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
