Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD

Ayahuasca.

      As a researcher, however, I knew enough to seek expert help in the development of the questionnaire, and a white, female shaman suggested I ask about the relationship. The questionnaire asks: “Do you feel that you have a personal relationship with the spirit of ayahuasca? If so, please describe this relationship. How do you communicate? How does this relationship affect your life? How is this relationship unfolding?”

      Ultimately, 75 percent of the eighty-one subjects reported an ongoing relationship with the spirit of ayahuasca. I was shocked by this finding, even though I was also, admittedly, receiving guidance from Grandmother Ayahuasca. I was hearing her voice and listening to her advice on data analysis, no less. The obvious contradiction here is not lost on me, and I can only marvel at the full extent of my lack of consciousness regarding this issue. What happened was that these findings sent me into an existential crisis from which I have not yet fully recovered.

      I could somehow accept that Grandmother Ayahuasca was talking to me, but if she was also talking to others, then I felt she must be real. With this, my whole belief system and worldview crumbled. Coming from a family of confirmed agnostics, I didn’t believe I had a belief system. I didn’t realize agnosticism was a belief system, just as most people don’t realize that their belief system is just one way of looking at the world.⁸

      Anthropologist Jeremy Narby related the story of a man who thought drinking ayahuasca would be comparable to smoking a joint. He was not pleased with his experience: “My way of looking at the world was completely altered and no one warned me!” Narby said the man was quite bad off for a few years and facetiously remarked that ayahuasca should come with a warning label: “Beware. This could be dangerous to your worldview.”⁹

      Of course, a warning label wouldn’t have stopped me from trying ayahuasca, and ever since, I’ve struggled with my particular ontological crisis: “Are spirits real?”

      Only one man from the study had a similar problem. He called it a “radical ontological difference,” and he wrote: “The notable aspect of the worlds of possibility that ayahuasca opens up is this: These realms are occupied. This is shocking. There are others. Lacking any inherited, assumed, or borrowed belief structure with which to explain or interpret this, I am struggling.” A man after my own heart.

      I still have trouble believing my own data. I cannot sustain my Western concept of reality and accept that I, like so many others, am in direct communication with the spirit of ayahuasca. My Western belief system shatters in the face of my experiences, but then, like a cartoon resurrection, pieces itself back together after each ceremony.