Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:16 pm

I just meant the info you provided that served to connect the dots, generally.

And yes, that is what I was referring to with the C-130's, which per Mike Ruppert, included guns-for-drugs operations. When I lived in Arizona in the 80's, I heard stories of people hiking the desert in the middle of nowhere and being confronted by uniformed guards with automatic weapons. Couldn't that have been Evergreen Air related? They had a big base in Marantha AZ.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby PufPuf93 » Wed Aug 24, 2016 5:46 pm

American Dream » Wed Aug 24, 2016 2:16 pm wrote:I just meant the info you provided that served to connect the dots, generally.

And yes, that is what I was referring to with the C-130's, which per Mike Ruppert, included guns-for-drugs operations. When I lived in Arizona in the 80's, I heard stories of people hiking the desert in the middle of nowhere and being confronted by uniformed guards with automatic weapons. Couldn't that have been Evergreen Air related? They had a big base in Marantha AZ.


Could have been Evergreen but maybe more likely drug related in general.

In Winter 1976 I went with a girl friend to Los Cruces NM to visit a local woman who had met a summer hire "Jim" for the USFS in NW CA who attended New Mexico State and she had moved with "Jim" when he went back to school.

We traveled to visit one of "Jim's" friends "Jack". Jack had been a football player at New Mexico State and then played pro with the AR team in the World Football League (? I don't specifically recall the name of the failed league as I did not follow).

He was working for one of the former owners of the AR football franchise as security at this "ranch" . We traveled past White Sands and Cloudcroft and went south to this high red rock desert that didn't look like it would support a cow. We drove an hour or more out this rough track that needed 4wd and high clearance as was poor road bed. Jack, former footballer, lived in a trailer on a rise below a small oasis like valley with a wet meadow and spring.

There was also a newish 4000 sf or so stucco, brick, and red tile house surrounded by a razor wire electrified fence. Outside the compound were two large Quonset hut type buildings and a freshly leveled and tarred airstrip. There were Dobermans and a Las Vegas showgirl inside the enclosure and the young woman wasn't quite sure at that point if she was a prisoner or a girlfriend. The owner had met her in Las Vegas and brought here there and she had hardly heard from him since and had not seen the owner since she was flown there.

We missed the action but every several days or so several armed guys (and money) would show up and meet an airplane from Mexico. Pot. I don't know if anything else was trafficked. It went into one of the Quonsets and Jack's job was to load small aircraft that came in periodically to distribute in USA, no money transfers. The other Quonset was full of food and toilet paper and so on. Jack and his wife hung out with the showgirl because they were all bored and scared. They were in similar situations as they had been brought there and left not realizing what they were getting in to. I would imagine that before there was all the domestic pot grown that was a common type arrangement. I was glad to leave and we did not stay long.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Aug 24, 2016 11:10 pm

From little rumors I have heard, sometimes those sorts of operations involve some of the richest and most powerful people in the State. The politicians are quick to blame Mexicans hauling knapsacks, of course.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Aug 27, 2016 6:49 pm

John Lennon's First Acid Trip


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jbTCyvKAKo


It was spring 1965. Lennon and his wife, Cynthia, and Harrison and his wife, Pattie Boyd, were attending a dinner at the London home of dentist John Riley and his girlfriend, Cyndy Bury. Before the foursome left, Riley asked them to stay for coffee, then urged them to finish their cups. Shortly after, he told Lennon he had placed sugar cubes containing LSD in the coffee. Lennon was furious. "How dare you fucking do this to us?" He knew something about the drug: It was a powerful hallucinogen – termed a psychedelic – and it caused changes in thoughts, emotions and visions that frightened some observers. Psychologist Timothy Leary had famously been fired from Harvard University in 1963 for conducting experimental therapeutic sessions with the substance.

"It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film," Cynthia Lennon said. "The room seemed to get bigger and bigger." The Beatles and their wives fled Riley's home in Harrison's Mini Cooper. (According to Bury, John and George had earlier indicated a willingness to take LSD if they didn't know beforehand that it was being administered.) The Lennons and Harrisons went to Leicester Square's Ad Lib club. In the elevator, they succumbed momentarily to panic. "We all thought there was a fire in the lift," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1971. "It was just a little red light, and we were all screaming, all hot and hysterical." Once inside at a table, something like reverie began to take hold instead. As Harrison told Rolling Stone, "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours."

The couples ended up at the Harrisons' home in Esher, outside London. John later said, "God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic. George's house seemed to be just like a big submarine... It seemed to float above his wall, which was 18 foot, and I was driving it. I did some drawings at the time, of four faces saying, 'We all agree with you.' I was pretty stoned for a month or two." This unwitting initiation into LSD would find its fulfillment the following year in Revolver, the Beatles' bravest and most innovative album.

...McCartney took LSD for the first time within the year, though it wasn't in the company of the other Beatles. The drug, he said in a 1967 interview, "opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God... It is obvious that God isn't in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life. It was truly a religious experience." He also said of LSD's effect, "It started to find its way into everything we did, really. It colored our perceptions. I think we started to realize there wasn't as many frontiers as we'd thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers."

In the coming months, the Beatles would forswear LSD. Lennon, though, who had consumed it the most – frequently, sometimes to a degree that worried others ("We didn't realize the extent to which John was screwed up," said Harrison) – wasn't always true to that word. One day in 1968, following a night of psychedelics, Lennon summoned some intimates to Apple Records and announced he'd had a revelation: He was Jesus Christ, come back to Earth, and he wanted a press release issued to that effect.


http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... ce-w436062
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Aug 31, 2016 10:31 pm

Man's Son Part I

For starters, anyone who has read a decent amount of literature on the Manson crimes is inevitably left to wonder why Charlie wasn't busted well before his crime spree escalated to murder. Local law enforcement officers had ample reasons to bust Manson at any given time during the 1967-1969 period in which he was last out of prison. Preston Guillory, a former deputy sheriff in Los Angeles, stated:
"A few weeks prior to the Spahn Ranch raid, we were told that we weren't to arrest Manson or any of his followers. We had a sheaf of memos on Manson -that they had automatic weapons at the ranch, that the citizens had complained about hearing machine gun fire at night, that firemen from the local fire station had been accosted by armed members of Manson's band and told to get out of the area. Deputies started asking, 'Why aren't we gonna make the raid soon?' I mean, Manson's a parole violator, we know there's narcotics and booze. He's living at the ranch with a bunch of minor girls in complete violation of his parole. Deputies at the station quite frankly became very annoyed that no action was being taken against Manson...

