Part 1
Part 2
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
FIELDWORK REPORTS 1 & 2
PERUVIAN
‘THE REALM OF
VISIONS’:
Marcus C.Y. Lumby ,
MA (Oxon), MA (Kent), DCH/DHP (
Member of ‘The International Council for Medical
and Clinical Therapists’
FOREWORD
‘Anything that sheds light on the Universe,
anything that reveals us to ourselves,
should be welcome in this world of riddles’.
Aleister Crowley, ‘ Magick’
It is almost two years now since my last period
of study with the Ayahuasquero healers of Peruvian Northwest
If my research may indeed be properly described
as an attempt to evaluate the experiential processes whereby post-crisis
consciousness attitude changes are integrated within the constantly evolving
interpretative paradigms of the subject then the current directionality of
the associated concerns represents at least an idiosyncratic case in point.
The project remains, as it always has been, essentially reflective of a lifetime
spent ‘touching the Sacred’ (Smart, N. 1997)- a living reflection of attitudes
and orientations established as a consequence of a somewhat haphazard programme
of cognitive extremes in the form of near-death-type experiences both circumstantially
and ritually induced, each approach informing and reinforcing the intentionality
of the other in an ongoing exploration of the outermost reaches of embodied
consciousness. There are those who have expressed grave concerns about the
supposed risks attending such a programme, but for me ‘exploration’, in the
broadest sense of the term, has always suggested itself to be a matter of
‘feeling the fear and doing it anyway’. In exploring relatively uncharted
(or at least unreported) dimensions of the deeper psyche the explorer will
inevitably encounter challenges to both psychological and physiological equilibrium.
However, in the field contexts of Amazonian shamanism/s there already exist
tried and tested procedures for meeting such challenges (the indigenous shamanic
use of hallucinogens such as Ayahuasca remains primarily a matter of medicine,
of maintaining, or re-establishing ‘bodymind’(Pert, C. in Chopra, D.
1990:66) integrity in the face of constant threat). Certainly I have, on several
occasions in the course of my fieldwork, skirted the frontiers of oblivion
but the shamans with whom I work, those masters of repair, have always managed
to transform any injuries incurred into advantages.
Inspired by the experiences of a formal curacion,
or ‘healing’, during my last period of fieldwork (detailed in Part II of the
following report) I have subsequently qualified as a psychotherapist specialising
in clinical hypnosis. Among other things, this initiative suggested itself
as an ideal means of participating directly in a culturally recognised correlate
of traditional shamanic therapies, and one least likely to infringe the Northern
Hemisphere’s enduring ‘chemical transcendence’ taboo (Cohen, S. 1971:155).
My involvement with clinical hypnosis continues to prove a source of invaluable
insights into the broader workings of experiential psychotherapies.
With specific relevance to my research I have already encountered a number
of patients more than willing to engage auto-directionally with ‘The Realm
of Visions’ via hypnotic rites of access, and their subsequent experiences
have been encouragingly analogous with those of both Ayahuasca hallucinosis
and circumstantial near-death experience, and most especially when trance
is induced in conjunction with ‘restricted environmental stimulation’ procedures
(Alexander, D.A. in Heap, M. and Dryden, W. (Eds.) 1991:79).
However, while non-pharmacological methods of
visionary induction may indeed produce impressive results the target states
of consciousness are most readily (and safely) accessible through the carefully
orchestrated implementation of psychedelics. As I was to write in an early
draft of my project proposal, ‘there remains a great deal of work to be done
before the knowledge derived from the analysis of ethnomedical approaches
may be fully accommodated within the modern clinic and the practice of scientific
medicine'. I remain firmly of the opinion that major contributions can be
made here by individuals intimately familiar with the techniques employed
by indigenous ‘vision healers’ in managing such experiential potentialities
towards successful therapeutic outcomes. It is encouraging to see that a growing
number of researchers are recognising the fact that ‘by acquiring a greater
familiarity with how shamanism and shamanic practices work’ we can ‘only stand
to benefit enormously from millennia of knowledge and praxis in the use of
imagery…to evoke desired psychological, physiological and spiritual responses’
(Overton, J. 1997:17). Unfortunately, scientifically approved modes of analysis
remain somewhat inimical to the possibilities of creditably assessing the
subjectively experienced content and form of visionary ‘therapeutic narratives’
(Mattingley, C. 1998:72-103), generally consigning them, at least for the
foreseeable future, to the often solipsistic consolations of religious or
experimental philosophy. However, my own attitude towards such matters
is informed by the core conviction that ‘subjective reality and objective
reality are tightly bound together’ (Chopra, D. 1990:178), and ‘all things
are real…’, and therefore susceptible to scientific scrutiny, ‘…that are real
in their consequences’, an orientation that admits what I have come to refer
to as phenomenological positivism. Simply stated, phenomenological
positivism suggests that, for example, the generally accepted objectivity
of a piece of crystalline carbon has in fact no greater claim to ‘reality’
than a thought in that they are both indubitably manifestations of ‘the totality
of all that is’ (Bohm, D. 1980:55). Such a perspective may appear less radical
when considered in the light of the fact that even a diamond, that archetype
of solidity, is subatomically more than ‘99.9999 percent empty space’ (Chopra,
D. 2000:29). The ‘holotropy’ (Grof, S. 1993, 1998) here intimated obviously
has enormous implications not only for Medicine but also for Western materialist/scientistic
reality paradigms in general.
Notwithstanding the apparent fruitfulness of these
complementary theoretical departures my focus remains primarily on the continued
phenomenological exploration of hallucinatory extremes of consciousness, and
most particularly those forms of consciousness referred to by R.C. Zaehner
as ‘panenhenic’ (‘the experience of feeling absolutely at one with the world
or cosmos…a kind of eyes-open fusion with reality which lies about the person’
(Smart, N. 1997:170)). It is important here to stress the fact that my anthropological
research concerns are primarily focused on matters pertaining to sensibility,
defined as ‘the emotional, moral and aesthetic nexus through which thought
comes to be expressed in action, and so made public, visible, and accessible
to our observation’ (Clendinnen, I. 1991:5). Nevertheless, and of late, the
classically ‘ophidian symbolism’ (Mundkur, B. 1978:125-158) of many of my
own visionary experiences under the influences of Ayahuasca, coupled with
a reading of Jeremy Narby’s pioneering work ‘The Cosmic Serpent’ (1998), has
led me towards a re-appraisal of the ‘triune brain’ theories of Paul D. Maclean
(1973). If the human brain may indeed be modelled in the form of a tripartite
system of progressive evolutionary accretions then it is tempting to speculate
that in the case of Ayahuasca hallucinosis subjects may be experiencing a
re-elicitation of ‘reptilian consciousness templates’ persisting in some as
yet to be isolated archaic subset of the human genetic code. The prospect
a psychedelics-mediated ‘bio-archaeology of consciousness’ is tantalising
to say the least (cf. Jerison, H.J. 1976). However, the possibility of gaining
an empirical purchase on such hypotheses may well be a long way off, but the
fact that they can even be entertained is a testament to the contribution
that hallucinatory (‘mind-wandering’) experience can make, as it always has
made, to humanity’s collective quest for an ever more vivid understanding
of its own nature. What can, at this stage, be said with certainty is that
the area of the brain referred to by Maclean as the Reptilian- or R-Complex
(primarily the ‘seat’ of aggression and reproductive appetites and impulses)
includes, unsurprisingly, the so-called ‘reward centre’- the key neurotransmissional
mechanism in addictional behaviours.
