The history of consciousness from the Upper Paleolithic to the modern world can be briefly described as a one-way trend from maximally polyphasic societies that valued altered states of consciousness for the vital information they provided about self, world and transformation to monophasic societies in which materialism and linear thinking are the sole source of legitimate meaning and where transformation seems to be an impossible dream. Twenty thousand years ago, shamanistic practices were universally available and widely employed, but as society became more complex and hierarchical they were gradually replaced with less effective rituals. Personal encounters with transcendent experience became rare, and religion began to consist of symbolic dramas that portrayed a world of belief for people who no longer knew or even imagined that direct numinous experience was possible (Walsh, 1990: 47). Even in the theocentric European Middle Ages, mysticism aroused suspicions of heresy. Today, altered states of consciousness are so misunderstood and underappreciated that to most people they suggest pathology, gullibility or deliberate deception.

          Apart from William James, C. G. Jung was one of the earliest psychologists and is still one of the very few to have vigorously opposed this sad trend toward a flat and lifeless mechanical world so devoid of transcendence and wonder that even religion seems powerless to transform it. Indeed, Jung found it “probable that any one who has immediate experience of God is a little bit outside the organization one calls the Church” (CW11: ¶481). “The Churches stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief, which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it. Belief is no substitute for inner experience” (CW10: ¶521). In an atmosphere where even the Churches cannot be counted on to support inner experience, the most ordinary sort of altered state, the dream, has little value. “Even Freud, while recognizing the utility [of dreams] in therapy, saw the material as reflections of the culturally aberrant. Only Jung saw them as a vehicle of transcendence” (C. D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 268). A major aim of Jung’s Complex Psychology has been to reintroduce polyphasic consciousness, where “certain doors and windows [are left] open to [the reality] of other worlds” (Ibid., 269). This is not a call to “go unconscious,” but rather a challenge to the West to become as clear about our psychic capabilities as we are about the objective world — to effect an unprecedented integration.

          In the last three or four centuries, the West has learned how to investigate the empirical world. We have taught ourselves how to think precisely and how to measure differences that are too fine to distinguish with our unaided senses. Having learned in principle how our senses work, we have invented machines to extend them. For example, with telescopes we can “see” nearly as far away in space and time as the postulated Big Bang, and to “see” with segments of the electromagnetic spectrum that our sense organs cannot register, such as radio waves and microwaves. In the other direction, we have mapped and measured the movement of subatomic particles. Western science has been unrelenting in mastering our extraverted senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. In the 1600’s it was still possible to wonder what good could come of experimenting with telescopes and microscopes. But not today, for three and a half centuries of “steady work” have gone a long way toward mastering our powers of extraverted investigation.

          In contrast, we have hardly begun to imagine that our introverted powers might also be susceptible of mastery, that is our capacities for altered states of consciousness. We have yet to determine what they are good for, how we might use them, how we might extend them, in what ways they are reliable and when they ought to be distrusted. This chapter will assemble evidence showing that altered states can be mastered, primarily by looking at what investigators of shamanism have discovered about techniques for entering into, gaining some influence over, and obtaining information from the visionary world and its effects upon our whole bio-psychic organism. What shamanism, meditation and other uses of altered states have to teach us has not been subjected to the “steady work” that might finally “throw off our unconsciousness” in this domain. A great deal remains to be done, and probably will not be done as long as our society stays rigidly monophasic; but there is evidence from anthropology, neuropsychology, and various schools of meditation to suggest a rich field for investigation.

Jung on the mastery of altered states. Mastery is not a word that Jung was inclined to use. In fact, he emphasized letting go of our Western tendency to identify with our ego and to try to control everything in our lives, for relinquishing ego-centered control helps us to discover aspects of our unconscious wholeness. It is the first step in becoming aware of non-ordinary states of conscious and the fact that thoughts are simply “given” to the ego, that they come from somewhere unconscious. It leads, in short, to “original thinking.” Jung avoided mentioning mastery, evidently, lest he seem to imply that more monophasic ego-control was desired rather than less.

          My Toronto colleague in the study of mysticism, however, Dan Merkur, has convinced me with his book, Becoming Half Hidden: Shamanism and Initiation Among the Inuit (1992), that a shaman’s accomplishments cannot be understood without addressing the issue of mastery. Merkur makes it clear that shamans distinguish themselves from the ecstatically gifted laity by the degree of control they exercise over their altered states. “Shamans neither passively enjoy nor passively suffer their trances. Rather they actively employ them, more or less consciously, to serve their own religious goals” (Merkur, 1992: 157). While an apprentice, the shaman-to-be is guided in her altered states by the suggestions of a master shaman. The goal of the training is to help her gain a degree of voluntary control over what happens when she journeys through the greater cosmos.

          This kind of mastery is quite different from what our monophasic society is apt to appreciate. To the extent that a shaman is taken on cosmic journeys in which he seems to leave his body behind, his observing ego is a passive recipient of the ecstatic experience. But because he learns to go where he wishes in that larger cosmos and because he deliberately seeks out and obtains important information, he retains a significant measure of initiative. Shamanism, therefore, requires a peculiar balance between deliberate choice and submission to an agency that is quite foreign to our ego. This ambiguous region is precisely the area that Jung’s work addresses, and it is why I believe I am being faithful to Jung’s intentions when I call it “mastery of altered states.”

          We have already encountered several of the techniques Jung recommends for gaining mastery. First and most obviously, he urges us to attend to the state of our consciousness and to take note of the subtle changes that indicate our unconscious is expressing itself. Dreams, especially, are to be recollected and recorded, for they represent visions of ourselves and of the world that are likely to clash with and befuddle our ordinary assumptions. These first two techniques amount to catching our everyday consciousness in the act of changing. Normally, we Westerners preserve the monophasic illusion when we ignore these changes or dismiss them as absurd. Jung urges us to bring them into focus and learn from them, and that cannot be accomplished unless we discipline ourselves to relax our ego-centered vigilance while sharpening our attention.

          In active imagination, Jung’s most characteristic exercise for exploring non-ordinary consciousness, we can distinguish at least three techniques: (a) to still the chattering mind that would belittle the images and thoughts that manifest in our altered states, (b) to attend to the “original thinking” that manifests as a curious gift from elsewhere, and (c) to get emotionally and morally involved in the visionary events that unfold within us.

          In dealing with potentially neurotic issues, Jung would have us recognize our complex reactions for what they are, stereotyped altered states that play themselves out under the cover of a powerful and habitual emotional bias that is inadequate to the situation at hand. He would have us observe the operation of the complex as the ego-alien automatism that it is, thereby providing some opportunity for the more rational cerebral cortex to get involved.

          By attending to dreams and subtle changes in our waking consciousness, by practicing active imagination, and by managing our complexes, we also train ourselves to utilize the “transcendent function” that makes psychological transformation possible. When we find ourselves faced with irreconcilable opposites, powerful conflicting tendencies that must be taken seriously, it is important to know that these are autonomous inner forces that deserve respect but cannot be acted upon directly. In this situation, Jung urges us to “hold the tension” between the opposites and observe them as they grow stronger. The task is to allow ourselves to feel pulled this way and that, while resisting the temptation to end the conflict with an arbitrary decision that would accomplish little more than to relieve the tension in the short run. In this way, we can induce the transformative/unitive state of consciousness that is characterized objectively by rhythmic harmony in the brain and subjectively by the emergence of a reconciling symbol in consciousness (CW8: ¶131-193). [1]

          A sixth and final technique of mastery that Jung employed might be called “active imagination in tandem” (cf. Haule, 1999c). This is a practice that is not described in the Collected Works but rather in his addresses to the students of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich during the 1950’s (Speaking: 359-64). He implies that the analyst and analysand inhabit a mutual emotional field during their analytic sessions. He says that if the analyst does not hide behind a professional persona but remains “natural, spontaneous, open, and vulnerable,” images, ideas and feelings will emerge out of the shared emotional field just as they do out of one’s own personal emotional state when one is practicing active imagination in private. Within the mutual field of analysis, the “original thinking” that emerges is relevant to both parties. Jung says it is as if a 2,000,000 year-old man were to enter the room with the wisdom of the human race at his disposal. If they are open to it, the two parties will come to know themselves against the wisdom of the Great Man. It is very much as though a shaman’s spirit familiar were to appear. The danger for the analyst is that she may be tempted to think that it is her own wisdom that she articulates. Jung insists, therefore, that the essential discipline is to remember that the Great Man is an other, a visitor from the unconscious who is very much not the ego.

Shamanism, Understood and Misunderstood

          The word, shaman, derives from šaman, meaning “ecstatic one” in the Siberian Tungus language. [2] Today, shamanism refers to a loose collection of techniques for altering consciousness that is found in remarkably similar forms the world over. Indeed, it is so wide-spread that the only reasonable conclusion is that shamanic practices did not so much diffuse from a one-time invention as to be repeatedly discovered as a capability of the human neuro-psychic organism. Indeed, evidence that we have already considered shows that shamanic practices are at least 40,000 years old, and possibly much older (M. & S. Aldhouse-Green, 2005: 62). Shamanic techniques for altering consciousness amount to a powerful expansion of the human psychological repertoire: “Shamans understand things in a way that other people just do not, they understand them better and more profoundly” (Narby & Huxley, 2001: 263). [3]

There is no agreed cross-cultural definition of “shamanism.” Indeed, it is characterized by a chameleon-like elusiveness . . . There is, nevertheless, a certain combination of key characteristics[:] . . . a layered cosmology, with the flight of the shaman’s soul to other levels of this cosmos, and the power to use this journey to fight, command and control spirits which inhabit these realms and affect human destinies. Thus shamanism is both an epistemology, that is a system of contemplative thought with an implicit set of propositions, and a blueprint for action, as in the location of game animals or the retrieval of kidnapped souls (Ibid., 292).

Eliade. The classic study of shamanism, and still the only world-wide survey, is Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published in Paris in 1951. [4] The general structure of shamanism is that, although the shaman sometimes inherits his office, the best and most representative shamans are “called by the spirits.” That is they spontaneously fall ill and undergo an initiatory ecstasy in which they experience their body being dismembered and reassembled. They thereby acquire a more powerful identity and eventually the ability to gain some mastery over their ecstasies. Typically, they experience their “soul” traveling between the three worlds, or cosmic planes, we have often discussed to retrieve the lost or abducted souls of those who have fallen sick or to conduct the souls of the dead to their final destination. Shamans are usually assisted by spirit familiars they may have had to conquer (an aspect of gaining mastery); and they may frequently be entangled with other shamans in battles that take place in the greater cosmos of ecstasy. Such battles may have serious consequences on the material plane.

          Eliade’s book has been criticized on two counts: (a) that it emphasizes the shaman’s upward journeys to the heavenly world over downward journeys to the lower world, presumably due to the author’s Christian bias (e.g., Rozwadowski, 2001: 63), [5] and (b) that it claims the use of psychedelic substances by shamans represents a degenerate and profane form of shamanism. On this second point, Eliade retracted the claim after R. Gordon and Virginia P. Wasson’s work [6] proved the ubiquity of consciousness-altering mushrooms and herbs in the history of the human race. Regarding the complaint about overemphasizing upward shamanic journeys, it has always seemed to me to apply more aptly to Eliade’s book, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (French, 1954; English, 1969), where his aim is to show that yoga doctrines and practices have their roots in shamanism. He seems to have succeeded in this latter aim (e.g., Ripinsky-Naxon, 1993: 20), even if it also appears to be the case that shamanic journeys to the lower world are far more common and significant than upward journeys.

