All My Friends are Shamans: Westerners & The Medicine

It’s actually a Western conceit. None of the indigenous medicine people around the world call themselves “shamans” as the Westerners do, because Westerners have had a void or a disconnect from the mythic archetype of the medicine person and the healer has been reduced to doctor in some levels. We split it up just like we have this distance between the mind-body-spirit or this denial of spirit in essence itself, this dichotomy that's developed in the West over the last few hundred years.

We've also lacked the medicine people so that our culture's got this hunger and this thirst. It's reflected in our cultural archetypes in the mythologies and the science fiction and the fantasy of the wizard and the sorcerer and the superhero and things like this. Still, we're hungry for the authentic archetype.

So in 2006, I went down to Peru to the second Amazonian Shamanism conference which a Western businessman hosted called Alan Shoemaker, who had been living there for a few years and had been working with the medicine of Ayahuasca.

And for listeners, Ayahuasca is a jungle medicine that grows all throughout South America. It's a national treasure second only to Macchu Picchu. In Peru it's been sacrosanct at that level. It's a brew which is combined from the Banisteriopsis Caapi, which is a woody vine that grows in the jungle, and other admixture plants, usually including things like the Psychotria viridius, which is the chakruna plant, which contains DMT.

And so the jungle people had hit upon this method of combining the vine. The body's own biochemical system has these stomach enzymes which break down the DMT and naturally occurs in our brains. DMT is a visionary chemical yet in some terminologies in the West they call it a drug. Still, actually, it's a neurotransmitter that nature has threaded all throughout plants, mammals, humans, and insects.

KBOO: Is that the psychoactive ingredient in the ayahuasca brew?

Rak: It is.

KBOO: Well, why not just... I know in your book you talk about taking DMT directly. Why not just do that? I mean, what's the advantage of...

Rak: Well, there's many reasons here. Now, in the indigenous understanding, Ayahuasca is a purgative, so you physically purge and can vomit, but what is happening is it's cleaning out your body.

They did one main scientific study in the early 1990s with the Hoasca Project, which Dennis McKenna–the brother of Terence–was involved with. They verified that what Ayahuasca is doing on a neurological level is it seems to re-link up the neural pathways. It basically sort of defrags the mind and the body, so it's cleansing of any viruses, any illnesses, and it's helping re-link up these neuronal pathways. It is definitely, as they say in Peru, the indigenous people say it's the medicine or it's madre, it's the mother.

And so the DMT in Peru creates these amazing, very virtual or even more than real, lifelike visions. It can be the geometric sort of shapes and entities or this incredibly visionary landscape in which painters like Pablo Amaringo, who we example in the film have anchored some of these landscapes of the interior terra incognita.

So the indigenous people, they use it as a medicine; it is a medicine, but Westerners have this relationship and this understanding from the 1960s and the 1980s and these different generational waves of drug contact or recreational use.

Now, I don't exactly believe that recreation is the only thing going on because, again, in an indigenous understanding and not just in the Amazon but all around the world, tribal peoples have been caretakers for the land and for these psychoactive substances. And in which the land they see as an entity. In South America, they call this Pachamama. They have a name for the planet as a whole. Right.

And so you know James Lovelock in the 1970s he developed this idea of the Gaia Hypothesis of the earth as a whole system, which is sort of regulating and energy is cascading through it. It's alive and sentient and self-organizing and it births species like us right and this is the whole thing. Hence, the planet secretes these bio-pheromones these “exo-pheromones” or these these psychoactive substances all over the planet:

There's psilocybin mushrooms, saliva divinorum, peyote, opium, San Pedro, Syrian rue, et.al; like everywhere you can look there are indigenous plant medicines which change your consciousness. So in Peru, they have anchored this with the ayahuasca experience, but they treat it as a medicine for the mind, the body and the spirit. The Westerners are coming, and this is what I document in the book, "Aya: a Shamanic Odyssey" and the film that's based on the book "Aya: Awakenings".

This, not just my own personal journey to go down to South America and sit with the shamans and they call themselves–the curanderos–which is from the Spanish: to heal. And so they work with the medicines, but the Westerners, they were noticing, were coming also to treat their own illnesses. Ayahuasca is a verifiable medicine has been working on many people for ailments they have. It has reputed–and there's some scientific studies that are trying to do double-blind studies to confirm this for Western science and the verification needs there–but working to help cleanse tumours and cancers and help put AIDS into remission, or anything that's wrong with the body.

