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| Native Preparing the Ayahuasca Twin Herbs for Cooking (Photo: Chris Kilham) |
by Dennis McKenna
On a personal level, ayahuasca has been for me both a scientific and
professional continuing carrot, and a plant teacher and guide of
incomparable wisdom, compassion and intelligence. My earliest encounters
with ayahuasca were experiential; only later did it become an object of
scientific curiosity, sparked in part by a desire to understand the
mechanism, the machineries, that might underlie the profound experiences
that it elicited.
As a young man just getting started in the field of
ethnopharmacology, ayahuasca seemed to me more than worthy of a lifetime
of scientific study and so it has proven to be. Pursuing an
understanding of ayahuasca has led to many exotic places that I would
never have visited otherwise, from the jungles of the Amazon Basin to
the laboratory complexes of the National Institute of Mental Health and
Stanford; it has led to the formation of warm friendships and fruitful
collaborations with many colleagues who have shared my curiosity about
the mysteries of this curious plant complex. These collaborations, and
more importantly, these friendships, continue, as does the quest for
understanding. Though there have been detours along the way, always, and
inevitably, they have led back to the central quest. Often, after the
fact, I have seen how those apparent detours were not so far off the
path after all, as they supplied some insight, some skill, or some
experience, that in hindsight proved necessary to the furtherance of the
quest.
Just as ayahuasca has been for me personally something of a Holy
Grail, as it has been for many others, I have the intuition that it may
have a similar role with respect to our entire species. Anyone who is
personally experienced with ayahuasca is aware that it has much to teach
us. There is incredible wisdom and intelligence there. And to my mind,
one of the most profound and humbling lessons that ayahuasca teaches –
one that we thick-headed humans have the hardest time grasping – is the
realization that you monkeys only think you’re running things.
Though I state it humorously, it is nonetheless a profound insight on
which may depend the very survival of our species and our planet.
Humans are good at nothing if not hubris, arrogance and self-delusion.
We assume that we dominate nature, that we are somehow separate from,
and superior to, nature, even as we set about busily undermining and
wrecking the very homeostatic global mechanisms that have kept our earth
stable and hospitable to life for the last four and a half billion
years. We devastate the rainforests of the world; we are responsible for
the greatest loss of habitat and the greatest decimation of species
since the asteroid impacts of the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million
years ago. We rip the guts out of the earth and burn them, spewing
toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. At the same time, we slash and burn
the woody forests that may be the only hope for sequestration of the
carbon dioxide that is rapidly building to dangerous and possibly
uncontrollable levels. For the first time in the history of our species,
and indeed of our planet, we are forced to confront the possibility
that thoughtless and unsustainable human activity may be posing a real
threat to our species’ survival, and possibly the survival of all life
on the planet.
And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most
impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary
of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: you monkeys only think
you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is
that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We
need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft
and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in
the scheme of things. We are not. Our spiritual institutions have
devolved into hollow shells, perverted to the agendas of rapacious
governments and fanatic fundamentalisms, no longer capable of providing
balm to the wounded spirit of our species; and as the world goes up in
flames we benumb ourselves with consumerism and mindless entertainment,
the decadent distractions of gadgets and gewgaws, the frantic but
ultimately meaningless pursuits of a civilization that has lost its
compass. And at this cusp in human history, there emerges a gentle
emissary, the conduit to a body of profoundly ancient genetic and
evolutionary wisdom that has long abided in the cosmologies of the
indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have guarded and protected this
knowledge for millennia, who learned long ago that the human role is not
to be the master of nature, but its stewards. Our destiny, if we are to
survive, is to nurture nature and to learn from it how to nurture
ourselves and our fellow beings. This is the lesson that we can learn
from ayahuasca, if only we pay attention.
I find it both ironic, and hopeful, that within the last 150 years,
and particularly in the last half of the 20th century, ayahuasca has
begun to assert its presence into human awareness on a global scale. For
millennia, it was known only to indigenous peoples who have long since
understood and integrated what it has to teach us. In the 19th century
it first came to the attention of a wider world as an object of
curiosity in the reports of Richard Spruce and other intrepid explorers
of the primordial rainforests of South America. In the mid-20th century,
Schultes and others continued to explore this discovery and began to
focus the lens of science on the specifics of its botany, chemistry and
pharmacology (and, while necessary, this narrow scrutiny perhaps
overlooked some of the larger implications of this ancient symbiosis
with humanity).