Jung. Jung makes only one reference to shamanism before the publication of Eliade’s book. In 1918, when he located the origins of depth psychology in the spiritualism craze at the end of the nineteenth century and French theories of dissociation that can be traced as far back as Mesmer’s “animal magnetism,” he describes the whole intellectual movement as a “rebirth of the shamanistic form of religion” (CW10: ¶22). From 1952 onward, in the last nine years of his life, Jung makes upwards of a dozen references to shamanism, each time citing Eliade’s book. He says that the ideas and rituals of shamanism “far from ever having been invented, simply happened and were acted long before they were thought” (CW11: ¶410). He calls shamanism “the original model of the individuation process” (Ibid., ¶460; CW13: ¶462). He also describes shamanism as the foundation of “medical psychology” (CW18: ¶578) as well as a numinous, archaic form of prophecy, priesthood, philosophy, and religion (CW11: ¶448).

           Jung was particularly impressed with the theme of dismemberment and re-creation (CW11: ¶246, n.9; CW13: ¶91, n.4), for it implied a mythology of transformation parallel to that of individuation. And he often mentioned the theme of the shaman’s spiritual marriage to a spirit-guide of the opposite sex (CW9i: ¶115, n.8; CW14: ¶2, n.5), for it shows the importance of the anima figure and eros in the process of encountering the wholeness of the self. He found the shadow, too, in the shaman’s trickster qualities, the malice and vengeance of spirit battles, and the grueling and painful initiations that he thought might well leave psychic scars. He believed that this shadow material added the missing element to the “phenomenology of spiritualism,” which at the turn of the last century displayed a good deal of “sickish sentimentality” (CW9i: ¶457).

Misunderstandings. Despite the views of anthropologists and others who have carefully investigated shamanistic phenomena, the majority in our monophasic society continues to exhibit hostility and fear. Psychiatry tends to classify mystical states as pathological. Behaviorist and materialist approaches favored by a good many scientific investigators tend to dismiss the employment of altered states of consciousness as irrational, undisciplined, and superstitious. Ecstatic cults that emphasize personal experience of the spirit realm are generally seen to be threatening to doctrinally-organized religions and even to society at large — much as Christianity has almost always suppressed the indwelling Holy Spirit, a part of the Trinity that is rarely discussed because it is too dangerous. The government’s “war on drugs,” another manifestation of the collective hysteria that altered states arouse, appears to be unstoppable despite its ineffectiveness and its deleterious effects (Winkelman, 2000: 3).

          Having been forgotten for tens of millennia, shamanism was rediscovered in Europe in 1672 by a dissident Russian Orthodox priest, Avvakum Petrovich, who had been banished for heresy to Siberia. There he encountered a shaman predicting victory in a war against the Mongols; but Petrovich said, “My soul saw that [the army] would be massacred,” and opposed the war. The army marched off anyway, and only two soldiers returned. Narby and Huxley (2001: 23-6) point out that the priest ironically and unconsciously used a shamanic state of consciousness to oppose the shaman he found so abhorrent. The incident inspired 150 years of stories and rumors in Europe about animism, spirits, other worlds, and altered states of consciousness (Price, 2001b: 3-6).

          In the same period, reports from missionaries in the Americas interpreted the use of tobacco and other means of altering consciousness to obtain information and effect cures as somewhere between “jugglery,” i.e., charlatanism, and “dealing with the devil” (Narby & Huxley, 2001: 23-6). A century later, shamanism had become a topic to conjure with, for the Enlightenment dispensed with fears of satanic involvement. People were free to worry about what was real in the stories and what deceitful (Ibid., 21-5). Artists like Goethe (whose Faust portrayed the dilemma of “Modern Man” in Jung’s view) and Mozart (Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, Idomeneo, etc.) found shamanic themes to be powerful sources of inspiration (Flaherty, 1992).

Growing understanding. The earliest anthropological reports on shamanism were published in the late nineteenth century, where the central theme was that shamans claimed to communicate with “spirits” for the sake of their communities. Such an approach gave shamanistic phenomena an underlying coherence for the first time, and led to sympathetic portraits of shamans as people very much like ourselves. If they were given to trickery in much larger measure than we, at least their intentions were honorable, for they meant to be helpful to their communities (Narby & Huxley, 2001: 39-73).

          The twentieth century opened with accounts of shamanism as a pathological condition based on “arctic hysteria,” which the successful shaman nevertheless learned to master. Data collection became much more careful; consciousness-changing techniques, such as drumming, were identified; and the dangerous, vengeful dimension of shamanism was recognized. Peter Elkin emphasized the shaman’s discipline and training. Lévi-Strauss saw shamans as primitive psychoanalysts (Ibid., 79-107). In his book, The Savage Mind (French 1962, English 1966), Lévi-Strauss attempted to overcome European cultural bias by showing “that magic and science require the same mental operations and complement one another. He made it thoroughly acceptable to take shamanism seriously” (Ibid., 244). Thus by the end of the twentieth century the fact of altered states of consciousness had ceased to boggle professional Western minds and we could begin to appreciate that it is the mastery of such states that is the essential thing.

          About this time, anthropology began to experiment with “participant observers.” Bronislaw Malinowski had developed the method in 1910, but a half century of the Standard Social Science Model forbade subjectivity and contamination of scientific reports with naïve native perspectives. Gordon Wasson, the American banker and mushroom enthusiast, broke the ice with his highly respected studies that began in the late 1950’s. Carlos Castaneda popularized the practice — whether his books be seen as anthropology or as fiction. Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst were the first anthropologists to take peyote under Huichol supervision. Michael Harner and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff took jagé with the Indians of the Upper Amazon. Holger Kalweit studied with Tibetan shamans in refugee camps in India (Ibid., 135-83). American anthropologist, Edith Turner published this report of participant observation in 1992:

I saw with my own eyes a large gray blob of plasma emerge from the sick woman’s back. Then I knew the Africans were right, there is spirit affliction, and it isn’t a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology. And I began to see how anthropologists have perpetuated an endless series of put-downs in regard to the many spirit events in which they have participated — participated in a kindly pretense. They might have been obtaining valuable information, but they have been operating with the wrong paradigm, that of the positivists’ denial.

. . . Thus for me, “going native” achieved a break-through to an altogether different worldview, foreign to academia . . . We anthropologists need training to see what the natives see (quoted in Narby & Huxley, 2001: 261f).

How Shamanism Works

          The essential piece in shamanism is that shamans tune their autonomic nervous systems so as to experience what lies below ordinary consciousness, namely “neurognostic structures,” the neural structures that make “knowing” (gnosis) possible (Winkelman, 2000: 78). Myth, and the archetypes that comprise it, simultaneously affect physiology and meaning. They are said to “conflate” biology and meaning and to “collapse the false dichotomy” that Western thinking makes “between objective and subjective knowledge” (Ibid., 241). With this language, Winkelman comes very close to Jung’s metaphor, whereby instinct and archetype comprise a spectrum. Instinct, the bodily end, occupies the infrared region, while archetype, with its numinous spiritual implications extends into the ultraviolet.

          Jung’s metaphor implies there is a bottom-to-top continuity between inherited behavior patterns and the mythic images that express their intentions. This whole entity is what we have been calling an archetype. And it is the reason why archetypal images “entrain” physiological responses. Image generation is found in the same package with neural networks, hormone release, and all the rest. At the bottom end, we inherit a set of genes which build bodily structures that interact with the environment to produce certain behavior patterns. Near the top end, we cannot avoid recognizing the conditions that entrain that behavior. One form of such recognition is what the biogenetic structuralists call “penetration,” whereby a symbol at the violet end activates unconscious neural networks at the infrared end. When we encounter archetypal images in literature, in ritual or in dreams, the entire chain of events is set in motion and we find ourselves moved, intrigued, aroused, and ready for more. We are engaged from the lowest bodily level to the highest spiritual dimension of experience.

          Winkelman had the biological discoveries of the entire twentieth century to draw upon for his description of this bottom-to-top archetypal structure. [7] Jung’s sources, however, lay mostly in the nineteenth century and were summarized by Pierre Janet (1903), who sought to understand human psychology in terms of stages of evolutionary development as well as he could construe them at a time when the disciplines of genetics and molecular biology had hardly been imagined. [8] Thus, when Janet spoke of a “drop in mental level” (abaissement du niveau mental), he meant that an individual’s psychic functioning had dropped to that characteristic of an earlier stage of personal development, or even to that of a less evolved animal.

Trance induction. We have already discussed how the autonomic nervous system can be tuned with (a) extensive motor behavior, such as dancing, (b) auditory driving, such as drumming, (c) fasting, (d) sensory deprivations, and (e) other austerities, such as pain, injury, and extreme cold. Later in this chapter, we will discuss the use of hallucinogens. In all cases, the balance is altered between the sympathetic system that arouses us for emergencies and the parasympathetic system that slows us down for nourishment and sleep. Generally, the sympathetic system is stimulated to the point of exhaustion, generating a spillover effect upon the parasympathetic. This generates high-voltage, slow EEG-waves in the emotion-governing limbic system which synchronize the entire brain from the very primitive brain stem to the frontal cortex that is primarily responsible for ego-function. The brain becomes hierarchically integrated, bringing neural networks that are normally unconscious within the reach of self-conscious awareness, harmonizing the limbic system and the cortex, and synchronizing the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Brain-wave patterns slow to alpha and theta rhythms, inducing a sort of “waking-dream” state that promotes “integrative processing” (Winkelman, 2000: 128-30).

Shamanism and integration. Once the integrative state of shamanic consciousness is attained, the bottom-to-top archetypal organization of the brain becomes open to the shaman’s awareness. Lower brain centers are engaged, but no longer fully unconscious. To greater or lesser extent, they become available to the shaman’s observing consciousness. This brings with it a sense of insightfulness, understanding, certainty, conviction and truth. One has the sense that all of this surpasses ordinary understanding, and memories of the insights achieved tend to persist into ordinary consciousness when the shamanic state has passed (Ibid., 4). In addition to the bottom-to-top integration, there is also a “horizontal” assimilation of separate archetypal patterns into a larger model of self based upon deep structures that operate independently of language. The shaman thinks analogically rather than in a language-based manner, and this leads to animistic and anthropomorphic thinking. The animals talk. Everything seems to be alive and guided by a human-like soul (Ibid., 2).

          The deepest and most integrative of neurognostic structures are those associated with the shamanic initiation, when the individual faces death and dismemberment and is then reassembled and reborn. The shaman-to-be faces the most central terrors of human life and survives, an experience that would transform anyone’s outlook (Ibid., 82). Such deep, universally human issues, which appear to be related to the theta-wave pattern of whole-brain stimulation, are central to the survival of the species (Ibid., 136f). The altered functioning of the brain in integrative mode, therefore, is tuned to the fundamental issues of human survival and the psychocultural beliefs of the shaman’s own society.

