August 6, 2009
by Peter De Conceicao
In the last ten years, there has been a slowly growing occurrence of
underground ayahuasca religious ceremonies in Southern California,
and primarily in Los Angeles. These ceremonies are spread by word of
mouth, and entrance to it carries a donation. It's a 'donation'
because it can't be called an 'admission,' which is considered
taxable income. Also, the ayahuasca drink used in the ceremony is
illegal. What is ayahuasca, and why is there a ceremony surrounding
it? First of all, ayahuasca is a religious drink consumed by
indigenous Indians in the Amazon. It's hush-hush here in this country
because the drink is technically illegal. This is because its active
psychedelic component is a compound called DMT (the illegal part.)
DMT is short for dimethyltryptamine. It occurs naturally in mammalian
brains, albeit in extremely small amounts. It is a psychotropic drug.
It can be extracted and refined from certain plants, such as mimosa
hostilis. DMT is also a Schedule 1 drug in the United States. This
means, very simply, that ingesting this innocuous-sounding substance
lands you in very hot water with your local drug and law enforcement
authorities.
By the accounts of people who have ingested DMT, the experience
begins with the visual appearance of geometric shapes of increasingly
complexity. This is then followed by the gradual imposition of a
subjective perceptual reality populated by entities of either animal
and/or non-human form, and interestingly, of creatures which resemble
contemporary descriptions of aliens. There are also encounters with
human spirits (who may or may not be relatives.) The preceding is a
grossly simplified encapsulation of the sensory experience and it
should be noted that the duration and appearance of these entities
varies from individual to individual.
Now, these perceptual experiences may or may not sound like the
psychotropic adventurer's cup of tea (which is how ayahuasca's
consumed) but there's a caveat to this ticket-to-fairyland beverage;
the taste of ayahuasca is indescribably vile, and the Indians also
refer to ayahuasca as la purga, (the purge) because the consumer will
inevitably vomit, or have extremely loose bowels. There are
alternative and less gastro-intestinally distressing ways to ingest
DMT, such as smoking it, or injecting it. Both are disquieting
prospects, because in order to smoke it, you must know how to
chemically extract and refine it. To inject it is an even more
physically invasive procedure that immediately bumps DMT consumption
into a much more serious category of psychotropic exploration. DMT is
not for the bong and pizza crowd.
So what's the point of ingesting DMT if it can either make you hurl
or require that you have a background in organic chemistry? It isn't
called the 'spirit molecule' for nothing, because the transcendent
qualities of DMT cannot be disputed. The ingestion of DMT in the form
of ayahuasca is a sacred function by amazonian Indian shamans and
tribes. It is also part of religious ritual by the Christian Santo
Daime sect of Brazil. DMT is one of the few psychotropic substances
where users frequently describe interactive encounters with personalities.
DMT's consciousness-altering experience has been sampled by William
Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary. They
all attest to DMT's potent launching of the subject into a sometimes
frightening plane of reality. But they all agree it is a powerful
psychoactive experience. The "trip" itself seems (in a distillation
of several accounts) to break down into specific stages:
Firstly, geometric patterns appear in the subject's vision. They grow
in intensity and complexity. They are not static, but mobile, and
constantly changing into higher orders of shapes and size. The second
stage is the movement of the experimenter through a metaphorical
transitional structure; this could be a huge tunnel, encountering a
"membrane" of light, beyond which dim figures can be seen, or
entering a vast hall or chamber, where the topmost dome or ceiling
opens up to whatever the individual is then about to experience. And
this next part is where it gets tricky.
Depending on whom you talk to, this next stage ranges from traumatic
to awe-inspiring. Various animals may be seen. Most encounter the
"machine elves." In some experiences, they're literally wearing
elf-garb, down to pointy hats. In other instances, they may have an
insectoid appearance. They're all under four feet high. Many times
they're aware of your presence, and may try and interact with you.
There's a strong impression they're workers. But even this stage is a
preamble. If you're lucky (or unlucky) you might next encounter the
"alien entity." This personality fits most contemporary descriptions
of an "alien" large head, narrowing chin, black slits for eyes.
Their demeanor can range from indifferent, to curious, to outright hostility.
Many of those who have partaken of either ayahuasca or DMT testify
that the stages of experience described above may not happen during a
single trip. Sometimes it takes multiple DMT sessions to progress
toward the next phase. It's as if there's an acclimation mechanism at
work. Because of the seemingly organized aspects of the DMT-induced
experience, some experimenters have hypothesized that DMT turns off
filtering mechanisms in the brain that prevent certain visual and
auditory stimuli from interacting with our cognitive processes. These
stimuli are assumed to be unrelated to our consensual reality, to our
coping & survival in it, and therefore our neurobiology has evolved
to block it from our consciousnes. In other words, if these filtering
mechanisms didn't exist, we'd be swamped by so many audiovisual
phenomena that we wouldn't be able to focus on our immediate survival needs.
So where's the auditory and visual stimuli coming from? Is it
generated by our subconscious, by some part of our brain that's been
locked away for hundreds of thousands of years? The commonality of
the experiences, the literal "sameness" that all DMT experimenters
both supports and undercuts that. The initial appearance of geometric
patterns could be ascribed to a section of our noggin that all of
homo sapiens shares, one that generates the same imagery. But the
animals? The elves? The aliens?
It could be that DMT is helping the user to access a collective
unconscious of stored archetypes. But if you're willing to ingest
that scenario, then why not a dimension beyond our own? Is that still
too far of a stretch? There's actually a precedent for this belief
system. It's called religion, and billions of us ascribe to one form
of it or another. Sometimes, out here in Los Angeles, it's by word of
mouth, a donation, and a teacup of la purga.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment