By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Mexico

I’ve spent most of this week watching American television and movies. I leave the TV on all night long. I toss and turn with my bad back, and bad lungs, catch a rerun episode of Two and a Half Men, or CSI, and conk out again. Then I awaken to the U.S. morning talk shows. It’s a grueling regimen, only for the strong. Or the lonely. For periodic relief, I switch to Mexican television (be patient, I really am going somewhere with this). Mexican TV is not one iota better than US television, but is veeerrry heavy on the booty. More than heavy. Astronomical. Think all-but-bare tits and ass close-ups every fifteen seconds, straight through commercials, dramas, comedy shows, history shows, and even the news where possible. Every show but the bullfights and that old nun who comes on at ten PM, who invariably drives me back to the U.S. channels.

Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world’s a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state’s 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.

This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.

The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions.

For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.

However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape. Go live in a shack in the woods. Call that escape. But everything in the outside world continues to run in accordance with the humming energy of the hologram. There is no cutting our umbilical link to the womb of this illusion, this mass hallucination. There is only getting a longer umbilical cord, closing your eyes, and pretending that what the rest of the nation does has no effect on you. We were all born and raised in that womb. We can no more divorce the neurochemistry and consciousness it shaped in us, than we can deny that we had an earthly mother and are of her tissue. Our consciousness is born of the hologram’s connective neural and electrical tissue.

That common womb of American consciousness is dying. Slowly or rapidly, depending on how you assess the global ecocide and peak everything, it is dying. There will be resuscitations along the way, more massive infusions of money, fear and the rawest sort of fantasy fed to a mood and commodity drugged public. Still, its condition is terminal, because the hyperdrive consumer culture it was built to sustain, is itself unsustainable. Its appetite ate the world. In fact, so voracious is its appetite that even if our “consumer economy,” (legalized feudal theft) sees a recovery, and resumes the level of growth required just to keep capitalism alive, it will die just that much faster. It is not in capitalism’s DNA to care about the death of the earth. Nor is it in the brain chemistry of an American satiated on prime beef and sailing across the landscape at 70 miles per hour in a $40,000, steel exoskeleton from General Motors, to care. Hominid gratification is what it is — hard wired — and there is no circumventing it.

The system has just begun its crash, and already we are seeing an armed infantilized nation wail, hurl blame and do horrific things, the worst of which we do to one another (excluding sending predator drones after Middle Eastern school kids). Surveillance, witch hunts, destruction of civil liberties, and the government inching toward star chamber trials for those who do not display correct traits. Citizens embracing totalitarianism as stability in the face of the ultimate instability — the death of the planet.

The political regime or philosophy does not exist which can turn this scenario around. Slow it down, maybe, but put things in reverse, nope. Not when six billion mouths are munching at one end of the last noodle, and at the other end a fraction of a billion well armed technological people want the entire noodle. Not when life is already so damned cheap you can buy a girl slave in Haiti for twelve bucks, or 50 child slaves for your Asian sweatshop for less than the cost of a new car. Or an American working man for half of what it takes to support a family, then throw his ass over the company fence when he’s no longer needed. Or bury him in mines as he cries out in Jesus’ name, blow him up in Iraq, and Stelazine his kids minds and souls under the hot lights of the hologram, readying them for “the labor market.” Schenectady or Soweto, life is dirt-cheap and getting cheaper everywhere on the planet.

Meanwhile, gangster capitalism needs that hologram to maintain the illusion that life is not cheap, and that Jennifer Anniston’s ass can be yours in mind and dream (Personally, I’m a Julianna Margulies fan — The Good Wife”). And most of all, “The Gram” is required to keep its captives deluded and sated enough to remain productive and consuming — not to mention hating the right people — right up to the last moment before total collapse, and they are no longer needed. The higher owning/investing class is safe, no matter what happens. Oh sure, as Edward Bellamy wrote, a few of them topple from their high perch on humanity’s coach during the hell bent journey, but their class remains.

What happens to the rest of us in that great, sweating, moaning throng who have drawn the coach these centuries? What will remain for us on ruined plains of collapse?

Here is what I believe will remain. Reality and the truth, and the opportunity for spiritual evolution, which, in the end, I think will include most people. And much suffering. The reality of the world has always involved suffering. Despite the ballyhoo of modern science and technology, just as much suffering remains, more actually, given our increased numbers on the planet. Suffering happens to individual human beings and there are far more of those now. Of course, fat cat NGOs and governments deal in percentages and rates, so they will not have to account for the increased millions of miserable beings. We have more humans suffering — and not just from poverty either, think of depleted uranium, toxic waste, sweatshop slavery — than we had humans on earth a couple hundred years ago.

The hologram has, and still does, prevent Americans from grasping any of this. Instead, the hologram allows us to believe that life can exist without suffering. We actually achieved that state for a while, too, by forcing the suffering on unseen people elsewhere. We accepted the hologram’s one voice to the many as truth (not that we had much choice, The ‘Gram was all we knew), then let our souls and national character necrotize in the warm bath of self-gratification and statist hubris.

Nasty picture ain’t it? One surely painted by a bitter, sick old man who hates America. Years ago, my fellow countrymen used to ask if I hated America. They finally quit asking me when I started answering, “Hell fucking yes!” But I don’t hate Americans. In fact, while I do not believe in “hope” — that superstitious, childish wishing upon a star — I do believe America is once again, for all the wrong reasons, the last best hope of the world. If we do not succeed in destroying it first.

Clearly, we have taken an unimaginably disastrous course, and intend to take everyone else out with us. Yet we have only done what most of the world’s nations would have done, given such brute power and wealth for such a time. Perhaps more accurately, done what most of the world’s governments and leadership would have. So long as nations have hierarchical leadership, they will have escalating hierarchical greed, power hunger and destructive folly — and therefore, eventually approach hierarchical evil at some point. It may be an old saw, but power does corrupt.

Study us. See how an essentially good people (although the Native Americans would never agree) went wrong. After all, we were born the same unblemished child as everywhere else on the planet. And even now, given what has happened, one cannot fully indict all the “little people,” past or present. My granddad was a decent guy until the day he died. So were my dad and mom. And I try to be. But all of us can be rendered blind by faceless machines not entirely of our own creation, and then made submissive beasts to the coarsest among us. Ask any German. Or Hutu. We can be manipulated to believe that the rules do not apply to us, as in the cult of American exceptionalism. Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. I’ve been there and back several times in my life, and I am sure of that. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade.

Inside most Americans is a globally brattish child. Thanks to our endowed natural resources (since squandered) and to armed national theft abroad, the American has not suffered enough to become a responsible adult on the planet. I suggest that others learn from our example and do differently while they still have the chance. Take heart that they may yet live in a country where capitalism’s nihilistic dynamo has not built up such a head of steam. There are still some left, but as near as I can tell — and mind you, I don’t know shit — their leadership is caught up in the same elite games and traps. National leadership is its own moral and spiritual trap.

Who am I to give advice? Nobody. But this is the Internet, and any dick brain with a keyboard may do so.

My advice is to resist pride in anything said to be national, whether it be prosperity, healthcare, culture, competence, social cohesion and identity, or whatever. Pride and courage do not live in the same house. Courage, which has little to do with blood and guts, but everything to do with sacrifice, chooses to dwell alongside humility.

Again, what will be left after the big collapse? Perhaps after a period of terror, violence and chaos, when the undeniable on-the-ground truth becomes apparent, through ecological disaster, war and other events, a more positive national cathexis will occur. If it does, it probably will not resemble anything we can conceive of in these times. If we can get past the terror involved from our present apprehensive vantage point, it is easy to see why positive national, even global cathexis may be unavoidable.

Cause for well-reasoned optimism exists. Its way the fuck out there, but it’s there. Not that it is something to cling to, or even pursue. Clinging and desire are the cause of all suffering in the first place. Doing so only prolongs suffering, personal, national or planetary. The Buddhists are right about that one. So are the Baptists when they say “The world gets right when the people get right.”

The big problem at the moment though, for us as sentient beings, is:

What to do when I get out of bed each day? Give money to the Democrats? Move out of the country? Stay and fight the bastards?

Throwing money at frauds and fools doesn’t work. Moving to Mexico or Canada takes money in a time when money and jobs are scarce everywhere. As for staying and fighting, really fighting, there is not one person reading this who is going to go strangle the sleazy fucks having martinis on Wall Street with their pet Senator. Nobody reading this is going to instill genuine physical fear, which is the only thing such lizards might respond to. We are left to work within the system, as per the hologram’s directive. Their system. Ha!

The answer, to me at least, is to do the most obvious thing first. And I do mean obvious in the most mundane sense. Like fixing breakfast with all the contemplative awareness possible. Seriously. The tiniest right action, the action in complete unself-conscious natural awareness, connects to all the rightness in the universe. And the universe is always right. Because it owns all of our asses, plus black holes, and those teensy pinholes in time that physicist say make you an immediate neighbor of Shakespeare and mastodons — only you don’t know it. It owns the molecules of the ages. Everything.

This proposition is unappealing to Americans and just about everyone else in the western world. To be perfectly honest, a big screen TV, the Internet, and tickets to a Rams game are more accessible and immediately gratifying. Right action in the moment does not light up your neural pleasure centers like cheap sex or jalapeno Doritos. However, I am trying to do it anyway, at least until the opportunity for cheap sex presents itself. When it does, it will most likely be the right action for that moment. Funny how things work.

In any case, by the mundane right action of breakfast, I mean fixing breakfast to locate one’s heart in that particular day. Then proceeding toward the least harm one can discern to do, with full knowledge that we always do harm, whether we intend to or not (the world is full of subtle unintended violence). Eliminate whatever suffering in sentient beings one encounters, whether it be in bums, dogs, kids, plants, or the rich fucker next door moaning over his enormous tax bill. To him that is suffering. There’s no sliding scale about this shit. I once worked for a guy who bawled when some kid keyed his Porsche. Misery is relative. Compassion is sublime.
Besides, this is what the heart is designed for — to serve as a compass for the spirit, regardless of how one defines spirit or denies its existence. What the hell, we gotta call the best in ourselves and in our species something, so we can connect with it. The mind has some terrible limitations in doing that sort of thing. As in, it cannot. Necessary as rationalization is for survival, reason ain’t everything. In the big picture, it is a small ingredient. Merely an asset, a monkey tool.

Even thinking seems ultimately to lead to the value of non-thinking, which is to say, pure human existence and consciousness. Pure unadulterated duration. This is the most fearless plain, the one on which all things are manifest as they really are, in their purest form, before social and personal hallucinations settle over them like a shroud.