Until recently, at least in the West, consciousness
essentially presented itself as a protean mirror of objective reality.
However, following the exponential developments in interactive information
technologies during the past two decades objective reality (specifically in
relation to the Internet) is increasingly becoming a mirror of consciousness.
With the passing of each day we find ourselves more deeply immersed in a hallucinatory
matrix of multiple and mutually determining eidetic states, some organic,
some silicon-based. Incidentally, it should perhaps come as no surprise that
the ‘Digital Age’ is only made possible through the magic of quartz- pandemically
the philosopher-shaman’s stone (Morton, C. and Thomas, C.L. 1998:57). This
nascent spirit-world of the Internet finds its age-old analogue in
the visionary realms of societies that still employ holotropic (shamanic)
modes of consciousness in their everyday orchestrations of existence. Societies
that have maintained such practices, and the associated sensibilities, in
an unbroken chain reaching back into the obscurities of pre-history have much
to teach us and prepare us for as ‘The Realm of Visions’ once again reasserts
its predominance in our own social organisation. Again there will be healers,
and sorcerers, and those who are both. It promises to be a world just as beautiful
and dangerous as this, and of course, in the final analysis, just as real.
PART ONE
30th October
INTRODUCTION/P>
In consultation with my supervisor at
FIELDWORK OBJECTIVES.
In the absence of any experientially derived expectations
I couldn’t help but keep my field objectives broad, a ‘broadness’ further
facilitated by the uncommitting license of self-funding: 1) To learn to live
in the Peruvian Amazon; 2) To introduce myself directly to the affects and
intrapsychic dimensions of Ayahuasca shamanism; 3) To pursue my studies of
Latin American Spanish. Ostensibly, it was to take the form of a reconnoitre
of both the external and internal ‘fields’ of my formal research. Notwithstanding
pre-departure discussions with my supervisor I felt distinctly as though I
was taking a proverbial ‘leap in the dark’ as I left
With the benefits of hindsight the seven weeks
I spent in
Provisionally I had intended to spend five weeks
or so at the ‘TAKIWASI Centre for Drug Rehabilitation and Investigation of
Traditional Medicines’ in Tarapoto. Prior to my departure from
GENERAL FIELDWORK LOCATION.
The jungle city of
Modern
In a socio-cultural context long-used to the accommodation
of such diverse elements Western cosmopolitan/biomedical approaches to healthcare
exist within a broader context of approaches described by the magico-medico-
religious syntheses of traditional Amazonian ‘shamanic’ initiatives. Far
from comprising a relic of the region’s pre-colonial past shamanic medicine
has maintained its centrality and continues to address a wide variety of common
afflictions which, while they remain largely beyond the pale of Western scientific
recognition, may prove as debilitating and even fatal as afflictions that
are seen to exist within the contemporary therapeutic domains of biomedicine.
Indeed, of
The base-note of the vast majority of Northwest
Amazonian shamanic therapies, and certainly of such therapies as practiced
in and around Iquitos, is provided by Ayahuasca- a potently hallucinogenic/psychotherapeutic
‘sacrament’ prepared from a woody jungle liana (Banisteriopsis caapi)
which, in the indigenous view, stands at the heart of the region’s ethnomedical
pharmacopoeia as nothing less than ‘The Queen of Medicines’. Of particular
relevance to my project is the capacity of the various Ayahuasca preparations
to induce affectively complete near-death-type experiences and consequential
psychotherapeutically conducive ‘attitude changes’ in the drinker, i.e. the
explicitly systemic insights and cognitive orientations characterising
human consciousness in proximity with an immediately perceived threat to its
embodied existence. Indeed,
When I arrived in
Following the decision, on the night before my
first ceremony, the diet was inaugurated by Don Francisco with a ritual purificatory
perfuming of my body. The perfuming was accompanied by whistled icaros
(power songs which are used for performing shamanic tasks) and the application
of organic tobacco smoke (mapacho). I was instructed to remove all
metal items (rings etc.) in order to preclude their ‘energific interference’.
‘You’ve entered’, my supervisor said when this procedure had been completed,
and certainly the ritual had induced in me a marked sense of liminality, but
then of course a six week introductory Ayahuasca diet must constitute a ‘rite
of passage’ by anyone’s reckoning.
‘LA SACHAMAMA’ ETHNOBOTANICAL GARDEN.
La Sachamama (‘The Mother of the Jungle’) was
founded in 1990 by Don Francisco Montes Shuna. It is located 18 km outside
the city of
As an institution La Sachamama might best be described
as an oasis of conservation- a clearly delimited and protected secondary rainforest
environment established with the avowed intention of ‘protecting the vast
array of useful plants and the traditional knowledge and lore evolved throughout
generations of indigenous inhabitants of the region’ (quoted from a Sachamama
seminar prospectus, ‘Plants as Teachers: Traditional Wisdom and Rainforest
Conservation Strategies’). For those who pass through it La Sachamama
is very much a shamanic school (an ‘Amazonian ashram’, as my supervisor so
appositely referred to it) where the forest plants themselves are regarded
as the principal teachers. The ‘lessons’ of the plants are effected
both by experiential reflection in their presence (just by living amongst
them they gradually assume personalities, quasi-sentient presences
that even if they are purely matters of ‘projection’ are nonetheless affectively
compelling) and, more dramatically, by the ritual ingestion of hallucinogenic
derivatives which both catalyse and accentuate a sense of ‘integration’ and
‘communion’.
THE AYAHUASCA DIET.
