Peter Gorman has been places. He’s been inside, outside, upside, downside, this side, that side, and the other side. In the words of Dennis McKenna; Peter Gorman has “been way, way beyond the chrysanthemum on many a dark jungle night.” And that’s putting it mildly.

His new book Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming, is brewed with an enchanting lucidity. To read it is to drink down a story, a whirlwind, a wild fire of spirits and curanderos, pirates and teachers, frogs and vines, snakes and shamanism, plants and visions woven across the arc of a quarter century’s worth of heavyweight Amazonian, Texan and New York City adventures.

Written with the total recall of an expert investigative journalist, prepared with the special flair and flavors of a Master Chef, the book is spun lavishly, elegantly. Reading the book places you deep in the forest, late at night, around a small campfire, listening to a savvy bard recount terrifying ghost stories. Stories you might only barely admit to believing. Thing is, these stories, and the storyteller, are realer than real. Furthermore, the ghosts in these stories appear to you in sharp focus, they surround, they approach, touch, terrify, cajole and, they are ones holding lights up to their faces.

Ayahuasca in My Blood articulates very clearly Gorman’s relationship with the realms of the “way, way beyond”. It must be said, however, that Peter has also been, and remains, very down-to-earth.

The heart of the book concerns Peter’s extraordinary experiences with ayahuasca. However, his struggles with his family, his work, his truck, his ranch in Texas, his life in NYC and his old bar in Iquitos all play major roles in an intense narrative that manages to include magnificent, informal biographies of three of his most important and respected teachers; Moises Torres Vienna, an ex-military man who first takes Gorman out into the deep green, imparting lessons in survival; Pablo, the powerful Matses headman who introduced Peter to sapo—the now legendary frog venom medicine; and of course the story of the humble and potent curandero, Don Julio Jerena.

Ayahuasca books are bursting forth like wildflowers, yet rare is it to find one’s self SCUBA diving through the veins of someone who’s traversed this terrain as long, deep and freaky as Gorman has.

Try as I might to avoid presumptions, or pull cliches, it must be said that Ayahuasca in My Blood is destined to become a classic. In fact it’s already there. More than that, it’s a valuable reflection on the nature of shamanism, a reflection that has not, to my knowledge, ever been illuminated in such a visceral way.

If one considers the spectrum of related literature—take for example William S. Burroughs’ The Yajé Letters, Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations, Wade Davis’ One River, Jimmy Weiskopf’s Yajé: The New Purgatory, or Steve Beyer’s Singing to the Plants—Peter Gorman’s Ayahuasca in My Blood weighs in amongst these giants and, in many ways, ties them all together.

Like Gorman, William S. Burroughs stumbled into the role of being a precedent setting, right-place-at-the-right-time gringo drawn to the jungle and its medicines long before most of the world even caught a whisper of anything to do with ayahuasca. Terence McKenna went very, very deep and utterly lived (and loved) to tell the tale, however tall and unlikely it may have seemed to be. Wade Davis, the gifted writer and explorer, wove together a story of the jungle, plants, and his friends and mentors Richard Evans Schultes and Tim Plowman. Jimmy Weiskopf courageously detailed his own hell, transformation and learning, and Steve Beyer simply laid it all out in one fell swoop.

Ayahuasca in My Blood is a mix of all of the above. What distinguishes the book is in part due to Gorman’s style as a writer, he’s most certainly and abundantly endowed with the Irish gift of gab, and a memory of unparalleled clarity. However, perhaps more importantly, is in how this book casts, with tremendous verve, the doors of perception wide open, busting them off their hinges, sending them flying into the deepest void you care to imagine, where a great wind sweeps you clean off your feet, rockets you head over heels into a whole other ballgame, brings you back to reality, momentarily, then threatens you, teases you, provokes, challenges and simply never lets up until you find yourself dropped, like some kind of jungle-fied Dorothy, breathless, in the eye of a poltergeist tornado, with a snake in your stomach and bills to pay.

There are very few people alive who have 25 or more years experience with ayahuasca, most of them are the old mestizo and indigenous shamans of South America. Rarer still are those among this experienced group who are willing and able to write about their experiences. Peter Gorman, in opening his heart, his life and his talents, shares a masterwork in this respect; a tremendously earthy, rich, poetic, way-out and honestly magical artifact, gathered from the deepest of depths.

MORGAN MAHER: What first brought you to the Amazon jungle?

PETER GORMAN: I always loved travelling. Starting in high school I began to hitchhike, eventually crossing the U.S. several times and logging about 50,000 miles on my thumb. Feeling like I’d seen a good deal of the U.S., I headed out to Europe and then on to Mexico for a few months.

In Mexico I fell in love with the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. I’d have gone back but the woman I lived with bought me a book on my return called Headhunters of the Amazon, by a fellow named Up de Graf. I think it was published in 1923, but it dealt with his time in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon from about 1896-1906 or something like that. Large sections of the book took place on the Yavari River, the border between Brazil and Peru. He painted it as a wild place, a no man’s land. So I decided to go see that river.

The nearest jumping off point was Iquitos, Peru, and so that’s where I went in 1984 with a couple of pals. I returned in 1985 to do a month of jungle survival training with a fantastic guide and teacher, Moises Torres Vienna.

I didn’t get to the Yavari right away, but did get there in 1986, and in 1988 spent some weeks there. A couple of years later I was able to secure my own boat and run the length of that river. It was as wild when I reached it as it sounded like it was for Up de Graf.

Much of the book, and your experiences in the jungle, is inspired and connected to your friend and teacher Don Julio Jerena. Could you tell us about Julio?

Julio…hmmm. Well, he was the local curandero—healer—on the Aucayacu River, about 212 km south of Iquitos, not far from the river town of Genero Herrera. I first met him in 1985, when Moises took me out that way. He was small, strong, handsome. He had a bright smile and ears that were too big for his head. But he had a light in his eyes that I’d rarely seen. He was impish, full of fun, and an amazing healer. He was also the father of a pretty huge brood: I know nine of his children—the youngest born when he was 70—and I’m told there are a few I’ve never met.

In real life, he supported his family with his military pension, which was several hundred dollars a month because he’d been in action in two wars as a young man, and as a fisherman. He was the simplest of men. He loved living on his little river, loved his small fields of yuca and sugarcane, corn and plantains. He loved his boiled fish and plantains. He loved to laugh. He was elegantly humble.

But he was also a man of immense power. When he walked in the jungle he didn’t slash at the underbrush, he sort of waved at it with his machete as though the suggestion that the vines part was enough to get the vines to part. And most of the time it almost seemed as that were true. He healed with a wonderful touch, using ayahuasca to connect with the spirits—the sentient side—of the plants he’d need to utilize to heal a wide variety of ailments. Over the years I saw him work on snakebites, sick children, cancer patients (that one was one of my guests, and she got several more years than she thought she would), fungal infections, parasites—a host of things a lot of medical doctors would have a tough time healing. And he loved doing that.

What lessons did he impart upon you?

How to laugh when kids are driving you up the wall. How to apply patience to jobs to get the work done. To realize that the spirit of ayahuasca and the spirits of the other plants, and the guardian spirits are the doctors and that if we’re lucky enough to get the chance to heal someone sometimes to never believe that we are the doctors. To understand that this world, this universe and the other realities are all connected and that we have the ability to connect with it all.

What lessons, or what kinds of lessons, have the plants taught, or continue to teach you?

That’s not easy to answer. I am just whoever I am. I’m a dad, a journalist, a guy trying to put good healthy food on the table. Someone who has cats and dogs and chickens and ducks and birds and a goat and who tries to remember to feed them all before I feed myself.

Would I be who I am if I’d never gone to the Amazon? If I’d never had ayahuasca? I don’t know. I would still be me, but I’d be a different me. But what part of that can I compartmentalize to say “Oh, that’s the ayahuasca?” versus just plain “Oh, that’s the experience of living, of raising kids” or whatnot?

A great deal of the work that ayahuasca and other plants have done on me, I think, relates to my heart. To the ability to love freely, knowing there’s no shortage of what you can give. To forgive freely, knowing that holding the anger or pain is only going to make you sick and will do no one any good.

I think I also understand the first inkling of healing others. Not that that’s something I can do, like a trick. But when my mother-in-law was dying, the plants let me put my hands on her back and absorb the heat her body was putting out. They allowed me to take it and eliminate it so that she could sleep. It blistered my hands but gave her rest.

There’s really a great deal of learning that’s gone on. It’s the compartmentalizing that’s difficult to do. In other words, I think I’m a better person than I might have otherwise turned out, but when I look in the mirror I see that I’m still full of flaws.

An important person in your life, and in the book, is your jungle teacher Moises Torres Vienna. Could you tell us about Moises.

Like Julio, Moises was one of three extraordinary teachers I have had as an adult. Four if you include my ex, who taught me an immense amount about the jungle she grew up in. But the three were different. I met Moises with my two pals on my first trip to Peru. We’d seen Cuzco and Machu Picchu and hiked in the Cordillera Blanca near Huaraz and had finally gotten down to the jungle in Iquitos, where I was instantly at home. On our first day there, Moises, a ruggedly handsome former trainer of jungle forces for both the Peruvian and American military, was by then retired and a guide. He approached my friends and I on the street in Iquitos and asked if we wanted a guide.

I was so tired of people saying they were guides by that time that I blew him off. I told my friends we should just catch a big riverboat somewhere and we’d wind up in a jungle town and find a real guide there, rather than use this smarmy little guy.

So we did. We took a boat that took us to a little town—at that time—called Requena on the Ucayali River, headwater for the Amazon. It was a fascinating place. But difficult for gringos, which it didn’t get many of. For a hotel we had to take a place where wood partitions ran halfway up the wall and were topped by wire mesh. The guy downstairs kept a burro that brayed all day and night. We were followed by maybe 100 people everywhere we went—which was up and down the single street of the place. No one could change US money, and nobody had food prepared in restaurants. When you came in and ordered, they went out to try to buy a chicken for your meal.

And nobody would take us into the jungle. They were all afraid of ghosts, Indians and jaguars. People went out as far as their chacras, fields, maybe 1000 yards behind the main street but that was pretty much it. Nobody we met in the nine days we spent there would even consider stepping into the canopy behind the last field.

We spent the nine days in that crazy little place—which has grown up a great deal in the last 26 years—because the water was low that time of year and no riverboats coming from further up the river at Pucallpa could navigate. A couple of days of rain raised the river sufficiently though, and just about the time we were acclimating to Requena, we were out of Peruvian money and had to return to Iquitos.

Shortly after we returned to our little hotel—I always took a single room so that I could make trip notes—there was a knock on the door of Larry and Chuck’s room. It was Moises. The guys got me and Moises asked how things had gone. I told him they’d gone great. He laughed. He said he knew we hadn’t gone to the jungle because nobody in Requena went to the jungle. They were all too afraid. But he would take us to the jungle if we liked. Full jungle was how he put it. Then he added the word “ayahuasca?” which none of us had ever heard of. He explained it was an hallucinogen that was a powerful traditional medicine. We could try it during our time in the full jungle if we liked.

We said okay, negotiated a price and then just as we were finished, he looked at my feet and said, “you can’t come. No boots, no jungle. Spine trees on the jungle floor.”

That was a new take. A Peruvian guide turning down a gringo’s money?

Then he laughed. “Don’t worry. I have a pair of boots that will fit you.”

When he returned that evening with a pair of size 10 leather workboots, I was sold.

Over the years we became great friends. He’d take me out on long hikes, teach me jungle survival—like what vines to drink from and which would kill you—how to figure out if a food was good to eat or poisonous, how to build shelters, set traps, avoid snakes or kill them if you had to, brought me to the Matses, helped me put together my first boat for a 30 day trip on the Yavari. He was patient with a lousy student, made certain his lessons were well learned, was tireless at the end of long hiking days when I was too beat to get a fire and food going, and never forgot to bring extra coffee and a couple of spare packs of smokes for me. And he laughed the whole time doing it. Just a wonderful teacher.

