This letter was previously sent from Jonathan to the list; it is being sent again to some of you who may not have received it in the past:
My Brothers and Sisters,
It has come to my attention that there is, at best, some lack of knowledge about an aspect of our spiritual healing program in the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen. I am speaking of our clear, long-standing agreement that all of our works be conducted using only the sacrament of the Holy Daime; arriving at the work, inside the boundaries of the work and on the land where we do those works. I want to offer an explanation for that policy. My perspective comes from my 32 years of drinking Daime, having participated in works all over the world, and having engaged in almost every expression of the question we are addressing.
The center of our mission in CHLQ is healing. That may go without saying to those who are members of this circle. But not every Daime expression had that mission. Of course healing is always an aspect of any program, because one of the qualities of the Daime is that it is a healer; in the chemistry of its tea-body, in the vibrational frequency that it engenders in us, and in the beings who come in attendance to it in the ceremonies we perform. But our particular mission goes beyond that general observation. We have been explicitly shown, by the heritage from our teachers, in vision, in the reality of what is reported by the many people who come to us, and in the training that many of us have received and been taught to apply, that in the range of spiritual vibrations that the Daime brings, healing is primary in this mission. And for healing to happen as deeply, fully, and completely as possible, the space held for it to happen in has to contain certain qualities.
Primary among those qualities is cleanliness of the energetic space. Allied with that cleanliness is coherency. Coherency leads to safety. And for coherency to be present, there must be integrity.
Cleanliness means that the energy of the space is simple, harmonious, and consistent. A mixture of vibratory influences makes the atmosphere muddy. That is why we conduct the ritual in certain ways, with certain prayers and symbols and configurations. Not because one configuration is inherently better or more blessed than another, but because the coherency of the ritual makes the space safe and energetically available for healing. Different substances- even allowing that they may be used in a sacred way and with a consciousness of consecration (which is not always the case) - have different vibrational expressions. That difference creates what I call a wobble in the current. That wobble can be perceived. That wobble can interfere, and in my experience has done so in many places, with the fine state of vibration that the healing forces need to do their work most efficiently. It is simply not worth the trade-off of the interruption of that space to indulge the preferences of a few people who want to mix their medicines.
On another level of the energetic atmosphere-the mental level (which is different than the mind)- healing is a delicate process that requires coherency of thought and intention among the people holding the space. That means that we all must be in accordance with agreements we make on many levels: how we conduct the ceremony; how we comport ourselves; how we take care of people; who can come to a work; how we honor the Daime and each other, and what we put in our bodies as our sacrament. Some people doing anything outside the agreement, particularly as happens often that the action is done in secret- but really that the action is done at all- and some people adhering to the agreements, makes the space lack the vibration of coherency. And then it lacks integrity.
Integrity is a quality of the heart. It is what allows a focus without distraction of the heart’s energy. That focus is vital in the moments when the Daime shakes us so as to shake out that which needs to be revealed and healed. There are those that would use those moments of shaking to add another substance to their experience in order to mitigate the shake. But the very point of the transformational aspect of the healing process is to embrace that moment of shaking. That is exactly what our doctrine teaches that our firmness is for. To add another substance in that moment sidesteps the transformation and interrupts the holding space for everyone. It may make that individual feel that they have navigated the difficulty, but in reality they are abandoning their oar and allowing the boat to capsize.
The purpose of the Daime path is for liberation of our being from the density of matter and the cycle of karma, healing of our bodies and minds, illumination of our spirit and our path, and joining in harmonious union with each other and with nature. The purpose Is not to get high and sing a bunch of beautiful songs. We do get the pleasure and the joy of being freed from our normal limited consciousness, but that is to be able to experience a different consciousness and change our identification from the one to the other. And we do get to sing, in community, most beautiful, powerful, and instructional hymns. But that pleasure and the ritual that holds the form for that experience are meant to facilitate the liberation, not to be the end in itself.
A final point I want to offer you in this short paper is that we are also the heirs and practitioners of a mediumistic / spiritist perspective on the world and healing. We understand, through observation and experience, that there are worlds within worlds, dimensions beyond and under this one that we are accustomed to call reality. And there are beings that inhabit those realms that seek to influence this one. Those beings, like humans, have a range of qualities and a range of intentions. They seek to influence us humans for a range of reasons. The main one is that this plane is so rich in experience, so multi-leveled in the vibrations that are present in this realm, that many beings want the experience of interacting with it, for their development and for ours. A second reason is that they want to influence us, our history, and our direction. Again, with various goals.
