The Unspoken Hierarchy and Hubris of the Medicine and Spiritual Communities
On the inversion at the heart of the healing economy & the people it exiles.
There exists, within what is called the medicine and spiritual world in this part of the planet, a hierarchy that organizes nearly every gathering, every ceremony, every introduction and exchange between practitioners, and which, despite its near-total influence over who is centered and who is marginalized, who is treated as teacher and who is treated as new, who is granted the benefit of the doubt and who is required to prove themselves, is almost never named out loud. The silence around it is not incidental but constitutive: the silence is part of how it operates, because the moment the hierarchy is named with any precision its logic begins to come apart, and the people whose authority depends upon it have a strong material incentive to keep it submerged beneath the language of love and lineage and reverence that the spaces use to describe themselves.
It does not appear in marketing copy or in the bios of facilitators, nor does it correspond to any framework that the actual lineage carriers of these medicines, in their home territories, would recognize as their own. What it corresponds to instead is a logic of accumulation that has been imported wholesale from the surrounding economy and dressed in the aesthetics of indigeneity: how many ceremonies one has sat, how rare and exotic the medicines have been, how distant and difficult the pilgrimages, how many years one can claim to have walked, how many objects of power one has gathered, how many teachers one can name. This medicine resume functions in precisely the way every other accumulation logic in late capitalism functions, as status currency, as social capital denominated in spiritual rather than financial units, and like any status currency it produces a class of people whose primary relationship to the work in question is the maintenance of their position within it rather than the metabolizing of what the work was meant to teach.
This is the first observation that the field cannot afford to internalize, because to internalize it would be to admit that the medicine economy in its present form has reproduced, almost perfectly and at every level, the extractive grammar of the world it claims to be healing from: it rewards rarity over depth, intensity over integration, visibility over service, and it codes the people who cannot or will not keep traveling and keep buying and keep stacking as less serious, less developed, less far along on a path whose markers it has unilaterally defined. The grammar is colonial in the most precise and unromantic sense of the word, which is to say that it organizes value around acquisition and around the display of acquisition, with the surface ornaments of Indigenous traditions used as legitimating décor for what is, structurally, the same accumulative ego project that the larger culture runs everywhere else.
The Inversion
The deeper problem, and the one that takes longer to perceive precisely because the hierarchy itself works to obscure it, is that the hierarchy is inverted: the people positioned at the top of it are very often the ones least integrated into the work they claim to lead, and the people positioned at the bottom or outside the structure entirely are very often the ones whose lives have become the actual practice. This is not a polemical reversal made for rhetorical pleasure but a structural observation about how spiritual accumulation, as a social form, selects for and rewards a particular type of practitioner who must, by the logic of the form itself, remain in a beginner’s relationship to the medicines they are accumulating.
To stack ceremonies at the rate that confers status in these communities, a person has to remain dependent upon the door being opened by something external to them, has to keep pursuing the high state rather than metabolizing what the high state already showed them, and has to keep returning to the threshold rather than walking through it and staying through. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with sitting with medicine and nothing inherently wrong with returning to ceremony, and the traditions that carry this work seriously have rhythms of return built into them at every level of practice; what must be distinguished, however, is return from repetition and pursuit from practice, because the status hierarchy does not reward integration but rewards motion, does not reward arrival but rewards the spectacle of seeking, and consequently has no category whatsoever for the practitioner who came down from the high state on purpose and chose to stay down, in the body, in the ordinary, doing the slow and largely invisible work of becoming useful.
What forms within these communities, then, is a class of people whose authority depends structurally upon their staying in motion: they cannot sit still without a substance opening the channel for them, cannot perceive without something amplifying their perception, cannot teach without props, cannot stand in a room as themselves without the borrowed charge of a recent ceremony or a freshly procured object, and because they have built so much social and economic infrastructure around the performance of authority they must defend that performance, often quite aggressively, against any presence that threatens to expose its underlying emptiness. The presences that threaten to expose it are precisely the ones doing the integrated work: the sober ones, the fasting ones, the ones who have been on the path for years without teachers and without lineage credentials and without indoctrination, simply feeling their bodies and listening to life, the ones who came down on purpose and stayed down. These are the practitioners coded as new, coded as not yet ready, offered chances by people who have no actual standing to extend them, and the coding itself is the tell, because what is being defended in such moments is not the medicine and not the lineage but the position of the one doing the coding.