Another element of your experiences in the Amazon concerns your friendship with the Matsés. Could you speak a bit about the Matsés, and perhaps about Pablo in particular?

Now you’re on to the third of my three extraordinary teachers, Pablo, the curaka. Pablo, like Julio and Moises, had this fantastic light in his eyes. All three looked like they were chuckling on the inside, enjoying every minute of living, despite all three of them living in the physically difficult Amazon.

Moises and I ran into some Matses on the Aucayako in 1985. A year later I went to one of the rivers they have traditionally lived on, the Galvez River, which drains into the Yavari. We spent about a month on the river on that trip, moving from camp to camp—there were six camps of Matses at that time up there. Pablo’s was the smallest: Just he and his four wives and his friend Alberto and his two wives, and their kids. Maybe 20 kids all told, though I later met a number of Pablo’s older kids and in all he probably had 30.

Moises and Pablo had history. In 1970 or 1971, Pablo had been a young Matses among a band that had raided the city of Genaro Herrera. They stole machetes and axe heads, several women and two young longhaired Franciscan Friars or monks. They later killed the latter, probably when they discovered they weren’t women.

In retaliation, the Peruvian military bombed the Matses camps for four days. During that same time, Moises, then a sargeant in the military, led a ground group against the Matses. Despite being half-indigenous, Moises cared little for indigenous and always described the ferocity with which he killed some of them with a sort of perverse enjoyment. But he said that changed when he saw Pablo and some other Matses trying to down the Peruvian bombers with their bows and arrows. “They were completely unafraid,” he said. “And Pablo was the bravest. I admired his courage and we became friends because he said he admired my courage as well.”

Meeting Pablo was no disappointment. He took me hunting, showed me medicinal plants, gave me my first dose of sapo—frog sweat—and laughed when I was writhing in pain on the ground. He talked with plants and animals and swore they talked back. He’d blow nu-nu, a tobacco and macambo snuff, at the clouds to keep it from raining and damned if it might not be raining all around the little camp but not in it. He really was one of the last of the “antiguas”, the old timers who knew the old ways of the Matses, and those ways involved deep interaction with the jungle in ways that seem mysterious and magic to those of us who witness them but don’t understand them.

For medicines, it seemed—and I knew Pablo over a 20 year period, maybe eight long visits in all—like every plant was a cure. If it wasn’t a cure it provided food or shelter or the material to make hammocks with. He’d use plant medicines like nu-nu to see where to hunt the following day—and he had to hunt well to feed all those wives and kids. He shared everything with me, even tried to get me to go on a raid to a distant village to rob some champi—young girls so that I could have a couple of wives. That was the only adventure on which I turned him down.

He’s the man responsible for the medical breakthroughs now being made using the peptides from his sapo frog—which turned out, when I was able to bring it out of the jungle—to be the phylomedusa bicolor, the giant monkey tree frog. And because of his work—primarily—on plant collecting with me for Shaman Pharmaceuticals in the early 1990s, he’s the reason that all of the Matses are now the only tribal group in all of Peru that now has permanently demarked land along with air, water and mineral rights. That was something Shaman arranged after the second of my very successful medicinal plant collecting trips on the Yavari and Galvez rivers. My trips, but it was Pablo and a couple of others at different camps, who produced the goods for Shaman. I was just the conduit.

I’ve written a lot about Pablo and plant collecting, and someday I would like to just write about Pablo the person. He was just an hilarious character top to bottom.

How has your life changed over the course of more than 25 years learning and working with ayahuasca?

Well, now that you’ve gotten me talking about my three great human teachers, I will add ayahuasca as my great plant-spirit teacher. My life changed? Don’t know because it’s the only life I’ve had. And that includes those guys, that jungle, those rivers, the sounds, the shapes, the food, the rain, the crossing of log bridges… and ayahuasca is a big part of that. But my life also includes being an investigative journalist, a dad, a brother, a plumber when the sink gets clogged, and everything else that goes into living. For me, it’s just a life. Ayahuasca and the jungle are not separate, have not been separate from my normal life since I met them. Sometimes I’m in the U.S, sometimes in the jungle, but it’s all one life.

I really think that ayahuasca, more than anything, has shown me in a very real and concrete way, that things like personal guardians exist, that everything is sentient and must be respected on equal value with everything else. I mean the old coffee grinds as well as the tallest tree, as well as that fly that’s buzzing around you incessantly. It’s showed me the value of life in a way I was taught but didn’t understand. It’s allowed me to see the other realms, to even sometimes operate in them to affect changes in this realm. It’s filled me with wonderment about every single day. I wake up wondering what’s going to be shown to me every morning and I love that.

I might have done that without my three teachers and ayahuasca, but I’m not sure. I do know that I used to push love away, thinking somehow I wasn’t good enough or worthy, and that in the last 10 years I’ve learned to say “give it here! Gimme what you got!” and to give it away freely as well. That’s one place where I think the change in me is noticeable. To me at least.

In what ways has your experience and relationship with ayahuasca affected your day-to-day life?

Well, I like that I can fly now, And having superstrength is a gas….kidding. Ayahuasca is part of my day to day life, so I don’t know, beyond what I’ve said about giving and receiving love, how else it’s changed things. The spirits in general, have been helpful: they’ll sometimes tell me what plants a person needs to use to rid themselves of a physical ailment, or get in my face if I start overreacting to the kids and bring out the dad voice too quickly. They remind me when I’ve had too much to drink and think I can drive just to the corner….and then they’ll make the keys disappear if I try to ignore them. And I am very glad they do those things. I’m very appreciative.

Your book is filled with amazingly detailed descriptions of your ayahuasca visions. Perhaps they could even be described as experiences, in that you tend to go far beyond what may be commonly associated as “ayahuasca visions”. For example you describe going to “The red room. The place where the healing happens”, or the market “where you get the medicines” or Joe’s Café. What do these kinds of places mean to you, and how have they changed your perception reality?

Those places are real places. Something to remember is that our human brain needs to compartmentalize things. Since we’re not brought up dealing with spirits on a day-to-day basis, when we run into one, we tend to give it a human or monstrous shape—a shape it might not have at all. But our brain needs to be able to process things so we give those spirits a shape, a name, a visual we can deal with so our brain won’t explode from not knowing how to process the information.

Now the “red room” is how I see a particular place. That place is an unmeasurably large cavern where all of the pain and suffering, all of the rotten deeds and selfish acts go. And in that place there are spirits who know how to transform that pain and horror into something positive so it can be let out into our world again without hurting anyone anymore. So when I’m called on to take someone’s pain or grief or whatnot, I don’t want to just keep it or it’ll stay with me. So having been shown the red room—and someone else’s brain would have them perceive it entirely differently—I know that’s the perfect place to put that awful stuff I’ve taken out of somebody. So to me it’s a place of transformation for rotten, pain and anguish causing feelings and suffering that’s very accessible in real life terms. I just open the door—which happens to be right next to me when I need it—and ask those spirits to take that junk and transform it into something good.

The market to get the medicines is another interesting place. I’m not someone who knows all the plants—heck I probably know less than the average person. Still, I’m sometimes asked to come up with a remedy for someone. And the guardians—call them guardian angels if that’s more comfortable, though they don’t look like classic angels to me—know that, so they very nicely introduced me to a market filled with plants. And when someone needs something, I go to that market—no, you can’t see it, it’s only in my perception the way it is—and shout out the name of the illness or problem that needs fixing. And the plants are so freaking generous they just sometimes shout out the name or names of those that I’ll need. And then I’ll write them down and relay the information. Ridiculous on the face of it, and I’ll probably be sent to the looney bin for even suggesting what I’ve just said. Still, even when I’m given a plant name I’ve never heard of, I can usually find it on the net and because the plants are so generous, the use of the plant is generally spot on for what needs healing.

Joe’s Café is another spot. Just a little café where you get to see things not normally visible to the human eye. It’s not around all the time, just when I need it.

Now, the most important thing to remember with all these places, these gifts, is that I’ve been warned they can’t be used selfishly. I couldn’t go to Joe’s Café and see who is going to win a ball game tomorrow night. If I did and then bet on the outcome, I’m sure I’d lose, and not only that, I’d probably never be allowed to go to the café again.

Also important to remember is that while this stuff is crazy, it’s not. It’s just accessing other realities that exist but move at maybe a different vibratory speed than the reality in which we exists does.

And facilitating access to those realities are what the plant teachers like Ayahuasca and San Pedro and Peyote do. The codicil—if that’s the right word—is that once you’ve opened the door to those realities, once you’ve broadened the bandwidth of your sight to see those realities or experience them, you probably won’t be able to fully close that door again. And that’s pretty frightening to some people. I mean, to say there are ghosts is one thing. To have them waking you at 3 AM while they clomp around the kitchen is quite another.

What guides you?

A simple sense that this could be a wonderful world if we’d all just pitch in and make it one. In journalism my work involves trying to expose rotten and vile things so that we can see them for what they are and eliminate them. Sometimes that means exposing the horror the war on drugs creates—from politically/financially motivated private prisons to mandatory sentencing laws to property forfeiture, to keeping hemp illegal when it might do so much good if its status was changed.

Other times I’m motivated because I see the poor getting shafted in a million ways, or how the U.S. can manipulate politics around the globe to ensure benefit to private companies at the expense of whole populations.

Those things motivate me and they become my guide posts as well. I’m not going to fix this damned world, but I am damned sure allowed to keep trying in my own way.

Then there are my jungle groups, where I take guests out into the deep green and have them experience the jungle and ayahuasca in a pretty traditional setting. So many of those guests are so ripe for change, so hoping to change their lives—even if they don’t know it—that those trips often are just the thing they needed to either find a new direction in their lives or to give them the courage to deal with their lives in a more positive way. Those people, already good people, mostly just need a little polishing after life has kicked them around some. And I love being able to put them in touch with the things that can polish them up. Cause that makes a better world too.

What is important to you?

My kids, my friends, the under-served, underprivileged, the folks getting the short end of things. And my ex-wife’s new babies. And my granddaughter. And the dog and cats and everything else we take care of. What’s important to me is to keep looking at life like a new thing. To keep working to get the same gleam in my eye over living that Julio, Moises and Pablo always did.

What is the most frightening thing you’ve encountered?

My own selfish behaviour. Watching and being forced to relive some of the stupid, selfish things I’ve done over and over before Ayahuasca will let me vomit them out. The spirits can be demanding and they can be very very frightening, but in the end it’s my own negativity, my own failures, my own stupidity, my own self-centeredness that provokes the greatest fear. And when the medicine tells me we’re going to be working on something related to that on a given night, well, many times I have tried my best to run away from the experience out of sheer terror.

You’ve experienced many different peoples, plants and places. What is it about the Amazon and ayahuasca that continues to captivate you so?

In all my time in Peru, both as a guest and when I lived there and ran my bar, I have never once gone to sleep without having learned something new. That is a very amazing thing to be able to say. And that is something that keeps the Amazon, the jungle, the rivers, the medicine fresh. It just thrills me to be there.

Of course, there’s a lot about it I don’t like. I don’t like the noise of the motorcars, I don’t like the dust in the air and the diesel fuel smells in Iquitos. I can get bored when I have done my work for the day—and when I get bored I want a drink to get a party going, and that’s led to some hilarious and not so hilarious events over the years. But overall, something still happens every day, and I mean every day, that makes me look at the world with just a slightly different pair of eyes when I go to bed than I had when I woke up. That’s a pretty irresistible lure for me.

I’ve asked this kind of question before, and I know you’re a fantastic chef so I’ll ask you, too; You’re out in the jungle, you’ve packed some fruit and vegetables with you and some supplies. You’re hungry, you’ve got a few of your team with you, some of them just returned from hunting, others from fishing. It’s a beautiful day and you’ve all worked very hard. What are you going to cook up?

Well, I’m not much on most jungle meats—I’m just not big on monkeys and sloths and such—but if my guys happened to come on a majas, a large jungle rodent, well, for sure we’re gonna roast some of that. It’s one of the few animals in the jungle that has fat on it, and when that fat starts to drip into the flames, well…..

