The Plants Told Us To: Origins of Ayahuasca

Rak: Thanks, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here.

CF: Yeah. So, interesting topic. I'm sure this is going to set up some bells and whistles in some people's lives. So you are a reporter and you went deep into the Amazon to record and report on your experiences with Ayahuasca, so lay the table lay the groundwork a little bit on what Ayahuasca is so those of people who don't know will understand it and then we'll go from there.

Rak: Okay well I first went down to the Amazon in 2006 and I was a freelance journalist that was interested in reporting on not just Ayahuasca but what was the the role of this almost mythical archetype of the shaman and what it represented in both popular culture and in indigenous communities, what role that person played and why was Ayahuasca even at that time becoming very popular in the West?

In the decades since then, it's increased exponentially in popularity and people have read about it in so many magazines from like Time, New York Times, CNN's done shows on it. Almost every major Western media outlet has covered Ayahuasca. In general, Ayahuasca is a sacred medicine of the Amazon. It is a brew that is made from a concoction of different plants.

Chief amongst those is this woody liana vine called Banisteriopsis caapi, which is a scientific name for it. It contains harmine and harmaline – substances that are known in the West as chemicals, and some of the admixture plants that the shamans or the curanderos of the Amazon add to the brew include: chacruna or chaliponga, which contain dimethyltryptamine (DMT) which is a very interesting neurochemical in itself. It's close to a neurotransmitter, it's threaded throughout much of nature in us humans in our brains, in mammals, in plants, in insects, it's very close to serotonin. The DMT in the plants is what often is thought to catalyze a visionary experience, which is very, tangible.

In some of these visions, there's painters, indigenous painters like Pablo Amaringo, who's since passed on, Mauro Regato and Andy Debernadi, et.al. And they capture in their artwork some of the visionary landscapes that Ayahuasca commonly produces. And they're very beautiful, almost celestial in their representation of realms of nature and realms of the spirit, things like that. But the catalyst and the chief reason for Ayahuasca's popularity is that it is proving very efficient in being a healing modality.

The Default Mode Network

So with Ayahuasca, recent scientific tests have pointed to the fact that like other psychoactive substances it seems to turn off the default mode network of the brain, which are these regional clusters of the brain which help solidify the ego and the sense of identity and when those areas are switched off, basically the 'mind at large' is connecting to the vast reservoir of consciousness itself which is always out there. And a lot of the healing of Ayahuasca comes up when subconscious material rises to the surface, people that have traumas or psychic wounds or issues around their lives and their loved ones. A lot of that processing material it's been likened to you know "a year's worth of psychotherapy in one night", which is very very true.

People that have undergone Ayahuasca can testify to this: you process it's hard work. The thing with Ayahuasca is it's not recreational, it's not a drug, it's a medicine, it's protected as an indigenous treasure in Peru, second only to Machu Picchu. It's the second national treasure of Peru and all through the Pan-Amazonian basin they use it as a medicine. Before they had access to Western medicines, of course, you know the indigenous tribes all over the Amazon basin would use many substances, many different plants, Ayahuasca amongst them.

It's a purgative, so you do vomit – not always but quite often. And in that vomiting you are bringing up any physical illnesses or bugs or viruses you might have. Also in the indigenous cosmovision and their world paradigm, they believe that we contain as human beings a physical body and an emotional body and an energetic body and that the root cause of dis-ease or illness starts at that deeper sort of energetic level. And so Ayahuasca is also working on not just the physical illnesses, but also these emotional or energetic knots that we may have contained within our subtler bodies.

What I basically discovered is that the shamans of the Amazon, they don't call themselves shamans, they call themselves, well, all through different parts of South America, they have different names themselves. In Peru, they call themselves curanderos, which is from the Spanish 'to heal'. As well as Ayahuasca, they work with hundreds, if not thousands of other plants.

In some of my experiences with Ayahuasca, I've discovered that this is, for me, one of the most beautiful and re-weaving aspects of it. It's that once the physical healing is done and the emotional components are sorted, there's a very tangible sort of astral melting into this field of being, which is the closest thing I can call it, it's the web of life.

CF: Essentially what you're saying, one of the greatest benefits is that it really sort of shuts down that daily chatter that is bubbling through all of our brains, our external sort of stream of distraction, for lack of a better word, which is actually the right word, the stream of distraction, which allows us to block that out in some way and then focus on very deeply rooted inner conversations that need to be heard or perhaps have been suppressed in some way, right? Is that is that accurate what I'm saying?

You are the Medicine

Rak: That's definitely one component. See the thing with Ayahuasca is, when they call it a medicine in the indigenous understanding they mean something different than what we mean by medicine, you know. They have a they have a more holistic point of view. They're not just rooted in the intellect like the West is so much. So when they say medicine or the medicina, they mean that there's something in it, not just the chemical component.

