Ayahuasca – A discussion

[YinYang]

Hey JayCee, I have obviously been thinking about this a lot since we came back, and read a couple of things online about charlatans who are profiting from the popularity of ayahuasca. I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I 'do' think authentic ayahuasqueros are pretty rare. I remember reading somewhere that an ayahuasquero trains for 30+ years in the Amazon, before being allowed to run their own ceremonies. I think it was Peter Gorman's book where I read it, which I mentioned earlier in this thread. I should perhaps also mention that despite my fascination with entheogens, I don't use any entheogens. My fascination ends with reading, for now. As for weed, also not my cup of tea. I tried it a few times, and didn't like the effect... I like my mind alert, and weed felt to me like a dimming of the senses.

I agree with Alan Watts' approach of these substances, he lived in the 60s in San Francisco, the epicentre of the psychedelic explosion, and he also noticed that everyone is practically binging on LSD, which he didn't agree with. He writes about it in Joyous Cosmology, and that is where him and Timothy Leary disagreed. Timothy Leary pushed strongly for the excessive use of these substances.

This is from Alan Watts' biography about that time in the 60s when LSD became popular, which by the way, was an exceptional read. This biographer was very gifted, leaving no stone unturned. I wanted to experience this weekend what Alan Watts described in Joyous Cosmology...

In 1958 Watts, who, unlike the beats, had always been wary of drugs, was invited to take part in an experiment by Keith Ditman, the psychiatrist in charge of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) research in the Department of Neuropsychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of the things that encouraged him to do so was the way he thought that the mescalin experience had made the ascetic Aldous Huxley warmer, more human. So he went along to Ditman’s office and took one hundred micrograms of LSD. Perception was changed in a fascinating way: time was slowed down, plants and grass and a church across the road were all great marvels, and a book of sumi-e paintings was a revelation; yet he was faintly disappointed. It seemed to him that he had had a wonderful aesthetic experience, but one that did not approach the mystical unity that Huxley had described. Later he was to believe that the clinical/ laboratory atmosphere of a formal test in a hospital had itself imposed certain limitations on his response, though it is also true that the dose is a small one.

He let a year go by and then tried a series of five experiments with the drug, varying the dosage from seventy-five to one hundred micrograms. These trips were extraordinarily rewarding. Perhaps the most remarkable effect had to do with time, what Watts called "a profound relaxation combined with an abandonment of purposes and goals. ... I have felt, in other words, I endowed with all the time in the world, free to look about me as if I were living in eternity without a single problem to be solved.” Within this freedom was another astonishing freedom: "I was no longer a detached observer, a little man inside my own head, having sensations. I was the sensations. ... It is like, not watching, but being, a coiling arabesque of smoke patterns in the air, or of ink dropped in water.” An irresistible feeling of beauty and wonder, absent from his first experiment with the drug, took over.

Watts writes of one experiment conducted late at night at his house in Millbrook:

Some five or six hours from its start the doctor had to go home, and I was left alone in the garden. For me, this stage of the experiment is always the most rewarding in terms of insight, after some of the more unusual and bizarre sensory effects have worn off. The garden was a lawn surrounded by shrubs and high trees — pine and eucalyptus — and floodlit from the house which enclosed it on one side. As I stood on the lawn I noticed that the rough patches where the grass was thin or mottled with weeds no longer seemed to be blemishes. Scattered at random as they were, they appeared to constitute an ordered design, giving the whole area the texture of velvet damask, the rough patches being the parts where the pile of the velvet is cut. In sheer delight I began to dance on this enchanted carpet, and through the thin soles of my moccasins I could feel the ground becoming alive under my feet, connecting me with the earth and the trees and the sky in such a way that I seemed to become one body with my whole surroundings.

Looking up, I saw that the stars were colored with the same reds, greens and blues that one sees in iridescent glass, and passing across them was the single light of a jet plane taking forever to streak over the sky. At the same time, the trees, shrubs, and flowers seemed to be living jewelry, inwardly luminous like intricate structures of jade, alabaster, or coral, and yet breathing and flowering with the same life that was in me. Every plant became a kind of musical utterance, a play of variations on a theme repeated from the main branches, through the stalks and twigs, to the leaves, the veins in the leaves, and to the fine capillary network between the veins. Each new bursting of growth from a center repeated or amplified the basic design with increasing complexity and delight, finally exulting in a flower.

