The Challenge of Medicine

Ancestral medicine, you call it sometimes. Other times, drugs. Master plants, you say. And synthesized elementals circulate too. These compounds that shake you out of your spiritual laziness, you call medicine.

The stimulation of your being's sensors triggers responses on your part, it awakens the awareness that notices the stimuli. The process of shedding the weight of numbness, you perceive as healing. And whatever heals earns the name of medicine.

So it turns out that even the slightest sensory stimulus is medicine. The wheat that revitalizes, the air that brings life and the water that makes it flow. The eternal presence of the Great Spirit is medicine. Suffering, falling and dying are medicine. The total absence of stimuli is medicine too. Bad stimuli, the ones you don't want to happen, are also medicine. What grounds do we have to say that this plant is sacred and that one is a weed?

The scent of a flower is medicine, and so is the stench of your mortality. The blessed rain is medicine, and so is the lonely drought. Full joy is medicine, and so is the guttural rage of the cornered tiger. The social crisis you live through with sweat, grief, helplessness and tears, this too is medicine. Bitter-tasting, isn't it?

A good medicine doesn't heal. A good medicine stirs up a storm of stimuli in that exact space where healing is lacking. The sudden stimulus can disorient you for a while, it can make you drunk. The stimulus can hurt. A good medicine, heedless of your weakness, touches the sorest spot, the thickest knot, the most agonizing illness. A good medicine doesn't help you out of bed; it pushes you, maliciously but precisely, so that you have no choice but to walk with a firm step.

Do you trust the reverie painted by little Santa María? Marijuana, I mean. With her comes a smokescreen that hides plain reality from your sight. This curtain is not meant to keep you trapped in the confusion it causes, but rather to make you do everything, and the impossible, to find clarity. With a steady gaze, you pass through that psychedelic veil of nervous hungers, anxiety and vice. Here, on the other side of this veil of maya, the medicines you call clairvoyance, serene peace and steadiness of gaze reveal themselves, and a satisfaction finds its voice, beating sweetly in the heart. If you stay lost in the many colors, you miss the oneness that sobriety teaches.

Ayahuasca isn't for cowards either. She carries the jungle within, and in the jungle you must wake up sharp if you want to survive. If you dare enter the jungle, the serpents will drop on you and may catch you in their coils. “Whatever flows, goes,” you might suddenly say, careless. "I'm a shaman," you might think, puffed up. A false spirituality can distract you through ceremony after heavy ceremony. Taking this plant shows you, mercilessly, the eternity of Creation, and still you insist that things are as the ego's whim dictates. You still think you're just a person trying to heal. You still resist the world. You still lie about yourself. How many ceremonies do you need to accept that you are the eternal that knows no illness?

Ayahuasca is a mother. A mother shelters, but a mother also lifts you up. A mother shows you where to fly when you decide to leap from the nest. And if you keep drinking, it's because you want to. Then she will push you, and you will have to take the leap. You will have to learn to fly, simply because it's time you did. The moment will come when you want to leave behind the vices of your childhood, when you'll have had your fill of the breast of self-pity, when the cradle of comfort will grow too small for you. You will want to wake up and walk in the world, so that you can then leave the world behind too.

Every belief, every identity, every habit. Everything will go, you'll want to leave it all behind, for that is what the path is for: to be left behind. Medicine is a challenge. Whatever you call medicine, if it's a challenge, it's medicine. Are you willing to take it on? Are you willing to take yourself on? Are you ready to let yourself go?