"...You have to remember that Charlie was on federal parole all this time from '67 to '69. Do you realize all the shit he was getting away with while he was on parole? Now here's the kicker. Before the Tate killings he had been arrested at Malibu twice for statutory rape. Never got (imprisoned for parole violation). Manson liked to ball young girls, so he did his thing and he was released, and they didn't put any parole on him. But somebody very high up was controlling everything that was going on and was seeing to it that we didn't bust Manson."


(The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Adam Gorightly, pg. 148)

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 01, 2016 5:43 am

Man's Son Part II

"Another connection between the killers and victims was provided by their shared interest in drug trafficking. Several of the victims -including Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Sharon Tate herself -were linked to the trafficking of hallucinogens. Rosemary LaBianca was a known trafficker of methamphetamine, and likely other drugs as well. Frykowski had reportedly secured a deal just before the murders that would have made him the exclusive distributor of MDA in the L.A. area, his operation financed with coffee heiress Folger's considerable financial resources. Jay Sebring, who before the murders had once appeared in an underground movie that also featured Mansonite Bobby Beausoleil, appears to have been involved in the drug trade as well. A man named Joel Rostau is known to have delivered drugs to Sebring at the Cielo house just hours before the murders. Rostau was found murdered the next year in New York City. Another Sebring associate showed up dead just a month later in Florida. Immediately following the killings on Cielo Drive, Sebring's house was thoroughly cleaned by friends before police arrived to conduct a search."
(Programmed to Kill, pg. 141)



As noted above, Rosemary LaBianca was involved in the LA drug scene at some level. Her husband and the only other victim at the LaBianca residence, Leno, also had ties to the Mafia. He served on the board of directors for a Hollywood bank police came to believe was Mafia connected -several board members were later convicted of fraud as a result of the LaBianca murder investigation. At the time of his death Leno was apparently in deep to the mob. Adam Gorightly states:

"In the weeks following the murders, detectives found themselves weaving through the complex maze of Leno's financial affairs. According to a police report, Leno was a '...chronic gambler...' with a '...$500.00 dollar a day habit..." At the time of his death -it has been alleged -Leno was in debt to the tune of $30,000 to Frankie Carbo's Mafia organization. Manson, it should be noted, previously hung around with Carbo in prison. As he admitted to Geraldo Rivera: 'I knew Frankie Carbo. Frankie Carbo knew Leno LiBianca.' "
(The Shadow Over Santa Susana, pg. 113)


Investigative journalist Maury Terry came to similar conclusions while researching the Manson case. Terry states:

"A Los Angeles source who was knowledgeable about the Manson set in 1969 said: 'Frykowski was the motive. He had stung his own suppliers for a fair amount of money and that didn't go down well at all with the people at the top of the drug scene here. And to make it worse, he was upsetting the structure of the LSD marketplace by dealing independently, outside the established chain of supply. He was a renegade.' "
(The Ultimate Evil, pg. 489)


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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 02, 2016 6:32 pm

Kerouac was in some ways the most conservative of his circle (not that the Pranksters to come were so leftist as such):


Interview with Jack Kerouac on The Ben Hecht Show, October 1958

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxoWC9fgI00


JK: I like Eisenhower as a man . . . as a man, great man. BH: You do huh? Is he a great ... (Hecht laughs) JK: I don't know anything about politics.

-Empty Phantoms - Interviews and Encounters With Jack Kerouac, Paul Maher Jr.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 02, 2016 9:56 pm

OBAMA FINALLY HANDING OUT PARDONS, AND AFTER 22 YEARS FOR POT AND ACID, THIS DEADHEAD WILL GO FREE

It’s some small comfort however that Obama is on a bit of a spree during his final months as President, recently bringing his record up to 673 commutations and providing a light at the end of the tunnel for a number of non-violent drug offenders, including Timothy Tyler, who was busted in 1994 for selling pot and acid to an undercover cop and sentenced to life. He’s been in jail for 22 years. His sister has been fighting for his freedom, collecting over 423,000 names on his behalf—from her petition:

My brother Timothy Tyler was just 25 years old when he was sentenced to die in prison for a nonviolent drug offense. He’s watched murderers and rapists leave prison while he has no chance of ever leaving. He is now 45 years old and I want to bring him home. Timothy was a young Grateful Dead fan, who in May of 1992, sold pot and LSD to a friend who turned out to be a police informant. He had never been to prison before, but a judge was forced to give him double life without the possibility of parole because of two prior drug convictions — even though both those convictions resulted in probation.


Tyler’s case was followed pretty closely by activists against mandatory minimums and long sentencing, likely at least partially because as a Deadhead he’s a poster boy for non-violent offenders. After growing up with an abusive stepfather, he saw his first Grateful Dead show at 17, and began following the band and and doing acid fairly regularly. Tyler also dealt with bipolar disorder and psychotic episodes, at times believing Jerry Garcia was God, and once ending up in a psych ward for trying to build a dam naked on the side of an Arizona highway. In prison he became a vegetarian, and though he previously dated women, he began having sex with other inmates to escape the isolation and oppressive claustrophobia of prison


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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:09 am

Regarding Jack Kerouac, I could have been much clearer. I found the interview with Ben Hecht interesting more than anything and heard Kerouac to be espousing an apolitical view as much as anything, though I was surprised to hear hime be as supportive as he was towards Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. I think there were legitimate reasons to be negative towards the Soviet State but I also understand that this degenerated into a crude anti-communist paranoia by the end of Kerouac's life.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters also seemed to espouse a cultural/spiritual praxis that was conflicted politically, as for example with anti-Vietnam War rallies, that their allies in Hells Angel underground wanted to attack and shut down. Whether any of that had to do with the drug business and the desire for protection from law enforcement, I can't tell for sure...
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Sep 04, 2016 10:31 am

Coming Out of the Psychedelic Closet: Final Thoughts

By Neşe Devenot, PhD

In an April 2016 article in Harper’s Magazine, author Don Baum explicitly describes how the “War on Drugs” was founded on the desire to control minority social populations. He cites John Ehrlichman, a top aide to Richard Nixon:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”


Beyond this historical connection between drug laws and social control, there continue to be very real and very troubling consequences to disclosing psychedelic use. People who choose to take psychedelics run the risk of losing their jobs, being disowned by their families, and losing their children to state custody. These are not insignificant dangers.

