Ayahuasca and Human Destiny
DENNIS J. MCKENNA, PhD
From J Psychoactive Drugs. 2005 Jun;37(2):231-34.
My good friend and colleague, Dr. Charles Grob, has extended a kind
invitation to submit a contribution to this special edition of the Journal
of Psychoactive Drugs, devoted to the topic of ayahuasca, for which he has
been selected as guest editor. I'm pleased to be asked and happy to respond,
particularly since I have collaborated for many years with Dr. Grob and
other colleagues who are represented here, on various aspects of the
scientific study of ayahuasca. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has
been one of the major preoccupations of my life.
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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