[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
>> Deep in the heart of the Amazon,
out of generations of indigenous people,
from mysterious origins, birthed from a specific combination
of plants comes a visionary experience,
an ancient healing tradition, modern controversy and massive
interest from younger generations all surrounding
a sacred brew called Ayahuasca, a beverage that contains DMT.
DMT is a tryptamine that even our brain produces,
but the chacruna leaves contain much more.
Left alone, this molecule will be metabolized
before having any effect.
So the sacred vine is added to protect its entry
through the body, into the brain, and into our experience.
From scientists to shamans, many theories
abound regarding the strange effects of Ayahuasca,
and yet it still is not fully understood.
>> So Ayahuasca is--
it's a whole bunch of things.
But you know, on the nuts and bolts level, it's a beverage.
It's made from two plants, at least one of which
contains dimethyltryptamine.
At the cultural level, it's much broader than that.
These are essentially shamanic practices,
and Ayahuasca is at the center of that kind
of traditional medicine, you know,
which is really a mind body kind of medicine.
>> This mind-body medicine has been used for so long
in a region devoid of literature that the true beginnings
of Ayahuasca are left to oral traditions and myth.
There are only a few cultural artifacts
that have survived this hot and wet climate
before being completely decomposed
and recycled back into nature.
And the mystery of how the indigenous discovered these two
ingredients among countless other species
has baffled the world.
>> Why do these few plants, out of a half a million
in the world, have these unearthly effects on the mind
and sometimes on the body, that they think can transport him
to outer realms of space?
And they believe in these plants there is a resident spirit.
>> Ayahuasca was the only psychedelic session where I had
a sense of a personal therapist, kind of like a spiritual guide
of some sort, which I didn't see,
but it was a very clear sense of energetic presence
and telepathic communication guiding me in a very specific
way through my sessions, what I should look at, what I should
work on.
And if I didn't do it, it sort of
returned and was sort of putting some pressure on me to do it,
you know.
It had an intention for me, what I should do,
what I should become in that session.
>> The indigenous of the Amazon refer to it as Mother
Ayahuasca, known by some to be the divine feminine principle
and the first woman of creation.
The Ayahuasqueros, or healers, say
it is her that we commune with for guidance
before, during, and after drinking Ayahuasca.
It is she that allows us access to all that we've forgotten
in this life and all others.
However, in the initial ceremonies
where people are introduced to this resident spirit,
it can be painful and quite confrontational
because so much of our trauma is unknown to us,
and therefore we rarely acknowledge our baggage
as a part of us.
>> So, what Ayahuasca does is she goes through the physical
and energetic body--
and emotional bodies-- that are totally interconnected.
And she's going through and our traumas
are held in the tissues.
And so, she's going and ripping out that stuff.
And so, it hurts, whether it be physical, through nauseousness.
Or even actual pain, or sometimes we
have that stuff in our thought processes, our patterns.
And so, we're holding onto this stuff,
and Ayahuasca is opening, opening, opening
and pulling that stuff out.
>> Everyone's experiences are different in personal ways.
Not everyone experiences pain.
Some are left in ecstasy.
But no two ceremonies are identical.
Some describe the evolution of ceremonies
as the medicine speaking a story of our blind spots
and ailments.
Although traditionally the main purpose of Ayahuasca
has been for healing, it's typically
the visionary quality that initially attracts newcomers.
They come with curiosity, expectation, ambition,
and a drive to become enlightened,
a mystic, a spiritual savant.
But if you listen to those who have
spent many years with the medicine,
or even just a few weeks in a traditional setting,
you'll learn that the path to heaven
often comes through the belly of a personal hell.
The wake-up call happens when those
who want to merge with pure divinity
are faced with their fears of death.
In Ayahuasca culture, facing mortality
is a prerequisite to evolving on the path of spirituality.
The vine itself is called the vine of souls
or the vine of the dead.
And even though these difficult encounters are well-known,
there are still thousands of people journeying to the Amazon
with the desire to peek behind the veil,
to receive the overflowing gifts of life
and uncover these painful yet fruitful mysteries of death.
