Program Notes
In this episode, we talk with Jeremy Narby, PhD about his new book Plant Teachers, which compiles traditional indigenous and contemporary scientific knowledge about ayahuasca and tobacco. In this far-reaching conversation Narby talks about the different types and uses of Ayahuasca, creating partnership between scientific and indigenous knowledge, respecting the positive and negative powers within plant medicines, advocating for indigenous Amazonian people, and much more. This conversation was recorded in our live Psychedelic Salon, which happens every Monday and Thursday, and that you can access from our Patreon and Discord pages.
Jeremy Narby, PhD, is co-author of Plant Teachers with indigenous elder Rafael Chanchari Pizuri. This brief, information-packed book presents a cross-cultural dialogue that explores the similarities between ayahuasca and tobacco, the role of these plants in indigenous cultures, and the hidden truths they reveal about nature. Juxtaposing and synthesizing two worldviews, Plant Teachers invites readers on a wide-ranging journey through anthropology, botany, and biochemistry, while raising tantalizing questions about the relationship between science and other ways of knowing.
Narby became an early pioneer of ayahuasca research while living with the Ashaninca people of the Peruvian Amazon in the 1980s. He studied anthropology at Stanford University and now lives in Switzerland and works as Amazonian projects director for Nouvelle Planète, a nonprofit organization that promotes the economic and cultural empowerment of indigenous peoples. Jeremy is also the author of the award-winning book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, which was originally published in 1998.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
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Alpha and Omega.
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today I’m going to play a recording from a
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recent live salon when anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby was our guest. Now many of our fellow
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saloners first learned of Jeremy’s work with a publication back in 1999 of his book The Cosmic
00:00:39 ►
Serpent. And it was in that year that I first heard him speak at an ayahuasca conference.
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and it was in that year that I first heard him speak at an ayahuasca conference.
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Jeremy has really deep roots in our community.
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Now in today’s program notes, I’ll put links to his books and other online sites that are referenced to in this conversation.
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If this is the first time you’re listening to one of these live salon sessions,
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you’ll hear that they’re really kind of informal.
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I first began doing them in 2018, and when the pandemic began,
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I added a Thursday morning session to our regular Monday night time so that some of our friends in
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Europe could join a little more easily. Originally, I was doing these live salons just, well, just for
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my supporters on Patreon as a little extra thank you for keeping me out of poverty. Then, when the pandemic came,
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well, some of my longtime supporters lost their jobs
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and had to drop off a Patreon.
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So I began, and will continue,
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posting the weekly links to both sessions
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on our Discord server as well.
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And if you aren’t familiar with Discord,
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not only is it free,
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you don’t even have to give them your email address to sign up just
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go to psychedelicsalon.com and at the top of the page is an invite to join us over there and connect
00:01:52 ►
with some of the others and i also hope that you’ll drop by for one of our live salons even
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as a lurker if you like and at the end of this conversation with jeremy i’ll be back to let you
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know who our next guest will be in a live salon.
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Now, here’s our conversation with Jeremy Narby in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Let me just introduce Jeremy.
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I think probably everybody knows who Jeremy Narby is.
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But I was at a conference, and I see Warren is here.
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And Warren was at the same one. This is in
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late 99, and it was the, as I understand it, the first ayahuasca conference in North America. I
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think there’d been so many ketos or down there before, and Tony Rich promoted the thing, and
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just by curious circumstance, I was in his ayahuasca circle, and I’d only just, I was a
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newcomer. I just barely knew what was going on. I didn’t know anybody.
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And in this conference had, you know, a lot of really,
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all the big names in ayahuasca, several shamans there.
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Ralph Metzner was I think the MC,
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but the only talk I remember was Jeremy’s and,
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and the, the sort of synchronicity here is I have several friends who were at
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the 1983 psychedelic conference in Santa Barbara where Hoffman spoke,
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Richard Evans, Shultes, Shulgens,
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and they had a one cancellation and they put a substitute in and it was
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Terrence McKenna.
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And the only thing anybody remembers anymore is Terrence McKenna.