The West has isolated what the chemical components of Ayahuasca are, you know, they can apply those separately and if you do that in a medicinal set and setting, yes it will have a physical effect.vBut there's also this tangible thing called spirit and this is what they believe. They believe that in that web of life everything is alive, everything is animated with this spiritual energy which comes from a central Source and everything is in a reciprocal relationship.

So you know, relationships are important. The relationship you have with your body and with wellness or with illness is also a very important factor in their understanding of medicine and sickness.

So they believe that the ayahuasca plant itself contains a spirit, which they call the Madre, the mother. Now Mother Ayahuasca is, they use a relationship sort of language, or we might use a chemical language, they use relationships. So the Madre is the mother, it's one of the premier plants in their modality toolbox, and it is very effective.

And in that relationship, they believe that the spirit of Ayahuasca also interacts with our spiritual beings and it is helping facilitate the healing. So it's not just the neurochemical level of engagement, it's also the spiritual level. It approaches the individual from a very esoteric level as well as a very physical level. So there's a combination of interchanges occurring when this happens.

CF: You're talking about the physical as well as the mental and the spiritual, which are all combined.

Rak: Yeah, that's correct. There's a multiplicity of levels of engagement, and that's really important, I think, to understand, because the West often tries to reduce things down to a mechanistic universe where things can be put on the table, deconstructed, analyzed, and known, and that's one part of it.

But the knowing isn't enough. It's like there's a relationship. So you're having a relationship with Ayahuasca and part of that relationship is doing what they call the "dieta" and the "dieta" can be confusing to some people because there's many levels to it.

If you're a seeker going down to experience Ayahuasca they say it's best to have basically a vegetarian diet, to cut out things like the sugars, the salts, the red meat, the alcohol, sex is another thing they recommend to cut. Basically what you're doing is you're withdrawing from those things because what you're doing…

CF: All physical stimuli, all physical stimuli?

Rak: Yeah, well, you're trying to reset basically your physical and energetic body back to its default mode settings in the aya.

CF: That's a good way to explain cleanliness.

Rak:c Yeah. And you know a lot of the attributions of the cures of Ayahuasca – whether that's for physical ailments or tumors or cancers or even things like AIDS being put into remission… Essentially, it's not just the Ayahuasca. What it is, it's a whole system here. It's like going down into the jungle on a retreat setting, withdrawing from the world and the EMF and the data and the stress and all those things, and bringing your body back to health, which means to its optimal conditions, because this is also very core to what Ayahuasca reveals. Ayahuasca is not just the medicine, you are the medicine.

The body is the medicine, it is originally at the default settings, the factory settings that nature intended you to have. You are designed to be perfect. You are designed to be in optimal health. You are designed to engage in right relationship with nature, and nature will feed you and clothe you. And if you were in that relationship, there would not be the illness and the disease we see in our Western civilization, which is out of right relationship with nature.

CF: And so we are out of sync with our bodies and essentially we're trying to get back to a very root primal state where we are sort of cleaning the slate of all things that are contemporary, getting back to our very root primal state where we're able to sort of approach this from a much more logical you know organic level correct?

Rak: Yeah that's correct.

The Problem with Gurus

You know, it's like to put it in its right set and setting, Ayahuasca is used still to this day by hundreds of thousands of people across South America, native people who are using it as a medicine and a physical medicine.

And in the West, what many shamans told me is they were seeing people come down for physical healing and getting amazing results and that was all good and well, but the vast majority of seekers that were coming down to South America to experience Ayahuasca didn't necessarily have a physical ailment. But the shamans recognized there was still something wrong with them. They did have a sickness and they basically attributed that sickness to a mental disorder, which was being out of right relationship with the flow of life, with the web of life, with Mother Nature.

CF: That makes total sense to me. I think that many people, probably the majority of people that are going there, are going for some sort of spiritual enlightenment that allows them to connect with their destiny on a greater level.

Rak: I agree. And so we didn't do my little plug, but what happened in my 2006 journey is that story became a book called Aya: Awakenings, which is now a film. And in that I very sincerely believe that there is this movement I'm documenting of Westerners who have lost this right relationship with the planet. They lost this sense of spirituality, which cannot be suppressed over hundreds of years to the Western Mechanistic understanding of the universe. We have tried to kill off God and tried to kill off our relationship to spirit. But energy can't be created or destroyed and neither can spirit. So when you suppress it, the sicknesses of our culture manifest, because we are not exercising that spirit.

CF: I think it's been misdirected. I think it's the best way to look at it is that the spirit has been misdirected. This goes back 500 years, 1000 years, perhaps, to when conventional religion has intermediated and brought about a different set of circumstances where people are falling into traps.

