similar to the ones used in Spanish research.2 Unfortunately, the shamans he had intended to use for the study refused to work with the pills, saying that the spirit was lost during the processing.
Neither the research participants nor I had any idea what we actually drank in our ayahuasca ceremonies. Brews vary greatly, and the addition of datura, a potentially toxic plant that is sometimes added to the medicine, can change the nature of the experience in dramatic ways. I heard of one traveling shaman who, when he began to run out of tea, added vodka to the mix. Another perspective on the question of potency arose when an experienced shaman tested a number of mixtures used in ceremonies around the San Francisco Bay Area. He reported, “None of these will take you where you want to go,” meaning that the tea was not correct for spiritual journeying.
Not knowing exactly what people were drinking was only half the problem. There was also no way to know how much of the mystery brew people drank. During a ceremony, each participant sits in front of the shaman to receive the cup of dark, mysterious, muddy liquid. Supposedly, the shaman, in that moment, psychically determines the correct amount to give. Some say the shamans have X-ray vision allowing them to see into the subtle body of the person sitting in front of them, so they know how much to pour into the cup. I was grateful not to be researching whether or not this was possible. For my humble purposes, I only had to accept that the potency and dose of the tea couldn’t be controlled or even documented.
The one criterion for entering the study was that the person had drunk ayahuasca in North America at least once. They may also have attended ceremonies in South America, but the research asked only about their experience in North America. I had solid, well-thought-out reasons for focusing the study in this way. I was primarily interested in a psychospiritual framework for understanding why people drank ayahuasca, what they learned from their experience, and how it changed them and their lives. I wanted to explore how this medicine from the Amazon basin was being used in a Western culture.
There were also cultural and language issues I avoided by focusing on North America, but the real truth is that I didn’t want to travel to collect data in places where I would have to shake out my shoe before putting it on to make sure that a tarantula had not wandered into a new home. I didn’t want to go to the jungle. I didn’t want to hear that the gardener had killed a poisonous snake on the path between my cabin and the makeshift bathroom and left the head of the snake on a stick to ward off other poisonous snakes from the area. There are all kinds of subtle ways that researchers might unwittingly influence the outcome of a scientific study. In my case, I was not so subtle.
I also focused the study on what happened in the days and weeks following the ceremony. Having lived at the Esalen Institute during the late sixties and early seventies, first as a residential fellow and then as a staff member, I had had a bird’s-eye view of what were then called human potential workshops. Three or four simultaneous workshops were held on weekends and during the week. Eventually, I began to recognize repeat customers. Some would claim to have had an amazing breakthrough, either psychological or spiritual, or just as often both, but then they would return a few months later with the same problems, seeking yet another amazing breakthrough. I began to wonder about the challenge of integrating high-intensity workshop experiences so the benefits wouldn’t fade away but would lead to deeper insight and real change.
I saw the same challenge integrating ayahuasca experiences, so that they were not merely collected in a kind of neo-shamanic spiritual materialism, as in, “Let me tell you about my amazing vision.” I wanted to see how people were integrating their ayahuasca experiences into practical changes that manifested in their daily lives.
The phrase tossed around the ayahuasca underground is that “one ceremony is more helpful than ten years of psychotherapy.” That is quite a claim, and I wanted to hear first-person accounts explaining how the medicine had made a difference in people’s lives well beyond the ceremony. The underlying questions were, “What was the meaning of your experience? How has it changed your life?”
The same questions arose decades ago regarding the long-term spiritual impact of psychedelic drugs. That is, one mystical experience does not a mystic make, the distinction being between a religious experience and a religious life. As psychiatrist Roger Walsh explained, “The universal challenge is to transform peak experiences into plateau experiences, epiphanies into personality, states into stages, and altered states into altered traits.”3 Religion professor Huston Smith described the same issue more poetically: “to transform epiphanies into abiding light.”4
It’s very tempting to study the flashes of illumination during ayahuasca ceremonies — the visions, mystical experiences, and paranormal phenomena. The extraordinary visions are beguiling and entrancing in a mythological way. They are most often seen with eyes closed, but some are seen with eyes open, like a design overlay on what no longer seems like the real world. Ayahuasca has been called the “television of the jungle,” since some visions unfold like a cinematic narrative.5 The context for the visions can range from the Amazon jungle to flying saucers to Egyptian temples. I can safely say there is no typical experience — anything is possible, and it’s often unimaginable.
People also report traveling through the universe, meeting spirits, talking to dead people, and receiving energetic healings. These healings involve a strong somatic component involving the physical or subtle bodies, beyond the purgative qualities of the medicine. A more difficult element to describe are the philosophical awakenings that move Westerners from their safely ensconced worldview to a magical, mystery tour of the universe.
Psychologist Ralph Metzner — who is now one of the elders of the psychedelic community, having started with Timothy Leary at Harvard more than half a century ago — collected an array of first-person reports of ayahuasca experiences, which he published in Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature.6 These descriptions are typically dramatic and mind-boggling, but I didn’t want the research to explore this experiential content. There are already plenty of ayahuasca stories on the internet and a growing number of visionary artists and filmmakers documenting the fantastic visions. In addition, I knew that an Israeli psychologist, Benny Shanon, had already conducted a psychological study of the ayahuasca experience, analyzing visions, ideas, insights, and emotional and bodily effects.7 He wanted to know whether there was an order to the experiences, a progression with distinct stages. But his research didn’t delve into what the experiences might mean in a therapeutic context or how people changed as a result of the visions.
Even without understanding what the ayahuasca visions mean, the electric images resonate powerfully with the collective unconscious, often remaining vivid in memory for years. For the indigenous cultures, the visions reflect the ayahuasca cosmology, with stories of shamans marrying pink dolphins and living at the bottom of the Amazon River.8 The visions are dreamlike and complex, replete with exotic cities, jaguars, and iridescent snakes that sometimes swallow people whole. Again, the magical world of ayahuasca lies beyond the scope of mere psychological research.
I kept my focus on the long-term changes following participation in ayahuasca ceremonies and outlined the scope of the research on the front page of the questionnaire:
This study focuses on how the ayahuasca experience influences your life and how you use it in your life. The questionnaire doesn’t ask about your visions when you drink ayahuasca. Instead, it focuses on your intentions before and your experiences after.
The First Interview
The first step in developing a research questionnaire is to conduct open-ended interviews to get an overview of the territory, opening up avenues of exploration and opportunities for clarification in the research. The first person I interviewed was Jonathan Talat Phillips, who told me he’d used ayahuasca three times and said, “It changed my life.”
Then thirty-five, Jonathan had beautiful features, hippie-length