The beauty of the experience reminded Watts insistently of something, and he realized that the garden had the kind of exotic beauty of the pictures in the Arabian Nights, of scenes in Persian miniatures or in Chinese and Japanese paintings. Those artists too had seen the world like this. Was that because they too were drugged and seeing therefore a strangely heightened and beautified version of the world, or was it that the effect of LSD was "to remove certain habitual and normal inhibitions of the mind and senses, enabling us to see things as they would appear to us if we were not so chronically repressed?” What the Oriental artists saw in their health and wisdom, Watts is saying, he could see with the help of LSD.

Inevitably Watts wondered about the possibilities of a drug so potent. Writing in 1960 he says that "the record of catastrophes from the use of LSD is extremely low, and there is no evidence at all that it is either habit-forming or physically deleterious. ... I find that I have no inclination to use LSD in the same way as tobacco or wines and liquors. On the contrary, the experience is always so fruitful that I feel I must digest it for some months before entering into it again.” It was a drug, he goes on to say, to be approached with the care and dedication with which one might approach a sacrament.

He continued to experiment with it throughout the next couple of years and achieved, in an experience with his friends at Druid Heights, a piercing sense of how very lonely he had felt all his life, "a bag of skin,” chronically and hopelessly cut off from all other "bags of skin” — "the quaking vortex of defended defensiveness which is my conventional self.” Sitting up on the ridgepole of the barn with Roger and his friends, laughing helplessly with them at the sight of a broken car standing in Elsa’s garden, sitting round a table on the terrace, sharing homemade bread and wine, he had the most extraordinary intimation of peace, of having "returned to the home behind home".

This sense of being loved and cared for, of a place of deep trust, made it possible for him to know what he called the "helpless crying of the baby.” The confident talker and performer and entertainer suddenly knew himself as an infinitely needy and sensitive self, "a blithering, terrified idiot, who managed temporarily to put on an act of being self-possessed. I began to see my whole life as an act of duplicity — the confused, helpless, hungry and hideously sensitive little embryo at the root of me having learned, step by step, to comply, placate, bully, wheedle, flatter, bluff and cheat my way into being taken for a person of competence and reliability.”

It was both a wonderful and an agonizing discovery, one that raised even more interesting questions as to what this amazing drug could achieve. Writing The Joyous Cosmology in 1962 Watts had come to see drugs like LSD and mescalin as a kind of medicine for sick modern men that would give them the experience of being "temporarily integrated.” Like medicine, transforming drugs were not, in his view, a way of life. You took them if you needed them, you deepened the experience "by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful."

In 1961 LSD was only just beginning to become available outside the medical world. Watts shared Huxley’s feeling that it might be shared by minds already developed by aesthetic, philosophical, and religious ideas and practices. Unlike Huxley he guessed at the danger of a widespread availability of LSD, fearing that it would produce the chemical equivalent of bathtub gin. One of the reasons for writing The Joyous Cosmology, Watts claimed, was to inform people about the drug while there was still time, to encourage them to approach it with a kind of reverence, rather than with a desire simply for "kicks.”

In this he was entirely opposed by Timothy Leary. Leary came relatively late to LSD, not actually trying it until 1962. But for several years before that he and Richard Alpert (a psychologist, who later became Ram Dass) had experimented extensively with psilocybin and had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the psychology faculty at Harvard to set up a series of systematic drug experiments there. So instead Leary and Alpert worked with university staff members and volunteer students and their families. There were a lot of volunteers.

Partly because of a series of experiments involving the use of psilocybin by prisoners in the Massachusetts prison system, in which he found that he could make prisoners less depressed and hostile and more responsible and cooperative, Leary began to feel that psychedelic drugs might have something to offer everyone, and he developed a kind of evangelical zeal to share his discoveries. He gave out mushroom pills freely, particularly to writers; Robert Lowell, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Koestler, and Allen Ginsberg all "took the mushroom” with Leary.