          Winkelman points out that these integrative achievements are not merely bio-psychic, but “bio-social”; they are universally human, cross-cultural characteristics “that constitute the primordial basis for religion,” that is for ultimate explanations that are inevitably generated when our brain’s “causal operator” applies itself to the most fundamental and comprehensive “zone of uncertainty” (Ibid., 71). Here is where the deepest and broadest integrations occur. Shamanism is “the mechanism by which the distinct modules for human thought were integrated” (Ibid., 58). The dynamic of shamanism reveals the limitations of Mithen’s model of psychic integration (opening the doors between the side chapels of the Paleolithic mind). Mithen’s view is too much oriented to conscious, language-based thought. “Shamanism contributed to this integrative cognition through the systematic neurophysiological, psychological, psychosocial, and symbolic effects of the altered states of consciousness which produced integrative brain states” (Ibid., 102). In other words, the caves give us evidence of a deeper process than Mithen has described, a reorganization of the human psyche that paved the way for all that has followed. [9]

Healing and transformation. In the course of a life of shamanizing, an individual repeatedly activates deep neurocognitive structures through altered states of consciousness and the use of symbols — those of the shamanic costume, the induction procedure, the healing rituals, and those of society’s mythic narrative. All of this restructures the brain and psyche at levels below theoretical and operational thinking. Ritual and the shaman’s journey through mythscape repeatedly restore and reexamine the structure of the mythic cosmos. And these activities, performed in altered states of consciousness, re-align neural networks, and harden their “wiring,” so that eventually the myth reestablishes itself automatically every time the shaman undertakes a consciousnessaltering exercise. Mythscape repeatedly explored, “serves as a bridge between the iconic and the verbal rational levels by including elements of both domains” (Winkelman, 2000: 88).

          In short, the bottom-to-top structure of the archetypes is regularly exploited by shamanism. Although everyone’s brain-and-psyche is structured archetypally, shamans exploit this structure to firm up the neural “wiring” that links image with physiology. Years of practice will potentially bring the shaman to the point that every incident in life is instantaneously appreciated for its mythic significance. Ideally, the experienced shaman lives in mythscape all the time, the archetypal structure of reality functioning as a background that lurks out-of-focus in waking consciousness but remains always available. Nevertheless, Eliade’s stories of shamans who become sick unless they have regular opportunities to shamanize attest to the on-going importance of immersing oneself in mythscape and activating deep neural networks that carry with them a sense of wholeness in self and cosmos.

          Shamanic healing rituals have a similar effect upon patients. The ceremony itself evokes opioid (endorphin) release which alters autonomic nervous system balance and generates an emotional charge. The same endorphins that build mother-infant and lover-lover bonds constitute the foundation of all social bonding. They foster social interaction, play, the comfort of having a place in society, and provide a sense of belonging (Winkelman, 2000: 198). Endorphins work on the whole ritual community, whose social cohesion favors the entrainment of certain physiological process in the patient, and prepares them all for the effect of mythic reenactment (Ibid., 231). Myth “molds, stabilizes, and integrates the patient’s experience, giving it meaning.” In this way it facilitates the integration of ego-identity within the mythscape of the group, while strengthening the top-to-bottom archetypal structure of brain-and-psyche (Ibid., 245).

Ritual healing produces cures through entraining deep levels of neurocognitive organization, evoking repressed structures and psychodynamic complexes and re-elevating them into consciousness. These repressed structures can produce conflict and collapse the ego in development of a different relationship of self to the world. Integration of this previously unconscious material into the conscious network may result in profound changes in the individual’s experience of self and world, including alteration of behavior, personality, self-understanding, and autonomic balance (Ibid., 245).

          The shaman has been called the expert in a non-ordinary “grammar of mind” (Jordan, 2001); for the shaman remembers and reestablishes the reality of the greater cosmos that interrelates the ecology, the economy, the social structure, and the source of collective meaning. Illness, both personal and social, is often understandable in terms of alienation from the greater cosmos. Temporal concerns draw people away from the timeless foundational reality of the myth, and it is the shaman’s duty to restore the connection. “Equipped with an impressive corpus of empirical knowledge (ethnoscience) and a profound grasp of human behavior, the shaman fulfills the vital role of a psychocultural adaptive mechanism, not merely as a healer of diseases, but as a harmonizer of social and natural dysfunctions and imbalance” (Ripinsky-Naxon, 1993: 9). To accomplish such goals, the shaman must be something of a showman and manipulate the “set and setting” of ritual, to address the current psychosocial reality of the community as well as that of the patient. Conditions must be right for the mythic imagery to have its full effect.

Shamanism and Mastery

          Showmanship, arranging the “set and setting” within which altered states of consciousness will be experienced, even perpetrating the illusions for which shamans the world over are renowned — all in the best interests of individual healing and the revitalization of society — have little to do with the mastery of altered states. All of these activities can be performed by a shaman in ordinary consciousness. By “mastering altered states,” we mean learning to gain some control over what happens when one is in a trance state. The question before us is whether altered states can be refined and developed somewhat analogously to the way Western science has refined, developed, and extended our sensory capacities. Are “inner” discoveries and manipulations possible that would parallel the techniques of an “outer”-directed science?

          If altered states of consciousness are useful for healing and transformation, can we learn to use them dependably; or must we, perhaps, induce trances and then just hope for the best? Is it possible to gain some mastery over what happens to our consciousness while we are entranced? Surely the importance of altered states of consciousness is not simply that they exist, but rather what we can learn to do with them. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky of Cambridge University, one of the most respected contemporary experts on shamanism, defines the shaman as “any kind of person who is in control of his or her state of trance” (Vitebsky, 1995: 10). He implies that altered states are “an absolutely normal, ordinary, indispensable side of human experience” (Hunt, 1995: 1), but that shamans distinguish themselves in having refined their talent for exploiting this universal human capability. Among contemporary shamanic societies, the San (Bushmen) of southern Africa are one of the most closely studied and frequently cited examples of a simple hunter-gatherer culture. For that reason they may resemble our Ice-Age ancestors. There is very little role-distinction in San society, and every San is a potential shaman. Some individuals, of course, display a greater talent for becoming entranced and for controlling their trance, but the trance-dance involves the whole community, and anyone who enters a trance is authorized to heal. The San say that a form of energy they call n/um rises in their bodies as they become entranced. It is a painful experience; but if an individual is to become an effective and dependable shaman, he or she is expected to have mastered the pain of n/um by the age of thirty-five (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1989: 34).

Role of the conscious ego. Mastery of altered states begins with exercises undertaken in ordinary consciousness. This is true, not only for such seemingly exotic activities as shamanism, but also for everyday altered states, such as those employed by athletes. For example, golf champion Arnold Palmer has said that you have to know that you will make your putt: “The hardest thing for a great many people is to win. They . . . doubt. Which gets them into trouble” (Murphy & White, 1978: 99). He implies that a state of supreme confidence had to be cultivated, that he had to learn to master his state of mind. Decades of success on the golf course demonstrate that he has done so, but he does not tell us how — and perhaps does not know himself what he did.

          Perhaps many shamans, too, have gained mastery without knowing how they did it, but some general principles of mastering our conscious states may be enunciated. Not unlike learning how to drive, chip, and putt a golf ball, consciousness-training inevitably involves a good deal of habituation, i.e., repetition of some simple actions to the point that they become automatic. Consciousness-training, just like athletics and musicianship, requires “steady work” to “throw off an unconsciousness” most of us do not know we have, for we have never imagined gaining control over our altered states.

          The biogenetic structuralists refer to the process as “relegation.” When we practice an activity over and over, we establish new neural networks in the brain; and the better “wired” those networks are (on the principle that “neurons that fire together wire together”) the more capable they are of functioning outside of conscious guidance.

          A pianist in the midst of performing a concerto does not have to think which keys to strike or by which technique. Practice has rendered such motor activities highly automatic, leaving consciousness free to attend to the general form of the musical passages and to the nuances inspired by this particular performance. While he plays his part in the concerto, the pianist is in an altered state of consciousness in which he may be said to “inhabit” the music, to live in the world of the concerto, while a certain capacity to introduce subtle changes in timing, mood, and emphasis reveals his mastery over unconscious networks, giving the performance its unique character.

          Extended, conscientious repetition “wires” a neural network so solidly that it can be trusted to function without conscious attention. As this degree of dependability is achieved, the network will automatically be “disentrained from the [larger] conscious network” of the ego, and “relegated” to the lowest functional level of the nervous system capable of performing it well enough (C. D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 98). Such “demoted” networks are not lost. Rather they can be “rediscovered,” at first with effort, and eventually quite naturally. “If there is sufficient interest, consciousness will actively, even persistently search for the requisite network” (Ibid., 99). Searching for and finding unconscious networks is part of what “mastery” means.

          Some of the simplest examples of such searching and finding have to do with the influence the conscious ego can exert over subsequent sleeping states. For example, J. Allan Hobson, the Harvard dream researcher, says that experiments done with lucid dreaming (i.e., dreams where we know we are dreaming) show that it is possible to influence the content of dreams by concentrating on some issue while falling asleep (Hobson, 2002: 20). In this case, a conscious intention seems to be “held,” even as the conscious ego disappears into sleep. Somehow, despite the alteration of consciousness to the dream state, something is “searching out” normally unconscious networks in order to investigate the issue in question. Meanwhile, the very fact that we are capable of lucid dreaming (though it may not be a common experience) implies some sort of control, namely the ability to see the dream as a dream and not to believe it is waking reality. A critical function of the waking ego is retained despite our passing over into a state of sleep.

          A second issue is implied by Hobson’s comment. The very idea that we may intend to have a lucid dream while we are awake and thereby influence our brain-and-psyche to achieve lucidity implies a certain conscious influence over the dreaming state. Most people have to train themselves to achieve this small degree of mastery. A standard technique, in fact, for learning to become lucid while in the dream state is to develop the habit of asking oneself repeatedly during the day whether one is dreaming right now or awake. In the beginning, the would-be lucid dreamer will have difficulty remembering to ask herself at odd moments during the day: “Am I dreaming now? How can I be sure?” A habit has to be developed until the thought will come to mind unbidden and repeatedly during the day. It must become sufficiently automatic as to be “relegated” to a much lower functional level, and thereby become available also during sleep.

          A similar claim is made by Lewis-Williams and Pearce when they report that we can gain far more control than we may have imagined over our hypnagogic imagery — those fleeting and fragmentary images and impressions that pass through our minds while we are falling asleep. If we make an act of will to attend to those images, we can increase their duration and frequency. Furthermore, this greater stability of attention will persist into the dreaming state and teach us “to control and prolong both [our] hypnagogic experience and [our] dreams” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 44).

What replaces the waking ego. In all these instances, the notion of a part of our consciousness “searching” for unconscious memories, capabilities, and other associations, seems quite apt. But the “consciousness” that “searches” for the relegated network is surely not quite identical with the ego of ordinary consciousness. It must resemble, rather, the ego of “original thinking,” the one that has relinquished the illusion of being in charge but is aware of being given to. This is the experience that inspires Jung to say, “I think unconsciously,” and “My thoughts are given to me, I do not invent them” (Speaking, 166). From the perspective of the ordinary ego, the ego that emerges in “original thinking” seems strangely passive and withdrawn from the empirical world. Yet it clearly does “search out” unconscious networks. It performs an activity that the ordinary ego can only dream of doing.