Getting into the heart of the Amazon
requires much time, money, and determination just
to get through the hustle and bustle,
only to arrive on a long boat ride to your final destination.
Once the boat departs and you're finally
miles from modern civilization, the jungle begins to speak.
The volume of the jungle seems deafening and ominous,
overpowering at times.
The anticipation of the coming ceremony
puts the nerves on alert.
And so begins the real work.
The curandero, or healer, will seek the purest leaves,
the wisest vines, pound them, pray over them, and add them
to the pot, light the fire, and begin
the alchemical distillation.
The ceremonial maloka is prepared
for the evening, beds, blankets, buckets, and the altar.
When the night hits, the jungle shifts
its song and the ceremony begins.
The maestro blows the protective smoke of mapacho tobacco
over those about to drink, and then he pours the brew.
Each individual accepts their share, sits and drinks.
The first thing one might notice is the taste.
A confusing mix of bitter, sour, sweet, and the unknown
fills the taste buds and lingers.
Once the medicine becomes noticeable,
it can be felt in the stomach and in the tissues,
in the bones, and deep down in the psyche.
As the minutes pass, the medicine
spreads out and tracks a path through every layer
of the body, mind, and beyond, until at last, hours later,
the peak is upon us.
The peak usually lasts roughly for an hour or two,
but it is also known to come in waves.
The pulse of Ayahuasca is slightly
different for every person and even changes
from ceremony to ceremony.
Visions begin swirling and pulsing in front, behind,
and everywhere around us.
Time and space may dissolve, and the visions
become the only reality.
And it is at this point the creatures of the jungle appear.
>> I have seen and experienced a lot of identification with
animals, but there seems to be preponderance of certain
animals like Jaguar and Anacondas.
>> They may be entirely animal, they may be entirely human.
But sometimes you get these therianthropes.
Again and again they crop up in visionary experience.
I've had such visions myself under the influence
of Ayahuasca.
So, it doesn't surprise me that ancient people
had those visions as well.
The shamans are drinking Ayahuasca to enter a deeply
altered state of consciousness.
And a great many of those shamans
paint their visions today.
>> Are people under these states experiencing the same visions
that our ancestors saw in each corner of the globe?
How would it be possible that humans
are connecting to ancestral visions
through a plant combination?
>> Various aspects of the visual cortex are stimulated
by the presence of psychedelics.
So, the fact that we have visions we can easily explain.
The content of the visions, what it is we see,
presents some much more significant challenges.
How is it that the brain gets access to information
that people often claim has nothing at all to do with what
they've experienced before?
Well, perhaps some of this can be understood
as the stimulation of what's been called archetypes,
archetypal structures.
>> Archetypes are common types of people or forms that seem
to emerge from mythology and visionary imagery,
from cultures separated by time and space with no known contact
or communication.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung
wrote extensively about these visions
from patients in psych wards who spoke
of seeing imagery that is nearly identical to mythological
figures that at the time were not even
translated into English yet.
If these archetypal forms are not
withered by the passing of time, is there
a reason for their arrival in our visions?
Some believe these are messages for our personal advancement
by showing us who and what we truly
are, not the individual body or identity we inhabit,
but all the events that have unfolded
since the origin of life and beyond.
>> I think what happens with plant medicine is that plant
medicine helps you get yourself out of your own body and look
at yourself.
There's your birth, but then there's
your mom's birth, you grandmother's birth,
the birth of a nation, the birth of humanity,
the birth of the universe.
It's like this longer life, kind of very much like quilting,
where in the quilt you might be just one stitch,
but you're one stitch of this big, beautiful quilt,
this big, beautiful pattern that, for us, would
be a story or the history, if you want to call it that.
>> Whatever the source, these visions are almost always
outside the realm of anything we've ever experienced in this
waking life.
They tell stories, reveal hidden truths,
conjure emotions, and even lead the mind into realms unknown.
Many who try to explain these visions by conventional means
come up short of legitimate answers.
Some say the visions are alive.
In combination with these visions
comes the strange bodily sensations
and the physiological effects of the beta carbolines
in the vine.