However, in the indigenous understanding of what a medicine is, they believe it's more than just a bio-chemical. It's a different language for it and a different cosmovision, they say. Just like we might say earth and they say Pachamama. And it's got this, they have a relationship with the earth and they have a relationship with their medicines. And this is part of what I came to understand that the Westerners, like myself, were developing. It's not just that there's this drug tourism, which is what some of the description is around this generation of Westerners going down to Peru and South America to engage with Ayahuasca for healing.

It's also that we're re-learning right relationship with these plant sacraments and through them these divas or these spirit entities or this whole spiritual ecology, which is beyond the pale of Western permissibility almost, but in the indigenous understanding it's an animus spirit. They believe that spirit is in everything. Spirit animates everything and there's relationships of spirit so when they say the word “medicine” or medicina, they don't just mean it's a chemical thing you can put on a table and take it and it'll work for everyone the same.

They believe there's a spirit in the plant or the medicine and the Ayahuasca for instance, is opening up their ability to connect with the spirit world on behalf of their patients. And so this idea of ayahuasca shamanism is now really in the last five or ten years, reaching out to embrace the world. And it's very popular as a healing modality and as an experience for people to undergo.

The shorthand has been that it's like a year's worth of psychotherapy in one night. Quite often the subjective experience for my understanding, is that it's like the unconscious becomes very permeable and it sort of pours into the conscious mind. And they say that you can't hide from Ayahuasca because what it's really revealing is yourself.

And so when the curanderos work with the medicine of Ayahuasca, it's not just the chemical structure of this plant doing the work, it's enabling them to open up their own psychic potential and energetic bodies to work on behalf of the patient–and they deal with a whole spiritual ecology of spirits to then call in the healing properties of these spirits. They sing in ceremony what they call the icaros–which is their vibrational codes and the healing is done in concert with the curandero, the healer, as the facilitator on behalf of the spirits working through the plant medicine. So this is a very dense type of cosmology for the West to take on board.

But in broad strokes, what's happening is a generation of people of all ages–it's not just youth culture. It's like people, all socioeconomic groups, all sort of belief systems. This is a medical medicine that has a very direct experiential effect on people and it works.

It works on a physical level for healing, it can work on an emotional level for healing and what it's ultimately revealing, it's helping people see themselves, it's helping people sort through their emotional memories to rebalance their relationships with their loved ones to revisit old hurts and wounds and to purge and to let go of these things and that is sort of the whole system theory of healing that's behind this experience.

KBOO: You know there's so many dimensions to your book. I mean, you can look at it as an adventure story and it is quite an adventure. I thought it was very gripping just on that level alone. It could be just a journalist who's just wondering about this stuff and curious about it and it goes off on this journey and this adventure that turns into a multi-dimensional thing but it's obvious by the end of the book that you're highly idealistic about Ayahuasca and what it represents, and here's a quote, it goes:

"With ayahuasca the West is now learning "to open up and trust in a spirit world, "and our very survival may depend on it." Can you speak to that?

Rak: Yeah, well, it should come as no surprise to anyone who is aware of where we are in his-story at the moment in the 21st century that we're undergoing an ecological crisis. We're undergoing a sort of systematic cultural, financial, political crisis. There seems to be this disintegration of the paradigm that we know because it hasn't been sustainable.

It's been built on the back of this unsustainability of the planet herself, and again we're talking about this key idea of right relationship. So I see there's no coincidence at the same time as the power plants and the medicines like Ayahuasca. We named some of the other sacraments that are available around the world that the planet herself secretes, they regulate the species.

The planet knows what she's doing and she's undergoing great transformation at this time and many different cultures point to the fact that we're living through a shift in world ages whether that's the Kali Yuga or the end and beginning of a new cycle of the Mayan calendar or this idea of cyclic time. So indigenous people who live on the land and have done so for tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands of years, have handed down these world maps or these mythologies of understanding of cyclic time. But we can see even just on our flat line of history where we are that we're living through a time of great transformation.

I went in as an objective journalist in an experiential sense to understand what was going on, so my whole worldview completely exploded.

I had never seen or experienced tangibly spirits. I had recreationally and spiritually engaged with LSD and other man-made chemicals in electronic music culture in the scene in Australia, in the counterculture and had what I would consider spiritual experiences, but I'd never really tangibly been opened up to the world of spirit itself.

