‘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 Amazonia (part funded with a generous grant from MAPS). With hindsight, the intervening period probably represents a fairly typical catalogue of the sorts of frustrations and obstacles that beset individuals compelled to conduct research in the field of psychedelics. In my opinion, there is a strong argument supporting any suggestion that many of this world’s riddles remain intractable for the very reason that we do not in fact welcome much of what we should, but that is another story. However, and notwithstanding my continued existence within a cultural milieu that remains to a large extent constitutionally opposed to such crucial clinical and epistemological initiatives, the time has proved far from unproductive.

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.

30^th October – 23^rd December 1997

INTRODUCTION/P>

In consultation with my supervisor at Cambridge University’s Department of Social Anthropology (Dr. Francoise Barbira- Freedman) it had been decided that the most appropriate socio-cultural fieldwork context for my research into the psychotherapeutic role and biopsychosocial dynamics of shamanic near-death-type experience would be the jungle city of Iquitos in Peruvian Northwest Amazonia. Having been unsuccessful in my attempts to secure the funding necessary to commence my formal research at Cambridge in the academic year beginning on 1st October 1997 I arranged with the Board of Graduate Studies, the Department of Social Anthropology, and Pembroke College for a deferral of entry. Given the sudden increment of twelve months’ free time, and compelled by a desire to experience firsthand something of the object of my future inquiry, it seemed that a period of preliminary fieldwork would be the most advantageous course of action for me to take. I had never been to South America before and I was eager to make an effort to redress my complete practical ignorance of the region while complementing my library knowledge of Ayahuasca shamanism with personally ‘embodied’ experience. Such a venture was also seen to present an ideal context for Spanish language study.

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 London for Lima.

With the benefits of hindsight the seven weeks I spent in Iquitos and its environs have come to suggest a study in serendipity. As previously stated, my fieldwork objectives were sufficiently broad to accommodate most conceivable alterations in my plans for their practical realisation. Particularly during my first week in Peru circumstances beyond my control defined a future that I could hardly have anticipated. Indeed, very little transpired as I intended but much as I would have hoped had unfamiliarity not kept a firm check on any personal tendencies towards exclusory anticipation.

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 England I had contacted the director of Takiwasi, Jaques Mabit, and he had told me that I was very welcome at the centre. When I arrived in Peru it seemed to make more sense to go somewhere that already had a personal introduction in place, not to mention the fact that I preferred the prospect of ingesting Ayahuasca for the first time in an environment which my supervisor had described as ‘safe’. However, I knew that my supervisor was then in Iquitos and I decided to meet her there first before travelling on to Tarapoto. I therefore left Lima for Iquitos with a list of possible contact addresses.

The jungle city of Iquitos lies 1000 km northeast of the Peruvian capital of Lima. It is itself the administrative capital of the district of Loreto and is situated at the southern extremity of the ethnographic region referred to as Northwest Amazonia. Loreto has international borders with Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil.

Modern Iquitos was founded in 1863 during the region’s ‘rubber boom’ and the evidence of this heritage remains intact in the colonial-style architecture of the city centre, and especially where it fronts with the Amazon River. This large (60,000 inhabitants), long-established jungle conurbation in one of the least-developed regions of the Amazon basin has occasioned a pooling of diverse cultural elements- a fertile, if not always equable, coming together of numerous indigenous traditions with those of the Peruvian mestizo population and foreign influences. The Yagua, Bora, and Shipibo peoples comprise the three main indigenous groups, all three of which have naturally made idiosyncratic contributions to the collective cultural ethos which now characterises Iquitos- a syncretistic processual bricolage of ethnically discrete and cosmopolitan elements. Nowhere is this wealth of cultural resources more evident than in the diversity and eclecticism of initiatives that address the physical, mental, and spiritual health of the populace.

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 Iquitos’s total population an estimated 4000 are practising shamans or Ayahuasquero/curanderos. Such individuals are seen to provide a crucial complementary health service and there is evidence to suggest that this service is the object of a gradually increasing demand. While many patients may have recourse to traditional shamanic medicine only after the failure of cosmopolitan approaches (either in terms of therapeutic efficacy or economic accessibility) in a cultural context that includes numerous afflictions specific to that context (so-called ‘culture-bound syndromes’ such as susto, dano, pulsario, and mal de ojo (Dobkin de Rios, M. in Harner, M.J. 1973:76-77)) the importance of such a ‘last resort’ is unlikely to diminish in the foreseeable future.

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, Iquitos was chosen as the fieldwork location for this project because the shamanic techniques and emphases which have established themselves there ‘fit’ the project’s focus rather than the project having been designed to fit the context.

