As part of wrapping up the project of analyzing Dose Nation’s ‘Final 10’ podcast series, I post here my notes written while listening to Episode 6. These notes served as the basis for my part in the discussion with Max about this episode in Transcendent Knowledge Podcast Ep. 20.

  • Episode covers healing, medicine, ayahuasca ceremonies.
  • Kent describes how shamans do a certain kind of physical healing. Long-winded, not relevant. I don’t care about shamanic claims of physical healing.
  • Kent polemicizes against gurus.
  • Claims that psychedelics and Timothy Leary’s encouragement to “drop out” allowed gurus to take over people. This is misreading of Leary and of the cultural context of the 60s and 70s. What caused an interest in gurus in America in the 20th century? Kent wants you to think that psychedelics caused it, solely, apart from any other factor.
  • This episode well illustrates Kent’s sensationalism. He moralizes throughout: it’s so bad that anyone could ever encounter harm at ayahuasca centers. We should disapprove sternly of anyone who is even indirectly associated with harm experienced at ayahuasca centers
  • He describes a murder during an ayahuasca retreat. He reads from a news article, but the details are unclear. He interprets that the murder happened during an ayahuasca ceremony, and expands from here to blame all of ayahuasca tourism for the murder. An example of sensationalizing. I have no investment in ayahuasca, but sensationalizing strains credibility and is exhausting to listen to.
  • States that losing control and becoming ‘primal’ and ‘violent’ is the worst thing that could happen to someone. This is profound in a certain way: Losing control is the worst thing to an ego!
  • Reminder: Kent had a freakout on psychedelics. Instead of investigating further the dynamics of freakout, he turned to the ‘psychedelic community’ for an answer about what happened. From them on, he intentionally took small doses to retain control. Kent is obsessed with retaining control. He is the voice of the modern ego resisting control undermining psychedelics. While his critiques are valuable in some ways, he has this huge blindspot.
  • The focus on murder at ayahuasca centers is a bit over the top. As if no one ever murders anyone at any other time under other circumstances.
  • Kent’s tone of moral panic is culturally retrograde. Exposing ayahuasca centers as bunk and corrupt is fine and worthy, but moral panic supports Prohibitionist safety and security culture. If you’re going to moralize against psychedelic-related deaths, talk about deaths caused by Prohibition.
  • I’m very confused about what his point is about the shaman and death at the facility, and about the open letter from the ayahuasca community. Trying to attack the shaman as a lowlife criminal, but that the open letter authors chastising him were wrong to do so. The connection is not clear, and his sensationalizing and moral panic tone confuses whatever point he is trying to make.
  • Thinks that being a ‘spiritually-evolved master’ means being perfectly moral.
  • Kent has to admit that we don’t know what killed the kid, but Kent wants it to be the ayahuasca itself, I assume because it dehydrates you through excessive purging. But he’s inconsistent and wants it to be because ayahuasca makes you “crazy.” For the idea that ayahuasca makes you “crazy,” he’s relying on a W.S. Burroughs quote about “derangement”.
  • About Shamans, he says: “when shit goes wrong, they have no control and they don’t want to take responsibility.” Very revealing comment. Concepts of control and responsibility are wrapped up in making an individualized subject ego, one also capable of being blamed.
  • He criticizes indigeneous people getting scared about the deaths of foreigners, panicking, and not treating the bodies properly. In his ideal version of the world, they would be in total control, or someone would be in control, and would prevent ‘bad’ things from happening or would no how to handle ‘bad’ things with perfect understanding. Normative ethics of responsibility. Kent wants a bubble in which nothing ‘bad’ ever happens.
  • Attacks shamans for not being ‘spiritually advanced’ without defining what that would mean.
  • A more productive question would be “why are ayahuasca ceremonies appealing to modern Westerners?” Kent is not interested in all that. He’s interested in reinforcing the ordinary state, in reifying ordinary state egoic life, not having psychedelics impinge upon that.
  • General thought on cultural criticism of shamans as uncivilized: Western science and medicine is full of ‘uncivilized activities’ that resulted in progress of knowledge and ideas. If you prize rationality and self-experimentation and knowledge, you have to accept casualities.
  • An excessive focus on safety is authoritarian