Re-Story-Ation

Therapy

Ancient principles for living encourage a wondrous view of the world. Is this the ‘re-enchantment’ with life we need?

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Rainforests gave the West spectacular medicines for the body. Could their way of life provide healing for the mind too?

Half of all pharmacological medicines are derived from plants, including recent innovations, and 25% come from global rainforest. Curare, the muscle relaxant Amazonian tribes used to stun animals, prompted a revolution in anaesthetics and modern medicine. Quinine was the first cure for malaria. Vincristine and Vinblastine from Madagascar, used the treat cancers, have vastly extended the chance of surviving childhood leukemia.

Now, thousands flock to ayahuasca retreats to balm their souls. But passionate field researchers both young and old claim the lifestyle and ideology around the medicine is essential to redemption.

“Our profound alienation is a consequence of turning relationships into things”

Washington-based Joseph Mays, wields a master’s in ethnobotany from the University of Kent – a likely hotbed of radical thought – after observing responses to globalisation from the Yanesha in central Peru. He’s published a smart medicinal plant guide for the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve and works as the program director of Chacruna’s arse-kicking Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative (IRI).

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Mays cracked his bonus Vital lecture off by quoting Karl Marx like a boss.

“Marx spoke about the ‘metabolic rift’, man’s alienation from nature,” says the scholar and activist, “We are now in ‘The Anthropocene Epoch’.”

That’s the conceptual geological era we’re living in now. The official one’s the Holocene. The Anthropocene represents a time man begins to have geological impact upon the Earth, roughly marked by the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

“We should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind”

Ernst Junger warily observed the march of technology throughout the 20th century. He wrote that it was best explained by the senseless, arbitrary nature of the First World War. Not only in the power new weapons had to slaughter hundreds in a moment, but the absence of any serious evaluation of why it was happening.

Junger considered the endemic, fatalistic nihilism he witnessed in the trenches, and in the commuter era that followed it, “a new, terrible practice” and spoke of “the loneliness of man in a new, unexplored world, whose steely law will be felt as meaningless.”

Vincent Blok, in his acclaimed Ernst Junger’s Philosophy of Technology writes that our enlightenment values of '“Reason and humanity, of morality and individual freedom” count for nothing now they are wedged within the indefatigable gears of… The Anthropocene.

“The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable”

Mays quotes feted Brazilian anthropologist, Cambridge lecturer and writer of Cannibal Physics Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who writes that our profound alienation is a consequence of “turning relationships into things” and “perceiving life as a collection of detached objects.”

The animistic view though is “inherently subjectifying” in contrast to the objectified modern era. It also stands alongside our own subjective spiritual beliefs, working as a system to integrate Earth and consciousness.

“We are now in The Anthropocene Epoch”

Breaking the dichotomies – mind-body, mankind-Earth, civilisation-environment – can also free us from our alienation. Our energy spent on tweaking existing problems could go into designing alternatives. “Maybe we should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind, and imagine many other compositions or assemblages,” says The Life of Plants writer Emanuele Coccia in his introduction to Modern Alchemy, a new series of photographs by Viviane Sassen published by JBE Books, photos from which you see here.

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from JBE Books

Learning on the job develops a deeper relationship with the non-human elements of vocation and personal growth. Individual responsibility and local ‘bottom up’ development puts ownership for our immediate experience in our own hands, away from the distraction of political infighting.

Communities are marginalised in a similar manner to the environment. Energy is better spent providing a container for them to address their “own needs, and their own priorities in a self-directed manner from the ground up” as a forest would. Or like Somerset UK’s Frome Model of Compassionate Primary Care that has slashed hospital admissions by 40% over a decade, which you can read about in this issue’s Medical section.

“Biological and cultural diversity are inextricably linked,” says Mays, “And the culture of plants and communities are inter-dependent. The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable.”

Infinite Debt to the Biosphere

Integration

We cannot hope to fully repay our debt to nature. But we can give it a go

From Irving Penn – Burning Off the Page at Pace gallery Los Angeles till Sept 3

Feeling that familiar Western guilt? Motivated even to actually do something?

But what?

Never fear. You can pay money, like normal, and it’s (kind of) fine.

