Читать книгу Listening to Ayahuasca - Rachel Harris PhD - Страница 8
ОглавлениеIt was 1970, and I was sitting in the office of Dr. Kurland, the medical director at the Maryland Psychiatric Hospital, the epicenter of leading-edge psychedelic research. I was twenty-four years old, armed with only a bachelor’s degree in psychology and my own psychedelic experiences. My years at the Esalen Institute (www.esalen.org) as a residential fellow and staff member had given me the connection to Stanislav Grof, who arranged the job interview. Dr. Kurland was very kind to see me. Although he had no intention of hiring me, he did give me some fatherly advice: “Go to graduate school.”
I eventually followed his advice, but by then the federal government had passed the Controlled Substances Act, which essentially outlawed research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs, including marijuana. These substances were deemed to be both dangerous and without medical benefit despite hundreds of research articles that explored how psychedelics could facilitate the therapeutic progress of psychiatric patients, alcoholics, and terminal cancer patients. The US government under President Nixon, in a reaction to the cultural revolution of the sixties, declared a “war on drugs” that was not consistent with the available research findings. This decision stopped all further scientific exploration.
I gave up my dream of doing psychedelic research. I completed my PhD and pursued a more conventional research career, receiving a prestigious New Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health. But in 1982 when the NIH called to ask for my next grant application, I had to tell them, “I’m pregnant, and I’m going to stay home with the baby.” The conversation ended immediately. I left my research career a few weeks before my daughter was born and changed the course of my professional life from research to private practice.
I saw clients for thirty-five years, specializing in well-educated, high-functioning people who wanted to clear up unresolved issues from childhood or to work on personal relationships. These people were essentially the same kind of people who went to Esalen workshops. They had some sense of a spiritual path or interest in their psychospiritual development. I also led workshops at both Esalen and the Omega Institute, and as a result, I had the opportunity to see how people integrated psychological insights from intensive workshop experiences into weekly psychotherapy and then how they translated their learnings into daily life.
Although I loved doing psychotherapy and leading workshops, I continued to mourn the loss of my research career. That is, until I heard the voice of Grandmother Ayahuasca: Do the research, she told me.
But I get ahead of myself. How I found ayahuasca, or how the spirit of ayahuasca found me, I will never fully understand. I hadn’t been searching for the medicine; I’d never even heard of it. It was February 2005, and I was living in New Jersey, innocently searching for a tropical beach vacation, which is certainly a very sane endeavor. A friend told me of a retreat center nestled between the rain forest and the Pacific Ocean on the remote coast of Costa Rica. I registered immediately for a retreat with only a glance at the lectures and program offered for that week.
Needless to say, I was surprised when the woman organizing the travel arrangements called to ask me about my intentions. I didn’t know what she was talking about. She explained that the retreat included two ayahuasca ceremonies. I told her I’d get back to her with my intentions, and I immediately turned to a book about ayahuasca that I’d bought years ago but never read: Ayahuasca: Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature, edited by Ralph Metzner. I’d had spiritual experiences with psychedelics when I was in my twenties, and now that my daughter was grown, I felt free to renew my interest, especially with an opportunity like this falling directly into my lap.
I knew immediately what my intentions would be. Six years before, when my father was dying, I brought him to my home with hospice care. The sound of his death rattle filled the house, shaking me to my bones. The slow rhythm of his breathing echoed inside me, hollowing me out as I wondered which breath would be his last.
During one of those moments, as I was waiting for his next inhalation, the universe exploded inside me. I felt the space within me expand outward in all directions at once. I saw sparks of multicolored lights in the shape of a tunnel through space, dark space all the way out to the ends of the universe.
All of a sudden, I was rushing through this tunnel, pulled from my body, and launched into space. I quickly realized that I was out of my body, traveling fast. I was scared. With a jolt, I brought myself back down into my heart-pounding body and looked around the room through new eyes, as if seeing for the first time. I could almost feel myself in my brain, behind my eyes, where the seeing actually occurs.
I calmed down with slow breaths, but I had no idea what had just happened. My brain kicked in and scanned for similar experiences. Years ago, during an earthquake in San Francisco, the walls of the hotel ballroom had buckled and waved like ribbons in the wind, but this wasn’t an earthquake. Nor was it a psychedelic experience. I wasn’t on anything. Shaky and pale, I found my way to a chair, as if sitting down would increase my connection to the earth.
After my dad’s death, I tried to figure out what this experience was all about, wondering what had happened to me. I described the experience again and again to my wide network of spiritual friends — Buddhists, psychologists, teachers of Transcendental Meditation, shamanic practitioners, spiritual directors, Jungians. No one had a clue.
Finally, I talked to Carol Hegedus, a friend who had worked for the Fetzer Institute and brought Bill Moyers’s Healing and the Mind program to television. She’d been studying Rudolf Steiner and intuitively knew what had happened to me. “You went with your dad as he was leaving this world,” Carol explained in a simple, matter-of-fact way. “You went partway with him.” Something inside me became quiet and still. No wonder I had been so frightened — I was afraid that if I didn’t come back to my body, I would die along with my father. This explanation made sense to me, reaching deep into my bones with a knowing certainty.
My dad had been in a coma, in the final stage of dying. Without consciously choosing or even being aware, I joined him as he was leaving. Almost like a gift, I caught a glimpse of the classic near-death experience — the tunnel, the whoosh sensation of traveling fast out of my body, the emotional intensity filled with personal and spiritual meaning.
I felt unfinished with this experience. I wondered for years what would’ve happened had I not become frightened and returned to my body. Would I actually have died? Would I have been sent back? Would I have seen where my father was going? I always wondered, and now my intention for the ayahuasca ceremony was to continue this journey.
