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. ♦
Ariel Levy joined The New Yorker as a staff
writer in 2008. Her subjects for the magazine have included the South African
runner Caster Semenya, the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the
swimmer Diana Nyad, and Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case
that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act. Levy received the National
Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for her piece “Thanksgiving in
Mongolia,” which will appear in the 2014 “Best American Essays” anthology; she
is currently expanding the essay into a book. Levy teaches at the Fine Arts
Work Center, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, every summer, and was a Visiting
Critic at the American Academy in Rome in 2012. She is the author of “Female
Chauvinist Pigs.” Before joining The New Yorker, she was a contributing
editor at New York for twelve years.
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De THE NEW YORKER, 12/09/2016
Ilustración: BJØRN LIE
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