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Well, the only thing I remember from the ayahuasca conference,
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this is Jeremy’s talk. He was talking about his book at the time, The Cosmic Serpent. And here’s what
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really captivated me about Jeremy is everybody else had gotten to psychedelics or gotten to the
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conference because they were into psychedelics first, and then they got into ayahuasca and the
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plants. Jeremy started the other way. He was a scientist, anthropologist. I let him tell about it, but he was the only one I
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could quote and cite to my friends who thought I was absolutely insane getting involved in plant
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medicine and ayahuasca. And I’m just going to read one little sentence here from this book,
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the thing that really is something I don’t think I should ever forget. And that is anthropologists invented the word shamanism to classify the least
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comprehensible practices of quote primitive peoples. And, and I think that’s really important
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to realize that shamanism is to describe things that we really don’t understand too well. And with that, maybe
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Jeremy, you can tell us how you first got the inkling to investigate what was going on when
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you were working in Peru. Well, thanks for all your kind words and also for the question.
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Also for the question, I started, I went down to Peru as a their resources rationally, and then give it to individuals with a market mentality so that
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they could cut down the forest and establish cattle pastures. This was the, let’s say, the
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official view of how to develop the third world, and in particular, the Amazonian jungle, as it was called at the time.
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And so there were some clear flaws with that whole approach, starting with the fact that
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indigenous Amazonian people had a lot of knowledge about the rainforest and how to use it. And so
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that’s what I wanted to study. I wanted to live with a group of indigenous Amazonian people
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right in the middle of the forest
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and do what anthropologists do.
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So you live with people, you hang out,
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you work with them when they work,
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you ask them a lot of stupid questions,
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you take notes when they’re maybe not looking
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because it kind of makes it,
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taking notes in front of people kind of gets in the way.
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So I tried to sort of practice a warm human kind of what I thought was anthropology
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out of political solidarity with these people. For me, it was a question of human rights,
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that they actually were bona fide human beings that had knowledge and who, yeah, the more I could
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show that they used their resources irrationally, the more I could show that they used their resources irrationally,
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the more I could argue that they deserved the right to own their lands.
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So, you know, this was not mystical by any means.
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The thing was that after spending a couple of weeks with these Ashaninka people,
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so these were barefoot Indians, The elder people didn’t speak Spanish.
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I was speaking Spanish with the younger people.
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They knew all the plants in the forest around them,
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which was incredibly diverse.
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It’s in fact, the epicenter of world biodiversity.
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They ascribe uses to about half of them.
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And so they say, so here’s a plant
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that accelerates the healing of wounds.
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I’d say, okay, well, let’s check it out. I was into, I wanted to study their knowledge about
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the forest. So here’s a medicinal plant. The experts were flying over the forest saying this
00:07:16 ►
forest isn’t used. I was under the trees with the Indians and they were saying, yes, we use this
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plant to accelerate the healing of wounds. So that was part of what I was trying to show, that you could use the forest productively,
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rationally, without cutting it down necessarily. But you needed knowledge to do that and that
00:07:36 ►
knowledge needed to be made explicit. So I started checking out their knowledge. You say this plant accelerates the healing of wounds. I have a wound.
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Let’s try it. Only to find that it worked. And then I had chronic backache. The same thing.
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I’d been to Western doctors in London and Switzerland. I tried cortisone injections,
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heat treatment. I’d played too much tennis when I was young. And these, as Shaninka said, look,
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we have a plant, you take its roots at the new moon, you drink half a cup of this stuff,
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you may feel cold for a few hours, you’ll see a few visions, you’ll turn into rubber,
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and on the third day, you’ll be healed. And I thought, well, look, you know, this couldn’t
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be true. If it were really true that Amazonian people had a cure for backache, science would
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know about it. But still, I’m interested in checking it out. It couldn’t be less efficacious
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than what the doctors had proposed. So I tried this sanango, chirik sanango, and it worked just as they said it would. Cold
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sweat for like eight hours, stumbling all over the place, no body coordination for 48 hours.
00:08:53 ►
And on the third day, the deep tension and pain in my lower left back was gone and never returned.
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So this is what they call a medical anecdote. It has no value whatsoever
00:09:06 ►
medically. But as far as my investigation of Ashaninka resource use, it led me to the key
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question. I’m still trying to answer your question, but the key question was, okay, so you guys have
00:09:17 ►
real knowledge about all these plants. How do you know what you know about plants?
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And that’s where the shamanism came hurtling into the room.
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Because different people would say, oh, well, we have ayahuasqueros, tabaqueros.
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They take ayahuasca, which is a hallucinogenic plant brew or heat tobacco concentrate,
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and communicate in their visions with the essences that are common to all life forms and that are sources of information. They were saying nature speaks to people in their
00:09:53 ►
visions and in their dreams. At the time, the first time I heard this, I thought it was a joke.
