The Cosmic Serpent Page 5

  It is true that not all of the world’s indigenous people use hallucinogenic plants. Even in the Amazon, there are forms of shamanism based on techniques other than the ingestion of hallucinogens; but in Western Amazonia, which includes the Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Colombian part of the basin, it is hard to find a culture that does not use an entire panoply of psychoactive plants. According to one inventory, there are seventy-two ayahuasca-using cultures in Western Amazonia.11

  Richard Evans Schultes, the foremost ethnobotanist of the twentieth century, writes about the healers of a region in Colombia that he considers to be one of the centers of Western Amazonian shamanism: “The medicine men of the Kamsá and Inga tribes of the Valley of Sibundoy have an unusually extensive knowledge of medicinal and toxic plants.... One of the most renowned is Salvador Chindoy, who insists that his knowledge of the medicinal value of plants has been taught to him by the plants themselves through the hallucinations he has experienced in his long lifetime as a medicine man.”12

  Schultes does not say anything further about the hallucinatory origin of the botanical expertise of Amazonian people, because there is nothing one can say without contradicting two fundamental principles of Western knowledge.

  First, hallucinations cannot be the source of real information, because to consider them as such is the definition of psychosis. Western knowledge considers hallucinations to be at best illusions, at worst morbid phenomena.13

  Second, plants do not communicate like human beings. Scientific theories of communication consider that only human beings use abstract symbols like words and pictures and that plants do not relay information in the form of mental images.14 For science, the human brain is the source of hallucinations, which psychoactive plants merely trigger by way of the hallucinogenic molecules they contain.

  It was in Rio that I realized the extent of the dilemma posed by the hallucinatory knowledge of indigenous people. On the one hand, its results are empirically confirmed and used by the pharmaceutical industry; on the other hand, its origin cannot be discussed scientifically because it contradicts the axioms of Western knowledge.

  When I understood that the enigma of plant communication was a blind spot for science, I felt the call to conduct an in-depth investigation of the subject. Furthermore, I had been carrying the mystery of plant communication around since my stay with the Ashaninca, and I knew that explorations of contradictions in science often yield fruitful results. Finally, it seemed to me that the establishment of a serious dialogue with indigenous people on ecology and botany required that this question be addressed.

  AFTER RIO, I knew that I wanted to write a book on the subject. My original intention was simply to name the enigma and to establish an exploratory map of the following cul-de-sac, or paradox: We can use their knowledge, but as soon as we reach the question of its origin, we must turn back.

  By drinking ayahuasca in Quirishari, I had gone beyond the signs saying “you have reached the limits of science” and had found an irrational and subjective territory that was terrifying, yet filled with information. So I knew that the cul-de-sac had a passage that is normally hidden from the rational gaze and that leads to a world of surprising power.

  However, I did not imagine for an instant that I could solve the enigma. I was convinced that I was dealing with an essentially paradoxical phenomenon that was not subject to solution.

  Chapter 5

  DEFOCALIZING

  Twelve months after the Rio conference a publisher accepted my proposal for a book on Amazonian shamanism and ecology. I was going to call it Ecological hallucinations. Several weeks later my employer agreed to let me spend part of my time working on the book.

  I was set to investigate the enigma of plant communication. But where was I to begin?

  My initial impulse would have been to return to the Peruvian Amazon and spend some time with the ayahuasqueros. However, my life had changed. I was no longer a free-roaming anthropologist, but the father of two young children. I was going to have to conduct my investigation from my office and the nearest library, rather than from the forests of Peru.

  I started by rereading my fieldnotes and the transcripts of the Carlos Perez Shuma interviews. I paid particular attention to the strange passages I had left out of my thesis. Then, given that writing is an extension of thinking, I drafted a preliminary version of a first chapter on my arrival in Quirishari and my initial ayahuasca experience.

  During this immersion in mysterious moments of my past, I started thinking about what Carlos had said. What if I took him literally? What if it were true that nature speaks in signs and that the secret to understanding its language consists in noticing similarities in shape or in form? I liked this idea and decided to read the anthropological texts on shamanism paying attention not only to their content but to their style. I taped a note on the wall of my office: “Look at the FORM.”

  One thing became clear as I thought back to my stay in Quirishari. Every time I had doubted one of my consultants’ explanations, my understanding of the Ashaninca view of reality had seized up; conversely, on the rare occasions that I had managed to silence my doubts, my understanding of local reality had been enhanced—as if there were times when one had to believe in order to see, rather than the other way around.

  This realization led me to decide, now that I was trying to map the cul-de-sac of hallucinatory knowledge, that it would be useful not only to establish its limits from a rational perspective, but to suspend disbelief and note with equal seriousness the outline of the ayahuasqueros’ notions on the other side of the apparent impasse.

  I read for weeks. I started by refreshing my memory and going over the basic texts of anthropology as well as the discipline’s new, self-critical vein. Then I devoured the literature on shamanism, which was new to me. I had not read as much since my doctoral examinations nine years previously and was pleased to rediscover this purely abstract level of reality. With an enthusiasm that I never had at university I took hundreds of pages of reading notes, which I then categorized.