          For instance, Jung sometimes describes active imagination as a technique for getting our moods to speak to us. Perhaps we are out of sorts and do not know why. Withdrawing from the concerns of everyday life — including the constant chatter by which the ego of everyday consciousness maintains its narrow perspective on world and self — and redirecting our attention to the meditative field of active imagination, we permit images to emerge “out of our mood.” The activated neural networks that belong to the general state of brain-and-psyche that is the mood are drawn into the conscious field and appear as images and fragments of dramas. The mood is supported by the deeper levels of the top-to-bottom structure of the archetype, while the imagery is produced by the top layers.

          As we argued in Chapter 8, in the same year that Jung discovered his method of active imagination, or “original thinking,”1913, Edmund Husserl published his own account of having developed a similar technique for catching consciousness in the act. Again, he describes a “strangely passive” agent, in contrast with the ordinary behavior of the ego. The advantage for us of Husserl’s account is that the ego that functions in his “phenomenological epoché” is much more precisely described than is Jung’s “original thinker.”

          Husserl calls this agent the “transcendental ego.” But it only seems passive to us, because we are identified with our ordinary, empirical ego, the one that believes it is in charge of our careening and thoughtless course through a world that exists outside of itself as a set of independent objects. When we look more closely, however, we see that absolutely everything is given to us by the transcendental ego — the whole world and even ourselves. It is the truly active agent: “The Objective world . . . with all its Objects, derives its whole sense and its existential status . . . from me as the transcendental Ego, the Ego who comes to the fore only with transcendental-phenomenological epoché” (C. D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 33). [10]

          Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili (1990: 31f) describe an exercise by which we can learn to experience Husserl’s transcendental ego. First, we must learn to concentrate stably on a single object in the conscious field (perhaps a blue vase). It will take some practice to keep the concentration steady. Then, we must switch to a second object (the table it sits upon) without losing the first, and practice until both objects can be held steadily in mind. The third step is to alternate the focus of our attention from vase to table and back again without losing either object. The final and crucial step is to attend — not to the objects themselves — but to the effort required by these acts of attention. This shift “brackets” the “existence” of the objects, which is what Husserl means by epoché. Object and subject — no longer separate entities — are revealed to be what they are in consciousness, two aspects of the same phenomenon.

          Husserl’s shift is the essential move in all mystical practices. One attends not to the object itself, existing in the world out there, but rather to the act of consciousness by which the object is held. This shift sets aside the naïve “empirical ego” and reveals the transcendental ego that has been there all along. Like the ego of active imagination, the transcendental ego emerges when the habitual constraints of the everyday waking ego have been by-passed. When the shaman makes this shift, it “allow[s] him to immerse himself and participate in a broader more destructured phenomenal field” (Ibid., 341), i.e., a field of phenomena no longer structured by everyday expectations.

Learning to “steer” a trance state. If “the goal of shamans is to find the correct balance or equilibrium point between tapping into sacred forces and the ability to control them” (Hayden, 2003: 59), the equilibrium point surely is closely related to Husserl’s transcendental ego and Jung’s original thinking. Furthermore, it seems obvious that shamans must possess sufficient “ego strength” to tolerate conflicting themes, structures, demands, emotions, and the like, and to trust that a non-conscious force like Jung’s transcendent function will be able to resolve their discrepancies. The empirical ego is incapable of such integration, and the transcendental ego is simply handed the resolution in symbolic form (cf. Winkelman, 2000: 83). But still, some “steering” of the altered state is required. “The shaman’s art is to consciously bring about the state of trance and to steer it” (Müller-Ebeling, et al., 2002: 39).

          Dan Merkur (1992) describes such “steering” of trance states using the language of hypnosis. He says that an entranced apprentice shaman is guided by “hetero-hypnotic” suggestions made by the master shaman in charge of the training. After sufficient guidance by another, the apprentice begins to learn some techniques of “auto-hypnosis,” i.e., to guide the course of her own trance. Merkur does not justify his choice of hypnosis as a metaphor or explain how the transition takes place, from hetero- to auto-suggestion. Nevertheless, he nicely sets the parameters for any discussion of mastering altered states. Furthermore, his descriptions accord very well with those of archaeologist and rock art specialist, David S. Whitley, describing puberty ceremonies among the Indians of California, “Shamans tried to manipulate the initiates’ visions to ensure the proper, culturally prescribed supernatural experiences” (Whitley, 2000: 86). Brian Fagan, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes similar “hetero-suggestions” among the San:

During the trance dances, shamans might draw each other’s attention to things they can see, such as a spirit-eland standing in the semidarkness beyond the fire. Participants look in the same direction and share the same vision. When everyone has returned to a normal state of consciousness, the visions are described. The shaman is then able to manipulate these visions for the audience, using such things as dance, flickering lights, or paintings, to direct his narrative (Fagan, 1998: 65f).

          The biogenetic structuralists bring us closer to understanding the interior process of “steering” one’s own trance state. The first step in gaining mastery is learning to attend to consciousness itself. That is, we have to learn to “exit the natural mind” by making a phenomenological reduction like that of Husserl. The natural mind — whether it looks out at the outer world or in at the inner world — can only see what happens to appear. With my natural mind in the waking state, I look out the window and see cars passing by on the street, leaves trembling in a light breeze, sparrows squabbling over a crust of bread someone has dropped on the sidewalk. Or in the natural mind of the dream state, I see a girl on a bicycle collide with the mailman’s letter-cart; papers begin to blow everywhere, and I run to help pick them up. In either case, the natural mind is heedless of the consciousness that makes these things appear. We have to make some sort of phenomenological reduction, some turn to “original thinking,” if we are ever to “learn that what we perceive is a pattern of neural activity,” that it belongs to us, and that we potentially have the power to exercise some influence over it (C. D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 108f).

The “warps” in our stream of consciousness. The biogenetic structuralists describe consciousness in terms of a nested hierarchy: modes, states and phases. The largest “nests” are the modes, the four biologically-based gross types of mammalian function: wake, dream, dreamless sleep, and transpersonal consciousness. These same categories are distinguished in the Hindu Upanishads, where transpersonal consciousness is called turīya; and the first three are self-evident to us all. While in the waking (or sleeping) mode, we find ourselves in various distinct “states” of consciousness, each of which is “based upon sociocultural learning and psychosocial needs” (Winkelman, 2000: 124). Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s distinction between “primitive thinking” and the “theory-based” thinking of the monophasic West describes extreme examples of sociocultural learning. The “primitive’s” conscious state is based in being alert for archetypal patterns or “collective representations,” while we in the West are attentive to theoretical explanations for why events occur (Lévy-Bruhl, 1922).

          Certainly different cultures favor different states of consciousness, but acculturation and psychosocial needs do not restrict each of us to a single waking state. We would be wrong to think that a university physicist is always in the same conscious state. Surely he is in a highly focused physical-science state of mind while working in his laboratory or teaching his students. But he is in a familial state of mind while picnicking with his wife and children. Indeed, each of us knows a variety of familial states of mind, ranging from bickering to bliss. There is probably no end to the list we could make of familiar states of consciousness — all without entering the murkier region where altered states are to be found. Each psychosocial state is a way of being a psyche-in-the-socialized-world.

          We pass through a number of states of consciousness in the course of a day: a groggy period at the beginning, quiet reflection while reading the paper, irritated competitiveness during the commute, and so on. But no one of these conscious states is uniform. In each one we go through phases. Take reading the morning paper. For a few moments, we read the story behind the headline, and our imagination takes us into the mayor’s office, where several individuals hurl accusations at one another. Then disjointed memories of these local political figures flit through our minds as we follow the article with skepticism. There are moments of fumbling for our coffee cup, rearranging ourselves in the chair, suddenly remembering an appointment made for 11:15, and so on. Each of these is a different “phase” within the same general “state” (quietly reading the paper). A phase is a “discrete, cognized strip of unfolding experience” (Ibid., 142).

          Phases of consciousness are separated from one another by gaps where, for instance, my feelings about the mayor fade out as I find myself fumbling for my coffee cup. The biogenetic structuralists call these in-between moments “warps.” Consciousness is “warping” from one state to another, and these “nowhere moments,” the warps, are the handles by which the transcendental ego can grab hold and steer a state of consciousness. Warps are the secret behind the mastery of altered states.

          What the biogenetic structuralists call “warps” have long been known in the literature of Eastern meditation as the empty moments between thoughts, whose discovery is crucial for transforming consciousness. They are momentary and so evanescent that in most cases we have to train ourselves to notice them. There are some warps, however, that are easier to detect; and paying attention to the easier ones helps us to begin noticing subtler instances. For example, the warp between a drop in blood sugar and the feeling of being tired and irritable is characterized by familiar physical signs. Learning to become aware of the warp before we fall into a phase of touchy exhaustion can be very useful, for it allows us to take a little timely nourishment and thereby eliminate or diminish the undesirable phase. The warp between wake and sleep is another — called “hypnagogic” while falling asleep and “hypnopompic” on awakening. Sharpening our awareness of these transitions can increase dream-recall (C. D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 142-4).

          Jung’s idea of becoming conscious of a feeling-toned complex relies upon the reality of warps. Experience shows that once we become aware of the stereotyped pattern of experience and behavior that a complex produces, we can identify it as a typical “state of consciousness” that seems to “get into us.” At first we will recognize the complex-behavior only after the fact and with chagrin. Practice in attending to our conscious states, however, enables our catching a complex-reaction in the act, and at progressively earlier moments. Finally, if we become sharp enough to catch the warp before the complex-state becomes established, we can learn to reduce its effects or even to avoid it.

Steering through the warps. Shamans generally wish to induce certain novel states and phases of consciousness rather than avoid others that are dysfunctional and all too common. Using ritual to tune their autonomic nervous system and that of other participants is the prime example by which shamans create a warp and steer themselves and others — not into just any altered state, but — into a desired mood, one that is conducive to healing, transformation or discovery (Ibid., 147; Winkelman, 2000: 124). Consciousness can be steered into specific states by employing the principle of “symbolic penetration” to the warps. Symbols introduced in the warps penetrate to unconscious neural networks and evoke experiences with a mythic or numinous tone, and inspire a conviction of truth, awe, curiosity and vulnerability (C. D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 229). Shamans take advantage of the warp’s lack of form to trigger unconscious networks that structure the next phase into which consciousness passes.

          A shaman’s practice at employing the transcendental ego to attend to the states and phases of consciousness begins during an apprenticeship when the beginning psychic traveler is steered by a master shaman who drops suggestions into the novice’s warps. Repeated experiences of trance states and warp transitions under different circumstances and with the penetration of different symbols exposes the apprentice to a wide range of conscious phases. Any one of them might solidify as a sort of complex, the distinctive source of an extraordinary power. Seen as supernatural authorities from another realm of the cosmos, i.e., as “spirit-guides,” such stereotyped phases of consciousness are experienced as autonomous agents. They can bring about dissociations in the shaman’s personality. But by learning to control these phases through symbolic and ritual devices applied to the warps, “a young shaman learns to integrate alternate phases into a single personality” (Ibid., 147). Shamanic mastery of altered states of consciousness is essential — first to preserve the shaman’s own sanity, then as a means of taking charge of journeys through mythscape as a “free soul,” and finally to manipulate the patient’s state of consciousness in the direction of health.