And so what I was revealed to me in my experiences with Ayahuasca in the jungles of Peru is that the world is you know, as they say, it's stranger than we can imagine, is that we are embedded within an ecology and the web of life extends in a multi-dimensional sense, much further than the average person would believe.

But the cutting edge of science and of physics and quantum physics and even astrophysics is now realizing that things are so interconnected in this dense web of life itself that there's a parallel and there's a convergence I believe, between many of the spiritual cosmologies and many of the now quantum cosmologies that are basically saying the same thing.

You know, one of the things about the ayahuasca mystique is this idea that there are spirit entities that you will encounter, that spirit becomes embodied in some way or another whereas with other things like other psychedelics like LSD, you don't have that kind of experience where you are actually communicating with an entity, even if you are delving deep into psychic realms.

KBOO: Describe, you know, try to help us understand this. Those of us who haven't ever taken Ayahuasca, what is it like to–your book is really graphic about this, but can you speak to that to our audience today?

Rak: Well, I'll just mention that on that point as well, the book has now been adapted into the film, "Aya: Awakenings”. The challenge in making the film was to anchor the book in a visceral way that would take the viewer on the journey, not just talk about the ayahuasca experience. And I could say things like, you know, it's usually done in the Shipibo Indigenous style in the dark, the curandero sings these icaros, these songs which are a vibrational code code and a navigator and they can bring on a shifting consciousness through song, through vibration, which gets back to this very ancient understanding of the power of sound and of language and of vibration itself.

Ayahuasca basically loads into your body: I feel it sort of sneaking through me as a warmth and you can feel this energy sort of coursing through and activating, You have to do a dieta, it's best to have fasted during the day and there's a rigorous dieta that people must: not be on SSRIs, you give up meat, alcohol, sugars, salts.

KBOO: Are there good reasons for this? It's beyond custom?

Rak: There's some jungle dogma in that, but also what they're basically saying, the curanderos say, you're getting your energy body back to the default settings. Basically, as you would have as a baby and it's the sensitivity.

When they train to become shamans, it's often from a very early age as a hereditary root where they might be chosen as one of the children of a curandera themselves, or undergo an initiatory sickness. An initiatory sickness – what happens is that they basically go to death's door and they come back, they survive. There's some cases in other areas where people are hit by lightning and it's the same thing – they've chosen to be the medicine person because not just physically if they survive but this again comes back to this key idea of vibration and this is what the physicists tell us, everything is vibration, right? But what they don't tell us is that everything is conscious vibration, that consciousness itself is a vibration that we can now measure with the EEG and MRI and these technologies. So the initiatory sickness or the hereditary route to shamanism is all about this sensitivity and when you do the dieta it's the same.

You're stripping away all these extra layers like the electromagnetic frequency we're always bathed in the West now as you know, wireless and lights and all this stuff. Our diets which are often very poor and you know processed foods and even within food itself even if it's organic it's the sugars.

The sugars stimulate our nervous systems, making us on a different vibrational level than the plants. The plants are so subtle that you need a very increased sensitivity to be receptive to the signals.

So the curanderos train for years and decades to become the curandero or the shaman, but they go out into the dense jungle and they have this regimen of dieta. Hence, they just eat certain foods that are cleansing and allow them to be very receptive to building up this clean auric field over time. Then when they're clean there's no chemicals involved in this process except stripping away the blockages to be open to receive the signal.

And it's this sensitivity which many different practitioners and modalities are all striving towards getting us to attain.

It's not that these are things which are only from psychoactives or drugs or medicines and whatever language you give it. It's the fact that what they're revealing is the potential we have within ourselves. This goes back to Aldous Huxley to get back to the psychedelic culture. Huxley said that the brain is a reducing valve for the mind. The brain operates down on the terrestrial biosphere down here to block out the majority of information we could receive in full spectrum consciousness.

Very interestingly enough, the push in the last decade or so, with organizations like MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, which is an NGO out of the West Coast of America has been working with government and working with the medical establishment to bring psychedelics back into the medical framework to do the right double-bind test studies and to work with people to see what the potentials of these medicines are.