In such times as these, that hard bright plain is bitch to find, much less travel. For sure it starts with the moment called now.

And right now, good god, it’s two AM! Time for the nightly Law and Order rerun on Mexican TV.
Hologram take me home.

I’ve created a dappled story of our evolution including everything that’s happened for us from the beginning of the universe and onward, even into the future. this evolutionary sequence is a blend between a delvish drop, the book thinking like a mountain, by john seed, joanna macy, arne neass and pat flemming as well as from brian swimme’s the hidden heart of the cosmos and also from joanna macy’s book despair and empowerment in the nuclear age.This drop is intended to be read out loud while the listeners meditate on the words as they flow through… for this purpose, feel free to read these words, while gently flowing in and out of the reading to visualise and imagine yourself as each of these life forms as you are prompted. I have left the words just about as they would be read to an audience of listeners, so that they can be taken and used for just that purpose by any of you. Feel free to further experiment with this visualisation, and guide people through this process. The best method to be successful with this meditation, is to know that it is easy to remember all this, because all this information is already deeply embedded into our genetic memory. please feel free to post a reply, and let us know what our story was like for you.telektenonik embrionik total recall recapitulate.

As organic expressions of life on earth, we have a long and panoramic history. We are not yesterday’s child, nor limited to this one brief moment of our planet’s sotry: our roots go back ot the beginning of time. We can learn to remember them. The knowledge is in us. As in our mothers’ wombs our embryonic bodies recapitualted the evolution of cellular life on earth, so can we now do it consciously, harnessing intellect and the power of the imagination. Certain methods help to trigger that remembering. They are various guided meditations focused on our evolutionary journey, evoking our fifteen billion-year story as the Universe.

Taking this opportunity to think about the more-than-human world from a more-than-human perspective : if you are open to a little ego dissolution this will lead you through a shamanistic visualization sequence. The intention is to prime our creative imaginations, and explore a path of evolutionary remembering, mourning, honoring the extinct and taking responsibility as steward-healers of the biosphere.

If we peek through the frameworks of the evolutionary history of life on our planet, it is clear that our species has single handedly wreaked havok upon a sensitive interconnected web of life which is far larger than we can possibly imagine… or can we?

Let us go back, way back before the birth of our planet Earth, back to the mystery of the universe coming into being. We go back 13,500 million years to a time of primordial silence… of emptiness… before the beginning of time … the very ground of all being … From this state of immense potential, an unimaginably powerful explosion takes place … energy travelling at the speed of light hurdles in all directions, creating direciton, creating the universe. It is so hot in these first moments that no matter can exist, only pure energy in the form of light … thus time and space are born.

All that is now, every galaxy, star and planet, every particle existing comes into being at this great fiery birthing. Every particle which makes up you and me comes into being at this instant and has been circulating through countless forms ever since, born of this great couldron of creativity. When we look at a candle flame, or a star, we see the light of that fireball. Your metabolism burns with that same fire now.

After one Earth year, the universe has cooled down to some 13 billion degrees centigrade. It now occupies a sphere of perhaps 17 billion miles in diameter … This continues to expand and stream outward …

Some 300,000 years pass while great space grows to about one billiionth of its present volume and cools to a few thousand degrees – about as hot and bright as the visible surface of the sun. The electrons are now cool eneough for the electric force to snare, cool enough for matter to take form.

Matter begins to assume its familiar atomic form for the first time. The first atoms are of hydrogen, then helium and then other gases.

These gases exist as huge swirling masses of super hot cosmic clouds drawn together by the allure of gravity … these slowly condense into forms we know as galaxies and our own galaxy; the Milky Way dances among them. Purged of free electrons, the universe becomes highly transparent by its millionth birthday.

Within the Milky Way, our sun was born about 5 billion years ago, near the edgs of this galaxy while the cosmic dust and gas spinning around it crystalized inot planets. The third planet from the sun, our own Earth, came inot being about 4.5 billion years ago.

The ground then was rock and crystal beneath which burned tremendous fires. Heavier matter like iron sank to the centre, the lighter elemetns floated to the surface forming a granite crust. Continuous volcanic activity brough tup a rich supply of minerals, and lifeted up chains of moutnains.

Then about 4 billion years ago, when the temperature fell below the boiling point of water, it began to rain. Hot rain slowly dissoloved the rocks upon which it fell and the seas became a thin salty soup containing the basic ingreditents necessary for life.

Finally, a bolt of lightening fertilized this molecular soup and an adventure into biology began. The first cell was born. I was there. You were there. We all trace our genetic and epigenetic lineage to this event, as does every cell of every living thing on Earth. Every single cell in our bodies is a direct descendent in an unbroken chain from that original cell. In this way we are intimately, energetically and physically related to all living things.

Through this cell, our common ancestor, we are all related to every plant and animal on the earth

Remember that cell awakening. Be that cell awakening (as indeed you are). We are all composed of that cell which grew, diversified, multiplied and evolved into all the biota of the earth.

What does it feel like to reproduce by dividing into two parts that were me, and now WE go our seperate ways?

The cell evolved into forms of bacteria, some of which created the oxygen that began to form the biosphere. 1 billion years ago the first multicellular organisms evolved as algae and then seaweed, creating an atmosphere that killed much of the bacteria and make it possible for further developments of plant life. 600 million years ago simple water creatures emerge.

Now I am a creature of the water. For 2.5 billion years, simple forms of life wash back and forth in the ocean currents. Imagine them as I speak their names: coral … snails … flatworms … jellyfish … sponges … During this time there is a vast ice age on the earth wiping out many prehistoric gene pools. Imagine yourself as perhaps a simple worm of an early coral living in the warm sea. Feel your existence at this time for it remains within each of your cells, the memories of this period in your childhood as Gaia.

FISH .:. This is followed by the evolution of fish and other animals with backbones. How does it feel to have a flexible backbone? How do you move through the water as a fish?

Lying belly down, now, staying in one place, begin to experience a gentle side to side rolling, with your head torso and lower body moving all as one. How does the world look, feel, sound? Be aware of your backbone, your head and gills. What does it feel like to move through the ocean, to listen through the ocean?

500 million years ago came fish, the first vertebrates to emerge from the evolutionary chain of being. By 25 million years later green plants had moved onto the land and began to cultivate the soil strata for animals to follow. Millipedes and centipedes were amongst the first animals to travel along the land, cultivating dry habitat around 450 million years ago. Spiders and Scorpians developed soon after. Early, wingless insects like silverfish could be seen on the new greening landscapes.

300 million years ago the earths geography began to develop as a PanGaian supercontinent, a period of unbridaled evolution begins at this time. Insects developed wings and 2 feet long dragonflies could be seen flying through forests of ferns, moss and horsetail. During this time seeding plants now sweep across the fertile lands and amphibians emerge.

AMPHIBIAN .:. The first animals to emerge from the seas were the amphibians … slowly use your forearms to drag your body along. Pull with your left and right together … as amphibians, we are still very dependent on the water, especially for our reproductive cycle.

250 million years ago comes reptiles and dinosaurs.

REPTILE .:. It isn’t until the evolution of the reptilian amniotic egg that we are liberated from our dependence on water and able to move completely onto dry land … still crawling on your belly start to use legs coordinated with arms, alternating from one side ot the other. Notice how our range of movement and perception changes … By 200 million years ago, we have successfully moved onto the land.

During the next period of 50 million years there are two major extinction events which decimate the earths diverse population. About 180 million years ago Pangaia begins to split apart and continents form, these filled with huge dinosaurs and increasingly forested landscapes. 130 million years ago pollen containing flowers form and beautiful new colors come to the gardenic earth. During this time the first proto-mammals begin to develop. 65 million years ago a huge meteor strikes the earth killing most of the dinosaurs and making more space for mammalian development.

EARLY MAMMAL .:. As mammals we become warm blooded. Remember how as a reptile you used to have to wait, sluggish, for the sun to warm you? The sun now fuels your metabolims in a more complex way. What are the advantages of this?

Living in holes, alert, sense of smell, sampling molecules from the air. To breed before being consumed. All of us are descended from this pedigree for 4 billion years. At every step billions fell by the wayside but each of us was there. In this game, to throw tails once is to fall by the wayside, extinct, a ghost.

Imagine yourself as a lemur, or perhaps as a small cat … Notice how supple your spine feels … Now with your belly off the floor, begin crawling on your hands and knees. Hwo does this new-found freedom feel? How does your head move?

Now our young need to be looked after until they can fend for themselves.

EARLY MONKEY .:. Begin by moving on hands and feet with greater lightness, leaping and climbing,. Discover more flexibility in movement of the spine, head and neck. Make sounds. Notice increasing playfulness and curiosity. We move trhough the trees, running along brances and swinging through them, our strong opposable thumbs giving us the grasp we need. Our sensitive fingertips (with nails instead of claws) able to judge the ripeness of fruit or groom. Agile balance and keen vision develop. We eat food on the spot where we find it.

GREAT APE .:. Our bodies become heavier and stronger. We can squat erect but use knuckles to walk. Experiment with balancing. How does the wrold look and smell? Communication?

Ten million years ago a major climactic change begins and the forest, home of the ape, begins to retreat to the mountains and is replaced by woodland and open savannah.

EARLY HUMAN .:. It is here on the open savannah that we first learnt to walk on two legs … standing on two feet with strong jaw thrust forward. How does it feel? Vulnerable but inventive and adaptable. Able to look up and easily see the sky. We postpone eating food until it can be brought back to camp and shared. We live in families, discover language, catch fire, make art music, tools … the complexities and subtleties of cooperating successfully with others in a group involves the development of language, the telling of stories, the use of tools, the making of fires.

About 100,000 years ago, during the warm interglacial period, a new hominid species emerges called Neanderthal. We bury our dead, sometimes with flint tools – many in a fetal position suggesting the return to the womb of mother earth for rebirth, often in graves lying on an east/west axis – on the path of the sun which is reborn every day – our practice of burying the dead shows a dramatic increase in human self-consciousness. Now physical evolution stands still and cultural evolution takes over.

By our archeological records, 4000 years ago marks the beginning of recorded human history. This evolutionary storyline shows that our roots reach much deeper than our civilization. To this day the first few weeks of human embryonic development is identical to the embryonic development of all animals, reptiles and fish. We are connected.

Although just a blip in the deep ecology of our world, in a few thousand years we have managed to rape and pillage the nature that used to grow strong in this very spot. Imagine a rainforest of thousand year old trees surrounding you here. Those trees, plants and animals are the ancestor spirits of this sacred space.