Acquiring shamanic mastery. The process of acquiring shamanic mastery over altered states has been described by the biogenetic structuralists as comprising three stages. In the future shaman’s initiatory sickness, a previously habitual structuring of brain-and-psyche as that of an unremarkable ordinary citizen is subjected to extraordinary pressures that cause it to fragment. The center no longer holds while radically new, extremely vivid imagery and emotional reactions intervene, causing confusion and panic. Images of dismemberment are highly appropriate to this first phase. When the shaman-to-be finds an experienced mentor who can help to contain this efflorescence of frightening material, guided journeys into mythscape force the novice to become accommodated to the new psychic landscape. Growing familiarity with this expanded cosmos and with the warp manipulations that make it possible begin the process of reassembling the fragmented brain-and-psyche into a new and expanded form. If the initial phase is fragmentation, the middle phase is assimilation, and the final phase is consolidation. For, “With guidance and experience, the shaman gains mastery over his new realm of experience. He becomes expert at cross-phasing warps and transcending levels of his own internal structures. What was earlier experienced as dismemberment and madness now becomes exploration” (C. D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 272f).

          The biogenetic structuralists cite Jung’s disciple Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949) as support for this three-part description of a shaman’s maturation. They might also have cited the central theme of Jung’s studies in alchemy, expressed in the Latin motto, solve et coagula, and also in the Greek name for alchemy, the spagyric art. [11] Every psychic transformation begins with the fragmentation (or “dissolving”) of an old synthesis. Elements, old and new, are then experienced in isolation from one another, rather chaotically, before they “coagulate” into a new, stable configuration.

SHAMANIC MASTERY:
ANTHROPOLOGY OF AYAHUASCA USE IN THE AMAZON

          The use of psychoactive drugs to induce shamanic states of consciousness has been widespread in human history. Some of the best documented material comes from the shamanic use of a drug mixture variously called ayahuasca, jagé, or daime in the Upper Amazon basin, involving parts of Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. We will call it “ayahuasca.” Evidence for its use in shamanism is very ancient, and it is used today by more people and by more classes of people than ever before. Originally, it was used by very simple hunter-gatherer societies, so that its use may closely parallel the shamanism of our Ice Age ancestors. Today, it seems that only the highest social classes in the Andes remain ignorant of ayahuasca. The main advantage for our purposes of investigating ayahuasca rests upon its thorough documentation, especially by participant-observer scientists. This provides us a wealth of information which helps us closely consider how South American shamans attain mastery over their altered states of consciousness. What we learn from them tells us a good deal about how traditional practitioners have manipulated the warps in their altered states.

Ayahuasca: General Introduction

          Ayahuasca is a psychedelic tea made by boiling together pulped pieces of a vine found widely in the Amazon jungle together with one or more other herbs. Ayahuasca is the name of the brew in the Quechua language, which is the Native American lingua franca of the Andes. Much of the evidence that follows comes from Ecuador and Peru. Aya means “bitter,” “dead person,” and “spirit”; huasca means “vine.” It is the drink of the vine that is bitter to the taste and turns its drinkers symbolically into dead people and experientially into spirits — in the same sense that our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic linked the ideas of dying and entering trance. Although its ingredients are somewhat variable, depending upon locale and the purpose of drinking it, ayahuasca is ubiquitous in the Upper Amazon, and known by other names, including yagé by the Tukano Indians of Columbia (Luna, 1986: 9).

          Anthropologist Jeremy Narby says that ayahuasca use in Western Amazonia stretches back without interruption some 4,000 or 5,000 years. The natives and Western “participant observers” describe ayahuasca as a “school” and a “teacher.” It is a much older school than the European university system, which is not yet 900 years old (Narby, 1999: 154). Somewhat more conservatively, Dennis McKenna reports that archaeologists have found evidence of figurines and drug delivery systems for an inhaled version of ayahuasca in the Ecuadorian Amazon that date to 3500 or 4000, b.p. (D. McKenna, 1999: 190). The first European to encounter Ayahuasca was the English botanist, Richard Spruce, in 1851; and the earliest written report of first-hand experience was made by an Ecuadorian civil servant named Villavicencio, in 1858 (Shanon, 2002: 19).

          What impresses most investigators is the universality of the experience: certainly not socially or culturally determined (Ibid., 318f), and “most plausibly . . . because we Homo sapiens are [all] wired the same” (R. Siegel, 1989: 235). Psychedelic researcher, Stanislav Grof, is particularly struck by the precision of this archetypal universality: “I had never suspected that the ancient spiritual systems had actually charted with amazing accuracy, different levels and types of experiences that occur in non-ordinary states of consciousness. I was astonished by their emotional power, authenticity, and potential for transforming people’s lives” (Grof, 1992: 17).

          Universally, ayahuasca is said to reveal the real world, the world of the spirits, i.e., the greater cosmos from which all true and valuable knowledge comes. The brew itself is described as a powerful spirit being that enables its users to know this and other worlds, past and future, and the natural environment (geography, flora, and fauna); to diagnose illnesses; to discover game animals, the plans of enemies, and lost objects; to communicate with distant relatives; and to travel in time and space (Luna, 1986: 60-2).

          Although some of the earliest and most influential accounts of ayahuasca use were published by participant-observer anthropologists working with fairly remote tribes of Indians (Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971, 1975; Michael Harner, 1972, 1973), most of the material gathered here comes from more recent observers who have studied with mestizos, who call themselves vegetalistas more frequently than ayahuasqueros. Although mestizo literally means a person of mixed race, it is used by these researchers as a sociocultural term. Whatever their race, mestizos, in this sense, are individuals who have Spanish as their mother tongue and are at home throughout the thousands of square miles that comprise “the large and diffuse Upper Amazon cultural complex” (Luna, 1986: 15). The extensive interchange of information across such huge geographical regions, nations, and local cultural traditions means that shamanism effectively transcends all social boundaries (Ibid., 35). It combines ideas and imagery from several Indian traditions with European religious traditions. Indeed, each practitioner develops a uniquely personal syncretism (Ibid., 41). In Brazil, there are three legally recognized Churches that imbibe ayahuasca as a sacrament; they call the drug daime (literally, “give me”) (Shanon, 2002: 21-6).

          Most mestizo vegetalistas have worked in the jungle during their youth, usually tapping rubber trees, learned the flora and fauna of the forest, and been in contact with local Indian cultures. Some have moved to cities and absorbed a good deal of the esoteric literature of Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism, and Far Eastern traditions (Luna, 1986: 158). In the Peruvian Amazon, Luis Eduardo Luna reports that only a very small portion of the upper middle class and the upper class lead a life that is ignorant of ayahuasca and the forest (Ibid., 73). Apparently this most European layer of society is insulated by its wealth from the attractions of ayahuasca use; for, “Demoralized by the shock of acculturative forces, mestizo inhabitants of Iquitos [Peru] suffer from high rates of stress-induced anxiety and associated psychosomatic disorders. The use of ayahuasca, as supervised by mestizo healers, is incorporated into complex healing ceremonies” (Grob, 1999: 224).

Cave painters redux. Parallels between the Upper Paleolithic cave painters and the ayahuasqueros of the Amazon are striking and extensive. Both sorts of shamanism are practiced by simple hunter-gatherer societies, both understand becoming entranced as a symbolic form of dying, and both embrace the notion that the shaman’s free soul travels through a greater cosmos that makes this empirical world more tractable. Both use altered states of consciousness to heal, find game animals, and the like. Both paint and etch into stone characteristic images associated with their trances.

          It appears that drug use probably does not distinguish South American shamans from their forebears in the Upper Paleolithic. The likelihood is that the cave painters did employ drugs for trance induction. Duke University anthropologist Weston LaBarre has argued in his book, The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion (1970), that “hunters and gatherers, rather than farmers, were probably the first to learn much about hallucinogenic plants” (cited in Dobkin de Rios, 1990: 7). Gordon and Virginia Wasson (1957) report that the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria, also called “fly agaric,” began at the end of the last Ice Age. Indeed, it appears that since Amanita grows in symbiotic relationship with birch and pine trees, that the mushroom followed the retreating ice cap northward along with the trees (Ibid., 34f). Its use has long been associated with Siberian shamanism, which may well be the historical successor to Upper Paleolithic shamanism. It is also believed, however, that the Upper Paleolithic people probably used ergot, a more dangerous drug, which is found in a blight on grain, and is often associated with the late-antique cult of Eleusis.

          The classic three stages of trance are widely reported with ayahuasca use — although Benny Shanon, the researcher who has had the most extensive personal familiarity with the drug, says that the sense of passing through distinct stages diminishes with cumulative experience (Shanon, 2002: 277). Psychopharmacologist, Ronald K. Siegel believes the experience of the tunnel is a common illusion caused by the fact that the center of the visual field produced by ayahuasca is so bright that the images there are obscured, while images outside the center retain their distinctness (Siegel, 1989: 232). Imagery from the visions, however, especially the phosphene designs, are unmistakable in body paint, textiles, ceramics, and other utensils. Reichel-Dolmatoff’s study of the Eastern Tukanoan Indians (1987) is the most densely documented volume, but studies of Native American rock art from both continents show the close relationship between shamanism, myth, and art (cf. Whitley, 2000; Patterson-Rudolph, 1990; Grant, 1967).

          The most impressive statement, however, is a series of shamanic paintings by the former ayahuasquero, Pablo Amaringo, published in a large format book with text by Luis Eduardo Luna (1993) Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. Pablo Amaringo’s story is somewhat typical of mestizo shamans. Born in 1943, he declared himself an atheist at the age of fifteen because the Catholic Church wanted nothing to do with a poor man who wished to become a priest. He worked as an assistant Harbor Master in Pucallpa until he was discovered to have a heart condition. Then he found he could draw and went to jail for counterfeiting currency. He escaped, and his father cured his heart problem with ayahuasca. Believing his life was now reformed, he went back to jail to serve out his sentence and was released for good conduct in 1969. He practiced as a vegetalista until 1977 but abandoned shamanism on account of spirit-world battles with an angry curandera [12] who believed that her spirits had left her as the by-product of Pablo’s cure of his sister’s hepatitis. Having been hurt by an act of her sorcery, Amaringo went to a vegetalista to be cured and was told that he would never escape the attacks of the vengeful woman unless he use his own shamanic powers and kill her. Unwilling to become an unscrupulous sorcerer himself, he relinquished ayahuasca and dedicated himself to art (Luna & Amaringo, 1993: 25-8).

          When he paints, Amaringo “concentrates until he sees an image in his mind” (Ibid., 28). Thus, he evidently practices a sort of active imagination in which he gains access to his transcendental ego. Judging from the verbal descriptions he has provided to accompany his published paintings, it appears that every canvas is a record of a well-remembered instance from his shamanic practice. As he sketches the images on paper or canvas and fills them in with color, he sings or whistles the shamanic songs (icaros) he was taught by his mentors — human, vegetal, or spiritual. He attributes his powers of visualizing to his experiences with ayahuasca.

