True Shamans Never Use Any Drugs or Alcohol

Stories like this are just appalling. Please learn from this tragic death that there is no True Shamanism in ayahuasca or any drug.

Petaluma man's son died in Peru trying 'to further open his mind'

By GUY KOVNER
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Published: Saturday, September 15, 2012 at 1:11 p.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, September 15, 2012 at 1:11 p.m.

Kyle Josef Nolan and his parents knew exactly why the 18-year-old Sebastopol man traveled to a retreat center in the Peruvian jungle: to participate in an “ayahuasca ritual,” ingesting a psychoactive concoction used by Amazonian people for centuries and popular with westerners, including the musician Sting.

Kyle Nolan.

But the 10-day program at the Shimbre Shamanic Center went tragically wrong, and the operator, a shaman named Jose Manuel Pineda Vargas, attempted to cover up Nolan's death and lied to his mother when she first arrived in Peru, according to Sean Nolan of Petaluma, Kyle's father.

Peruvian National Police said they arrested Pineda, 58, who called himself “Master Mancoluto,” and two men who allegedly helped bury Nolan's body on the shamanic center's property outside the city of Puerto Maldonado in southeastern Peru near the Bolivian border.

A YouTube video depicts Pineda leading authorities to the spot where Nolan's body was unearthed.

Ingeborg Oswald of Sebastopol, Nolan's mother, and his sister, Marion Nolan, were in Peru Friday waiting to bring Nolan's body home and also obtain official reports on his death, Sean Nolan said.

“This is what he wanted to do,” Sean Nolan said. “This was not to be a vacation for him, but rather an experience to further open his mind.”

Nolan, a 2011 graduate from Analy High School, had taken a year off from school and worked odd jobs to save money for the trip to Peru and the shamanic retreat, where ayahuasca is the “centerpiece” of a 10-day program, Sean Nolan said.

“It does have inherent risks,” he said.

Sean Nolan said he was concerned about his son's use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive brew widely used by indigenous Amazonian people that contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a psychedelic substance that is illegal in the United States.

Day 33 Drug Use is Not Shamanism

I do not use psychoactive plants in my practice to enter the spirit domain and I will tell you why.

Right now you can easily join a group of people and take a trek into the jungles of the Amazon to meet with indigenous shamans who will house you and feed you and let you try their hallucinogenic drug to supposedly connect with the spirit world. At great expense, time, money and physical discomfort you will indeed see visions and have a huge hallucination. But your vision will never be what those shamans experience. Why? Because they are from a different culture than you are. They have completely different beliefs and so, since beliefs create reality, their reality is different than yours, therefore what they see is different than what you see and their vision is different from your vision.

They actually know this! So they are not giving away any shamanic secrets or initiating you into their tribe or anything else of the sort. They are making money sharing a plant that is plentiful and they get lots of money and the guests honor them and treat them so special like holy men, well it is all great fun and enjoyable for them. And that is fine.

You will never see or experience what an indigenous shaman experiences with his holy plants. You do not believe what he believes. In our modern western culture we understand psychology, how the brain works mechanically, synapses and brain activity, we know about the left lobe and right lobe and treat depression and disease with modern methods. In our belief system as modern men we have no need for psychoactive drugs to be able to reach our Creator. Creator is not far away and only accessible through priestly ritual to us. These drugs are useless for that purpose to us. Sure you will have an hallucinogenic experience for sure! We know how these drugs interfere with the lobes of the brain and cause an increase in the firing of synapses to cause hallucinations, but to connect with the spirit world? Not for the white modern man, sorry.

I do not use nor recommend any use of drugs for this reason. Make sense?

Aho

Shaman Elder Maggie

www.shamanelder.com