Monday, November 20, 2017

Ayahuasca Diet, another time....

So I'm so verklempt at newcomers voicing their encouragement of the Dieta associated with ayahasca--so salt, no pork, no hot peppers, no oil--that I want to strangle people. Here was my response:
No offense, but since salt was not a food in Amazonia--people licked salt lick clay for salt, for instance--to say that giving up salt, which no one in Amazonia ever ate, is the equal of saying don't drive a Ferrari in the jungle. Easy to give up since no one ever had one. Damn, lots of people listen to nonsense but do not do their homework. All food in the Amazon, all the fish and plantain, has MSG in it. No, I'm not lying. Any person who says they don't put that in there is lying. MSG was brought over by the Chinese in the mid 1800s, when they came to build the railroads in Lima/Cuzco, etc. Salt, what little there was, was to preserve food to sell. But MSG is everywhere. Every meal in Iquitos, every meal in the jungle, every dieta meal has MSG. And I will include every non-gringo owned restaurant in Peru that offers an
"ayahuasca diet". That's just the way it is. If you have a curandero who says he doesn't eat salt, I understand. Why? Because there never was salt--or hot peppers, or oil, or sugar--in the Amazon till 10 years ago. More or less. But the reality is that any curandero worth his weight will eat a huge meal four or five times a day while cooking ayahuasca. Then he or she will eat another huge meal--with coffee if available--10 minutes before they serve ayahuasca. The ones who deny this are full of bologna and I would never drink with them. Get real. No Pork? Of course not. Who the heck would live with a pig or pigs who bring ten thousands of mosquitoes under your hut for a year, bringing in tens of thousands of insects only to kill one to take a pork chop, which makes it non-saleable? No, no pork. But wild boar, wild pork, is fine. i've never met a curandero who turned down boar while they were making ayahuasca. I am so tired of the nonsense of religion, whether it is catholic--which is the best religion I know because it forces you to do at least one good thing you don't want to do every day, every day--or ayahuasca. It is gringos putting words in the mouths of curanderos, who say "yes" because it gets them more clients. Please understand that.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fine arguments.
That doesn't have to argue, however, that eating our western junk food, and mostly the meat of our sad and drugged animals, may promote a better experience with ayah.
So the western narrative is intuitively posing its own rules to deal with such powerful entheogenic experience.
The salt is known to counter the effects of ayah, so abstaining from salt would be a better way to manage the scarcity of medicine in places far from Amazon.

Unknown said...

Whenever we view things through our cultural lens, with our added bias', we see what we want to see... and what we want to see may bear little resemblance to what's really true. I'm sure the typical shaman, deep in the jungle, isn't eating a pepperoni pizza before drinking. Not because he wouldn't like a slice or two... but where in the heck is he going to get a decent slice out in the bush, or any slice for that matter. So we might conclude that pizza is on the dietary restricted list, never to be consumed by a "real shaman", or maybe it's just the obvious... there's no pizza in remote jungle.

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