          The paintings manage to convey a numinous sense of the visionary. Generally, there is a shadowy group of humans, usually painted in gray or black, using ayahuasca in a tambo (an open-sided, thatch-roofed platform on stilts, a typical jungle shelter). These humans are almost hard to find, however, for the huge colorful serpents, mermaids and figures from myth and fairy tales that completely overwhelm the scene in the tambo. All of these figures seem to emerge out of dense jungle foliage, as though the squiggles, circles, dots, and zigzags of the phosphenes have coalesced marvelously to suggest jaguars, goddesses, monkeys, armed warriors, and flying saucers. There are cities and castles and humanoid monsters comprised of animal parts from several species, not unlike the so-called shamans in the Ice Age caves.

          Anthropologist Jeremy Narby says the paintings strongly resemble his own ayahuasca visions (Narby, 1998: 69), and Luna says he has shown them to many vegetalistas who say they have seen the same images themselves. He has heard many descriptions of visions from people participating in ayahuasca sessions that sound like the same images and mythic themes that Amaringo has painted (Luna & Amaringo, 1993: 43, n. 69).

Ayahuasca: Psychoactive Principles

          The vine (huasca) that gives ayahuasca its name is Banisteriopsis caapi and other species of the Banisteriopsis genus. It climbs the trunks of huge forest trees as a liana, and attains a woody stem diameter of three or four inches. By itself, it has little potency as an hallucinogen. The hallucinogenic component of the brew is derived from the leaves of a bush, Psychotria viridis or Diplopterys cabrerana. These supply the most potent of psychoactive drugs, known by its abbreviation, DMT (N, N-dimethyltryptamine). DMT is easily deactivated in the stomach by monoamine oxidase (MAO), which removes the amine group from DMT. Alkaloids called beta-carbolines provided by Banisteriopsis, however, function as MAO-inhibitors, keeping DMT active and allowing it to be absorbed into the bloodstream and make its way to the brain (D. McKenna, 1999: 198). Not a few observers have remarked upon the herbal and biochemical acumen or incredible blind luck that induced hunter-gatherers to hit upon such a complex and ingenious solution to achieving altered states of consciousness four or five millennia ago. Vegetalistas say that the vine taught them how to make the brew and everything else they know.

          Casual drug users of DMT by-pass the stomach’s MAO barrier by smoking a little of the powdery chemical sprinkled into a pipe of tobacco or marijuana. They receive an “overwhelming immersion in an extremely alien world that lasts less than ten minutes” (Pinchbeck, 2002: 140). The smoke is said to smell bad and to cause the room one occupies and one’s body as well to “break into crystalline shards” (Strassman, 2001: 6). By contrast, the beta-carbolines produce subtle hallucinations that are “soft and warm.” Their effect upon DMT is to “pacify and humanize” the visions and to extend the experience from a few minutes to several hours’ duration. It must also be mentioned that beta-carbolines are powerful emetics and purgatives — so much so that ayahuasca is often referred to as “the purge” by its users in South America. The beta-carbolines function very effectively against intestinal microbes and worms (Luna, 1986: 59). Most inexperienced users of ayahuasca cannot avoid extensive vomiting and diarrhea.

Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Rick Strassman, has written an extraordinary account of his research with DMT, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001). It begins with great hope and ends in morbid terror. He calls DMT “the first endogenous human psychedelic,” found naturally in the cerebrospinal fluid and urine (p. 68), and apparently representing an adaptation for dealing with extraordinary experiences (Ibid., 53). Far from barring the way to the DMT molecule, as it does to most other drugs, the brain appears to “hunger” for DMT (Ibid., 52). And, unlike most psychedelic drugs (e.g., LSD, psilocybin and mescaline) DMT use shows little or no “tolerance effect,” i.e., none of the tendency to require more and more of the drug to achieve the same original effect (Ibid., 136). When acting upon the brain, DMT elicits spiritual states, extraordinary joy, timelessness, a sense that what one experiences is “more real than real,” the coincidence of the opposites, the conviction that consciousness will continue after death, a vision of the fundamental unity of all things, and a sense of wisdom and love (Ibid., 54).

          The body produces its own DMT in the pineal gland, which has the highest levels of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, of any structure in the human body. Serotonin levels are held high in the brain while we are awake during the day, and is replaced by melatonin, the neurotransmitter which regulates the brain during sleep. The pineal gland converts serotonin to melatonin and also to DMT. Furthermore, as a sort of inborn ayahuasca production center, the pineal gland also produces beta-carbolines to inhibit MAO, which would otherwise breakdown the DMT (Ibid., 69).

          Strassman believes that the primary pathway by which DMT produces visual and auditory hallucinations has to do with little mounds of tissue located directly beneath the pineal gland, separated from it only by cerebrospinal fluid. These “mounds” are the visual and auditory colliculi (“little hills”). Electrical impulses from the eyes and the ears have to pass through these colliculi before they go anywhere else in the brain. Anything secreted by the pineal gland would fall first on the colliculi, and then secondly affect the “emotional brain,” or limbic system, which surrounds the pineal gland (Ibid., 61).

          Thus DMT seems strategically located in the brain to bring about spectacular results instantaneously. The sorts of incident that provoke DMT production are nearly all moments of life-or-death crisis: the birth process, psychotic crises, near-death experiences, and death itself. A fifth DMT moment occurs when deep meditative states are achieved (Ibid., 68f). Evidence from the final chapters of Strassman’s book suggest that spontaneous release of pineal gland DMT may also be responsible for the frightening experiences that have led some people to believe that they have been abducted by aliens. With the exception of this last possibility, it appears that the body supplies DMT in moments when we are in greatest need of unshakable certainty regarding spiritual realities that will put our material existence into a meaningful context — precisely the function shamanism seems designed to provide. [13]

          Because DMT competes with serotonin (and melatonin) for receptor sites in the brain (Calloway, 1999: 263) and because the pineal gland has some control over their relative concentrations in the brain, it seems that there may be at least three different modes of operation that the brain is capable of. Journalist Daniel Pinchbeck describes this situation after the metaphor of tuning a radio:

With the “normal” levels of serotonin, the brain is tuned to “consensual reality” — something like the local pop or talk radio station. By substituting psilocybin, ibogaine, dimethyltryptamine, or some other psychedelic compound for serotonin and other neurotransmitters, you change the station and suddenly you begin to pick up the sensorial equivalent of avant-garde jazz, Tibetan chants, or another channel resonating with new and astonishing information. Yet your mind, the perceiving core of the self remains more or less unaffected. In that sense, psychedelics, unlike alcohol or heroin, are not even intoxicating (Pinchbeck, 2002: 36).

Managing psychedelic states. Rick Strassman began his study wondering whether pineal gland DMT was the source of the natural psychedelic states accompanying birth, death, near-death, and mystical experiences. He seems to have succeeded in that, and reports that “not one volunteer, no matter how worn out, refused that fourth and final high dose of DMT” (Strassman, 2001: 12). It seemed to be a wholly positive experience, with no danger of “habituation” or addiction. “Too much” DMT only meant that the subject could not remember anything after the session except that “something frightening had happened” (Ibid., 18). But Strassman ended by terminating his research project midstream, resigning from the university, and sending his unused DMT back to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Ibid., 307). The reason for this is that he and his subjects came to believe that they were becoming too vulnerable to encounters with alien beings (Ibid., 219). Several of his experimental subjects had formed a support group because no one else could understand what had happened to them. They wanted to convince themselves that they were not losing their minds (Ibid., 201).

          Strassman was a diligent researcher in that he carefully screened his subjects in advance, and paid a great deal of attention to the set and setting within which the subjects were given precisely measured injections of DMT. He listened to their subsequent reports sympathetically and with close attention to detail. He had a trained medical staff and equipment ready in case of any unexpected difficulty. But he makes no mention of the basic principles of psychedelic research that have appeared in nearly every extensive account that has been published since R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston’s 1966 classic, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience.

          Masters and Houston describe three stages of psychedelic experience. In the first, the subject is exposed to marvelous hallucinations and may have powerful impressions of seeing deeply into the meaning and beauty of natural objects, such as flowers and fruit. Alternatively, these first experiences may in a minority of cases be quite frightening. The second stage is crucial, for then we begin to see that all this imagery has something to do with our own lifestyle, our unresolved guilt, our neurotic complexes, our rigidities and fears. Only those who come to grips with these personal issues go on to transformative symbolic experiences with profound mythic, spiritual, and religious overtones. In short, psychedelic altered states have to be managed. The second step, what Masters and Houston call the “recollective-analytic stage,” cannot be bypassed. In contrast, it seems that Strassman’s subjects had only encountered psychedelic imagery and made no attempt to manage their experience by examining what their experiences had to tell them about themselves.

          It seems, therefore, that adequate management of psychedelic states requires the two preparations Strassman made: (a) screening and (b) carefully preparing the set and setting. Once the drug is administered, however, there are further steps to follow, and it is the entranced subjects who bear the greatest responsibility for them: (c) familiarizing themselves with the trance state, (d) developing a framework for understanding their own psyche’s response to the material and critically examining their own psychology, (e) developing a framework to understand the mythscape they have entered, perhaps even mapping it, and (f) only then learning to guide the altered state by manipulating its warps.

          Having not done all the interior work, Strassman found he could not resist taking the visions of alien beings literally. He wondered whether “dark matter” may be the explanation, and began to speculate that DMT tunes the brain to an alternate reality that exists parallel to this one and is comprised of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles) (Ibid., 316-22). Of course, such an hypothesis may not be mistaken. But with our present understanding of psyche and cosmos, it is surely premature. There is no way to explore the hypothesis, no way even to collect evidence for or against it. A project that started out as an example of Western science encountered a reality that is “unthinkable” within the Western paradigm. Perhaps this is what the shamanic world has been offering us for 40,000 years, and why we retreat so quickly to the monophasic reality we know so well.

          Strassman’s fright resembles that of John Mack’s alien abductees; and their complaint was that if these alien beings can appear whenever they wish, as it seems, then the world is not what we always thought it was. Life and the cosmos became terrifyingly unpredictable for them. If that cosmos is real, our Western assumptions are insufficient. All of Mack’s abductees began their course of alleged abductions in a state of terror. But those who bravely pursued the experience eventually began to learn something valuable from it. Many discovered that they themselves were “part alien.” Their own personal reality was expanding in archetypal directions (cf. Mack, 1994; Haule, 1999a: 145-222). Strassman failed to stick to it long enough to become thoroughly familiar with the trance state or to develop a framework, either interior or exterior. Nevertheless he is aware of Mack and even points out Mack’s observation that many self-described abductees report having been taken from their homes “in the early morning hours when the pineal gland is most active” and that the abduction phenomenon has been responsible for many people “reconnecting with spirituality” (Strassman, 2001: 322).

The ayahuasca “diet.” The DMT in ayahuasca is probably responsible for the UFOs in Pablo Amaringo’s paintings and in the reports of other ayahuasqueros. Profound DMT experiences — whether following ingestion of DMT from an outside source or from a natural stimulation of the pineal gland — force us to see the world in a radically different way. This appears to be something shamans have known for 40,000 years.