Traditionally an individual’s introduction to
the visionary dimensions of Ayahuasca shamanism is effected through a ritual
‘diet’ and mine was to be no exception. For six weeks I was to live at La
Sachamama in a palm-thatched malocca and subsist on nothing but plain white
unsalted rice, boiled yucca and bocachico (a small river fish which
compensates for its lack of teeth or external spines with innumerable hairlike
bones) served three times a day. I would also work through six or seven cups
of clavohuasca tea which acts as a cleansing diuretic. Dietary proscriptions
included sugar, salt, red meat, spice, coffee, alcohol, and fruit. There was
also a strict prohibition of any kind of sexual activity. Such a regimen is
intended to cleanse the body, and hence the mind, of ‘pollutants’ that might
otherwise interfere with the purity of the Ayahuasca’s psychophysical effects.
An awareness of combinatory psychoneurochemical synergy is writ large in Amazonian
plant-based shamanism/s.
For the duration of the diet the La Sachamama
‘shaman- in-residence’, Don Fernando Lachi, would be my tutor and master of
ceremonies. Don Fernando was trained in the arts of the Ayahuasquero
by his father Don Hector Ahuanaris, a highly respected Cocama shaman. In addition
to conducting Ayahuasca ceremonies at La Sachamama Don Fernando administers
an urban practice in
Notwithstanding the supportive presence of my
supervisor the forty-eight hours before my first ceremonial ingestion of Ayahuasca
was marked by a vacillatory mood of excitement and apprehensive introspection.
I decided that the best way to deal with this was simply to trust myself to
the process and do exactly what I was told. I felt very comfortable, ‘grounded’,
and safe at La Sachamama but hallucinogens come with a reputation for unpredictability
which can naturally be a source of intimidation. To occupy myself during the
morning before the first ceremony I attended every stage of Fernando’s preparation
of the potion in La Sachamama’s Ayahuasca ‘kitchen’- a roofed fireplace in
the buttress roots of a large tree. After seven hours of boiling water the
blackened aluminium cauldron contained little more than half a litre of rusty
brown gravy-like liquid which Fernando duly filtered and decanted into a clear
plastic bottle. At
Prior to the ceremony my supervisor offered me
a few words of advice, the most important being the suggestion that one may
to a certain extent control the ‘direction’ of Ayahuasca-induced visionary
experience by deliberately re-focusing consciousness in the tan-tien
region of the body. This is situated about a fist’s width below the navel.
In martial arts it constitutes the ‘eye’ of the energy centre known as ‘the
sea of breath’. In physical/kinaesthetic terms it marks the body’s centre
of balance. In addition to this she told me that I should expect to vomit
and possibly even lose control of my bowels.
THE REALM OF VISIONS.
The following extract from my field journal, written
on the morning after the ceremony (
‘At nine o’clock in the evening Fernando, Francisco,
my supervisor, Fernando’s wife and I filed through the forest to the Ayahuasca
temple (the ‘Salon del Diablo’)- a purpose-built structure with thatched
roof, root-bound earthen floor, and benched sides open to the plants and trees
set at the top of the hill that is ‘La Sachamama’. The tension of waiting
for my first encounter with the mighty ‘Queen of Medicines’ had resulted in
a severe headache in the left hemisphere of my brain but I carried on regardless.
On entering the
After a brief period of quiet Fernando ‘focused’
the ritual by playing three tunes on a single-stringed mouth harp. A gentle
rain plattered on the temple’s roof and I heard a cackling bird-call that
suggested, rather ominously, the threatening laughter of a malevolent witch.
Following this Fernando and Francisco began to whistle lightly, their synchronous
modulations gradually assuming the discernible rhythm of the first icaro.
Somewhat self-consciously I attempted to whistle along with them as a means
of balancing my anxiety but soon gave up in the face of their expertise.
As the icaros progressed half an hour passed with
my mind impatiently scanning experience for a hint of the onset of visions
(I really didn’t know what to expect). However, when they came there was no
doubt about their actuality- little islands and flecks of coloured lights
(phosphenes) floating, shifting, and ‘tailing’ through kaleidoscopic, increasingly
intricate patterns and forms, finally coalescing into a shifting field of
stylised ‘faces’ (reminiscent of Iban- and Kwakiutl-type spirit motifs).
The whistled icaros had become chanted songs and with a little effort of will
to overcome any lingering trepidation I closed my eyes. Instantly my experiential
field became a hydrodynamic phantasmagoria of virtual reality-type
imagery, alternating in time with the shifts in rhythms of the songs between
brilliantly coloured electrical patterns and similarly coloured animated pictures
which appeared to blend the imaginal qualities of the work of the artists
Bosch, Escher, and Giger. A maze of glowing green tunnels opened up before
me and for perhaps fifteen minutes I fell/flew through these with vertiginous
rapidity, revelling in the mesmerising beauties of the component luminescent
patterns and images, before the conclusion of the accompanying icaro drew
my consciousness back into the space of the temple. I opened my eyes and saw
Fernando emitting a measured blown breath into the air above the mesa, and
I reciprocated with a heavy, liberating, sigh of deep relief, feeling as though
I had just come to the end of a ride on a roller-coaster. All traces of apprehension
and anxiety were gone in the wake of this exhilarating preliminary incursion.
As I reflected dizzily on what I had just experienced the dizziness suddenly
became an intense nausea and I was compelled to leave the temple. When I got
outside I held the trunk of a small tree for support, visualised my mouth
opening like that of a snake about to strike, and vomited violently into the
tree’s roots. With each heave and retch I saw the depths of my ‘soul’ open
and expel a great tide of industrial waste- inorganic, non-biodegradable
materials, predominantly lurid plastics and non- specific ‘toxins’ seemingly
distilled from the residual, soul- polluting traces of a lifetime’s bombardment
with ‘advertisements’, indeed anything alien and inimical to the living, organic,
systemic, cyclical processes of the forest reality (at least this was
how I interpreted the lived experience). I looked up at the sky and
felt exquisitely purged, lightened, purified- as though a tidal wave had just
washed through the ditch drains of the Belen shanty I had visited a few days
earlier. After this I returned to my seat inside the temple as though returning
to the security of a womb/home from which I had boldly strayed. Watching Fernando
and Francisco silhouetted against the bright forest I saw a cluster of glowing
red lights, like hot coals carved into the form of faces (eerily animate
and sentient-seeming), concentrated around Francisco’s chest, shoulders, and
neck.
Following the purificatory purge the content of
my visions became much clearer, and more distinctly ‘forest-derived’. On closing
my eyes again I saw stylised vines- almost taxonomic line drawings- with their
different parts (leaves and stems) sectioned off and distinctly colour-coded.
