Seeker Syndrome

Published May 12, 2021, 9:55 AM

The dangers of Datura revealed, and a different perspective on what it means to seek… and the cost for those of us who do.

Support India during the pandemic by donating to the organizations listed below that were suggested by Astray producer, Ankita Anand.


Guest Experts:

Suzy Singh ~ Therapist, author and international speaker on karma and consciousness

Alberto Roman ~ Shaman // Contemporary Curandero 

Astray Production Team:

School of Humans // iHeartRadio

Caroline Slaughter ~ Host, Writer, Producer

Ankita Anand ~ Producer

Gabbie Watts ~ Supervising Producer

Tunewelders - Sound Production

Jason Shannon ~ Composer 

Harper Harris ~ Sound Design, Audio Mixer

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

School of Humans. I want to recognize the devastation that India is facing with the pandemic. As a country that has given Astray so much, we're giving back to organizations assisting Indian civilians right now. My co producer in Kita Nand has suggested a few organizations that we've listed in the show notes. Last episode we followed Charlie Marinelli's trip to the Edge of Enlightenment in India, and that was supposed to be the end of Astray until Charlie told me about Datah, a psychoactive nightshade which he thinks might have led to a psychosis. But he only suspects this because he witnessed what he believes were the dangerous effects of data firsthand. It was scary to see her like that. I mean, I was like, what the hell, what is going on here? Charlie is commenting on the American woman in psychosis who he helped, a story we covered in episode eight, but we're bringing it up again because of a possible connection to to Torah. It was August twenty nineteen, a month into a stay in India, when he ran into this woman at a cafe. I could tell immediately that something was off, and I had the manager come over to me. He was like, hey, we got this American woman. She won't leave, like she's just kind of sought refuge in this cafe. She keeps her questing like the music to be turned down, and you know, she was freaked out and she was kind of like looking for a safe, quiet space, which the cafe is not. She was reacting to the music and chatter of the cafe and was visibly disturbed when anyone approached her. To Charlie, she seemed paralyzed, like she couldn't leave the cafe or was too scared too. She had a blank stare in her face. I mean, like I said, I don't even know her name. To Charlie mentioned this woman in episode eight. I asked him to track her down for an interview, but like he says, she couldn't tell me her name. And when I first talked to her, I went over and she wasn't really talking. I just asked her as like, can I sit down. She's kind of like nodded, and I sat down next to her and I just started, you know, talking, Hey, I'm you know, I'm from America too, and you know what's going on? And there wasn't much information that she was giving me. It was just kind of like, I mean, the lights were on, no one was home at the time. Charlie was hanging out with an Austrian guy who'd been living in India for eight years. He had traveled from Austria to India with a terminal cancer diagnosis. Healed himself there and with his passport expired, he just stayed one of the many who followed the grid in India. And I trusted the guy who was very intelligent, knew something about everything type guy just had information, just a lot of information. He said, he's like, it looks like Totra. The Austrian automatically identified this woman's erratic behavior as a reaction to the poisonous and psychoactive nightshade to Torah, and he gave me the whole rundown about like the Yogis will give it to people that that aren't going far enough in their opinion, what does that mean? They're they're not having as as deep of a spiritual experience as they hope. They're not going inwards enough. They're not they're not making progress in their opinion, They're not making it to the next level, and so the satura will be used to take these people to the next level. Precisely the way that I understand it is it's used as like how I would use psilocybin to get to another level, but it's a much more intense psychedelic and is used without people's knowling because it can just be slipped in food tea as well. Charlie managed to get some information out of the woman. She had traveled from Hawaii to India to attend two back to back silent yoga retreats and was participating in a dry fast during the second, which might have set her off. But according to the Austrian, what was going on with this woman didn't look like a response to her conditions or lack of sustenance. Her behavior looked like the effects of something far more dangerous and deadly. Data The nightshade this woman was allegedly altered by as a trumpet shaped flower that blooms in a variety of colors. It can be pure white, purple, a golden yellow. It blossoms in a shrub found in ornamental gardens or growing wild along roadsides in India, and because it's common there, it can result in accidental exposure, though there aren't times its potent toxin is used intentionally. The entire plant is poisonous from the roots to the seeds, though according to an article in the National Library of Medicine, the most concentrated levels of tropain alkaloids are found in the flowers, blooms, and seeds. These tropain alkaloid properties include hyociamine, atropine, and scopolamine, which when used separately with an awareness of dosage, can help aid anything from digestive issues to motion sickness, to Parkinson's to heart problems. But when these three are combined in a toxic trio, they're deadly and can easily lead to psychosis. When I was looking for stories about people who have been dangerously affected by tetaura, I found one reported in Vice about a man in Romania who, after consuming detaura seeds, fell into a deep sleep, but when he woke, he didn't know if he was awake or in a knight. He experienced terrifying hallucinations