[hosh]

You're making an assumption that "freakouts" is necessarily a bad thing. Freakouts can have some severe material consequences (including as we saw, death), but antipsychotics do not necessarily help. Humans have a normalcy bias such that, anything that is unfamiliar are to be considered with caution, fear, and even anger. There's a tendency to use antipsychotics to get someone to a state of what's considered "normal", but "normal" does not always mean healthy.

The shamans who are trained in the jungle and work with this stuff uses a variety of methods to work with those kinds of episodes. These are not fun, and they aren't really safe either. Some of the groups in the US are not trained or equipped to deal with it, and the more responsible ones will refuse to let someone drink if there are prior cases of psychotic breaks.

I do remember in one ceremony, one of the persons there went off on a journey. This was a group I don't usually participate with. To me, it wasn't unusual for someone to go into an episode like that. I've seen it happen in others and in myself. (And granted, I have heard of those who go somewhere and never come back but I have not seen it directly myself).

What was unusual in that case was that there no separate room set aside. Usually, the energies being whipped out of a person like that is intense enough to start inducing things in other people. What it usually induces is fear (fear of the unknown). As people started to get more and more uncomfortable, their own consciousness transmits feelings of judgement and censure ... which does not help the situation.

Ayahuasca is tricky like that. She'll allow situations like that to arise, and see if you're going to be mindful of things; or to facilitate an empathy exercise where you feel what it is like to be on the other side of those judgements. Freakouts like that can happen to anyone -- and likely, the more rigid, the more closed-minded, the more judgemental you are, the more likely it will be your turn next.

[apathy]

Once upon a time I took everything under the sun. I don't judge people for doing the same.

But if you're claiming to "guide" people through a trip with potential for physical harm (and in an inustrialized, urban environment, that's pretty much all of them), you're goddamn right I'll judge you if you fuck someone up.

If a hospital pulled this shit and didn't even try to mitigate potential harm, they'd be shut down. Would you claim it should be otherwise? People certainly have out of body experiences in the ER on a fairly regular basis...

So, no, I don't take issue with people using hallucinogens. I used a ton when I was younger and had a vanishingly small number of bad trips. The part I take issue with is where people get irresponsible. Humans are pretty fragile (stop by the ER some time, they can survive a lot, but not everything). I judge those who won't take care of each other.

[hosh]

You make some good points.

However, I'm not speaking about whether someone's action is worthy or unworthy, but rather, the specific reaction of judgement itself as a form of conscious energy. When examined energetically, the intention of judging itself is often a form of social aggression, usually in reaction to aversion.

Aversion is a natural instinct when we come across something that is toxic, or more precisely, perceived as toxic to our bodies. Toxins get expelled. This is very natural, at least for human bodies.

The thing is that Consciousness spans more than being human, and it persists beyond the our given lifetime as a human. We trade roles and act out this theatre where, sometimes you are the one judging, and sometimes you are the one being judged for the same actions. What is toxic at some level of teaching is not toxic at other levels of teaching. The teaching that an individual needs is specific to that moment, in that setting.

Also, 'harm' and 'potential harm' is not so simple. There are physical, emotional, and mental damage that can be inflicted, both accidentally and deliberately. However, it's been my experience that people generally confuse pain with suffering, and conflate the two. Pain can be measured and compared, but suffering cannot. Suffering does not result from pain so much as it results from going against the natural flow of consciousness. So when we speak of "harm" in the conventional sense, we measure it in terms of pain, but we are often really speaking of "suffering" in the subtext, or subconsciously.

When people are reacting to freakouts, they are not usually reacting to the potential danger so much as the suffering from the arising fear of that danger. The aversion to suffering is so strong, there's this spiraling effect as the fear in participants start resonating, and then compound out of control. From this perspective, judgement is a kind of immune response to toxic energies, and while it might be appropriate outside of ceremony space, it isn't necessarily helping you as a participant if you focus too much on judging others within the ceremony. This is, after all, gaining insight about yourself. A good question to be asking at that point is, "What am I learning from this experience of me judging someone else?"

To come back to your points though: what I said above comes out in groups that act responsibly, and can provide a reasonably safe place to explore dangerous aspects of life like that. They don't spike the brew. I've been with groups where there are EMT or an MD on hand. There are sufficient facilities to isolate someone going through an intense journey (which always look like freakouts). There are sober helpers to make sure people get what they need ... and keep the knives hidden away. The shamans know how to deal with the really nasty stuff that will pop up once in a while.

While the nature of medicine is such that many will experience a safe way to explore some very dangerous stuff, one of the things people explore is life, and the inherent dangers and risks of life. At some point in someone's journey, they learn by taking falls and getting back up.

[apathy]

It seems like at least some of the groups you've sat down with had these things nailed down. At some point there are objective hazards in life, and I'm comfortable knowing that we can't possibly control them all. I've done some pretty irresponsible things to my brain (18-hour trips on alpha-methyltryptamine, that sort of thing) but in the end I am the one who pays (or will pay) the price for that.

Honest-to-god shamans that are the recipients of generations' worth of accumulated cultural traditions aren't my concern; I'm hardly fit to judge them. But that doesn't seem to be what's going on in some of these ceremonies. It's irresponsible (and kind of shitty) to act as a guide unless the guide is prepared to handle extremal behavior.

As far as judging others for taking hallucinogens, nah. People's brains react differently to different agents at different points in time, and that's something that you either learn to deal with or you stop taking hallucinogens.