Rak: Yeah I agree and so this is a thing where so many Westerners now over the last century or so have become disenchanted with the the major Western Abrahamic religions and with the vehicle of organized religion itself. What Ayahuasca is providing is this direct vegetal gnosis to the heart of the planet, to this connection, to the core of what religion really is. In Latin, religion means to re-weave or reconnect, and you've got to ask to what? And you know, we look at evidence of it in prehistory, of goddess worship, of cultures that worshipped the manifestation of the divine and we're embedded in it.

And this is what Ayahuasca shows you. It reconnects you to the web of life and to spirit and to your relationship with your spirit inside the great spirit. And that's the beauty. That's the beauty.

CF: So you went down there as a seeker. Did you have a preconceived notion or were you going there purely out of curiosity or you're going just as a journalist to sort of report on this?

Rak: Well, I tell always multiple levels to the story. You know I thought I was going down to report on the story but what was really happening was that I was undergoing essentially my own shamanic initiation. You know, I've had spiritual leanings towards mysticism my entire life and I guess I recognized that the story got me down there and then inhabiting the story, when I went very deep down the rabbit hole, it just went on and so much deeper and the revelations and the understandings and the knowings and the remembrance of spirit and my place in this web of life and trying to understand it.

So I documented quite fiercely over about nine weeks I traveled around Peru in a Iquitos and Pulcallpa and up the Amazon. I sat with over 24 different shamans or curanderos and practitioners to really weave together more of a bigger story of what they were all doing and why the West was coming and what the relationship was evolving into, to capture that big story. But in living it, I underwent some extreme psychic events and some beautiful experiences, you know.

CF: Now that raises a question. So when you went down there, you were not actually looking to be, you were not actually on a quest to find your own self and yet you when you immerse yourself in this culture and and actually live the experience first-hand because you actually took it several times and then you reported your experiences as you were under the influence of this and your revelations. I mean were you able to step outside of yourself and be the reporter the journalist sort of the messenger at the same time that you are involved in this whole process of understanding yourself at the same time? This is a very sort of naked moment for you, right?

Rak: Yeah, it's a very intimate situation.

CF: We're seeing you pursue this at your core level. So it's one thing to report on something. It's like you're not going to a baseball game and reporting on that you're in the midst of this huge mind trip for lack of a better word, where you're completely immersed in this medicine that is altering your consciousness as you speak, so this had to be very real. You're standing up there saying here I am, right?

Gonzo Journalism

Rak: Yeah it's completely naked and raw. I was freelancing under the the guise of being a Gonzo journalist, luckily, which means I acknowledge there's objectivity, but to really get to the core of these type of experiences you have to go in. You have to experience it, then you have to report on what you experience. So of course it's subjective, but you know, keeping journalistic integrity you try to have as much context as you can.

It's almost like having a GPS navigation system in your car: you can still see through the wind screen what's really happening, but you've got this little side view. There's a different point of view happening but you've got to keep hovering between the both. You've got to keep the objective with the subjective to give the readers a more rounded approach.

But it's incredibly intimate and that's the value of both the book and the film, AYA: Awakenings, is that it takes you, the viewer reader, on the journey–on my journey–which is also a collective journey because there's hundreds of people that the book documents in different points of view.

CF: So as you entered into this experiment–and we're going to call it that for lack of –just because we're going to, that's the best word to use right now. When you entered into this sort of realm of experimentation. Did you have any trepidation? Were you a little bit nervous about entering into it? Were you anxious about this? Or were you like, "Yeah, I really want to do this and see what's going on beneath the surface."

Rak: Well, I was largely pretty excited. I was largely pretty into it. I mean, that's sort of the gung-ho adventure type of personality I bring to it but also here's the thing, you know: every ayahuasca ceremony is unique and different and especially if you haven't drunk before, a lot of the nervousness is basically the build up of the ego and the build up of the trepidation of the unknown, because the ego wants to control it. It wants to know. It wants to protect you as an organism. It wants to be in charge.

And so, you know, a lot of the trepidation I may have thought in that first or second ceremony was actually the unknown of the ego and what would happen. And Ayahuasca can take you into many different places. It's almost never the same twice because it's really where you need to be healed if you go into a body that's level of emotional level or the visionary journey.

And one thing we didn't comment on, you know, the role of the shaman in the global sha. Mircea Eliade was an anthropologist, who wrote the book Shamanism, the classic text in the 1950s.

The Role of the Shaman

CF: That's from Greek mythology the psychopomp.

