Lecture given online at Harvard Divinity School Inaugural Conference on Ecological Spiritualities in April 2022.
At this moment of profound ecological and health crisis, there is an urgent call for a fundamental rethinking of our attitudes toward the natural environment.
This presentation explores the role of Amazonian plant medicines in promoting indigenous spirituality and how this could help change ecologically damaging attitudes and rearrange pieces of the hegemonic Western culture.
The starting point is the assumption of spirituality as ancestral sacred practices that awaken our relationship with something greater than the self.
Such practices could challenge the dominant culture at the same time as they are constrained by it.
Western individuals typically have a unitary self, created through binary exclusions that are hierarchically linked both to each other and in relation to society.
The rise of indigenous ceremonies and rituals in the past decade as a way of healing and reconnecting with nature (including our own nature) is deeply related to our urgent need to re-access our own selves, our consciousness, and also nature and the cosmos.
Conclusions give some insights on how plant medicines facilitate the deep connection with indigenous animist values and related cosmo-visions that may help us to move beyond Western individuation and the dominant attitudes that originated the current ecological crisis.