          As for those that have experienced DMT in its more natural form of ayahuasca tea (as opposed to Strassman’s injections), some claimed to have had no visions at all, and some found the experience unpleasant or even frightening. Precautions are always essential in the traditional use of the tea. The set and setting of the experience are carefully controlled, and all participants are required to follow “the diet,” which is variously described in the literature. Most ayahuasqueros insist on the avoidance of carbohydrates, meat and salt. Sometimes rice, manioc and fish are recommended. Sex is usually forbidden. The main thing is to lower tryptophan levels in the bloodstream (usually found in carbohydrates) to prevent “serotonin syndrome,” an acute physiological condition of distress that results from an overabundance of serotonin that may occur when the tea’s inhibition of MAO removes the main source of serotonin deactivation (Metzner, 1999b: 28f). Monoamine oxidase (MAO) deactivates serotonin, DMT and melatonin. The symptoms of serotonin syndrome are nausea, vomiting, tremors, elevated temperature, cardiac arrhythmia and renal failure. In the most extreme cases, it can result in coma and death (Calloway, 1999: 260).

Ayahuasca and the Mammalian Psyche

          The most authoritative treatment of ayahuasca use is Benny Shanon’s The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (2002). Shanon, a cognitive psychologist, is Professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Over the course of a decade, he actively participated in more than 130 ayahuasca sessions. His book is the first cognitive psychological investigation of the ayahuasca experience, the first and only theoretical treatment, and is based on the largest collection of data. He believes that the non-ordinary experiential phenomena that ayahuasca induce present a new and uncharted natural cognitive domain [14] — perhaps something like the new “radio station” Pinchbeck describes. Shanon spent vacations and sabbaticals in Brazil and Peru because he found ayahuasca to be a “school and a teacher.” He has mapped the course of his “schooling” and found that every series of sessions dealt with a different problem — though perhaps not identified until later — that confronted him with himself, produced a struggle he was often tempted to avoid, and ultimately changed him from a “devout atheist” to one convinced of the reality of a spiritual domain (Ibid., 8).

          While surveying his fellow drinkers of the ayahuasca brew, he found that asking them about their psychedelic experience was a bit like asking them about their sexual encounters, insofar as they were more likely to be open and generous with the details when they knew their questioner had had comparable experience (Ibid., 43f). He lists the following typical reasons why people drink ayahuasca, and says he identifies with every one of them: for the joy of the experience, because it reveals true knowledge that is elsewhere unavailable, because it yields psychological insight and understanding, because it provides a sense of well-being, personal transformation and transcendence, because it puts one in touch with the sacred, and because it provides social coherence and cultural identity (Ibid., 324-6).

Initial experiences. Joan Parisi Wilcox (2003) gives us a first-person account of initial experiences that she and her friends recall from ayahuasca sessions they had in the United States. Later some of them traveled to the Amazon forest for a more traditional series of sessions in a ritual context. These earliest experiences are valuable for what they tell us about the preliminary lessons to be had in the “school” of ayahuasca: “Bam! Reality shifted . . . I was assaulted with geometry, . . . complex patterns, spinning . . . their immensity was overwhelming, shocking, even terrifying” (Wilcox, 2003: 19). With her eyes open, she saw geometric visions (phosphenes) imposed over the “‘real world’ . . . as if I were seeing two different worlds, both existing independently” (Ibid., 20). She witnessed spheres that were simultaneously alive and mechanical, without personality but possessed of “awesome purpose” (Ibid., 21). Her immersion in that alien world, she believed, was partial; she felt she would “face death” if she were to enter it fully (Ibid., 22). This “immensity” that threatened to “fry my circuits” brought her “the realization that I haven’t got a clue — about myself, about the world, about reality, about anything” (Ibid., 55).

          All the qualities we have touched upon — wondrous, strange, numinous, yet disturbingly “alien” — reside in Wilcox’ early experiences. She seems to be face-to-face with death, evidently a universal feature of DMT. We also see the predominance of phosphenes that seem to have a life of their own and may form themselves into “the fantastic coils of an enormous serpent” to inspire “awe and humility” in the face of its “spiritual power” (Metzner, 1999b: 47). But other reporters recall even earlier reactions that were not at all visionary, but violently physical. F. Bruce Lamb, who encountered ayahuasca while working as a forester in the Upper Amazon in 1960, says that a typical first reaction to the drug is a violent discharge of energy through the nervous system that may lead to a few minutes of abdominal convulsions, nausea, and powerful sexual arousal (Lamb, 1985: 21). He found that he could eventually achieve a “smooth and harmonious flow of energy.” The ayahuasca “diet” was essential, but he also required “the constant tutelage of a master” to steer his experience by influencing the warps in his consciousness. Later he was able to follow ayahuasca on his own, for the brew itself directed his experience as a teacher (Ibid., 134f). Shanon concurs, saying that the school of ayahuasca “has different classes . . . the notion of relatively ordered stages . . . within sessions and across sessions, over the course of one’s accumulative experience with the brew” (Shanon, 2002: 289).

Animals and the “Fourth Drive.” Our monophasic culture treats the use of psychoactive drugs as some sort of recent aberration that is entirely foreign to “nature.” We have seen that our ancestors from the Upper Paleolithic — and possibly much further back than that — have known and used consciousness-altering substances and rituals. Indeed, we considered the phylogenetic roots of consciousness-changing rituals in Chapter 9, with the knowledge that our human brain functions much the same as that of our primate, canine, feline, and cetacean cousins. They must feel pretty much the same as we do when they engage in their rituals; they, too, have learned to tune their autonomic nervous systems. The same is true of consciousness-altering herbs and mushrooms. Those who have investigated the pursuit of intoxication by wild animals believe our four-legged relatives have enjoyed such plants far longer than we have. Many have concluded that humans discovered coffee, tea, khat, iboga, fly agaric, and other mind-altering plants by observing animals seeking them out. We might conclude that modern humans lived for millennia in sober ignorance of such things until a few of our perhaps rebellious or reckless ancestors began to watch the chimpanzees, goats and reindeer. But realistically, if we take evolution seriously, we would have to guess that our first human ancestors knew about these things because their parents did — for that “generation” belonged to the species that is ancestor both to us and to the chimpanzees. We knew what all animals knew, both before and after the species-divide.

          After examining thousands of non-human animals, psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel says he is “convinced that seeking intoxication is natural behavior in the animal kingdom” (Siegel, 1989: 13). All of us mammals have opiate receptors in our brains. Somewhere along the line of evolution, some early species invested some energy in producing those receptors. Because there was already something in the environment to “receive,” animals with the receptors had a survival advantage over those who did not. The receptors and the altered states of consciousness they make possible have been favored by natural selection (Ibid., 100).

          Ronald Siegel (1989) and Giorgio Samorini (2002) have collected hundreds of stories of animals deliberately seeking out certain leaves, roots, flowers and fruits for their ability to alter consciousness. For example, gorillas, boars and porcupines dig up the bitter roots of the iboga shrub for the ibogaine they contain. Ibogaine is a tryptamine-based molecule, a relative of DMT, as are most psychoactive alkaloids. The biochemistry of these animals is essentially the same as ours, and their willingness to tolerate unpleasant tastes and symptoms in order to change their consciousness also resembles ours (Siegel, 1989: 65). Reindeer not only seek out the fly agaric mushroom, they are also aware that the urine of those who have eaten the mushroom contains an even better form of the active ingredient. Thus travelers are warned against urinating in the open when reindeer are present, and every Koryak man carries a sealskin vessel of his own urine to attract “refractory reindeer” (Ibid., 66f; Dobkin de Rios, 1990: 32). One final example, the huge, heavy durian fruit of Asia falls to the ground and ferments, where it is eagerly sought by elephants, monkeys, orangutans, honey bears, squirrels, flying foxes, and tigers, as well as humans. Tigers have been known to attack children carrying the fruit, but only to steal the source of intoxication, leaving the children unharmed (Samorini, 2002: 29).

          The abundance of such evidence has led Siegel to describe a “Fourth Drive,” alongside the basic three of hunger, thirst, and sex. The fourth drive is the desire to rapidly change one’s mental state through the pursuit of intoxicants. It is “no more abnormal than the pursuit of love, social attachments, thrills, power, or any number of other acquired motives . . . [it] cannot be repressed. It is biologically inevitable” (Siegel, 1989: 209f). Evidently intoxication is a form of “deconditioning [that] allows for new behavioral ways to be established in a species.” Even if only a few individuals in a species seek out intoxication, they represent an essential minority (Samorini, 2002: ix-xi).

          Many have asked a more fundamental question — not just whether intoxication may be an essential fourth drive for mammals and perhaps birds, but — what is the nature of this evolutionary peculiarity. Those plant alkaloids that provide healing and insight and help us discover new survival strategies are produced at a tremendous expense by plants who appear to derive no benefit for their own survival. The plants build molecules that are close analogues of the neurotransmitters found in mammalian brains, molecules that alter the function of those brains in marvelous ways. But it is not at all clear that the plants need them for their own purposes. This is a “strange symbiosis” (Metzner, 1999c: 290) — perhaps “an interspecies communication” (Paul Devereux, 1997: 242). [15]

Transformation and the goal. Not all users of ayahuasca have glowing tales to tell. Many people never get “beyond the puffs, bursts and splashes of light” that constitute the first stage, as defined by Masters and Houston. “Only a small minority experience full-fledged visions — often those that do not experience them the first few times, do not consume [the brew] further” (Shanon, 2002: 98). Some that do, go on say that after about two years the visions diminish, but long-term drinkers report an increase in insights, and spiritually uplifting perspectives (Ibid., 137). Post-modern anthropologist, Michael Taussig (1987) has famously said, “Yagé lies” (using the Tukano word for ayahuasca). Shanon (2002: 246) agrees that ayahuasqueros can both find the truth in their visions and also be misled by them. Clearly it is not the psychoactive plant molecules that bear the truth. Rather truth and falsity belong to what we choose to do with the experience. In similar fashion, Jung is believed to have said, “Intuition is a hundred percent reliable fifty percent of the time.” [16]

          Benny Shanon outlines fourteen “progressive stages” in the school of ayahuasca (Ibid., 95-111; 293ff). More simply, he tells us he divides his work into three “cycles” of sessions. His first 67 sessions comprise the first cycle, when he appears to have gone through the stages outlined by Masters and Houston. First he was exposed to a general idea of the wonders that were in store for him, then he had to learn to handle the experiences. This would be the first stage of mastery. Then he learned to heal diseases — first hand, since he was the patient cured of his malaria. At the end of the first cycle, he had begun to learn shamanism by serving as an apprentice. In his second cycle, roughly the next 60 sessions, he became a director of ayahuasca sessions, learned to become attentive to changes in consciousness through observing others, and learned about the nature of the mind, consciousness, and mysticism. At the time his book was published, he had just begun his third cycle of sessions (Ibid., 302).

          Strassman summarizes his follow-up conversations with DMT volunteers by saying that they had developed a strong sense of themselves, a diminished fear of death, and a greater appreciation for life. Some said they were better able to relax and were less driven in everyday life. Some said they drank less alcohol, others that they had a greater certainty that reality is much more layered, that their perspectives had become broader and deeper (Strassman, 2001: 274). Metzner says that ayahuasca helps people see one another and themselves better. They learn to think more clearly about relationships, the nature of the cosmos, and their own place in it (Metzner, 1999c: 278).