of monsters chasing him, and like Charlie, he didn't see things as they were. At one point during his episode, he was desperately trying to find his girlfriend and what he thought were train cars but were actually bushes. Eventually he found out that he'd been drugged by some guys who had robbed him. They took everything but left him in a psychotic state. He barely survived. As he said in the article, under the influence of tatora, you can't really tell whether or not you're awake and could easily jump in front of a truck. Tatora can be ingested, smoked, or absorbed topically and something like a lotion, and it can be used against others without their knowledge, which is something Charlie pointed out earlier from what he had heard from the Austrian Tatora's used on yoga or meditation retreats to get people to go deeper, further and hit this edge of enlightenment that, as we've heard, is psychosis. Though I couldn't find someone to talk to in the yoga meditation world with experience around datra, I did speak to a shaman from Costa Rica or a contemporary corndero, which is what Alberto Roman prefers to be called. Alberto is very aware of the potential dangers of data and ayahuasca circles. Ayahuasca is considered the vine of the soul, in some cases the vine of the dead. So most people who drink it, one of the experiences that they will consistently share is a connection communion with something beyond their ordinary awareness that is fulfilling. Deep. Ayahuasca is an Amazonian brew that originated among indigenous communities in South America. As a courandero, Alberto leads people through these ayouasca ceremonies. So when I do a ceremony, I treat everyone there as if they are shamans themselves, because typically in the old days, you know, there was a woman or somebody who would drum and chant and dance and receive some sort of information about what's happening in the habitat, or they would drink a potion and from their dispense wisdom. But now everybody wants to drink. So when I bring people into my circle, I tell them they're self shamanizing, not only for themselves, but for the group. So there's a level of accountability and responsibility that they have to also meet me at. But not all courandero or sammons have a moral compass like Alberto. That's when the torah comes into play. There has been a lot of controversy among people in this horizon around the use of datura because at certain doses it can have benefits, dosage and intension like anything else. Courandets and are not gurus. These are people also in a process of understanding who they are. They can be seduced by the money, by the power, by the status that's being brought to them by different cultures. And so when you mix ayahuasca, which is really you know, two main ingredients of the ayahuasca line and the chatuna leaves, then you have the traditional Ayahuaska experience. Not some people, when they add the tuda, they open up a space where where the participants is a little bit more suggestible to the influence of puddos or pandas who who might have either good intentions. I think that the tuda will will accelerate a process or might use it to suggest to a woman to have sex or to you know, bring more money to themselves. We've always had that in any tradition, you know, there's always there's always people that appropriate the lineage for their own their own gains. So it's not only a problem or a challenge within our communities. It happens in zen you know, you know the West Coast is always full of scandals with the zen Masters that all of a sudden have not dealt with the with their shadow of sexuality and intimacy and get all the boundaries confused. So data it can be very, very dangerous. So you know it's all about dosage. But there's enough of a discussion in the community around it that's proven that there's too many people that are have walked into the tradition without really spending the requisite amount of communion with these things. You know, could you speak to like more of the effects of data when it's used or when it's odd, it's so horrific, so you just kind of go into this dark space. Sometimes you're you're talking about larger doses and you're you're in mobile. Immobile is how Charlie described the American woman at the cafe. He said she was paralyzed, like she couldn't leave the cafe, which is what as soporific like data will do. You can have beautiful visions and you're also more suggestible, so when somebody tells you something or feeds you something information, you're less likely to challenge. This makes me think of Babbage's influence over Charlie. Like it was stated last episode, he was a puppet on a string. So the torah, like any mind altering drug, can be used as a form of control and an abuse of power, which is a dynamic that can easily come into play between a student and teacher or a follower, and they're a leader. Powers the capacity to affect and be affected. There's a positive side to power, which affirms liberates as active, and there's a negative side to power, which typically hinders, hampers, and restricts. So I think the boucles, the dark magicians what they're doing. Ultimately we use that example of power. They're restricting your capacity to be free, to live, to be liberated, to be active, to activate all all your potential. They're keeping that within a certain a certain range for their benefit. Tatora is not only abused in some spiritual ceremonies. In an article published by Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, it's been called roadside poison when it's baked into a cookie or another digestible and offered to unsuspecting devotees attending Hindu festivals like Ali and Shivaratri. The effects of the Tatorah forces people into a suggestible state, which has in some cases resulted in their being robbed or sexually assaulted. Is tata as common a threaten India as it seems, I asked in Kita about this. I have heard of the plant. I've also seen it very commonly growing in the wild. Whenever