I imagined I could almost see written labels on the colours but gradually
realised that the labeling was in fact ‘in’ the colours. Indeed the
colours (predominantly blue, green, and yellow) were the significatory equivalent
of labels. Each part, individually and in myriad combinations, appeared to
pertain to the treatment of specific afflictions which at this stage I could
only wonder at. I supposed it to be a sort of hallucinogenically imparted
pharmacopoeia- the forest coding the mind and the mind coding the forest in
an infinitely fertile dialectic of timeless healing wisdom. I opened my eyes
and felt compelled to reach out and touch a small tree with a crown of broad
leaves growing behind me. I placed my right palm gently on one of the nearest
leaves and felt instantly united with the plant. Momentarily I found
it impossible to decide where the plant ended and I began. Simultaneously
it seemed that I was the plant and the plant was me, fused together as a single
symbiotic entity in this realm of visions. Looking out into the forest I envisaged
the Ayahuasca plant as a straight, pillar-like, purple ‘tree’ spiralled about
by a broad-leaved, ophidian vine- fabulously beautiful, alien, almost sexually
attractive. This was ‘The Death Vine’ at its most spellbindingly seductive-
a crowned serpent on the universal world tree of shamanic religiosities. On
one of the vine’s branches I saw a single mauve blossom which was subsequently
unfurled manually by a number of small winged anthropomorphic ‘spirits’ to
reveal at its centre an entity I immediately recognised as ‘The Master
of Flowers’. He was dressed in iridescent robes of green and blue butterfly
wings. His face was part human, part insect, and part plant. From beneath
his nose extended long, fine, golden catfish-like whiskers. When he emerged
from the blossom he presented me wordlessly with a ball of brilliant light,
and again with a sense of immediate recognition I knew it was both an ‘instrument
of orientation’ and a ‘master key’, clearly designed to facilitate
navigation in future visionary journeyings.
Suddenly, and without any warning in the visionary
narrative, I was back in the temple listening to Fernando and Francisco’s
icaros and watching them at work with their shacapas in what suggested itself
imaginally as a glowing green-lit field of pure consciousness energy. Instantly
I felt I saw how the forest produced and continues to produce consciousness,
sustaining it with its life-giving structures, patterns, and processes- an
almost unimaginably ancient plant-human evolutionary symbiosis (see McKenna,
T. 1992). By extension I saw the forest symbolically as ‘The Mother
of All Things’ and thus, by definition, as the mother also of itself. All
the way up through the multidimensional systemic hierarchies of its plant
and animal (including human) processes I imagined I saw how it sustains and
maintains itself, and hence all parts, for the greater good, and hence
for its own/our own inscrutable purpose. The knowledge it imparts to its human
components through its plant teachers seemed to constitute a crucial dynamic
in the mechanics of the collective fate. This appeared to confirm my
suggestion that the shaman is thus ‘a mechanismal mechanic of the Mechanics
of Fate’. But while within such an interpretive framework the shaman is enabled
to ‘control’ fate through plant knowledge s/he only does what it is intended
for them to do in accord with the pre-emptive implications of the collective
fate of the forest as a symbol of the boundlessness of cosmic possibility.
The notion of an autonomous manipulative wielding of shamanic power seemed
ultimately an illusion, one which must be transcended if the true potential
and implications of such visionary agency is to be realised. While I saw Ayahuasca
shamanism as eminently instrumental it was also presented as a spiritual path
which needs no other justification than that it fulfills the requirements
of an ever-evolving universal, processual, and unitary field of consciousness.
The forest appeared literally to create consciousness as consciousness creates
the forest in a self-organising, mutually determining systemicism of meticulously
implemented principles of positive and negative feedback. At the end of my
first Ayahuasca-mediated lesson I was left with the tantalising intimation
that the forest, and indeed the universe, conceived of in absolute terms as
synonymous with ‘Consciousness’ (Aldous Huxley’s ‘Mind at Large’, (1954:20)),
is in effect symbiotically defining its own ultimate manifestational condition
through the boundless creative/transformative fertility of plant-human entheogenesis.
At just after
(N.B. It is important here to note that these
opinions and attitudes do not necessarily reflect those of my ordinary state
of consciousness. However, in order to communicate faithfully the phenomenological
aspects of my first Ayahuasca intoxication I have seen fit to report such
opinions and attitudes exactly as they occurred to me both during and immediately
after the ceremony.)
My supervisor returned to England on the morning
following my second journey into the visionary dimensions of Ayahuasca and
over the course of the next five weeks I was to drink ten more times.
INCREMENTS OF THE DIET.
During the course of the six week diet what I
lost in terms of physical weight (24 pounds) was more than compensated for
in terms of experiential insights and personally ‘embodied’ knowledge. Most
importantly the Ayahuasca series afforded me the opportunity to test the principal
hypothesis of my project against the phenomenological actuality of Ayahuasca
intoxication. The project hypothesises that the core dynamic (what I have
come to refer to as ‘The Ecstatic Insight’) of both circumstantial and ritual
near-death-type experience (any direct confrontation with what Taniah Luhrmann
refers to as ‘the most terrifying absolute of human existence’ 1989:258) involves
the induction of an ‘affectively revelationary, cognitively transformational,
meaning structured sense of the systemic interrelation of all ‘states’-
physical and metaphysical- comprising the perceived ‘totality’’.
This centres on an affective recognition of ‘the transpersonal significance,
implications, and necessity of all aspects of personal experience in
the context of a universal nexus of reciprocal, mutually determining, and
purposively orchestrated component states’ (quoted from original project proposal).
As such this insight complex is seen to comprise ‘the principal psychotherapeutically
conducive attitude change consequent both to ritual and circumstantial near-death-type
experience’ (Ibid.).
This theoretical orientation established itself
over a period of years following a personal circumstantial near-death experience.
Indeed, it was the ‘attitude changes’ consequent to this- particularly an
intimation of the totality’s systemic orchestration- that generated an interest
in the induction and epistemological implications of shamanic worldviews
(crystallised during a six month sojourn with the Baffinland Inuit of Canada’s
Arctic in 1994). A comparison of psychiatric reports pertaining to circumstantial
NDE and those of hallucinogenically induced transcendence during my
research for a Master’s degree dissertation on Tukanoan Ayahuasca shamanism
(‘The Eyes of the Jaguar: Shamans, Shamanism, and Shamanic Consciousness
in Northwest Amazonia’) highlighted a striking correlation between these
two conventionally analytically discrete experiential categories. The centrality
of the ‘death-rebirth’ affective assemblage in both shamanic rehabilitatory
and vocational phenomena further supported the suggestion of a core phenomenological
equivalence.
