we think about the entire nature of the universe.

This article is based on a conversation I had with Manda Scott on the Accidental Gods podcast.