Some would say I was called to that first meeting with Grandmother Ayahuasca. Certainly, the serendipity factor was ridiculously high. But I was the one who had to say yes to the retreat center, yes to the ceremonies, and ultimately, yes to the research. In saying yes, I opened myself to one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
Flash forward to Costa Rica: Like a snake working its way through my intestines, the ayahuasca tea moved deep inside my body. I realized this tea was far more powerful than any psychedelic I’d done before, and here I sat between the Pacific Ocean and the rain forest, no telephone or even internet contact available, no cars, literally no exit. The person in charge was an indigenous shaman, decorated with ritual ochre and feathers, who didn’t speak English. He did, however, clear the ceremonial space to protect us from unwanted spirits, although this was not a great reassurance. It was from his hands that I received the foul-tasting, murky brown liquid — he looked me in the eye through the candlelit shadows and whistled into the tea, a shamanic prescription for my energy. I downed the cup.
After thirty minutes or so of trying to remain calm and confident, I lifted off. Without warning, I zoomed through space, traveling way beyond the speed of light through a tunnel whose walls were lined with multicolored points of light that became streams of color as I flew past. In a cosmic whoosh, I broke through into the blackness of space filled with stars and eternity. I was gone in so many ways — out of my mind, out of my body, and out of this world. No longer an “I.” Only nothingness with unending silence, no fear or perhaps no “I” to be afraid.
In my visionary journey, I was back with my father during his last conscious days. I relived my last words with him, “I love you, Dad.” He responded with the same uncharacteristically emotional words that he had said on his deathbed: “I’ve always loved you.” After floating in space a while longer, I settled back down to earth and into my body. I felt as though a veil had been lifted, that I was bathed in love.
During the ceremony, I was more open than I was at the stressful time of my father’s dying, better able to fully receive my father’s final message. His words reached back into my childhood, subtly changing childhood memories so that my perspective shifted. I felt more loved, better able to recognize and receive the love that was “always” there but not always felt. Tears warmed my cheeks. Gratitude flooded my heart. I was grateful to relive this last moment with my dad, to feel the full impact of his words. I knew this experience had shifted my personal history in an essential way that somehow allowed my heart to be more open.
Questions about Ayahuasca
I began asking research questions the very next morning, when I knew without a doubt that I’d had a profound and deeply personal healing, far beyond anything I’d experienced with other entheogens — the term for psychedelics taken for spiritual purposes to catalyze an inner experience of the Divine. As a psychologist, I couldn’t help but ask: How does ayahuasca, a psychospiritual medicine, work? Who is the spirit of ayahuasca, which indigenous cultures respectfully call “Grandmother”? And, really, what does that mean? Is she a real spirit? Does she help everyone? How could this medicine so precisely fulfill my intentions? Almost as if she knew me, or rather, like the National Security Agency, had access to my operating system?
I prevailed upon the translator to convey my questions to the shamans, two Secoya elders from Ecuador. I wanted to know about the process of drinking ayahuasca: Are there stages people pass through as they become experienced drinkers? Do people see the same visions regardless of cultural beliefs or locations? How do the shamans’ songs affect the visions and healing? How were the shamans trained? Do shamans agree on what they see? Heaven help me — I was asking about what’s called inter-rater reliability, or the degree to which the two shamans saw the same things.
A few years later I learned that this was not such a crazy idea; some shamans are also interested in inter-rater reliability. A Western shaman, who grew up in an indigenous village and was trained by his godfather, a traditional shaman, told me about one of his initiations. He was presented with a variety of patients in front of a panel of three experienced shamans, and they all had to agree on the diagnoses and treatments. Even with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a common reference, Western psychotherapists often disagree about diagnoses, and even more frequently they disagree about treatment plans. This young shaman faced a very high bar to pass, but pass he did.
The most difficult question I asked was: How does the medicine work? It’s almost an unfair question, since we don’t really know how psychotherapy works, although we have plenty of theories. We only recently figured out how aspirin works. In itself, the question is culture bound in a Western psychotherapeutic framework. There was no way the shamans could understand my questions, much less speak to them.
I tried a different approach, a phenomenological one that was less mired in a Western therapeutic context. I asked the shamans, “Can you see what I see during the ceremony?” One shaman smiled and nodded. I hesitated with my next question, not sure it was politically correct, but decided to seize the moment: “Can I see what you see during the ceremony?”
At first the shaman was taken aback by my impertinence, especially coming from a woman, but he recovered quickly with a hearty laugh, explaining that there is a hierarchy. He can see my visions, but I can’t possibly see his. “Thank you,” I replied, grateful that he was not offended.
I learned very early that the linguistic and cultural divide between me and the indigenous healers was way too wide for me to bridge. My psychological questions were meaningless to them. The shamans live in an ayahuasca-saturated world I can never fully understand, a world that is as real, or even more real to them, as this world.
Mission Accepted
In 2008, three years after my first ceremony and long after I’d given up trying to understand how the shamans do whatever it is they do, Grandmother Ayahuasca came to me during a ceremony and, in a no-nonsense way, told me to do a research study. I took her request as a mission — she, in all her wisdom, had chosen me (ME!) to do this work. Ego inflation barely describes my state of mind.
Yes, I heard a voice, and questions about this voice have bounced around in my head ever since. What was this voice? What does it mean that I heard a voice? I had no answers. You might think I would have ignored the voice’s directive: Do this research. Instead, I never doubted. I accepted the mission and congratulated the spirit of ayahuasca for her wise decision to choose me.
