I have two friends (who are not known to one another) who both came back from their South American ayahuasca experience claiming that the drug opens a portal into another dimension where they spoke with godlike beings. When I suggested that it merely altered their perception and connected them deeply with their own minds as psychedelics do, they insist that the experience of opening the interdimensional portal was literally real and that ayahuasca is not like all those other hallucinogens.
Later I learned that this is a common problem. And in this case, it doesn’t look like having a sitter helps, because the ayahuasca shaman is likely to encourage them to interpret their experience in this way. I wouldn’t consider ayahuasca tourism an example of good, productive use of psychedelics.
Maybe you think their beliefs are particularly pernicious for some reason?
For me, I've had a slew of crazy 'spiritual' experiences that I can't quite reconcile now that I've stepped away from the church. In a sense it can be quite haunting.
In my late teens I had a bunch if warts on my hands. It was really gross and I was appropriately self-conscious. The church I was part of had these INSANE / aggressive faith healers or whatever come through once a year. A bunch of crazy stuff would happen each year (e.g. people quitting smoking en masse after smelling an overwhelming stench of cigarettes followed by something resembling fresh baking...)
The overall tone was 'spiritual' -- either through anticipation or expectation, I'm not certain.
We were sitting around and my buddy suggested I go up re: the warts, but I really didn't want to. He said that he had warts as a kid and his Dad prayed over him for healing. The following day the warts turned black and fell off (gross) -- and that was it. No scarring, etc.
So we prayed for healing over these warts and I didn't think much of it. I'd seen this sort of fruitless petition many times, so it wasn't anything out of the ordinary.
The following day I was getting out of the shower and noticed that all of the warts had turned white. I washed my hands in the sink and sure enough, the warts all came off.
These days I chalk this up to persuasion / placebo -- as if somehow something clicked in my mind to trigger some sort of targeted healing... but it's still extremely hard to reconcile this experience.
When you're in this environment for years on end, or even a weekend (church camp), everything is spiritual -- and even normal things like a bag of salad that seems to last longer than expected is made out to be something it isn't. I don't view it as healthy, but regarding your friends' experiences, I can totally understand the experience, emotions, etc that make something like that seem real.
I'm not trying to suggest you're lying or anything, but these kinds of stories get warped in our memories over time and sort of settle on a more significant, but less accurate version.
Personally, I think that these things seem real to people because they want to believe it's real, and so they'll latch on to anything that remotely stands out and attach a meaning to it. Over time their memories of the event settle on that idealized version of it.
I think it ultimately boils down to persuasion and the environment. When you're surrounded by 'faith', you can pin a lot of things onto that -- much like how some folks buy into horoscopes, homeopathy, statues, prayer cards, etc.
I know someone who considers themselves to be really lucky because they win a lot of contests -- but they only win a lot of contests because they enter a lot of contests.
I used to have warts on my hands and feet when I was a kid. It wasn't bad, only one on a finger and two in a benign spot on my feet. But they were very persistent for many years. I never saw a faith healer, but they still fell off on their own one day, never to return again. I had actually completely forgotten about that until I read your message, likely because it held no significance for me. The coincidence of faith healer + warts falling off appears more significant that warts falling off with no apparent instigator.
The search term for those looking for more information is “machine elves”.
https://non-aliencreatures.fandom.com/wiki/Machine_Elf
I, too, find ayahuasca tourism to not be a very good or productive way of experimenting with psychedelics. The mysticism/religion is not inherently beneficial, and you can experiment a lot closer to home without all of the woo if you like, with much the same results.
Modern witchcraft is a lot like this, spells are basically like stronger versions of new years resolutions or therapy.
I'm curious, did they believe there is a high probability of godlike beings existing in another dimension before they took ayahuasca?
A lot of people don't really understand how potentially transformative a powerful psychedelic experience can be, particularly if it entails a classic mystical experience.
A common characteristic of them is that they are experienced as "more real than real", that valuable, even sacred truths and insights are revealed, and often what is revealed seems indubitably true, or at least at a deeper level of truth than something like mere belief.
After such experiences some may come to question what they experienced, and may come to doubt it or re-interpret it in a way that they couldn't while under the effect of the psychedelic, but others can't or won't.
This may be due to a number of factors.
First, few people have a very developed critical faculty. Most are not used to questioning their own perception of the world or their beliefs. When faced with such an overpoweringly true-seeming experience (perhaps the most powerful of their life) their instinct is to take it at face value and believe.
Many of them are also seekers, looking to be convinced or converted, or in some fashion already believe something like what the experience reveals, though sometimes true converts are made (like atheists becoming theists, radical switches of political orientation, etc).
