Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (50 page)

In this imaginal world, Jung began to confront and question the figures
who appeared to him; and, to Jung's surprise, those imaginal persons replied
to him in turn. "Near the steep slope of a rock," Jung says, "I caught sight of
two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl. I summoned up my courage and approached them as though they were real people,
and listened attentively to what they told me." And again: "I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I
observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I."52

One of these imaginal people, a wise pagan whom Jung named Philemon,
"seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality." Philemon spoke
to Jung as follows: "He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself,
but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room,
or birds in the air." It was this imaginal Philemon who taught Jung the reality
of the psyche-"that there is something in me which can say things that I do
not know and do not intend. "53

Visionary Experiences

Active imagination shares important characteristics with a number of other
experiences, often considered to be anomalous. Hallucinations, lucid dreams,
DIM journeys, out-of-body experiences, false awakenings, waking dreams,
apparitions, eidetic visualization, and active imagination are all characterized by a greater or lesser degree of presentness, detail, externality, and three dimensional explorable spacefulness. We may call these, collectively, visionary
experiences. Specifically, visionary experiences

• occur with the force of a present perception of external reality;

• have what appears to be the same quantity and quality of sensory
detail as ordinary experiences;

• are experienced as external to the experiencer;

• occur in what seems to the experiencer to be an extended, threedimensional, explorable perceptual space; and

• frequently involve interactions with apparently autonomous others.

We can, further, distinguish overlapping visionary experiences from total
ones. An overlapping vision appears to occur within the otherwise normal
perception of the environment-the monkey on the neurologist's lap, an
apparition in the hallway, cast-iron lawn furniture in front of a jungle hut. A
total vision substitutes an entirely different perceptual space for the ordinary environment-a lucid dreamer floating down a staircase; a runner hovering, looking down at her own body during a marathon; a vision of a golden
child standing by a garbage-strewn empty lot. Either type of visionary experience may be multisensorial, incorporating vision, sound, and kinesthesia. Of
course, there can be ambiguity. I may seem to awaken in my darkened room to
see a figure standing in front of the dresser by the bed. If I have in fact awakened, then the figure appears to occur in my normal perceptual space; if this
is, instead, a false awakening, and I am in fact dreaming, then clearly the vision
has constructed not only the figure but my room as well.

Visionary Experiences

Sometimes these sorts of visionary experience are called anomalous experiences, and have generally been ignored or pathologized by mainstream psychology. Recently, however, largely through the influence of Stanley Krippner,
researchers have begun to pay more attention to these states, and the American
Psychological Association has published a text entitled Varieties of Anomalous
Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, which contains chapters on hallucinatory experiences, lucid dreaming, and out-of-body experiences, among
other things.'

Eidetic visualization-the deliberate mental creation of minutely detailed
three-dimensional landscapes, deities, and other beings-has been little investigated and has generally not been included among such anomalous experiences. Yet the practice is widespread, and lies at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist ritual
meditation.' Interestingly, Jung disliked eidetic visualization, which he called
"voluntary imagination," considering it, in contrast to active imagination, to be
superficial and trivia[ .3

Psychologists Celia Green and Charles McCreery have characterized all such
experiences, both overlapping and total, as metachoric, in the sense that, even
where portions of the experience appear to occur in ordinary perceptual space,
in fact the entire perceptual field has been replaced with a visionary one.4

NOTES

1. Cardefia, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000.

2. Beyer, 1973, pp. 68-81.

3. Casey, 2000, p. 213; Jung, 1921/1953-1977, p. 428.

4. Green, 1990; Green & McCreery, 1994, pp. 55-62; McCreery, 2006, p. 7.

Total visionary experiences convey the sense of being in an explorable environment, often in the presence of autonomous other-than-human persons.
This sense has been discussed, in particular, by analysts describing active
imagination-a world they call imaginal, and which I have here called visionary. For example, transpersonal psychologist John Rowan says, "It is crucial
to understand that the imaginal world has a reality of its own, within the four
walls of its own realm."54 Here, Hillman says, "we have to engage with persons whose autonomy may radically alter, even dominate our thoughts and
feelings."55 Psychologist Mary Watkins says that one creates for oneself a
home in the imagina1.56 "The imaginal world," says Rowan, "is a world where
real things happen."57 Henry Corbin, a scholar of Sufism and Persian Islam,
calls this visionary world the mundus imaginalis, "a very precise order of reality,
which corresponds to a precise mode of perception. "51

The same descriptions would fit a wide variety of total visionary experiences.
People move through explorable landscapes-along a country road, through
unfamiliar streets, high enough in the air to see the tops of the trees and small
hills.59 They interact with objects and people-push open a door, carry on a
conversation, confront an angry father.'° They turn corners and see unexpected
things-a small chapel, a war memorial, a sunlit glade.', Unexpected events
occur-a sparrow alights on one's hand, something with pointed ears scurries away, the hands of a clock suddenly move.12 These descriptions come from
active imagination, lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, and false awakenings, but they have a striking phenomenological consistency.

These visionary experiences can also be characterized along two dimensions-first, according to the degree to which the experience is entered into
intentionally; and, second, by the amount of control the experiencer exercises
over the content of the experience. Active imagination would be high in intentionality and low on control; eidetic visualization would be high on both; and
a Charles Bonnet hallucination would typically be low on both.

The same type of experience may occur at different points along these dimensions on different occasions. Hallucinations of the deceased are a commonly documented part of the grief reaction.63 Such experiences are typically
low on intention but may vary on control, to the extent that the bereaved attempts, for example, to engage the deceased in conversation or perhaps even
attempts to call the deceased for purposes of communication. A lucid dreamer may-or may not-be able to control the actions of dream objects and persons, or be able to do so to varying degrees.