They've worked with other organizations that have been working with psilocybin cell-bind study, which is very verifiable. They've discovered this very exciting thing: psilocybin on the brain. They've done the EEG and the MRI scans, and they've discovered that what it's actually doing is turning off the default mode network. It's a bit of the brain called the default mode network, and when it's switched off the psilocybin is no longer having the active, psychoactive stimulant. All it's doing is switching off the bit of the brain, and the brain is receiving more information. It's opening up to the signal that's already there.

And so I believe, look, what the plants are doing, they're not just cleansing the body, they're cleansing the emotions and they're cleansing the energetic body, and they're bringing us back to this sensitivity to hear the call of nature.

KBOO: You know, it's interesting, you say in the book that there seems to be an increase in the ability of seekers from the West to handle these kind of experiences, and that the tourists perhaps are coming because the spiritual tourists because they are answering a call, they hear deep within themselves for reconnection.

Rak; Yeah. The origin of the Latin for the word "religion" is to reconnect, so the modern last few generations of disenchantment with religious institutions with hierarchies, with power structures that tell us to have faith, but we don't feel as a tangible connection to spirit ourselves. We've been lost in the West from having the spiritual rudder to navigate the reality grid of the world. You can't take a step forward unless you know from your heart why you're taking it and where you're really going. And this touches on the whole idea of being initiated.

KBOO: And another thing that's in the book: Jan Kounen, the director of the ayahuasca movie Renegade said to you: “we're lost because in our culture only the women are initiated because they give birth. Maybe this is something we have to reinvent because it doesn't exist in our culture.”

Rak: This is a beautiful example, yet indigenous tribes know that it's certain junctures of you know teenage into adulthood they have initiations and that quite often involves psychoactive substances, because what these things are doing is they're revealing the full potential of consciousness and what consciousness is embedded in. They're bringing us back into right relationship with the mother with mother earth, by connecting us to the web of life.

And when you feel your connection to the earth, not just as a mental concept, but you can feel it in your heart, you can hear the whisper and the breath of the breeze and you can feel the insects you know, communicating with the plants and the whole web buzzing and alive and intimate and calling you back into it. It's empathic. It's a beyond linguistics, a level of heart speak, right?

But this is the potential for what it can, these substances can reveal. And when you feel this, you have been initiated back into the great green web, into the womb, and into the right relationship with Pachamama. Which is what we need to heal the planet. We're not going to rape, pillage and plunder the mother, our mother, the planet, if we can feel the result and feel her heartache and feel that tangible feedback loop coming from her.

KBOO: So do you think Ayahuasca is for everyone?

Rak: I don't think Ayahuasca is for everyone, but we are all Mother Earth's children, and we all have, look, I say that there are many paths that all lead to the same central Source.

Have you seen the weather lately? I mean, I'm from Australia where the bushfires are raging. I go to New York where there's polar vortex raging. It's like we have crossed the tipping point and we are living through this time of great transformation.

So we need to have tools to change our consciousness and to change our direction as a culture because it's unsustainable. It's going down. We need to retrofit what we need: the heart as the rudder to tell us where to go, to bring us back into right relationship and to heal the wounds we've created and to live sustainably.

KBOO: Now we've only got about a minute left so let's be sure to tell our listeners what they can find or do on your website: www.aya-awakenings .com. That's A-Y-A-awakenings .com, what can they find there?

Rak: It's a load of rich content there, you've got a link to the book which is like a 500 page travel memoir into the heart of Amazonian shamanism and also you know very deep spiritual journey but it also maps not just my journey but a generational journey down into these realms of rediscovery.

The film Aya: Awakenings is a shamanic artifact that takes people on a very powerfully dynamic journey. We visualize and we anchor the soundscapes, the jungle the interior visions of the Ayahuasca and of the experience and people who have had the medicine basically start to have a vibrational flashback when they watch the film – and if you haven't you're going to get it very much very quickly.

KBOO: And that's available via the website. You can get video on demand, you can buy the DVD or you can stream it off the website and you can buy the book. And there's the book which I found to be incredible. I couldn't put it down. It's a pretty big book but it's an incredible story, an amazing tale of your personal experiences and you're reporting, I got to hand it to you. That was a great book.

Rak: Thank you. I speak from the heart, my words, and my medicine.

KBOO: Well, thank you very much, Rak. It's been a pleasure. I would love to talk much longer, but I'm afraid we've run out of time today. Thanks again for tuning in and being a part of it.