Completely Tired of The Recent Ayahuasca Threads...

I am so tired of the various threads about ayahuasca running around the boards after the recent and notable death of a kid named Kyle at an ayahuasca center. I wish he hadn't died. I'm sorry for his mom and dad and sisters and brothers and the rest of his family and friends. But his death has spawned so much junk that I'm gonna react. And this is what I'm gonna say. And I have a right, I think, to say it.


I have held back, but it's hard...
Listen everyone. I have held back but it's hard. Not just on this most recent Bill Hamilton thread, but on all of them. For Mancoluto: We have no freaking idea how Kyle died. Mancoluto has no idea how Kyle died. If he confessed to burying the body, then he is guilty of that, but unless he actually killed that poor kid, he has no idea how he died--at least that we know of. So stop yapping and wait for pathology. Damn.
   In terms of who knows more about ayahuasca, what a freaking crazy question! This group or that group? Who the hell knows, and anyone who says they do is nuts. The shipibo never never never used a symbol of ayahuasca pre-2003 or 2004. Their beautiful cloths were put in front of their villages to show the maze of how to get into the village and if you couldn't read it you would fall into their traps and die. That's what those cloths are about. Why? Because they enslaved half the Amazon during the rubber boom. How? Because they were the well known riberinos--they had canoes, while a host of tribes didn't, and to save their skin they gave a lot of other indigenous up. Which meant there was a lot of animosity from other tribes. Which meant they had to make mazes to keep those angry groups out of their territory. And they made them on the telas, the cloths. If you could read them you would get in; if not, well, you fell into really horrible traps. Not that they were bad people, but they were saving themselves. And any tela, cloth, which has anything to do with ayahuasca on it, will not be more than 8-9 years old. The old cloths, the ones that are 100 years old, don't have that. That's new.
    So who knows more? Who the hell knows. Remember that until 30 years ago, pretty much only the ayahuasquero drank the medicine. My mother and father in law, my wife and her brothers all went to Tuesday and Friday ceremonies all their life, but they only drank (the women) at menstruation first time; at marriage, and maybe one more time in their lives. The men drank at puberty, marriage, and maybe one more time. Ayahuasca was only for the curandero. You show up, explain your problem, he/she drank, saw the problem and the solution and returned from the dream with the solution, whether it be a change in life for you, plant medicines for you, or whatever. It's only us gringos who demanded to drink the potion, and so these curanderos have no idea what that really means--and so most people will never drink with a real curandero because he/she would never let you drink. But we make these fake people and they serve 12-20-40 people at a time--unfreaking heard of in the Amazon tradition.
   Mancoluto and a number of other well-known curanderos are just a symptom of a disease we created. I'm not saying what he did is okay. And I'm not going to okay a curandero sleeping with a client. But I am really tired of reading people who know nothing about the history/culture spouting off on various threads. Please stop.
    Just today someone wrote me to say she was selling a pretty much ready- made ayahuasca center. I nearly choked. Who the freak was this person to have set up an ayahuasca center in the jungle? What does she know? Has she lived there 15-20-40 years? If not, she has no business, in my book--and no one else does either--in cutting jungle to make a center. Why? Why? Why? For ego? Because you think you've seen the answer on a vision? Cool. Wait 20 years and see if it's a true vision before you co-op locals, cut jungle, build a place.
   Damn, I'm pissed off reading all this bullshit from people who don't know a freaking thing about the culture, the medicine. They want to elevate local doctors on a little tributary to the status of folk hero. NOTICE: Curanderos are just local docs on little tributaries. They don't promise anything to anyone. It's only gringos that extract those promises. We create the disease. Let's stop doing that, okay?????
   A lot of you will hate me for this, but I've been reading so much junk I'm ready to vomit. And not a good, cleansing puke, just garbage.