Now if the guys were attacked by a cayman and had to kill it, we’d cut the tail into thick steaks and grill them, then slather them in lime and garlic…

If the guys fishing happened to bring back a couple of fat piranha’s, well, put those guys on the grill and toss a bit of vinegar on them, and some wild cilantro if we can find some. Piranha are some of the best eating fish in the world.

For fruits, I can always go for a thick slice of jungle papaya with lime juice and a bit of salt.

For starch, I’d try to find a couple of yuca roots. Just boil them simply is good by me, or, if you’ve got a bit of oil, sauté them babies.

For veggies, let’s do a stir fry with ginger, cabbage, cauliflower, green beans, tomatoes, spinach and whatever else we’ve got or can find.

If we have some Ucayali beans—kind of like a pinto bean that comes from the Amazon–with us and we were smart enough to start them early, well, we’d have a little oil with lots of garlic and onion—or onion grass if we don’t have onions—in the pot. When that was just right, I’d fill the pot with water, add the beans when it’s boiling, toss in several diced tomatoes and some acholte or cumin other local spice. And four hours later, when the beans were ready, I’d finish it off with fresh cilantro. If we don’t have any, I’d put some Yerba Louisa, lemon grass, in to give it that final bite.

That sounds like a pretty good meal to me, even if nobody has any majas or cayman tail or piranha.

Your book is fecund, and flowing with amazing stories and experiences. Any stories that you would have loved to fit in, but somehow couldn’t? Anything left untold?

There are a lifetime of stories not in the book. The book concentrates on ayahuasca and my relationship with it. There is some jungle, some damned good adventure, some love, some loss, victories and defeats, but it’s primarily about ayahuasca’s relation to all of that. Each of the two plant collecting trips in my own boats from Iquitos to Leticia to Angamos and up the Galvez—30-plus day trips after the month of finding and rebuilding the old boats I used—could be it’s own book. Trips up the Rio Napo are not even mentioned. A hike from Tamishacu to the Rio Midi is passed over. That was a good one. It was my first time, real time spent on the Yavari River. Moises and I hiked maybe four days to a little town on the Rio Midi, which lets out into the Yavari. Our plan was to make a balsa raft and float to the Yavari and from there, float down to Leticia in Colombia, where we would catch a boat down to Iquitos. Problem was, the river was too low for that. Also, there was very little balsa available.

We arrived in the little town just as they were starting a 3-day celebration of Peru’s Independence from Spain. That was quite a party. People came from all over that part of the jungle to dance, sing, drink and feast nonstop. You’d be given a huge gourd of fermented masato, maybe a quart, and drink it down till it was finished. Everyone would cheer. Then they’d give you another, and another. So you had to vomit out what you drank to make room for more. So everybody was vomiting, and drinking and vomiting….most wonderfully hilarious party I ever attended. And this was good masato—the yuca had been properly chewed and spit out by the women, helping it ferment and giving it just the right texture. Bit of an acquired taste.

At the end of the party, with no raft, we convinced one of the partygoers to take us down to the Yavari and then down to Leticia. The problem was, he had little gas. Just about enough for the few hours it would take his little 15 Hp motor to the mouth of the Midi.

Moises was certain that once we got there we could get gasoline to continue the trip. Well, we went from one little shack—they were pretty well spread out—to another on our first day on the Yavari and came up empty. We had to paddle with one oar as that’s all the man had, most of that day. And that night we got stuck in a very slow whirlpool that simply spun us around and around all night long. We all woke up sick from the spinning.

On the second day, Moises changed tact. He ordered me to carry our shotgun, and he’d approach a little hut owned by some fisherman and I’ve have to point that shotgun in the general direction of someone and he’d demand whatever gas they had. Now most everybody out there had a half a gallon of gas stashed somewhere, so we spent days going half-gallon by half-gallon, essentially stealing everybody’s gas on the river. We promised we’d return it when the boatman came back upriver, but nobody believed us.

So there we were, stealing gas, and our boatman was sure we were gonna leave him stranded in Leticia with no gas for himself and no gas to pay back to people, so he was afraid he was going to get killed when he returned home.

He wasn’t. We were good for our word. In the Brazilian town of Benjamin Constant, right next to Leticia, we stopped at a floating service station and I bought—on credit—two 55 gallon drums of gasoline. The boatman got one for his work, and everybody else was to get double what we took from them at shotgun point.

It wound up working out fine, and everybody remembered me as a good guy when I returned to them in my own boat a couple of years later. We just laughed about it over masato.

There was also no room, or place in the book, for a recent story when I came on an illegal logging operation and some of my team and I, at my direction, cut all the logs in the log raft loose and floated them down to a large lake where they dispersed everywhere. My hope was that the logger would have to spend enough time regathering them that he’d lose his profit and decide not to illegally log anymore, at least on that river.

And there was very little room in the book for talking about being the only gringo in a place like Iquitos to run a bar. And one that was on an old port on the roughest corner in town. There were a million stories out of that place, and I think people still talk about The Cold Beer Blues Bar down there, even when I’m not around. I probably still get 30 emails a year from strangers asking where it is. And it’s been closed for almost 10 years.

And the markets, and having an extended family, and getting friends out of jail and run ins with DEA types and military guys and getting bitten by piranas and flesh eating spider bites and having to do nearly a whole trip on a broken ankle and having an intestine explode in the middle of a trip and what it’s like to hang around the docks in the third world, or fly in little Cessna’s without any instrumentation over that vast forest, or collecting artifacts for the Museum of Natural History in New York, running into huge boas, having a boat of mine attacked by black cayman … there are lots of things in the book, and I hope it’s a great read and all that, but there’s lots more to tell. It’s been one heck of a life.

Peter Gorman’s Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming is available now.

]]> http://www.ayahuasca.com/spirit/bloodletting-with-peter-gorman/feed/ 2 http://www.ayahuasca.com/creativity/ayahuasca-and-transformation/ http://www.ayahuasca.com/creativity/ayahuasca-and-transformation/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:04:32 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.ayahuasca.com/?p=480 From Neurons to Nirvana: Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century, produced and directed by Vancouver-based filmmaker, writer, and media artist Oliver Hockenhull. ]]> Steve Beyer talks about ayahuasca and transformative experiences. This is a clip from the film project From Neurons to Nirvana: Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century, produced and directed by Vancouver-based filmmaker, writer, and media artist Oliver Hockenhull. You can learn more about the film project here.

From Neurons to Nirvana is about the science of psychedelics — the quest to discover how psychoactive substances affect the neurological system and how those effects are related directly to how we understand the world around us; how they affect consciousness and what that means for our understanding of ourselves, our relationship with others, and our understanding of the world.

Hockenhull is working in partnership with executive producer Mark Achbar (The Corporation) and Betsy Carson, and with European co-producer Oval Filmemacher, Berlin. He has been developing and shooting this film over the last two years, filming extensively in Canada, the USA, and Europe.

You can help to make this film a reality. See how you can contribute here — and how you can get signed DVDs, exclusive downloads during production, music tracks, special imagistic loops for continuous ecstatic play on your monitor, an exclusive audio clip of Aldous Huxley recorded in the 1930s, and even co-production credit. Check it out.

Steve Beyer is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. His website and blog is at www.singingtotheplants.com.

The following interview with Donal Ruane was conducted in May 2006 by Gyrus, and was first published in Dreamflesh Journal Vol. 1.

Gyrus: What strikes you as unique about the experience of ayahuasca?

Donal: It’s a difficult question to answer, as I get more experienced. The reason being that my experience of ayahuasca varies according to who I drink it with, and the brew. It appears to me that how the brews are made, and the additives that are used, and the set and setting in which it is consumed, very much alter the experience.

Last year in Iquitos I had a session with an Indian shaman from the Witoto tribe—a very interesting tribe who have had an awful history of exploitation and abuse, by colonists and by missionaries, who have devastated their belief systems and their way of life. They feature heavily in Wade Davis’ book, One River. I didn’t know much about them until I met this shaman, Don Mariano. He’s from Columbia, along the Rio Negro I think, one of the tributaries of the Amazon. He’s sixty-four years old, and he first started training to be a shaman, dieting with ayahuasca, at eight years of age. So he’s been drinking for a long, long time.

His ayahuasca was very different from the other brews I’ve drunk. My experiences are mainly with two types of ayahuasca. Initially it was with the Church of the Santo Daime, and then later I started to drink with Peruvian shamans.

Now after drinking regularly with the Santo Daime for a few years I started to feel increasingly restricted. I felt the experience itself and the brew itself was controlled and there was pressure to conform to their particular model and ultimately to become a member. The church itself was founded by Raimundo Ireneu, a black rubber trapper, after a period spent drinking ayahuasca in the jungle where he received instructions to found the church from a female spirit who he associated with the Virgin Mary. Ironically enough, Ireneu himself was probably initiated into the use of ayahuasca by a Peruvian mestizo shaman. Of course, the Santo Daime only works within a certain spectrum of what is possible with ayahuasca. This is not necessarily such a bad idea; ayahuasca has the ability to manifest some pretty dangerous phenomena. Let’s say that of all the hallucinogens it is one of the more unpredictable.

Don’t get me wrong, I am enormously grateful to the church. However, as is often the case with such matters, a synchronicity nudged me in another direction. The day I bought the book Ayahuasca Visions I also met Pablo Amaringo for the first time, coincidentally, in a London art gallery where I had gone to meet a friend. Out of that initial meeting, my friendship with Pablo developed so much so, that I decided to visit him in his hometown, Pucallpa, four months later. During that first visit, while talking to Pablo, I realised there was a lot more to learn about ayahuasca than I could possibly learn in the context of the church. The ritual use of ayahuasca in the Upper Amazon region has developed over millennia into a sophisticated science, a plant alchemy with a remarkable mythology of its own.

Now there is a big difference between the Santo Daime brew and the traditional ayahuasca drunk by shamans in Peru—it’s a lot less visionary and isn’t as purging. You don’t enter the remarkable visionary realm, and you don’t get the ‘drunkenness’ which you normally associate with ayahuasca in Peru, which they call mareación—a Spanish word which translates as ‘sea-sickness’…

This is what William Burroughs talked about as “the motion-sickness of time travel”…

Yeah, he talked about it that way. It’s something that comes on usually within about two hours, but it can come on at different times. Usually you start feeling very nauseous, then your body heats up. I usually sweat and yawn profusely; it’s very uncomfortable and unpleasant. At this stage you become very disoriented, and you may vomit, sometimes in conjunction with diarrhoea. They can be separate, or you can get the two of them together. The mareación usually lasts about half an hour, three quarters of an hour, but again there’s no standard. Now you don’t tend to get this with the Santo Daime brew, and you don’t get the visions. Of course the Santo Daime is always drunk with the lights on, and traditionally ayahuasca is always drunk in the dark.

The other ayahuasca I have most experience with is what I call Pucallpa ayahuasca, which is like ‘moonshine’. That’s the standard ayahuasca recipe, which is made using the bark of the vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the leaves of the bush Psychotria viridis—alone. They do put additives in it, but that’s to do with particular shamans’ own likes and dislikes. Some of these additives are psychoactive, but other aren’t. For example, plants like coca have quite subtle effects compared to something like Brugmansia (which they call Toé), which is similar to Datura but in fact isn’t—although it contains the same tropane alkaloids. Some shamans use Brugmansia on its own, usually by smoking the leaves.

The ayahuasca of Don Mariano had Banisteriopsis caapi, Oco yagé (Banisteriopsis rusbyana), mapacho tobacco (Nicotina rustica), and two leaves of Toé. The Oco yagé would have been the substitute for Psychotria viridis. I only found out later that it contains 5-MeO-DMT, so it’s not very visionary. I got some slight hypnagogic visions, but not many. I originally thought that ayahuasca’s a “visionary” vine, so if you don’t get visions, you’re not getting proper ayahuasca. But while that one didn’t give many visions, it was an incredibly powerful teacher—probably one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had.