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I thought the guy was pulling my leg. But in fact, no, different people
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would say this very matter-of-factly. And finally, one guy, I went to another village. In fact, the
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two neighboring villages squabbled over the anthropologist because, you know, entertainment
00:10:16 ►
was rare. So how come you have the monopoly of this guy? We want to have the anthropologist.
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So, okay, so I got sent over 10 kilometers away to this other village. And after spending the first day working in the garden
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with some guys, I was hanging out with them. This is anthropology, drinking manioc beer with the
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guys. And I said, oh man, you guys have such knowledge about the plants and we were in the
00:10:41 ►
garden today. And so how do you know what you know about plants?
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Brother Jeremy, if you want to know the answer to that question,
00:10:49 ►
you have to drink ayahuasca.
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It’s the television of the forest.
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You can see images and learn things.
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And if you like, I can show you sometime.
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Well, I’ll cut a long story short um i tried it and then the
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actually the experience was so extraordinary i certainly learned a lot of things um i think i
00:11:16 ►
learned just what i needed to know it’s a i saw how small i was I saw how human beings were part of a wider fabric. The overall experience was like an antidote to the anthropocentricism of anthropology. There I was, a human studying humans, and this plant brew showed me how small humans were and how similar we were to plants and animals.
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You know, like images of the veins of a human hand and the veins of a green leaf just going
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so fast, so detailed, so clear. Clearly not things that I’d seen before. You know,
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the question was, what is this? Where is this coming
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from? And that was just a small example of so many other things that I saw that night.
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So clearly, on the basis of my personal experience, this was like 1985, what these
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Asháninka people were saying corresponded to something not that it wasn’t real
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it was almost too real, too intense
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and certainly way off the radar
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of academic anthropology
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or psychology or what have you
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because to consider that there’s
00:12:38 ►
verifiable information in your hallucinations
00:12:41 ►
is the definition of psychosis
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I mean you have to be nuts
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to believe that, or rather, if you believe that, then by definition, you are nuts.
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But that only made it more interesting. So here was something that, you know, I was studying their
00:13:01 ►
rational uses of the rainforest. They themselves said that at the heart of their knowledge of the rainforest, there was this irrational, shamanic, hallucinatory
00:13:12 ►
sphere that contradicted the basic principles of my own system of knowledge.
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You know, so the problem was not that there wasn’t anything there. The problem was that there was too much there, much too much on the plate.
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and tobacco in my PhD dissertation for Stanford University on the Ashininka’s uses of the rainforest and became a doctor in anthropology. And then I started working as an activist to
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raise funds for indigenous Amazonian people and found myself in like the early 1990s,
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giving talks, explaining that the only people who use the rainforest rationally
00:14:07 ►
are the indigenous people who live there and who don’t destroy it they use it for hunting
00:14:14 ►
for fishing for medicinal plants for gathering cosmetics dyes foods building materials
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they build small gardens where they plant a big diversity of plants,
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and these gardens then get gobbled back up by the forest. The whole thing is sustainable and
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productive, and they’re the only ones who know how to do it. So if you want to save the rainforest,
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the best way to do it is to entrust the lands to the indigenous inhabitants who live there.
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So that’s what I was arguing. And after a few years arguing
00:14:46 ►
this, I realized that I was continuing to leave out the part about the hallucinatory origin of
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part of their ecological knowledge. And so it took about eight years between the time of having the
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initial ayahuasca experience and then getting to a place where I could no longer ignore
00:15:07 ►
that question. And then so I started writing the book, The Cosmic Serpent, to deal with that
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question. What does it mean when these people living in the most biodiverse place on earth
00:15:20 ►
say that a good part of their knowledge about plants and animals and the forest comes from
00:15:28 ►
the visions of their shamans so i think that might answer your question
00:15:36 ►
oh yeah it it does and and uh the the fact that it took you so long from your first experience to to kind of immerse yourself in it.
00:15:48 ►
Was that because of what you were afraid your contemporaries and peers would say or why did it take so long?
00:15:55 ►
You know, I thought you were saying it took you so long to answer that question.
00:16:00 ►
Oh, that was a great answer.
00:16:02 ►
No, but it’s a long answer because it’s kind of, it’s true. It’s a bit of a long story. Yeah. Back then, I mean, you know, people tend to forget how things used to be. So what is this 36 years ago?
