Overview: This is the third of a five-part series titled “Learning at the Feet of the Plant Teachers,” by Jonathan Goldman, Founder and Director of the Santo Daime-based Church of the Holy Light of the Queen in Ashland, Oregon. In this series, Jonathan recounts a powerful experience with Daime (Ayahuasca) and emphasizes the importance of responsible use in spiritual ceremonies. He warns against the dangers of seeking guidance from untrained shamans, highlighting the potential for psychological harm. True healing, Goldman argues, is a long and challenging journey, not a quick fix. Goldman expresses concern over a recent surge in the popularity of plant medicine use, which has unfortunately coincided with a rise in unqualified practitioners. He worries that improper ceremonies conducted by these individuals can lead to negative experiences and damage the reputation of plant medicine as a whole. He also criticizes those who exploit this growing interest for personal gain. To address these issues, Goldman proposes the creation of a “Guild of Entheogenic Practitioners” across the upcoming parts of the series. This voluntary organization would establish ethical and safety standards, ensure proper training for practitioners, and offer a trusted resource for those seeking safe and legitimate ceremonies. The guild would respect individual autonomy and traditions while providing a certified list of qualified practitioners. Unregulated practices, Goldman argues, risk government intervention and potential bans on plant medicine use. He believes that responsible self-regulation through a guild system can protect both participants and the future of plant medicine use. Stay tuned for the following parts of the series where Goldman delves deeper into solutions and the potential benefits of this approach.

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Learning at the Feet of the Plant Teachers: Part 3

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Discernment

There are at this moment a disturbing number of practitioners of all spiritual arts, along with many other people in many arenas, who have stepped off the cliff of discernment and are tumbling through the clouds of conspiracy, fantasy, and even madness. They are me in an undiscerned form.

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If you want to be a useful instrument of the actual plant teachers, you must consciously, seriously, ruthlessly work on the revealing and transforming of your lower self. To the extent you have bypassed this sometimes difficult but necessary process, to that extent your unexamined lower energies will leak into your ceremonies and cause distortion in the healing and teachings.  Thinking and declaring that because you take sacred medicine you are automatically healed is just not true. It’s not just a matter of your commitment, which may be sincere. It is a matter of doing the hard work of becoming an example of healing. It’s not just about handing someone a glass or a pill or a chocolate bon bon or a mushroom or blowing powder up their nose or burning a hole in their skin or lighting a pipe.

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If you do not actively work on your grounding, if you do not practice and evolve the internal skill of ruthless discernment, if you avoid the confrontation with your own inner darkness, and most especially if you do not accept and welcome the offer that the plant teachers will vibrationally extend to you to come into and live in the place of humility in the center of your heart — which means, first of all, accepting the reality of not knowing — you can go about imagining and advertising yourself as a shaman when in actuality you’re a deluded fool. It is easy to conflate spiritual inspiration with ego trickery. There are beings whose job it is to teach you discernment by playing on your vanity and avoidance of your own pain. By telling you what your ego wants to hear about how great is your soul, how deep is your knowledge, how special is your mission, they make a mockery of authentic spirituality, spreading dangerous silliness rather than authentic knowledge. Which is why they are called, in Portuguese, “zombeteiros” or “mockers”. Knowing who it is that is really teaching you, who your real boss is, and what their motivation is, is the difference between being of use in bringing Light to earth and augmenting the spiritual confusion that is so prevalent today.

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The jump from accurate spiritual observation to complete delusion is understandable if you know nothing about the influence — inside ceremony and out — of the non-physical beings. Those of us that do medicine work are as susceptible to those thoughts, feelings, and entities as anyone else. In some cases, we are more vulnerable because of the forces we call into the ceremonial space and because of our own developing mediumship. If we lack the humility and discernment that comes from training with people who have walked the path well before us, we are vulnerable to delusional influences. We can’t have it both ways. You can’t open the gates of perception and then expect it to be guaranteed that only the beings who want what is good for us to come through. As above, so below. There are ways to keep the space — in us and in the ceremony — pristine, only giving ingress to those who are light-committed. That ability to be protected and to protect the space and the participants in ceremony can be learned. That training starts with a commitment to our own healing and to, as my wife says, “not driving ahead of our headlights.”  There are time-honored ways to protect yourself and the people for whom you have taken spiritual/energetic responsibility. We need to know how to put gatekeepers at the portals whose openings we invoke.