          Shanon reports that, overall, ayahuasca makes people think and reflect and to integrate their insights into a comprehensive, unified picture of self and world (Shanon, 2002: 162). Ayahuasca has the specific effect of interesting people in the origin of the universe and the laws that govern the natural world (Ibid., 169). Clearly, their thinking begins to take on a mythic quality, in the sense that their “causal operator,” as the biogenetic structuralists would call it, begins to try to assimilate all the visionary experiences they have had and to integrate them with the empirical world they live in every day. Ayahuasqueros become aware that consciousness is not merely personal, but also transpersonal and non-individual, and that the inner and outer worlds are not distinct (Ibid., 206-8).

          These are views that Jung insists upon throughout his Collected Works. Ayahuasca clearly takes people in the direction that Jung believed we need to go, but most of our authors seem to miss this. Thus Shanon says: “Empirically the Jungian data parallel those revealed by ayahuasca visions, yet theoretically, the Jungian archetypes fail to explain the concrete commonalities of contents in both ayahuasca visions and other materials that Jung himself investigated” (Ibid., 391). It is hard to imagine what Shanon objects to, here. If archetypes are understood as we have described them, as top-to-bottom structures, in which the “ultraviolet” top imagines and recognizes in terms of collective images and the “infrared” bottom is comprised of inherited neural networks and other structures that are common to all human beings, then ayahuasca visions ought to have much in common with the mythology, dreams, and Gnostic and alchemical images that fill Jung’s writings. And they do.

          If Shanon, however, wonders why ayahuasca visions feature so many “serpents, palaces, and objects of gold,” these have been consistently identified by Jung as images of the self; and as such, they suggest that ayahuasca visions will probably have the effect of revealing the transpersonal and impersonal nature of consciousness and the fact that inner and outer worlds are not distinct.

          They lead, in short, to ultimate visions concerning the nature of the self and the cosmos. But this is precisely what Shanon says of ayahuasca experience: that it provides a metaphysical perspective that resembles Hindu philosophy and perennial philosophy (Ibid., 164). He also reports that several of his informants said that they had “discovered that God was beyond good and evil, or that he encompasses both good and evil (Ibid., 178). As we have repeatedly seen, this is precisely Jung’s conclusion.

Ayahuasca and Mastery

          At a typical mestizo vegetalista ceremony, people gather two to four hours in advance of drinking the brew, and the leaders tell stories to prepare the participants for the visionary experiences they may have. Here the “set and setting” for altered states is established as dignified, spiritual, belonging to ancient tradition, and open to visions of deep import. Luna says, “The shaman is not only the one who ‘sees,’ but also the one who knows how to tell what he has seen, and to do it in such a way that people will also see it” (Luna, 1986: 142). Story-telling itself is a powerful means of altering consciousness.

          Depending on the devotion of the leader, there may be prayers to Christ, to God the Creator, and to the Virgin Mary, invocations that invite the highest representatives of the sacred realm to be present. Then each participant is given about 50ml of the thick tea and all but one of the lamps are blown out. Twenty or thirty minutes later, when the shaman begins to feel the effects of the brew, he starts to shake his rattle and whistle an ayahuasca song (an “icaro”). For the next 40-60 minutes, people view their visions in silence and near darkness. Occasionally people will leave to vomit or defecate and return. When the hallucinations begin to come in waves, chants begin under the leadership of the shaman, with an invitation for the participants to join in if they know the tunes (Ibid., 146-8).

Preliminary requirements for mastery. Such preparations are designed to shape the expectations of the participants toward having a healthy and positively transforming experience filled with visions. The shaman provides suggestions designed to ease the participants into an experience that is safely contained by social cohesion (the physiological and cognitive effects of the preliminary ritual) and by the sense that they are in the hands of a benevolent deity, with a personified Ayahuasca taking that role for those who do not impose a Christian structure on the experience. Autonomic nervous system tuning is the underlying goal of the preliminaries. Even so, when the drug takes effect, one is apt to feel a very strong “Bam!” Violent physiological reactions are the rule, especially for those who are least experienced; and the imagery itself is usually terrifying. People may find themselves turning into jaguars against their will, being devoured by boas or having boas crawling into their mouths. In the face of such assaults, “it is necessary to be calm and not to be afraid of the visions” (Ibid., 153). There is much that will be terrifying, but it is essential “to master one’s hallucinations” (Narby, 1998: 147). The shamanic “gnosis must be earned” (Pinchbeck, 2002: 143).

          Calmly submitting to an onslaught that would be overwhelming for any unassisted human ego is a common requirement of certain religious practices. In the tantric traditions, a practitioner may heroically dare everything that is terrifying, disgusting or sexually provocative — anything that threatens to arouse the sympathetic nervous system to the limit, that is to the point of spill-over, when the parasympathetic system begins to take over. During this time, it is essential for the aspirant to steadily and calmly observe her own consciousness (cf. Haule, 1999b: Chapters 6 & 7). In a much quieter manner, the same approach was taken by St. Francis of Assisi (Haule, 2004). The essential piece in profiting from such over-stimulation is to manage an attitude of equanimity. Jung calls it “holding the tension” in expectation that the “transcendent function,” one’s own principle of balance and wholeness, will provide a transformative vision. This is the first requirement of mastery: calm contemplation of an over-stimulated situation.

Finding a balance. Holding the tension sufficiently to view potentially overwhelming imagery without losing one’s equanimity is a notable achievement, but it is inherently passive. When describing active imagination, Jung argues that one must not simply observe the imagery but get actively involved. This, he says, is the essential difference between passive and active imagination (CW7: ¶368f). Pablo Amaringo, the Peruvian shaman-become-painter, makes very much the same point, when he says, “It is only when the person begins to hear and see as if he/she were inside the scene, not as something presented to him, that he is able to discover many things. . . . I saw how the world is created, how everything is filled with life, how great spirits intervene in every aspect of nature and make the universe expand” (Luna & Amaringo, 1993: 27).

          Getting involved in the action, however, has to be done with a certain restraint; otherwise ordinary ego-consciousness may obstruct the process. Over-reliance upon ordinary mental states is very likely the reason so many who participate in ayahuasca ceremonies fail to see visions at all, or find that after a time they disappear. There appears to be a fine balance one needs to find between an active participation that goes too far and reestablishes ordinary consciousness, on the one hand, and a passive letting-be in which one never learns anything on the other.

          Pinchbeck addresses this issue in saying that he searched for a “psychic space between willing and letting go.” Too much of either extreme resulted in his losing the visions altogether. “There was, I realized, a skill to perceiving them, an initial effort that required utilizing a form of visionary seeing that was disconnected from normal sight” (Pinchbeck, 2002: 142). Those who learn to find this balance and can return to it with some confidence, may have arrived at a point Shanon describes. He had been an amateur pianist since childhood, but he had never been able to play without pages of printed music. After a few ayahuasca sessions, however, and the training they provide in holding a psychic balance, he suddenly developed a spontaneity at the piano that allowed him to improvise endlessly upon Bach variations. He describes it as a balance and a flow between two poles: deep immersion in piano playing together with a reflective distance. To master ayahuasca, he says, is pretty much the same. One must find a balance between fear and vanity (Shanon, 2002: 252f).

Tuning the warps. The primary means by which American shamans tune their own warps and those of ritual participants and patients is through song. Songs, understood as gifts from the spirit realm — acquired in altered states of consciousness while on vision quests or while practicing shamanism — are nearly universal among the native peoples of the Americas. In the Andes, the word for a shamanic song is icaro, from the Quechua verb ikaray, which means “to blow smoke in order to heal” (Luna, 1986: 100). Becoming a vegetalista is nearly synonymous with learning a large number of icaros and how to use them. The melodies and words of a shaman’s icaros modify the effects of ayahuasca by applying emotional pressure to the warps in people’s consciousness. Luna tells us the intensity of visions can be increased or diminished, their colors changed, their emotions shaped — even the structure of the visions altered (Ibid., 105). Shanon says that in the use of ayahuasca, music functions as a axis mundi, a “world axis,” which not only joins the three cosmic planes into a single experiential unity, but also provides the pathway by which shamans move from one plane to another while entranced (Shanon, 2002: 313; cf. Eliade, 1964).

          Shamans master their own entranced consciousness by using their icaros in a manner that Dan Merkur (1992) would surely describe a “auto-hypnotic.” They are a means of manipulating for oneself the intensity, imaginal content, and emotional engagement with the visions. Luna says that a shaman’s repertoire of icaros has its own hierarchy, with the individual’s “principal icaro” at the top — the song that represents the essence of the shaman’s power. One of Luna’s shaman-informants, Don Alejandro, told him that “if a vegetalista manages to learn the main icaro of another practitioner, he will inherit his knowledge upon the latter’s death (Luna, 1986: 109).

          Protective songs, “icaros arkanas,” are used by the shaman to reduce the danger of exposure to powerful spirit entities inevitably encountered during a cure: “When a vegetalista is healing or when he enters other dimensions through the ingestion of psychotropic plants, he is particularly vulnerable and exposed to the attacks of agents that cause illness” (Ibid., 107). Even if we retain our Western monophasic mentality and assume all illnesses that are curable by shamans must be essentially psychosomatic, we can still appreciate that entering an imaginal realm where the psychosomatic forces exist would be dangerous for doctor as well as patient. Without trying to name such agents, apart from acknowledging that they must be archetypal, it is easy to see that what infects the patient might also carry the danger of contagion for the doctor. Recall how contagious we find lust, depression, hilarity and anger to be when we are in ordinary states of consciousness. Psychoanalysts are keenly aware of the fact of contagion. Jung mentions it frequently (cf., also, Searles, 1979; Haule, 1993).

          F. Bruce Lamb’s informant, Don Manuel Córdoba, a mestizo who had been captured by Indians earlier in his life and learned shamanism from them, says clearly [17] that he uses icaros to tune his warps: “They actually initiate and channel the flow of visions. Later as the scene progresses, it seems that half-learned, half-spontaneous chants sway the sequence and content of the internal vision message. My impression is that all this material flows from a pre-conscious level or perhaps even from some outside source” (Lamb, 1985: 135). The shaman, Don Manuel, also demonstrates his ability to tune the warps of others’ consciousness, when he uses his icaros to give a man named Izidoro the experience of being transformed into a black jaguar — in return for Izidoro’s teaching Córdoba how to make curare:

Imitating all the jaguar sounds my Indian captors had taught me, interspersed with precise songs and chants, I brought the black jaguar into our visions . . . Gradually, Izidoro seemed to blend with the body of the black cat. They wandered off into the forest and I followed in my dreams. . . . that big cat showed my Tikuna friend things you would not believe . . . (Ibid., 46f).

          Joan Parisi Wilcox provides a distinctly lay person’s perspective. She says she found the icaros of her teacher, Don Luis, to be “mesmerizing” — even when she had not drunk any ayahuasca. Although she did not understand the words of the songs, for they were a mixture of Spanish and Quechua, she fo