Rak: It is, it is yeah and so this idea that's what I lean or in my experiential journalism in that subjective sense is trying to bring information back about these other realms, about where I go to or we go to as a collective when we journey and when these indigenous cultures in shamanic societies say it seems to be all around the world indigenous people have maps, mythology maps or very practical maps of how they travel to these other worlds and It's basically a cartography, it's an invisible…

CF: Right, right, right, I understand that. But you know, we had experiments along this line and it seems to me, and maybe I'm making a gross assumption here, but it seems to me that Ayahuasca is definitely a mind-altering opening type of vehicle, excuse me, that allows you to look at life through a different set of lenses, there's no question about that, that you're looking through a different set of lenses. And as those lenses are induced and brought up, does that experience, is that experience a good experience or is it a scary experience?

And the reason I ask that is because, you know, if people who've done LSD in the past or whatever have a sort of, they recount sort of a similar outcome as a result of doing that stuff, of taking LSD. And I think that there are certain similarities there. And I'm wondering if you can address what those similarities might be like if you have experience in both. And I don't want to put you on the spot. But I'm just wondering how it plays out in that realm.

Rak: Yeah, there's a lot of points in there. Basically, I would say that Ayahuasca is less giving you a new lens than polishing your old lens to clarity and to optimal conditions. In a sense of is it a good experience or a bad experience? It's all up to you and the lessons that we learned in the 1960s through altered states and the LSD movement. It's basically that it was the same. It's not the the catalyst it's the set and setting and it's the person taking it and where they're at. It's like where the vector where they're gonna go, right?

CF: I understand it but isn't there a sense that can be amplifiers of of your emotional state or they can show you deeper aspects of yourself?

Rak: Essentially it's our mind at large. You're sort of tapping into a sector on your hard drive for lack of a better metaphor and the idea is that you're bringing up an area that may have been suppressed for many years in your life.

CF: I'm wondering if somebody has suppressed something for ages and they don't want to go back there or even if that's the proper way to do it, does this present a conundrum for them? Can this become a panicky kind of situation?

Rak: It can be, and the thing I didn't say, sometimes I guess Ayahuasca can be awe-ful in the original sense of the word, full of awe, A-W-E, awe, in the sense that you can experience realms of celestial density and vibrance and brilliance which are just too much for the human soul to take.

Or you can go into past life memories or genetic memory or your emotional memory. And the thing is, it's like a browser, it's like, you know, Firefox or Internet Explorer, you can take you places. But you have to learn shamanically how to navigate. And the Western culture is just relearning this skill base and that this whole dimension exists. And so it can be heaven or it can be hell as Aldous Huxley said.

CF: Right. And so there, that's what presents, I would think, a certain amount of trepidation on some people because it's like, maybe I don't want to go there. Maybe I'm happy as I am, but I'm trying to play devil's advocate here simply because I have done LSD myself. I know what it's like, I know where I went, there was times when it was great, there was times when it was bad. Does that set the stage for something that could be unwanted, I guess is what I'm wondering. That's sort of my trepidation.

Rak: Yeah, that can often be the case. Now, the beauty about the ayahuasca experience when it's done in the legal conditions of South America and I've only been to Peru and that's the environment I know best is that what people are looking for in the 60s was often the elders and they looked to India and the gurus there and they looked for support that their explorations into the mind and into other dimensions had precedent and they wanted to find that cultural support. Now In the 21st century with Ayahuasca, we have the lineage and the support on the grounds with the lodge system in Peru.

When you drink with an indigenous curandero, the shamans have trained for dozens of years, if not more, to know their healing capabilities and know what they're doing. There is a support mechanism there, at least in the Peruvian tradition, with lodges that have been established for over 20 years now for seekers coming down to the lodges, you can be in a safe set and setting, you are catered for with facilitators in the ceremony.

So you're fairly safe, you're entering into sort of a clinical situation in some ways, right? You're not going to freak out. There is an inverse that you know, which we could go into more depth about choosing the right lodge and you know we're doing your research well, because as with any industry, reputations come and go and there can be concerns about the duty of care and the integrity of some practitioners.

But by and large you know you can find a very safe setting with the right shamans to work with and in that setting you are facilitated. You will go through your inner journey and then people will be there to help you on the outside.

Ayahuasca Integration

I know that at least in California, on the West Coast and around San Francisco, there are even some psychotherapists that I know of which help people make sense of their ayahuasca experiences and help with follow-up psychotherapy type of integration.

CF: Yeah, and I saw something in New York Times recently about how they were taking prisoners in Brazil and giving them Ayahuasca as a way to sort of purge themselves of their pasts. So I understand that.

One of the questions I want to ask of you, I read a book recently called The Cosmic Serpent, perhaps you're familiar with it, it's by Jeremy Narby. And he was trying to figure out where and how and why this concoction came about. Because it's not as if people just sat around and said, "Well let's just go boil up that leaf and boil up that leaf and see what happens when we drink it." There had to be some sort of guidance from somewhere.

And where do you think that guidance came from? How did this evolve? How did this arrive on the planet? Well, there's no exactly understanding of that.