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In a worldly milieux with so much conflict, so many, many thoughts, such an enormous quantity of useless but loud opinion, and so much underlying fear, despair, and increasing desperation — all of it being provoked by forces obvious and hidden that feed off the fear and revel in the disunity — it’s easy to lose your way; to think you and your buddies know the secret truth, when really you’re just another clown stuffed into the Volkswagen. And it is simple and possible to find your way back to the real path the teachers have opened.

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It’s easier to stay lost, fantasizing that you have found the Truth, than to do the hard inner work of finding your way step-by-step through the morass of emotion, belief, and karma to the authentic Light. The plant teachers see our plight. They can, and want to, help. That is one reason that the plants are so much more available now than they were in 1988. But the help and the healing and the comfort are not automatic.

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No one is immune from the tricks of the mind. You can imagine that you are channeling divinity when really you are channeling the seductive mental illness swimming in the general field of human thought, including your own. Such confusion in anyone is disturbing and requires us to increase our own discernment. Such confusion spread by people claiming to be spiritual leaders and asking the rest of us to trust our vulnerabilities to them in a vibrationally delicate, sacred setting is more than dangerous. 

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I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture. Reality is nuanced. There is also at this moment a good number of people dispensing useful wisdom, exhibiting clean inspiration, and helping with true healing. Showing the way through the morass by their example of humility, compassion, and devotion to truth. Times of transformation have everything going on. Sorting out who is who and what is what is what I mean by the art of grounded discernment, which is the number one necessity to cultivate in this time. The plant teachers can help us develop that vital sensibility. But they won’t do it for us. If we prefer to remain arrogant and ignorant, more committed to our ego than to the spirit, they will step aside and allow us to learn by our eventual fall from grace.

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Cultivating discerned, grounded intuition requires intention, awareness, daily work, honest feedback, and self-forgiveness. If we want to be useful instruments of light-committed divine forces rather than tools of deception, we need to do our inner work outside of ceremony.

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Ceremony is a laboratory and a schoolroom. By which I mean that in ceremony we are shown the landscape of our inner territory from various angles. Sometimes it is with a spotlight illuminating in stark detail what we do, or don’t do, in our day to day lives that promotes, or interferes with, the promulgation of goodness, kindness, and bringing Light to bear on this earth plane. How are we fulfilling our prayer to be instruments of those benign qualities and the beings who transmit them to us and want to transmit through us? 

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The bulk of the inner work is not done in the ceremonial space. Jane and I have had a number of years when we have drunk Daime 120-140 times. Presently the number is closer to 60. And in all these years, on most of the days in between conducting ceremonies and traveling, I sit in front of my altar, breathing into the space of humility in the center of my heart chakra, often crying as my embodied trauma that has been plucked in the ceremonies is unraveled. I have had therapy sessions, and multiple consultations with people who I trusted, most especially teachers from my spiritual lineage. I exercise in the gym to sustain and strengthen my body, my “aparelho”, or instrument as it is called in spiritism work. I do the exercises, the inner yoga I learned and teach to increase my grounding, my calmness, and link me more firmly with my heart and with the Source of Light. I hike in nature, opening myself to Her vibrations. Every day I do clearing of my energy bodies of the extraneous energies I accumulate through my life and work as a sensitive medium.  

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I do all this first for my own healing. I take plant medicine because it is my medicine, my sustenance, and my spiritual path. I’ve happily accepted the bonus of the karmic job of helping other people heal themselves. But really, I do this for me. Life is short, and I have a list of healing I came to this life pledged to do. That list is way shorter than it was, but there are still some big items to check off. And I work on myself because I have been given and have accepted that responsibility to help beautiful, sensitive, sincere, vulnerable people wake up. I am a dented instrument slowly being bumped out and polished. I need to be an active collaborator in that process; for myself and for the integrity and nobility of the work I’ve been given and have agreed to do.

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I do not suggest that you do what I do. I do suggest that you need to do what works for you in your own healing path. And that is not just to go to ceremonies, take plant medicine, and declare yourself healed.