Plus you can also change your behaviour. I offer genuine compassion for how tough this can be. Especially when it involves not only stepping outside of your comfort zone, but abandoning the concept of comfort zones althogether.

Anthropologist and documentary film maker Nicholas Spiers is The Chacruna Institute of Psychedelic Plant Medicines’ lead researcher. He’s written an Annotated Bibliography of Key Texts on the Indigenous and Historical Uses of Psilocybin for them, and he co-directed this year’s plant medicine TV smash The Peyote Files with Chacruna founder Bia Labate. He’s also made films about Salvia divinorum and Racist Psychedelic Myths. Nick, who spent several years embedded in the Sierra Maztecha, is, like many animistic converts, not one for any sort of BS whatsoever. 

“Our own society seeks ‘catharsis’ which technically means a ‘balm’ or ‘quick fix’,” he explains, “we look at ‘unwellness’ rather than ‘wellness’ leading to a a culture of fear. True reciprocity would be a titrated experience, expanding our capacity for both the comfortable and the uncomfortable.” Sure. Can you give us an example, Nick? 

“Well, what you’re doing here on Vital is trying to address mental health. Right now, for example, bipolar diagnoses struggle to find work, and marginalised communities may display what appears as ‘psychosis’,” he replies, “The foundation of Western psychology is at fault, but nothing is done to help them or address it.”

The West currently looks to epistemology – drilling down to a single truth – to inform its purpose. Cultural beliefs, which cannot be measured empirically, don’t count towards epistemological truth.

“Plant medicine is inseparable from people”

Ontology though considers the nature of existence instead, where consistencies can still be found – including in matters less easily pinned-down, like the regularity of change or the source of creativity. 

Joseph Mays, program director of Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas, puts our dysfunctional dependence on epistemology into an economic frame. “The indigenous communities are suffering from the same extractive system that takes from our own environment and wellbeing. It externalises as many costs as possible,” this includes exploiting tribes and its local workers he says. So “reciprocity can happen in any relationships, human or non-human, employer to employee. Or with ones friends, family, and neighbours: “the conservation of nature requires the conservation of communities,” adds Mays.

Ernst Junger floated many of these themes in 1951’s The Forest Passage, which is gradually becoming his most referred to treatise.

Therein Junger holds court in spectacular fashion. “Before our eyes, fields that sustained owners and tenants for thirty generations are carved up in a manner that leaves everyone hungry,” he wrote in one of the first broadsides at extractive materialism, “Forests that supplied wood for millennia are laid level; and from one day to the next the goose that laid the golden eggs is slaughtered and its flesh used to cook a broth, that is shared with all but satisfies none.”

Junger’s life coaching centred on his concept of ‘the forest rebel’. I pretend to be one while I’m doing my forest bathing. Junger’s archetype focuses on retaining a sense of freedom, without plunging into the abyss of ‘fatalism’ by deciding you’d better just be more of a bastard than everyone else seems to be. Instead, you can hold on to your own morals and independence.

In Icelandic myth, Junger explains, “A forest passage followed a banishment; through this action a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources. This was considered honourable, and it still is today, despite all the platitudes.” Others may roll their eyes, but really they cannot help but be impressed by your autonomy.

The forest rebel has not given up hope, either. “Freedom is prefigured in myth and in religions, and it always returns; so, too, the giants and the titans always manifest with the same apparent superiority,” quoth Junger with characteristic confidence, “The free man brings them down; and he need not always be a prince or a Hercules. A stone from a shepherd’s sling, a flag raised by a virgin, and a crossbow have already proven sufficient.”

Which leads us to handing over your disposable income. Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative aims to ‘decolonise philanthropy’. Existing programs demand certain concessions from the recipients of their charity dollar; the IRI is strictly ‘no strings attached’ and works directly with 20 community groups distributing donations equally.

Reforestation, peyote conservation, traditional storytelling documentation, and a Shipibo Plant Medicine Garden that shares its seeds with other communities are only a few examples. It’s raised over $100,000 in tis first year with only 7.5% of that going on overheads. 

“Plant medicine is inseparable from people,” says Mays, “studying the perspective hinted at by visionary plants can give us a guide forwards.”

‘Be the change you want to see’ then, like the cushions at Ikea implore you to do. That trite quote is attributed to Mahatma Ghandi when he actually said was more profound: “As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is, and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”