Dr. Jacques Mabit works at Taki Wasi, treatment center that embraces medicinal plants to help visitors overcome serious addictions. This is an exploration into why this is a spiritual path that deeply resonates with me.
Why it took me until I got older to start embracing aspects of Christianity on my spiritual path
For many of those involved in entheogenic movement, any spiritual tradition is good to play with in order to find our way for what works uniquely for our individual path. At the same time, it’s easy to feel a heavy burden from our own culture and life, where religious traditions often rigidly proclaim for us what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
When I thought about experience approaching spirituality, it was often connected with captivating rhythm of Rastafarian drums in camps of Jamaica, trance practices of Sufis in Pakistan or Ethiopia, Or it might have even even been Orthodox choirs ( when I was able to out aside probably even bigger social conservatism and obscurantism of Orthodox priests I met in my path. )
But Catholic tradition to me was just boring, out of tune moaning of my local priests, Sunday mass of my childhood when all we did was counting time left until we were free to play again. For me, it felt like there was all fire and brimstone, with very little love. Neither in life attitudes, nor in aesthetic experience I could find anything but Hammurabi’s style laws, repression and boredom.
I couldn’t overcome barrier of aesthetics and symbolism, impossible to erase intellectual knowledge of 2000 years of hypocrisy of the institution and feeling that lack of love or actual experience is being compensated by excessive rigidness and moral preaching.
A Christian priest who works with medicinal plants? I had to visit him and find out for myself
So awhile back, I saw something like light in the tunnel when I met a man by th ename of Dr. Jacques Mabit, who works at Taki Wasi, a treatment center for addiction that works with medicinal plants. In my opinion it is by combining discipline of the tradition with practical skill acquired in years of rehearsal, not theoretical or theological excercises, but actual experience, that dr Jacques Mabit can be one of few I was able to meet who are reviving mystical path grounded in Christian roots.
In my opinion, we need to experience Truth for ourselves, not through the authority of somebody else. This is why Dr Mabit’s path resonates with me.
This is a path where the experience of divine can be actually participated in, and not read about in tales of events 2000 years ago during weekly intellectual ritual. I am saying this as personal opinion, he may consider it heresy, but after all I am not bound by any institutional connection, so can afford to be heretic.
I was more affected by philosophy of Beshara, more closer to anarchic Qalandars then sober men of shariah, dancing with the Sufis never made me think that mosque is better than an open meadow, and so here as well I believe that being inside their well choreographed transformative ritual and listening to superfast, creative and captivating Catholic prayers and icaros of dr Mabit is as close as I can get for now to Christian experience of divine, without likelihood of you seeing me on next Sunday mass.
But for someone who always rather preferred incomprehensible Shipibo songs, not be forced to listen to mestizo “Jesus Christo curandero,” that is a lot already, and I think it is great portal back into Christianity for many like me.
Dear men of the Book, don’t follow bad example of your radical Muslim peers who are bombing Sufi shrines, and try to understand the work of this man. People like him can be great bait in your fisherman’s work, or to put in other words, great salesmen in the age of global supermarket of traditions.
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Cover photo: Tata Mundo