Being responsible stewards of the earth means taking to heart the current planetary healing crisis. What are the long term consequences of gmo seeds, monocropping, fish farming, deforestation, desertification, waste mis-management, urbanization, chemical fertilizers, terminator genes, acid rain, global warming, fossil fuel depletion, species extinction, cultural appropriation and warfare?

In Canada we are hosting some of the last Whooping Cranes, Peregrine Falcons, Burrowing Owls and Beluga Whales. Through the toxic destruction of their natural habitats, and introduction of alien species into the ecosystem, these beautiful creatures are now on the endangered species list.

Canada has seen the total extinction our Labrador ducks, Passenger Pigeons, and the flightless relatives of the penguin, the Great Auks.

Hear the silently sung state of grace from Gaia and all her living denizens. Understand how countless dna links in the co-ecology of the Earth have been lost through our disfunctional human development strategies and irresponsible energy usage. Since everything is connected, we must revision the way we relate to our process of being in the world.

FUTURE HUMAN .:. The possible human: to the extent that we can surrender our tiny self to our actual, biological being, we can then manifest the powerful erotic energy of evolution and then our personalities slowly come to partake of the nature of evolution, the nature of this planet home.

Sitting down quietly by yourself … in your mind’s eye, open to any glimpses images, forms that are waiting to emerge as future human life … potential in us that is waiting to awaken a larger ecological self, living fully as part of nature expressing our full potential in watever way may occur to us … form.

Now slowly come back and opening your eyes, find a partner close by to you and sit with them. Taking turns speaking, going back over the stages you remember, describing in the first person what you experienced, what you noticed about each life form. Using the presnet tense – “i am a single cell and i notice …. “ You are now recounting your evolutionary journey, recounting how the cosmic journey has been for you so far. You have 5 minutes each to do this recounting, so try to capture the parts that were most vivid for you. Be sure to listen to the partner who is speaking silently, wtihout interjecting.

And so now we come to the present moment once again, and what now shapes our world. Our industrial society with its bombs and bulldozers. We are at the brink of time. We are know this at some level of our consciousness. Each of us, at some level, knows that we are doing ourselves in – that Gaia herself, our self, is in danger. And at some level of your consciousness that is why you are here. Perhaps in some ways you came here to heal yoursleves on a personal level and find your power in terms of your individual lives. True enoguh. But we are also here because we know our planet is in danger and all life on it could go – just like that! And we fear that this knowledge might drive us insane if we let it in. Even those who are working hard to eliminate these dangers often find it hard to fathom the scope of these realities.

So we are now at a point unlike any other in our long history. I supspect that we have in some way opted to be here at this culminating chapter or turning point. We have opted to be alive when the stakes are high, to test everything we have ever learned about interconnectedness, about courage, to test it now when Gaia is ailing and her children are ill. We are alive right now when it could be the end of conscious life on this beautiful water planet hanging there like a celestial jewel in space.

Our foremeothers and forefather faced nothing quite like this, because every generation before us took it for granted that life would continue. Each lived with the tacid assumption. Personal death, wars, plagues were ever encompassed in that larger assurance that life would contineu. That assurance is lost now and we are alive at a time of that great loss. It effects everyone, weather they work for the logging companies or the peace movement. And the toll it takes has barely begun to be measured.

In so-called primitive societies rites of passage are held for adolescents, because it is in adolescence that the fact of personal death or mortality is integrated in to the personality. The individual goes through the prescribed ordeal of the initiation rite, in order to integrate that knowledge, so that he or she can assume the rights and responsibilites of adulthoodl. That is what we are doing right now on the collective level, in this planet-time. We are confronting and integrating into our awareness our collective mortality as a species. We must do that so that we can wake up and assume the rights and responsibiliteis of planetary adulthood – so that we can grow up! That is in a sense what we are doing here.

When you return to your communities to organize, saying no to the machinery of death and yes to life, remember your true identity. Remember your story, our story. Clothe yourself in your true authority. You speak not only as yourself or for yourself. You were not born yesterday. You have been through many dyings and know in yoru heartbeat and bones the precarious, exquisite balance of life. Out of that knowledge you can speak and act. You will speak and act with the courage and endurance that has been yorus through the long, beautiful aeons of your life story as Gaia.

There is something more to human consciousness, to our whole experiential journey through life, than we currently acknowledge.

Interpretation of the nature of religious experience or ‘transpersonal states of consciousness’ varies widely. Many people who have experienced the integrative healing, creatively inspiring and psycho-spiritually transformative power of transpersonal states are less likely to dismiss their experiences as neuro-chemical aberrations, accidents, or self-hypnosis. Impressed by the extremely coherent information and stunning organisational complexity of visionary journeys, they are more likely to be left with a revived sense of wonder and conviction that there is more – in some sense – to human consciousness, to our whole experiential journey through life, than we currently acknowledge.

This does not however mean we need immediately to adopt simplistic spiritualistic or religious ideas. Religious vocations originally developed around maintaining the tenuous relationship with transpersonal dimensions of consciousness, and preserving the cumulated knowledge of these shamanic journeys. But when the experiential basis is lost, this cumulated knowledge degrades into static dogma that can be twisted and bent to exercise power and prejudice, and the rituals that once constituted the symbolic scaffolding for journeys into immaterial information fields (Bricoleur 2003) become empty re-enactments without any authentic dimensions.

Yet despite the memetic theory of religion espoused by popularist scientists such as Richard Dawkins, there exists a latent and biologically grounded potential for the human psyche to undergo reorganisations, an integrative arc of healing, that includes encounters with experiential realms strongly reminiscent of world spiritual mythology. This visionary or shamanic transformation can induce integrative healing, creative inspiration and existential transformation. It is this visionary journey into the endogenous imaginal dreamtime that is the psychobiological ground of most spiritual mythology and imagery.

Today our extreme occupation with the seemingly external has reduced our ability to enter mytho-poetic states. Scientism and the devaluing of the arts pervade the education system. Anyone expressing behaviour beyond the norm, risks loosing everything to a primitive system of medical psychiatry. Modern psychiatry, maintained by the mega-profitable pharmaceutical industries, has an institutional ignorance of the powerfully cathartic and complex dynamics of transpersonal states. Its implicit materialist and linear paradigm and poorly trained workers are ill-equipped to deal with the crisis and transformation of meaning and flux of axioms in peoples lives.

Yet, the shamanic narrative persists and has growth throughout the 20th into the 21st century, disseminated by radical anthropologists, ethnobotanists, scholars, artists, and therapists. The message remains that humanity has a dual nature, a life of the external world, and the life of the inner, unconscious. And that if these worlds can be reconciled, and made one again, then the fertility circuit will be maintained, and the human condition in time redeemed.

The rediscovery of the dynamics of transpersonal healing is one of the exciting aspects of the times we live in. It opens up therapeutic forms that do not depend on external verbal exchanges but through opening doors to dynamic experiential journeys whereby the self-healing capacities of the psyche can come into play. However with transpersonal healing comes certain challenges, including confrontation with pain and fear, the death of old ways of seeing the world, and inner journeys involving phenomenological realms and powers that mainstream society does not accept the existence of.

Shamanism and Mythic Recreation in Capitalist Cultures

Many people earnestly wish to work toward a mythic restoration of the West. Thousands of westerners are working toward an actualization of latent potentials via a revival of Shamanic ritualistic forms. Much modern interest in shamanism has focused on the use of psychoactive plants intrinsic to the healing and visionary practices of shamans. Yet the Westerner must be very careful in any approach toward integrating the plant traditions. We lack an integrative framework and wise experienced elders.

Particularly, the background of sickness, drug abuse, illusion, escapism, trend, toxification and destruction of our bodies and environment endemic to our society may taint our notions of psychoactive plants. In this context we may use them as unusual means of hurting ourselves. Without deconditioning from these unconscious self-destructive behaviors it is very difficult to approach the profound reality of shamanic practices without dragging in the dysfunction of our own culture.

That said, entheogenic plants are powerful tools and it is quite possible to use them in a truly life-positive manner to provoke growth in new directions and to creatively solve challenges on ones life journey. It is said that shamanism is not about the nature of reality, but about the life and death of human beings. In short, these tools can enable us to live better and cope with the prospect and passage of dying better.

Vegetalista

Shamanic ecstasy is so innate, primary, rooted in biology, and transcending of cultural differences, that shamanism is theoretically recoverable by even demythologized Westerners. It is very helpful to look to others cultures, whose Shamanic traditions are relatively more intact, for the purpose of reviving the techniques of ecstasy and ritual approaches, in order to develop a pan-Gaian shamanism appropriate to our global civilization and contemporary knowledge of ecology and cosmology.

In the New World, Shamanic practitioners are the keepers of an incredible amount of ecosystemic knowledge, such as the seasonal variations governing foods and medicines. Before the genocidal invasions of the Europeans, this sophisticated; highly connected knowledge enabled sustainable agricultural practices that supported millions of people. The peoples of the Amazon live within the infinitely complex ecosystems of the Amazon Rainforest, abundant with reptiles, insects, amphibians, birds and mammals, rivers, and forests. Accordingly, the plant kingdoms of the rainforests are a primary orientation of life, spiritually and physically.

In the Mestizo populations growing on the banks of major Amazon tributaries throughout Peru, the shaman of plant knowledge and medicine, who communicate with Sacha Runa (elemental spirits of the plants), are known as Vegetalista. The vegetalista regards plants as teachers, hosts to elemental spirits that can communicate with human beings. Ayahuasca is a revered and respected sacred medicine, considered a spiritual and physiological panacea par excellence. Ayahuasca is regarded as a Grandfather or Grandmother, because its medicine can instruct in healing, visionary insight, and the art of using other plants for various purposes. Sometimes it is referred to simply as la medicina – the Medicine. It is employed across the Amazon basin for the treatment of disease and to access to the visionary or mythological world that provides revelation, blessing, healing, and ontological solace (Dobkin De rios 1972, Andritsky 1984).

Ayahuasca Tea : La Purga

The use of Ayahuasca may well be primordial, its use extending back to the earliest aboriginal inhabitants of the region (Schultes and Hofman 1992). The ethnographer McEwan (2001) believes that abstract liminal patterns such as zigzags, serrated lines and geometric forms found on traditional textiles, pottery and body art of various tribes represent the perceptual threshold between everyday and transpersonal realms of consciousness. These relics, combined with an abundance of myths describing the origin of Ayahuasca as deeply intertwined cosmologically with the creation of the universe, earth, and tribal people, indicate a long history of human use.