I had a rare combination of experience: an academic research background and a psychotherapy practice along with personal experience with ayahuasca. I didn’t question how Grandmother Ayahuasca could possibly have known this, or how she had evaluated my skills, resources, and determination to interview and collect data from people willing to admit to a perfect stranger intimate details of their experiences with an illegal substance. At this point in my career, I was in private psychotherapy practice, outside the academy, my research career abandoned long ago with the birth of my now thirty-something daughter. Given the illegal status of ayahuasca, it’s possible this research could only have been done by someone outside the hallowed and federally funded halls of academia. Did Grandmother Ayahuasca know all this and take it into consideration in choosing me?
Well into the second year of the project, one of my expert consultants, a Western shaman, casually said to me, in reference to something else entirely, “Everyone thinks they’ve received a mission from ayahuasca. I don’t believe two-thirds of what she says to me.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You mean she was just kidding? I didn’t have to do this research study?”
In fact, as I’ve found, the feeling of being assigned a mission by Grandmother Ayahuasca is relatively common. Had I known this from the start, I might not have taken the whole project so seriously. I might have assumed that my sense of having been called was merely an artifact of the ayahuasca experience.
But I have no doubts that Grandmother Ayahuasca personally asked me to do this study. I heard her voice repeatedly along the way. I felt that she opened doors for me, making the whole project evolve smoothly without even a minor hassle, which is unusual in research. Something inevitably goes at least a little wonky.
During one ayahuasca ceremony, as I was just beginning to feel the effects of the medicine in my body, I had another conversation with the spirit of ayahuasca.
Involve Lee in the research, she said. Lee Gurel was the mentor of my own former research mentor. He’s a nationally recognized psychologist with a lifelong career in prestigious research positions.
“I’ve already spoken with him,” I replied, with the adolescent tone of having been there, done that. A part of me couldn’t believe that I was talking to Grandmother Ayahuasca like a snotty sixteen-year-old.
Grandmother Ayahuasca was patient. She ignored my tone and simply added, Involve him more.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
A few days later, I called Lee and told him, “Grandmother Ayahuasca told me I should involve you more in the research.”
Slight pause. “Alright,” he said, simply and, no doubt, with an impish grin, never once questioning my source.
Guided in the Research
As I developed the questionnaire for the study, I made an early decision to be totally transparent as a researcher, and I placed a personal statement on the questionnaire’s front page (for the full questionnaire, see appendix A):
I am being guided in this research by my own personal experience of ayahuasca. I’m a psychologist who has worked in research and has had a private psychotherapy practice for over thirty-five years. My intention is to publish the research results. This research is being conducted via personal networks of kindred spirits.
By asking people to participate in the study, I was also asking them to admit to using an illegal substance, and I felt that I had to be willing to be equally vulnerable or more so. Participants could complete the questionnaire anonymously, while my name and personal information were right up front and all over the internet. I also wanted people to know that I understood the ayahuasca experience from the inside. I was not just an observer — I was a participant, a kindred spirit.
By saying I was “guided . . .by my own personal experience of ayahuasca,” I meant to imply my belief in the spirit of ayahuasca as a sentient being with the intention to influence. From a Western point of view, this statement was not only irrational but it could conceivably be seen as tainting the research results. It could be argued that my statement influenced how people answered the question about their own relationship with the spirit of ayahuasca. However, I thought it was important to state publicly that the study was not my idea alone, that I was acting in collaboration with Grandmother Ayahuasca, even following her orders. There were times when I did, indeed, feel like a good foot soldier dedicated to completing my mission.
Then there were other times when I questioned my sanity: What was it about my experiences with ayahuasca that led me to embark on this research project? Did I really believe that I was responding to a personal request from Grandmother Ayahuasca? Was I officially and, quite publicly, going off the deep end?
Let’s just say I had my doubts about the whole project, but what kept me going was that first experience with ayahuasca when I relived my experience of my father’s dying. I’ve talked with many others who also had amazing initial encounters with ayahuasca. It’s almost as if she bonds us to her with that initial intense, deep spiritual experience and profound healing. Even if other ceremonies don’t reach those heights, we remain eternally grateful. So when she asked me to do the research, of course I said, and continue to say, yes.
Research Limitations
Admittedly, my research has some obvious limitations.1 First, it was not a controlled study. There was no random assignment to a control group, no double-blind assessments. The study is the first stage of research exploring a new phenomenon. It is more than a survey, but not an experimental design, which was clearly impossible.
For one thing, there’s no way to control for the potency of the ayahuasca brew, or what researchers would call “the dose.” Shamans cook their own brews in their own idiosyncratic ways, often adding different plants to the mix in a mysterious process. The indigenous perspective is that the potency can be affected by the type of ayahuasca vine cooked into the brew — there are varieties that shamans can distinguish but Western botanists are unable to differentiate. The native names given to the range of ayahuasca vines are poetically evocative — red, yellow, black, or white, along with sky, bright star, or thunder ayahuasca — but no studies have been done to determine if there are chemical differences. As if that’s not complicated enough, the quality of the brew is supposedly influenced by the time of day the vine is cut, the stage of the moon, and what songs are sung during the preparation.
Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), reported that his organization tried to control the potency variable by freeze-drying the ayahuasca and processing it into a capsule similar to the ones used in Spanish research.2 Unfortunately, the shamans he had intended to use for the study refused to work with the pills, saying that the spirit was lost during the processing.
Neither the research participants nor I had any idea what we actually drank in our ayahuasca ceremonies. Brews vary greatly, and the addition of datura, a potentially toxic plant that is sometimes added to the medicine, can change the nature of the experience in dramatic ways. I heard of one traveling shaman who, when he began to run out of tea, added vodka to the mix. Another perspective on the question of potency arose when an experienced shaman tested a number of mixtures used in ceremonies around the San Francisco Bay Area. He reported, “None of these will take you where you want to go,” meaning that the tea was not correct for spiritual journeying.