  Five months into my investigation, my wife and I visited friends who introduced us during the evening to a book containing colorful “three-dimensional images” made up of seemingly disordered dots. To see a coherent and “3-D” image emerge from the blur, one had to defocalize one’s gaze. “Let your eyes go,” our hostess told me, “as if you were looking through the book without seeing it. Relax into the blur and be patient.” After several attempts, and seemingly by magic, a remarkably deep stereogram sprang out of the page that I was holding in front of me. It showed a dolphin leaping in the waves. As soon as I focused normally on the page, the dolphin disappeared, along with the waves in front of it and behind it, and all I could see were muddled dots again.

  This experience reminded me of Bourdieu’s phrase “to objectify one’s objectifying relationship,” which is another way of saying “to become aware of one’s gaze.” That is precisely what one had to do in order to see the stereogram. This made me think that my dissatisfaction with the anthropological studies of shamanism was perhaps due to the necessarily focalized perspective of academic anthropologists, who failed to grasp shamanic phenomena in the same way that the normal gaze failed to see “three-dimensional images.” Was there perhaps a way of relaxing one’s gaze and seeing shamanism more clearly?

  During the following weeks I continued reading, while trying to relax my gaze and pay attention to the texts’ style, as much as to their content. Then I started writing a preliminary version of a second chapter on anthropology and shamanism. One afternoon, as I was writing, I suddenly saw a strikingly coherent image emerge from the muddle, as in a stereogram: Most anthropologists who had studied shamanism had only seen their own shadow. This went for the schizophrenics, the creators of order, the jacks-of-all-trades, and the creators of disorder.

  This vision shook me. I felt that I had finally found a warm trail. Without wasting time, I continued in the same direction.

  As I felt certain that
the enigma of hallucinatory knowledge was only an apparent dead end, and as I was trying to suspend disbelief, I started wondering whether I might not be able to find a solution after all. The passage that led to the shamanic world was certainly hidden from normal vision, but perhaps there was a way of perceiving it stereoscopically. ...

  Speculating in this way, I realized that the hallucinations I had seen in Quirishari could also be described as three-dimensional images invisible to a normal gaze. According to my Ashaninca friends, it was precisely by reaching the hallucinatory state of consciousness that one crossed the impasse. For them, there was no fundamental contradiction between the practical reality of their life in the rainforest and the invisible and irrational world of ayahuasqueros. On the contrary, it was by going back and forth between these two levels that one could bring back useful and verifiable knowledge that was otherwise unobtainable. This proved to me that it was possible to reconcile these two apparently distinct worlds.

  I also felt that I needed to improve my defocalization skills in order to succeed. I live not far from a castle that belonged to the family of Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes investigations. During my youth, I had often admired the famous detective’s “lateral” methods, where he would lock himself into his office and play discordant tunes on his violin late into the night—to emerge with the key to the mystery. In the wintry fogs of the Swiss plateau, I started following Holmes’s example. Once the children were in bed, I would go down to my office and get to work with hypnotically dissonant music playing in the background. 1

  Some evenings I would go further. Given that walking makes thinking easier, I would dress up warmly and go for strolls in the misty darkness with my tape recorder. Accompanied only by the rhythm of my boot heels, I would think aloud about all the imaginable solutions to the enigma that was beginning to obsess me. The following day I would transcribe these nebulous soliloquies looking for new perspectives. Some passages truly helped me understand where I was trying to go: “You must defocalize your gaze so as to perceive science and the indigenous vision at the same time. Then the common ground between the two will appear in the form of a stereogram. ...”

  My social life became nonexistent. Apart from a few hours in the afternoon with my children, I spent most of my time reading and thinking. My wife started saying I was absent even when I was in the room. She was right, and I could not hear her because I was obsessed. The more I advanced with this unusual methodology, the fresher the trail seemed.

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, I went over the scientific literature on hallucinogens and their supposed effects on the human brain.

  Here is a fact I learned during my reading: We do not know how our visual system works. As you read these words, you do not really see the ink, the paper, your hands, and the surroundings, but an internal and three-dimensional image that reproduces them almost exactly and that is constructed by your brain. The photons reflected by this page strike the retinas of your eyes, which transform them into electrochemical information; the optic nerves relay this information to the visual cortex at the back of the head, where a cascade-like network of nerve cells separates the input into categories (form, color, movement, depth, etc.). How the brain goes about reuniting these sets of categorized information into a coherent image is still a mystery. This also means that the neurological basis of consciousness is unknown.2

  If we do not know how we see a real object in front of us, we understand even less how we perceive something that is not there. When a person hallucinates, there is no external source of visual stimulation, which, of course, is why cameras do not pick up hallucinatory images.