I see at my first thought is this is a plant which is supposed to be a favorite with Lord Shiva. I regularly see it being offered in Shiva temples, and the second thought, this is poison. According to Hindu religious text, tatorah is believed who have emerged from Lord Shiva's chest after he drank the deadly poison Hallao. This makes sense saying that Shiva is the god of death and destruction because Tatora is associated with Shiva. The plant has regularly offered, but not consumed, at Shiva Ratri, the annual festival honoring Shiva. Now, people drinking bang or what you call bang over there to get a high is very common, But I do not know of anyone personally who has ingested datura, maybe because of how deadly it can get. I was talking to someone who has spent a lot of a life in villages, and she said that some people who like to stay high twenty four seven would use a couple of tatura seeds along with whatever else they're taking for their high. But it is clearly not something people are as casual with as they are with some their natural intoxicans like bang or bang. Do you know anything about a toora being used in these Hindu festivals? Again, no, it's bang or bang that is used in holy but I have not personally seen being used in festivals. I actually read last year this newspaper report that said that around three people in a family got really sick because they put the tura seats in their shoes and they drank it because someone had told them it can cure them of COVID And they got really ill after it, and they were rushed to a hospital and thankfully they were saved. But this is how we hear of the tura when someone tries to bring it into their daily life. I mean, as a child, it was grilled into me that you will see this plant around and just know that this is poison. So when you listen to Charlie's story with Baba Ge, do you think that it could be possible that he would have been drugged with tatorah. From his account, he did seem drugged, not in his usual state. Now, I can't say if it was the tourah that was being used to have some kind of hold over him. Only a medical expert can qualify that. But if there is someone who has been using plants pollingestion regularly and knows that only a certain amount will get deadly and not beyond that, they could have used it. It's definitely a possibility. This is known first as something fatal and then as something that is an intoxicant. So basically, if someone possibly Babaje, had a knowledge of dosage with tatorah, they could use the plant as an intoxicant to affect another person whom they wanted to control, but would have enough awareness of the plant's potency not to kill them. After the break, we'll hear with Charley thinks was he drugged by tatorah or is it something else? Entirely, Charlie Marinelli got something out of his visit to India. He wasn't prepared for a psychotic break. He had never been diagnosed with mental health issues in the past, nor had he taken anything that wouldn't do such a long episode. But to Torah, I mean it can last six months. It can never go away, but it can last six months of psychosis. Charlie, psychosis lasted two months, not six, but it was two months too long. Why do you feel like you might have been slipped to Tora? It just adds up that Taura makes sense because I mean, even being on heavy antipsychotics after the fact, I was still in a psychotic state until I got out of the hospital in Austin, until I really got that dose of lithium for a week. Charlie describes this lithium dose as a chemical lobotomy, and then I started coming out of it, but I was still so confused up until that point, and just thinking that I was controlling a whole lot more in my surroundings than I was. The timeline makes sense. We're wired as humans to connect a cause to an effect, So to say that Charlie psychosis was an effect of to Torah makes his surreal experience makes sense, and knowing this information could prevent us from falling into the same trap. But like the other stories we've covered an astray, this is a gray area. We don't definitively know what triggered Charlie psychosis, just like we don't know what happened to Ryan Chambers, who presumably had a reaction to the anti malarial drug he was prescribed. Or Justin Alexander Schetler, who allegedly trusted a bad Sadu. Or Jonathan Spalen, whose disappearance is surrounded by endless possibilities, or Russell whose body was found but his cause of death remains a mystery. There is no conclusive cause behind the disappearances of these men, but there is one thing we know. India syndrome didn't have anything to do with it. Why isolate India? This is New Delhi based therapist, author, and international speaker on karma and consciousness Susie Singh, who I spoke to about black magic in the last episode as a listener of AUSTRAI. Singh has insightful thoughts on issues that have been raised in the podcast, which he shared in an interview within Keyta and Me. What about the praise for shamanism in Peru and the Iowa's tourism in South America? There have been reports of people who died after consuming the hellucygenet teach a plant. So perhaps the term should be Sika syndrome, not India syndrome. When Singh redefined India syndrome as seeker syndrome, it's so clearly articulated what I've been examining the podcast, what it means to be a seeker and how far one is willing to take that quest for enlightenment. But it also shed light on my own compulsion to seek. As seekers, we look outside ourselves for answers, which can lead to profound experiences, and as we've witnessed, can also lead to dangerous ones. But what if the answers we're seeking aren't outside of us at all? So how do you advise people to trust themselves more as opposed to looking outside of themselves for answers. So the first principle in the search is to know yourself. People think that they know their mind, but that is one of the hardest things to do. One needs to start by observing your thoughts, yourself talk, your constant