There are people like Timothy Tyler, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the nonviolent charge of “conspiracy to possess LSD with intent to distribute” even though he viewed LSD as a spiritual sacrament. As a follower of the Grateful Dead, he was locked away in a federal prison where—for two decades—listening to music was forbidden altogether. Another Deadhead was Rudd Walker, who died in prison in 2014 after serving over a decade of a life sentence. Should we not speak up for them, simply because the likelihood of imprisonment for white users of psychedelics is astronomically less than for black drug users?

Even outside of prison, the police also have a history of conscripting drug users into dangerous undercover informant roles under the threat of lengthy prison sentences. Coerced to participate without legal aid or even discussing the arrangement with their parents, young people like Andrew Sadek and Rachel Hoffman have been murdered as a result of botched sting operations.

Beyond the explicit harms to psychedelic users, Emma’s critique fails to account for the indirect harms caused by limited access to psychedelic therapy resulting from stigma and illegality. As Dr. Holland describes, psychedelic therapy shows significant promise in the treatment of a wide range of psychological disorders, including end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and addictive substance abuse, among others. The unavailability of effective treatments for these issues presents implications far beyond the lives of “recreational” psychedelics users. What would the world look like if more of us felt increased connection to the earth and to each other, less afraid of dying, less paralyzed by personal and collective traumas, less imprisoned by destructive habits?

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http://www.psymposia.com/magazine/previ ... l-thoughts
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Sep 04, 2016 2:23 pm

The resurrection of the rose

by Jorge Luis Borges

DOWN in his laboratory, to which the two rooms of the cellar had been given over, Paracelsus prayed to his God, his indeterminate God - any God - to send him a disciple.

Night was coming on. The guttering fire in the hearth threw irregular shadows into the room. Getting up to light the iron lamp was too much trouble. Paracelsus, weary from the day, grew absent, and the prayer was forgotten. Night had expunged the dusty retorts and the furnace when there came a knock at his door. Sleepily he got up, climbed the short spiral staircase, and opened one side of the double door. A stranger stepped inside. He too was very tired. Paracelsus gestured toward a bench; the other man sat down and waited. For a while, neither spoke.

The master was the first to speak.

"I recall faces from the West and faces from the East," he said, not without a certain formality, "yet yours I do not recall. Who are you, and what do you wish of me?"

"My name is of small concern," the other man replied. "I have journeyed three days and three nights to come into your house. I wish to become your disciple. I bring you all my possessions."

He brought forth a pouch and emptied its contents on the table. The coins were many, and they were of gold. He did this with his right hand. Paracelsus turned his back to light the lamp; when he turned around again, he saw that the manís left hand held a rose. The rose troubled him.

He leaned back, put the tips of his fingers together, and said:

"You think that I am capable of extracting the stone that turns all elements to gold, and yet you bring me gold. But it is not gold I seek, and if it is gold that interests you, you shall never be my disciple."

"Gold is of no interest to me," the other man replied. "These coins merely symbolise my desire to join you in your work. I want you to teach me the Art. I want to walk beside you on that path that leads to the Stone."

"The path is the Stone. The point of departure is the Stone. If these words are unclear to you, you have not yet begun to understand. Every step you take is the goal you seek." Paracelsus spoke the words slowly.

The other man looked at him with misgiving.

"But," he said, his voice changed, "is there, then, no goal?" Paracelsus laughed.

"My detractors, who are no less numerous than imbecilic, say that there is not, and they call me an impostor. I believe they are mistaken, though it is possible that I am deluded. I know that there is a Path." There was silence, and then the other man spoke.

"I am ready to walk that Path with you, even if we must walk for many years. Allow me to cross the desert. Allow me to glimpse, even from afar, the promised land, though the stars prevent me from setting foot upon it. All I ask is a proof before we begin the journey." "When?" said Paracelsus uneasily.

"Now," said the disciple with brusque decisiveness.

They had begun their discourse in Latin; they now were speaking German.

The young man raised the rose into the air.

"You are famed," he said, "for being able to burn a rose to ashes and make it emerge again, by the magic of your art. Let me witness that prodigy. I ask that of you, and in return I will offer up my entire life."

"You are credulous," the master said. "I have no need of credulity; I demand belief."

The other man persisted.

"It is precisely because I am not credulous that I wish to see with my own eyes the annihilation and resurrection of the rose." "You are credulous," he repeated. "You say that I can destroy it?" "Any man has the power to destroy it," said the disciple.

"You are wrong," the master responded. "Do you truly believe that something may be turned to nothing? Do you believe that the first Adam in paradise was able to destroy a single flower, a single blade of grass?"

"We are not in paradise," the young man stubbornly replied. "Here, in the sublunary world, all things are mortal." Paracelsus had risen to his feet.

"Where are we, then, if not in paradise?" he asked. "Do you believe that the deity is able to create a place that is not paradise? Do you believe that the Fall is something other than not realising that we are in paradise?"

"A rose can be burned," the disciple said defiantly.

"There is still some fire there," said Paracelsus, pointing toward the hearth. "If you cast this rose into the embers, you would believe that it has been consumed, and that its ashes are real. I tell you that the rose is eternal, and that only its appearances may change. At a word from me, you would see it again."

"A word?" the disciple asked, puzzled. "The furnace is cold, and the retorts are covered with dust. What is it you would do to bring it back again?" Paracelsus looked at him with sadness in his eyes.

