How Tribal Memory, Sacred Healing, and Medicine DAOs Could Reweave What Civilization Forgot
1. When Science Becomes Servitude
I used to believe that working in a European research lab meant freedom, the freedom of science to explore, to innovate, to push the boundaries of human knowledge. But I quickly discovered that even curiosity must submit to funding priorities. Grants were often awarded not based on vision, but on alignment with the interests of major corporations, which controlled the funds of the European Community.
When I proposed a study to my boss on the effects of marijuana on brain–computer interfaces—at the frontier of neuroscience and altered states—the answer was polite, but clear: no funding available. Not because the science was weak, but because the topic fell outside the sphere of what mattered to the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital where I was working, and the Ministry of Health.
Even the academic world around me felt quietly transactional. Conference submissions required high fees. Publishing in respected journals often depended more on institutional affiliations than merit. There was brilliance, yes, sure, but there were also gatekeepers. And a growing sense that science, as I had imagined it when I was a child, was no longer a free field of exploration, but a system increasingly shaped by hierarchy and economics.
So I left.
I went to China, not to escape, but to breathe. What began as a sabbatical year slowly turned into something much longer. And there, in the mountains of Yunnan, something unexpected happened: spirituality entered my life. I found myself surrounded by a group of foreigners: artists, hackers, and meditators, each on their own journey.
Then something truly unforeseen emerged. In science, we call it an emergent property—when the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts, when the result is unpredictable, greater than the input. That’s how RiShi Labs was born—the Laboratory of the Eclipse: a self-organized, boundaryless creative commune.
We were inspired, not by books or theories, but by what we felt in the everyday rhythms of Chinese life. One concept stood out: guanxi—the subtle, living network of relationships that flows beneath society. And another phrase we heard often: “double happiness” (双喜): your happiness makes me happy, so joy is multiplied when shared.
This was the hidden virus of China, not control, but a kind of millenarian relational wisdom. We caught it. It changed us. We stopped organizing around individual goals and began living through shared ones. Art, music, healing, food, silence, celebration, it all flowed through relationship, not roles.
RiShi Labs was born of this contagion, not as a project, but as a pulse. No bosses. No plan. No product. Just a network of people infected by the quiet, ancient intelligence of a civilization that had survived collapse more than once, not by force, but by flexibility, harmony, and flow.
2. Tribes Were the First DAOs
At RiShi Labs, decisions were made by consensus. No one was above the group. Resources were shared. Healing happened in relationship. If someone was struggling, others stepped in, not out of obligation, but out of recognition: your well-being is part of mine.
It echoed what I would later experience among the Huni Kuin in Brazil and in the forests of Peru: an older form of intelligence, not based on dominance but on distributed presence. Elders offered guidance, not control. Ceremonies were collective, not transactional. There was no brand, no profit motive, only reciprocity, rhythm, and story.
In Civilized to Death, Christopher Ryan shows how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in egalitarian, mutually sustaining bands for 95% of human history. These were not primitive societies, but actually they were highly functional, emotionally sane, relationally rich.
Daniel Pinchbeck, in How Soon Is Now, takes this further, arguing that our only path forward lies in remembering what we’ve buried: tribal coherence, ecological intimacy, sacred time. What we need is not reinvention. It is re-indigenization.
And strangely, the DAO—the Decentralized Autonomous Organization—might be one of the tools to help us get there.
3. Decentralized Since the Beginning: Tribal Roots of the DAO
Long before smart contracts and governance tokens, tribes practiced what we now call decentralization. Power was earned, not imposed. Value was shared, not hoarded. Identity was collective, not branded.
Among the Zapatista-inspired communities I visited in Chiapas, there was no money. No top-down rules. Decisions were made in horizontal assemblies. Labor was exchanged through trust. Food, care, stories, and healing circulated through mutual obligation, not profit.