When I arrived in Iquitos I was unable to locate my supervisor at the suggested addresses so I telephoned Jaques Mabit in Tarapoto and he said that I might try the ethnobotanical garden of ‘La Sachamama’. On my first trip to La Sachamama I met Don Francisco Montes Shuna (the Founder/Director) who provided me with the name of another hotel. On my return to Iquitos I managed to speak to my supervisor on the telephone and we arranged to meet at La Sachamama. Two days later we met in the forest and my fate was sealed: a recent escalation of hostilities on the disputed border between Peru and Ecuador had resulted in the airspace between Iquitos and Tarapoto being deemed temporarily unsafe for domestic traffic so neither my supervisor nor I would be going to Takiwasi after all (Iquitos remains accessible only by air or river). However, after discussing my fieldwork objectives with Don Francisco my supervisor suggested that a six week ritual introductory Ayahuasca ‘diet’ at La Sachamama would be equally beneficial with reference to the phenomenological aspects of my project.

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 (‘The Mother of the Jungle’) was founded in 1990 by Don Francisco Montes Shuna. It is located 18 km outside the city of Iquitos and is accessible via the west-bound Nauta road which has now been sealed to the 40 km point. The garden itself comprises a 150 acre landholding of montaigne forest close to the Amazon river. It currently supports more than 1200 species of medicinal trees, shrubs, lianas, vines and herbs, the majority of which are taxonomically identified with both local and scientific names. 50% of these plants are native to the region and 50% are cultigens and wild species collected amongst various indigenous groups throughout the Peruvian Amazon.

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’.

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 Iquitos where he lives.

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 midday I ate a light lunch of plain rice after which began a twenty-four hour fast.

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 following extract from my field journal, written on the morning after the ceremony (12/11/97), is quoted in full as the most direct means of communicating something of the nature of my first experience of Amazonian shamanic ritual Ayahuasca intoxication:

‘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 temple Fernando guided me to a seat on the right of the mesa (altar table) where I sat with my back to the forest which was now lit a ghostly blue by a bright half moon. Fernando then placed his bag beneath the mesa and lit a single oil lamp, the light of which seemed to close the forest off in darkness. As they organised themselves Fernando and Francisco spoke together in hushed voices while Fernando’s wife sat in silence behind and to the rear of the mesa. My supervisor sat opposite me on a bench on the other side of the temple enclosure. Fernando lit a mapacho cigarette and whisked smoke over himself and the mesa with a shacapa (a ritual fan of dry leaves which also acts as a rattle-like accompaniment to the icaro songs). The bottle of Ayahuasca potion stood in the middle of the mesa before Fernando, its colour a muddy red like the waters of a jungle river in spate. Momentarily I lost myself a little deeper in its opacity and fancifully I imagined its ‘colour’ to be that of ancient secrets distilled over millennia into ever-increasing potencies of human insight. My focus was broken by Fernando standing up and leaving the temple with his cigarette, blowing smoke outwards into the darkness in short, sharp, ‘whooshes’. He walked anticlockwise through the forest around the temple apparently sealing the ritual space against ‘malign influences’ from without. When he returned he sat down again behind the mesa and produced from his bag a small half-calabash about the size of a coffee cup. Opening the bottle of potion Fernando whistled an icaro into it and then blew tobacco smoke onto the liquid several times, closing the bottle and shaking it gently to mix the smoke with the Ayahuasca. Apparently, the ‘spirit’ of the vine is nourished and further empowered by the organic potencies of mapacho (see Narby, J., 1998:19-35). Following this procedure he purificatorily ‘smoked’ the calabash, filled it with a full measure of Ayahuasca, and then passed it across the mesa to me, signalling for me to drink. I stood up, walked across to the mesa, and took the calabash in both hands. My supervisor had told me to knock it straight back in one gulp and so that is exactly what I did after uttering a customary ‘salud’. It actually tasted far less unpleasant than I had been led to imagine- a curious woody ‘blend’ of yeast extract and creosote! I gave the empty calabash to Fernando and sat back down, deeply conscious of having just passed the point of no return. Fernando himself then drank an equal measure and Francisco somewhat less. My supervisor, in her role of ‘sitter’, desisted. When all was complete Fernando extinguished the lamp, instantly flooding the ritual space with the moonlit monochrome of the surrounding forest.

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 midnight Fernando concluded the ceremony with a culminatory icaro and then relit the lamp on the mesa. As my eyes adjusted to the light my mind, notwithstanding the hallucinogenic storm of visions and insights by which it had so recently been engulfed, felt unexpectedly clear- every thought seemingly tipped with an exquisite ‘Ayahuasca-knapped’ arrowhead of pure rock crystal. I was a little unsteady on my feet but the dominant feeling was one of calm, post-ecstatic euphoria- a blissful oceanic content with what had transpired during the course of the ceremony accompanied by a deep sense of experiential ‘closure’. There were no uncertainties, no doubts, no questions, and no confusions. It was as though I had somehow seen and ‘understood everything’ (Noyes, R. 1972:176). I imagined that all my future journeys in the realm of visions would merely afford increasing clarifications and sentential elaborations of the feelings and insights I had experienced during this initial incursion. With each subsequent journey my expository ‘knowledge’ would increase in accord with processes of exegesis, but I would never actually ‘know’ more than I ‘knew’ then. Everything I would ever know in some sense lay within me already and now I had had a fleeting glimpse of it all. It appeared that my future would therefore comprise a process of ‘understanding’ what it meant to imagine, indeed to ‘believe’, that at some inisolable level of experience one has indeed ‘understood everything’. As we straggled back through the forest in private pools of torchlight I thought to myself ‘perhaps not only do entheogens ‘raise the divine within’ but they might also be simultaneously raising, or at least catalysing the raising of a divine without. Once back to my billet in the longhouse, and as I slipped inexorably again into the realm of visions (the lingering influence of indole molecules now illuminating fabulous dreamscapes) I found myself asking the same question endlessly until sleep at last overtook awareness: ‘Consciousness is evolving towards, as opposed to emerging from, an apotheosis?’’.