Banisteriopsis caapi, often refered to as Yage, constitutes the common base ingredient of Ayahuasca tea. B.caapi contains beta-carbolines that exhibit sedative, hypnotic, anti-depressant, monoamine oxidase inhibiting, and occassionally entheogenic activity (McKenna DJ, Callaway JC, Grob CS 1996). The vine is traditionally married with another plant – Ayahuasca is a synergystic potion. Typically it is mixed with a tryptamine carrying plant. The foliage of Psychotria viridis (Chacruna) is the principle admixture of Ayahuasca potions employed throughout Peru and Brazil. In Columbia and Amazonian Ecuador, the plant Diplopterys cabrerana (Chaliponga) is often used instead. The combination of Yage vine with Chacruna or Chaliponga is sometimes known as a marriage of power and light . This marriage is necessary to unlock the shamanic mareacion and its visionary mythological vistas. Without marriage, the Yage vine alone is a purifier, a purgative, a physical medicine and anti-depressant but generally not a visionary catalyst.

It is a consistent belief that for Ayahuasca to teach its medicine it is necessary to follow a program of cleansing via diet, sexual abstinence and purgatives for at least 6 months during the period of apprenticeship, for preparing the body and mind of neophyte so he becomes perceptive of Sacha Runa and other energetic forces. This may be prolonged to several years in one has a true vocation to becoming a powerful, disciplined shaman. In some cases the spirits will appear and prescribe the duration and character of the diet. No salt, sugar, alcohol, pork, peppers, fats, farm chicken, certain fruits and vegetables and cold beverages can be ingested (Dobkin de Rios 1973, Chevalier 1982, Luna 1984). The most important food prohibition is the avoidance of pork. The idea is that pig, farm chicken, fish and cold beverages espantan a los vegetales – make the plant spirits escape. Some of the plant teachers can be jealous; if the diet is broken they may punish the offender by causing an illness. This is expressed by the saying that the plants kutichiy , which means to take back teachings, good luck or health that has been imparted by the medicine plants.

Purification through purging and diet allows one to exist in a higher energetic state. Ajo Sacha – Mansoa hymenaeamanilkara, and Mucura – Petiveria alliacea are both used in limpias , cleansing baths, and are considered to aid in the expulsion of saladera (phlegm) from the organism. The curanderos prepare the leaves of Mucura or Ajos Sacha into an aqueous infusion, then the client washes themselves with the liquid and rinses the mouth out to cleanse them of the accumulated saladera that is causing bad luck and ill health (Dobkin de Rios 1981). The vegetalista whistles the appropriate icaro over the patient whilst painting the person with the liquid (Luna 1984).

Synaesthetic Languages

Ayahuasca changes perceptual modalities in a dynamic yet nonetheless lawful way. This aspect of pattern within its effects makes the visionary state an inter-subjective territory and opens the way to interesting forms of healing and communication.

An Icaro is a magical song, a prayer, a melody – either whistled or sang – that functions in such a way. These songs are vibrations that smash the symmetry of the air into patterns, and these patterns are carried via the nervous system into consciousness, where the magic melody asserts energetic effects. They are forms of prayer that induce psychobiological effects and prevents people from becoming stuck in an aspect of the visionary experience. Don Francisco Montes Shuña (a Pucallpa-born maestro, of Capanahua descent, founder Sachamama Ethnobotanical Garden, cousin of Pablo Amaringo) defines the icaro as an “air or force charged with positive energy” – i.e. with healing power – “that all curanderos store inside their body”, and are used to pull out the negative energy from the body of a patient. The plant with which a curandero has dieted, is regarded as the teacher of these power songs. A plant maestro may have learned many songs that to a great extent represent his power within the realms of Ayahuasca healing and visionary gnosis.

The Ucaylai, one of the headwaters of the Amazon has a reputation within Peru for being an area of intense shamanic activity. For the Shipibo, Conibo and Stetebo who live in this region, patterns elicited by shamanic states of consciousness are regarded as a synaesthetic ideographic language that has become integral to their aesthetic sensibility. 200 years ago their buildings, skin, ceramics and textiles, as well as mysterious shaman books (now lost, see Gebhart-Sayer, 1985) were all adorned with their distinctive, delicate pattern style.

Shipibo-conibo vegetalista say that geometric visionary designs are the symbolic visual aspect of healing songs (icaro s). The shaman says, “My song is a result of the design image”. Nishi Ibo (the spirit of Ayahuasca) reveals before the shaman quiquin design medicine, as luminescent geometric configurations. The shaman heals his patient through the application of the song-design, which saturates the patients body and is believed to untangle distorted physical and psycho-spiritual energies, restoring harmony to the somatic, psychic and spiritual systems of the patient. (Gebhart-Sayer, 1985)

“Essentially, Shipibo-Conibo therapy is a matter of visionary design application in connection with aura restoration… the shaman heals his patient through the application of a visionary design… every person feels spiritually permeated and saturated with designs. The designs remain with a persons spirit even after death…” (Gebhart-Sayer, 1985)

“I asked Don Basilio what comprised the arkana (shamanic defenses) he had sung over me… He took one of the beautifully decorated skirts used by Shipibo women, and pointing to the design, he said to me, “I put these in your body.” This was a confirmation of the work carried out by Angelika Gebhart-Sayer in which she shows that the patterns used in the body paint, textiles, ceramics and other utensils of the Shipibo are symbolic representations of songs (icaro s) (L. E Luna, 1991)

Ayahuasca Healing

There is clearly a great deal of valuable traditional knowledge that has developed over countless generations of humans working with Ayahuasca. But what does it feel like to imbibe such a magic potion ? Describing such states of being is a challenging creative task. In fact Ayahuasca is so tremendously novel a potion that even for regular drinkers the territory can be unpredictable, and responses also vary between different physical and mental constitutions.

Drinking the tea often entails a phase of purging and resolving traumatic experiences that have imprinted and in some way constrained the body and mind (see the work of Stan Grof and Christopher Bach etc.). This purging is a deep cleansing, thorough and not an easy thing to experience. It could be described as something of an ordeal. As part of this process, conventional ways of organising or ‘thinking about the world’ are undermined through a shift that occurs deep in our emotional body. This phase has been described in the ethnographic literature of shamanism, as a shamanic initiation involving dismemberment. An author, writing of the state of psychiatry in the 1960’s, spoke of ‘decompartmentalisation’. All the conventional categories are flooded to breaking point, the dams burst, and new connections are made.

The clearer ones system, the better able one is to receive and integrate spiritual energies the knowledge of Ayahuasca. The concept of subtle body phlegm is an important one in New World shamanism. “Vegetalistas say that Ayahuasca is needed for cleansing all the flemosidades (phlegm formations) that accumulate in the intestines” (Luna 1984). The flemosidades are believed to arise from environmental toxins, certain foods, trauma (soul loss), and moral transgressions such as ill will, etc. Analogous to blockages of chi in the meridians, or prana in the nadis, flemosidades disrupt the smooth functioning of the body and mind. Clearing the flemosidades prepares the body to journey deeper into health and wisdom. Therefore, the clearer and healthier one is, the easier it is to manage the physical symptoms of Ayahuasca cleansing.

When the body is loaded with toxins, pesticides, fertilizers, and fungicides from poor food, pyro-toxins from tobacco smoke, ozone and other oxidants from air pollution, chlorine, lead, phosphates and fluoride in drinking water, Ayahuasca gives the body an opportunity to expel some of these poisons via vomiting and diarrhea. Ayahuasca is known by Mestizo s as ‘la purga’. It is helpful to remember what purging represents – a state of purgatory, a sometimes-painful place where the light of heaven burns up ill deeds. The fire of hell is the light of heaven; they are one and the same emanation of the Clear Light of awareness upon which we project our benevolent and wrathful realities.

The purge is experienced as a radical detoxification occurring on physical, energetic, emotional, psychological and spiritual levels. The vine can feel like something living, snaking through the intestines then insinuating itself into every capillary of ones being, leaching out things that are causing harm. This phase of the journey can be driving, relentless and sometimes shocking in its similarity to ‘exorcism’. Alternately it can be experienced as incredibly gentle and merciful, like being in the infinitely tender arms of the Great Mother or angelic beings. Much is determined by how aligned and transparent one is, and how much one is able to witness and stay present rather than fall into reactive and defensive patterns. Staying present with humility of mind is a skill that some people progressively develop through drinking.

Journeys into Divine Creation

Many westerners approach Ayahuasca because they believe it may provide information that may elucidate the ‘meaning of life’. Rather than providing complete answers, Ayahuasca respects the great mysteries of life, and makes them more fertile. No final answers or conclusions snap into view. Like science, practices that facilitate transpersonal expansion of consciousness – yoga – are methods of knowledge, gaining information through empiricism.

Perception broadens, and so does knowledge of the weave of the world, which increases understandings of the patterns and forms of life, and this allows increasing levels of appropriateness and right relations within life praxis, because the relationship between self and world is better understood. But there are always fresh vistas, and no finalities have come into view. If anything, wisdom is shown to be responsive and dynamic, not a collection of static pieces of knowledge. There is a time for everything, and no single rule for anything. Only the fearful mind seeks premature confines, and in a ‘hermetic’ box life dies.

“The spirit is at play, energy is eternal delight, both matter, life and mind are expressions of the cosmic logos. This world is the expression of the divine logos that the primordial man and woman create through each other. At play in the fields of creation, characterized by differences and boundaries, Shiva and Shakti play in creativity and love. Shiva and Shakti is man and woman, liberated and in love, who have set each other free. This universe is an overflow of this love, an expression of the exuberance of this love.”

Ayahuasca unfolds experiential passages that can often constitute an organized, intelligent experiential journey. The sequence and content of the experience can appear lucidly intelligent and deeply meaningful for the drinker. These journeys can include deep encounters with ones biographic history, constitution, web of relationships, and even participatory engagements in mythopoetic realms of staggering realism, beauty, organizational complexity, and profoundly meaningful narrative, which subsequently catalyze changes to paradigms of cosmos and self.

Ayahuasca teaches that we often live in a habituated state of contraction and fear, and that it is possible through spiritual work, through listening to our voice of conscience, and through learning discipline and compassion to straight paths in our lives on earth, to move beyond this contraction and fragmentation to higher levels of our human nature, where our powers of imagination, intuition and sensitivity become abundant.