He was following a tradition that the British philosopher Gerald Heard and the psychologist Oscar Janiger had begun in the 1950s of deliberately initiating people into LSD, believing that it was God’s way of giving the twentieth century the gift of consciousness and saving it from Armageddon. "When you made contact, it was like two people looking at each other across the room, and with a sort of nod of the head that acknowledged that you 'too!’ ” wrote Leary. Janiger had turned on a number of Hollywood film stars and directors, Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, and Stanley Kubrick among them. He had also run tests with people from many walks of life, a number of whom had felt illuminated and changed by the LSD experience, and he had had some encouraging results working with depressed patients.

The rumors of the effects of psychedelic drugs began to cause a kind of excitement that boded ill for the sort of controlled initiation Huxley or Watts or Janiger favored. At Harvard Leary was continually being approached by students who wanted to try LSD. When he obeyed college rules and refused to oblige them, they got supplies in Boston or New York. The chemistry students synthesized their own. Leary described it this way: "In this the third year of our research the Yard was seething with drug consciousness.” Dozens of Harvard students had visions. Some dropped out and went to the East. "Not necessarily a bad development from our point of view,” Leary wrote with his usual insouciance, "but understandably upsetting to parents, who did not send their kids to Harvard to become Buddhas.” Worse still, "dozens of bright youths phoned home to announce that they’d found God and discovered the secret of the universe.”

In California, LSD, not yet illegal, was being widely distributed, much of it synthesized by an entrepreneur named Stanley Owsley. Leary’s Psychedelic Review disseminated information about methods of taking it. Braver or wilder souls, like Ken Kesey, author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, held rock-and-roll dances in which the place of honor in the middle of the floor was given to a baby’s bathtub full of punch spiked with lysergic acid.

The words hipster and hippie were coming into the language and were applied to the new "far-out” crowd by the beats. By the end of 1965, in the words of a harassed police captain, "the word is out that San Francisco is the place for the far-out crowd,” and within San Francisco the old student neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury had become the most far-out, both because of its cheapness and because of the attractiveness of its Edwardian houses. As if to fit in with the landscape many of the hippies started wearing Edwardian and Victorian clothes — they were cheap and good to look at during LSD trips or when stoned on marijuana.

Golden Gate Park became a sort of extension of the neighborhood, together with a handful of favorite stores and coffee houses that stayed open all night. A professor opened an experimental college in the Haight in which students could decide what they wanted to study, outline a course, get a faculty sponsor, and hire a teacher. There was a preponderance of people wanting to study art, psychology, and occult religion.

Street theatre became a common sight, and it mostly reflected antiwar or antiracist sentiments. The new rock-and-roll, which, to begin with, was not interested in much besides "love,” was gradually adopting anti-establishment ideas. Already by 1965 many folkies were turning to the electric guitar and were singing songs, like Dylan’s "Subterranean Homesick Blues,” that caught the new mood. The hippies listened to the new bands, like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Byrds, and to new singers, like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. They admired the Beatles, but began by thinking them a bit "cozy.” The bands played against and within light shows in which their audience danced in the light of strobes, ultraviolet light, and overhead projectors. Charles Perry describes a message displayed by projector at one light show that went: "Anybody who knows he is God go up onstage!”

The Haight was beginning to get into the drug market. By the early sixties marijuana (once enjoyed mostly by Latins and working-class blacks) had become popular on campuses, and by 1963 people were smuggling it from Mexico. Most of the selling was done by hippies who found it a way of making a living. Ounces ("lids”) sold for eight to ten dollars, a kilogram at around sixty dollars. The hippies broke up the kilos and sold smaller amounts at a good profit.

LSD was still legal (until October 1966) , and the extraordinary perceptions and fantasies, images and colors associated with it began to influence pop art, clothes, and songs. The Beatles’ new album Revolver gave broad hints that the Beatles themselves were "turning on,” while a new paper, the Oracle, with an amazing use of colored inks, exploded in a vast rainbow that included all hippie preoccupations in one great Whitmanesque blaze of light and camaraderie. American Indians, Shiva, Kali, the Buddha, tarot, astrology, Saint Francis, Zen, and tantra all rubbed shoulders in one edition, one that sold fifty thousand copies on the streets. When the Oracle printed the Heart Sutra , it devoted a double spread to the Zen Center version, complete with Chinese characters.