Not knowing exactly what people were drinking was only half the problem. There was also no way to know how much of the mystery brew people drank. During a ceremony, each participant sits in front of the shaman to receive the cup of dark, mysterious, muddy liquid. Supposedly, the shaman, in that moment, psychically determines the correct amount to give. Some say the shamans have X-ray vision allowing them to see into the subtle body of the person sitting in front of them, so they know how much to pour into the cup. I was grateful not to be researching whether or not this was possible. For my humble purposes, I only had to accept that the potency and dose of the tea couldn’t be controlled or even documented.
The one criterion for entering the study was that the person had drunk ayahuasca in North America at least once. They may also have attended ceremonies in South America, but the research asked only about their experience in North America. I had solid, well-thought-out reasons for focusing the study in this way. I was primarily interested in a psychospiritual framework for understanding why people drank ayahuasca, what they learned from their experience, and how it changed them and their lives. I wanted to explore how this medicine from the Amazon basin was being used in a Western culture.
There were also cultural and language issues I avoided by focusing on North America, but the real truth is that I didn’t want to travel to collect data in places where I would have to shake out my shoe before putting it on to make sure that a tarantula had not wandered into a new home. I didn’t want to go to the jungle. I didn’t want to hear that the gardener had killed a poisonous snake on the path between my cabin and the makeshift bathroom and left the head of the snake on a stick to ward off other poisonous snakes from the area. There are all kinds of subtle ways that researchers might unwittingly influence the outcome of a scientific study. In my case, I was not so subtle.
I also focused the study on what happened in the days and weeks following the ceremony. Having lived at the Esalen Institute during the late sixties and early seventies, first as a residential fellow and then as a staff member, I had had a bird’s-eye view of what were then called human potential workshops. Three or four simultaneous workshops were held on weekends and during the week. Eventually, I began to recognize repeat customers. Some would claim to have had an amazing breakthrough, either psychological or spiritual, or just as often both, but then they would return a few months later with the same problems, seeking yet another amazing breakthrough. I began to wonder about the challenge of integrating high-intensity workshop experiences so the benefits wouldn’t fade away but would lead to deeper insight and real change.
I saw the same challenge integrating ayahuasca experiences, so that they were not merely collected in a kind of neo-shamanic spiritual materialism, as in, “Let me tell you about my amazing vision.” I wanted to see how people were integrating their ayahuasca experiences into practical changes that manifested in their daily lives.
The phrase tossed around the ayahuasca underground is that “one ceremony is more helpful than ten years of psychotherapy.” That is quite a claim, and I wanted to hear first-person accounts explaining how the medicine had made a difference in people’s lives well beyond the ceremony. The underlying questions were, “What was the meaning of your experience? How has it changed your life?”
The same questions arose decades ago regarding the long-term spiritual impact of psychedelic drugs. That is, one mystical experience does not a mystic make, the distinction being between a religious experience and a religious life. As psychiatrist Roger Walsh explained, “The universal challenge is to transform peak experiences into plateau experiences, epiphanies into personality, states into stages, and altered states into altered traits.”3 Religion professor Huston Smith described the same issue more poetically: “to transform epiphanies into abiding light.”4
It’s very tempting to study the flashes of illumination during ayahuasca ceremonies — the visions, mystical experiences, and paranormal phenomena. The extraordinary visions are beguiling and entrancing in a mythological way. They are most often seen with eyes closed, but some are seen with eyes open, like a design overlay on what no longer seems like the real world. Ayahuasca has been called the “television of the jungle,” since some visions unfold like a cinematic narrative.5 The context for the visions can range from the Amazon jungle to flying saucers to Egyptian temples. I can safely say there is no typical experience — anything is possible, and it’s often unimaginable.
People also report traveling through the universe, meeting spirits, talking to dead people, and receiving energetic healings. These healings involve a strong somatic component involving the physical or subtle bodies, beyond the purgative qualities of the medicine. A more difficult element to describe are the philosophical awakenings that move Westerners from their safely ensconced worldview to a magical, mystery tour of the universe.
Psychologist Ralph Metzner — who is now one of the elders of the psychedelic community, having started with Timothy Leary at Harvard more than half a century ago — collected an array of first-person reports of ayahuasca experiences, which he published in Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature.6 These descriptions are typically dramatic and mind-boggling, but I didn’t want the research to explore this experiential content. There are already plenty of ayahuasca stories on the internet and a growing number of visionary artists and filmmakers documenting the fantastic visions. In addition, I knew that an Israeli psychologist, Benny Shanon, had already conducted a psychological study of the ayahuasca experience, analyzing visions, ideas, insights, and emotional and bodily effects.7 He wanted to know whether there was an order to the experiences, a progression with distinct stages. But his research didn’t delve into what the experiences might mean in a therapeutic context or how people changed as a result of the visions.
Even without understanding what the ayahuasca visions mean, the electric images resonate powerfully with the collective unconscious, often remaining vivid in memory for years. For the indigenous cultures, the visions reflect the ayahuasca cosmology, with stories of shamans marrying pink dolphins and living at the bottom of the Amazon River.8 The visions are dreamlike and complex, replete with exotic cities, jaguars, and iridescent snakes that sometimes swallow people whole. Again, the magical world of ayahuasca lies beyond the scope of mere psychological research.