The chasers gatekeeping the integrators is the inversion at the heart of the healing economy, and it is the single most important pattern to be able to see, because once it becomes legible the politics of these communities rearrange themselves into a clarity that cannot be undone, and many things that previously felt confusing or unjust resolve themselves into a simple structural fact about who has metabolized what.
What Sobriety Actually Is
There is, within the medicine economy, a category of practitioner for whom the economy has almost no functional language, and that is the sober, embodied, daily practitioner, the one who is not anti-medicine, who has very often done significant medicine work earlier on the path, but who at some point chose to come down from the high state on purpose and to stay down, building a practice from the body itself rather than from the next ceremony. In most contemplative traditions on this planet, this turn from the peak experience back into ordinary life is not understood as a regression or a stalling but as the actual attainment toward which the peak experiences were always pointing: the bodhisattva does not remain in nirvana but returns into the body, into the dishes and the relationships and the political conditions of the world, and does the work from there, because the work is the descent and not the ascent, the return and not the departure.
The medicine economy does not know what to do with this person, because the economy is built upon people staying in the chase, and someone who has stopped chasing is, from the economy’s perspective, no longer a customer and no longer a useful node in the status network through which legitimacy is circulated. So the practitioner who has descended and stayed gets quietly demoted, coded as having lost their edge or their seriousness or their commitment to the path, when the truth is the precise opposite: they walked through a door that the chasers are still standing in front of, and they kept walking, and they are now somewhere the surface markers of the economy can no longer track.
Fasting belongs in the same conversation, and is worth naming with some specificity because it is so universally misunderstood inside these scenes. Fasting is one of the oldest perceptual technologies in every Indigenous tradition that has carried this kind of work, used precisely to seal the body as a clean instrument and to open the channels that substance work attempts to force open from the outside; a fasting body in a room of fed and medicated bodies is not a deficient body but the most prepared body present, the one to which the field will speak most directly, the one through which whatever wishes to communicate will find the least interference. The traditions know this and have always known it, but the medicine economy has forgotten it, because the economy depends on substances being the primary mechanism of opening, and a fasting body opening cleanly without substances is a structural threat to that premise and to the entire architecture of authority that has been built upon it.
This is the part that the hubris cannot see, and cannot afford to see, because seeing it would require admitting that the form of work the economy has organized itself around is not the only path to depth and is not even, by the testimony of the traditions themselves, the deepest path, but is rather one path among several, a path with real medicine in it when it is held in right relationship, and a path that becomes the precise opposite of itself when stacked into a status game, with sacred plants reduced to props and sacred objects reduced to power tokens and ceremony itself reduced to a performance of access for the consumption of a paying audience.
The Diagnosis Is in the Behavior
The traditional carriers of these medicines describe each plant as a teacher of particular qualities, and the descriptions are remarkably consistent across lineages and continents: mambe is described as palabra dulce, the sweet word, a plant that organizes the practitioner toward slowness and kindness and careful speech and long listening; ayahuasca is described as a teacher of humility and of the encounter with one’s own shadow before any other shadow may be addressed; tobacco is described as a plant of prayer, of relationship, of offering before asking. Each medicine has, in this sense, a fingerprint, and a person in genuine right relationship with the plant will begin, over time, to look like the plant, to carry its qualities in their body and in their voice and in the way they hold themselves with the people around them, because the plant is doing what the plant does, which is to organize the human toward the qualities it teaches.
This gives us a diagnostic that requires no inside knowledge of any lineage and no credentialed authority to apply, which is simply the question of what the metabolizer is becoming over time: are they getting kinder, are they getting slower, are they getting more careful with their words, are they becoming more permeable to feedback and more able to apologize and more able to be wrong, or are they getting sharper and more controlling and more grandiose and more reactive and more certain of their own authority. The medicine reveals itself in the metabolizer, and if the metabolizer is hardening rather than softening then the medicine is not landing, the relationship to the plant is broken, or there is no relationship at all and only consumption, and no quantity of subsequent ceremonies will repair that fact unless the underlying relationship is repaired first.