"The furnace is cold," he nodded, "and the retorts are covered with dust. On this leg of my long journey I use other instruments."
"I dare not ask what they are," said the other man humbly, or astutely.

"I am speaking of that instrument used by the deity to create the heavens and the earth and the invisible paradise in which we exist, but which original sin hides from us. I am speaking of the Word, which is taught to us by the science of the Kabbalah."

"I ask you," the disciple coldly said, "if you might be so kind as to show me the disappearance and appearance of the rose. It matters not the slightest to me whether you work with alembics or with the Word."

Paracelsus studied for a moment; then he spoke: "If I did what you ask, you would say that it was an appearance cast by magic upon your eyes. The miracle would not bring you the belief you seek. Put aside, then, the rose."

The young man looked at him, still suspicious. Then Paracelsus raised his voice.

"And besides, who are you to come into the house of a master and demand a miracle of him? What have you done to deserve such a gift?" The other man, trembling, replied:

"I know I have done nothing. It is for the sake of the many years I will study in your shadow that I ask it of you - allow me to see the ashes and then the rose. I will ask nothing more. I will believe the witness of my eyes."

He snatched up the incarnate and incarnadine rose that Paracelsus had left lying on the table, and he threw it into the flames. Its colour vanished, and all that remained was a pinch of ash. For one infinite moment, he awaited the words, and the miracle.

Paracelus sat unmoving. He said with strange simplicity: "All the physicians and all the pharmacists in Basel say I am a fraud.

Perhaps they are right. There are the ashes that were the rose, and that shall be the rose no more." The young man was ashamed. Paracelsus was a charlatan, or a mere visionary, and he, an intruder, had come through his door and forced him now to confess that his famed magic arts were false.

He knelt before the master and said: "What I have done is unpardonable. I have lacked belief, which the Lord demands of all the faithful. Let me, then, continue to see ashes.

I will come back again when I am stronger, and I will be your disciple, and at the end of the Path I will see the rose." He spoke with genuine passion, but that passion was the pity he felt for the aged master - so venerated, so inveighed against, so renowned, and therefore so hollow. Who was he, Johannes Grisebach, to discover with sacrilegious hand that behind the mask was no one?

Leaving the gold coins would be an act of almsgiving to the poor. He picked them up again as he went out. Paracelsus accompanied him to the foot of the staircase and told him he would always be welcome in that house. Both men knew they would never see each other again.

Paracelsus was then alone. Before putting out the lamp and returning to his weary chair, he poured the delicate fistful of ashes from one hand into the concave other, and he whispered a single word. The rose appeared again.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 05, 2016 9:37 am

Musings of Recluse and Notes on Further Programming


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I am pleased to announce my first formal podcast. It was conducted by Jasun Horsley of the fabulous Auticulture. The podcast has been split into two parts, the first of which was published on Saturday. Over the course of the interview we discuss a host of topics, including ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, Project Pelican, the New Age movement, the counterculture, inter-dimensional control, nonhuman intelligences, Christian fundamentalism, atheism and a host of other compelling topics. The podcast can be found here.


http://visupview.blogspot.com/2016/09/m ... rther.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 05, 2016 10:11 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 10, 2016 5:37 pm

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/ ... in-the-u-s

THE DRUG OF CHOICE FOR THE AGE OF KALE

How ayahuasca, an ancient Amazonian hallucinogenic brew, became the latest trend in Brooklyn and Silicon Valley.

By Ariel Levy


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Ayahuasca, used for centuries in South American jungles, is booming in the U.S.


The day after Apollo 14 landed on the moon, Dennis and Terence McKenna began a trek through the Amazon with four friends who considered themselves, as Terence wrote in his book “True Hallucinations,” “refugees from a society that we thought was poisoned by its own self-hatred and inner contradictions.” They had come to South America, the land of yagé, also known as ayahuasca: an intensely hallucinogenic potion made from boiling woody Banisteriopsis caapi vines with the glossy leaves of the chacruna bush. The brothers, then in their early twenties, were grieving the recent death of their mother, and they were hungry for answers about the mysteries of the cosmos: “We had sorted through the ideological options, and we had decided to put all of our chips on the psychedelic experience.”

They started hiking near the border of Peru. As Dennis wrote, in his memoir “The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss,” they arrived four days later in La Chorrera, Colombia, “in our long hair, beards, bells, and beads,” accompanied by a “menagerie of sickly dogs, cats, monkeys, and birds” accumulated along the way. (The local Witoto people were cautiously amused.) There, on the banks of the Igara Paraná River, the travellers found themselves in a psychedelic paradise. There were cattle pastures dotted with Psilocybe cubensis—magic mushrooms—sprouting on dung piles; there were hammocks to lounge in while you tripped; there were Banisteriopsis caapi vines growing in the jungle. Taken together, the drugs produced hallucinations that the brothers called “vegetable television.” When they watched it, they felt they were receiving important information directly from the plants of the Amazon.

The McKennas were sure they were on to something revelatory, something that would change the course of human history. “I and my companions have been selected to understand and trigger the gestalt wave of understanding that will be the hyperspacial zeitgeist,” Dennis wrote in his journal. Their work was not always easy. During one session, the brothers experienced a flash of mutual telepathy, but then Dennis hurled his glasses and all his clothes into the jungle and, for several days, lost touch with “consensus reality.” It was a small price to pay. The “plant teachers” seemed to have given them “access to a vast database,” Dennis wrote, “the mystical library of all human and cosmic knowledge.”

If these sound like the joys and hazards of a bygone era, then you don’t know any ayahuasca users—yet. In the decades since the McKennas’ odyssey, the drug—or “medicine,” as many devotees insist that it be called—has become increasingly popular in the United States, to the point where it’s a “trendy thing right now,” as Marc Maron said recently to Susan Sarandon, on his “WTF” podcast, before they discussed what she’d learned from her latest ayahuasca experience. (“I kind of got, You should just keep your heart open all the time,” she said. “Because the whole point is to be open to the divine in every person in the world.”)

