The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (66 page)

For the UDV, it was an important event, given its political subtext. At the time, CONFEN, the Brazilian drug agency, was debating whether ayahuasca was a dangerous substance liable to abuse, and whether its use in religious practices should be banned. The UDV wanted to show that
hoasca
was inherently safe, not subject to abuse, and that its ritual use should be allowed. By inviting a distinguished roster of international experts, they hoped to present an impressive conference that would favorably influence the CONFEN authorities. It seemed strange to me that I was regarded as one such “distinguished” expert on ayahuasca, but I suppose I was.

During our travels in Peru in 1985, Eduardo and I had both mused about the possibility of conducting a biomedical study of ayahuasca. Many of the
ayahuasqueros
we dealt with seemed remarkably healthy in mind and body, and many, though quite elderly, were still quite strong. We asked a naive question: was there something about long-term, regular ingestion of ayahuasca that enhanced their health and vigor? We speculated about ways that we might approach that question, and I even started drafting a grant application to NIDA after we returned home. I quickly realized that, in Peru, we’d have trouble conducting a study that involved asking for blood and urine samples; that wouldn’t be appropriate in light of cultural attitudes about witchcraft. And even if we got the samples, they’d be difficult to preserve. Beyond the logistical problems loomed the simple fact that NIDA would never fund such a study. So we shelved the idea at the time.

But it turned out that the organizers of the UDV conference had exactly that kind of a project in mind. That was their real agenda; they wanted to enlist the help of recognized foreign scientists to carry out a biomedical study among UDV members that, they hoped, would support their petition to CONFEN to allow the sacramental use of the
hoasca
tea. In this case, the logistics were more realistic. Many of the UDV members were themselves physicians, there was no cultural baggage involving witchcraft to contend with, and there were many UDV members who were eager to submit themselves to poking and prodding. So with the encouragement from top UDV
mestres
, I returned to the States and dusted off my old proposal. I revised and submitted it to them for their approval, which they gave. I started soliciting funds through Botanical Dimensions, and over the course of the next couple of years we were able to raise about $75,000 to conduct the study.

But that lay ahead. Back at the conference, after three days of PowerPoints and roundtables at a UDV temple on the outskirts of São Paulo, the event culminated in an ayahuasca ceremony with the foreign dignitaries as the guests of honor. About 500 people took part in that ceremony. I had a profound visionary revelation, in which I experienced photosynthesis from a molecule’s eye view, and understood the importance of this everyday miracle for the sustenance of life on the planet. It was a cathartic and moving experience, one of my most profound ayahuasca journeys. The following account of my “lesson from the Teacher” has been adapted from an earlier version that appeared in
Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Sacred Vine
(Luna and White, 2000).

On the night in question, the weather was humid and balmy. In the gathering dusk, we all walked the short distance from the dormitories where we had been staying to the temple, nestled in a small valley about a quarter mile away. In the center of the amphitheatre-like space, a long table was arranged, with chairs arrayed around it and a picture of Mestre Gabriel, the UDV founder and prophet, hung beneath an arch-shaped structure decorated with the sun, moon, and stars at one end. Several gallons of
hoasca
tea, a brownish liquid the color of café latte, was in a plastic juice dispenser placed on the table beneath the picture of Mestre Gabriel; beside it was a stack of paper picnic cups.

A special set of chairs had been reserved for the visiting dignitaries along one of the terrace-like elevations close to the center of the amphitheater. We threaded our way among the members already seated and took our places in the reserved spot.

After everyone had gotten settled, the
mestre
in charge rose to start dispensing the brew, helped by a couple of acolytes. The members formed an orderly line, and one by one we filed down to stand before the
mestre
and be handed a paper cup containing our allotted draft; the size of the servings varied from person to person, and seemed to be measured according to body weight and the
mestre’s
assessing gaze; one got the feeling that he was taking the measure of the soul and spirit of the supplicant standing before him. Each person took their cup and returned to stand in front of their chair. Once everyone had been served, the
mestre
gave a signal and all raised the cups to their lips and drained the bitter, foul-tasting beverage in two or three gulps. One of the Brazilian scientists standing beside me slipped me a small piece of dried ginger to chew to kill the aftertaste; I was grateful for the kind gesture.

Having drained their cups, everyone sat back in their comfortable webbed chairs. I kept hoping someone would turn off the glaring, buzzing, fluorescent lights overhead that were altogether too bright and quite annoying. They were to stay on during the entire evening, however. For about forty-five minutes, everyone sat, absorbed in their own thoughts. The crowded hall was absolutely silent. After this period, a few people began to get up and totter toward the bathrooms as the nausea, a frequent side effect in the early stages, began to take hold. About the same time, the
mestre
began singing a beautiful song, called a
shamada
, and though I could not understand the Portuguese words, the melody was quite moving. The sound of the heartfelt
shamada
mingling with the wretching, gasping noises of people throwing up violently in the background made me smile at the incongruity, but no one else seemed to notice.

My own experience was not developing as I’d hoped. My stomach was queasy but not enough to send me to the bathroom, and I felt restless and uncomfortable. I felt very little effect, except for some brief flashes of hypnagogia behind my closed eyes. I was disappointed; I had been hoping for more than a sub-threshold experience. When the
mestre
signaled that he was ready to give a second glass to anyone who wanted it, I was among the group of about a dozen gringos that queued up in front of the table; apparently I was not the only one who was having a difficult time connecting with the spirit of the tea.

I took my second drink and settled back into my chair. It tasted, if possible, even worse than the first one had. Within a few minutes it became clear that this time, it was going to work. I began to feel the force of the
hoasca
course through my body, a feeling of energy passing from the base of my spine to the top of my head. It was like being borne upwards in a high-speed elevator. I welcomed the sensation as confirmation that the train was pulling out of the station.