Each brew has its own personality. This one was very talkative, and it was very purgative too, due particularly to the tobacco additive, which made me really nauseous and gave me diarrhoea; I got both. And because of the Oco yagé, it lasts over six hours, rather than the average four hours.

They say that Toé and Oco yagé are “teacher” plants; the brews are less visionary, less about power and more about receiving teaching. That’s what I received: a very, very powerful teaching. I was literally talked to for four, five, six hours. Almost from the time it came on this telepathic dialogue started, which is one of the phenomena we get with ayahuasca. What it is, I’m not sure; there are many theories. The locals call these phenomena “spirits”. McKenna called it the Logos and connected it with Philip K. Dick’s creature of pure information that we find in his extraordinary novel Valis. I’ve been drinking and studying this for about seven years now, and I’m still trying to understand all these phenomena.

When I first came across Pablo’s paintings I had never before seen an artist capture the visionary realms in such a startlingly original way. I was captivated not only by the visions themselves but also by their paradoxical nature… so vividly alien, and yet so extraordinarily familiar and beautiful. I wondered, where are these dimensions located? Pablo explained to me that he had visited many such places, many universes when he drank ayahuasca. He said, “I have visited the Moon, I have visited Mars, I have visited Jupiter, yes, all the planets. There are many planets. I have visited all of them. There are many spirits in these places. There are sacred temples, places like islands with castles. In these castles some spirits are good but some are bad. They have human faces but their body is of a tiger or a snake or an eagle.” Pablo told me that shamans learn to immerse themselves in these domains and interact with the spirits like actors in a film. This only happens after dieting and drinking ayahuasca for a long time—so that you no longer see visions as if you are looking at television but are completely immersed in them.

How could this be so? How could so-called ‘primitive’ people and peasants have developed such a sophisticated methodology of interaction in these ‘virtual realities’? Jung speculated that “it may well be a prejudice to restrict the psyche to being inside the body. There may be a psyche outside the body, and one has to get out of oneself to get there.” He further speculated that this ‘psychic reality’, rather than being two separate worlds, one inside and one outside, was in fact two aspects of the same world: a microcosm and a macrocosm. This has very much been my own experience. For ayahuasqueros the difference between the purely mythological and what we would consider ‘real’ is indistinct.

In fact, the only way to really understand these ‘invisible’ realms is through metaphor: the secret language of the shaman. What we are talking about here is a way of seeing, a method of perceiving ‘reality’ differently. For the ayahuasquero the tobacco smoke from his pipe becomes a vine which becomes a rope which becomes a snake which becomes a ladder to climb into other worlds. The anthropologist Graham Townsley, while working with Yaminahua ayahuasqueros in the Peruvian Amazon, was told they called this “language-twisting-twisting”. For example, arkanna is a Quechua word meaning “to block” or “to guard”. It can be an icaro, a magical song, or an object like a crystal or an animal that the shaman puts inside you to protect you. Or it can be tobacco smoke blown over you to form a protective shirt or armour, like a bullet-proof vest. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is fluid. For a child, a chair can very easily become a flying saucer; a simple stick a golden sword that defends against evil knights. As one gets older this imaginative engagement with the mysterious potential of the universe is ‘unlearned’. The child is literally programmed not to see in this way from a certain age. Children who continue to see in this way, who refuse to give up their secret friends, are usually considered ‘deviant’ and treated as mentally ill. What we are talking about is really a technique for ‘seeing’ that we in the West have lost! A technique that enables one to view ‘reality’ as a constantly unfolding mystery… an interconnected domain of wonder, rather than the ‘objective’, fragmented view we usually perceive.

As a child growing up, I heard many stories of ‘seeing’ fairies among the old people in the west of Ireland. When I asked them where the fairies were now they always said the same thing: electricity and cars had driven them away. What really happened of course was that people stopped seeing fairies because of the paradigm shift overtaking the wider community at that particular time. The influx of new technology required a radical shift in the belief systems that had sustained that rural peasant community for thousands of years. Beliefs, which included a reciprocal relationship with nature spirits, were literally unsustainable in the ‘light’ of the electric bulb. The new magic had destroyed the old… and people gradually stopped seeing and believing in fairies. Which in my view is a great shame.

Another factor in this was the gradual encroachment by civilization on the wilderness; cars and electricity made the areas where these beliefs still existed more accessible, and he introduction of radio and television and the electric light literally lit up the darkness where these beliefs existed, ironically making them invisible once more. I love Patrick Harpur’s idea, which he expounds in his wonderful book Daimonic Reality, that the unconscious was formed during the Reformation. He speculates that the Anima Mundi, the World Soul, was withdrawn from outside and relocated within, as the collective unconscious, eventually to be rediscovered by 20th century depth psychology. In effect, the daimonic realm was forced underground into the unconscious regions of the mind at the beginning of the Age of Reason, when the mind became identified with reason.

I’ve had a lot of what I would call “archetypal experiences”, encounters with archetypal beings and phenomena. A lot has been written about this, but I don’t think there’s been as much work done on just steadily studying how and why archetypes manifest, what they are, and how our experiences of them vary over periods of time. What do these experiences actually mean?

Anyway, something else I find remarkable about ayahuasca is the purging aspect. One thing I noticed around Pucallpa is that they call all the plants La purga.

All the ingredients of ayahuasca?

No, all the different plants that shamans diet with, the teacher plants within this “science”. The science has various names. For instance, an old name that Pablo used was alquemica pallistica, which means “tree alchemy”. There’s also ciencia vegetal—a mestizo term meaning “plant science”—and ciencia de los palos, “science of trees”. A very old Quechua term is caspi yachai (“tree wisdom”).

What we’re talking about here is a form of alchemy. My theory is that this so-called “plant science” is in fact the ancient precursor of medieval alchemy. I think the Spanish named it this when they came over because they recognized what was going on.

In the same way that the Catholic communion must have been seen by the conquistadors to be “primitively” echoed in the mushroom cults of Mexico, where they called the mushrooms “God’s flesh”.

Exactly. And this science believes that a certain number of plants-some obviously psychoactive, some not-each have a “mother”, some sort of ancestor relation. They also use the terms father, or grandmother or grandfather in this sense. These are the owners of the plant, and these owners can be reached by going through a strict diet of purification and consuming the plant in isolation.

I’ve dieted with ayahuasca, but I’ve also done a eight-day diets with plants that are not psychoactive. For instance, the “jungle onion”, cebolla de selva (or cebolla de monte), is referred to as a purgative, and it did make me vomit the first time I drank it. Tobacco does the same thing. I think all the plants have a purgative effect.

But not necessarily to the point of inducing vomiting? Perhaps more just detoxifying?

Yeah, making you sweat or whatever. They flush things out of you. To me the whole point of the science is a purification of the body, in order to communicate directly with these plants and learn things from them. And this is done over periods of time. It requires isolation from people: no conversations, no looking at people, and no people looking at you. Sitting alone, eating a special diet: no salt, no sugar, no pork, no alcohol, no sex. In fact, traditionally you eat only boiled plantain with a small number of fish-interestingly enough, fish that only eat plants. There’s boca chica (a type of snapper), palometa (related to piranhas), and sardinas.

With some of the plants, particularly the trees, the diet is even more important because some of them are highly poisonous. It’s much more dangerous to not go with the diet with those than it is for, say, ayahuasca. It’s interesting that purifying the body allows you to ingest “poisons”…

So some things we consider inherently poisonous may just have bad reactions with things we habitually consume.

That’s what it seems to be. One of the people I got to know and interview was an old shaman called Don Fidel Mosombite—who incidentally first turned Terence McKenna onto ayahuasca in the mid-1970s. He has been a practising ayahuasquero for over fifty years, and has dieted with a lot of plants and trees. One of these was the catahua tree (Hura crepitans). He told me he dieted with this tree for three months. He had to drink the sap of this tree once and he was intoxicated for three days. He said he thought he was going to go insane! During this time he had an experience where he was suspended by a rope upside-down from a steel pole, rather like the hanged man in tarot. During this he was cut loose and started to fall, and if he hadn’t dieted well he would have been killed. Just before he hit the ground he suddenly transformed into the commander of a ship which was travelling underwater. This was the catahua ship. Then a voice gave him instructions on how to smoke the leaves of this tree in order to heal people.

We take the word ayahuasca and put it on our Western list of psychedelics. Do you think that creates a false impression of how it works, and that it should be seen as embedded with the entire ciencia vegetal, this whole belief system revolving around spirits and their various plants?

The whole molecular level of nature is connected with spirits in this science. The scientific categories we have broken things down into, they have personified.

Do the key constituents of ayahuasca—Banisteriopsis caapi, Psychotria viridis, etc.—do they have a special role in the “pantheon”?

Different shamans have different views. Graciela said that the jungle onion, and Ajo Sacha, which is jungle garlic, are much more important than ayahuasca. That they’re much more potent for healing. But what Pablo said to me is that ayahuasca is at the centre of the whole system. Usually you go from ayahuasca to the other plants—though this isn’t always so.

There’s different ways they heal, specific to the plant. Take plants like Sangre de drago [Dragon's blood, Croton lechleri], or Una de gato [Cat's claw, Uncaria tomentosa], which have particular effects. They’re medicinal herbs. Dragon’s blood is phenomenal for congealing cuts.

But there is also a lot of magic involved in this science. For example, it is believed that by blowing an icaro into a glass of water and getting the patient to drink, it will cure a wide range of illnesses.

Could you talk more about the effects of ayahuasca in relation to this system?

My experiences with it don’t fit the materialist view of how it works, which says that you take certain plants, mix them together in certain amounts and you get this effect. In terms of dosage, you can take more and not have a very strong experience, or take less and have a much stronger experience.

I feel there are realms made visible by ayahuasca that are to do with the plant itself; but there also appear to be realms that are all around in the jungle—and I don’t know what that’s all about. Because that doesn’t fit our paradigm. I’ve had experiences of ghosts, all sorts of different presences, little dwarves or whatever, that they connect with different plants, different phenomena out in the jungle. They seem to be things connected with place. I don’t have those experiences when I’m drinking here in London. Having all those trees around you, it seems to open up another level of the experience.

What is made visible here in your flat? Or is it a more interior experience?

It’s just a more interior experience. One of the things they say is that the further away from humans you are, the more pronounced the experience is. To get really in touch with spirits, you have to be way out in virgin jungle. I’ve never done that, but I’d love to. Certainly the city isn’t a very pleasant place to be when you’re opened up like that. It’s not that there aren’t all sorts of energies or spirits around in cities…

Maybe ayahuasca just isn’t the best way to approach them.

It comes from a particular place, and it’s connected with that ecology. And that seems to be the realm that it opens up.

Something I also wanted to mention about the varying effects of dosage is that shamans appear to be able to “take it out of you” after you’ve drunk it-by either blowing you with tobacco, or rubbing you with aguardiente, which is sugar cane rum, and camphor.

Like a magical thorazine?

Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. It’s been done to me, and it very obviously did happen. That was a time when I’d only taken half of what I’d done the night before, but it really was quite ferocious. They often sniff ayahuasca and see it as having an effect, y’know?

And you think this is beyond “set and setting”?

I think it is beyond that, I think there’s a magical element to it, and I don’t really know how it works. Maybe it is set and setting, maybe set and setting and intention are that powerful. Maybe intention is that powerful, and when you put it together with ayahuasca, it multiplies its power by a million, like putting a magnifying glass over it. You have the sun, and a piece of paper, and with the magnifying glass it bursts into flames. Maybe that’s what it does to the intention: it ignites it. But there certainly seems to be an aspect to it that I can’t understand, a magical element.

Could you back-track to the vomiting thing? You talked about it being called La Purga. In our culture, vomiting’s associated with eating disorders, being too drunk, basically a pathological thing—undignified.

From the first time I witnessed it, it did completely throw me. The diarrhoea as well. It was very casually dealt with. I also saw people doing that after smoking pipes of tobacco—vomiting and diarrhoea. But they also have a thing about spitting as well, which we have a taboo against.

