Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
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 in another direction.18
Meanwhile, a Swiss scientist felt she received advice from the Spirit of Tobacco, which is another important plant teacher in the Amazonian cosmology. Both she and the American biologist reported that their contact with the independent spirits or plant teachers shifted their way of understanding reality.
The French scientist summarized his experience by saying that “all the things he saw and learned in his visions were somehow already in his mind, but that ayahuasca had helped him. . .put them together.”19
When I read this story, I was struck by how Grandmother Ayahuasca’s tone with the French scientist was qualitatively different from my experience of her. The voice the French scientist reported was quite professorial with a touch of no-nonsense academic attitude. Perhaps, I might speculate, similar to his own voice. In contrast, with me, Grandmother Ayahuasca sounded like a patient mother, kindly ignoring my impertinence and calmly stating her request.
After many interviews with people recounting conversations with Grandmother Ayahuasca, I’ve noticed this same discrepancy. She doesn’t have a consistent voice, although she does seem to be an independent entity. Her voice takes on an appropriate tone for each conversation. For instance, a twenty-five-year-old man reported that Grandmother Ayahuasca told him, Go home and clean your room. Then she added, almost as an afterthought, And get a haircut. The voice was authoritative but not critical. She meant business but was not harsh.
For Westerners, stories of plant teachers giving scientists research advice, spirit doctors providing healing, and indigenous tales of spirit marriages between shamans and pink dolphins — all this pushes the boundaries of belief. It can be very difficult to discern what’s real and what’s imagined. In truth, this doubt comes with the territory.
For instance, what about those magical pink dolphins? Having grown up and lived along the eastern seaboard, I thought I knew dolphins. I’ve seen them from Maine to the Caribbean, swum with them, communed with them in the wild, and I can differentiate Atlantic white-sided dolphins from harbor porpoises at a distance. When I heard of the Amazon’s pink river dolphins, I was incredulous, never mind the issue of interspecies marriage. I figured this was a bit of mythology, just another charming piece of ayahuasca cosmology. Turns out there really are pink dolphins living in the rivers of the Amazon basin. Now, whether the shamans actually marry them or not . . .
In the next chapter, I share some of the first-person reports I gathered in my research. Some might seem too good to be true. Like pink dolphins, like the voice of Grandmother Ayahuasca, the stories may be beyond our imagination. We don’t always know what we don’t know.
“I eat less and feel better. I’m less negative, more sensitive to my spouse, less harsh, more loving. I feel better about myself, more alive. I learned how to live, how to love, how to help others.” This was Nathan’s description of how he changed as a result of participating in one hundred ayahuasca ceremonies over a ten-year period. A sixty-three-year-old teacher with a master’s degree, Nathan’s most recent experience with the medicine was two months before participating in the study. (Note that, in this chapter and throughout the book, pseudonyms are used for all study participants.)
Do one hundred ayahuasca ceremonies in ten years sound like an addiction problem? That would be an incorrect assumption for a few reasons. First of all, ayahuasca is not addictive (for more on this, see “Addictions,” chapter 8, page 228). Second, what if Nathan described attending a meditation retreat every month for ten years? Would that sound like an addiction or like Nathan was a serious meditation student? I think it’s more accurate to say that the ayahuasca ceremonies were an integral part of Nathan’s psychospiritual