An intimate familiarity with the ego-shattering
trauma of circumstantial NDE might account for my apprehension concerning
the endurance of a hallucinogenically induced correlate, but given the nature
of the project I have formulated for myself I had little choice but to acknowledge
the apprehension as inevitable, register its cautions, and ultimately transcend
it.
The largely unproblematic positivity of my first
Ayahuasca experience (see above) was to set the tone for the following eleven.
Notwithstanding the fact that at times during these I was torn limb from limb
by armies of utterly implacable ‘demons’, digested by anacondas, and dissolved
in the most foetid, putrescent, deathly sewers of my deepest hells the predominant
affective impression of these experiences was of life’s ultimate invincibility.
All my initial Ayahuasca-induced ‘deaths’ were perceived as nothing more than
points of manifestational transition in a unific and perpetually regenerative
process of living. While there was much in the visions that proved
an occasion for ‘horror’ they were characterised, somewhat paradoxically,
by a complete absence of ‘fear’. In contrast to this my circumstantial NDE
was characterised, at least initially, by intense ‘fear’ but very little ‘horror’.
Of course, during the latter I was deeply conscious, given the pain and severity
of my physical injuries, of a very real possibility of literal death, while
during my first experiences of Ayahuasca ‘death’ I did not completely close
the phenomenological gap between the experience of dying in actuality and
the experience of ‘dying’ hallucinogenically. At this introductory stage of
Ayahuasca ‘death experience’ my ego stubbornly, if tenuously, maintained its
integrity and thus its capacity to maintain an awareness of such ‘death’ being
an intrapsychic simulation of the actuality. An insufficient ego-dissolution
facilitated the persistence of an awareness of my observing the processes
of my own death from a position of ultimately unthreatened life, and this
naturally detracted from the convictional intensity. My experiences of ‘dying’
under the influences of Ayahuasca intoxication did not, during the diet, transcend
their conscious classification as ‘imaginary’. The experience of being conscious
of imagining that one is dying is affectively quite different from the experience
of literally dying in the absence of the cushioning afforded by such
an awareness. There would appear to be a perceptual threshold at which point
subjective and objective experiences become affectively indistinguishable.
However, during this first diet, at least with regard to death, I did not
manage to cross it. As a consequence all my Ayahuasca ‘deaths’, imaginally
intense and affectively compelling though they were, never got beyond the
stage of being unprecedentedly vivid, quasi-lucid waking dreams.
While I describe these introductory Ayahuasca
experiences as ‘dream-like’ it is important to qualify this by saying that
they were characterised by a radical dissolution of the customary boundaries
perceived as existing between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ fields of perceptual
stimuli. Indeed, there were times, most notably under the influences of Ayahuasca
potions prepared with the addition of Toe (Datura), when the imaginal
content of my conscious experience was unaffected by my eyes being either
open or closed. Normally when our eyes are open we see what surrounds us ‘objectively’,
even if it is only darkness. However, in the above instances the process was
inverted and the opening of my eyes affectively and optically objectified
the subjective content of my visions. This Ayahuasca-induced experience of
‘the objectification of the subjective’ suggests itself as a crucial dynamic
in the psychosomatic efficacy of such therapies. When the quotidian
distinction between what one imagines subjectively and what actually occurs
objectively is dissolved by the intrapsychic effects of Ayahuasca ‘mind’ and
‘body’ are affectively unified as a seamless field of common conscious experience.
The experience of the mind becomes synonymous with the experience of the body
as a consequence of this discretionary collapse. On several occasions in the
course of ceremonies, as I watched Fernando healing variously afflicted individuals
(most graphically in the case of a young woman literally starving herself
to death subsequent to incurring an unidentified sorcerer’s curse), I imagined
I saw how his healing influences and manipulations were affectively mediated
across the mind-body divide by songs and breathwork in the context of a unitary
experiential field which rendered the imagination of being healed synonymous
with an actuality. Fernando strengthened this impression with certain
‘special effects’ which included a grating sound he made by sucking saliva
between his teeth. This produced in my mind (and apparently in the patient’s)
an intensely vivid impression of his literally ‘digging’ a hard, charcoal-like
sickness substance out of the body of the patient. These images of
extraction were further supported by loud sucking and copious spitting. At
another level of abstraction I clearly saw the healing power of Fernando
in the form of a serpent battling with the patient’s sickness which also assumed
the form of a serpent. The patient’s body appeared to my eyes to be completely
transparent, its only visible content being these battling serpents. On another
occasion I imagined I saw Fernando release ‘a small, green demonic
spirit entity’ from the body of the above-mentioned woman afflicted by the
effects of malign witchcraft. At the precise moment that this ‘spirit’ left
the patient’s body her cries of torment became a protracted sigh of relief.
While outside the experiential domains of ritual Ayahuasca intoxication I
might most reasonably interpret these ‘impressions’ and ‘entities’ as being
the products of hallucinatory projection they were, within the multidimensional
systemic context of the ceremony, extraordinarily persuasive, and it is in
their persuasional claims to actuality that lies the potency of their healing
affects. Indeed, my experience of Ayahuasca hallucinosis occasionally engendered
the distinct impression that its instrumental efficacy (especially with regard
to visionary healing interventions) depends to a large extent on a radical
inversion of normal subject-object cause and effect relations. Metaphorically
speaking, under the influence of Ayahuasca it is as though the individual
is enabled to pass through the glass and silver of a mirror and effect changes
directly within the virtual domain of reflection (‘The Realm of Visions’).
Under normal circumstances the reflection in a mirror can only be altered
by altering the positioning of the objects of reflection existing materially
in the physical world, the world this side of the glass. However, in
Ayahuasca shamanism, as with other shamanisms, it is the reflection, or imaginal
domain, that is directly manipulated and the objects of that reflection merely
fall into accord with such reflectional manipulations. It therefore seems
to be a matter of the physical world reflecting the reflection as opposed
to the reflection reflecting the world.
The healing affects potentiated by the non-ordinary
consciousness of Ayahuasca intoxication are also clearly exemplified by the
attendant experiences’ synaesthetic aspects. For example, on occasions under
the influences of Ayahuasca I not only ‘heard’ Fernando’s icaros, or power
songs, but imagined that I actually ‘saw’ them- emerging from the shaman’s
mouth as fiery trails of red energy (cf. the previously observed spirit
heads around Francisco’s neck) weaving a protective cocoon around the ritual
participants or binding the sicknesses of specific patients into submission.