The healing process is about purging the body. And they use plants that purge the body, that make you spit up phlegm, which make you vomit and have diarrhoea, and sweat. That’s four ways of getting toxins out of the body. That’s usually in conjunction with dieting, which means that you’re also reducing your intake of toxins.

So, similar to alchemy before the point when magic and science separated, what they’re practicing here is a quite sophisticated “nature science”, knowledge of plant properties and so on, but completely intermingled with what our culture would call “superstition”. For them it’s part of the same system.

The way I understand it is that it’s a metaphor anyway, and the goal that’s produced out of alchemy is spiritual enlightenment—personal mastery and immortality.

What form of immortality do they see it as?

All shamans believe they live on in spirit form after they die.

Reincarnation?

Ordinary mortals keep on returning to the material realms until they work everything out they have to. Shamans, on the other hand, depending on how advanced they are, because of the spiritual work they have done through the suffering of the dietas, believe they become pure spirit and live on eternally. Death is not the end, basically. There’s a lot to be said about the whole psychedelic experience being a preparation for death. And that resonates for me.

The whole idea of making gold out of shit, as it were, I can see happening in the dieting, in purifying the body, vomiting and diarrhoea, getting rid of the toxins and pollutants. But also all the psychological stuff as well. I was releasing angers and resentments, and releasing memories, phenomenal memories. This wasn’t when I was on ayahuasca, it was dieting the day after. Just sitting there and remembering kids I went to school with, all this sort of stuff. It was like my memory banks were completely opened for the first time. I suppose rather like what we are told will happen at the exact point of our death—confronting all our past deeds.

One of the more startling experiences I had was when two entities in a canoe confronted me. They were like aliens. I’d just travelled through this awesomely beautiful multi-coloured golden city, and they told me that the Spanish never found El Dorado—that this is it. That the extraordinary experiences that ayahuasca can make available to us if we follow the proscriptions of the diet were in some way a secret fount of knowledge and teaching, connected with immortality, that humans could make contact with—and have been making contact with it for thousands of years. That El Dorado was a metaphor that the Spanish mistook for a literal truth. There never was any golden city in the jungle. I suppose this is an ongoing problem humans have had interpreting mythology, including the Bible—taking it literally. Metaphor is, at its simplest, a way of interacting with the ‘other’, with the unknown.

What about the identity of the “spirit” of the plant, or plants? McKenna has his thing about “the Mushroom Voice”. Whether you see the psilocybin mushrooms as being seeded from space, as McKenna suggested, or having evolved on Earth, genetically it’s a distinct entity in nature. Ayahuasca, however, doesn’t exist without humans. The constituent plants exist of course, but we’re talking about an admixture that’s an artifact of human culture.

If there were no humans, I don’t think this realm could exist. Because the third ingredient along with the two plants is human consciousness. That realm is some sort of common ground—Jung would call it the collective unconscious. It’s also a realm where you can meet other shamans and mystics and so on, and where shamans have fights. And it carries over into dreams.

It seems that an awful lot of revelation comes through in dreams, during or after the diet. And that’s the most understandable, clear information coming through. Certainly the combination of the dieting, the plants you use, and the tobacco you smoke, enhances and incubates dreams in combination with isolation from the normal everyday familiar world of human interaction. Being deprived of status and normal social relations focuses the mind into the now. The initiate is ‘betwixt and between’, a liminal state where revelation can take place.

Many people may think that the key to this mestizo shamanism is the visionary experience of taking ayahuasca.

Sometimes the visionary experience is superfluous. Often the more interesting stuff can happen just after, or a period of time after you drink ayahuasca. I think it stays in the body; particularly if you keep on dieting, it’ll stay in the body longer than normal. After drinking for months in Peru, when I came back I’d say there was still ayahuasca operating in me for up to a year afterwards. I brought up an awful lot of things, negative things, and it appeared to teach me about my depression… which then, over time, transformed into something else. Something I could understand. Something I had control over. This happened after I came back from Peru. It was a very difficult period, for a few months, where it kept coming back. It appeared to be showing me how it worked: this is how it works, and you have control over it, you don’t have to be a victim of this.

Ayahuasca to me is a harsh teacher. It expects an awful lot of you, and if you don’t learn the lesson, it can push your face in it. There are many stories in the mythologies around Pucallpa of the bad sides of ayahuasca—as much as it can give you good things, it can give you bad things. It can make you lazy, lethargic, it can destroy your life. It can cause illnesses, if you go against it. It is believed that if you diet badly, it punishes you. Instead of doing good, it does harm to you.

If you mix different plants, it gets jealous. It is conceptualized as having all the characteristics of human beings by the shamans who use it, including anger and jealousy. There appears to be an almost sexual relationship going on between the shaman and the plants, and the spirits of the plants are very jealous; you’re not allowed to mix plants. For example, when I was dieting with this jungle onion, I wasn’t allowed to drink ayahuasca for three months afterwards. I couldn’t even smell it, Graciela said, because they get jealous when they get mixed up.

Many of Pablo’s experiences, being attacked by sorcerors, have happened in his dreams, when he wasn’t using ayahuasca at all. When you do drink ayahuasca, especially when you’re dieting, you tend to have very light sleep, very “lucid” sleep, where you’re almost awake.

You’ve said of Western anthropologists who have taken the plunge and partaken of ayahuasca ceremonies, that that’s all well and good, but that actually the literature misses some of the more important effects you only get after a prolonged initiatory experience. What have we missed?

Well, I haven’t experienced anything that I haven’t heard anyone else talk about; but in the main field of anthropology, it tends not to be talked about. In Jeremy Narby’s book Shamans Through Time, there’s an anthropologist called Edith Turner who talks about seeing these ghostly figures coming out of a person being healed, and I’ve seen phenomena like that.

What convinced you that this was something other than an hallucination? Not that it’s not “real”, but that there’s not much that people haven’t seen when taking strong psychedelics!

Because I wasn’t intoxicated enough at the time. These experiences happened before or after taking ayahuasca. I’ve seen enough hallucinations to know this wasn’t that. “Hallucination” is a very problematic word anyway.

I’ve seen smoky figures standing over sick people, presences around me while I’m drinking. These were there, with your eyes open. I’ve also seen figures sitting in the trees, watching while I’m doing ayahuasca, which are transparent, like the creature in Predator. Like silhouettes of crystal or glass.

The word “shade” comes to mind…

Yes, that’s an interesting word. On the borders, betwixt and between. That’s where I’m at. To me there’s many levels of hallucinations; I’ll have to start cataloguing it to figure it out. There’s the full-colour visions that you see on ayahuasca, very fast, with your eyes closed. There’s another level of figures you can see, like the snakes I saw here on the floor, which were so realistic I nearly tried stamping on them! On that level I’ve seen figures come to me and hand me things at the beginning of sessions. A few weeks ago, actually, a figure came to me and gave me a glass of beer; I don’t know what that was about because I don’t drink any more…

One of your ancestors!

One of my demons… When I had the very powerful mystical experience with Don Mariano, these Shipibo women came and put books on a table in front of me. They were communicating to me using sign languages. I’d call them “hypnagogic”, dream-like. The sort of phenomena I associate with mushrooms or acid.

Then there’s all the aural stuff, voices speaking to you, and your psyche dividing into parts. That could account for the spirit phenomena, but I’m not sure. You get a chance to see your fears and neuroses, your own operating system, but detached from it to observe how it works. How it creates your sense of self in the world, and how it creates the world you perceive and experience.

Jung described individuation as separating out the distinct parts of yourself…

That’s certainly what I’ve observed in my work with ayahuasca. There are many levels to working with it. There’s the idea of “plant teachers”, and the idea that it’s like university, with a hierarchy of levels of understanding, moving upwards all the time. I had a huge breakthrough experience last year in Peru and it became so different from my previous experiences. I had a lot more confidence with it, and I learned how to deal with a lot of my fears. I also know that’s not the end! I know that when you reach a certain level, you level off; then suddenly you go boom and you’re moving up again. That “jumping up” is quite a challenge, and can be quite traumatic, because it opens up a whole new realm.

You sense that these levels are governed by the experience itself, and only loosely tied to human traditions?

Yeah. If you keep on working with it, it brings you to different levels. That’s an alien idea for us: that plants could be enabling something like that, that they could teach us.

That they could do anything but just sit there! Could you talk about icaros a bit, the magical songs of the ayahuasqueros? Is that specific type of tradition unique to South American ayahuasca use, or do they have similar things in Central American mushroom use, in Siberian shamanism, or whatever?

I’m not as familiar with the other traditions. I know singing itself is definitely a part of all shamanic traditions. Being a shaman is often equated with the ability to sing, and without songs you are not a shaman. One of the things that I thought was interesting was if you compare Shipibo shamanism with mestizo shamanism. Mestizo shamanism is about 150 years old, and it was learned by people of mixed blood, people from Europe who left the cities to work as rubber trappers in the jungle around Pucallpa and Iquitos. They got ill and went to indigenous Indians and learned about ayahuasca. With mestizo shamanism, you mostly learn songs from your maestro. Some of them can be received, but a lot are handed through family members. Often the songs that are believed to be most powerful are those in different languages: Quechua, Campa, other Indian dialects. It’s the reverence for the Other. You find that again with gringo spirits that appear to mestizos; it’s something from outside your own culture that has power. But for the Shipibo there isn’t this tradition of handed-down songs. The songs they sing are always improvised on the night of the session.

Unlike most other shamanic traditions, they don’t really have “objects”. They have a pipe, and bottles of aguardiente, medicinal plants and stuff. They might have rattles, but these would usually be made from the leaves of the piníon tree. Their basic tools are blowing their pipe tobacco, maybe certain perfumes… and icaros.

When I was dieting I would get repeating nightmares, hag-ridden kind of experiences, very terrifying. After a period of time I would start singing songs when these came up. There’s a whole vocal aspect to these experiences for me. I was waking up and going [lets out a strained high-pitched sound]. At the time this seemed almost like trying to scream, or trying to articulate the terror I was going through-which often woke everyone in the village up! But over a period of time, those high-pitched sounds became the songs I had been learning while drinking ayahuasca. It wasn’t conscious, it would just come out, until someone woke me up.

The other way I received icaros is directly through the mareación, the ‘sea-sickness’ phase of taking ayahuasca. You get very dizzy, very hot, your body boils, you’re sweating, it’s very uncomfortable. You also start yawning and yawning, and the more you yawn the more tired you get—you feel like you’re falling asleep or going unconscious. Melodies came to me spontaneously, having that experience. I don’t know where they came from, I would just start singing.

Graciela Shuna

Later, Graciela taught me how to put words to them. They have particular phrases in Quechua, which are in all the songs, and which are almost interchangeable. They’re all about calling the doctors, calling the magic, giving power, asking for power from the plants, etc. A lot of the songs have the same sort of words and phrases, with different melodies; the same phrase is repeated over and over again. Those phrases are important, but it seems to me that they’re not as important as the melodies. Once you have the melody, you have power from it, because you have something you can use.

When I was dieting with the jungle onion, on the first night after drinking it, I had this incredibly vivid dream where this very powerful man came. There’s all these images of power they have; they talk about doctors, policemen, presidents, kings, queens, commanders in the army. Often I had dreams about powerful people. In this dream it was a kind of trickster, a very powerful, rich businessman. I didn’t trust him. He was doing a deal with me, and he was taking me somewhere in a car with three other older men. He was sending me into this building that was falling apart. All the floors were damaged by water, very weak in the middle. A beautiful old house, with beautiful designs on the walls. When I got to the top room I started falling through the floors… down, down, down. But it wasn’t frightening. There was a brass band playing a waltz, and I started singing along with it spontaneously. All around me, as I was going down faster and faster, were all these beautiful dancing designs, like ayahuasca visions, beautiful patterns… I was amazed.

Of course, I woke Graciela up; she was sleeping beside me, and I was singing my head off! “Donal! Donal!” [laughs] She interpreted the powerful man as being the father of the plant. He was coming to teach me something, a Shipibo icaro. And the beautiful designs I was seeing were the songs: the designs were the visual manifestation of the song.