Several things follow from this discussion. First, it seems that ayahuasca
experiences specifically, and shamanic experiences generally, fall within the
class of visionary experiences. Shamanism seems to rank high on intentionality and relatively low on control, like active imagination. While the shaman
can control his or her own actions while interacting with the spirits, the shaman has no direct control over the actions of the spirits; the shaman can ask a
question, ask for help, even demand compliance, but most commonly cannot
compel a particular response.

Tying shamanism to such experiences as lucid dreaming, active imagination, and eidetic visualization raises a number of interesting questions. Apart
from their phenomenology, what do they have in common? To the extent
that, at the time of experiencing them, they are convincing, detailed, explorable, then the line between the visionary and the everyday worlds is fluid, as
source-monitoring experiments seem to show, and the line is shifted by culture, training, experience, and ayahuasca. El doctor, the teacher, teaches us to
de-reify the world, to personify, to mythologize-to obliterate the boundaries,
construct a visionary world from the detritus of the everyday, let us see through,
turn the world into metaphor, into magic.

AYAHUASCA AND THE SPIRITS

These discussions of misattribution, construction, and the visionary provide
a framework within which we can begin to think about the spirits shown to
us by ayahuasca. First, the gap-filling qualities of ayahuasca are similar toindeed, perhaps the same as-the gap-filling processes that are arguably the
basis of every perception. What ayahuasca adds, then, is a reduction in the intensity of our source monitoring-precisely what Hillman calls soul-making,
the relaxing of our stream of ontological judgments. The intensity of source
monitoring is learned behavior, culturally determined; and what we see, in this
luminous fused space, are precisely the spirits-and even our departed loved
ones-to teach us what we do not know.

Here, then, is a model for understanding ayahuasca, for steering between ontological categories. If we are peopled by the gods just as we are peopled
by voices, ayahuasca uses the raw material of the visual world to construct
the outward manifestation of our inward reality. With ayahuasca, Socrates'
daemon not only speaks but appears, to teach or terrify, constructed out of
the ambiguous forms, the visual detritus of our own jungles. Is this what ayahuasca teaches, that the world is magical?

Endogenous DMT

DMT is widely distributed in the natural world. It is found, in the Amazon Basin,
in the ayahuasca companion plants chacruna, sameruca, and ocoyage; in several trees in the genus Virola, from whose sap the hallucinogenic snuff epena is
made; and in the tree Anadenanthera peregrina, source of the hallucinogenic
snuff yopo.' In North America, it is found in such trees and shrubs as Mimosa
hosti(is, Acacia spp., and Desmanthus il/inoensis and in such grasses asArundo
donax and Pha(aris tuberosa. It is also found, endogenously, in mice, rats, and
human beings.

No one seems quite sure what to make of this last fact. DMT has been identified in human blood, urine, brain tissue, and cerebrospinal fluid;3 it apparently
passes easily into the brain through the blood-brain barrier.4At first glance, the
presence of DMT in the human body seems surprising-almost as surprising as
the fact that bufotenine, the psychoactive toad venom, is found in human urine
as well .5

But, in fact, the human body is full of tryptamines, including melatonin and
the ubiquitous serotonin, all chemically related to the dietary amino acid tryptophan. Bufotenine and DMT are both formed from serotonin and tryptamine
by the enzyme indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, which is ubiquitously
present in human nonneural tissues.' Trace levels of endogenous psychoactive
tryptamines thus appear to be the result of normal metabolic processes. The
question is: Do they do anything?

The answer is: No one knows. In 1988, psychopharmacologist Jace Callaway-now well known as a member of the Hoasca Project studying the use of
ayahuasca by the Uniao do Vegetal in Brazil-proposed that, at night, serotonin
becomes converted into DMT by the pineal gland and plays a central role in activating dreams?

Psychopharmacologist Rick Strassman also thinks that the source of endogenous DMT is the pineal gland-coincidentally, the organ Rene Descartes considered the seat of the soul and the place where all our thoughts are formed.
The pineal produces serotonin, melatonin, and (3-carbolines, all with the same
tryptamine core as DMT. So why not DMT as well?

Strassman claims that this pineal DMT has a variety of important effects.
Given the avidity with which the brain draws DMT across the blood-brain barrier,
he believes that endogenous DMT must be necessary for normal brain functioning.8 He has proposed that a wide variety of anomalous experiences-psychotic
hallucinations, mystical visions, alien-abduction experiences, and near-death
experiences-are the result of abnormally high DMT levels in the brain9 In addition, high levels of DMT "may help mediate some of the more profound mental
experiences people undergo"-that is, "mystical or spiritual experiences" such
as those during birth, just before death, and in deep meditation.'° Even more,
he hypothesized that the "individual life force" enters the human fetus through
its pineal gland and departs the body at death by the same route, each time triggering the release of a flood of DMT."

As far as I know, these ideas remain speculative and unsupported by empirical research. For example, comparison of urine in people with schizophrenia and
controls without schizophrenia has failed to show any systematic differences in
DMT levels.' I know of no research comparing, say, blood DMT levels in normal controls and subjects immediately postpartum or postmortem, or in normal
controls and persons in deep meditative states, or in dreaming and nondreaming sleepers, all of which ought to be relatively simple to do. There is also the
question of whether endogenous DMT is supposed to have similar psychoactive
functions in mice and rats.

Such speculations, too, have been dismissed on the grounds that the trace
levels of AMT and other endogenous psychoactive tryptamines in the human
body are insignificant metabolic by-products that are simply too small to have
much effect; and this contention in turn has been rebutted by referring to trace
amine receptors, where even tiny amounts of amines can elicit a surprisingly
strong response.13 But much of this speculation may have been superceded by a
recent study demonstrating that the receptor to which endogenous AMT binds is
in fact the sigma-i receptor.