A field full of practitioners who have stacked enormous medicine resumes and become harder and more controlling and less kind over the course of that stacking is, by this diagnostic, a field that has lost contact with the medicines it claims to carry; the plants are not the problem and the traditions are not the problem, but the relationship is the problem, and the hierarchy that elevates the hardened to teaching positions is the very structure that protects the broken relationship from being seen, named or addressed.
Who Gets to Decide
The final piece, and perhaps the most difficult to dislodge because it has been built into the architecture of these communities at the level of basic assumption, is the question of who has the authority to decide who is on the path. The medicine economy operates on a transmission model in which authority flows downward, through teachers and lineages and ceremonies into which one has been admitted, and in which the people who occupy positions toward the top of the hierarchy reserve the right to decide who has been let in, who is ready, who is still new, and who is to be quietly excluded. This model presents itself as ancient and as faithful to the traditions, but it is in significant part a recent invention, a structural mimicry of religious bureaucracy that the actual carriers of these traditions, in their home territories, would frequently not recognize as their own.
Every actual lineage on this planet began with someone sitting down and listening, listening to their own body and to the land and to the unseen, without a credential and without a transmission, and the teachers and elders and rituals came afterward as transmission infrastructure rather than as the source itself. The source has always been direct, has always been available to the practitioner willing to undertake the discipline of becoming a clean enough instrument to receive it, and anyone insisting that the source can only be reached through their particular middleman position is, by the very structure of that insistence, demonstrating that they are no longer in contact with what they claim to mediate, because contact with the source produces a humility about its accessibility rather than the proprietary defensiveness that the gatekeeping role requires.
This is why the practitioners who can actually see do not mistake other seers for beginners; the recognition is mutual and immediate, and operates at a level of perception that the social markers of the medicine economy cannot reach. When someone in a position of social authority within these communities codes a long-walking practitioner as new, what is being revealed is not the practitioner’s level but the perceiver’s, because they are reading surface markers (age, vibe, social positioning, accumulated objects, recognized teachers and audible vocabulary) in place of the actual field, and they are reading surface markers because the field itself is no longer legible to them, because their own apparatus has become too cluttered with the things they have handed their authority to. The crones know. The land knows. The animals know. The elders who actually carry the lineages know, and tend to be the quietest people in any room. The hierarchy is loud because it is compensating for what it can no longer perceive.
The Invitation
If you are reading this and you have been on a quiet path for years, without teachers and without elders and without indoctrination, simply feeling your body and listening to life, then you are not behind, you are not new, you are not at the bottom of any hierarchy that matters, and the people positioned above you within the visible structure are very often performing some version of the work you have already done. If you came down from the medicine high on purpose and chose to stay down, in the body and in the ordinary and in the work of becoming useful to the people around you, then you have made the move that the contemplative traditions have always described as the actual attainment, and the economy will not name this for you because the economy needs you to keep doubting yourself, since your settled body, by simply existing in the field, is bad for its business.
If you have been coded as new by people who could not perceive what you actually are, that is information about them and not about you, because people who can see do not mistake seers for beginners, and the miscoding is itself the diagnosis.
The medicine itself is not the problem and the lineages themselves are not the problem; the plants are real, the traditions are real, the work is real, and there are practitioners alive on this planet who are carrying these medicines with the integrity and the discipline and the lineage relationships that the work actually requires. The problem is the hierarchy that has grown up around the medicines in this part of the world, and the hubris that hierarchy produces in the people most invested in maintaining it, and the ways that hubris exiles the very practitioners who are doing the integrated work that the hierarchy claims to value. Naming this is the first move; refusing to keep pretending it is not happening is the second; and the third is the slow steady restoration of standing to the practitioners whose lives have become the actual practice, regardless of whether the visible structure recognizes them or ever will.
The accumulation logic is colonial; the chasers gatekeeping the integrators is the inversion; the sober embodied daily practice is the path the traditions actually pointed at; the bodhisattva returns; the body is the instrument; the land is the witness; and the crones are still showing up to the people who have prepared themselves to receive them. That is the lineage, and it does not need the hierarchy’s permission to continue.