The self-help guru Tim Ferriss told me that the drug is everywhere in San Francisco, where he lives. “Ayahuasca is like having a cup of coffee here,” he said. “I have to avoid people at parties because I don’t want to listen to their latest three-hour saga of kaleidoscopic colors.”

Leanna Standish, a researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine, estimated that “on any given night in Manhattan, there are a hundred ayahuasca ‘circles’ going on.” The main psychoactive substance in ayahuasca has been illegal since it was listed in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, but Standish, who is the medical director of the Bastyr Integrative Oncology Research Center, recently applied for permission from the F.D.A. to do a Phase I clinical trial of the drug—which she believes could be used in treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s disease. “I am very interested in bringing this ancient medicine from the Amazon Basin into the light of science,” Standish said. She is convinced that “it’s going to change the face of Western medicine.” For now, though, she describes ayahuasca use as a “vast, unregulated global experiment.”

Most people who take ayahuasca in the United States do so in small “ceremonies,” led by an individual who may call himself a shaman, an ayahuasquero, a curandero, a vegetalista, or just a healer. This person may have come from generations of Shipibo or Quechua shamans in Peru, or he may just be someone with access to ayahuasca. (Under-qualified shamans are referred to as “yogahuascas.”) Ayahuasca was used for centuries by indigenous Amazonians, who believed that it enabled their holy men to treat physical and mental ailments and to receive messages from ancestors and gods. Jesse Jarnow, the author of “Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America,” told me, “It’s a bit less of a to-do in many of its traditional uses—more about healing specific maladies and illnesses than about addressing spiritual crises.” Now, though, ayahuasca is used as a sacrament in syncretic churches like the Santo Daime and the União do Vegetal (“union of the plant”), both of which have developed a presence in the United States. The entire flock partakes, and the group trip is a kind of congregational service.

The first American to study ayahuasca was the Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes, who pioneered the field of ethnobotany (and co-authored “Plants of the Gods,” with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD). In 1976, a graduate student of Schultes’s brought a collection of the plants back from his field research to a greenhouse at the University of Hawaii—where Dennis McKenna happened to be pursuing a master’s degree. Thanks to McKenna, some B. caapi cuttings “escaped captivity,” he told me. “I took them over to the Big Island, where my brother and his wife had purchased some land. They planted it in the forest, and it happened to like the forest—a lot. So now it’s all over the place.”

Terence McKenna died in 2000, after becoming a psychedelic folk hero for popularizing magic mushrooms in books, lectures, and instructional cassette tapes. Dennis McKenna went on to get a doctorate in botany and is now a professor at the University of Minnesota. When we spoke, he was on a book tour in Hawaii. He had been hearing about ayahuasca use in a town on the Big Island called Puna, where people call themselves “punatics.” “Everybody is making ayahuasca, taking ayahuasca,” he said. “It’s like the Wild West.”

If cocaine expressed and amplified the speedy, greedy ethos of the nineteen-eighties, ayahuasca reflects our present moment—what we might call the Age of Kale. It is a time characterized by wellness cravings, when many Americans are eager for things like mindfulness, detoxification, and organic produce, and we are willing to suffer for our soulfulness.

Ayahuasca, like kale, is no joy ride. The majority of users vomit—or, as they prefer to say, “purge.” And that’s the easy part. “Ayahuasca takes you to the swampland of your soul,” my friend Tony, a photographer in his late fifties, told me. Then he said that he wanted to do it again.

“I came home reeking of vomit and sage and looking like I’d come from hell,” Vaughn Bergen, a twenty-seven-year-old who works at an art gallery in Chelsea, said of one ayahuasca trip. “Everyone was trying to talk me out of doing it again. My girlfriend at the time was, like, ‘Is this some kind of sick game?’ I was, like, ‘No. I’m growing.’ ” His next experience was blissful: “I got transported to a higher dimension, where I lived the whole ceremony as my higher self. Anything I thought came to be.” Bergen allows that, of the nine ceremonies he’s attended, eight have been “unpleasant experiences.” But he intends to continue using ayahuasca for the rest of his life. He believes that it will heal not only him but civilization at large.

The process of making ayahuasca is beyond artisanal: it is nearly Druidical. “We pick the chacruna leaf at sunrise in this very specific way: you say a prayer and just pick the lower ones from each tree,” a lithe ayahuasquera in her early forties—British accent, long blond hair, a background in Reiki—told me about her harvests, in Hawaii. “You clean the vine with wooden spoons, meticulously, all the mulch away from the roots—they look so beautiful, like a human heart—and you pound these beautiful pieces of vine with wooden mallets until it’s fibre,” she said. “Then it’s this amazing, sophisticated process of one pot here and one pot there, and you’re stirring and you’re singing songs.”

She and her boyfriend serve the ayahuasca—“divine consciousness in liquid form”—at ceremonies in New York, Cape Town, Las Vegas, Bali. They showed me pictures of themselves harvesting plants in a verdant Hawaiian jungle, looking radiantly happy. I asked if they made a living this way. “We manifest abundance wherever we go,” she told me. Her boyfriend added, “Consciousness is its own economy.”

Like juicing—another Kale Age method of expedient renewal—ayahuasca is appreciated for its efficiency. Enthusiasts often say that each trip is like ten years of therapy or meditation. Ferriss, the author of such “life-hacking” manuals as “The 4-Hour Workweek” and “The 4-Hour Body,” told me, “It’s mind-boggling how much it can do in one or two nights.” He uses ayahuasca regularly, despite a harrowing early trip that he described as “the most painful experience I’ve ever had by a factor of a thousand. I felt like I was being torn apart and killed a thousand times a second for two hours.” This was followed by hours of grand-mal seizures; Ferriss had rug burns on his face the next day. “I thought I had completely fried my motherboard,” he continued. “I remember saying, ‘I will never do this again.’ ” But in the next few months he realized that something astounding had happened to him. “Ninety per cent of the anger I had held on to for decades, since I was a kid, was just gone. Absent.”