What is the nature of the power of icaros?

It’s having a relationship with something that’s outside yourself, but also within yourself. By learning about that and engaging with that, you learn something, and you get power. You’re powerful by the fact that you’re relating in that sort of way.

Maybe related to the strength that a Jungian would see gained in integrating parts of the Self? Psychic integration.

Yes, exactly. When she started interpreting my dreams, I could see her pattern. Everything was interpreted in order to empower me. To show me that everything-all my experiences, all of my psychic life-was part of an interconnected landscape that I was now becoming familiar with and learning about. By engaging with that, and by being able to have a relationship with that landscape, that was giving me its own power.

There’s that paradox of relating to something outside you and inside you. And when we talk about “psychic integration”, the process is actually about separating things out, as figures, landscapes…

It is a funny one. It gets back to the idea of, “What the hell is an archetype?” They’re part of us, but they’re outside us as well. And everybody can engage with them, so they’re personal, but they’re also universal at the same time. It seems that there’s a space where they exist that’s both outside us and inside us.

There’s a fragmentation, but I presume for someone who’s insane, these parts wouldn’t be connected in any way. But when you’re in this altered state and you’re learning about it, it doesn’t feel like a part is going way over there and I’m “losing my mind”. What you’re doing is leaning about all these compartments of your consciousness. They’re like mirrors that are reflecting each other. You can observe consciousness itself at work, how it operates. You can see all these negative or problematic parts of yourself, and you can see how they work, and how they control. And you can also see how they don’t have to control you. It’s like Cubism or something, getting a chance to see it from loads of different perspectives. In that act of observing these parts of yourself, you get a chance to have power over them. It’s a slow process.

Obviously, once you have this understanding of what’s going on with yourself, you’re much more able to see what’s going on with other people, and help them.

It’s like the “theory of mind” in evolutionary thought, where self-awareness is seen to be at least partly initiated by the evolutionary pressure in proto-hominid apes to understand others. The pressure to act in a socially effective manner required having an understanding that something like your own self-experience is probably happening inside others. And thus, to understand, manipulate or empathize with others, you looked within, to make guesses about other people’s thoughts and motives, based on your own inner workings.

“Modular” theories of consciousness are also popular in evolutionary thinking now—seeing discreet types of intelligence, like social intelligence, technical intelligence and so on, as having evolved semi-independently. Obviously it’s different to the psychological “compartments” you were talking about, but interesting all the same.

You described the experience in concrete, spatial terms…

It does feel like the mind divides into these compartments. And one of those is an observer, watching the other parts. It’s separate from them. And that’s incredible. The fact that it’s separate. You see that they’re not integral parts of you—which is how you feel. You can feel your fears are you, but they’re not. They are, but they’re also outside you, and you can control them.

How did Graciela conceive of this, or is it just your experience? Was there part of her mythology that expressed that, and did she know what you were talking about when you related it?

No. I think it’s a Western thing. They have very different models. The whole issue is one of witchcraft and sorcery; it seems to me that they don’t have an explanation for negative experiences in altered states. Or, they do, but it’s an external one. All negative experiences in these states are rationalized as sorcery and psychic attack and so on. It’s not an aspect of yourself. Like paranoia, in the West would be seen as an internal thing projected out. Whereas they take it on as an external threat, and treat it in that way. But it works, what they do. It’s still a huge area that I expect to carry on trying to understand.

Another thing is the idea of voices that come to you. I don’t know what they are.

Disembodied voices?

It’s hard to say… It’s like what we were saying about the inner/outer division: for all intents and purposes, it’s ‘our’ own voice, talking to us. But it’s different. In one of the first experiences I had after drinking with Graciela, after she had gone to bed we had what appeared to be a telepathic conversation for an hour and a half while she was asleep in the next room. Among other things she told me that I could become a shaman. The next day she came and told me that I’d come and talked to her in her dreams, and that I’d thanked her for all she had done for me. A few weeks later during an ayahuasca session she said while in trance that the spirits had talked to her, and she confirmed the very things I’d been told that previous night by ‘her’. So she confirmed the conversation I had with her, about becoming a shaman.

I’ve had other conversations, and they’ve been quite extraordinary. If I’m rational, it can’t be spirits, because spirits don’t exist. Right? So it must be a part of myself. In some way, by dieting and drinking a lot of ayahuasca regularly, you break down your normal consciousness, and there’s a paradigm shift. And in that shift you gain access to a fount of information, the Logos, whatever you want to call it, and whole realms of beings. This feeds you information about all sorts of things. It can be predictive, it can tell you about healing people, all sorts of stuff.

What about songs being used to shape and guide the experience?

Yeah, and to take you to places. My experience of that is that the experience of drinking ayahuasca is too awful to contemplate without singing. The songs appear to be like roads, or some sort of guidance through what appears to be a chaotic experience. They’re guides through what can be an incredibly alien environment. That’s all I can say.

The beliefs around those songs are that particular plants teach you songs, and that that is a direct communication with the spirit of that plant. That plant is actually speaking to you through songs, and by having the song of that plant, that gives you the power of that plant to heal, and to protect yourself and so on. There’s loads of different types of songs: songs to take you to different places, songs to cure different illnesses, songs to modify the visions, songs to calm people down when the mareación is too much, songs to reduce the visions when they’re overwhelming and frightening, when you think they’re never going to stop… And then there’s the songs that are like “story songs”, which tell stories about the mythological experiences you can have: of going underwater and meeting mermaids, meeting the ghost ships, spirits of the jungle, etc. There’s songs with words, and songs that are just hummed, blown or whistled melodies.

Actually, icaro means “to blow”, and there a whole mythology of the breath of the shaman having power to heal. By smoking tobacco, you make the breath visible. That’s one of the reasons for smoking tobacco. The whole idea of blowing and sucking is found throughout South American: blowing for protection or to heal, or sucking out things like magical darts or whatever.

There’s a number of ways the tobacco works. They can blow out the smoke, and you can see it, the breath, the power, blowing over someone’s body. So that enhances the ritual, theatrical aspect. The other thing that comes out, which I find really interesting, is the “magic phlegm”. This is the phlegm that comes up from smoking tobacco.

A different view from our culture. We don’t call it the “magic phlegm”!

Very different. They call it the mariri, the magic phlegm, and only some shamans have it. It’s really weird how they get it. They get it through the diet, and it comes in the stomach, and then up, and it burns inside them… It’s difficult to understand. The shaman will bring it up, and he will suck the dart or whatever that’s causing the illness out of the person, with the phlegm in his mouth. That acts as a protection—so the arrow doesn’t go back into him, and cause harm to him. He holds it there, then he spits that phlegm out.

The other thing is that they use perfume. So they put a perfume in their mouth, suck something out of someone, and then tsssscccccchhhhh! they spit the perfume out. Again, the perfume protects. Or else they have the perfume and they blow it over someone as a fine mist, like blowing tobacco smoke.

The perfume stuff is fascinating to me. It’s also used to modify the visions. An apprentice shaman puts perfume on himself; so again there’s a whole sexual aspect of contact with spirits. You’re preparing yourself by putting on nice clean clothes and perfume before you drink. There’s also sniffing perfume when the mareación is coming on, to enhance the visions. There’s a whole olfactory realm, or spectrum, with ayahuasca, as well as the auditory aspect.

Do you hallucinate smells?

No, but you can modify the experience incredibly with smells. With the aguardiente, with camphor. There’s agua de florida (flower water), and Tabu, different commercial products that they use. I’m still learning about this, it’s such a big, big area. There’s been very little research on this. In talking to Pablo, it seems there’s less and less perfumeros around. There’s ayahuasqueros, tabaqueros, paleros (who are tree specialists), toéros (who work with Toé). And from what I can gather from Pablo, there’s very few perfumeros left. It’s a really sophisticated thing, the perfumes they make are really powerful. Shamans will go to a perfumero to get special perfumes to protect them from sorcery or to heal an illness. Like you might sing to create patterns around you for protection, he will do that with smell, with odours. Pretty wild stuff!

When using perfumes with ayahuasca, does the odour make a transition into visuals?

Yes, that’s one aspect. It also helps to calm you down, it can reduce anxiety. But yeah, you see the smells, absolutely.

On ayahuasca, you’re incredibly suggestible, so all these things are tools. By virtue of having an intention, you feel like you can make it happen. There’s certainly a kind of self-hypnosis; and by implication, you can hypnotize the person who you’re healing. And by doing that, by convincing them that you have this power and that you’re doing this, that by itself will enable them to heal themselves.

So it’s like Paul McKenna as well as Terence McKenna!

There’s all sorts of things going on there. I don’t like to use the term “placebo”, because people go, “Oh yes, placebo, I understand it.” It’s like “archetypes”-we don’t actually understand these things. We see placebo as kind of like you’re pretending, or you think it so it works… I think it’s a bit more complex than that.

What are you trying to achieve with the film?

I’ve always been a filmmaker. I went to art school, and got into making Super 8 films, and after that I worked with bands, then went on to do Exploding Cinema, trying to create a whole alternative culture around film making. Then I got involved in raves, VJaying, further away from film making.

Then I went through an awful crisis in my mid to late thirties. I was experimenting with all sorts of different substances, like a mad doctor, getting hits and misses, after not taking any for a long time. I started falling apart, and this very difficult crisis lasted on-and-off for a few years. During that I discovered ayahuasca, and I just started shooting film. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing. I was interested in shamanism, and always had been since reading Casteneda’s books as a teenager.

On one of my trips to Peru in 2001 I went with a camera to interview Pablo Amaringo, after talking to him before and realizing he knew an awful lot. But there was no real plan about what the film was going to be like. It evolved over a period of time. When I was working with a production company after coming back from Peru, I had all this footage, and I said I wanted to do something with it. The film came out of that process. I started to see that my story was actually part of the film, and that’s what I should be looking at.

Then I went out to Peru again with a cameraman, to get more footage, and to start documenting the experiences I was having much more comprehensively. I started thinking about how my story and experiences would be the best way for me to try and understand shamanism, the mythology and so on. Otherwise it was just “funny primitive people” doing weird shit out in the jungle, which we have no bridge to; I realized I was the bridge to this experience, and that this was a powerful way to try to understand this. Part of my healing has been to try and understand what these people are talking about.

So the film’s come about as a result of several different stories: their stories and folklore, the shamans over there; partly, my own story; and the stuff I brought to it from Ireland, folklore that I’d collected there, some of which seemed to resonate with the oral traditions around shamanism I was hearing around Pucallpa. All these elements gelled together as an idea, Stories on a Stick.

At the same time, with me the director in the film, I started thinking about the whole documentary form. It’s an interesting way of interacting with the documentary process, which is seen as being objective; in a way I was “going native”, crossing over a line. About a year after I started doing this, these mainstream films started appearing, like Supersize Me and American Splendor. You could see the whole idea of documentary breaking down, using reconstructions and so on like in Touching The Void. This gave me the confidence to really push the boundaries of what a documentary could be. I was really interested in playing with the form like this, and of course the film lent itself to this sort of experimentation because it was about psychedelic states, dreams, mythology, memory and the supernatural.

Putting yourself into the film, deconstructing and reconstructing your experiences… Did this relate to or grow out of the experience on ayahuasca, of having the different parts of your psyche laid out before you, with an observer part watching?

I hadn’t consciously thought of that, but now that you mention it I’d say there’s something interesting going on there. It’s quite a cubist film in that way, in that there are all these different perspectives—even down to the whole thing of working with special effects, trying to create these visual metaphors. There’s a mixture of the diary form, from my own diaries, written and video diaries; there’s my own memory, which is very elastic; and there’s the special effects, trying to reconstruct internal, subjective experiences and create visual metaphors. People have said you can’t reconstruct these things, and you can’t. But since humans started taking plants, going back to Palaeolithic caves, there’s been representations of the experience; whether it’s just dots pecked onto a cave wall, the entoptics, the swirls, whatever.

Maybe they knew they were falling short of representing the whole experience, but they still felt compelled to mark it.

