Conference

I hope you can join us next April 23-25, 2020 for the next conference from my colleagues at Chacruna Institute:  Sacred Plants in the Americas II! This global virtual summit will bring together indigenous leaders, activists, researchers, practitioners, and community builders from around the world. Together we will discuss the globalization of psychedelic plant medicine from a variety of perspectives and explore how we can offer reciprocity to honor the indigenous cultures and traditions that these medicines come from. See below for an abstract of my presentation. And they kindly offered a special 20% discount code for our community! Use the code discount_jorge to register for tickets here: http://sacredplants2.eventbrite.com/

The Visionary Powers of San Pedro (Wachuma):

Implications for Scientific Naturalism and Decolonial Research

After a brief overview of the three main historical waves of San Pedro use (archaic fertility rituals, curanderismo, and spiritual seeking), this presentations summarizes its main forms of preparation and healing effects. Then it introduces the phenomenon of shared visions, in which several San Pedro practitioners report seeing—with their open eyes—the same subtle phenomena in the external world. This phenomenon, it is argued, not only raises a serious challenge to contemporary scientific naturalism, but also suggest the existence of subtle or energetic dimensions of reality coexisting with the physical domain.The possibility of San Pedro’s intersubjective testing of so-called supernatural claims paves the way for participatory decolonial research programs developed by Western researchers in symmetrical collaboration with Indigenous traditional healers. The presentation concludes outlining the stages of one such research program that embraces an open naturalism, being thus receptive to both the ontological integrity of spiritual referents and the plausibility a multiverse—or multidimensional cosmos—housing a rich variety of subtle worlds.