Читать книгу Listening to Ayahuasca - Rachel Harris PhD - Страница 10
Оглавление“I now think we know very little about the universe,” reported a thirty-three-year-old male editor. “There seems to be a much richer tapestry of spiritual dimensions for us to access, explore, and learn from. I now believe that the universe is connected through consciousness, that we are all one and interconnected through a web of love and life. I used to not believe in anything.” A thirty-eight-year-old female graphic designer echoed his thoughts, “I changed from being an atheist to a deeply spiritual person. I live with the sense of awe and knowledge of the great beyond, with feelings of humility and hope. I learned that reality is much larger and more complex than our ordinary state, that the Divine exists and is accessible to us all. This is a major shift in worldview.”
In the study, a noetic awareness of a previously unknown spiritual dimension was one of the most frequently mentioned experiences resulting from ayahuasca ceremonies. A twenty-five-year-old male graduate student wrote, “I appreciate Nature as Divine. The spiritual world is primary; the world of the rational senses is secondary.” A thirty-six-year-old male paralegal said, “It’s made a believer out of me — there’s more to consciousness than waking and dreaming.”
A fifty-seven-year-old male teacher wrote that he felt “a reaffirmation that there is a definite spiritual presence in the universe and that there are many more dimensions than our conventional mainstream one.” He’d had fifteen ayahuasca experiences over an eight-year period. He added, “Also a deeper attunement with other plant and animal life. I appreciate all life more. Time also felt relative.”
“I see light and opportunity to learn and grow in everything. I walk around in perfect awe and wonder at the world. I feel like I’ve found heaven on earth, and it’s a state of being,” said a thirty-three-year-old female graduate student. At the time of the study, this woman’s most recent experience with ayahuasca was six years before, which shows that these ecstatic feelings are not temporary, but long-lasting.
Study participants often mentioned decreased anxiety around death, accompanied by a deeper appreciation of life. “Because of ayahuasca,” a twenty-seven-year-old male graduate student wrote, “I’m impressed by the mystery and feel okay not knowing. I feel safe, even in death. Life is right here, right now, and that’s a gift!” A forty-two-year-old woman said, “I totally trust that there’s a Divine Force working for us, that all is really connected, and that life is a gift.” A fifty-four-year-old male social worker said he now understood that “life and death are two words describing the same process. I trust more in constant transformation.” He further explained that he was “learning to surrender to what is, to love what is. . . . I am part of the cosmos.”
The intensity of these experiences is apparent; many described one of the most important experiences of their lives. “I consider that one time to be a life-changing experience,” wrote a forty-seven-year-old female homemaker. A twenty-four-year-old male teacher said, “Ayahuasca was the first religious experience of my life.”
“I saw my soul,” wrote a forty-five-year-old man. “It was a square rusted piece of metal off to the side. I thought I should clean it.” His comment reminds me of the Sufi concept of polishing the mirror of the heart to allow more Divine Light to be reflected into the world.1
A thirty-five-year-old female bookkeeper, who’d had a total of five ayahuasca experiences, left most of the open-ended questions blank, but she wrote, “My second ceremony has stuck with me because in it I experienced a very prolonged state of pure joy and bliss and understood that that is who I really am.” Others wrote: “I’ve learned how little I know and how big the universe is”; “I’m part of the Cosmos”; and my personal favorite, “I glow light.”
A few people referenced a process of unfolding, in which they were working with the medicine over time. A twenty-nine-year-old graduate student expressed his long-term view of ayahuasca: “I think of my relationship to the medicine as lifelong, that I believe I will continue to use the tea throughout my life to open myself up to nonsecular channels of wisdom and guidance.” A sixty-three-year-old woman said, “I’m learning to keep my heart open, to accept myself and what is.”
“I no longer hate myself. I was able to let my hate go. Mama Ayahuasca filled that black hole with her love and it became my love!” said a thirty-one-year-old male accountant, who continued: “Life is more livable. It has more meaning — I don’t feel so insignificant. I believe in spirits now. I believe I have a spirit.”
A forty-seven-year-old male computer analyst wrote that he now felt “there’s more to life than normal, daily activities. My ayahuasca experiences have opened some profound blockages, emotional knots that I’ve been carrying around for a long time. This plant is a way to discover a whole new level of spirituality.”
The range of personal revelations was extensive and not easily categorized. Some people reported clearly ecstatic, mystical experiences of pure joy, love, and timelessness. Others wrote about an encounter with the Divine. Some mentioned seeing death as an illusion along with a new appreciation for life as a gift. Others experienced an alternate reality in the spirit world.
People continued to mention their personal healing even when the questions were focused on spiritual issues, which makes total sense. Our emotional and spiritual lives are intertwined and inseparable. The last two quotes above move seamlessly between psychological healing and spirituality — from self-hatred to love and from emotional knots to spiritual opening. It’s one of the hallmarks of this medicine that it works on all levels. Just don’t ask me how.