Rak: You know, as Jeremy Naby said in his book, his book, The Cosmic Serpent, he was looking at the origins of not just Ayahuasca but DNA and this idea of serpents all throughout different cultures. And he thought that could that be a sort of map of the double helix of DNA itself and it seems to be something in that.

Some people will say that Ayahuasca is definitely thousands or even tens of thousands of years old. There's anthropological evidence throughout South America and Mesoamerica of DMT containing snuffs which are different from Ayahuasca but that obviously they knew about plants containing DMT in many different cultures and they still have some of the implements used there. Ayahuasca, because of the nature of it, there's not a lot of artifacts left–basically plants–and you drink it from a cup or a bowl, but there's not really anything left there.

Recent anthropological evidence has been looking at the evolution of Ayahuasca just since the rubber boom in the turn of the 20th century in Peru. Basically, you know, a lot of indigenous native Indians were killed throughout Peru and sort of the Pan-Amazonian Basin and Ayahuasca as the rubber boom came and civilization came and as their cultures changed Ayahuasca changed as well.

So the recent hundred years or more of evidence we have is still mestizo, which is like not the native jungle indigenous purebred type local Indians, so it's hard to say what they know. There's anecdotal evidence that it goes back quite a long time, but also the Ayahuasca has been changing, and that they think that Ayahuasca as just the vine itself, the Banisteriopsis Caapi–that's the bit which is the purgative and the healer on the physical level.

It's also psychoactive in very high doses, but it doesn't have the visionary component, the DMT in the brew. They think that at least up to maybe the 1960s or 70s even, that could have been the predominant form of Ayahuasca and that the DMT-containing brew is something which has been reinforced only since Western interest has been there. So it's hard to say.

CF: Well, let me ask you this. How do you think that this was derived? Because I get the distinct impression from various areas that I've looked at that this was sort of, it sort of became embedded in our DNA; there was this embedded inherent sort of knowledge that this was a recipe that was worth knowing, which is interesting in itself because that would mean that it sort of came through the the natural DNA of evolution of the humanity to come up with this formula, because it's not something you would just go out and you know, say a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Somebody had to create this.

Rak: All right, this is the thing. So basically, you've got a jungle which is full of, as we know, science discovers new plants and new species in the Amazon basin every year. There's new things discovered. But there are literally tens, if not hundreds of thousands of different plants in the Amazon Basin. And the thing with Ayahuasca is you have to boil it up. You have to boil it up in a pot of water, and you have to put the two plants together.

CF: So out of the hundreds of thousands of plants, how did they discover to use the banisteriopsis caapi?

Rak: Exactly. Exactly. That's my point. Here's the mythology. What they say is most of the tribes have ayahuasca origin stories and essentially they say that the Ayahuasca told them to do it. And this is what you have to understand and get your head around, because they believe that there's an animist vision of the world and nature is alive and nature talks to us.

Now Stephen Bayer is a Western doctor and sort of anthropologist. He has a book called Singing to the Plants, which documents this quite well. But it's this idea that the more sensitive we become by reducing our diet with the sugars and salts and things like that, the more we can hear the call of nature and the spirits talking to us. And when we hear them talking to us, we can engage with them.

And then from that original nodal point of connection, then it was learnt and the skill was passed down to other shamans and other tribes and things like that. And you know what? I believe that could be true as well.

CF: But you know, there had to be some sort of revelation. I mean, don't you think, I mean obviously you're a journalist, you're a logical thinker, you have to come to some sort of state and mind where you say, okay, let's do this with this and that and that and it has to work, right?

Rak: I mean something about that, you know, the mistake you may be falling into here is the trap of the intellect and the ego because again Western culture doesn't believe that plants have spirits, doesn't believe that there's an intelligence in nature, doesn't believe when multiple indigenous tribes all say the same thing, even though they're spread out geographically, they say the plants told us to do it.

And so they go, oh, they must be wrong. Western we don't believe in that worldview. If you take Ayahuasca, you will tangibly feel that worldview. It's not even intellectually thinking, it's there's an intuition and there's a telepathy between the plant kingdom and the human kingdom. And In that telepathy, in that overlap, there is a knowing which is from the heart, and it is true, and it is real, and that very well could be the case of how they were told.

CS: Right. Yeah, it just seems that, you know, that's sort of the, I like the idea of this sort of being part of our collective subconscious that has a sense of knowing that this is the right thing to do, sort of. So that would indicate to me as sort of the presence of some sort of exterior sort of knowledge that brought this to our lives so that we would understand this because you know it's sort of a whole idea where does this come from? Does it just arrive and we just say well, we'll do this and we'll do that and you know when you say that the Ayahuasca taught us to do this What was that conversation like? Who had that conversation? How did that get transferred to mankind?