I kept my focus on the long-term changes following participation in ayahuasca ceremonies and outlined the scope of the research on the front page of the questionnaire:
This study focuses on how the ayahuasca experience influences your life and how you use it in your life. The questionnaire doesn’t ask about your visions when you drink ayahuasca. Instead, it focuses on your intentions before and your experiences after.
The First Interview
The first step in developing a research questionnaire is to conduct open-ended interviews to get an overview of the territory, opening up avenues of exploration and opportunities for clarification in the research. The first person I interviewed was Jonathan Talat Phillips, who told me he’d used ayahuasca three times and said, “It changed my life.”
Then thirty-five, Jonathan had beautiful features, hippie-length blond hair, and an enthusiastic energy. He said, “I used to work for a nonprofit, but during my ayahuasca ceremony, three spirit doctors in white coats came to me and told me to start a healing practice. They promised they would show up at each session and heal people.” He recounted his magical story without any sense of doubt. “So I became a Reiki practitioner.”
His story made perfect sense to him but not to me. After all, I considered myself a psychologist, and still do, even though I was wandering in unknown territory. I got worried at the mention of “spirit doctors in white coats,” and I wanted to know if this guy was for real, if he was crazy or what.
I questioned him and searched for any other delusional signs but found none. Besides his healing practice, Jonathan was involved in a successful and creative internet venture (see his website, psychonaut-talat.com). He did volunteer work and was well-liked and respected by his community of friends. I didn’t know how to make sense of his spirit doctors who, by the way, appeared to him as promised during every Reiki session to work with each client. He had a good practice. I didn’t know if his clients knew about his helpers or not.
Both then and now, I have no idea how to understand this story of spirit doctors from a psychological point of view — I simply took notes and listened seriously, just as I’ve always done with clients who describe unusual experiences. Spirit doctors are common in ayahuasca iconography, and in a ceremony in North America, Jonathan met the same spirits who visited during ayahuasca ceremonies in the rain forest, thousands of miles away. After just three ceremonies with ayahuasca, Jonathan changed not only his life but his whole cosmological understanding of reality. I was shocked both by his story and by my realization that I was right behind him, not only hearing the voice of ayahuasca but following her advice to dedicate my time and energy to this research project.
Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with that first interview, and subsequent interviews weren’t much more helpful. I must admit that I didn’t take Jonathan’s story seriously, so it never occurred to me to ask, “Who were these spirit doctors?” or “What did they say?”
Since then I’ve read a description of spirit doctors that made at least some sense to me. Pharmacist Connie Grauds traveled to Peru to get continuing education credits for working in an indigenous healer’s garden. When she accidentally cut her foot, she thought she would need to travel two days upriver to receive proper medical care. Instead, the shaman used plants to heal an infection in her foot that normally would’ve required antibiotics. She realized at this point that the shaman’s expertise surpassed her Western training, and she entered into a traditional shamanic apprenticeship with him. After two decades of study, including ayahuasca ceremonies, Grauds had her own spirit doctors and the temerity to ask them, “Who are you?”
In her book Jungle Medicine, Grauds wrote that they appeared “in a dream as a mass of swirling energy. You called for us? they asked, almost like genies summoned from a lamp. . . . We are the shear unbridled healing forces of nature. . . . It is we, the generative forces of nature, who do the healing. Not you.”9
Later, I communicated with Grauds, and she expanded on the nature of her relationship with these spirit doctors. She wrote to me, “They soon appeared again in my sleep with the following directive, If we are to continue healing your clients, we need some reciprocity from you. Bring people into nature, lecture on the healing power of nature, be the Voice of Nature and its healing powers for us. That’s the deal, and so it is, even today.”10
Again, the question of spirit doctors is beyond the scope of psychological research, but my first interviews brought me face-to-face with the limits of my understanding.
These interviews showed me that people were hungry to talk about their ayahuasca experiences, not just because they were dramatic and sensational, but because they needed a witness, someone who would listen to their extraordinary tales from start to finish. During these interviews, I was often more a therapist than a researcher. Being able to tell their stories gave the interviewees a greater sense of understanding and enabled them to find meaning in their experiences that they could use in their ongoing lives. At the very least, these initial interviews confirmed the importance of focusing my research on integration.
Developing the Questionnaire
The decision to focus the research on integration was totally my own. Grandmother Ayahuasca asked me to conduct the study, but she gave me no guidance on the content of the research. All the details of how to proceed were up to me. My initial interviews only added to the mystery surrounding the medicine — obviously, I wasn’t up to asking about spirit doctors. Instead, I turned to a Western shaman who had been trained by an indigenous shaman. We spoke the same language and shared the same psychospiritual, Western perspective. He also had been conducting ceremonies and observing people for years, so he had the clinical information I had tried and failed to gather from initial interviews.
“What questions should I ask?” I said right away as we sat in an otherwise empty Chinese restaurant. I was ready to take notes in between bites of broccoli chicken.
“Let’s begin with the details of the ceremony. It would be good to know what people are actually doing,” he said.
Nothing was known about how people were doing the ceremonies, so we included questions that asked for concrete details: what kinds of settings, with or without live music, were dietary instructions or medication warnings given, were these followed, and was there any screening or follow-up offered. I also wanted to collect phenomenological data about personal experiences before and after the ayahuasca ceremonies. What kinds of intentions did people have initially and then how did their intentions change with subsequent experiences with ayahuasca? Did they do anything special to integrate their experiences afterward? How did they change as a result of their ayahuasca experiences? I asked nineteen open-ended questions about changes in use of alcohol, marijuana, or other psychedelics; changes in health or diet; changes in personal relationships, emotional moods, or dreams; and changes in attitude toward oneself, life, or spiritual beliefs. In other words, I asked about almost everything and the kitchen sink (for the complete questionnaire, see appendix A).