  Strangely, and with few exceptions, these basic facts are not mentioned in the thousands of scientific studies on hallucinations; in books with titles such as Origin and mechanisms of hallucinations, experts provide partial and mainly hypothetical answers, which they formulate in complicated terms, giving the impression that they have attained the objective truth, or are about to do so.3

  The neurological pathways of hallucinogens are better understood than the mechanisms of hallucinations. During the 1950s, researchers discovered that the chemical composition of most hallucinogens closely resembles that of serotonin, a hormone produced by the human brain and used as a chemical messenger between brain cells. They hypothesized that hallucinogens act on consciousness by fitting into the same cerebral receptors as serotonin, “like similar keys fitting the same lock.”4

  LSD, a synthetic compound unknown in nature, does not have the same profile as the organic molecules such as dimethyltryptamine or psilocybin. Nevertheless, the great majority of clinical investigations focused on LSD, which was considered to be the most powerful of all hallucinogens, given that only 50-millionths of a gram brings on its effects.5

  In the second half of the 1960s, hallucinogens became illegal in the Western world. Shortly thereafter, scientific studies of these substances, which had been so prolific during the previous two decades, were stopped across the board. Ironically it was around this time that several researchers pointed out that, according to science’s strict criteria, LSD most often does not induce true hallucinations, where the images are confused with reality. People under the influence of LSD nearly always know that the visual distortions or the cascades of dots and colors that they perceive are not real, but are due to the action of a psychedelic agent. In this sense, LSD is “pseudo-hallucinogenic.”6

  So the scientific studies of hallucinogens focused mainly on a product that is not really hallucinogenic; researchers neglected the natural substances, which have been used for thousands of years by hundreds of peoples, in favor of a synthetic compound invented in a twentieth-century laboratory.7

  In 1979, it was discovered that the human brain seems to secrete dimethyltryptamine—which is also one of the active ingredients of ayahuasca. This substance produces true hallucinations, in which the visions replace normal reality convincingly, such as fluorescent snakes to whom one excuses oneself as one steps over them. Unfortunately, scientific research on dimethyltryptamine is rare. To this day, the clinical studies of its effects on “normal” human beings can be counted on the fingers of one hand.8

  AS I READ, the seasons turned. Suddenly winter gave way to spring, and the days began getting longer. I had just spent six full months focusing on other people’s writings. Now I felt the time had come to pause momentarily, and then to start writing my book.

  Making the most of the first warm spell of the year, I took a day off and went walking in a nature reserve with my tape recorder. The buds were starting to open, springs were gushing everywhere, and I was hoping that my ideas would do the same.

  It had become clear to me that ayahuasqueros were somehow gaining access in their visions to verifiable information about plant properties. Therefore, I reasoned, the enigma of hallucinatory knowledge could be reduced to one question: Was this information coming from inside the human brain, as the scientific point of view would have it, or from the outside world of plants, as shamans claimed?

  Both of these perspectives seemed to present advantages and drawbacks.

  On the one hand, the similarity between the molecular profiles of the natural hallucinogens and of serotonin seemed well and truly to indicate that these substances work like keys fitting into the same lock inside the brain. However, I could not agree with the scientific position according to which hallucinations are merely discharges of images stocked in compartments of the subconscious memory. I was convinced that the enormous fluorescent snakes that I had seen thanks to ayahuasca did not correspond in any way to anything that I could have dreamed of, even in my most extreme nightmares. Furthermore, the speed and coherence of some of the hallucinatory images exceeded by many degrees the best rock videos, and I knew that I could not possibly have filmed them.9

  On the other hand, I was finding it increasingly easy to suspend disbelief and consider the indigenous point of view as potentially correct. After all, there were all kinds of gaps and con
tradictions in the scientific knowledge of hallucinogens, which had at first seemed so reliable: Scientists do not know how these substances affect our consciousness, nor have they studied true hallucinogens in any detail. It no longer seemed unreasonable to me to consider that the information about the molecular content of plants could truly come from the plants themselves, just as ayahuasqueros claimed. However, I failed to see how this could work concretely.

  With these thoughts in mind, I interrupted my stroll and sat down, resting my back against a big tree. Then I tried to enter into communication with it. I closed my eyes and breathed in the damp vegetal scent in the air. I waited for a form of communication to appear on my mental screen—but I ended up perceiving nothing more than the agreeable feeling of immersion in sunshine and fertile nature.

  After about ten minutes, I stood up and resumed walking. Suddenly my thoughts turned again to stereograms. Maybe I would find the answer by looking at both perspectives simultaneously, with one eye on science and the other on shamanism. The solution would therefore consist in posing the question differently: It was not a matter of asking whether the source of hallucinations is internal or external, but of considering that it might be both at the same time. I could not see how this idea would work in practice, but I liked it because it reconciled two points of view that were apparently divergent.

  The path I was following led to a crystalline cascade gushing out of a limestone cliff. The water was sparkling and tasted like champagne.

  THE NEXT DAY I returned to my office with renewed energy. All I had to do was classify my reading notes on Amazonian shamanism and then I could start writing. However, before getting down to this task, I decided to spend a day following my fancy, freely paging through the piles of articles and notes that I had accumulated over the months.