I remember an old song by Silvio Rodríguez, “The Fable of the Three Brothers,” which encouraged us to try to keep our eyes on the past, the present, and the future. It is difficult to maintain all three perspectives at once, but I will attempt to do so here. I hope those reading these lines will join me on this journey through time, which is both individual and collective. Its value lies in what we share.
By Juanjo Piñeiro
Yesterday
YESTERDAY If I look back—to 1994—I remember being certain that life had to be more than the emptiness I saw around me. I was looking to experience states of consciousness other than the ordinary as a means of discovering if there was something more. That year, I had read and heard that invisible worlds existed. I had tried various non-chemical methods of perceiving other realities—which did not work for me—and I had decided to try to open my doors of perception with the help of a psychedelic substance. In the Granada of that time—and I fear it remains the same today—it was very difficult to obtain good LSD or other reliable entheogens, so several friends and I began to investigate the plant alternative. We found some literature on ayahuasca, and those readings led me to want to try it. Given my traveler’s nature, I decided at the end of 1994 to head to South America in search of a direct experience, bored and tired of reading about that mysterious potion. Upon my return, after six months of travel and having more than achieved my goal, I turned the letters I had been sending to my friends during my journey into a book, recounting what I was living and experiencing with shamanic plants. I sent the manuscript to the publisher Gaia, and to my surprise, they agreed to publish the book, which I titled En busca de las plantas sagradas (In Search of Sacred Plants) (Gaia, 1996). I never thought of titling it In Search of Shamans, and this is important to highlight in this context, because contact with readers made me discover the large number of people interested in the entheogenic experience itself, rather than shamanism per se.
My second book, El despertar del Hongo (The Awakening of the Mushroom) (Grijalbo, 2000), describes my first trip through Mexico in 1996 and shows a moment of transition. During the two months I was in that country, I got to know shamanic Mexico, but I also met—especially in Zipolite and the capital—young urban Mexicans who were experimenting with psychedelic substances on their own, without the need for external rituals, intermediaries, guides, or masters. Some told me they called themselves PSYCHONAUTS. They told me about how they used the Internet to find information, obtain psychoactive substances, and communicate with each other, and I felt closer to them than to the shamans I had met. After my second return from America in 1997, I traveled to Barcelona and began to meet Iberian psychonauts, and thanks to the Internet and various Entheogenic or Psychedelic Gatherings in the psychoactive capital of Europe, I met famous and anonymous foreign psychonauts. Thus, I began to verify that my individual process was also a collective one. Little by little, I understood that many Westerners had approached shamans—in person, through readings, in courses, or through various churches—looking for an experience we did not yet know how to achieve on our own in the environment where we were born and educated. However, we were all discovering how to modify our state of consciousness without having to become anyone’s disciples, finding useful and effective chemical tools, creating methods adapted to our needs and desires, and becoming capable of answering our own questions.
My third book, Psiconautas: Exploradores de la conciencia (Psychonauts: Explorers of Consciousness) (La Liebre de Marzo, 2000), closes a spontaneous trilogy that reflects my personal itinerary of the last 5 years—an itinerary that, I insist, has been, is, or will be that of many other people in our culture. If I previously gave a voice to shamans, in this new book I give it to several Western experts in the use of entheogens, such as Ann and Sasha Shulgin, Terence McKenna, Jonathan Ott, Giorgio Samorini, and Douglas Rushkoff. They belong to various generations and countries, and they create and continue our own psychonautic tradition, which is socially inconspicuous but existing and alive in the real world.
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Today
TODAY Currently, the past, present, and future are mixed, depending on each person’s specific case. Many of us have realized that shamanism, with all the respect it deserves, is not our thing, although we can learn from it what is valid for us and leave aside what we do not need. Other people have preferred to try to be Western shamans, to be accepted as apprentices in some indigenous community; they have renounced everything Western and have—in my humble opinion—idealized and mythologized the indigenous, whom in too many cases they only know from a distance. I am not going into whether it is better or worse; it is another option. Another has been to try to fuse shamanism, new technologies, and chemical substances like LSD or MDMA—ecstasy—creating purely Western rituals, such as raves, with DJs acting as cyber-shamans. Other people have chosen to learn to heal with psychedelics, using both shamanic and Western techniques, as is the case with another guest of Psiconautas, Richard Yensen (Hacia una medicina psiquedélica / Toward a Psychedelic Medicine, La Liebre de Marzo).