These open-ended questions were what allowed people to express the personal suffering that had brought them to ayahuasca and how the medicine helped them to change. Sometimes the help was immediate, falling into the category of miraculous cures. Other times, healing required patient discipline, learning new ways of dealing with emotional moods and relationships. At the time of developing the questionnaire, I didn’t realize how therapeutic it would be for people simply to describe how they’d changed.
I’d never seen a research protocol with so many open-ended questions. Usually researchers try to keep questionnaires simple and easy to fill out, since it’s usually difficult to get people to cooperate and complete the process. Yet I designed a questionnaire that was sixteen pages long with nine pages of essay questions. It never occurred to me to worry about getting people to answer all these personal questions about their illegal explorations into an Amazonian medicine. This wasn’t optimism about the data-collection process; I just never considered that this might be a potential issue. Looking back, I wonder about this total lack of concern. It’s uncharacteristic of me, as I’m usually quite pessimistic, expecting that what can go wrong will go wrong. In this case, I was totally la-de-da: “Let’s ask this and this and this.”
I met with other indigenous-trained Western shamans who made even more suggestions. One very intuitive shaman said, “You should ask whether people experience a relationship with Grandmother Ayahuasca.”
“Like what?” I asked, completely ignoring my own experience with her.
“Ask whether they have an ongoing relationship with her.”
“Oh.” This question had simply never occurred to me despite the fact that I was doing the project as a result of my own relationship with Grandmother Ayahuasca. My unconscious never ceases to amaze me. I can only say that I must have thought I was one of the select few to be in communication with Grandmother Ayahuasca. This limited perspective set me up for a big surprise when the results came in — my findings led to a personal crisis regarding nothing less than my worldview and the nature of reality.
Measuring Mysticism
The nine pages of open-ended questions would yield a wealth of rich, qualitative information from people using ayahuasca in North America. These first-person reports are essential for ground-level exploratory research into a new phenomenon. However, the scientific preference is for quantitative data, and for this I turned to a well-established lineage in psychedelic research on mystical experience.
During the early sixties, when psychedelic research was still legal, Walter Pahnke was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist completing his PhD at Harvard Divinity School. He’s best known for the infamous Good Friday Experiment held in Marsh Chapel at Boston University in 1962.11 For this, he randomly assigned seminary students either to an experimental group taking psilocybin or to a control group taking a niacin supplement. Despite his hope that the side effects of niacin would pass for a psychedelic drug, both subjects and monitors quickly figured out who actually received the psilocybin. The experiment was held in the basement of the chapel, and the music from the Good Friday services held directly above was clearly heard. This was a serendipitous intervening variable in the study, since the religious music helped to create a sacred atmosphere for the divinity students. Many of them mentioned the importance of the music when they were interviewed twenty-five years later.
In that follow-up study, MAPS founder Rick Doblin tracked down the seminary students, many of whom were now working as ministers, and he asked them to once again complete the same questionnaire that Pahnke had used years ago. The results were startlingly similar. The people who had received psilocybin reported high levels of mystical experience, a conviction that had only grown with the benefit of a long-term perspective. Doblin wrote that they “still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives.”12
An interesting aside is that one anonymous person from the original study refused to be interviewed for the follow-up twenty-five years later. It is assumed that he was the same person who had had a bad experience on psilocybin during the study. This seminary student bolted from the basement of the chapel in a mad dash to get away, and Huston Smith, who also participated in the Good Friday Experiment, later described chasing after him.13 The Boston University Chapel is located on Commonwealth Avenue, one of the busiest streets in Boston, and it is in the center of an urban campus. Even though it was a holiday weekend, lots of people were likely milling around the square outside the chapel. It must have been quite a sight to see Huston Smith, the eminent professor of religion from MIT, who was more of an aesthete than an athlete, tackling an escapee from a research study on mysticism.
Although I’m presenting this as a humorous anecdote, it raises questions about the possibility of a bad trip that have to be considered along with the healing benefits of psychedelic substances. At the time of the Good Friday Experiment, the medical standard was to give the would-be escapee a shot of Thorazine to bring him down. Evidently, this approach didn’t help this person integrate his difficult experience, since he refused to talk about it twenty-five years later. We now know more about how to work therapeutically with people when challenging moments arise during a psychedelic experience, but this requires a safe environment with skilled helpers. These resources are not always available during ayahuasca ceremonies in either North or South America.
Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment was groundbreaking research — it was a first attempt to study mystical experience in a controlled experimental design. This was one of the first applications of psychological research to a traditional religious concept, and it was only possible because Pahnke understood that psilocybin could reliably lead to mystical experience. His focus on mystical experience was also prescient, as recent psychedelic research indicates that the mystical experience may be the critical variable necessary for a therapeutic outcome. To collect quantitative data, Pahnke developed a questionnaire designed to measure the universal qualities of mystical experience, which he named as unity, transcendence of time and space, deeply felt positive mood, sense of sacredness, noetic quality, paradoxicality, ineffability, and transiency.14 However, please note that an experience need not contain all of these aspects to qualify as mystical.
Three decades later, after research on psychedelics was once again possible, Roland Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine were able to continue this line of scientific inquiry, studying the mystical effects of psilocybin. Based on Pahnke’s research, Griffiths’s team developed the “Persisting Effects Questionnaire,”15 which I adapted into an eighty-one-item questionnaire called “Changes in Yourself and Your Life” (see appendix A). Using a 5-point scale, I asked people to describe how they’d changed as a result of their ayahuasca experiences. Both Griffiths’s and my questions explore the same universal qualities of mystical experience originally described by Pahnke.
