Novelist Isabel Allende once downed some ayahuasca (which is, you know, a shamanic South American hallucinogen) so that she could finish a trilogy of adventure books.
“But after forcing down the foul-tasting brew, she was catapulted to a place so dark her husband feared he had ‘lost his wife to the world of spirits’. Her life flashed before her as the hallucinogen took hold. She faced demons, saw herself as a terrified four-year-old and curled up on the floor, shivering, retching and muttering for two days.”
Sound unpleasant. But! “Allende emerged aching but lucid and was able to complete the trilogy, now being adapted for film by the co-producers of The Chronicles of Narnia.” Ok, so: Ayahuasca is worth looking into.
You should take a look at Wade Davis’s ONE RIVER, which goes into the efforts of American botanists to track down ayahuasca and then observe its effects, and John Horgan’s RATIONAL MYSTICISM has an excellent chapter on his experience. Daniel Pinchbeck writes about it a bit, too, from a less scientific but more personal perspective.
I thought it might be worth looking into too, until I heard about all the unpleasant side effects. Namely:
“It’s not like vomiting at all: It’s as if great chunks of physical matter are explosively hurled from the bottom of your bowels—the vomiting often sounds like a waterfall in reverse, the water rushing up the rocks and violently cascading from your mouth.”
Though three novels and a movie deal might wipe that sour taste right out of my mouth.
Only someone who has truly worked for a longer period of time with ayahuasca can really only BEGIN to assess its value. Isabel has only drank ayahuasca once & she barely scratched the surface of what it can teach the one who is truly interested in understanding themselves, life & the origin thereof. Ayahuasca is the only brew that is able to save people from having a nervous breakdown (I speak of exeprience).
Ayahuasca journeys are intensely personal & no one has the exact same experience because it depends where an individual finds themselves in their own development & process, nor will they have the same experience twice. What you hear will never be a match for your own experience – it’s as simple & complex at the same time as it gets. To avoid doing ayahuasca “because of its side-effects” is like saying: “I don’t want to eat any meat because of the side-effects.” Ignorance can be cured. So can fear. What can’t be cured is an unwillingness to really grow, expand & stop being a sissy.
An excellent book to begin to understand what ayahuasca really is (it is different things to different people, but still, the following is a very good point of reference), is Jeremy Narby’s “Cosmic Serpent”. Ayahuasca is the universe, the cosmos made manifest in a plant brew.
It is a Master Plant Teacher, the biggest teacher & healer one could ever hope to ‘meet’. In this respect, the learning never ends.
I might have done some of this back in college. Pretty awful, but then I finished my philosophy term paper.
Is that Jane above the same one from the Jane’s Addiction song? Cuz, you know, she would probably know all that stuff.