The common result of this is what
some call la purga, the purge.
The need to throw up is why there are typically
buckets set out next to the beds in the ceremonial maloka.
And the belief of many indigenous
is that purging is the physical outlet for an energetic release
and surrender.
>> With the purging, some people might say, well,
why are you going to put yourself through that?
But it's actually part of the process of not only detoxing,
but also healing.
I think it depends on where you're at with the medicine.
I think in the beginning, a lot of the purging
has to do with physical stuff that's in your body,
because when you come out of ceremony,
you really recognize how your diet affects you, be it
the water or lack of water you drink,
or the type of food, how healthy or unhealthy it is.
Once the physical part kind of passes--
or I don't want to call it the next level, but maybe
a deeper level--
it becomes more of an emotional purge,
where sometimes you will realize that if you
go into the storyline, and if the storyline
is a negative storyline, that's when
the purging, like the feeling of purging, starts.
Then after a while, you start realizing that your habits kind
of recreate it again.
And then the next ceremony comes and you're still
getting it out.
And then you're just kind of repeating that cycle.
So, you get to a point that all of a sudden the purge
is the acknowledgment of there's something there
that you need to work with.
>> Working with discomfort, the trauma and unknown aspects
of the psyche is not a modern Western approach,
where most medicines dull pain, mask symptoms,
and require no work after being taken.
Ayahuasca, on the other hand, is impossible to take and forget
about, and requires the courage, strength, patience,
and understanding to face the darkest aspects of us
that we've forgotten.
>> We want to develop.
We want to know ourselves.
And it helps to surrender to yourself, in fact,
because what Ayahuasca is, it is a jungle medicine that
opens up your own subconscious.
So, if you see beauty, then you deserve
to feel that before you can, maybe,
be confronted with your behavior that is not always beautiful.
When you see darkness, it may indicate
that there is some shadow energy in you that
needs to be digested.
>> The strange ability for Ayahuasca to introduce you
to your own shadow in a detached and unique way is why
the indigenous have used it as a form of mind body medicine
for millennia.
Some of the most profound revelations under the medicine
often come once the purging is over,
once the difficulty and discomfort
subsides and the medicine begins the softer
part of the journey, in which the shattered
pieces of the story we've told ourselves
begins to reassemble into a more humbling, more
real, and holistic narrative.
The ceremony concludes, the morning
comes, a recommended period of silence to reflect.
And then the group comes together
and the sharing begins.
>> The sharing after your ceremony is integrating
the whole experience.
After Ayahuasca ceremony, you don't just
continue in daily life.
You're changed.
There is this neuroplasticity in the mind that
makes you change after every experience,
and this is a major experience.
>> Part of the Ayahuasca in the West, you know,
as well as when you do these ceremonies together,
you hear other people's pain.
You hear their purging and you hear their connection,
and you feel interconnected.
And you come out and you're very bonded.
There's been some-- one test I know
that Dennis McKenna and Charles Grubb and others
did a few decades ago now with Hoasca Project looking
at one of the Ayahuasca churches in South America.
And it wasn't just that the Ayahuasca was increasing
the serotonin in the brain, which it was,
on a neurochemical level, and they felt more integrated
and more connected because their community were all
doing Ayahuasca together.
What Ayahuasca can really do, they
say it can be like 10 years of therapy
in one night, because when you're in therapy in the west,
you're talking and you're engaging the intellect.
But Ayahuasca makes permeable your unconscious.
It opens the heart more.
And it becomes very visible.
Anything you've been holding in your energetic field, anything
emotionally or you've suppressed can come up.
And it comes up in a way that you're not attached to it,
so you can entertain it and go through this psychotherapy sort
of experience.
And then you can let go of it.
>> Another South American Ayahuasca study was conducted
by Terence's brother Dennis to evaluate the therapeutic value
of this plant mixture in a modern context.
And we found in our Ayahuasca study in Brazil
that long-term users of Ayahuasca
had an upregulation of the serotonin transporter.