(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.

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 Peru to the period of mandatory personal analysis that forms a part of the training of practitioners of certain schools of Western psychotherapy.

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.

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.

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 Iquitos would also have made the continued observation of the strict dietary regimen very difficult and I had no wish to compromise my ritual status. Notwithstanding these reservations it had come to my attention via one of the staff at La Sachamama that a regionally renowned Achuar (Jivaroan) Ajosachero shaman was currently in residence at a village no more than a day’s journey downriver. The opportunity of travelling deeper into the forest to visit such a specialist proved more than I could resist and, encouraged by Francisco with the proviso that I continue eating nothing but unsalted rice, yucca, and fish, I left La Sachamama in the company of a fellow dietista (a thirty-eight year old French air-steward and freelance student of traditional Amazonian medicine) and the above-mentioned member of staff- now turned ‘guide’- bound for the Achuar village of Tahuayo.

After a nine hour journey into the night along the Amazon river aboard one of Iquitos’s large diesel passenger ferries our little party disembarked and made its way to the banks of a tributary and a pre- arranged dugout canoe. Three hours of paddling later we arrived at a path into the forest along which we walked for an hour to the riverine settlement of Tahuayo. The residents of Tahuayo are Achuar refugees whose original homeland lies in the disputed border territory between Ecuador and Peru. They came to the region several years previously seeking sanctuary from the perennial hostilities that attend this dispute. Tahuayo itself consists of approximately fifteen raised maloccas set in clearings along the banks of the tributary from which the village takes its name. The villagers supplement the fruit and vegetable produce of their forest gardens with hunting (mostly monkeys) and fishing. Craftwork (basketry and traditional artifacts- blowpipes etc.) sustains a meagre flow of cash into the village economy.

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 7.30 pm we were requested to come up to the top right-hand corner of the malocca to watch Don Ramon prepare the Ajosacha. He sat on a low stool in wellington boots, mud-spattered trousers, and pink ‘Florida’ sweatshirt. We three sat on the floor in a semi- circle around him. He produced a half-gourd the size of a football and a smaller one the size of a large half-coconut shell. With an eighteen-bladed ‘Swiss Army’ knife he scraped off the outer layer of bark from the long, ginger- like Ajosacha roots and then began to scrape thin filaments rapidly into the larger of the two gourds. After about twenty minutes the gourd was half full of pale, moist root-shavings. He placed the gourd at his feet and produced a small cardboard box containing what turned out to be ‘seeing-stones’ which appeared to mediate a conversation with ‘spirits’. We only heard Don Ramon’s side of the conversation. He then produced a bottle of aguardiente (cane spirit) and began to pour it into the smaller of the two gourds which now contained the Ajosacha root-shavings. When he had poured the entire ‘coca cola’ bottle into the gourd he pulled up his sleeves and kneaded the root-shavings into the aguardiente. Having done this to his satisfaction he picked up the gourd and began to whistle an icaro quietly into the Ajosacha. He lit a mapacho cigarette and blew smoke into the gourd, placing it on the floor with a haze of heavy smoke wreathing among the shavings. Again he conversed with the spirits via his seeing-stones before picking up the gourd and familiar leaf shacapa. Shaking the shacapa above his right shoulder he sang a number of further icaros into the Ajosacha. Intermittently he would break the regular rhythm of the shacapa and sweep over his left and right shoulders. This procedure lasted for about half an hour before the potion was deemed to be sufficiently ‘empowered’ and purificatorily ‘suffused’. I drank after my French colleague. I cupped the gourd in my hands and sipped- the taste suggested a blend of cane spirit and very strong garlic. I then drank deeply and experienced a slightly vertiginous sensation in my head and a rather uncomfortable burning sensation in my throat and stomach (I had fasted since lunchtime). When we had all drunk Don Ramon resumed a conversation through his seeing-stones. Eventually I was instructed to hold one of these in my left hand under my shirt against the hollow just beneath the sternum with eyes closed. After a couple of minutes I returned the stone and Don Ramon rolled it together with the other one in the palms of his hands. He then looked thoughtfully into the stones before divining my future. When he had done this for all three of us he thanked the spirits through his stones which he then replaced in their box and concluded the ceremony. It had lasted for about an hour and a half, it now being 9.00 pm.

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.

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 Cambridge University, Dr. Francoise Barbira-Freedman, both for facilitating my dietary placement at La Sachamama and for her supportive presence at the all-important first ceremony.

Read second Field Report in this series