At the same time, ayahuasca escaped from its indigenous habitat and
made its influence felt among certain non-indigenous people,
representatives of “greater” civilization. To these few men and women,
ayahuasca provided revelations and they in turn responded (in the way
that humans so often do when confronted with a profound mystery) by
founding religious sects with a messianic mission – in this case, a
mission of hope, a message to the rest of the world that despite its
simplicity was far ahead of its time: that we must learn to become the
stewards of nature, and by fostering, encouraging and sustaining the
fecundity and diversity of nature, by celebrating and honouring our
place as biological beings, as part of the web of life, we may learn to
become nurturers of each other. A message quite different, and quite
anathema, to the anti-biological obsessions of most of the major world
“religions” with their preoccupation with death and suffering and their
insistence on the suppression of all spontaneity and joy.
Such a message is perceived as a great threat by entrenched religious
and political power structures, and indeed it is. It is a threat to the
continued rape of nature and oppression of peoples that is the
foundation of their power. Evidence that they understand this threat and
take it seriously is reflected by the unstinting and brutal efforts
that “civilized” ecclesiastical, judicial and political authorities have
made to prohibit, demonize, and exterminate the shamanic use of
ayahuasca and other sacred plants ever since the Inquisition and even
earlier.
But the story is not yet over. Within the last 30 years, ayahuasca,
clever little plant intelligence that it is, has escaped from its
ancestral home in the Amazon and has found haven in other parts of the
world. With the assistance of human helpers who heard the message and
heeded it, ayahuasca sent its tendrils forth to encircle the world. It
has found new homes and new friends in nearly every part of the world
where temperatures are warm and where the ancient connections to
plant-spirit still thrive, from the islands of Hawaii to the rainforests
of South Africa, from gardens in Florida to greenhouses in Japan. The
forces of death and dominance have been outwitted; it has escaped them,
outrun them. There is now no way that ayahuasca can ever be eliminated
from the earth, short of toxifying the entire planet (which,
unfortunately, the death culture is working assiduously to accomplish).
Even if the Amazon itself is levelled for cattle pasture or burned for
charcoal, ayahuasca, at least, will survive, and will continue to engage
in its dialogue with humanity. And encouragingly, more and more people
are listening.
It may be too late. I have no illusions about this. Given that the
curtain is now being rung down on the drunken misadventure that we call
human history, the death culture will inevitably become even more brutal
and insane, flailing ever more violently as it sinks beneath the quick
sands of time. Indeed, it is already happening; all you have to do is
turn on the nightly news. Will ayahuasca survive? I have no doubt that
ayahuasca will survive on this planet as long as the planet remains able
to sustain life. The human time frame is measured in years, sometimes
centuries, rarely, in millennia. Mere blinks when measured against the
evolutionary time scales of planetary life, the scale on which ayahuasca
wields its influence. It will be here long after the governments,
religions and political power structures that seem today so permanent
and so menacing have dissolved into dust. It will be here long after our
ephemeral species has been reduced to anomalous sediment in the fossil
record.
The real question is will we be here long enough to hear its message,
to integrate what it is trying to tell us and to change in response,
before it is too late? Ayahuasca has the same message for us now that it
has always had, since the beginning of its symbiotic relationship with
humanity. Are we willing to listen? Only time will tell.
Dennis McKenna is an American ethnopharmacologist and author. His
research led to new frontiers of the inner-space; one of the most
experienced psychonauts on the planet. His new book, The Brotherhood of
the Screaming Abyss! tells the story of his brother Terence McKenna:
“Terence McKenna is a legend in the psychedelic community: He is
remembered as a radical philosopher, futurist, raconteur, and cultural
commentator. He was and is one of the most articulate spokesmen for the
post-psychedelic zeitgeist. He is one of the prime originators of the
2012 mythos with all its attendent apocalyptarian anxiety. I am the
younger brother of Terence McKenna. I want to write a memoir telling the
real story of our intertwined life together over the last 60 years, and
of the ideas, adventures and explorations (both inner and outer) that
we shared. I am Terence’s only brother; I am the only one who can tell
this tale, from this unique perspective. Terence died in 2000, but his
ideas live on the Net and in his books (e.g. True Hallucinations, Food
of the Gods, The Archaic Revival, The Invisible Landscape and others).
The time has come to tell his story. In reality, it is our story.” For
more information about Dennis and his upcoming book, see www.kickstarter.com/projects/1862402066/the-brotherhood-of-the-screaming-abyss
To directly experience indigenous plant medicines under the guidance of master Amazonian Shamen, please visit Guaria de Osa.
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