judgment about people and things, your beliefs, behaviors, triggers, hot buttons, likes and dislikes, so mechanisms and fears, and practice with this regularly so that you can understand what is making you suffer, because what we are really striving to do is to give up the suffrag. The second principle is to own responsibility for finding your own truth, whether it's enlightenment, whether it's healing. We cannot expect that to be done by a second or third person. You must make it your own responsibility to find your troop or to find your healing, because that's the only way that will motivate you to work upon yourself. And the third principle is never give your power away. Learn to question things, and a true teacher will always take the trouble to explain it to you. A false teacher will subject you to authority and demand your trust. Trust, however, even by a teacher, must be earned. When it's given without truth, What the other is doing is taking your power away. They are taking away your power to think, to discern, to say no, to walk away. To protect yourself, never trust anyone blindly, do your checks on the person who wish to follow. Always follow and trust your own intuition because you do have what I call an inner guide, and that guide awakened you to your own quest. How can you not listen to your own inner guide. For women especially, I would say never meet baba's alone. The funny thing is women know this, and yet they continue to do it, you know, regardless of what claims these babas make about healing you. And this applies for people who are highly respected in society. It applies to people that your family may no one trust very deeply. I've had many incidents myself where I have been asked to sort of meet in private, and I have always said no. So it's very important that we do not fall into this trap because we have to understand there's a whole spin off industry related to spiritual healing, so we should not walk into any movie traps yet. Seeing also mentions being weary of taking food or drink from spiritual teachers, especially if you've just met them, or being initiated, and to any spiritual practice you don't have awareness or understanding of when we are really yearning for enlightenment over some answers of the spiritual response. We are very suggestible and we get very excited, like little children in a toy shop when we find someone who seems to know more than we do, or who promises us more than we can imagine, but be patient because nothing is going to accelerate your growth like your own spiritual practice. So trust in your own practice more than trusting in some third person to come and make it happen to you. When Singh was fifteen living in jaiper a baba appeared outside the gate of her home. He was wearing a string of holy basil beads around his neck, which he removed and with no words exchanged, handed a sing through the bars of the gate. She immediately put the beads on, and when she looked up, he had vanished. This exchange activated something and saying, she started hiding in the quiet of the house's storeroom so she could meditate, something she'd never done before, but she now knew advanced meditative techniques after the brief interaction with the unnamed baba. Because of this, the baba ended up becoming one of her greatest teachers. In all cases, in mind, I've had the teachers appear for me, come to me, and I have always told mine and tees, test your teacher before you thrust your life innocently into their hands, and never give you a power of discernment away to another. This is a mistake a lot of people make where they will blindly say, let the teacher decide for me what I should do, and they call it faith. Like Sidhartha says, your first requirement on the path is the ability to think. Sidhartha, a character in Hermann has his nineteen twenty two books by the same name, is on his own spiritual journey to self discovery, which unfolds in the book, and he says that on this spiritual path, the number one requirement is one's ability to think. That is something that they must never give away, because then you will not see harm coming, you will not listen to your intuition. A lot of the times we find that there are people who are in very authoritative positions in large organizations, and they're very well presented, and they speak very eloquently. The greatest guru speak very little, but their words ring with truth. There is one word these gurus are familiar with, and we've used it a lot in Astray, and that's enlightenment. After the break Seeing clarifies this term. But first she asks a simple question, why are you seeking enlightened? Why do you want that enlightenment? As a seeker herself saying, as a firsthand relationship to the quest for enlightenment, and she survived two near death experiences on this journey, which enabled her to have an even clearer understanding of what it all means. Most people seek enlightenment to escape their suffering. This is one of the key reasons why they fall victim to false gurus and meet with dangerous consequences. People want instant hirana. Everything today is I want to know over the counter kind of just a drug. Just give me a pill that will make me feel peaceful, that will make me feel instantly better. But that's addiction. That is not enlightenment. That is not spirituality. Spirituality is about doing the work, and it's called work for a reason. It's called work because it feels like work. The work is the hard stuff, the issues we avoid that keep us up at night or have haunted us our entire lives, throwing us into the same patterns we relive until we're too damned tired too. Only then are we ready to do the work, asking for help, going to therapy, joining recovery group, finding spiritual guidance through a vetted teacher. This is about sitting with our shadow, the dark stuff we don't want to look at, but finding awareness and understanding around it. That's the work from someone who's a practitioner. Her stuff, i can tell you, is