The energized feeling and the sensation of rapid acceleration continued. It was much like mushrooms but seemed to be much stronger; I had the sense that this was one elevator it would be hard to exit before reaching the top floor, wherever that might be. Random snippets of topics we had been discussing at the seminars in the previous days began to float into my consciousness. I remembered one seminar that had addressed the UDV’s concept that the power of
hoasca
tea is a combination of “force” and “light.” The force was supplied by the MAO-inhibiting
Banisteriopsis
vine, known as
mariri
in the local vernacular, while the light—the visionary, hypnagogic component—was derived from
chacruna
, the DMT-containing
Psychotria
admixture plant. I thought to myself what an apt characterization this was;
hoasca
was definitely a combination of force and light, and at that moment I was well within the grip of the force and hoped that I was about to break out into the light.

At the instant I had that thought, I heard a voice, seeming to come from behind my left shoulder. It said something like, “You wanna see force? I’ll show you force!” The question was clearly rhetorical, and I understood that I was about to experience something whether I wanted to or not. The next instant, I found myself changed into a disembodied point of view, suspended in space, thousands of miles over the Amazon basin. I could see the curvature of the earth, the stars beyond shone steadily against an inky backdrop, and far below I could see swirls and eddies of clouds over the basin, and the nerve-like tracery of vast river systems. From the center of the basin arose the world tree, in the form of an enormous
Banisteriopsis
vine. It was twisted into a helical form and its flowering tops were just below my disembodied viewpoint, its base was anchored to the earth far below, lost to vision in the depths of mist and clouds and distance that stretched beneath me.

As I gazed, awestruck, at this vision, the voice explained that the Amazon was the omphalos of the planet, and that the twisted, rope-like Yggdrasil-
mariri
world tree was the lynchpin that tied the three realms—the underworld, the earth, and the sky—together. Somehow I understood—though no words were involved—that the
Banisteriopsis
vine was the embodiment of the plant intelligence that embraced and covered the earth, that together the community of the plant species that existed on the earth provided the nurturing energy that made life on earth possible. I “understood” that photosynthesis—that neat trick, known only to green plants, of making complex organic compounds from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water, was the “force” the UDV was talking about, and indeed was the force on which all life depends; I was reminded of a line from Dylan Thomas, that photosynthesis is “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

In the next moment, I found myself instantly transported from my bodiless perch in space to the lightless depths beneath the surface of the earth. I had somehow become a sentient water molecule, percolating randomly through the soil, lost amid the tangle of the enormous root fibers of the
Banisteriopsis
world tree. I could feel the coolness, the dank dampness of the soil surrounding me, I felt suspended in an enormous underground cistern, a single drop among billions of drops. This sensation lasted only a moment, then I felt a definite sense of movement as, squeezed by the implacable force of irresistible osmotic pressures, I was rapidly translocated into the roots of the
Banisteriopsis
tree; the sense of the rising, speeding elevator returned except this time I was being lifted rapidly through the vast pipes and tubes of the plant’s vascular system. I was a single molecule of water tumbling through the myriad branches and forks of the vertical maze, which grew progressively narrower the higher I went.

Finally, the sense of accelerating vertical movement eased off; I was now floating freely, in a horizontal direction; no longer feeling pushed, I was suspended in the middle of a stream flowing through an enormous, vaulted tunnel. More than that, there was light at the end of the tunnel, a green light. With a start I realized that I had just passed through the petiole of a sun-drenched leaf, and was being shunted into progressively narrowing arteries as I was carried through the articulating veins toward some unknown destination. It helped that the voice—or my own narrative self, I’m not sure which—was providing occasional commentary on the stages of the journey as it unfolded.

Desperately I tried to remember my old lessons in plant physiology and anatomy. By this time I had been given the wordless understanding that I was about to witness, indeed, participate in, the central mystery of life on earth: a water molecule’s view of the process of photosynthesis. Suddenly, I was no longer suspended in the arterial stream of the leaf vein; I had somehow been transported into an enormous enclosed space, suffused with greenish light. Above me I could see the domed, vaulted roof of the structure I was inside of, and I understood that I was inside a chloroplast; the roof was translucent and beams of sunlight streamed through it like a bedroom window on a bright morning. In front of me were flat, layered structures looking like folded sheets stacked closely together, covered with antenna-shaped structures, all facing in the same direction and all opened eagerly to receive the incoming light. I realized that these had to be the thylakoid membranes, the organelles within the chloroplast where the so-called “light reaction” takes place. The antenna-like structures covering them literally glowed and hummed with photonic energy, and I could see that somehow, this energy was being translocated through the membranes of the thylakoids they were mounted on. I recognized, or understood, that these antenna-like arrays were molecules of chlorophyll, and the “anchors” that tied them to their membrane substrates were long tails of phytic acid that functioned as energy transducers, funneling the light energy collected by the flower-shaped receptors through the membrane and into the layers beneath it.

Next thing I knew, I was beneath that membrane; I was being carried along as though borne on a conveyor belt; I could see the phytic acid chains dangling above and beyond them, through the semitransparent “roof” of the membrane, the flower-like porphyrin groups that formed the chlorophyll’s light-gathering apparatus loomed like the dishes of a radio telescope array. In the center of the space was what looked like a mottled flat surface, periodically being smited by enormous bolts of energy that emanated, lightening-like, from the phytic acid tails suspended above it; and on that altar water molecules were being smashed to smithereens by the energy bolts. Consciousness exploded and died in a spasm of electron ecstasy as I was smited by the bolt of energy emitted by the phytic acid transducers and my poor water-molecule soul was split asunder.