Rak: Well, you know, different tribes have different origin stories and the mythologies and they name their characters in that story, but it's all mythology. There's no direct record. But here's the thing: I think what you're getting at–I agree with you that we have this collective unconscious and we have this deeper reservoir of knowledge that we can tap into in ourselves.

But what we're saying, you've got to sort of look from a higher vantage point of dimensionality. And this is what Ayahuasca can help with. It's like we can see the three or four dimensions we're in. Science says there's up to 12 hyperdimensions that perhaps we exist in and are embedded one within another.

And just within the web of life and mother nature, we think of ourselves as individual organisms. And this is basically the fall metaphor. You know, when we fell out of this right relationship with the planet of unity consciousness into individual ego consciousness.

So when we say we have these abilities within ourselves, yes we do, but where do they reside? They reside perhaps in that plateau where we join that unity consciousness of the collective world spirit, where all knowledge is embedded as some indigenous cultures say, like the aboriginals with their dream time. It's embedded in the land. The stories are in the land. They're never lost. Knowledge is never lost. It's always embedded in the Akashic field or in the landscape or in the land itself.

So, you know, I mean, there's a larger… it's not just intellect. There's a larger organism and there's a larger mind at large at work, which we are part of and we are relearning we're part of. And that is shocking to the individual ego.

CS: Well you know what, you're right. What bothers me, not bothers me, what is curious to me is that this ability to tap into this area is so widely necessary for us. I do believe it's necessary for us to do this. I think this is a very healthy sort of exercise to go through. I think for all people, I think everybody should take it in a controlled situation where people are comfortable and able to deal with whatever comes up, I think it's a very healing quality. What fascinates me is this sort of this connection between nature and our minds and where we fit into this long thread of humanity and DNA, this sort of evolutionary process. And why does this become part of our dialogue? That's what fascinates me.

Rak: Yeah, I agree. And for me, for me. As we mentioned before, we've had a glancing blow with deeper aspects of psychedelic spirituality in the 1960s, and it hasn't really gone away. So Ayahuasca, I have a little riff in the book where I say in the 1960s, acid opened the mind, in the 1980s, ecstasy helped open the heart, and in the noughts, Ayahuasca and the other plant entheogens are helping re-open the spirit.

 It's like there's been a cascade as 1950s white-picket fence America wasn't ready to go back to the garden. It wasn't ready to be embraced as a vegetal organism. So nature had to go through the lab. We had to have these experiences, these initiations to be ready to go back to what is really, has always been there, which is Mother Nature, who was alive and vibrant and loving and, you know, is in need of her species to come back into the fold.

CS: Yeah, I get that. So let me ask you this. You know, when people think about the whole process of self-discovery, of tapping into our subconscious, of becoming more fully aware, all of the words that we know and we attribute to sort of coming of age or coming of terms to ourselves, and many Buddhist monks will sit for years until they discover enlightenment, does this accelerate that process or is this a short cut to raising our consciousness or is this just a necessary step that many of us should go through?

Rak: Well here's one thing, we are living in the midst of the sixth great species extinction on the planet. This is what science tells us.

Emergence from the Emergency

So, our DNA, this is also what science says is specifically designed to respond to its environment. This is how mutations and evolution happens. So when there's an emergency in the environment, there is the reciprocal possibility of us evolving forwards. So how does Ayahuasca fit into this? Well, I feel that it's not just Ayahuasca.

Again, Ayahuasca is like an avatar of a deeper Gaian planetary consciousness. So there are other entheogens out there like Salvia divinorum or Peyote, et.al. And the planet itself secretes these substances at different areas of the bio-regions around the planet specifically to engage with the species. Like, she's alive and she's communicating through a chemical language of exo-pheremones, as Terence McKenna called it. She wants us to plug back in.

And so at this time of information, this is no shortcut. This is hard work. Ayahuasca is hard work. It's not just pop the red pill and escape the matrix. You can't be a passive passenger on an ayahuasca experience. It will kick your butt, astrally and physically. It demands of you that you know yourself.

And once you know yourself, you can't hide from yourself. It doesn't mean that you're going to be damaged by that. It means that you are full. You are whole, you are back to the settings you're meant to be and hopefully you understand that you are plugged into a planetary matrix and you are part of something larger.

I would say now it's not just Ayahuasca but I believe the spirit of the planet is asking us to come back into right relationship with Mother Earth and to be warriors for that right relationship, to create a new paradigm, which is the same as the archaic way of being in a sense. To live with technology and with ourselves as best we can in right relationship with the planet, to be sustainable and to be loving and to be the utopia we know we can be. So Ayahuasca is not the be all and end all, it's one modality amongst many.