terrifying. It's hard struggle about struggling against yourself. It's about battling your own bad habits, your own tendencies, about not getting provoked. It's about someone insulting me to my face and me wanting to react sharply and yet trying to hold on to my center and my piece in that moment when you're triggered. It's very, very hard to do that. But that is the practice, and that is the struggle. So it's not comfortable and beautiful. It's extremely uncomfortable, and like I said, it's a continuous battle. So what thing is saying is that enlightenment is not a quick fact, nor is it a destination. Enlightenment is a gradual process of purifying one's consciousness. It unfolds through intense in a work, quite like water coming to a boil, and once the boiling point is reached, the transformation occurs. A teacher can only guide you, but the inner work of transforming harmful habits, resisting damaging tendencies, creation of virtue's building of capacities, intensification of your aspiration, dissolving the equal mind. All these have to be done by the seeker himself. So if someone is promising you enlightenment, we want that, it is deception. In nineteen eighty six, when I was training under Shishu Rashankar Shui Shri Ravishankar was one of Thingh's earliest spiritual teachers. He said to me, Susie, I can open the window and point you to the move, but I cannot get you there. You will have to make that journey yourself. So enlightenment is a process and one the seeker has to be their own guide. For Akita, would you still consider yourself a seeker after doing a dry Yeah, definitely, I remain a seeker or even after doing this podcast. Our hectic life today does not allow the in build time, space and encouragement for someone to sit, contemplate, introspect, meditate, or take a mental health break. And that's why seeking becomes such a thing. Our mental and emotional health needs get postponed and suppressed to such a point that they feel the need to drop everything and desperately look for answers outside. If anything, this podcast has reinforced to me that seeking, questioning, openness of mind, curiosity, and understanding new things need to be on our everyday to do list, not just on our bucket list. As always in Ket's response is thoughtful answer sinct, but this question wasn't as easy for me to answer. In reliving Charlie's story with him and speaking to others who've experienced similar psychotic episodes in India and other countries, I've observed something about all of them. These see do not view their psychotic breaks as being solely harmful or scary. One person I spoke to, who wanted to remain anonymous, said her psychotic episode didn't happen to her. It happened for her. It's given her a deeper awareness of herself and the world around her, and in doing so, it was empowering. Charlie has said the same thing. I know this is a skewed way of viewing an experience that most of us would consider terrifying, but it makes me think of Plato's allegory of the cave. In the allegory, prisoners who have been confined to a cave from birth are chained facing a blank wall. There is a fire behind them, and when an object passes in front of the fire, these prisoners classify the object's shadow, perceiving the shadow as an actual entity, so the shadows are the prisoner's truth. One of the prisoners is set free. He's let out of the cave into the sunshine, which initially blinds him. He slowly adjusts to the light. He's told the objects around him, trees, birds, people are real, while the shadows in the cave are an illusion, just a reflection of the truth. Excited, the freeman returns to the cave to tell the prisoners about what he's learned. When he enters the cave, his eyes don't adjust to the darkness, so he can't see the shadows the prisoners are still identifying as real. When the freeman tells the prisoners what he's discovered outside the cave, they're hostile and resist his trying to free them, so this newly awakened man leaves the cave free but alone. Plato's allegory shows that like these prisoners, most people are satisfied staying in their comfort zone and can be resistant or reject anyone who points us out, sees things differently, or just wants to escape. The Cave, Charlie relates to this, I have to say that probably the biggest cost for me that I think I'm still struggling with is being discredited by my family and being kind of treated as I guess lesser comes to mind treated how people with mental illness in America are treated. It makes you wonder to such a deep level of what your reality is to you and why other people won't accept this reality and go farther than not accepting it but ostracize cue for it. Though Charlie's dad, having traveled through India with similar intentions to Charlie, is more aware of what he's going through, it's been harder on the rest of his family, who are understandably concerned about Charlie slipping back into psychosis. But if we look at the freeman who escapes the Cave as someone like Charlie who's awakened to a new reality that others might not understand and or want to understand, a reality that can be isolating but also liberating, then I think the answer to the question we've been examining is the cost of enlightenment may be enlightenment itself, but I guess that's ultimately a question for you to answer, and Keita's suggested organizations aiding civilians with the pandemic in India are listed in the show notes. Thanks for your support. Astray is a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio. Today's episode of Astray, Seeker Syndrome, was produced, written, and narrated by Me, Caroline Slaughter and keitaand is my co producer and Gavi Watts as our supervising producer. Astray was sound produced by Tune Welders, with score and sound design by Jason Shannon and mix by Harper Harris. Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, and Elsie Crawley. Thanks for listening, School of Humans.

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