All around the Amazon, the face painting, the weaving, the pottery, it’s all there, it’s everywhere, those designs are integrated into all aspects of their lives. They were creating metaphors, connecting everything. The stick of maize becomes the vertical shaft, which the shaman travels up and down to the upperworld and the underworld, which has a cross at its centre: the four directions, north, south, east and west, a map of human consciousness. It’s incredible how it all integrates, right down to how smoke becomes a snake, or a rope, or a vine, or a ladder. Things morph into other things. It integrates the world you live in. And that’s a powerful thing to do. Otherwise you’ve got a world that doesn’t make any sense, and that’s terrifying.

Ayahuasca is made from the stem of the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi), almost always combined with the leaves of one or more of three compañeros, companion plants — the shrub chacruna (Psychotria viridis), the closely related shrub sameruca (Psychotria carthaginensis), or a vine variously called ocoyagé, chalipanga, chagraponga, and huambisa (Diplopterys cabrerana). It is in fact the companion plant that contains the potent hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT); but, while DMT is effective when administered parenterally, it is, when taken orally, inactivated by peripheral monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A), an enzyme found in the lining of the stomach, whose function is precisely to oxidize molecules containing an NH2 amine group, like DMT.

The ayahuasca vine contains three primary harmala alkaloids — the β-carboline derivatives harmine, tetrahydroharmine (THH), and harmaline. Harmine is the primary constituent, followed first by THH and then by harmaline. These three harmala alkaloids are potent reversible inhibitors of MAO-A. Thus, combining the ingredients of the ayahuasca drink allows the DMT to produce its hallucinogenic effect when orally ingested — a unique solution which apparently developed only in the Upper Amazon. Indeed, the MAO-inhibiting β-carbolines in the ayahuasca vine may also potentiate the actions of psychoactive alkaloids other than DMT — for example, nicotine from mapacho (Nicotiana rustica), or the primary tropane alkaloids from toé (Brugmansia spp.).

The question is: Apart from inhibiting MAO, do these β-carbolines contribute to the nature or quality of the ayahuasca visionary experience?

The accepted wisdom answers no. A study of the ayahuasca drink used by the syncretic religious movement União de Vegetal in Brazil, for example, concluded that the harmala alkaloids “are essentially devoid of psychedelic activity” at doses found in the drink.

A number of experiments with harmine — the primary β-carboline in the ayahuasca vine — would seem to bear out this assessment. The chemist Alexander Shulgin has reviewed the self-experimentation literature and concluded that harmine has inconsistent effects, which have in common that not much either pleasant or interesting happens — pleasant relaxation and withdrawal in one case; dizziness, nausea, and ataxia in another. Researchers who have self-administered harmine have reported an increase in belligerence, fleeting sensations of lightness, transient subjective effects, mild sedation at low doses and unpleasant neurological effects at higher doses, and, indeed, no “notable psychoactive or somatic effect.” Some researchers have expressed doubts that harmine is psychoactive at all.

Jonathan Ott gives several accounts of his own experiences with ingesting infusions of the ayahuasca vine or other β-carboline-rich plants without DMT additive plants. During one shamanic ceremony, he drank an infusion of the ayahuasca vine mixed only with a small number of guayusa (Ilex guayusa) leaves, which contain caffeine but no tryptamines, which he intended to counteract the soporific effects of the drink. According to Ott, the caffeine content was insufficient for that purpose; he had to fight off sleep. He could see, he writes, why β-carboline-enriched infusions had been used traditionally as sedatives.

However, there are two reasons to question the common wisdom. The first is the work of Claudio Naranjo, who administered harmaline — not harmine — to 35 volunteers, by mouth and intravenously, under laboratory conditions. Harmaline, he reports, was “more of a pure hallucinogen” than other psychoactive substances, such as mescaline, because of the number of images reported and their realistic quality — what Naranjo calls their “remarkable vividness.” “In fact,” he writes, “some subjects felt that certain scenes they saw had really happened, and that they had been disembodied witnesses of them in a different time and place.” The volunteers often described landscapes and cities, masks, eyes, and what are elsewhere called elves — vividly realized animal and human figures, angels, demons, giants, dwarfs. If this study is credible, there are grounds to believe that, among the β-carbolines, at least harmaline, at sufficient doses, has independent hallucinogenic properties, phenomenologically not dissimilar to those of DMT.

Shulgin’s review of the self-experimental literature with regard to harmaline provides some confirmation of the reports of Naranjo’s volunteers. A 500-mg oral dose produced nausea and a complete collapse of motor coordination — “I could barely stagger to the bathroom,” one person reports — along with eyes-closed eidetic imagery, and “tracers and weird visual ripplings” with open eyes. It is even more interesting to look at the effects of Syrian rue (Peganum harmala), which contains pretty much equal quantities of harmine and harmaline, as opposed to the proportionally much smaller amount of harmaline in the ayahuasca vine. Oral ingestion of ground Syrian rue seeds caused intense eyes-closed hallucinations of “a wide variety of geometrical patterns in dark colors,” which evolved into more concrete images — “people’s faces, movies of all sorts playing at high speeds, and animal presences such as snakes.” Oral ingestion of a fivefold greater dose, as extract, caused “zebra-like stripes of light and dark” — visual effects which had “a physicality unlike those of any other entheogen I’d experienced.” In a second trial at the same dose, the participant saw “strange winged creatures” and traveled to “jungle-like places, full of imagery of vines, fountains, and animals.”

Now, the amount of harmaline in any sample of ayahuasca vine or drink is extremely variable; it is a matter of controversy whether any infusion of the ayahuasca vine contains enough harmaline to cause the effects reported above. Jonathon Ott, whose views deserve respectful attention, says that the amount of harmaline in a single 200-ml drink of ayahuasca would be insufficient to produce the effects reported by Naranjo.

Yet the accepted wisdom is challenged by ethnography as well. Among mestizo shamans, an ayahuasca drink made solely from the vine is sometimes ingested orally for hallucinogenic effects of a particular “dark” nature. In addition, ayahuasqueros, virtually universally, say that it is the ayahuasca vine that provides the fuerza, the power, and DMT-rich plants such as chacruna that provide the luz, the light, in the ayahuasca experience. In Colombia, the shamans say that the companion plant brilla la pinta, makes the visions brighter; among the Shuar, the companion plant is not considered to have any hallucinogenic effects, but rather is believed to make the visions clearer, and is in fact occasionally omitted. The great ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes reports that certain Colombian Indians smoke leaves of the ayahuasca vine; under certain circumstances, my teacher don Roberto Acho recommends the smoking of the bark.

Schultes himself, at Puerto Limón, drank an infusion derived solely from ayahuasca bark: the visions he experienced were blue and purple, he reports — slow undulating waves of color. Then a few days later he tried the mixture with chagraponga. The effect was electric — “reds and golds dazzling in diamonds that turned like dancers on the tips of distant highways.” As my teacher don Rómulo Magin told me, visions with the ayahuasca vine alone are dark and dim; the chacruna makes the vision come on like this: whoosh! he said, moving his closed hand rapidly towards my face, the fingers opening up as it approached. Luis Eduardo Luna, one of the leading investigators of Amazonian mestizo shamanism, reports that often a larger amount of the ayahuasca vine is added to the ayahuasca drink than is needed for MAO inhibition, precisely because of its ability to produce strong visual hallucinations.

There is also some reason to believe that THH may have some role in the hallucinogenic effects of the ayahuasca vine, either by itself or acting synergistically with other β-carboline compounds. Indeed, in 1957 Hochstein and Paradies had already conjectured — “astutely,” in the words of Jonathon Ott — that harmaline and THH might have “substantial psychotomimetic activity in their own right.” Strikingly, among members of the ayahuasca-using União de Vegetal church in Brazil, experienced users seem to prefer ayahuasca drinks where THH concentrations are high relative to harmine and harmaline. They explain that such drinks deliver more “force” to the experience. It is therefore surprising that so little research has been done on THH. Alexander Shulgin, in his search of the self-experimentation literature, found only a single and entirely unhelpful report. “More studies on tetrahydroharmine,” he says, “are absolutely imperative.”

Similarly, additive and — especially — synergistic studies of harmala alkaloids have not been performed. The ethnographic evidence strongly suggests that interactive effects are important and are yet to be investigated.

Steve Beyer is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. His website and blog is at www.singingtotheplants.com.

For a week I was preparing with prayers, candles, intensions… Daime work at the Barquinha of Dona Gabriel each day… Came the 27th, a Saturday before the Semana Santa and the entity Don Rafael was going to operate me. Finally I am going to heal the pain in my back which does not leave me alone ever since I had hernia of a disk two and a half years ago. It is normal that such treatments are done over 3 ceremonies (three 27th) but I had only one (two to come).

I did not know I was supposed to bring something to lie on, and sitting was never as difficult as it was that night.
I did not know what to expect… we were seven or eight people in a dark room, drinking daime and waiting. Are the mediums going to come in? Would They heal me?? Would Antonio (Toni), the medium with which Don Rafael works, come and assist me with Arruda and prayers?
Hour after hour, Glass after glass, we were left alone while there was a ceremony going on in the church. It was my appointment with Don Rafael, no one else. When an entity makes an appointment, he keeps it.
Sao Miguel was clearing the space and Oxalá passed by once in a while. I felt my light body being penetrated, stretched, snapped… like Iansa and Sao Miguel having a dance within me. Flashes of light, colours, patterns… but in fact, during the operation I did not feel much. I saw a saint/nun dressed in light purple healing the young man who sat opposite to me. After many hours, towards the end, I have seen a bent old man sitting beside me, and I assumed it was Don Rafael. A Preto Velho? (No, he is not Only, but perhaps he is As well).

Back at a friend´s house, after the treatment, I have touched the bed… my body was a baby’s body, one again. Nothing I could not do with my body. Not a thing I did not want to do. An amazing joy of existence filled me, the felicity of having senses. Diving deep into each tiny sensation; one finger touching another, feet crawling against ears, back moving against floor. Feeling each and every cell from within. Feeling each and every cell from without. Deep Vipassana. Deep gratitude for every pulse of the skin.
Deep sensing turns into seep sensation turns into sensuality. Baby is reaching puberty. Amazed by the perfection of my own body. Being allowed to touch and love and adore my own perfection without the disturbances that stopped me from doing so at the time.
Don Rafael gifted me with the teaching of self love, and the totality of self acceptance. Don Rafael gifted me with the memory of being newborn, and the choice to be in whichever physical memory I want to, the choice to let go of the armours, the protections I built during all stages of life when my vulnerability was met with roughness. Don Rafael showed me the choice of letting go and choosing to feel, The joy of feeling, The courage to be divine, The courage to hurt.
I felt without a safety net, without a bodyguard… but was I really? I had Sao Miguel with me. Somehow his presence mixed with the feeling of Greg and a great opening, sensuality and joy.
I couldn’t sleep, kept moving. The joy of moving- each movement is a blissful dance, a wholeness (yoga). Breathing, stretching, exercises became bliss once a gain.

I had received a Yoga/ Dance /Meditation routine.

And…

I met Don Rafael.
He was there that night- A teacher, a Friend, a lover, the guardian of the great mystery.

My back?
I have a choice now, to remember.

(For Greg who asked and I never answered)

Whilst the Great Spirit is Whole, God expresses itself through an unrolling, an evolution in temporal reality whereby new evolutionary forms and intelligences emerge to express the transcendental possibilities of Divinity. This is an outflow of love that cannot be contained. Thus we have life, thus we have our lives, our relationships, our circumstances.

And how often we walk dull and fogged, evading ourselves. For many years I was unable to fully look another in the eye, to be from essense to essense, because I believed the tears and sicknesses of the society I’ve been born into were my own personal shames. I incorperated it. I am prisoner and jailer both, though the door is always open to leave the samsara.

An angel of the plants took me beyond the body anchored in space and time, to the periphery of the universe, and I looked back upon the great creation, and I saw in that immensity a pattern in the world systems, a dance of souls, a galactic pillgrimage across many lives.