00:16:31 ►
disqualified from the profession. It’s true that he seemed to use fiction, create amalgams of different people, that it was certainly not orthodox anthropology. It wouldn’t have been
00:16:36 ►
even acceptable in journalism. You know, it was not, it seems, real reporting, you know, so that’s deontologically problematic, etc. But then along came Michael
00:16:48 ►
Harner, who was an academic fellow, and it became clear that once having done serious studies of
00:16:55 ►
Amazonian shamanism and other Siberian shamanism, and writing about it in Oxford University press
00:17:03 ►
publications and so forth.
00:17:12 ►
When he crossed the line and started beating on the drum himself and claiming that he as an anthropologist could work as a shaman, he also got disqualified. And it was pretty clear in the
00:17:21 ►
early 1980s that if you were a young anthropologist taking the hallucinatory
00:17:27 ►
sphere of shamanism too seriously you know as as if there was something really there
00:17:35 ►
that was you were not going to get your phd if you argued. You know, it wasn’t written down anywhere.
00:17:47 ►
But it was just like, you know, also, I’ll tell you, it wasn’t, I remember coming back
00:17:54 ►
to Europe in late 1986.
00:17:57 ►
And it’s true, I’d been really struck by this whole ayahuasca thing, learning from a plant.
00:18:04 ►
And I tell my friends about it.
00:18:07 ►
And their eyes would glaze over.
00:18:09 ►
They didn’t, you know, it wasn’t polite conversation.
00:18:12 ►
Talking about hallucinogens and vegetal hallucinogens that make you vomit fluorescent colors
00:18:21 ►
and see enormous serpents that explain things to you about how insignificant you
00:18:27 ►
are and so forth it’s like could we talk about something else maybe or you know it was I soon
00:18:35 ►
understood that even though I thought it was pretty fascinating at the time it was just like
00:18:41 ►
not polite conversation not welcome it was you like not polite conversation, not welcome.
00:18:45 ►
It was, you know, people would kind of look at each other funny.
00:18:49 ►
It’s like, maybe he drank a little bit too much of that stuff, you know.
00:18:54 ►
And to the point that I thought, okay, look, I’m just going to look into this by myself.
00:19:00 ►
I live in a quiet place.
00:19:02 ►
I’ll read the literature.
00:19:04 ►
I’ll take it apart and you know i i
00:19:07 ►
don’t uh i was no longer in a university i already had the phd or like the driver’s license as it
00:19:12 ►
were you know so um so there it was and the um the book um actually um it was almost an argument with my father, which was, he was a materialist businessman.
00:19:29 ►
He didn’t believe at all in any of this gobbledygook.
00:19:36 ►
He told me at the beginning that he said, I think ayahuasca is no different than milk.
00:19:41 ►
is no different than milk.
00:19:51 ►
You know, so I wrote a book to convince him otherwise.
00:19:54 ►
So, and it was like, you know,
00:19:58 ►
when I came upon the connection with DNA, for example,
00:20:00 ►
his first question, so we’d talk on the telephone.
00:20:02 ►
I’d say, oh man, I found this thing. And what the shamans say about the invisible essences inside different living beings. In fact, there are all kinds of correspondences
00:20:08 ►
to DNA, which is this molecule inside each living cell, so forth. He said, what are the dimensions
00:20:14 ►
of the molecule? Good question. I’ll look into that. I’ll get back to you tomorrow. So I went
00:20:20 ►
and looked into it. The DNA inside any one of your cells is like 10 atoms
00:20:25 ►
wide and two meters long. This is like a billion times longer than its own width. It’s like a
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little finger that stretches from London to Los Angeles. And if you took all the DNA threads out
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of a human body and lined them up, it’s long enough to go from the sun to saturn and back 70 times it’s
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two billion kilometers of dna inside your body and so in other words the numbers were mythological
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um uh the indigenous people said yes there’s this stairway to heaven or axis mundi or twisted
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staircase thing that goes from the earth all the way up into the
00:21:06 ►
heavens you know well uh that’s just the reality of dna molecules inside your own body in fact
00:21:16 ►
and so when my father would say what are the dimensions of the molecule if i go and do my
00:21:23 ►
homework and then i’d shoot it back to him and say you know you wanted to know the dimensions of the molecule if I go and do my homework and then I’d shoot it back to
00:21:26 ►
him and say you know you wanted to know the dimensions well here they are and um and on and
00:21:33 ►
on so the book was kind of made to like you said that you felt that it gave you material to convince
00:21:38 ►
your friends who were somewhat uh doubting of the whole thing i mean the the book was constructed to do that and and
00:21:48 ►
it worked perfectly for that because i i have an have an advantage you didn’t have talking to your
00:21:53 ►
dad after i heard your talk uh the people i first approached were my friends who were very active
00:21:58 ►
in the environmental uh activism and uh your cachet of you were trying to preserve the rainforest from the bottom up,
00:22:07 ►
working with the indigenous people. And that so captivated their minds. Then I’d buy them a copy
00:22:12 ►
of your book and give it to them. And a half a dozen of them are practicing ayahuasca retreats
00:22:19 ►
regularly now. So your book did work that way. It’s unfortunate you didn’t have it written to give to your dad right from the beginning,
00:22:26 ►
because there’s some, I’m so glad you brought this out about the indigenous people and the
00:22:32 ►
plant medicine.