Most psychological research makes every attempt to evaluate the impact of a treatment as soon as possible to increase the chances of significant findings. In my study, this was impossible. I had no control over how long ago the participants had taken ayahuasca. Some people might have used the medicine recently, but for others it might have been years. Both Doblin and Griffiths reported that even after time had elapsed, people felt their psilocybin experiences were one of the most spiritual and meaningful experiences in their lives.16 These results gave me confidence that the effect of a mystical experience with ayahuasca would persist over time. I trusted that I could ask similar questions about spiritual experience with ayahuasca users and that the power of their experiences would persist indefinitely.
I also had the advantage of personal experience with ayahuasca, and most, but certainly not all, of the psychedelic researchers also have experienced the drug they’re studying. Because of the well-documented problems with LSD researchers during the sixties — just remember Timothy Leary, who imbibed more drugs than he gave to his research subjects — the fact of personal experience is not openly discussed in professional circles. But it’s an important factor in determining what questions to ask in designing a study. I know from personal experience that the impact from ayahuasca ceremonies is strong, powerful, and able to persist over many years. For myself, it is almost as if something has been imprinted into my operating system, and I have been permanently changed. While designing the research questionnaire, I knew the research would reflect this experience.
Once I designed the questionnaire, I was ready to focus on data collection. Then, out of the clear blue, a major gift arrived, something so serendipitous that I could only credit Grandmother Ayahuasca with arranging it. That is, if you’ll indulge my magical thinking.
Finding a Comparison Group
I knew from the start of the research that it would be impossible to have an experimental research design, in which subjects were randomly assigned to either a treatment group who would drink ayahuasca or a control group who would not. Such randomization means that every subject in the study has an equal chance of being assigned to either group. In the most tightly controlled studies, neither the subjects nor the scientists know whether the subject has taken the drug or a placebo. This is the gold standard in scientific studies, and it allows the researcher to conclude that any differences between the experimental group and the control group are due to the treatment — in this case, ayahuasca. Such an ayahuasca study has still not been done in this country. Researchers have not yet figured out how to control for the dose and potency of ayahuasca or for the circumstances surrounding its use. Finally, before an experimental study can even be conducted, the government has to approve the study, and it will only do so if and when it deems ayahuasca safe for human consumption, despite the fact that ayahuasca has been used by indigenous tribes for thousands of years.
The idea for my study was simply to ask a lot of questions to try to find out what was going on in the ayahuasca underground. I thought of the research as a descriptive study that would provide a first look at this growing phenomenon. As I’ve described, my focus was clear: I wanted to know what happened after the ayahuasca ceremony. Understanding the clinical importance of integration, I thought it was important to discover what people were already doing to help themselves integrate their ayahuasca experiences into their daily lives.
In terms of research design, the next best thing to a control group is a comparison group. There’s no randomization. The groups are inherently different, but a comparison group is better than no group at all. It allows the researcher to compare and contrast two groups of people. And then, almost like a gift from the gods, a comparison group fell into my lap. A friend introduced me to a leader at a Catholic retreat center who directed weekend retreats consisting of lecture, meditation, and quiet time in nature. The people attending these retreats were similar to those who drank ayahuasca in that they shared a common passion for spiritual growth. Not one person from either the comparison group or the ayahuasca group questioned what “spiritual experience” referred to in the title of the questionnaire. They all understood without explanation what was being asked and what experiences were being studied. Perhaps most importantly, no one could doubt the spiritual legitimacy of people attending a Catholic retreat.
Collecting the Data
For the comparison group, the leader at the Catholic retreat center handed out the slightly revised “Changes in Yourself and Your Life” portion of the Ayahuasca Questionnaire to forty-six weekend retreatants during the summer of 2009. For the people in this group, using the 5-point scale to answer the eighty-one questions took about half an hour.
The Catholic retreatants were an average age of sixty, which was quite a bit older than the ayahuasca group. But similar to the ayahuasca respondents, the Catholic group had more men than women, and they had a similar level of education. More than half had attended previous spiritual retreats. Ninety percent of the retreatants practiced prayer or meditation four to five times a week. Most of them were Catholic. Only 15 percent of the retreatants had been in psychotherapy, which was the biggest difference from the ayahuasca group besides religious identification.
For the main ayahuasca study, from 2008 to 2010, I handed out the full sixteen-page questionnaire to all the Western shamans I knew, and I asked them to ask the participants in their ceremonies to complete one. I also personally handed out questionnaires at two conferences in New York City sponsored by Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (www.horizonsnyc.org). The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) announced the research project on their website, and people could complete the questionnaire online. The sample was totally by word of mouth. Friends in the know gave the questionnaire to other friends in the know.
In total, eighty-one people completed the questionnaire about their ayahuasca experiences. Overall, they were mature and well-educated. Their average age was forty-four, and most had a college degree, with almost half (40 percent) also having a graduate degree. Slightly more than half (57 percent) of the respondents were men. Eighty-four percent said they practiced a spiritual discipline like meditation or yoga at least four to five times a week, and three-quarters said they had been in psychotherapy. The religious affiliations were wide ranging, including everyone from agnostics to pagans. Eight people affiliated with Buddhism, which was the most frequently mentioned religion, and only three identified as Christian. Most had previous drug-related experiences with psychedelics — three-quarters of the research subjects had tried mushrooms, psilocybin, or LSD, and half had used ecstasy.
Even though I hadn’t worried about the length of the questionnaire, I was surprised that people happily completed the sixteen pages, often adding personal letters with more detailed information. People reported taking about two hours to complete the questionnaire. I found enormous support for the research from within the ayahuasca underground. Many people thanked me for doing the project and said that completing the questionnaire was helpful to them in their own process of integration.