Ayahuasca enthusiasts frequently use the language of technology, which may have entered the plant-medicine lexicon because so many people in Silicon Valley are devotees. “Indigenous prophesies point to an imminent polar reversal that will wipe our hard drives clean,” Daniel Pinchbeck wrote in his exploration of ayahuasca, technology, and Mayan millennialism, “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.” In an industry devoted to synthetic products, people are drawn to this natural drug, with its ancient lineage and ritualized use: traditionally, shamans purify the setting by smoking tobacco, playing ceremonial instruments, and chanting icaros—songs that they say come to them from the plants, the way Pentecostals are moved by the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues. “In Silicon Valley, where everyone suffers from neo-mania,” Ferriss continued, “having interactions with songs and rituals that have remained, in some cases, unchanged for hundreds or thousands of years is very appealing.”

Ayahuasca isn’t the only time-honored method of ritual self-mortification, of course; pilgrims seeking an encounter with the divine have a long history of fasting, hair shirts, and flagellation. But in the United States most ayahuasca users are seeking a post-religious kind of spiritualism—or, perhaps, pre-religious, a pagan worship of nature. The Scottish writer and ayahuasca devotee Graham Hancock told me that people from all over the world report similar encounters with the “spirit of the plant”: “She sometimes appears as a jungle cat, sometimes as a huge serpent.” Many speak about ayahuasca as though it were an actual female being: Grandmother.

“Grandmother may not always give you what you want, but she’ll give you what you need,” an ayahuasquera who calls herself Little Owl said, a few months ago, at an informational meeting in a loft in Chinatown. Two dozen people of diverse ages and ethnicities sat on yoga mats eating a potluck vegetarian meal and watching a blurry documentary about ayahuasca. On the screen, a young man recounted a miserable stomach ailment that no Western doctor could heal. After years of torment, he took ayahuasca during a trip to Peru and visualized himself journeying into his own body and removing a terrifying squid from his intestines. The next day, his pain was gone, and it never came back.

After the movie, Little Owl, a fifty-two-year-old of Taiwanese descent with black bangs nearly to her eyebrows, answered questions. “Do your conscious and subconscious work on different frequencies?” a young woman in a tank top wanted to know. “And, if so, which one will Grandmother tap in to?” Little Owl said that Grandmother would address your entire being. A friend of hers, a young African-American man in a knit orange cap who said that he taught mindfulness for a living, was standing by, and Little Owl asked if he had anything to add. “The medicine is like shining a light on whatever conflict needs to be resolved,” he said.

A Caucasian guy in his late twenties asked if there was anyone who shouldn’t take the medicine; he was deciding which friends he should bring to the next ceremony. Little Owl, who has a background in acupuncture, replied that every participant would fill out a detailed health form, and that people who have such conditions as high blood pressure or who are on antidepressants should not take ayahuasca.

An older man with silver hair and a booming voice spoke next: “Do you have doctors or anyone on hand who understands what’s happening on a pharmacological level if something goes wrong?”

There was a tense silence, and then Little Owl replied, “We are healing on a vibrational level.”

A plant is constantly interacting with its ecosystem: attracting insects it needs for pollination, discouraging hungry herbivores, warning other plants that it competes with for nutrients in the soil. It communicates using “messenger molecules,” which allow for semiosis (signalling) and symbiosis (interspecies coöperation), helping the species to improve its circumstances as the process of evolution unfolds. Some of the most important messenger molecules in the plant kingdom are called amines, and are typically derived from amino acids.

The human brain, too, is a kind of complex ecosystem, coördinated by messenger molecules of its own: neurotransmitters, which govern everything from the simple mechanism of pupils dilating in dim light to the unfathomable complexity of consciousness. The neurotransmitters that mediate emotion, awareness, and the creation of meaning are amines—such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine—which evolved from the same molecular antecedents as many plant-messenger molecules.

The main psychoactive substance in ayahuasca—N, N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT—is an amine found in chacruna leaves. Ingested on its own, it has no effect on humans, because it is rapidly degraded by an enzyme in the gut, monoamine oxidase. B. caapi vines, however, happen to contain potent monoamine-oxidase inhibitors (MAOI). Some ayahuasca enthusiasts maintain that the synergy was discovered thousands of years ago, when the spirit of the plants led indigenous people to brew the two together; others think that one day someone happened to drop a chacruna leaf into his B. caapi tea, a psychedelic version of “There’s chocolate in my peanut butter.” However the combination came about, it allows DMT access to the human brain: when a person drinks ayahuasca, a plant-messenger molecule targets the neurons that mediate consciousness, facilitating what devotees describe as a kind of interspecies communication.

If the plant really is talking to the person, many people hear the same thing: we are all one. Some believe that the plants delivering this message are serving their own interests, because if humans think we are one with everything we might be less prone to trash the natural world. In this interpretation, B. caapi and chacruna are the spokesplants for the entire vegetable kingdom.

But this sensation of harmony and interconnection with the universe—what Freud described as the “oceanic feeling”—is also a desirable high, as well as a goal of many spiritual practices. Since 2014, Draulio de Araujo, a researcher at the Brain Institute, in Natal, Brazil, has been investigating the effects of ayahuasca on a group of eighty people, half of whom suffer from severe depression. “If one word comes up, it is ‘tranquillity,’ ” he said. “A lot of our individuals, whether they are depressed or not, have a sense of peace after the experience.”

Having studied fMRIs and EEGs of subjects on ayahuasca, Araujo thinks that the brain’s “default-mode network”—the system that burbles with thought, mulling the past and the future, while your mind isn’t focussed on a task—is temporarily relieved of its duties. Meanwhile, the thalamus, which is involved in awareness, is activated. The change in the brain, he notes, is similar to the one that results from years of meditation.

Dennis McKenna told me, “In shamanism, the classic theme is death and rebirth—you are reborn in a new configuration. The neuroscientific interpretation is exactly the same: the default-mode network is disrupted, and maybe things that were mucking up the works are left behind when everything comes back together.”