Songs that are both heard and seen have a much broader range of affective
potentials (‘spheres of availability’ in magical parlance) than songs
that are merely heard in the ordinary sense. While the former retain their
sonic function as auditory vehicles for the ritual process their simultaneous
visual manifestation lends them experientially the instrumental qualities
of material ‘medicines’, or even of surgical ‘tools’. The Ayahuasquero shaman
would appear to apply them accordingly, choosing songs from his ever- expanding
repertoire applicable to specific psychophysical manipulations.
What gradually becomes apparent in the course
of a series of Ayahuasca intoxications is that each one represents a unique
and unrepeatable experiential stage, or evolution, in the development
of an individual’s knowledge of the associated phenomena. While a clearly
discernible pattern emerges defining the basal processes of intoxication the
content of each successive ‘journey’ constitutes a cumulative extrapolation
of the contents of all previous experiences- a systemic extension the complexities
of which render the experiences themselves inherently unpredictable if gradually
more manageable. Each journey takes one a little deeper into what I envisaged
cartographically during one ceremony as ‘the six directional, twenty-four
dimensional labyrinth of the Ayahuasca universe’ (see the ‘navigational key’
above), and a little further into that disputed territory that marks the conscious/imaginal/affective
experience of the literal frontier between life and death, or rather
(at least in holotropic/shamanic terms) that between embodied and disembodied
life.
The fact that several years prior to my first
encounter with the intrapsychic effects of Ayahuasca intoxication I underwent
an almost fatal circumstantial encounter with the reality of dying meant that
many of the attitude changes I expected Ayahuasca to occasion were already
in place. The cumulative cognitive effects of the twelve ceremonies I participated
in during the diet at La Sachamama therefore took the form of an accentuation
of already existing post-NDE attitudes as opposed to a primary induction.
Indeed, the cognitive orientations and philosophical implications of
my Ayahuasca experiences were characterised by a gratifying sense of familiarity-
gratifying from the point of view of their supporting the hypothetical pre-suppositions
of my project proposal. While I am aware that such a correlation may be in
part due to the ‘non-specific amplificatory’ (Grof. S. 1975) effects of such
hallucinogenic intoxication it must also be remembered that the theoretical
orientations of the project were derived from both firsthand NDE (circumstantial)
and ethnographic/analytic sources addressing shamanic worldviews, their instrumental
rationales, and modes of ritual induction which in the vast majority of formulations
are seen to involve at least an affective ‘death-rebirth’ sequence. My experiences
of confronting the reality of death (personal and archetypal), both on the
operating table and in an Amazonian Ayahuasca temple, inevitably constitute
subjective representations of a generally immanent phenomenon. However, in
the context of an overtly ‘biopsychosocial’ analysis of this phenomenon personally
embodied knowledge of the associated intrapsychic processes comprises a crucial
‘rite of access’ to the collective experience, a personal introduction to
the inner-spatial dimensions rendered experientially accessible by the human
psyche’s variously activated transcendent functions (Jung, C.G. 1960).
Given the nature of my inquiry I am inclined to liken my initial period of
preliminary fieldwork in
COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF THE AYAHUASCA DIET EXPERIENCE.
The visionary/imaginal effects of Ayahuasca intoxication
and the near-death-type experience components may be seen as convenient phenomenological/analytic
categories comprising a broader field of essentially cognitive transformations.
In the wake of the diet I am inclined to regard Ayahuasca cognition as an
all-inclusive condition of experience involving the human organism’s totality-
physical, psychological, and the contextual implications thereof. Indeed,
I would go so far as to suggest that the contextualising tendencies
of Ayahuasca consciousness constitute the primary psychotherapeutic function
of the associated experiences.
Personally speaking, Ayahuasca intoxication appeared
to effect a new ‘centre of consciousness’ outside the bounds of the quotidian.
Notwithstanding this radical re-positioning the original (ordinary) remained
accessible but it was consequently experienced as being externally monitored.
The new monitoring ‘centre’ was the centre from which I felt myself to be
negotiating the Ayahuasca experience. At times I was conscious of this effect
inducing an awareness of directly ‘experiencing the fact of experience’ (quoted
from field notes)- an objectification of the subjective. I experienced the
‘world’ as normally through the quotidian centre but I was at the same time
aware of a simultaneously functioning and more broadly encapsulating consciousness
(of which ‘I’ was the centre) that appeared to offer an assessment and an
explanation of the meaning of ‘myself’ in relation to the ‘world’ at
any given point in my personal history. By extension, these ‘explanations’
were extrapolated systemically to offer an absolute explanation of ‘the meaning
of myself in relation to the totality of all that has been, is, and ever will
be’. However, the explanation of my ‘meaning’ in relation to the ‘absolute’,
and indeed my ‘absolute meaning’, was not presented in anything approaching
the symbolic terms of a sentential logic (i.e. ‘language’). Rather it came
upon me as a consequence of the various visionary-affective narratives in
the form of an instantaneous realisation- what I now refer to for the sake
of communicatory convenience as ‘The Ecstatic Insight’. The object
of the insight itself appears to be linguistically ineffable. Any attempt
to dismantle or deconstruct it in words, even if such an undertaking was possible,
would negate the absolute field of systemic relationship that affectively
emerges only when the experiential components of that field are seamlessly
integrated.
The human mind, even under the influences of Ayahuasca,
would appear to balk at gazing for too long into ultimately unrepresentable
and inexpressible absolutes of universal meaning and my own mind came up with
some elaborate images with which to compensate for its inability to ‘unpack’
exegetically its own intuitive understanding. These hallucinatory-symbolic
evocations recurrently culminated in the form of a luminescent ocean of universal
possibility suspended bubble-like in a surrounding field of perfect darkness-
a glowing reservoir of past, present, and future events all imaginally intimated
as a boundless processual systemicism. This ‘liquid absolute’ evoked a sense
of the ultimate unity of events- an infinitely and eternally dimensioned
field of mutually determining component states, each event linked coherently
with every other across the manifestational gamuts of time and space as an
order of the highest degree. It appeared that any consciously isolable event
at any temporal moment and spatial position could be explained in terms of
its relation to every other. In that this explanatory matrix seemed relevant
to the processual histories of everything from the fall of a particular snowflake
to the creations and dissolutions of galaxies it also suggested a systemic/explanatory
contextualisation of the total histories of ‘materially individuated’ human
beings. It might have been disappointingly reminiscent of Newtonian clockworks
had this hallucinatory impression not presented itself cognitively as a unitary
field in which all apparent division seemed explicable in terms of perspectival
illusion, or Kantian ‘factual selection’ (from the ‘Critique of Judgement’
quoted in Bateson, G. 1972:488- 489).