Some of them mean us well and seek to enhance that wellness by helping us to elevate our consciousness, orient ourselves to Light, and create union among ourselves, with nature and with those beings themselves. They teach us in various ways, both in our works and in our lives, some of those ways harder for us to endure than others. But they are guiding us through positivity and love and charity. There are other beings who teach us by provoking our defects, our fears, our traumas, and by encouraging addiction. They have names; addictive beings, obsessors, zombeteiros. They seek to bring disruption, disunion, and disharmony by playing on our vanity, our unresolved emotions, our unexamined rationalizations, our pride, guilt and shame. And they do it, if they can, through getting us to become habituated to substances that promise us temporary relief. This is actually one of the easiest ways for beings to get control over humans. And it is one of the most common things that we humans fool ourselves about. We make up a story that what we are doing is medicinal, or even sacred, because the plants we are using come from nature and nature is by definition good. And they do have medicinal and sacred uses, depending on how, when and with how much internal liberation and with how much honest, heart-centered consciousness they are used. They can be medicine and they can be addictive. The discernment is available. It’s really useful to have a clean space in which to allow the discernment to make itself known.
Those challenging beings try to enter a space of healing; to test us, to wake us up, to play with us, to laugh at us. What they don’t know sometimes is that they are also seeking Light for themselves, even as they pretend to want to squelch it. But try they do, often. It is the responsibility of all of us to recognize how they seek entry to our consciousness and to influence our words, thoughts, and actions. For that, we need to know ourselves well. To know ourselves well, we need to be ruthlessly honest in our inner examinations. To then see, acknowledge, and make an internal program to heal our wounds, traumas and blindness. For that profound program to proceed, we need the space of that investigation to be safe, clean, coherent, and filled only with Light. Those beings who seek to bring disruption are welcome to receive the Light we call. They are not welcome to bring their disruption into our circle through the manipulation of our addictions.
When Baixinha. Marcelo Bernardes, and Ana Paschoa were in Ashland a number of years ago, they were asked to relate what Baixinha’s guide Caboclo Tupinamba, who is one of the guides of our healing mission, had conveyed when he closed the use of cannabis in the works of their church and their mediumistic works. They told us that he had said that the problem with the use of that plant in relation to the spiritual work was not the plant itself. The plant, because it is of the Mother, will do for its users whatever their consciousness asks for. He said that the problem is the lack of emotional maturity on the part of people; the lack of discernment as to what is spiritual and what is an avoidance of emotional material that the use of the plant then serves to increase.
I am here in this mission to heal my addictions and to help others do the same. I am deeply involved in the program that my guides have constructed for me to become an increasingly free person, choosing to follow Light in every moment, recognizing when I fool myself and get fooled by those beings into making up a story that I am following one thing when I’m actually following another. The space for that study - my school, my hospital, my laboratory - is precious and rare, and it is worth making a conscious effort to preserve it. That is what we have done for these 27 years. Everyone who wants to use cannabis and rapé is free to make that study in their lives as they see fit. I would encourage those choosing to make that study to do it with consciousness and awareness and humility. I do not see that the trade-off of letting the confusion of addiction, which is rampant in our world, into our healing mission is worth what we might possibly gain from expanding our program to include other substances. No one has shown me, nor have I seen, a benefit that would make me change my view. Simply because there are those people who are used to using those other substances, or because there are those in other expressions of the Daime mission who have made different choices, it is not worth the certain wobble in the current and the ultimately useless work of holding the union together that very often is the result of the entrance of those forces into the circle.
Mestre Irineu received to bring the ayahuasca, yaje, daime out of the forest. By the grace of the Divine, it eventually made its way to us. It is not something that any of us should take for granted. The Daime is an infinite teacher of true spirituality, and an authentic, amazing healer. When that Divine Being has taught us everything that it has to teach us, I will be happy to entertain the idea of adding other teachers to the program. In the meantime, I very much appreciate the love, harmony, truth, and union that I have glimpsed and felt in our circle. I pray that we have the heart, compassion, forgiveness, fortitude, courage, consciousness, integrity, and faith to grow our mission to serve all those who are called to enter our salão.
Jonathan