One way or another, today more and more people are looking for, to use Escohotado’s terms, pharmacological enlightenment—via experienced people, books, magazines, or the Internet; an option for visionary drugs—for which cyberspace or the home cultivation of mushrooms or psychoactive plants is a viable option; and learning how to use them, which is achieved by taking advantage of one’s own experience or that of others. This means acting with caution but without fear, with courage but without abandoning common sense, knowing how to prepare a session, and taking care of the dose, the timing, the setting, and the company. It means looking for the best substances for what one intends to achieve on each occasion: knowledge, pleasure, or well-being, if not all at once.
The psychonaut option seems the most indicated for people who can go and enjoy a party, a rave, or a chill-out, but who, in order to have transformative experiences with strong doses, prefer to be alone, as a couple, or in the company of a few loved ones with whom one has total trust. Being a psychonaut allows you to be free, to guide yourself, to be your own shaman or master. Each psychonaut creates their own method of using these powerful tools for exploring consciousness, incorporating whatever contributes something from any tradition or field of human knowledge. Specifically, classical shamanism offers a spiritual vision of life to our materialistic society, and a series of techniques that allow human beings to know other states of consciousness for themselves. Assuming that does not mean accepting the most adverse aspects of shamanism and established religions: superstition and dogmatic rules; sexophobia and machismo; the path of suffering to learn and the negative view of pleasure; the need for an intermediary to have a transcendent experience; the rejection of empirical science; resignation in the face of injustice and fatalism; the belief in destiny versus the conscious creation of the future in an open and symbiotically evolving cosmos; the denial of life in exchange for an afterlife that is always in the future, etc.
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Tomorrow
TOMORROW To reach the future with our gaze, I will speak of the psychonaut option, as I clearly see that it will become increasingly strong in our culture. Let it be clear that I find it positive that in a Western society like ours, there are several options for the person interested in knowing psychoactive substances. Thus, people who wish to travel with guides will choose from a variety that ranges from ayahuasca or peyote churches to raves, passing through rituals led by Westerners. And those who do not want to depend on other people or organizations can and will be able to have the experience when, where, how, with whom, and with the substance they consider most convenient, simply by having something fundamental: INFORMATION AND EXPERIENCE. Knowing how and where to look for them is the first step; the second is using them, and using them well; the third is sharing them, making the circulating information grow, and making the network of people all over the planet who want to change the current (dis)order of things more effective and fruitful.
I am increasingly convinced that the psychonaut is and will be one more actor in the new multi-cultural model of our era. This new integral model will take us beyond a system that is on the verge of extinction, but which will still take time to disappear, in a transition that will take decades, if not a century. It will affect all orders of life and will have to address intolerable situations such as—to cite the most flagrant—injustice, economic exploitation, ecological destruction, the situation of children, the elderly, or women, education or health, or the prohibition of Cannabis, ecstasy, and psychedelics. Our world is so interconnected today that by changing one part, the whole changes. It is not possible to live without participating in one way or another in the creation or destruction of life. Today more than ever, it is urgent to LIVE in a transformative, conscious, and full way.
Together with other people who do not use entheogens but also consciously participate in this transition process, the psychonaut is creating the new vital paradigm with their practice, trying to integrate science and spirituality, the material and transpersonal world, knowledge and pleasure, body and consciousness, new technologies and ecology, internal and external gaze, local and global, evolution and revolution, or any other supposed duality into their vision and life. Explorers of consciousness—using whatever method works for them—try to live from the understanding that the cosmos alternates states of equilibrium and disequilibrium, that it has a hidden order despite the apparent chaos, and that by occupying your place—our human place—doing what is truly yours, you serve the Earth, others, and yourself more. The human being lives out of alignment, and if they do not manage to find their place on this Earth, they will perish. Conscious evolution or the extinction of our species. A new life or death in life. Sometimes there is no other choice but to choose.
However, to try to change reality, one must know it completely, with first-hand experiences, perceiving it directly, understanding the movement and rhythm of the human being, of life, and of the universe, bravely crossing to the other side of the mirror to discover there that life is creation rather than negation, that nothing is black or white, and that in addition to a wide range of grays, there are many colors. Humanity is in a growth crisis. Being optimistic or pessimistic about the future depends on each one of us. We are still on a journey. Does anyone know the ending?
JUANJO PIÑEIRO, 2000
BOOKS BY JUANJO PIÑEIRO:
- LIBRERÍA MUSCARIA: www.muscaria.com (Mail order for entheogenic and transpersonal books. Comments, reviews, and recommendations)
- LIBRERÍA MAKOKI (BARCELONA)
- LIBRERÍA EL SENDERO (MADRID)
- LIBRERÍA FLASH (GRANADA)