It would seem that when the human mind is presented
with an intimation of the ultimate unity of all events in the phenomenal world
there are two principal interpretative choices that may be opted for. Firstly
that that the perceived systemic totality represents the sum of an ineffably
complex cumulative concatenation of circumstances that just happens probabilistically
to have produced ever higher degrees of order from the apparent chaos of its
origins, or secondly that this same objective system is in some sense consequential
to a purposively selective orchestration of infinite possibility. The first
describes a universe which is ultimately ‘meaningless’. It just is the way
it is because, given the probability-governed nature of the processes involved
in the evolution of its component states and the enormous timescales involved,
it couldn’t be any other way than it is at any particular moment- indeed the
Mother of All Accidents. The second describes a universe which is inherently
‘meaningful’ in the sense of its being a meticulously orchestrated systemic
processual unfolding in time and space of a purposive order. From this
point of view the universe may be seen to have an ultimate end (a telos)
which is somehow immanent, or implicately involved in the present as it emerges
from the past. The only difference between the two interpretations is that
in the first there is an absence of a sense of purpose while in the second
such a sense is present. These competing universal perspectives, or worldviews,
are otherwise identical. In both cases, at the scientifically examinable level
of manifestation, the eventualities of the objective universe are seen to
unfold identically. At this level the absence or presence of a humanly experienced
sense of absolute meaning in the totality would be unlikely to have any appreciable
effect on the universal processes involved, that is unless such a sense pertains
to some as yet unidentified objective properties of material organisation
(so-called ‘hidden variables’ (Bohm, D. 1980:65-110)). Notwithstanding this,
for the human individual the experiential induction of such an all-inclusive
sense of meaning may effect a transformation of dominant attitudes so marked
as to render the necessitated cognitive re-orientations irreversible. The
field of interpretative possibility made accessible by this new configuration
of consciousness simply cannot be contained within the parameters of the old,
a fact both effecting and demanding an often radical re-evaluation of the
experient’s philosophical/epistemological position with regard to the totality.
This transpersonalisation of the personal, which subjectively involved a contextualisation
of every aspect of my individual history within the broader framework of the
universal, effectively integrates the personal within an all- inclusive processually
developing system of absolute meaning. It occasions a worldview in which there
is no place for the term ‘insignificant’. As a consequence everything (including
everyone) was seen to shimmer with an interrelational relevance radiating
ever outwards through the degrees of abstraction my Ayahuasca-augmented consciousness
imposed arbitrarily upon its ultimate object- ‘the totality of all that is’.
This experience of contextualisation was attended by a dramatic intensification
of my sense of individual responsibility and agency. Conscious of my ‘self’
being a ‘component state’ of the whole I realised that whatever I do within
the context of the whole I do also to this self and vice versa. In turn this
led to a recognition of a synonymy existing between the concepts of ‘altruism’
and ‘self-interest’, and the consequent establishment of ‘healing’ as ‘the
greatest of all human aspirations’ in my hierarchy of personal/ transpersonal
values.
DIETARY RECORDS.
On the morning following each ceremony of the
dietary series I made it my practice to write as full an account as possible
of the attendant experiences. However, the multidimensional nature of the
modes of consciousness characterising Ayahuasca intoxication has a tendency
to strain the descriptive potentials of language to their limit. Of course
the ultimate ineffability of ‘mystical experience’ is an age-old problem
and those individuals who would attempt to communicate it have had recourse
to a variety of representational mediums including both poetry and painting.
The usefulness of poetic discourse in communicating such experience lies in
the potency of metaphor to articulate the unfamiliar by association (Rael,
J.E. 1992:1-5). Much of the Ayahuasca experience itself is consciously represented
in terms of visual images- imaginal concomitants of the neurochemical interaction
between potion and brain physiology. This re-configuration of neurochemical
processes effectively entails the experient seeing self and world
through what is literally for the duration of the intoxication ‘a different
brain’. The material ground of consciousness as it is individually experienced
is literally re-structured and this entails the embodiment of a radically
different reality orientation. In effect, Ayahuasca engenders a different
order of being which configures the objects of consciousness according to
a different order of epistemological organisation. However, the experiences
of ordinary consciousness and those of the non-ordinary modes engendered by
Ayahuasca intoxication are assimilated into a common field of memory. The
Ayahuasca mode becomes an integral part of the individual’s total experience
in that the images, insights, emotions, and cognitive configurations are remembered
in the same way as those attending ordinary modes. Ordinary consciousness
is forced to articulate the memories of its non-ordinary modes according to
the principles of metaphoric representation, and this is clearly evidenced
in my post-ceremony descriptions of which the first is cited above.
In addition to these written descriptions I also
made it my practice (encouraged by Francisco) to create a visual image encapsulating
the experiences of each ceremony. Some of these images entered my mind directly
in the course of particular ceremonies, some appeared in dreams, while others
coalesced from the subsequent conscious focusing of multidimensional experiential
refractions. On one occasion I actually witnessed the Ayahuasca creating
such an image within me during a ceremony as though on a mental ‘canvas’.
The following morning I simply moved the resultant image from memory to bark-cloth
without the slightest need for either condensation or elaboration.
Together, these written descriptions and imaginal
representations comprise a detailed record of my personal introductory acclimatisation
to the intrapsychic dimensions of Ayahuasca intoxication, a record in which
the establishment of a relatively stable over-all orientation can clearly
be discerned in the patterning of recurrent images, emotions, and philosophical
perspectives.
CONCLUSION.