When we got into it, it turns out
that deficits in those transporters
are linked to all kinds of pathologies, alcoholism,
suicidal ideation, intractable depression, all of the things,
in fact, that Ayahuasca is good for treating.
So, that can't be coincidence.
You know, it looks like Ayahuasca can actually
reverse these deficits over time and really
not just control the symptoms, but actually
repair the brain at some fundamental level.
So that's a remarkable thing.
>> Family physician and Ayahuasca researcher Dr.
Joe Tafur has been looking at epidemics across the US
as having a common origin.
>> Whether it's anxiety or PTSD or addiction or depression,
or even psychosomatic things like migraine,
they have problems in their emotional processing,
and that the psychedelics and plant medicines are
an interesting way to approach such problems.
>> I've suffered from pretty severe childhood trauma
and carried around this trauma with me for years,
not really recognizing what was going on.
It wasn't until I was in my really late 40s
that I really recognized this.
And I had a series of Ayahuasca experiences
that really took me into it, really made me face the trauma.
And one of the primary symptoms of the trauma
was fear, you know, that I had this kind
of continuous anxiety, this running fear with me for years.
The Ayahuasca spirit just literally talked to me
and said to me, hey, you know, you have a problem with this?
Hey, let's work this out.
Hey, come on.
I'm going to teach you.
I'm taking you to warrior school.
We're going to get rid of those fears,
and for the next four hours confronted me with just fear
after fear, all my deepest fears.
>> We have evolved out of tune.
There's an enzyme problem that has
caused us to fail to suppress the ego,
and then this creates a spectrum of cultural effects
that drives us all nuts.
And so, they have a kind of psycholytic therapy
to correct that.
And isn't it interesting that the fix turns out
to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios
of neurotransmitters already present in the organism?
>> The tuning and harmony of neurotransmitters cause
for the inner atmosphere of the body to become suitable
for physical and psychological relaxation and rewiring
of thought patterns.
However, the strongest and most lasting effects
neurologically happen in the gut.
The enteric nervous system has about 100 million neurons,
similar to what dogs have in their brain.
This neurology is in communication
with the microbiome, or colonies of bacteria
in the gut that are integral to our health and even
our impulses.
It is believed by Ayahuasca shamans that the real medicine
is not the brew itself.
>> And in the jungle, if you talk to the maestros and they
say, oh, you want to study the medicine?
Dieta, dieta, dieta.
They don't say Ayahuasca, Ayahuasca, Ayahuasca.
>> What they say, if you really get down with them,
is that the diet is everything, and that you're a tourist
and you're here for a few weeks, and yes,
we'll give you Ayahuasca.
But what this is really about is controlling diet
over a period of months, even years,
and taking a regular regimen of this stuff
and transforming yourself into some kind of other person.
>> In the Shipibo tradition, a diet, a dieta,
is to go through this kind of restrictive phase with
your food, you know, no salt, no sugar, no dairy, no hot spicy,
no greasy, no oily, no red meat, no pork,
in some cases no chicken.
It's this kind of purification, this period of sacrifice.
And then while you're doing that,
you're taking this other plant that most likely is not
psychoactive at all in any measurable form.
But you take it every day or in some kind of format.
And so you're connecting to the spirit of that plant
through the diet.
>> The indigenous believe that it is this other tea of dieted
plants that adds another layer of intelligence and guidance
to the ceremonial healing journey.
A deeply revealing truth can be seen
in the importance of a dieta.
Most every health concern in the modern world
that is preventable due to lifestyle
comes down to what we feed our bodies.
Ayahuasca has gained a lot of popularity
as a healing medicine, which it surely is,
but only when taken in conjunction
with a plant-based diet and listening for the messages
that the plants impart.
The more one listens, the more it
is evident that these plants actually
have their own language and are attempting to teach and prepare
the body and mind for Ayahuasca.
But the indigenous as well as Westerners
who've devoted their lives to this culture
and medicine believe these master plants
don't speak in a dry language, but rather
in a way that sings to our higher faculties of perception.
The songs that are sung are called icaros
and have particular meaning to the healers of the Amazon.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
>> That seems like crazy, you know, hard to believe.
