Psychedelic Renaissance

[Earth Walker]

For centuries, psychedelic pilgrims have turned to
AYAHUASCA to find the divine within.
It's now grown in suburban greenhouses.

Ayahuasca's key ingredients are now being grown in
suburban greenhouses across North America and Europe
and traded over the Internet. DMT -- dimethyltryptamine --
the molecule most responsible for the tea's visionary power,
is illegal in North America, but it is being synthesized,
crystallized, and distributed by basement shamans and
devottees from Los Angeles to Winnipeg.
On the weekend of May 11 to 13, a unique conference drew
botanists, anthropologists, psychedelic researchers, and
enthusiasts from around the world to Whistler. Dubbed
Entheo-botany 2: Shamanic Plant Science, the conference was
part of an international series marking a renaissance in the
knowledge and popularity of what are called entheogens,
inebriating substances said to help users realize the "divine"
within. The event was a Canadian coming-out party for
ayahuasca.
The contents of indigenous shamans' medicine bags are
spilling out into the realm of North American consumer culture
and raising questions about both religious privilege and the
psychology of human spirituality.
Indigenous shamans and traditional healers have used psycho-
active plants for millenia to cure illness, to communicate with
spirits, and to bind communities. From ibogaine-laced root barks
in Africa and PSILOCYBE mushrooms in the hills of Oaxaca,
Mexico, to mescaline-rich peyote in the dry southwest of the
U.S., plants have provided access to the supernatural, not to
mention tools for understanding the natural world.
A Website: www.ayahuasca.com is a good starting point for
detailed recipes for combining and cooking ayahuasca "analogues", or plant substitutes loaded with DMT and
beta-carbolines. There are guides for synthesizing DMT,
(Warning: if you follow some Internet-published DMT formulas,
you could blow up your basement!).

Other Websites

www.basementshaman.com

www.yage.net/cielo

Recommended Reading

One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain
Forest by Wade Davis (Simon & Schuster, 1996)

[Mariposa De La Luna]

I saw something once on DMT. It sounded crazy! I don't like acid and it sounded very much like it. They were saying how it opens your eyes/mind to other planes of reality. It was too wierd for me. Anyways if you work enough on it can't you do that by yourself without any chemical aids, natural or otherwise?

[Earth Walker]

A doctor spends five years conducting research in which he
administers 400 hundred doses of a mysterious drug to 60
volunteers using standard scientific methods: double-blind
studies, tolerance, research, interviews, rating scales, follow-up
studies, even EEG and MRI analyses. Despite even his own
expectations, one of his main conclusions is that our brains are
capable of perceiving "parallel universes, realms of existence
inhabitated by conscious entities".
Does that sound like science fiction? In fact, the conclusion came
out of the first new research in the U.S., in more than 20 years on
the effects of psychedelic drugs on humans. Rick Strassman, a
psychiatrist and Buddhist, conducted the research with
dimethyltrypamine, or DMT, between 1990 and 1995.
Before starting the research, he endured a two-year labyrinthine
process getting approvals from the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency, the FDA, and the University of New Mexico school of
medicine (scientific advisory and human research ethics
committees), as well as trying to obtain funding and a source of
DMT, which involved dealing with drug companies, doctors,
universities, laboratories, the National Institute on Drug Abuse,
and even a branch of the Freemasons.
It seemed worthwhile. Strassman wanted to learn about a
molecule that is present naturally in human beings and plants,
that is related to serotonin, and that he believed is produced in
humans by the pineal gland. But, as he states in the recently
released book he wrote about the studies, DMT: The Spirit
Molecule (Park Street Press, $26.95), "I began to wonder if I was
getting in over my head with this research." Even worse, he
writes, "I began wondering if I were starting a descent into
some sort of communal psychosis."
What gave Strassman pause were the consistent reports from
subjects of blasting through swirling colours to a strange world
where they made contact with "insect-like, reptilian creatures".
At first, he tried to explain the experiences as "simply products
of brain chemistry brought on by a 'hallucinogenic' drug, like a
waking dream". But the subjects resisted these explanations.
There was something happening here. Strassman could only surmise that DMT was taking people to "freestanding, independent levels of existence about which we are at most only dimly aware".
He also believed that he had found a key to alien-abduction experiences; mystical states; near-death, death, and birth
experiences; and the human spirit itself, which he claims enters
the human fetus with the development of the pineal gland 49
days after conception, which is also when the gender of the
fetus manifests. It's also the length of time, according to the
Tibetan Book Of The Dead, that it takes the soul of the recently
dead to reincarnate. Thus, Strassman coined the name "spirit
molecule".

[Earth Walker]

Such findings, if they have any validity, and Strassman makes a
convincing case that they do, "challenge our world view, and
they raise the emotional intensity of debate".
But Strassman himself put a stop to the research before he
had planned, for a number of reasons.
For one thing, he had to consider some of the consequences of
stumbling into parallel worlds or dimensions. "Were we opening
up Pandora's Box? How were volunteers going to live their lives
from that point on, after having experienced such an inexplicable
but certain reality?"
That the experiences seemed to have no lasting beneficial impact
"began eroding the basic foundations of [his] motivation for
performing this type of research".
Strassman write: "My attitude to high-dose sessions started
turning from hope for breakthrough to relief at volunteers
emerging unharmed and intact." And he writes about his
explanations concerning contact with nonmaterial beings: "Even
after stating them, I remain skeptical about their merit."
Part of the problem is the difficulty of describing rationally something that is so outside rationality. Anyone who has
experienced the infinite, through either mystical experience
(which may be a result of naturally occuring brain DMT) or high
doses of psychedelic drugs, anyone who has gone beyond the
spiralling language-based rational thought patterns into the
pure light of egoless, bodyless existence, wants to find a way to
explain or understand that experience. Argentine writer Jorge
Luis Borges spent a lifetime writing stories that twist througtime, space, and the infinite, largely in an attempt to come to terms
with an instant when he stood outside of time in a Buenos Aires
bus station; and Dutch artist M.C. Escher tried to capture the
infinite on two-and sometimes three-dimensional planes.
But as dizzyingly entertaining and intellectually stimulating as
attempts such as these are, it might be impossible to explain
with rational thought, with language or pictures or sculpture,
the unknowable.
That does not mean research with pyschedelics is pointless, any
more than literature and art by Borges and Escher are pointless.
Even if we can't fully comprehend the worlds that pyschedelics
take us to, the drugs have been shown to have therapeutic
value and they may teach us a great deal about the human
brain and consciousness. The final frontier may not be deep
physical space but the far reaches of our minds and spirits --
although the two may be more closely related than we realize.
"The most fruitful applications," Strassman writes, "will emerge
only if we can set aside the fear, ignorance, and stigma
associated with psychedelics. We also must avoid the naive and
wishful thinking that mars the arguments of some advocates
for their use."
But working with such substances should not be taken lightly.
As Strassman points out: "We must be prepared, for spiritual
realms include both heaven and hell (space & earth), both
fantasy and nightmare."

I can give more information on Ayahuasca, which is used by
indigenous people in South America, like making tea from
the giant, climbing Banisteriopsis caapi vine, and other plants,
etc.