In the early nineties, McKenna, Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center, and James Callaway, a pharmaceutical chemist, conducted a study in Manaus, Brazil, that investigated the effects of ayahuasca on long-term users. Fifteen men who had taken part in bimonthly ceremonies for at least a decade were compared with a control group of people with similar backgrounds. The researchers drew blood from the subjects and assessed the white blood cells, which are powerful indicators of the condition of the central nervous system. (McKenna told me, “In psychopharmacology, we say, ‘If it’s going on in the platelets, it’s probably going on in the brain.’ ”) They found that the serotonin reuptake transporters—the targets that many contemporary antidepressants work on—were elevated among habitual ayahuasca drinkers. “We thought, What does this mean?” McKenna said. They couldn’t find any research on people with abnormally high levels of the transporters, but there was an extensive body of literature on low levels: the condition is common among those with intractable depression, and in people who suffer from Type 2 alcoholism, which is associated with bouts of violent behavior. “We thought, Holy shit! Is it possible that the ayahuasca actually reverses these deficits over the long term?” McKenna pointed out that no other known drug has this effect. “There’s only one other instance of a factor that affects this upregulation—and that’s aging.” He wondered if ayahuasca is imparting something to its drinkers that we associate with maturity: wisdom.

Charles Grob told me, “Some of these guys were leading disreputable lives and they became radically transformed—responsible pillars of their community.” But, he noted, the men were taking ayahuasca as part of a religious ceremony: their church, União do Vegetal, is centered on integrating the ayahuasca experience into everyday life. Grob cautioned, “You have to take it with a facilitator who has some knowledge, experience, and ethics.” In unregulated ceremonies, several women have been molested, and at times people have turned violent. Last year, during a ceremony at an ayahuasca center in Iquitos, Peru, a young British man started brandishing a kitchen knife and yelling; a Canadian man who was also on ayahuasca wrestled it from him and stabbed him to death.

Grob speculated that the shaman in that case had spiked the ayahuasca. Often, when things go wrong, it is after a plant called datura is added to the pharmacological mix. “Maybe facilitators think, Oh, Americans will get more bang for their buck,” Grob said. He also wondered if the knife-wielding British man had been suffering a psychotic break: like many hallucinogens, ayahuasca is thought to have the potential to trigger initial episodes in people who are predisposed to them.

Problems can also arise if someone takes ayahuasca—with its potent MAOI—on top of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a common class of antidepressants. The simultaneous blocking of serotonin uptake and serotonin degradation encourages enormous amounts of the neurotransmitter to flood the synapses. The outcome can be disastrous: a condition called serotonin syndrome, which starts with shivering, diarrhea, hyperthermia, and palpitations and can progress to muscular rigidity, convulsions, and even death. “I get calls from family members or friends of people who seem to be in a persistent state of confusion,” Grob said. He had just received a desperate e-mail from the mother of a young woman who had become disoriented in the midst of a ceremony. “She ran off from where she was, and when she was found she was having breathing difficulties and is now having what appears to be a P.T.S.D. reaction.”

These cases are rare, but profoundly upsetting trips are common. People on ayahuasca regularly report experiencing their own death; one man told Araujo that he had a terrifying visualization of being trapped in a coffin. “There are some people who are getting damaged from it because they’re not using it the right way,” Dennis McKenna warned. “It’s a psychotherapeutic process: if they don’t integrate the stuff that comes up, it can be very traumatic. That’s the whole thing with ayahuasca—or any psychedelic, really. Set and setting is all-important: they’ve been telling us this since Leary! It’s not to be treated lightly.”

Williamsburg was throbbing with sound on the warm June evening when I went to an ayahuasca ceremony led by Little Owl. It was held in a windowless yoga studio next to a thumping dance club, and in the antechamber—a makeshift gym where we were told to leave our bags, amid worn wrestling mats and free weights—you could hear the sounds of drunk people in nearby McCarren Park, mixing with techno beats from next door. The studio’s bathroom shared a locked door with the club, and patrons kept hurling themselves against it, trying to get in.

But inside the studio it was surprisingly quiet. There were trees and vines painted on the walls, and about twenty women had set themselves up on yoga mats in a tight circle, some of them with significant piles of pillows and sleeping bags. Everyone was wearing white, which is what you’re supposed to do at an ayahuasca ceremony, except for a young woman who had on wild jungle-printed pants. My grooviest friend, Siobhan, a British painter, had agreed to come—“Is it crazy I’m spending money on white pants right now?” she had texted me, earlier that day—and we grinned at each other from across the room. We had carefully followed the dieta that Little Owl, like most ayahuasqueros, recommends for the week before a ceremony: no meat, no salt or sugar, no coffee, no booze. Siobhan and I were both pleased that at the very least this experience would be slimming.

The woman to my right, a twenty-five-year-old African-American I’ll call Molly, had put a little grouping of crystals on the edge of her mat. It was her first ceremony, she said, and she had chosen this one because it was exclusively female. The young woman next to Molly told us that she had done ayahuasca in Peru. “With men around, the energy gets really erratic,” she said. “This will be much more peaceful, vibrationally.”

Little Owl had set up a perch for herself at the back wall, surrounded by bird feathers, crystals, flutes, drums, and wooden rattles, bottles of potions, and a pack of baby wipes. She explained that her helper, a young Asian-American woman she referred to as “our helper angel,” would collect our cell phones and distribute buckets for the purge: smiling orange plastic jack-o’-lanterns, like the ones that kids use for trick-or-treating. One at a time, we went into the front room to be smudged with sage on the wrestling mats by a woman in her sixties with the silver hair and beatific smile of a Latina Mrs. Claus. When she finished waving her smoking sage at me and said, “I hope you have a beautiful journey,” I was so moved by her radiant good will that I nearly burst into tears.

Once we were all smudged and back in our circle, Little Owl dimmed the lights. “You are the real shaman,” she said. “I am just your servant.”

When it was my turn to drink the little Dixie cup of muck she presented, I was stunned that divine consciousness—or really anything—could smell quite so foul: as if it had already been vomited up, by someone who’d been on a steady dieta of tar, bile, and fermented wood pulp. But I forced it down, and I was stoked. I was going to visit the swampland of my soul, make peace with death, and become one with the universe.

Soon thereafter, the woman on my left began to moan. To my right, the woman next to Molly had started retching, and the woman beyond her was crying—softly at first, and then in full-throated, passionate sobs. Little Owl, meanwhile, was chanting and sometimes playing her instruments.

