Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
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appreciating it as a sign of the “integrated fabric of experience.”
Carl Jung described synchronicity as an event in the outer world that relates meaningfully to an inner world or psychological feeling.2 Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett wrote that these events “occur because psyche and matter are continuous with each other; they are two aspects of an undivided level of reality.”3
During the last few years, I’ve experienced dramatic synchronicities, all of them related to my personal journey and research with ayahuasca. The first incident occurred after I had been working with a white shaman for two years. I received the calendar of the Western shaman’s upcoming ceremonies, and when I looked over the list of possibilities, I heard a voice say no to each one. This was not my internal, intuitive voice, which feels like an analytical hunch. I heard an unusually loud no that originated from outside myself. At least the ceremonies I’d done with this particular shaman had brought me to the stage where I listened to that voice.
Around this same time, I felt “called” to explore a certain resort area about an hour away from where I was spending the winter months. I didn’t know anyone in the small towns there, but nonetheless, I was drawn to the area.
One Sunday afternoon I drove through the region, wondering what I was supposed to be doing there. There weren’t even any appealing restaurants for lunch. I caught a glimpse of a river from the highway and looked for a way to park so I could walk along the river. The first small road I followed ended in a town park with a half dozen men drinking from paper bags. I didn’t get out of the car. I drove over the highway to another small road along the river, lined with charming houses. I drove slowly on this narrow road, passing over regularly spaced speed bumps until the road narrowed even more and reached a dead end. No way to the river. I gave up and turned around to drive home, feeling disappointed and perplexed, wondering what this whole excursion had been about.
I forgot about my strong inclination to explore this area until a friend referred me to a shaman, only to discover that he lived in one of those charming houses along the river. Unknowingly, I had already visited his house. Now the “call” made sense. Without asking any questions about his background, I trusted the synchronicity and signed up for a ceremony.
The other synchronous incident happened when I was visiting Hawaii. Once again, in a similar way, I had felt called to travel there. A call to visit Hawaii? Even I was suspicious of my intentions. My rationale was that I wanted to learn more about how the ayahuasca vine and chacruna plants (which are both needed to produce the medicine) were being sustainably grown. I’d heard that these plants were being overharvested in the Amazon rain forest due to the increasing international demand for ayahuasca ceremonies. One Western shaman told me that his shaman complained that now he had to walk five hours into the jungle to harvest plants, whereas years ago they grew just a few steps away. Ayahuasca and chacruna have to be grown in a year-round tropical climate; not even South Florida will do. I planned on being in Hawaii for a month to give me plenty of time to meet my contacts in the ayahuasca underground and learn about their sustainable agriculture.
I emailed one of my contacts before I left for Hawaii and introduced myself. The man responded warmly and suggested I call him when I arrived on island. After I arrived, I called him, texted him, and emailed. No response. Finally, with only two days left, I officially gave up and decided to be a tourist for my remaining time.
I planned to tour a famous valley and, along the way, stopped in a little town that friends had told me was a good place for gifts. After parking, I paused to peruse the property listings in the window of a real estate office, which is something I always like to do. As I did, I noticed the name of the realtor was the contact person who had never returned my calls. I looked inside. He was sitting at his desk alone. I brazenly walked in and introduced myself. He turned red with embarrassment, since it was immediately obvious to us both that he had been ditching me for the past month.
I sat down, and after assuring him that I was not stalking him, I said, “This certainly scores high on the synchronicity scale.” This was my code for implying that Grandmother Ayahuasca must have had a hand in leading me to him. He got my message and warmed up to my interview, though I had neither pen nor paper — proof that finding him was unexpected and totally synchronistic.
Were these two incidences truly synchronous? Was Grandmother Ayahuasca guiding me, as so many people have described happening in their lives? Or was it a coincidence without any special meaning? The argument could be made either way, but the feeling runs deep in my bones. I felt guided in the way that the Lakota Indians call “hearing with the ear of the heart” or medieval Catholic monks called “reading the book of the world.”
The Therapeutic Value of Spiritual Experience
When discussing this aspect of ayahuasca, I prefer to use the term spiritual experience rather than mystical experience because it’s more inclusive. In scholarly research, mystical experience is defined carefully and specifically, and it includes or requires the presence of unity, transcendence of time and space, sacredness, noetic quality, and ineffability. By using spiritual experience instead, I can avoid the academic debate about what constitutes an authentic mystical experience. Certainly, in my study, reports of ayahuasca experiences describe some of the same mystical territory, but they also include aspects not usually mentioned in scholarly circles, like entry into otherworldly realms and contact with spirit entities.
What’s important here is that people describe, both in my study and elsewhere, huge leaps in their personal psychospiritual journey.4 They experience psychological healing and sometimes physical healing as well. Their way of being in the world undergoes a seismic shift from how they take care of themselves to how they understand their place in the universe. They also open up to what’s referred to as nonhuman worlds, including plant spirits, spirit doctors, personal ancestors, past-life experiences, and sometimes entities from other dimensions or universes.
My best description of the impact of ayahuasca is that it’s a rocket boost to psychospiritual growth and unfolding, my professional specialty during my thirty-five years of private practice. This kind of transformation is called “quantum change”5 in the professional literature, which acknowledges that psychology knows very little about it. Religious epiphanies are similar and better understood, or at least they are better documented by religion scholars. However, they, too, remain mysterious, with speculations of epilepsy as a contributing factor.
Philosopher William James explained them with his theory of “discontinuous transformation,” meaning that the leap is not a gradual evolution marked by education or practice but, rather, is a sudden, inexplicable awakening.6 In the case of ayahuasca testimonies, the leap is not inexplicable but directly attributable to the medicine, or to the spirit of the medicine. Perhaps both the chemical impact of the brew and the esoteric power of Grandmother Ayahuasca are involved.
One of the more famous spiritual experiences marked by white light, ecstasy, ineffability, great peacefulness, and a sense of the presence of God was reported by Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.7 His spiritual experience has touched millions of people through the now-ubiquitous self-help program. It’s not widely known, however, that his experience occurred while he was in an alcoholism-treatment program, which used a mix of drugs that included belladonna, or datura, one of the frequent admixtures to the ayahuasca brew. It’s possible that Bill W.’s revelation, which led to his abstinence, was caused by a plant associated with this Amazonian medicine.
From my study, what we do know is that the spiritual experiences arising during ayahuasca ceremonies lead to great changes in people’s lives. The qualitative descriptions of what people experienced and how they changed are confirmed by hard or quantitative data from the questionnaire. The people who used ayahuasca scored high on the two factors related to spirituality, “Joy in Life” and “Relationship to the Sacred.” When both qualitative and quantitative data are in agreement, we can be pretty sure we’re getting an accurate picture.
My Ontological Crisis
From the very beginning of the research study, I felt the presence of Grandmother Ayahuasca both in and out of ceremony. As I’ve mentioned, Grandmother