Synchronicity
In the questionnaire, I asked participants to describe any changes in synchronicity after drinking ayahuasca, thinking this would yield a gold mine of great stories, but . . . it didn’t. One person even went so far as to say, “I don’t believe in synchronicity anymore,” without explaining why. Most people left this question blank. A handful of people reported increased synchronicity in their lives, with one person appreciating it as a sign of the “integrated fabric of experience.”
Carl Jung described synchronicity as an event in the outer world that relates meaningfully to an inner world or psychological feeling.2 Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett wrote that these events “occur because psyche and matter are continuous with each other; they are two aspects of an undivided level of reality.”3
During the last few years, I’ve experienced dramatic synchronicities, all of them related to my personal journey and research with ayahuasca. The first incident occurred after I had been working with a white shaman for two years. I received the calendar of the Western shaman’s upcoming ceremonies, and when I looked over the list of possibilities, I heard a voice say no to each one. This was not my internal, intuitive voice, which feels like an analytical hunch. I heard an unusually loud no that originated from outside myself. At least the ceremonies I’d done with this particular shaman had brought me to the stage where I listened to that voice.
Around this same time, I felt “called” to explore a certain resort area about an hour away from where I was spending the winter months. I didn’t know anyone in the small towns there, but nonetheless, I was drawn to the area.
One Sunday afternoon I drove through the region, wondering what I was supposed to be doing there. There weren’t even any appealing restaurants for lunch. I caught a glimpse of a river from the highway and looked for a way to park so I could walk along the river. The first small road I followed ended in a town park with a half dozen men drinking from paper bags. I didn’t get out of the car. I drove over the highway to another small road along the river, lined with charming houses. I drove slowly on this narrow road, passing over regularly spaced speed bumps until the road narrowed even more and reached a dead end. No way to the river. I gave up and turned around to drive home, feeling disappointed and perplexed, wondering what this whole excursion had been about.
I forgot about my strong inclination to explore this area until a friend referred me to a shaman, only to discover that he lived in one of those charming houses along the river. Unknowingly, I had already visited his house. Now the “call” made sense. Without asking any questions about his background, I trusted the synchronicity and signed up for a ceremony.
The other synchronous incident happened when I was visiting Hawaii. Once again, in a similar way, I had felt called to travel there. A call to visit Hawaii? Even I was suspicious of my intentions. My rationale was that I wanted to learn more about how the ayahuasca vine and chacruna plants (which are both needed to produce the medicine) were being sustainably grown. I’d heard that these plants were being overharvested in the Amazon rain forest due to the increasing international demand for ayahuasca ceremonies. One Western shaman told me that his shaman complained that now he had to walk five hours into the jungle to harvest plants, whereas years ago they grew just a few steps away. Ayahuasca and chacruna have to be grown in a year-round tropical climate; not even South Florida will do. I planned on being in Hawaii for a month to give me plenty of time to meet my contacts in the ayahuasca underground and learn about their sustainable agriculture.
I emailed one of my contacts before I left for Hawaii and introduced myself. The man responded warmly and suggested I call him when I arrived on island. After I arrived, I called him, texted him, and emailed. No response. Finally, with only two days left, I officially gave up and decided to be a tourist for my remaining time.
I planned to tour a famous valley and, along the way, stopped in a little town that friends had told me was a good place for gifts. After parking, I paused to peruse the property listings in the window of a real estate office, which is something I always like to do. As I did, I noticed the name of the realtor was the contact person who had never returned my calls. I looked inside. He was sitting at his desk alone. I brazenly walked in and introduced myself. He turned red with embarrassment, since it was immediately obvious to us both that he had been ditching me for the past month.
I sat down, and after assuring him that I was not stalking him, I said, “This certainly scores high on the synchronicity scale.” This was my code for implying that Grandmother Ayahuasca must have had a hand in leading me to him. He got my message and warmed up to my interview, though I had neither pen nor paper — proof that finding him was unexpected and totally synchronistic.
Were these two incidences truly synchronous? Was Grandmother Ayahuasca guiding me, as so many people have described happening in their lives? Or was it a coincidence without any special meaning? The argument could be made either way, but the feeling runs deep in my bones. I felt guided in the way that the Lakota Indians call “hearing with the ear of the heart” or medieval Catholic monks called “reading the book of the world.”
The Therapeutic Value of Spiritual Experience
When discussing this aspect of ayahuasca, I prefer to use the term spiritual experience rather than mystical experience because it’s more inclusive. In scholarly research, mystical experience is defined carefully and specifically, and it includes or requires the presence of unity, transcendence of time and space, sacredness, noetic quality, and ineffability. By using spiritual experience instead, I can avoid the academic debate about what constitutes an authentic mystical experience. Certainly, in my study, reports of ayahuasca experiences describe some of the same mystical territory, but they also include aspects not usually mentioned in scholarly circles, like entry into otherworldly realms and contact with spirit entities.