Some of the deepest and simplest lessons that Ayahuasca has impressed upon me is to find my prayer and stay present and grounded in love, because life is a gift. What does it mean, to say life is a gift ? For me it means life is a very precious and beautiful thing, because it is the means to be in this chthonic, mineralogical, biological garden of innocence and experience. It is a fascinating, bizzare and wondrous space of experience, encounter, adventure and creativity. This is not to ignore its painful, traumatic and shocking aspects. But the terror of existence is fully balanced with its love and beauty, and death is the end of our limits, a wondrous, phoenix-like release from the bondage of gravity, illusion and pain.

In this way, Ayahuasca is not a means for escape or a catylist for transcendence. It is primarily a teacher of deep immanence. Whilst it reveals a greater backdrop of spiritual and cosmic/energetic interconnectivity, this great weave always re-converges in the dancing, sentient monads of consciousness that are the beings that create the Gaian web of life. Ayahuasca does not divest us of responsibility to ourselves, our families, our bioregions, our planet, or our relationship to God, Mystery, Great Spirit. Rather, it teaches and emphasizes deep interconnectivity.

One of the prayers recited to consecrate the space within Brazilian Santo Daime rituals talks of “perfect communion between my higher and lower self”. Ayahuasca brings the distant polarities of our being to bear upon each other, so that the light irradiates the unconscious, revealing the vistas of our ancestral and genetic karma, for forgiveness to be received. The aspects we carry that are incompatible with this vast vision of life are addressed and worked upon. The rigidity, pomposity and self-inflatedness of the ego-simulation are shown up for what they are – creations. And so an opportunity is presented to re-create ones life, through ones innermost attitudes and ethical praxis.

In the pattern of the human essence exists the impulse for creation: To create, play, evolve, and to explore the infinite varieties and manifestations of love. Humans reflect the cosmic creativity. Through this journey, the self accomplishes a regeneration of its imaginal capacity and its wholeness. Through unblocking the fertility circuit, unblocking tense, fear based control mechanisms, those pranic creative energies through which we are most aligned to spirit, can be expressed, as a gift to and from the source. As Tolkein has written:

“You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word … You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God… and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a “sub-creator” and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.”

Unity

“I feel deep connection with the Earth, that this love is in some way coming from Gaia and through me like I am a channel. The love, freedom, peace and harmony of creation, her boundless love, too great to fully accept, we have so many partitions within us that prevent us from being clear channels, givers and receivers of Love, Peace and Harmony. Our Earth suffers through a split between our culture and the freedom and love of creation. We fear death and wall ourselves up in our ego, in mental constructs. We halt the flow and fresh prana turns to putrefying ponds within this creation. This is a shadow within the earth. I felt again the need for love, for love to come through us and return unto the winds, fires, waters and earth. And love to the forgotten and the cast-away, the dead and the despised – the cosmic placenta of creation. I gave love to the forgotten, the underworld. I felt immense compassion rising to meet the darkness for healing.”
Samuel, 40

Transpersonal ecstasy obliterates the fragmentation between organism and environment, soma and psyche, Thanatos and Eros. It is to heal in the most fundamental way, to move beyond the life and happiness squandering, agitating and knotting force of fear itself, beyond the dissociated, enclosed, contracted fear state that exists as the underlying tone of many peoples consciousness, the same impulse of fear that causes us to separate from nature, to wall ourselves up, to deny change, and so deny death and rebirth.

In shamanic states of being, relations with phenomena previously experienced as separate and conflicting become understood in their greater harmony. This is the unitive experience; of unity remembered, of re-cognising all animals, plants, the planet and the cosmos as aspects of a vast ecology of spirit. As Thomas Berry put it so well, “The universe is not a collection of objects, it is a community of subjects”. In the perception of this greater, divine unity, that tone of underlying fear is reduced. With reduced fear is the reduction of the urge to control. We begin to allow ourselves to be open system, in the flow of transformations and pattern of relations that is nature. Where this leads, is deeper and deeper into the profound mystery of Life, existence, eternity, and a renewal of the energies of healing and creativity, a reconnecting of the fertility circuit that is the foundation of life.

Shamanism is a means to perform this important work. One of the lessons of shamanic work is that of our deep unity with the creative force of the universe. This gnosis heals psychophysical blockages that have hindered us, it dissolves toxic shames and double binds under a sense of wisdom and love we may not have known we had in us. This is a recovery of something special and sacred, and perhaps innate and natural, within the profaned human condition.

This healing represents the end of survival – and the beginning of Life.

Ayahuasca, is a word from the Quechua linguistic family of Andean-Equatorial South America. It means “vine of the soul” and refers both to a large forest liana (Banisteriopsis caapi), and a strong infusion (tea) made from its woody parts, or with one or more other plant admixtures. The most usual addition to the brew are leaves from the shrub Psychotria viridis. These plants are endemic to the Amazon Basin, where they are part of a much larger plantas maestras or “teacher plants” tradition native to that part of the world. Such plants – many of which have emetic, purgative, cathartic, dream-inducing and/or visionary effects – are used to facilitate states of consciousness that are believed to open into the worlds of spirit.

In the typical ayahuasca preparation, the molecular basis for this lies in the betacarboline complex (harmine, tetrahydroharmine, etc.) and the indole dimethyltryptamine (DMT). These are part of a structural group that includes neurotransmitters, molecules used to effect internal communication in the human body. In ayahuasca, these dialogues are deepened and expanded to include all manner of elemental, plant, animal, ancestor, and deity. These then appear less as an “other,” and more as participants in the metabolisms of yet larger bodies, such as regional ecosystems, or the earth itself.

Such organismic cosmologies are common to many indigenous peoples. These often suggest the existence of a reality a priori to material existence, one of mythic causality in which all beings are mutually transformative and exist as ontological equals, as “persons”. Dialogues with such a world are effected through imaginal exchanges (dreams and visions), dance, prayer, song, and their attendant feeling states and sensory awareness. These describe the body’s innate capacity to converse with what is presumed to be the affective life of the natural world. Ayahuasca allows access to this generous bandwidth of communication, and its repeated use cultivates familiarity with the ecology of souls which inhabit it.

Sophisticated eco-cosmologies have therefore evolved among Amazonian peoples around the use of ayahuasca and other plantas maestras. These tend to order such practical activities as healing, divination, procreation, and hunting within the concept of an all-encompassing fertility circuit. This view understands the world to be nourished by a finite supply of vital force that must be equitably shared. Human greed, waste, and disrespect can easily disrupt this flow, and the repercussions are thought to express themselves in personal and social ills. Spirituality and medicine are thereby integrated into various social norms which tend to preserve ecosystem integrity. Examples include food, sex, and hunting taboos, and the cultivation of kinship relations with plants and animals.

The world of nature as revealed by ayahuasca typically appears as a society, a culture of spiritual relations. The teachings of ayahuasca are acts of healing, remediations in energy flow and balance whereby one “becomes” the lessons. One so healed may then enter into transformative relations with larger organizing forces, with greater ecosystemic intelligences, which in turn tend to increase human self-consciousness, inspiration, revelation, and sense of mission. When these traits are understood within the context of spiritual evolution, ayahuasca takes on a religious significance.

The idea of healing body and soul has formed the essence of religious beliefs of peoples the world over. Similarly, one can conjecture that the supplication of humans to the healing power of nature is the source of much of what we know as religious thought. In this regard, the role of plants and fungi in the origins of religions has been explored by a number of authors. Perhaps the most well-known example is Soma, the mysterious plant (or fungus) recounted in the Hindu Rg-Vedas as a vehicle of religious ecstasy.

Plant-inspired religions can be understood as acts of guidance by an elder community of species to a younger one, the human. They are concerned with successful co-creative relations within the community of nature and the organismic and spiritual growth that these bring about. Such religions allow the initiate to cultivate an expanded sense of self, whereby one’s actions in the world are reviewed in experiences of right or wrong, heaven or hell. This often results in a greater awareness of, and respect for, the spiritual ecologies that govern the world.

These understandings have been lost to much of religious life as humanity civilizes itself into increasingly mono-species (exclusively human) social arrangements and dialogues. Politicizing, intellectualizing, and influences that move divinity off-planet have all played their roles in denaturing the religions that have co-evolved with Western industrialism.

However, a reformation of plant-inspired religions has been occurring since the late 1800s. These often come of syncretizing influences in places of sudden and disruptive culture change. Examples include the evolution of the use of peyote (Lophophora williamsii ) into a pan-Native American religion; and the creation of churches that employ iboga root (Tabernanthe iboga) in colonized central west Africa. Similarly, ayahuasca-based churches were born in the Amazon basin with the influx of colonists and forest extractivists.

In the late 1920s, a rubber tapper named Raimundo Irineu Serra, or Master Irineu as he came to be called, had a series of visions in the forests near Acre, Brazil brought on by his use of ayahuasca. In these he was visited by the Queen of the Forest in the guise of the Virgin of Conception. Through her he received the doctrine of a new religion based on spiritual healing. Ayahuasca took on the name of Daime, after the invocation Dai-me Amor, Dai-me Luz. . . (“Give me Love, Give me Light”), and the religion became known as Santo Daime. Master Irineu moved to the nearby town of Rio Branco in 1930, and there began to cultivate this religion with a small group of adherents.

A number of hymns began to be received by church members in the form of “singing murmurs,” considered to be gifted from higher worlds. They invoke an eclectic pantheon that includes Old and New Testament figures and various saints, spirits of sacred plants, forest animals, devic presences, and heavenly bodies. These, along with accompanying musical instruments and formalized dancing, became an important part of church ceremonies and source for doctrinal development.

As the religion grew in Brazil, it spread from rural caboclo (mixed-blood river dwellers) communities into new settings and populations. These include the urban middle class, health professionals, and intelligentsia, as well as more marginalized groups, such as drug addicts (the churches have become well known for their work in helping people to overcome addictions), counter-culturalists, and the urban poor. This growth stimulated the formation of sects. For example, the Barquinha (“little boat”) group emerged in the 1950’s; it accommodates aspects of the very heterogeneous Umbanda (mediumist) spiritualism.

Yet another rubber tapper, Jose Gabriel da Costa, encountered the use of ayahuasca with native Indians in the forests bordering Bolivia and Brazil. In 1961 he founded the U.D.V. (União do Vegetal) which soon spread into the urban south of Brazil. Among the more hierarchical and organizationally sophisticated of the ayahuasca religions, the U.D.V. stresses a less “active” service, with long periods of silence interspersed with conversational sharing.