DAOs today attempt to mirror these dynamics in code. They promise flat governance, token-based value distribution, and collective stewardship. But what we code now in blockchain, our ancestors already lived through ritual, myth, and land-based community.
To say DAOs are the future is misleading. They are, in their most sacred form, a return.
4. What Is a DAO? (And Why Should You Care?)
Before we go further, let’s pause.
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Sounds futuristic, maybe even a little robotic. But the concept is ancient, older than banks, governments, or even alphabets.
A DAO is a system where rules are not enforced by bosses or buildings, but by code and community. Decisions are made collectively. Resources are managed transparently. Power is distributed, not concentrated.
Think of it like this:
If a traditional organization is a pyramid, with power at the top, a DAO is a circle, where every voice, every vote, matters.
In technical terms, a DAO is built using blockchain technology. This means the rules and financial flows are encoded in “smart contracts”: public, tamper-proof agreements that anyone can verify. No middlemen. No secret boardrooms. Just people, purpose, and protocol.
But here’s the important part:
A DAO is not just tech. It’s trust.
It only works if the people in it show up with integrity. The code provides structure, but the spirit has to come from us.
So when we talk about a Medicine DAO, we’re talking about a new way to hold sacred work. A way to organize healing not through hierarchy or branding—but through shared responsibility, collective vision, and accountability to the values we claim to serve.
Not a new religion. Not another guru cult. Just a circle.
Like the fire. Like the tribe. Like the forest.
5. The Medicine DAO: A Mycelial Network for the Sacred
Imagine a network of healing centers, not franchises, not brands, but living communities, each deeply rooted in the land they inhabit and the traditions they honor. One in the Amazon. One in the Andes. One in Mexico. One in Gabon. All different. All autonomous. Yet all connected.
Each center is guided by the ancestral medicines and cultural memory of its place: ayahuasca, iboga, huachuma, mushrooms, Chinese herbs, sweat lodges, songs. But not as frozen heritage. Rather, as living traditions, capable of evolving through respectful dialogue with modern knowledge: trauma therapy, breathwork, neuroscience, and qigong.
Not fusion. Not appropriation. Evolution. Like DNA recombining to face a changing world.
The DAO is the nervous system connecting these nodes. It allows centers to share resources, coordinate support, and remain accountable, not to donors, but to each other and to the sacred. It provides a non-corporate framework for value to move between centers, elders, and seekers. It is a container, not for scaling, but for spreading with integrity.
At Paojilhuasca, we’ve already walked this path: ceremonies rooted in the Amazonian tradition, integrated with bodywork, Chinese medicine, qigong, and deep, slow integration. We don’t mass-produce healing. We protect it. We make it relational again.
The Medicine DAO is a way to protect that spirit across geography and generations.
6. Shadow Warning: Don’t Code the Same Empire Twice
But let’s not be naïve. Power always finds its way into the system, especially when wrapped in good intentions. If DAOs forget their tribal roots, they risk repeating the same patterns they were meant to disrupt.
If we tokenize the sacred without embodying its values, if we reduce healing to content, to metrics, to branded “medicine experiences”, we haven’t built a new future. We’ve just given the empire a new mask.
The DAO must be more than a tool. It must be a ritual in itself. A structure that demands participation, presence, humility, and care.
Otherwise, we will simply rebuild the same hierarchies on chains—and the forest will look at us and sigh.
7. Conclusion: A Return, Not an Escape
I left the laboratory not because I hated science but because I loved it too much to watch it decay. I left the system that paid me because I could no longer afford the cost of my own silence. I went to the jungle thinking I was escaping. But what I found was a return.
A return to curiosity without permission. To community without hierarchy. To healing that lives in the body, not the brand.
Now I stand between worlds. I still believe in technology, but only when it remembers the soil. I still believe in progress, but only if it spirals. And I believe we can build systems that protect what is sacred, if we root them in what has always made us human: reciprocity, presence, and story.
The Medicine DAO is not the answer. But it may be a vessel, to carry the fire forward without extinguishing its soul.