This can happen with any powerful psychedelic, but there are some special factors to consider for ayahuasca (and other psychedelics, like peyote, which have a long history of indigenous/shamanic use).
As far as ayahuasca goes, the people who facilitate ayahuasca experiences and the groups of people who take part in them (as ayahuasca is usually done in groups) often share and reinforce beliefs similar to what you described, both before and after the experience. There are also lots of articles, videos, and podcasts which tell people what to expect. This primes people to have such experiences, then interpret them in the way everyone else seems to, and accept them as true.
Talk about travel to other dimensions, the spirit world, entities like "Mother Ayahuasca", super powers, time travel, precognition, communication with the dead, etc are common, and usually discussed quite uncritically, as if none of this could possibly be anything other than absolutely and unquestionably true.
There are some skeptical, experienced voices, but they are drowned out by the believers.
Now, if the believers are right, then maybe this isn't a problem. But the thing is that there are many incompatible supernatural belief systems that people buy in to through psychedelic use.. from a belief in a world controlled by demons to a belief that everything is love, to Charles Manson and other cult leaders being gods, to more humble and peaceful beliefs, and it's hard to imagine how they can all be true.
Fortunately, the belief systems that most users get in to tend to be peaceful, constructive, and caring. But I am concerned that some people will get themselves in to a reality tunnel that's not quite so benign. It has happened.
Charles Manson's abuse of LSD was probably the most infamous example of this in recent times, but if we look at the belief systems that psychedelic users adopts as new religions, we only have to take a look at the history of religion through the ages to realize that quite bloodthirsty strife amongst believers is common, and still goes on today.
I sincerely hope that such a bloody future is not in the cards for the newly flowering psychedelic faiths.
To guard against this and increase the odds of safely navigating the psychdelic realm, it's probably prudent to cultivate a well functioning BS detector, and maybe have someone you respect and trust who you'll listen to if they call you on your own BS if you're somehow unable to, and maybe make you think twice for a second about you being the Second Coming of Jesus or being able to cause earthquakes with your mind.
There are some crucial aspects of what happened that are missing from your account.
1 - Not only did some people have bad reactions, but the media and politicians sensationalized the hell out those bad reactions, we're not seeing that now and the media attention has been extraordinarily positive.. so far. It could, of course, change on a dime if/when there's some juicy scandal that the media can whip people up in to a frenzy over.
2 - Psychedelics and cannabis were tied strongly in to the counterculture (including that new demonic music, Rock and Roll) of the time, which was a frightening bogeyman to politicians and mainstream culture.
Mainstream culture has pretty much absorbed much of that counterculture since then. Rock and Roll is pretty blase, hippies are seen as quaint anachronisms, psychedelic/surreal art is commonplace and won't raise an eyebrow any longer. People have bigger things to worry about.
3 - Psychedelics and cannabis were tied strongly to the anti-war movement and various political issues that were threatening the status quo. There's hardly any anti-war movement to speak of any longer, and psychedelic users don't seem to be threatening the status quo except for wanting to get their drugs of choice legalized, and maybe "save the planet" by taking better care of the environment. It's hard to get people wound up in opposition to that any longer.
Now, this could all change as psychedelics do have the potential to inspire art and music and maybe create a new counterculture, and to also inspire radical political action and seeking out of alternatives to the status quo, and I hope that does happen in some positive, constructive manner. And there could be a huge backlash against that once again, but there's not even a hint of it yet.
Something else that's going on now is that there's a lot more education about safe use of psychedelics, the therapeutic/medical model and the shamanic/sacred approach seem to be taking off on a scale that wasn't there in the 50's and 60's. Ayahuasca tourism is huge, and MDMA-assisted and Psilocybin-assisted therapies are ramping up (with veterans of all people!)
Talking about and getting help for mental health issues is also something that's much more widely accepted than it was in the 50's and 60's, when these things were pretty taboo. Psychedelic support and integration groups are also springing up all over the place. So people are much more likely to seek out help when they need it. That will hopefully have a positive effect to stem the flow of "acid casualties" this time around.
There's also a mental health crisis, where traditional mental health treatments are widely recognized as having failed, and people are looking for alternatives that work. This is somewhat similar to the 60's and 70's, when alternative treatments were also fashionable, but it seems such alternatives are much more acceptable today.
In addition to this, a lot of the people who were part of the youth culture and counterculture in the 60's are in positions of power now, and they're not as afraid of these substances as their parents were.
We're definitely living in interesting times, and right now the future looks bright, though of course that could change if people continue to use these substances irresponsibly and the media manages to turn reports of bad experiences in to a circus.