Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
this requires a safe environment with skilled helpers. These resources are not always available during ayahuasca ceremonies in either North or South America.
Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment was groundbreaking research — it was a first attempt to study mystical experience in a controlled experimental design. This was one of the first applications of psychological research to a traditional religious concept, and it was only possible because Pahnke understood that psilocybin could reliably lead to mystical experience. His focus on mystical experience was also prescient, as recent psychedelic research indicates that the mystical experience may be the critical variable necessary for a therapeutic outcome. To collect quantitative data, Pahnke developed a questionnaire designed to measure the universal qualities of mystical experience, which he named as unity, transcendence of time and space, deeply felt positive mood, sense of sacredness, noetic quality, paradoxicality, ineffability, and transiency.14 However, please note that an experience need not contain all of these aspects to qualify as mystical.
Three decades later, after research on psychedelics was once again possible, Roland Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine were able to continue this line of scientific inquiry, studying the mystical effects of psilocybin. Based on Pahnke’s research, Griffiths’s team developed the “Persisting Effects Questionnaire,”15 which I adapted into an eighty-one-item questionnaire called “Changes in Yourself and Your Life” (see appendix A). Using a 5-point scale, I asked people to describe how they’d changed as a result of their ayahuasca experiences. Both Griffiths’s and my questions explore the same universal qualities of mystical experience originally described by Pahnke.
Most psychological research makes every attempt to evaluate the impact of a treatment as soon as possible to increase the chances of significant findings. In my study, this was impossible. I had no control over how long ago the participants had taken ayahuasca. Some people might have used the medicine recently, but for others it might have been years. Both Doblin and Griffiths reported that even after time had elapsed, people felt their psilocybin experiences were one of the most spiritual and meaningful experiences in their lives.16 These results gave me confidence that the effect of a mystical experience with ayahuasca would persist over time. I trusted that I could ask similar questions about spiritual experience with ayahuasca users and that the power of their experiences would persist indefinitely.
I also had the advantage of personal experience with ayahuasca, and most, but certainly not all, of the psychedelic researchers also have experienced the drug they’re studying. Because of the well-documented problems with LSD researchers during the sixties — just remember Timothy Leary, who imbibed more drugs than he gave to his research subjects — the fact of personal experience is not openly discussed in professional circles. But it’s an important factor in determining what questions to ask in designing a study. I know from personal experience that the impact from ayahuasca ceremonies is strong, powerful, and able to persist over many years. For myself, it is almost as if something has been imprinted into my operating system, and I have been permanently changed. While designing the research questionnaire, I knew the research would reflect this experience.
Once I designed the questionnaire, I was ready to focus on data collection. Then, out of the clear blue, a major gift arrived, something so serendipitous that I could only credit Grandmother Ayahuasca with arranging it. That is, if you’ll indulge my magical thinking.
Finding a Comparison Group
I knew from the start of the research that it would be impossible to have an experimental research design, in which subjects were randomly assigned to either a treatment group who would drink ayahuasca or a control group who would not. Such randomization means that every subject in the study has an equal chance of being assigned to either group. In the most tightly controlled studies, neither the subjects nor the scientists know whether the subject has taken the drug or a placebo. This is the gold standard in scientific studies, and it allows the researcher to conclude that any differences between the experimental group and the control group are due to the treatment — in this case, ayahuasca. Such an ayahuasca study has still not been done in this country. Researchers have not yet figured out how to control for the dose and potency of ayahuasca or for the circumstances surrounding its use. Finally, before an experimental study can even be conducted, the government has to approve the study, and it will only do so if and when it deems ayahuasca safe for human consumption, despite the fact that ayahuasca has been used by indigenous tribes for thousands of years.
The idea for my study was simply to ask a lot of questions to try to find out what was going on in the ayahuasca underground. I thought of the research as a descriptive study that would provide a first look at this growing phenomenon. As I’ve described, my focus was clear: I wanted to know what happened after the ayahuasca ceremony. Understanding the clinical importance of integration, I thought it was important to discover what people were already doing to help themselves integrate their ayahuasca experiences into their daily lives.
In terms of research design, the next best thing to a control group is a comparison group. There’s no randomization. The groups are inherently different, but a comparison group is better than no group at all. It allows the researcher to compare and contrast two groups of people. And then, almost like a gift from the gods, a comparison group fell into my lap. A friend introduced me to a leader at a Catholic retreat center who directed weekend retreats consisting of lecture, meditation, and quiet time in nature. The people attending these retreats were similar to those who drank ayahuasca in that they shared a common passion for spiritual growth. Not one person from either the comparison group or the ayahuasca group questioned what “spiritual experience” referred to in the title of the questionnaire. They all understood without explanation what was being asked and what experiences were being studied. Perhaps most importantly, no one could doubt the spiritual legitimacy of people attending a Catholic retreat.
Collecting the Data
For the comparison group, the leader at the Catholic retreat center handed out the slightly revised “Changes in Yourself and Your Life” portion of the Ayahuasca Questionnaire to forty-six weekend retreatants during the summer of 2009. For the people in this group, using the 5-point scale to answer the eighty-one questions took about half an hour.
The Catholic retreatants were an average age of sixty, which was quite a bit older than the ayahuasca group. But similar to the ayahuasca respondents, the Catholic group had more men than women, and they had a similar level of education. More than half had attended previous spiritual retreats. Ninety percent of the retreatants practiced prayer or meditation four to five times a week. Most of them were Catholic. Only 15 percent of the retreatants had been in psychotherapy, which was the biggest difference from the ayahuasca group besides religious identification.
For the main ayahuasca study, from 2008 to 2010, I handed out the full sixteen-page questionnaire to all the Western shamans I knew, and I asked them to ask the participants in their ceremonies to complete one. I also personally handed out questionnaires at two conferences in New York City sponsored by Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (www.horizonsnyc.org). The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) announced the research project on their website, and people could complete the questionnaire online. The sample was totally by word of mouth. Friends in the know gave the questionnaire to other friends in the know.
In total, eighty-one people completed the questionnaire about their ayahuasca experiences. Overall, they were mature and well-educated. Their average age was forty-four, and most had a college degree, with almost half (40 percent) also having a graduate degree. Slightly more than half (57 percent) of the respondents were men. Eighty-four percent said they practiced a spiritual discipline like meditation or yoga at least four to five times a week, and three-quarters said they had been in psychotherapy. The religious affiliations were wide ranging, including everyone from agnostics to pagans. Eight people affiliated with Buddhism, which was the most frequently mentioned religion, and only three identified as Christian. Most had previous drug-related experiences with psychedelics — three-quarters of the research subjects had tried mushrooms, psilocybin, or LSD, and half had used ecstasy.
Even