Despite differences, all churches share similarities that derive from the integrative nature of ayahuasca itself. It is considered a sacrament, and like its predecessor soma, a divinity, both “Christ’s blood,” and a forest spirit. The replacement of the bread and wine Eucharist with ayahuasca brings an eco-spiritual force into communion with Christian saints and their prescriptions of love, peace, charity, and fraternity. By unifying the naturalized and the civilized, it appears to work as a bridge over the 500 years of culture clashes wrought by the colonialist enterprise. In this way it births new cultural forms of indigeneity, ways of belonging to the land that reflect the needs of the various peoples brought to it.

A notable example is the 1982 founding of a community called Vila Céu do Mapiá (Mapia) by Santo Daime church members. Located in a large forest reserve in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, Mapia is intended as an ecological-communal “social laboratory” where the teachings received through the Daime can be practiced in daily life.

The world affirmed by ayahuasca, and in fact all teacher plants, tends to run contrary to that enacted by industrial-growth cultures. Hence those individuals that convert often become less amenable to mainstream mores, values, and ways of life. The media in Brazil and elsewhere have observed this, and in recent years have accused the churches of contributing to the breakdown of society; this by inducing its followers into acts of fanaticism, such as leaving one’s city life and disappearing into the forest.

Antipathy to the forces of change unleashed by sacred plants is likewise reflected in the modern War on Drugs. Under international pressure, Brazil added B. caapi to its list of controlled substances in 1985. Following a series of appeals and investigations it was removed from the list with provisions in 1987, and fully exempted in 1992. In that year its legitimacy was celebrated with ayahuasca ceremonies featured as part of the inter-religious vigil of the Global Forum section of the Earth Summit conference in Rio de Janeiro.

As the use of ayahuasca spreads outside of Brazil, it continues to run into prohibition policies. In recent years the churches in Europe and the U.S. experienced a number of seizures and arrests. Many court cases are pending, though a decision on May 21, 2001 in the Dutch court acquitted the Santo Daime church under the constitutional right to freedom of religion.

Modern ayahuasca religions are born both of the sylvan cosmos and a humanity sundered from that world. They therefore have great implications during this era of ecological crisis. To reestablish communicative relations with medicinal plants is to reconnect with a perennial source of assistance to humans. What such plants can do for individuals, they can do for communities; in this way they engender healing cultures. This process continues in Brazil (e.g., the Centro de Cultura Cósmica has recently sprouted from both Santo Daime and the U.D.V. influences) and in other areas of the world, where such movements are more covert.

These religions are prophetic in considering themselves microcosmic realities of a future-healed earth, yet for them, the future is now. They presume that as more people awaken to this reality, a relational indigeneity appropriate for the times will become increasingly accepted as a new cultural norm, and the planetary crisis will then pass. This vision is millenarian in scope, and suggests the inevitable evolution of a heart-opening ecotopia. To this end, a Daime hymn sings of a “new life, new world, new people, new earth.”

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1976 Cosmology as Ecological Analysis: a view from the rain forest (Huxley Memorial Lecture 1975). Man. 11:307-318.

Ruck, Carl, R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Jonathan Ott

1992 Persephone’s Quest. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT.

Each doctor, each vegetal que enseña, each species of teaching plant has what mestizo shamans call a madre, mother, or genio, genius, or espíritu, spirit, or imán, magnet, or matriz, matrix. Informally, we generally translate all these terms simply as the spirit of the plant. In addition, mestizo shamans have a wide variety of protective birds and animals and plants, which we call, too, something like protective spirits. Yet, as Graham Harvey points out, those who are willing to argue endlessly about the meaning and applicability of the term shaman often refer to spirits as if everyone knows what the word means — as if, he says, “the word were self-evidently universally understood, and the beings universally experienced.”

So: what do we know about these spirits?

In many ways, they act very much like imaginary objects. First, spirits lack the sensory coherence of real things. That is, primarily, spirits cannot be touched, unlike real things, although they can often be heard and occasionally be smelled; although, in fairness, perhaps I should add that I have felt spirits — for example, rubbing my head — but never been able to touch them. Second, spirits are, unlike real things, not public, in that other people, in the same place at the same time, do not see the same spirit objects or persons I see. This point can be disputed by claims to the contrary, or by a claim that shamans, at least, can perceive the ayahuasca visions of others; but, as far as I know, these claims have not been well tested. Third, the behavior of spirits is unusual; spirits appear and disappear suddenly and unpredictably, fade away gradually, and transform themselves in ways inconsistent with the generally recognized behavior of real things. Fourth, the appearance of spirits may be significantly different from that of real objects and people. For example, the spirit of the ayahuma tree often appears as a person without a head, contrary to the normal appearance of real people, at least living ones. And the spirit of a particular plant may appear in an entirely different form at different times— for example, as male or female, old or young, with one or several heads — unlike real objects and people, who are generally fairly consistent in appearance from meeting to meeting.

On the other hand, spirits appear to have many of the qualities of persons — self-awareness, understanding, personal identity, volition, speech, memory. They are autonomous; they come and go as they wish; they may unilaterally initiate or terminate a relationship with a human. They can provide information or insight that the recipient finds surprising or previously unknown. They may have relatively consistent personalities — helpful, harmful, callous, malicious, indifferent, or tricky. Relationships with spirits may be demanding, dangerous, and exhausting, just as with humans.

Anthropologists have often expressed their puzzlement at this combination of attributes by asking dichotomously whether the spirits spoken of by their indigenous informants — and sometimes experienced by the anthropologists themselves — are or are not real.

The classic anthropological answer is no. Nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward Tylor coined he term animism to define the essence of religion as “the belief in spirits” — that is, as a category mistake made by young children and primitives who project life onto inanimate objects, at least until they reach a more advanced stage of development. Anthropologist Michael Winkelman, who has done research on shamanism and psychedelic medicine, similarly considers spirits to be simply a “metaphoric symbolic attribution” — that is, the incorrect attribution of “mind qualities like those of humans to unknown and natural phenomena … exemplified in anthropomorphic attribution of humanlike ‘mind’ characteristics to gods, spirits, and nonhuman entities, particularly animals.”

However, a number of contemporary anthropologists now contend that the answer is yes. Richard Shweder proposes that we “start with the assumption that malevolent ancestral spirits do exist and can get into one’s body, that they are experienced, and that the cultural representation of their existence and person’s experience of their existence lights up an aspect of reality that has import for the management of the self.” Jenny Blain, who is both an anthropologist and herself a neoshamanist seiðworker, protests against turning spirits into “culturally defined aspects of one’s own personality, not external agents.” Such reductionism is, she says, “part of the individualization and psychologizing of perception that pervades Western academic discourses of the rational, unitary self.” Anthropologist Felicitas Goodman maintains that spirits are real beings who seek communication with humans. “Ritual,” she says, “is the rainbow bridge over which we can call on the Spirits and the Spirits cross over from their world into ours.” Edith Turner is a prolific advocate for the simple reality of spirits: “I saw with my own eyes a large gray blob of something like plasma emerge from the sick woman’s back. Then I knew the Africans were right. There is spirit stuff. There is spirit affliction: it isn’t a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology.”

But the experience of spirits as autonomous personalities — what Terence McKenna has called alien intelligences or organized entelechies — ought to be taken as subverting this naïve dichotomous ontology. Indeed, so should any metachoric experience — hallucinations, lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, active imagination, eidetic visualization. We have already discussed metachoric experiences and their common features — their presentness, detail, externality, and three-dimensional spacefulness. To this we may now add one more — that, in any metachoric experience, one may be confronted by autonomous others.

Indeed, Carl Jung’s description of the other-than-human persons encountered in active imagination is strikingly similar to the shaman’s experience of encountering the plant and animal spirits. These beings, Jung says, know things and possess insights unknown to the person encountering them; they “can say things that I do not know and do not intend.” The encounter is a dialogue — a conversation between me and something else that is not-me — “exactly as if a dialogue were taking place between two human beings.” These persons possess autonomy, independent knowledge, the ability to form relationships — “like animals in the forest,” says Jung, “or people in a room, or birds in the air.” They “have a life of their own.”

Psychologist James Hillman says that this “living being other than myself … becomes a psychopompos, a guide with a soul having its own inherent limitation and necessity.” When we actively confront these other-than-human persons, respond to them with our own objections, awe, and arguments, then, as Ann and Barry Ulanov put it, we “come to the breath-stopping realization of just how independent of our conscious control such images are. They have a life of their own. They push at us. They talk back.” They are, says Hillman, “valid psychological subjects with wills and feelings like ours but not reducible to ours.”

The naïve dichotomous metaphysics takes as normative a particular set of experiences characterized by sensory coherence, predictability, and consistency. Experiences that are not normative by these criteria are either dismissed as mistakes or else normalized, reified, turned into stuff, into — as Richard Robinson used to put it — gaseous fauna.

James Hillman takes a very different approach. He does not reify the imaginal; rather, he mythologizes reality. He calls this soul-making. The act of soul-making is imagining, the crafting of images:

Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining which sees through an event to its image. Imaging means releasing events from their literal understanding into a mythical appreciation. Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing — that psychological attitude which suspiciously disallows the naïve and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul.

The human adventure, Hillman says, “is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul.” And what is soul? “Soul is imagination,” he says, “a cavernous treasury … a confusion and richness, both … The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.” And soul is “the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy — that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.” The question of soul-making is this: “What does this event, this thing, this moment move in my soul?”

Hillman calls this seeing through — the ability of the imagination’s eye to see through the literal to the metaphorical. Re-visioning is deliteralizing or metaphorizing reality. The purpose is to make the literal metaphorical, to make the real imaginal. The objective is to enable the realization that reality is imagination— that what appears most real is in fact an image with potentially profound metaphorical implications. Thus, says Hillman, soul is “the imaginative possibility in our natures … the mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.” “By means of the archetypal image,” he writes, “natural phenomena present faces that speak to the imagining soul rather than only conceal hidden laws and probabilities and manifest their objectification.”

So Hillman speaks of personifying not as a category mistake but rather as a “basic psychological activity — the spontaneous experiencing, envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic presences,” as a mode of thought “which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine.” Personifying is “a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences which touch us, move us, appeal to us” — a way of imagining things into souls.” If Hillman’s personifying, seeing through, soulmaking becomes a way of engaging with the world, a relational epistemology, then it is verging upon a genuine and nonreductive animism, one in which the world has become magical, filled with wonders, filled with the spirits.

