The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 51 of 125
Shamanism is about healing
Neither Wasson, nor Eliade, nor Schultes—nor, for that matter, Carlos Castaneda, nor Wasson’s disciple Terence McKenna—none of these great trailblazers of shamanism have paid much attention to what is clearly its primary feature. Shamanism is about healing, about curing pain, and (just like LSD) the complex interplay between healing and reconnecting with information we have lost. While there are Westerners who have studied to become ayahuasceros, I couldn’t find any account of their training, nor how they thought their experience could relate to the contemporary West. My earlier decisiveness about acid began to falter. Was I going to continue with trips that were becoming steadily crazier, and with the only person who had ever studied LSD in depth saying that they were about to become considerably more so? Misgivings I had brushed aside started to return. Another of the books I had been reading was Terence McKenna’s wonderfully subversive The Archaic Revival, but his banging on endlessly about DMT and psilocybin being the true model psychedelics had further undermined my confidence. Was I way off beam, following an approach everyone else had long abandoned? Much of my old negativity about LSD resurfaced. I was right about this drug when I was young, I thought. Admittedly it can do things that border on the miraculous, but at best it’s a hit-or-miss affair.