It is time for us to claim the lived gnosis that we dance from life to life, and we must sew carefully our deeds for they create the conditions of rebirth. As I journeyed into my past I approached the struggle of birth, and as I moved through birth I felt the karmic resonances that had conditioned the circumstances of my present life. A poor indian dying on the ground from sickness the invaders had brough to the land, my dying mind filled with wrath and sorrow, but also in my curses an incomprehension that these people were not ‘other’ but also One with my being, just as my family and the trees and the eagle and jaguar are One with my being.

The actions and thoughts of past lives condition the ground for ones present existence – particularly the extremes that swing back and forth in the universes orientating toward unity, urging beings toward the comprehension of unity even within the polarised situations of war and invasion, genocide and injustice : unity is still the underlying ontological prime.

Great empires rise and fall as the archetypal geometry of the universe unfolds and elaborates in its song of unity, and we are scattered across the aeons. Scattered by war and strife, tragedy and misfortunes. Many of us have cursed in our dying thoughts the actions and violence of the perpetrators, and in doing so we have been born within those very empires. The universe teaches unity above all else, it is always just a transition to something else. And lo, we find ourselves again on the other side, as we dance from life to life, birthing and returning in the great creation.

Thus we grow and learn, transmigrating across world systems from life to life over, aeons, learning and refinding ourselves in the changing times. And we continue this round, until… ? Until the unity of creation is fathomed, and the deepest knowledge flowers within this relatedness.

With this knowledge we can forgive our burdens and realise that death is but a birth, a refreshment, a balm and a re-creation. And the rememberance brings a solidity… the changing circumstances and problems of life attain an epiphenomenal status compared to the deeper and older story. We must not live in distraction ! This world is a beautiful and deep miracle !

Fill the boat with only that which is real, for the passing times will not sustain illusion. Following with love and compassion the ancient path, in the great round, ceasing the causes of the chains of strife, and rebuilding life anew.

Transparent Creation

When one comes to the end of oneself, the body and mind persist, but they are simply running along, and one is in the free fields of spirit.

Aya makes my ego fear and tremble, but it feeds my soul. It humbles the loud and decieving inner voices, and opens up a place in which I feel one with the hyperdimension of spirit.

In that hyperdimensional state, i seek to align myself to the heavenly spheres, and be a warrior of juramidam. the juramidam hears me, and instead of destroying me, works to destroy the illusion in me.

Beyond the crippling negative self-images, there are no serious crimes committed against my brothers and sisters, and that most often, I want the best and feel compassion. A mommentum of self forgiveness accumulates, leading me out of my despair.

Edifices of illusion persist like holographic structures, but with the help of seal medicine I swim underneath them, up and out of the titanic wreakages of history, and open into the beyond.

The pure One sends me an angel to deliver me from the idea that Ayahuasca is always hard and tough work. An angelic presence beautifies my consciousness, and I am overwhelmed by its lightness, highness and purity.

A true light pierces the encrustations around the heart and this is the beginning of a turing, a deep reorientation, from someone who looks at the past and regrets, to a reborn one who faces the future and the light.

Standing upright, despite the sorrow in the stomach and the urge to sleep and die. Stand and persist to shake off the discarnate entities that hijacked life and lived through the body and ego.

Walk the flowery path to the vaulted dome of grandfather and grandmother trees. Underneath, thousands of tiny trees grow and and nurtured. We are those seedlings, protected and under the guiding force of the ancient ones who have come before us and have fully become.

To be a vessel, become one with its ultimate way through learning in the Gaian realignment. We are sons and daughters of the pure One, we all are. Listen to the pure One and make choices according to that will. Anything asked for or desired, will be paid for, by burning, burning all the ego-serving and trivial motivations surrounding goals, until the ways are pure.

There are many bands, many levels and spectrums of the mareacion, and with the pure and good songs sing and dance toward that transcendental place, the celestial court, where the King sits on his fairytale throne, the professor of professors, who is our friend, as from vast places and strange places we all draw close to him for guidance.

The wisdom of plant teachers gives an upbringing most of us never had, gives a true education, heals institutionalisation, and points the way toward the great story of how this came to be, momment to momment.

I feel like I have become a whisp of air upon a high mountain, nowhere to be found at all, with light shining right through.

I will end a hummingbird
sipping nectar from the sun.
Past is ashes. today is a new day.
The frequencies of light play.
out of the maze of self-grasping
The angelic domains, mandalic, encircling
And a new era has begun.

I have been recovering from viral meningitis but my return to a feeling of life-force and health had been slow and impeded by winter and food poisoning. So basically, very run down. The weekend was very much involved in deep somatic cleansing.

After I drank the first glass of some highly concentrated Ayahuasca (banisteriopsis caapi and psychotria viridis) I sat in silent meditation, with no effects until about 40 minutes in.

From a momment of complete sobriety, the next momment I was bowled over by the blazing symbol of the Cross and the descent of the Christ archetype, the presence of a loving brother, whose emination proceeded to instantaniously burn away with great power the obscurations around my heart chakra. From one minute being totally closed, I was immedately connected with lifeforce and love to my immediate family, and silently wept for the love I have for them, and lamented for the blockages and confusions that exist between us. I felt deep love for my younger brother and he appeared before me in the nature of his soul or essense – not his earthly self. And he was a prince, a beautiful shining man who sent blessings and support for me in my work, and assured me that I could always call upon him.

My mind kicked in strong at this point and I ‘descended’ a few levels into the chthonic astral, the blazing, refractive hall of mirrors with amazing plantlike octopoid entities seemingly wanting some attention. The feeling was extremely psychedelic and hyperdimensional. I grounded in my solar plexus and persisted with my concentration. I went through some issues about self-responsibility. Early in the session a man had brought a sacred dagger, and I had mixed feelings about such a weapon being in the medicine space, due to my own paranoia of whether I could trust myself. The symbol of the sword was one ancient quintessence of masculinity and responsibilty. The voice came ‘put the penis down and take up the sword of your father’.

The transformation was an interuption of the ouroboric, self-referential, introverted and entropic feedback loops which kept my mind ‘playing with itself’ in a way analagous to physical masturbation. I had several embodied and mental representations of this closed-system loop. The sword blazed before me in the astral and it was a different kind of sword than I recieved from a cosmic bodhitsatva several years ago. This sword was a shard of energy hewn by God for those that put themselves to the work of the Acknowledgement, it is the sword of self-responsibility but it is also a symbol of rejecting the path of harbouring and entertaining twisted ways… it is a means of breaking bondage to Sheol and standing firm with cetain kind of entities. It is a different movement than incorperation or acceptance, it is less receptive – it is more individuated and affirming of a higher truth in the presence of jarring and disturbing forces.

When I took the sword I was presented with the Maelstrom, which is like a door opening to a howling realm of all kinds of shells, creation very far from the irradience of the source, and seeking to move further from the source in their own egoic agendas. I saw the pathways in which I have been hijacked throughout life, I felt deeply into early psychedelic experiences where I had ‘unconsciously’ moved into these places, and where I had used magic to align myself with those forces because of passing glamor, intellectual pride, and quasi-pleasure. I saw the fate of those that take arrogant and twisted paths, holding something back from the Great Spirit in the mistaken belief they can aquire something and hold onto it for themselves.

I saw the movement of partiality and lack of openness shading into a gradual and pernicious diminuition of character and of light. Pay Attention ! This life is a journey from Dark to Light, through the moral and spiritual conundrums we live within. I understood the nature of Sheol and how deep I have been, up to my neck, and what work it takes to repair oneself.

At this point of extrication I came face to face with evil. I wanted to run away, to move my body, to escape, but since the confrontation was spiritual, there was nowhere to run. I remembered the sword, and the truth of the heart, and sat, and stared back, praying for mercy and grace and light and strength. I prayed to these entities of the realm of shells, to “Soften and Know Yourself”. I never believe it is too late.

I came to one of the dominions of ‘lost angels’ – Los Angeles… my spirit particulated into several eminations and I descended into crack houses, to abide with the poor spirits there, in their sorrow and disorientation. I gave my love within this hell, and gave thanks to the vine that lets me do this work.

As my thoughts turned to the vine I went into the foundry of evolution, the Pangaean couldron of the deepest primordial rainforest, where lizards evolved over aeons into birds, where simians played in the tree canopies. The richness, baroque, elemental purity and creativity enlivened me, and there I saw the vine, sinewy and silent, snaking around the trees in the ancient gardens. Its meditative presence was profound, and I understood something of why it is called the Maestra or Madre of the Garden.

I was taken by two resplendent angels into the spiritual matrix of the earth’s creation and the sacred geometry of bio-spiritual evolution in a series of unfathomable visions. I felt deeply the influence of the sun and the irradient clear purity informing and designing the very structures of life with an encoded divine plan. I saw humanity as a crystalis, a method for generating Angels in the unfathomable clear light. I saw the work of purification as the burning of the crystalis around the divine manifestation – the fruit of what we may be, represented by the angel wings – the wings that let us soar in the astral.

I felt that the Acknowledgement, as I call it, which I suppose you could call the Galactic Alignment with the milky way, or the Day of Judgement, or the Singularity, is very near and all our dates are a mere approximation. We live within short days of mercy where we have the oportunity to align, to soften ourselves, to do as much psychocognitive archeology as we can, so when this Acknowledgement comes, when this vibration as deep as the cosmos comes, and the world of illusion passes away, that we are upheld by the love we have all shared, recieved, channelled, that our hearts have been decent and we have been in this world for more than ourselves, and we have ‘put ourselves on the cross’ – burnt karma, done that hard work, because it is the right thing to do.

In this place the continuum of ancestral and spiritual life was a continual reality of revelation. This revelation was a perfect dialogue between the ancestral/underworld/historical and the light/present/celestial realms, I was mediator seeking to bring together the opposites into restored unity by intent and prayer.

I felt no longer that God has left its creation. Instead, all manifest life was the face of God, the surface emination, looking outward toward itself. I felt the interaction between the group as a jewelled web, reflecting love energy in innumerable forms and flavours. The universe is something that surfaces as the infinite spirit flows, and its magic is the magic of God, the Lila. I felt the divine light as dripping crystal fire from every centre, radiating through a divine spectrum of archetype, angel, solar and planetary formations.

The whole-being felt the transience of the biological, and felt that the sole purpose for my present manifestation was to burn karma, to burn the sins of the fathers, to forgive, move on, and refresh the planetary so the energy was clear enough that a more perfect image of the celestial could arise in space-time. In the face of the mystery of death and the infinities of time and space I consecrated and sanctified the work and entrusted my heart to the highest Light.

I felt blessed by innumerable teachings pouring into heart. Incredible human wisdoms about life and the relation of the transpersonal to the personal. I felt strongly the benefits of this light and energy as it radiated and refreshed inner stagnation with its celestial, solar flare vibration.

Ultimately, I found unity in the solar, light continuum dancing and scintilating through All. I cease to exist, ‘I’ am not in creation. The diamond earth shines in the inherent purity of its diamond life. Sensitive to every occurence, heart still beating, yet the mind has ceased to be an entity. It is simply the world and the world is it.

I know that in time even the most lost atoms of mind will discover in the innermost centre of its constituent nature the indivisible light, that oneness, which shares in the indestructible purity of the Whole. To bring love and unity to all facets, to open relatedness between the shadow and the light, the dichotomies, so they are seen in unison as complimentary and sacred first principles of God emination.

Santifying and consecrating the heart to God, always placing ones being and faith in the highest Light.
“We are bacteria”
We are here.
“We are doomed”
Here We Are, NOW.

What next ?
Warm Heart
Good feeling
Kindness.
And the garden of Eden which is just manifesting as we love one another.

I saw the creation of a New Earth, and incarnated in that garden. The colours were electric. It was multidimensional, coming through senses and channels I do not possess in my earthly state. The elements were running free, everyone was alit with eyes, eyes, eyes of wonder at the vividness of this freshly hewn world, fresh from the foundry of creation, with snow on the mountains, and fresh water in the fountains, and that we all find ourselves there, in a world that reverberates with Love and Peace.