What’s important here is that people describe, both in my study and elsewhere, huge leaps in their personal psychospiritual journey.4 They experience psychological healing and sometimes physical healing as well. Their way of being in the world undergoes a seismic shift from how they take care of themselves to how they understand their place in the universe. They also open up to what’s referred to as nonhuman worlds, including plant spirits, spirit doctors, personal ancestors, past-life experiences, and sometimes entities from other dimensions or universes.
My best description of the impact of ayahuasca is that it’s a rocket boost to psychospiritual growth and unfolding, my professional specialty during my thirty-five years of private practice. This kind of transformation is called “quantum change”5 in the professional literature, which acknowledges that psychology knows very little about it. Religious epiphanies are similar and better understood, or at least they are better documented by religion scholars. However, they, too, remain mysterious, with speculations of epilepsy as a contributing factor.
Philosopher William James explained them with his theory of “discontinuous transformation,” meaning that the leap is not a gradual evolution marked by education or practice but, rather, is a sudden, inexplicable awakening.6 In the case of ayahuasca testimonies, the leap is not inexplicable but directly attributable to the medicine, or to the spirit of the medicine. Perhaps both the chemical impact of the brew and the esoteric power of Grandmother Ayahuasca are involved.
One of the more famous spiritual experiences marked by white light, ecstasy, ineffability, great peacefulness, and a sense of the presence of God was reported by Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.7 His spiritual experience has touched millions of people through the now-ubiquitous self-help program. It’s not widely known, however, that his experience occurred while he was in an alcoholism-treatment program, which used a mix of drugs that included belladonna, or datura, one of the frequent admixtures to the ayahuasca brew. It’s possible that Bill W.’s revelation, which led to his abstinence, was caused by a plant associated with this Amazonian medicine.
From my study, what we do know is that the spiritual experiences arising during ayahuasca ceremonies lead to great changes in people’s lives. The qualitative descriptions of what people experienced and how they changed are confirmed by hard or quantitative data from the questionnaire. The people who used ayahuasca scored high on the two factors related to spirituality, “Joy in Life” and “Relationship to the Sacred.” When both qualitative and quantitative data are in agreement, we can be pretty sure we’re getting an accurate picture.
My Ontological Crisis
From the very beginning of the research study, I felt the presence of Grandmother Ayahuasca both in and out of ceremony. As I’ve mentioned, Grandmother Ayahuasca specifically instructed me to involve Lee Gurel by name in the research project. I’d never received instructions from a plant teacher before, and looking back, I don’t understand how I never questioned my experience. With the same naïveté, it never occurred to me to ask other people about their relationship with Grandmother Ayahuasca.
As a researcher, however, I knew enough to seek expert help in the development of the questionnaire, and a white, female shaman suggested I ask about the relationship. The questionnaire asks: “Do you feel that you have a personal relationship with the spirit of ayahuasca? If so, please describe this relationship. How do you communicate? How does this relationship affect your life? How is this relationship unfolding?”
Ultimately, 75 percent of the eighty-one subjects reported an ongoing relationship with the spirit of ayahuasca. I was shocked by this finding, even though I was also, admittedly, receiving guidance from Grandmother Ayahuasca. I was hearing her voice and listening to her advice on data analysis, no less. The obvious contradiction here is not lost on me, and I can only marvel at the full extent of my lack of consciousness regarding this issue. What happened was that these findings sent me into an existential crisis from which I have not yet fully recovered.
I could somehow accept that Grandmother Ayahuasca was talking to me, but if she was also talking to others, then I felt she must be real. With this, my whole belief system and worldview crumbled. Coming from a family of confirmed agnostics, I didn’t believe I had a belief system. I didn’t realize agnosticism was a belief system, just as most people don’t realize that their belief system is just one way of looking at the world.8
Anthropologist Jeremy Narby related the story of a man who thought drinking ayahuasca would be comparable to smoking a joint. He was not pleased with his experience: “My way of looking at the world was completely altered and no one warned me!” Narby said the man was quite bad off for a few years and facetiously remarked that ayahuasca should come with a warning label: “Beware. This could be dangerous to your worldview.”9
Of course, a warning label wouldn’t have stopped me from trying ayahuasca, and ever since, I’ve struggled with my particular ontological crisis: “Are spirits real?”
Only one man from the study had a similar problem. He called it a “radical ontological difference,” and he wrote: “The notable aspect of the worlds of possibility that ayahuasca opens up is this: These realms are occupied. This is shocking. There are others. Lacking any inherited, assumed, or borrowed belief structure with which to explain or interpret this, I am struggling.” A man after my own heart.
I still have trouble believing my own data. I cannot sustain my Western concept of reality and accept that I, like so many others, am in direct communication with the spirit of ayahuasca. My Western belief system shatters in the face of my experiences, but then, like a cartoon resurrection, pieces itself back together after each ceremony.