CF: Right. I certainly would agree with you there. I think that this is a that that is probably the most germane point that comes from this conversation is that this really is a call to arms, for lack of a better term, to rise up and address their concerns, the mess we've made, where we've gotten. And I certainly appreciate that and love that concept very deeply, I think that's very real. When we look at your own personal experience, you went down there as a reporter sort of knowing a little bit what's going on, but not 100%. You've had some experience, you got some mileage on the old brain and you go down there and you take this and what was your first experience like? How would you sort of encapsulate that?

Rak: I happen to have my book here. I'll give you a very brief written excerpt. And these excerpts, basically I was taking written notes by candlelight in the ceremony as the dark went out and as soon as I came back and audio recordings. So this is basically unedited. The whole book is basically, it's been shaped, but it's basically the raw experience as I experienced it transmitted.

So this is an excerpt from "AYA: Awakenings."

"The Ayahuasca starts to come on slow, sneaking in and out like a lover, tantalizing me. The spirit in the plant is playing hard to get, or, more likely, she's finding me hard to get. She's interfacing, overlapping energy fields as her jungle medicine comes on strong.

There's a flash of vibrant green as something starts to happen. I fall into this target window of curious circuitry-like patterns, lines of energy called ayahuasca rivers.

Locks deep inside me that I never knew were there, a tumbling open, and I'm spilling into the spaces they reveal. Wrapped inside the mother, she who nurtures and destroys in her endless embrace, all those I love flash before my mind's eye in a slow-motion, emotional retrospective. I feel like I'm being unwound and examined, but I'm not sure if this is for me or for the spirit of Ayahuasca to get a quick vibrational diagnostic on the patient. I'm an open book to her gaze as I circumnavigate these heart spaces and heal the way I feel to each of my loved ones.

And then Madre Ayahuasca shows me bits of myself that they've forgotten or unused, like rooms to a house I've lived in all my life but never entered. Oh God, Ayahuasca is changing my perceptions and deepening my emotional connections to the web of life.

It's like there's an invisible thread and if you pull on it the whole picture will unravel revealing the true pattern underneath. I feel I'm intimately connected to everything around me by my vibrational wave front to that great atomic sea where we are all one.

Safe in the great green womb, I am remembering what this connection means and who and what we really are."

CF: That's beautiful. So that was a very metaphysical. During that time would you probably say that this was a very positive experience for you? And did you think you entered into this realm fairly secure and safe and and comfortable with who you were as an individual?

Rak: I must say that my book Aya: Awakenings traditionally is in the genre of Memoir or the travel narrative, you know, there's definitely an overarching journey and I based the book, basically the book started to write itself and I recognized that the structure was the same as Joseph Campbell's heroic journey of departure, initiation and return.

But usually in that scenario, someone starts off with a wound or with something that needs healing. I didn't have a definable something needed healing. Still, again, I was saying that larger context, what I recognized I gained through the journey was this incredible spiritual opening to the dimensions around me, to recognize that what I was experiencing.

Other people were verifying they were experiencing in different ways as well, was that the world was larger than I'd been led to believe, that there was a deeper capacity of myself and of what we are embedded in, which is not just a physical world, there's an energetic, vibrational, you could say, astral ecology that we are part of and the web of life extends beyond the physical into this ecology, this interdimensional ecology, and it continues.

And when we're trained with the modalities like Ayahuasca and the shamanism and the shamans can teach us, we can travel into this ecology. We can engage with the natives that live there. We can become Galactic citizens or intergalactic citizens essentially it's pretty out there I know.

Most of the ayahuasca movement to this day remains focused on the physical healing and the emotional healing and the connection to spirit, but what I learned from myself is that I basically am that type of psychopomp role I'm playing that role because I have gone deeper. I know deeper and I love the deep waters of spirit. I love to bring back information about that to share with the tribe, which is the essential third leg of the heroic journey, to bring something of value back to the tribe, to share it in the hope that it will be of help.

CF: I subscribe to the same sort of philosophy as you, I feel like if I'm a messenger along the same lines, and I'm wondering, you know, every one of us has damage, every one of us is damaged, every one of us needs to be healed in some capacity. So whatever that may be, no matter how people have different levels of damage, different people have different levels of needing to be healed. But there is that quality in all of us.

That is a very human quality because life is difficult, after all. Let's not paint the room rosy. Life is difficult. We have hardships. We go through them. When we can accept them, when we can deal with them, when we can stare at them face to face and perhaps even present them in a different phase or a different cloak of some sort. That's when I refer back to that sort of looking at the world through a different set of lenses. So your lenses at your own particular world and the world perhaps in general has definitely shifted as a result of this.

Changing the Lens

Rak: Yeah, absolutely, it shifted it again. Lenses is a really good metaphor. And I say that when you go to an optometrist and you take the eye test, and they can put on these multiple lenses, and you can see clearer, all of those lenses actually exist within us.