Steve Beyer’s blog Singing to the Plants is at www.singingtotheplants.blogspot.com

Translated from the book “Runapaqpacha Kawsaypi Warmimanta Yuyay, Yachaykunapash” (literally, “Thoughts and Knowledges About Women in Indian Universe and Life”) by Achiq Pacha Inti-Pucarapaxi (Luz Maria de la Torre)

A creation story from Otavalo, Imbabura, Ecuador

This story gives a sense of what “Pachamama” means (the feminine universe) and also gives a sense of the Andean conception of gender roles. “Kamak” in the word “Pachakamak” (from the verb kama- and the agentive suffix -k, “one who,” [-q in Cuzco/Bolivian Quechua]) is as complex in meaning as “Pacha.” Kama- might be translated as “to create order,” “to align with shared or common purpose,” or other meanings (I have seen it translated as “to breathe unity into”).

In everyday life in the Andes, Pachamama is invoked constantly, daily, given offerings and songs and asked for help, whereas Pachakamak is rarely ever mentioned.

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After Pachakamak, the Great Spirit Bringing Order to the Totality of Creation, created this world and Man and Woman, he told them to rest and to come back calm and refreshed the next day, so that he would give to each of them the duties in this world for which they had been created.

The human beings rested well in their new Earth home, which Pachakamak said he gave them to receive.

The Woman went to sleep immediately, and the next day quickly went to receive what Pachakamak gave. She rose and appeared together with the sun of dawn; she went and left the Man asleep. The Man had not gone to sleep immediately but had remained awake for a while to look at the world. Thus, today the woman is the one to arise very early.

The Woman arrived where Pachakamak was, to speak with him about the duties she would have in life, wanting thus to receive her destiny.

The Orderer of the Universe led her to see all that was growing. All the stones, all the mountains, all the beautiful maturing soil, rivers, lakes, all the happy plants and flowers, all the fragrances and colors he showed her. And also the work with the animals’ lives, their behavior, what each one did, their skins, he showed her.

Thus they walked among all things that live and grow. The blue upper world was there, where Father Sun, in charge of giving food and power to all living things, makes his beautiful light and warmth. And at night the upper world was filled with stars, and with the moon who also feeds life.

The Woman was in awe of all the great beauty showed to her. Each new beautiful thing that appeared before her, she asked that it be hers, all the great beauty that Pachakamak had made to grow. She touched and felt the heartbeat of life of all the different beings of creation — all the varied stones in the world, the minerals, the hard rocks and the sparkling crystals that came from the fertile earth. Every insect and every animal attracted her enormously, their great variety, their whimsical and harmonious forms, their skin and the color of their fur. But she always looked down, and she was attracted most of all to the puppies and the defenseless beings. She took them into her arms and held them in the warmth of her lap, and a desire grew inside of her to have all of this in her domain, under her care, to keep them so beautiful, and maybe she could make them even more beautiful, and care for them, and protect the puppies and the defenseless beings.

Everything was so beautiful and needed her care, it seemed that she couldn’t choose anything in particular to keep near her. Finally she decided, and said to the Great Pachakamak:

“Everything you have shown me is so wonderful. In the life of this world I want to work with and care for all that is so very beautiful, to obtain everything that is necessary to sustain their lives and that of my husband. I want Woman’s domain to be over all that exists here, everything that is on Earth, to care for it and observe it daily.”

The Woman’s words seemed so powerful to Pachakamak that he gave everything that grows and lives on Earth to the Woman. Everything was left in the Woman’s care.

“I put you in charge of life,” said the Great Soul. “From then to now, the different things you see, you will give life to the different things. Your mission will be to give continuity to eternity; to give Time within eternity. The different things will be born from your belly; you will give bodies to the human beings and to all life.

“You will have understanding, love and tenderness in order to be able to fulfill your duty. Your desire will always be to clothe, feed, sustain and care for life, and to keep life in order. Yours will be beauty, harmony, balance, which are necessary for this task. You will be sensitive, loving, and benevolent, since the continuity of creation depends on you, and in this everyone will help you. You will be ready to give your life for that which you have desired, because the children who are born from you need your care in order to prolong their lives, and it may be that they demand of you the greatest extreme, to give your own life in order that they be born.

“You will always seriously see everything that is in the present. Everything that presents itself to you, you will transform into beauty. You will decorate things and you will care for everything that is beautiful and worthy. The spirits of Water and Earth will always accompany you, and the Moon with all her children, the stars, will be with you directing your life.

“All the Universe that you see is feminine; the whole field of life which you have chosen and which I give to you. I give you the responsibility to generate, maintain and protect life, nature, and the Man. Through you the Man will be able to live, and he will seek you because you will give him the strength to be useful and you will direct his strength. In your work, I will help you together with all the other Powers, so that as you mature you will continue in your desire to reach out to all life. To your children, you will give life, love, and wisdom.”

Thus spoke Pachakamak and withdrew. The Woman was left happy. She took the responsibility that Pachakamak had given her, as she had wanted. All of Pachamama — Mother Earth, Mother Nature, Mother Universe — was hers. Something had only to appear and take form and presence, and the woman was its master and caretaker.

Then the Man appeared before the Great Pachakamak and said:

“I come into your presence, now tell me what work in this world is to be mine.”

The Great Pachakamak told him, “The Woman came first and desired everything that she saw. The Universe is now feminine, she has taken the responsibility to care for all life and has gained the honor of prolonging and sustaining life. So I have given to her everything that you see before your eyes.”

The Man was surprised. But then he recovered his breath and asked, “If you have given everything that exists to the Woman, what work is left for me?”

The Great Pachakamak assumed his state of wisdom and said: “The Woman has taken on everything that is visible in this world. You will not take the responsibility for what is visible. Everything that is visible is the responsibility of the Woman. But your place will be everything that is hidden from sight. I see that you will dedicate yourself to the ‘invisible world’ of the Creation.

“Everything that exists and appears, everything that has form and presence, everything that leaves a ‘footprint’ upon the Earth is the feminine world. Everything that does not exist or does not yet exist, everything that is invisible in the field of the world, everything that cannot be seen, everything that is hidden from the normal look of light and form, is your world. Here you will find the world of the future, of projections and plans, of dreams and ideals that hope to appear one day. You will go to that world in order to bring those things, you will make them appear, and you will put them into the hands of the Woman, and she will give them life. Yours will be the world of death, of transformation, of renovation. Yours will be the world of causes. You will not look at form but at what originates and gives form, its causes. Yours will be the world of mysteries, which will call you to resolve them. In this universe, the days of the future will be yours. Your work will be to think of what will come after the present day. You will be able to look beyond the visible world of the present and past. You will bring about the future. You will be a creator, and your knowledge will be of the depths. If you cannot find these depths, you will be a sterile and useless being and everything will be against you. But if you discover the mysteries of the depths you will be a great yachak (shaman).”

The Man was taken by Pachakamak to the world of laws, to the processes of transformation, to the internal world of thought, to the world of creative imagination, to the world of decisions, to the world of death. The Man descended into the depths of human passions, meeting hell and rising to unknown heavens.

“You will be a seeker, an explorer. You will have the curiosity and restlessness to discover what does not appear. Thus, you have dominion over the invisible, which will permit you to organize and govern the visible. You will seek wisdom, which will give you strength and authority.

“If you do not have wisdom, you will be useless to others. That which you seek and find does not belong to you. If you want to be a worthy Man, a son of Pachakamak, then you must share everything that you gain. The more that you share, the more will return to you.

“Yours is the field of magic. You will make it appear through your wisdom. You will give life to things that do not exist, but the moment that they take on existence, they no longer belong to your domain, but to the domain of the Woman. Because of this you will always be together with her, and from this joined action the universe will continue forward.”

The great Pachakamak reunited the human pair and felt satisfied and proud of his children.

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This gives a sense of Andean conceptions of gender roles, and also makes an interesting contrast to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, with its message about gender and about being expelled from the Garden and punished with the “curse” of work.

This also gives a sense of why shamanism is considered a masculine occupation in the Andes and Upper Amazon, even when practiced by women; when women practice it, it is generally considered to be an expression of their masculine side.

In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.

Partly as a result of our collective efforts, over the last few decades ayahuasca has become one of the most thoroughly studied of the traditional shamanic plant hallucinogens. We now have a firm understanding of the plant species that are utilized in its preparation, including the diverse pharmacopoeia of ayahuasca admixture plants, a shamanic technology unto itself that begs additional investigation. We understand the chemistry of the active constituents of its primary botanical components, and have better insight into its remarkable synergistic pharmacology.

We have identified potential therapeutic applications for ayahuasca and the role that it may some day find in healing the physical and spiritual wounds of individuals, if it is ever afforded its rightful place in medical practice. Ethnographically, my colleagues and I have made contributions to an understanding of the central role that ayahuasca already has in the context of Amazonian shamanism and ethnomedicine. We have described, and written about, its status as a window into the sacred cosmology of magic, witchcraft, transcendent experience, and healing that permeates and defines the practices of Mestizo ethnomedicine.

The visionary paintings of Peruvian shaman and artist Pablo Amaringo, brought so beautifully to the attention of the world by Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, has helped to make that tradition accessible to many who would otherwise have seen it (if they were aware of it at all) as alien, exotic, and incomprehensible. To an extent, our work has shed some small light on the more contemporary role of ayahuasca as the sacramental vehicle of syncretic religious movements that originated in Brasil and now are reaching out globally, if incrementally, to embrace a sick and wounded world that desperately yearns for the healing that this mind/body/spirit medicine can offer.

The story of ayahuasca, and our evolving understanding of its place in the world, and of its significance for medicine, pharmacology, ethnobotany, and shamanic studies, is far from over, and in fact, it may have just begun. I would like to believe that is the case. But for the purposes of this contribution, rather than submit yet another dense and lengthy review on the botany, chemistry, pharmacology, &c., of ayahuasca, I have chosen to adopt a broader perspective, and to indulge in some reflections, and speculations on the past and future of ayahuasca of the sort that a scientist, probably mercifully, rarely shares with his colleagues or the larger world.

To those readers who may wish for my more usual nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject, I call attention to my recent review in the journal Pharmacology and Therapeutics (McKenna, 2004). In addition, a complete list of all of “my” publications on ayahuasca is appended to the end of this article; and I use the term “my” advisedly because these publications represent the work and creativity of many people with whom I’ve been privileged to collaborate over the years. They would not exist without them.

On a personal level, ayahuasca has been for me both a scientific and professional continuing carrot, and a plant teacher and guide of incomparable wisdom, compassion, and intelligence. My earliest encounters with ayahuasca were experiential; only later did it become an object of scientific curiosity, sparked in part by a desire to understand the mechanism, the machineries, that might underlie the profound experiences that it elicited.