While the opportunity to undertake an introductory
Ayahuasca diet might have presented itself during the course of my formal
fieldwork the directness of the experience would, I suspect, have been complicated
by a multitude of contingent distractions. In the
absence of such distractions the diet I actually
undertook during this first period of preliminary fieldwork constituted a
complete and uncompromised immersion in the experiential domains of shamanic
Ayahuasca intoxication. For six weeks I was fortunate enough to be in a position
to give myself over unreservedly to the transformational processes associated
with a series of such intoxications. I was thus able to observe and record
in detail my own personal acclimatisation to Ayahuasca’s ‘Realm of Visions’,
from the tentative incursions of the early ceremonies, through the increasing
knowledge and confidence of the subsequent ceremonies, right up to the initiated
epiphanies of the last. Two ceremonies a week for six weeks (giving me about
fifty hours direct experience of the intrapsychic effects of Ayahuasca) was
sufficient to bring me to a point of relatively stable adaptation. Notwithstanding
the fact that the affective and imaginal detail of particular experiences
was inherently unpredictable over the course of the series I gradually became
aware of certain fundamental and broadly applicable strategies for negotiating
the effects and experiences of intoxication. With increasing familiarity I
began to learn to control the Ayahuasca’s influence and to work with it towards
specifiable intrapsychic objectives or the answering of particular questions
(e.g. pre-experiential question: ‘What is the greatest of all human aspirations?’-
post-experiential answer: ‘Healing’). The experience of being healed (used
here in the sense of ‘being made whole’) becomes the knowledge whereby self-healing
is effected. It would therefore seem likely that once the techniques of self-
healing are mastered sufficiently to maintain a relatively stable condition
of personal wholeness then Ayahuasca experients may find themselves
in a position from which they can effect the healing of others. Of course
not everyone who takes Ayahuasca- even in considerable quantities- will become
a healer, but the intrapsychic transformations and attitude changes
involved in inculcating a compulsion to heal would appear to be clearly discernible
in the context of the experiences themselves and principally in the unitary
implications of The Ecstatic Insight.
During the course of twelve ceremonies I was enabled
to appreciate the awesome educative potential of Ayahuasca experience. Much
more than being merely an ‘adventure in self-discovery’ (Grof, S. 1988) a
series of Ayahuasca intoxications constitutes an education in the psychotherapeutic
dynamics of Ayahuasca shamanism itself- a complex of ritual procedures that
involves the totality of human biopsychosocial experience. Indeed, and aside
from their visionary intensity, one of the most striking features of
serial Ayahuasca intoxications is the quality of self- exegesis characterising
the associated experiences. The role, function, and biopsychosocial dynamics
of the interaction between human beings and this extraordinary plant decoction
are all apparently explained in the course of the experiences consequent to
ingestion. However, the eidetic, emotional, and affective ‘language’ in which
such explanations are couched is, by dint of the multidimensional nature of
the Ayahuasca experience itself, somewhat inimical to communicatory mediums
governed by the principles of sentential logic. At this stage in my research
I would have to say that the greatest challenge facing those who would attempt
to communicate Ayahuasca’s implicit explanations is that of description. And
yet, if Ayahuasca psychotherapy is to achieve the level of cross-cultural
recognition it so richly deserves this challenge will have to be met.
Perhaps the most important increment of the diet
with regard to my future formal research has been the identification of a
core insight which is seen to inform every aspect of the total field of human-Ayahuasca
interactions. As personally perceived this insight exists at the centre of
the ritual experience of the death-rebirth affective assemblage and finds
phenomenological equivalence in circumstantial encounters with the reality
of death (NDE). This core insight (‘The Ecstatic Insight’) is characterised
by the experient’s conviction of having ‘understood everything’, not in an
analytical sense but rather in terms of a direct and unmediated experience
of universal order. In that the order experienced is seen to be a property
of ‘the totality of all that is’ (unifically perceived) it is equally applicable
to consciously particularised, or selected, aspects of the totality. This
naturally includes the order of ‘self’ and the order of its relation to other
people, to society, and ultimately to the universe as a whole. The Ecstatic
Insight thus appears to constitute an all- inclusive, affectively explanatory
key to the ‘systemic coherences’ characterising the reality orientation
engendered by Ayahuasca intoxication. In a sense it constitutes the originary
principle of an intuitive appreciation of an absolute systemic orchestration
and meaningfulness which in turn occasions often radical changes in the experient’s
self-world relational attitudes.
POST-SCRIPT: A DIVINATORY DIGRESSION.
At the end of the first three weeks of my Ayahuasca
retreat at La Sachamama Francisco suggested that it might be in my best interests
to take a short break from the rigours of the diet. Normally such diets are
broken up into periods of eight days followed by ‘weekends’ during which time
the participants are allowed to return to the city for the purposes of replenishing
supplies (tobacco, bottled water, torch batteries, etc.) and general recuperation.
However, I found the prospect of such excursions to be an undesirable intrusion
into the meditative rhythms of life established in the forest and aside from
the occasional shopping trip decided to forego the option of regular breaks.
More than a few hours in
After a nine hour journey into the night along
the
The Ajosachero shaman, Don Ramon, was expecting
us when we arrived and after presenting him with a ‘penis’ of mapacho
tobacco we were invited to stay with his extended family in his own malocca.
The Ajosacha ceremony was scheduled for that night.
At
After the ceremony I asked Don Ramon about his
shamanic training. Apparently, over the course of fifteen years he had undertaken
numerous strict and arduous diets (some lasting for more than a year) under
the tutelage of masters of several different plants. When I asked him why
he had chosen to specialise as an Ajosachero, as opposed to, for example,
an Ayahuasquero or Tabaquero, he said that he simply felt most
drawn to the ‘powers’ of the Ajosacha root. He felt most comfortable with
its intrapsychic processes with regard to his shamanic vocation and as such
he felt that as much as he chose the plant the plant chose him.
Ajosacha (Mansoa stendlyi, Pseudo calymna alliaceum)
is a ‘Planta Maestra’ generally used by Amazonian curanderos as a means of
‘channeling’ new icaro power-songs into their dreams. Unlike shamanic plants
such as Ayahuasca or Datura it is not hallucinogenic in the strict sense of
the term but rather influences the quality of dreams experienced while asleep,
lending them a distinctly auditory nature from which effects icaros may be
derived. My own post-ceremony dreams were disappointingly quiet but then it
is, according to Don Ramon, very rare for a single night’s ingestion to produce
the psychophysical condition appropriate to the realisation of such effects.
My colleagues’ dreams were similarly ‘unmusical’. Notwithstanding this, and
while the ‘Ajosacha/Tahuayo experience’ constituted something of a digression
from the Ayahuasca diet in which I was simultaneously engaged, it did present
me with the opportunity to participate for the first time in a properly ‘domestic’
shamanic ritual which included an elaborate divinatory procedure. On returning
from Tahuayo I resumed my Ayahuasca retreat at La Sachamama for another three
weeks without any ill-effects.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
I would like to take this opportunity to extend
my heartfelt thanks to Don Francisco Montes Shuna and Don Fernando Lachi for
making this introductory Ayahuasca diet at La Sachamama Ethnobotanical Garden
such a safe, enjoyable, and enormously incremental undertaking. Not only did
they do all they could in their professional capacities as ritual specialists
to ensure that the Ayahuasca experiences themselves were conducive to my continued
psychological and physical health they also offered me the support of their
friendship, as did all the members of staff and their families at the garden.
Thanks are also due to my academic supervisor at