But the idea is that you're dieting
these plants, these master plans, that
are going to teach you how to do this healing work,
and also facilitate your own personal healing
through the process, and that that's
going to be where you learn how to sing these songs from.
Like I said, hard to believe.
I wouldn't believe it if somebody told me that,
but that was my personal experience.
>> Maestro Gume was born and raised in the Ayahuasca healing
traditions and relates his family's process of introducing
him to the plants.
>> [NON-ENGLISH]
>> By modern reductionist beliefs,
it would sound crazy that these plants are wise teachers that
gift healing songs to the students or shamans.
Several origin myths of Ayahuasca
claim that these plants are the ones that
instructed the humans on how to make the brew,
and they did so not through human language,
but through song.
The imagery in several Ayahuasca cultures
actually illustrate the visual appearance
of the songs themselves, and it is
said that the songs of the master plants
are sung during ceremony to guide Ayahuasca
into the psychological root of the illness.
>> Well, we know that music entrains the brain in certain
ways and so do the psychedelics.
So, music can be used to augment the effects
of the psychedelics.
And this was well recognized by the shamans.
They often viewed it as the spirits are
being called in by the music.
>> These people have some kind of authenticity that you can
absolutely feel.
It's in the voice.
I met many Ayahuasqueros and the good ones
all had this voice thing going on,
that they could cast their voice way back in their throat,
and they kind of purr.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
>> The indigenous of the Amazon, as well as many other shamanic
traditions from around the world,
believe the only medicine is truth and authenticity.
Whether that comes through a shaman's
particular vocal vibration, a movement
of energy through dance, a cleansing
of the body through diet, or even
the mind-opening properties of psychedelic plants, truth
and authenticity is a state of being
that a human can surrender to or continue to defend against.
But if one is open to acknowledging
their blind spots, a new state of being unfolds.
>> It's a flowing with the energy of life.
And I think that's why people have so much synchronicity
after they have experienced Ayahuasca
or have experienced these kinds of medicines.
You start to run into events in your life.
And it seems like you just surrender to the flow,
and it takes you exactly where you need to go.
>> And this is why Ayahuasca has not simply remained
in the jungle, but has spread across the world,
and also why the culture stays traditional in some regions yet
evolves and updates in others.
The UDV and Santo Daime churches have
been established for semi-traditional and even
syncretic uses of Ayahuasca.
Even the Native American church that
originally protected peyote use has now included Ayahuasca.
Some say that Ayahuasca is growing beyond the jungle,
first through awareness and now being
grown in many different locations,
causing not only the medicine to spread,
but the cultural mindset of being one singular
species on a turbulent and rapidly changing planet.
>> Very often I'm surprised how common it is for people to come
to South America, for example, take Ayahuasca,
and they come back with this really broadened perspective
about how we fit into nature.
As global culture rediscovers these ancient medicines,
we're also rediscovering the traditions
behind them, which is a good thing because they
do have traditions.
And that's something that, as a society, we lacked, I think,
when in the 60s we didn't really understand that.
Now we do.
So, we're adapting shamanism to our own purposes
and developing variations of shamanism that may not
be traditional, but they're more appropriate for who
we are at this time.
>> Perhaps looking at the world in new ways,
relating to all nature as if it's an extension of ourselves
is the real medicine for the people,
not just through the visionary features of Ayahuasca,
but also through the master plants of the jungle that
the shamans diet to teach them the mysteries.
Perhaps the jungle really does speak or sing
the messages of Gaia that must be heard sooner or later.
And all those singing and living that message
are embodying the medicine, the truth and authenticity
that the world needs most, stepping aside from dogmas
and experiencing real moments of connection,
real compassion for others, lucid reflection
upon global issues, and inspiration
for future endeavors through visions of animal
guides, spirits, and entities.
This path is not for the tourist, not for the curious.
This path is for those who have accepted and committed
themselves to the health of all beings and the whole planet.
Up next, we explore the unique and lightning fast phenomena
of the DMT experience and the strange inhabited feeling
of the space.