Perspective and Motivation
The current context of the psychedelic ecosystem presents a unique opportunity to foster the emergence of ethical psychedelic cultures that enable broad and responsible access in the future. This entails several key imperatives. First, there is a recognized need to establish and defend ethical spaces for the exchange and generation of knowledge and information among diverse actors in the field of psychedelics. This priority constitutes not only a moral imperative but also an essential strategy for sustaining public support and that of policymakers.
A second fundamental ethical dimension in the evolution of this field lies in the preservation of indigenous traditions of plant medicine and in ensuring ongoing access to healing through these practices for indigenous communities. The growing public interest in psychedelics is exacerbating cultural and ecological harms to these traditions.
Beyond the moral obligation to support the communities that have safeguarded much of the existing knowledge about psychedelics, future opportunities for learning about effective, healthy, and ethical practices surrounding the use of natural medicines for personal development and self-knowledge are being placed at risk. Epistemological extractivism—characteristic of orthodox specialization in science and industry—fails to encompass the full potential suggested by ancestral traditions.
From an initial, non-exhaustive perspective, a minimal set of necessary considerations is proposed to incorporate these imperatives and initiate a collective process of knowledge construction.
1. Epistemological Shift: From Knowledge About the World to Knowledge With the World
Heidegger argues that modern epistemology has conceptualized knowledge as an act of separation: a observing subject and an observed object. This model has produced an instrumental understanding of nature and a notion of truth based on correspondence between mind and reality.
The resurgence of interest in entheogens challenges this logic. These experiences reveal non-dualistic modes of knowing in which subject and world interpenetrate. Instead of an epistemology of distance, what emerges is an epistemology of relation: knowing implies being affected and undergoing transformation in the experience of the other. In this regard, both the elder amawta of Tiwanaku and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger offer relevant perspectives; the latter asserts that there is no manifestation without an observer.
In the Aymara tradition, this principle is expressed as ayni: reciprocity as the foundation of every ontological relation. Knowledge is not possessed; it is cultivated in the bond. From this viewpoint, entheogens are not mere objects of study but ontological interlocutors—entities endowed with agency, memory, and will.
2. Phenomenology and Expanded Consciousness
Contemporary phenomenology, particularly from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, emphasizes that consciousness does not reside “within” the subject but constitutes the field in which the world manifests itself. In dialogue with this tradition, the entheogenic experience can be interpreted as a radical phenomenological expansion in which the categories sustaining the separation between body, mind, and nature dissolve.
The dissolution of the ego—a frequent phenomenon in entheogenic states—does not amount to a loss of identity but rather provides access to a relational mode of existence, where the self recognizes itself as a node within a network of interdependencies.
In Aymara philosophy, this notion finds its counterpart in the Andean concept of ch’ixi, proposed by anthropologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: the coexistence of heterogeneous elements without any one annulling the other. Entheogenic consciousness, or entheogenic knowledge, is projected as a ch’ixi experience of the real: a plurality of presences and forms of knowledge that intertwine without merging.
3. Relational Ontology for an Epistemology of the Sacred
Ancestral animist thought does not draw a sharp distinction between matter and spirit. Every being—mineral, vegetal, human, or cosmic—is animated by a vital energy that, in Aymara culture, is called ajayu.
This principle also permeates the act of knowing. Within this framework, research, understanding, and art represent ways of restoring the balance of ajayu across the entire space-time continuum of the cosmos.
From contemporary philosophy, this vision converges with the postulates of posthumanism, which recognizes the agency of matter and the distributed intelligence of nature. In this sense, the use of sacred plants is understood as systems of symbolic, biological, and spiritual interaction—technologies of the sacred—that enable human beings to relearn their belonging to a living web of meanings.
4. Toward a Reciprocal Ethics of Knowledge and Care
The purpose of the Ser Ajayu Hub is not to translate the ancestral into scientific language but to articulate a plural epistemological framework in which different knowledges coexist without hierarchies.
This demands an ethics of learning in which every act of knowing is simultaneously an act of care: a symbolic, biological, and spiritual interrelation in which all agents mutually construct and protect one another.