I felt a tingling in my hands not unlike the early-morning symptoms of my carpal-tunnel syndrome. I focussed on my breath, as everyone I’d interviewed had said to do, and then, for fun, I started thinking about the people I love, arranging them first alphabetically and then hierarchically, as the people around me puked and wailed in the dark and Little Owl sang and played her little flute.

It seemed as though hardly any time had passed when she announced that anyone who wasn’t feeling the medicine yet should drink again. My second Dixie cup was even worse than the first, because I knew what to expect: I barely made it back to my jack-o’-lantern in time to throw up. As I was wiping my mouth on a tissue, the girl across the room whose wild printed pants I had noticed started hollering, “I love you!” Some of us giggled a little. She kept at it, with growing intensity: “I love you so much! It feels so good!” The helper angel went over to calm her, and those of us who still had our wits about us said “Sh-h,” soothingly and then, as the screaming got louder, resentfully. All of a sudden, she was on her feet, flailing. “I’ve eaten so many animals!” she screamed. “And I loved them all!”

It was the flailing that got to me. I thought of the girl whose parents had called Charles Grob and the Canadian kid who stabbed his associate in Iquitos. Any second now, I would be descending into the pit of my being, seeing serpents, experiencing my own death or birth—or something—and I did not necessarily want that to happen in a windowless vomitorium while a millennial in crazy pants had her first psychotic episode. Her yelling was getting weirder: “I want to eat sex!” I got up and went into the front room with the wrestling mats, where I tried to think peaceful thoughts and take deep, cleansing breaths.

Siobhan came out a minute later. “Bloody hell!” she said. She did not look entirely O.K.

“All the animals!” Crazypants yelled in the other room.

“Let’s focus on our breath,” I told Siobhan, as the club music pounded next door.

“We’re supposed to be doing this in the flipping jungle,” she said, sitting down next to me on the wrestling mat. I thought about mosquitoes and Iquitos and felt that, actually, it was probably for the best that we weren’t.

Another woman came out of the ceremony. “I’m not fucking feeling anything!” she said. She had pink hair and a nose ring and looked like a ratty Uma Thurman. “This is fucked!”

“I want to feel the animals!” the girl screamed.

“Those are some bad vibes in there,” Pink Uma said. “I’m very sensitive to vibrations.”

“You don’t exactly have to be a tuning fork,” I told her.

“Sex and meat and love are one!”

I demanded that we get in a positive space—quickly. We all sat cross-legged on the mats, trying to focus on our breath.

But more women came out of the ceremony. “I miss my sister; I don’t like this,” said one, who had clearly been crying, a lot. An older woman with long gray hair seemed panicked, but soon started laughing uncontrollably. “I used to live on the houseboats in San Francisco in the sixties,” she told us. “But all we did was grass.”

“Maybe not so much talking,” Siobhan said.

“Let’s all sit down,” I said, in an aggressively serene voice that I realized I was borrowing from my mother, who is a shiatsu masseuse. “Let’s all have a nice trip now.”

Then the helper angel came out and asked us not to talk. “She’s shushing us?” Siobhan whispered, as Crazypants kept yelling and the club music hammered away.

“Listen,” I said, in my peaceful, bossy voice. “I think that girl is having a psychotic episode and it’s time to call 911.”

“Not necessarily,” Helper Angel said. This happened from time to time, she explained: the young woman with the pants was just having a “strong reaction to the medicine.” I asked how she could tell it wasn’t something requiring immediate medical intervention, and the angel replied, “Intuition.”

And what did I know? I’d never done ayahuasca, or even seen anyone else who was on it. She did this all the time! It was getting very crowded on the wrestling mats and the music was so loud next door and the woman who’d lived on the houseboats was talking about Haight-Ashbury and cackling. Siobhan and I went back to our spots in the ceremony.

The smell inside the yoga studio was not great. But Pants Girl was yelling only intermittently now, and Little Owl was strumming a guitar and singing her version of “Let It Be”: “When I find myself in times of trouble / Mother Aya comes to me.”

It occurred to me that this wasn’t working—that nothing was working, and now I would have to find another hippie to give me this disgusting drug all over again. And then maybe my default-mode network shut down for a second, or maybe I had a surge of serotonin, but for whatever reason the whole thing abruptly seemed hilarious, fascinating, perfect. I thought of my grandmother—Tanya Levin, not ayahuasca—who had recently done some hallucinating herself when she took too much heart medication and saw bugs everywhere laughing at her, and it didn’t seem like such a tragedy that I wasn’t having any visions. Maybe the ayahuasca was working: maybe this was the experience I was meant to have.

“Help,” I heard Molly, the young woman to my right, squeak.

“You need help getting to the bathroom?” I whispered. Some people had been stumbling when they tried to get up and walk.

“No, I just need . . . some assistance,” she said, her voice shaking with barely contained desperation. Helper Angel was still busy with Pants on the other side of the room. So I held Molly’s hand. I told her that she wasn’t going crazy, that we were just on drugs, and that everything was going to be fine. “Please don’t leave me,” she said, and started to sob. I told her to sit up and focus on her breath. Little Owl was drumming now, and chanting, “You are the shaman in your life,” in a vaguely Native American way.

“Please say more words,” Molly whispered.

I did, and Molly seemed to calm down, and pretty soon I was thinking that I was indeed the shaman in my life, and a downright decent one at that. It was at that moment that Molly leaned forward and let loose the Victoria Falls of vomit. She missed her jack-o’-lantern entirely and made our little corner of the room into a puke lagoon.

Just as when you stub your toe and there is an anticipatory moment before you actually feel the pain, I waited to feel the rage and disgust that experience told me would be my natural response to another person barfing all over me. But it never came. I thought of something Dennis McKenna wrote in his diary in 1967, about the effect that DMT was having on him. “I have tried to be more aware of beauty,” he wrote. “I have enjoyed the world more and hated myself less.” I sat there in Molly’s upchuck, listening to Little Owl’s singing, punctuated by the occasional shriek of “No more animals!” And I felt content and vaguely delighted and temporarily free. ♦
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