I had a policy to never say no, and I met with anyone who wanted to meet with me. I talked on the phone with people from Hawaii to Canada, invited people into my home in New Jersey, and met with others over dinners in New York. I did a series of telephone calls with a doctor in California in ten-minute segments sandwiched in between his patient appointments. I’m still in touch with him and many other interviewees.
I also felt that, for the sake of the research project, I should experience ayahuasca in the ways that it is available in North America. Up to this time I had only attended shamanic ceremonies in Central America. And so I attended a few Santo Daime church gatherings, known as “works.” Two of the three Brazilian syncretic churches are active in North America — Santo Daime and União do Vegetal. The American branches of these churches, which are headquartered in Brazil, are located respectively in Oregon and New Mexico, and they have been granted the right to use ayahuasca legally under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The third syncretic church, Barquinha, is the smallest and is only active in Brazil. All three syncretic churches use ayahuasca as a sacrament within a ritualistic blend of Christianity and spiritism or mediumship. In addition, I also participated in ceremonies influenced by the syncretic churches but based primarily on singing. Friends who know me well and understand my total lack of musicality and foreign language skills can sympathize with my sacrifice to stay up all night trying to sing Christian hymns in Portuguese while under the influence of the medicine. I was rarely on the correct page of the hymnal.
Hearing Voices and the Suspension of Disbelief
Early in my research, I hadn’t yet faced the ontological implications regarding my conversations with a plant teacher, nor could I answer the most obvious question: “Is Grandmother Ayahuasca real?” Frankly, this not-knowing drove me slightly crazy. At times, my worldview would tentatively unravel and then snap back like a door slamming in the wind. All my life I have taken intellectual pride in being agnostic. Spirits were simply not part of my belief system. In fact, I believed I didn’t have a belief system.
Somehow, despite this, I was able to accept my own experience of being guided by Grandmother Ayahuasca without much question and move forward on the project. I was just happy to be involved in research again after having left the field over thirty years ago. I felt that this study was helping me to resolve the loss of my research career when my daughter was born. Working with Lee Gurel was icing on the cake. Decades ago we had tried to work together on a research project but were unable to get the funding. Collaborating with him, as Grandmother Ayahuasca had insisted, was especially meaningful to me.
When I discovered Jeremy Narby’s 1999 experiment to ask Grandmother Ayahuasca for research consultation, it didn’t strike me as unusual.17 Narby brought three molecular biologists to the Peruvian Amazon to work with an indigenous shaman with the hope that they would gain information or insights that would contribute to their scientific studies. Narby acted as translator, facilitating long conversations between the scientists and the shaman. After a few ayahuasca ceremonies, Narby summarized the feedback from the scientists. An American biologist, who was working on the human genome, said she had a vision about DNA molecules; this led to an original hypothesis that she later pursued when she returned to her laboratory.
A French professor asked ayahuasca three specific research questions during a ceremony: In response to the first question, the voice said, No, it is not a key protein. In this organ, there are no key proteins, just many different ones which have to act together for fertility to be achieved. In response to the scientist’s second question, the voice said, I already answered that with your first question. And to the third question, the voice said, This question is not important enough for me to answer. The answer can be found without ayahuasca. Try to work in another direction.18
Meanwhile, a Swiss scientist felt she received advice from the Spirit of Tobacco, which is another important plant teacher in the Amazonian cosmology. Both she and the American biologist reported that their contact with the independent spirits or plant teachers shifted their way of understanding reality.
The French scientist summarized his experience by saying that “all the things he saw and learned in his visions were somehow already in his mind, but that ayahuasca had helped him. . .put them together.”19
When I read this story, I was struck by how Grandmother Ayahuasca’s tone with the French scientist was qualitatively different from my experience of her. The voice the French scientist reported was quite professorial with a touch of no-nonsense academic attitude. Perhaps, I might speculate, similar to his own voice. In contrast, with me, Grandmother Ayahuasca sounded like a patient mother, kindly ignoring my impertinence and calmly stating her request.
After many interviews with people recounting conversations with Grandmother Ayahuasca, I’ve noticed this same discrepancy. She doesn’t have a consistent voice, although she does seem to be an independent entity. Her voice takes on an appropriate tone for each conversation. For instance, a twenty-five-year-old man reported that Grandmother Ayahuasca told him, Go home and clean your room. Then she added, almost as an afterthought, And get a haircut. The voice was authoritative but not critical. She meant business but was not harsh.
For Westerners, stories of plant teachers giving scientists research advice, spirit doctors providing healing, and indigenous tales of spirit marriages between shamans and pink dolphins — all this pushes the boundaries of belief. It can be very difficult to discern what’s real and what’s imagined. In truth, this doubt comes with the territory.
For instance, what about those magical pink dolphins? Having grown up and lived along the eastern seaboard, I thought I knew dolphins. I’ve seen them from Maine to the Caribbean, swum with them, communed with them in the wild, and I can differentiate Atlantic white-sided dolphins from harbor porpoises at a distance. When I heard of the Amazon’s pink river dolphins, I was incredulous, never mind the issue of interspecies marriage. I figured this was a bit of mythology, just another charming piece of ayahuasca cosmology. Turns out there really are pink dolphins living in the rivers of the Amazon basin. Now, whether the shamans actually marry them or not . . .
In the next chapter, I share some of the first-person reports I gathered in my research. Some might seem too good to be true. Like pink dolphins, like the voice of Grandmother Ayahuasca, the stories may be beyond our imagination. We don’t always know what we don’t know.