It's a question of which one we're putting on. And it's not Ayahuasca. All through history, there have been different cultures which have used plants for lenses and you know the the the right the mysteries of Eleusis where the ancient Greeks used a substance for over 2 ,000 years for initiation you know or even the the the somers in the Rig Veda in the Vedic this is very very primal this is sort of part of our genetic DNA. All of it's recorded in the history books, it's just not well known because of the war on drugs and the war on altered altered consciousness.

We've had, Western culture has had this sort of censorship around these issues. I agree. It's right here in all of the religious texts in the history books. But yeah, definitely my lenses have expanded and been polished and changed.

Also, what I'm realizing on my journey as I evolve and mature myself is that a lot of these substances are just the catalyst for what we have within us. And I've been really getting into the idea of the yogic traditions and things like, mudras and asanas and anchors. And I was reading a book on Kriya Yoga, which is the Kundalini form of yoga on the ayahuasca retreat that I hold in Peru.

And basically everything it was saying could have been talking about Ayahuasca, but it was yoga. It was talking about energy and activating the energy within ourselves. And it was even talking about the visionary state and how basically, here's a little known fact, basically in the 1960s with the scientific tests of LSD, they confirmed that the LSD is metabolized by the body within 19 minutes. The actual trip usually doesn't come on before half an hour, you know what I mean?

So it's not, and they've done tests again with psilocybin mushrooms legally in the last few years, looking at turning off the default mode network. These substances are basically just switching on or off bits of ourselves that we have the capacity to be.

CF: So you know what? What jumps out at me most dramatically is this sort of search for truth which I think at its core is probably one of the most divine qualities any of us could possibly want, because when you discover the truth you've got nothing to hide from at that point, no matter how ugly it may be, no matter what it is. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's ugly, it's just the fact that it is truthful and in that essence it's pure and so because of that purity we have a sense of of great comfort.

I think it's like this whole idea it's far easier to tell the truth than it is to lie. So essentially this is a deep dive into our own internal truth and when we recognize that and can be comfortable with that we can evolve into and we can we can live to our highest potential.

Rak: Chris you're a beautiful man I concur exactly that's it you know, truth radiates it's being, and then Ayahuasca and all these different shamanic modalities, there can be multiple truths or different perspectives on what is happening, but the deeper you go, the more the words fall away and the more the heart feels and the intuition knows what these deeper truths are, because essentially it's about this unity consciousness and where it leads us back to this idea of Source. And when you feel that connection to the Source, every culture around the world, every being around the world knows it when it feels it: that is the ultimate truth.

CF: So when you look at this article I mentioned in the New York Times recently about prisoners in Brazil, here we have a bunch of prisoners in Brazil who are sitting behind bars wearing orange outfits and they're feeding them, they're giving them the ayahuasca treatments and these people are coming away dramatically different.

They're seeing what they've done. They are different people. It is a transitional state that they enter into and then come out of new people, different people. They have reached their core and this has got to be therapeutic on a number of levels.

Rak: It totally is and there's many different organizations around the world now legally studying Ayahuasca in a clinical setting trying to help bring it into the medical fold in the West.

There's organizations like MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, which is pioneering quite a few ayahuasca studies at the moment, some involving research with cancer and helping cure that.

Other ones looking at the psychoanalysis sort of benefits. And there's vast ayahuasca movements as well through South America and in Europe and you know on the grassroots level globally that Ayahuasca is is really helping again, it's helping heal people. But I must reinforce its not just Ayahuasca it's the person themselves who are their own medicine. Its that synergy between ayahuasca revealing and then your knowledge about yourself and your own transformation.

CF: And that's the best takeaway. That's the best takeaway. You know, there's not a single one of us that isn't damaged. There's not a single one of us that hasn't got skeletons in our closet. But if we resolve them, come to the point where we accept them, bring the elephant into the room, accept it, move on from there. We can be literally born again. I don't like to use those combination of words, but we can literally have that sense of Awakening, and that's what I think this really brings to it. We're running out of time, unfortunately. My guest today has been Rak Razam. His website is R-A-K-R-A-Z-A-M dot com, or I-A-Awakenings dot com. He's got a fabulous film on YouTube that's well worth looking into. It's A-Y-A-Awakenings dot com.

And he's a reporter who has going through this he entered into this realm as sort of a seeker a messenger of some sort to see what this is all about and during that discovery he came to an sense of enlightenment and he may very well be a model for many of us and I certainly appreciate your taking the time to talk today rock so it's been pretty enlightening I know we could go on for much more and perhaps we'll have you act on again after you go down there next time and Let us know what you've discovered while you were there.

Rak: Thank you Chris. It's been a pleasure.