As a young man just getting started in the field of ethnopharmacology, ayahuasca seemed to me more than worthy of a lifetime of scientific study; and so it has proven to be. Pursuing an understanding of ayahuasca has led to many exotic places that I would never have visited otherwise, from the jungles of the Amazon Basin to the laboratory complexes of the National Institute of Mental Health and Stanford; it has led to the formation of warm friendships and fruitful collaborations with many colleagues who have shared my curiosity about the mysteries of this curious plant complex.

These collaborations, and more importantly, these friendships, continue, as does the quest for understanding. Though there have been detours along the way, always, and inevitably, they have led back to the central quest. Often, after the fact, I have seen how those apparent detours were not so far off the path after all, as they supplied some insight, some skill, or some experience, that in hindsight proved necessary to the furtherance of the quest.

Just as ayahuasca has been for me personally something of a Holy Grail, as it has been for many others, I have the intuition that it may have a similar role with respect to our entire species. Anyone who is personally experienced with ayahuasca is aware that it has much to teach us; there is incredible wisdom and intelligence there. And to my mind, one of the most profound and humbling lessons that ayahuasca teaches – one that we thick-headed humans have the hardest time grasping – is the realization that “you monkeys only think you’re running things.”

Though I state it humorously, here and in other talks and writings, it is nonetheless a profound insight on which may depend the very survival of our species, and our planet. Humans are good at nothing if not hubris, arrogance, and self-delusion. We assume that we dominate nature; that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, nature, even as we set about busily undermining and wrecking the very homeostatic global mechanisms that have kept our earth stable and hospitable to life for the last four and a half billion years. We devastate the rainforests of the world; we are responsible for the greatest loss of habitat and the greatest decimation of species since the asteroid impacts of the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago; we rip the guts out of the earth and burn them, spewing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere; at the same time we slash and burn the woody forests that may be the only hope for sequestration of the carbon dioxide that is rapidly building to dangerous and possibly uncontrollable levels. For the first time in the history of our species, and indeed of our planet, we are forced to confront the possibility that thoughtless and unsustainable human activity may be posing a real threat to our species’ survival, and possibly the survival of all life on the planet.

And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: You monkeys only think you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in the scheme of things. We are not.

Our spiritual institutions have devolved into hollow shells, perverted to the agendas of rapacious governments and fanatic fundamentalisms, no longer capable of providing balm to the wounded spirit of our species; and as the world goes up in flames we benumb ourselves with consumerism and mindless entertainment, the decadent distractions of gadgets and gewgaws, the frantic but ultimately meaningless pursuits of a civilization that has lost its compass. And at this cusp in human history, there emerges a gentle emissary, the conduit to a body of profoundly ancient genetic and evolutionary wisdom that has long abided in the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have guarded and protected this knowledge for millennia, who learned long ago that the human role is not to be the master of nature, but its stewards, Our destiny, if we are to survive, is to nurture nature and to learn from it how to nurture ourselves and our fellow beings. This is the lesson that we can learn from ayahuasca, if only we pay attention.

I find it both ironic, and hopeful, that within the last 150 years, and particularly in the last half of the 20th century, ayahuasca has begun to assert its presence into human awareness on a global scale. For millennia it was known only to indigenous peoples who have long since understood and integrated what it has to teach us. In the 19th century it first came to the attention of a wider world as an object of curiosity in the reports of Richard Spruce and other intrepid explorers of the primordial rainforests of South America; in the mid-20th century Schultes and others continued to explore this discovery and began to focus the lens of science on the specifics of its botany, chemistry, and pharmacology (and, while necessary, this narrow scrutiny perhaps overlooked some of the larger implications of this ancient symbiosis with humanity). At the same time, ayahuasca escaped from its indigenous habitat and made its influence felt among certain non-indigenous people, representatives of “greater” civilization.

To these few men and women, ayahuasca provided revelations, and they in turn responded (in the way that humans so often do when confronted with a profound mystery) by founding religious sects with a messianic mission; in this case, a mission of hope, a message to the rest of the world that despite its simplicity was far ahead of its time: that we must learn to become the stewards of nature, and by fostering, encouraging, and sustaining the fecundity and diversity of nature, by celebrating and honoring our place as biological beings, as part of the web of life, we may learn to become nurturers of each other. A message quite different, and quite anathema, to the anti-biological obsessions of most of the major world “religions” with their preoccupation with death and suffering and their insistence on the suppression of all spontaneity and joy.

Such a message is perceived as a great threat by entrenched religious and political power structures, and indeed, it is. It is a threat to the continued rape of nature and oppression of peoples that is the foundation of their power. Evidence that they understand this threat and take it seriously is reflected by the unstinting and brutal efforts that “civilized” ecclesiastical, judicial, and political authorities have made to prohibit, demonize, and exterminate the shamanic use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants ever since the Inquisition and even earlier.

But the story is not yet over. Within the last 30 years, ayahuasca, clever little plant intelligence that it is, has escaped from its ancestral home in the Amazon and has found haven in other parts of the world. With the assistance of human helpers who heard the message and heeded it, ayahuasca sent its tendrils forth to encircle the world. It has found new homes, and new friends, in nearly every part of the world where temperatures are warm and where the ancient connections to plant-spirit still thrive, from the islands of Hawaii to the rainforests of South Africa, from gardens in Florida to greenhouses in Japan. The forces of death and dominance have been outwitted; it has escaped them, outrun them.

There is now no way that ayahuasca can ever be eliminated from the earth, short of toxifying the entire planet (which, unfortunately, the death culture is working assiduously to accomplish). Even if the Amazon itself is leveled for cattle pasture or burned for charcoal, ayahuasca, at least, will survive, and will continue to engage in its dialog with humanity. And encouragingly, more and more people are listening.

It may be too late. I have no illusions about this. Given that the curtain is now being rung down on the drunken misadventure that we call human history, the death culture will inevitably become even more brutal and insane, flailing ever more violently as it sinks beneath the quick sands of time. Indeed, it is already happening; all you have to do is turn on the nightly news.

Will ayahuasca survive? I have no doubt that ayahuasca will survive on this planet as long as the planet remains able to sustain life. The human time frame is measured in years, sometimes centuries, rarely, in millennia. Mere blinks when measured against the evolutionary time scales of planetary life, the scale on which ayahuasca wields its influence. It will be here long after the governments, religions, and political power structures that seem today so permanent and so menacing have dissolved into dust. It will be here long after our ephemeral species has been reduced to anomalous sediment in the fossil record. The real question is, will we be here long enough to hear its message, to integrate what it is trying to tell us, and to change in response, before it is too late?

Ayahuasca has the same message for us now that it has always had, since the beginning of its symbiotic relationship with humanity. Are we willing to listen? Only time will tell.

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Published on Ayahuasca.com with express permission of Dennis McKenna.

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Bibliography

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Amazonian sirenas, mermaids, look just like the mermaids of the classical European imagination — beautiful blond women with the tail of a fish, sometimes with several fish tails, who have melodious voices and hypnotic eyes, and who live in caves beneath the waters. They travel on boas. Indeed, sometimes they turn into boas; if the woman sleeping next to you turns into a boa during the night, that is a good sign that you have been seduced by a mermaid. Like dolphins, they can transform into human beings, and seek sex with human men, just as dolphins seek sex with human women. Handsome young fishermen in their boats are at constant risk of abduction by mermaids. That is why some men go out fishing, and never return.

Sirenas will seduce men with their sweet sad songs and carry them off to their underwater world. A sirena sings her songs on a lonely beach, or on a precipice by the water. A young man who hears her song will approach and yield to her, abandoning everything and going off with her forever. The family of the one who has disappeared think he has drowned, but the body is never found; if they ask a shaman, he tells them that the young man has been bewitched by a sirena, and has gone to live with her in her kingdom in the depths. Or the missing person may speak through the mouth of the shaman: “I am alive in an underwater city where there are mermaids and men with fish tails. There are great doctors, and life is beautiful and eternal.”

Both mermaids and yacuruna, water people, can become powerful allies of the shaman. Mermaids can appear in ayahuasca visions singing beautiful icaros, by which they exercise power over the underwater world, and which they will sometimes teach to a fortunate shaman. Like dolphins and yacuruna, mermaids can be powerful shamans, often summoned to aid in pusanguería, love magic. Offspring of humans and mermaids can be powerful healers, who live underwater and can be called among the healing spirits at an ayahuasca ceremony. The word yara is sometimes used to denote a sexually seductive mermaid, with blond hair and mother-of-pearl skin. Don Agustin Rivas tells how, while following la dieta, a beautiful strange female spirit named Yara would appear to him at dawn, lift his mosquito net, and lie down with him. He would awake just before having sex with her.

The term sumi or sume is used primarily to refer to a master shaman who has the ability to go at will into the underwater realms. Thus Pablo Amaringo says that sumis are those able to go under the water, who are “capable of entering the water as if it were the easiest thing in the world.” This is an important skill. The other-than-human persons who live under the water may be willing to share their great knowledge of healing and magic songs with an intrepid shaman. In addition, a shaman must be able to compel them to give up those they have kidnapped for sexual purposes, often using icaros they have learned from the underwater beings themselves.

Don José Celso tells a story of how he almost became a sumi. While he was drinking ayahuasca, a gigantic boa came to devour him; but he hesitated to enter ther creature’s mouth. If he had, he says, the boa would have vomited him into the underwater world. The artist Elvis Luna, commenting on a painting he made of mermaids, says that the mermaids are celebrating because soon a newly kidnapped man will be brought to their world. “They enchant the man with their sublime singing and their beauty. The moment the man is taken underwater the mermaids encircle him as part of his welcome to their world.” But the man they have abducted is in fact an apprentice shaman; he has just two days to establish a relationship with the mermaids in order to get their blessings, their spiritual knowledge. And during these two days he must be rescued by a sumi, a specialized shaman of the water who is monitoring the apprentice. “If two days have passed and he is not rescued,” Luna writes, “the man will experience an eternity in every day that he is underwater.”

Don Francisco Montes Shuña speaks of his uncle, don Manuel Shuña, a banco sumi, who could live and work in the water realm with the mermaids, and who in fact had a sexual relation with a mermaid who taught him many things; and of his grandmother, Trinidad Vilces Peso, a sumiruna who had control over the spirits of the water, could enter the aquatic realms, and transform into a fish, and who died at the age of 108 to become a doctora for the dolphins.

Steve Beyer’s blog Singing to the Plants is at www.singingtotheplants.blogspot.com