Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
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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 blond hair, and an enthusiastic energy. He said, “I used to work for a nonprofit, but during my ayahuasca ceremony, three spirit doctors in white coats came to me and told me to start a healing practice. They promised they would show up at each session and heal people.” He recounted his magical story without any sense of doubt. “So I became a Reiki practitioner.”
His story made perfect sense to him but not to me. After all, I considered myself a psychologist, and still do, even though I was wandering in unknown territory. I got worried at the mention of “spirit doctors in white coats,” and I wanted to know if this guy was for real, if he was crazy or what.
I questioned him and searched for any other delusional signs but found none. Besides his healing practice, Jonathan was involved in a successful and creative internet venture (see his website, psychonaut-talat.com). He did volunteer work and was well-liked and respected by his community of friends. I didn’t know how to make sense of his spirit doctors who, by the way, appeared to him as promised during every Reiki session to work with each client. He had a good practice. I didn’t know if his clients knew about his helpers or not.
Both then and now, I have no idea how to understand this story of spirit doctors from a psychological point of view — I simply took notes and listened seriously, just as I’ve always done with clients who describe unusual experiences. Spirit doctors are common in ayahuasca iconography, and in a ceremony in North America, Jonathan met the same spirits who visited during ayahuasca ceremonies in the rain forest, thousands of miles away. After just three ceremonies with ayahuasca, Jonathan changed not only his life but his whole cosmological understanding of reality. I was shocked both by his story and by my realization that I was right behind him, not only hearing the voice of ayahuasca but following her advice to dedicate my time and energy to this research project.
Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with that first interview, and subsequent interviews weren’t much more helpful. I must admit that I didn’t take Jonathan’s story seriously, so it never occurred to me to ask, “Who were these spirit doctors?” or “What did they say?”
Since then I’ve read a description of spirit doctors that made at least some sense to me. Pharmacist Connie Grauds traveled to Peru to get continuing education credits for working in an indigenous healer’s garden. When she accidentally cut her foot, she thought she would need to travel two days upriver to receive proper medical care. Instead, the shaman used plants to heal an infection in her foot that normally would’ve required antibiotics. She realized at this point that the shaman’s expertise surpassed her Western training, and she entered into a traditional shamanic apprenticeship with him. After two decades of study, including ayahuasca ceremonies, Grauds had her own spirit doctors and the temerity to ask them, “Who are you?”
In her book Jungle Medicine, Grauds wrote that they appeared “in a dream as a mass of swirling energy. You called for us? they asked, almost like genies summoned from a lamp. . . . We are the shear unbridled healing forces of nature. . . . It is we, the generative forces of nature, who do the healing. Not you.”9
Later, I communicated with Grauds, and she expanded on the nature