00:22:33 ►
I know we like to talk about ayahuasca and tobacco and the plants, and we’ll get to that.
00:22:37 ►
But the knowledge of the people, that’s really what’s so important.
00:22:41 ►
And what I’m wondering is, since you recently were in Peru, how are the indigenous people dealing with the pandemic?
00:22:49 ►
Well, you know, the thing that I heard over and over again from the Amazonian people that I spoke with recently in Loreto is that when the pandemic hit, they went into their communities, went into the forest, into isolated houses.
00:23:09 ►
If they got the illness, they took a lot of plants, clavoasca, ginger, lemon juice.
00:23:30 ►
lemon juice, and they say that they had a low mortality rate compared to the rest of the country. It’s true also that the indigenous Amazonians have a complicated relationship with
00:23:39 ►
Western medicine, and not for no reason. In other um historically you know doctors have come in and
00:23:48 ►
taken blood samples and gone away and you know they’ve never really been in a big hurry to
00:23:54 ►
look after indigenous amazonian people i mean i’ve actually i took a an ashaninka into a hospital in
00:24:02 ►
peru because he had a like a big wooden thorn stuck in his arm
00:24:07 ►
and it was like under the skin and you really had to go in there as a as a kind of a surgeon and get
00:24:13 ►
it out and the the the medical Peruvian medical doctor this is like 1985. He actually put his pincher in there to start and started sort of moving it around and say, well, you Indians, apparently you don’t feel the pain, right?
00:24:33 ►
And, you know, this was a tough Ashanyanka guy and it’s not in their culture. They don’t even go out when they really do have pain. They, you know, they say nothing. And I mean, this medical
00:24:47 ►
doctor was like torturing him for fun. And, you know, racism does strange things to people.
00:24:54 ►
You know, like you think, oh, well, this is not really a human being and he doesn’t really feel
00:24:58 ►
pain. So I’ll just mess around with him a bit. He finally pulled out the wood. Thank you very much.
00:25:06 ►
them a bit. He finally pulled out the wood, thank you very much. But, you know, that’s just how it’s been for indigenous Amazonian people. So when the pandemic hit, of course, the last people to get
00:25:14 ►
vaccines were indigenous people in Peru. And the last people to want vaccines were indigenous people
00:25:21 ►
in Peru. So they had that kind of ambiguous position where they were saying, we are completely abandoned by the Ministry of Health, which was true. And at the
00:25:31 ►
same time, we’re not so enthusiastic if they’re going to come around and shoot us up with needles.
00:25:36 ►
So it’s complicated in a nutshell. And I believe the Delta variant
00:25:45 ►
is the one that originated in Peru.
00:25:48 ►
So they actually have some serious problems there.
00:25:52 ►
Yeah, but except that,
00:25:53 ►
so I’m fresh back from Iquitos.
00:25:56 ►
I got back six days ago, Iquitos, Peru.
00:25:59 ►
I spent 10 days wandering around Peru with a mask on,
00:26:03 ►
even in Iquitos, which is a hot and sticky place.
00:26:07 ►
And actually, people were telling me there’s no more COVID here in Iquitos.
00:26:13 ►
We’re actually worried about dengue at this point.
00:26:15 ►
There’s no more COVID because like over 70% of the population has had COVID.
00:26:21 ►
Peru had like the highest death rate in the world, something like 0.7% of the population
00:26:28 ►
died. So they really got hit hard. And now they have really excellent numbers. So you know,
00:26:36 ►
the last will be first and vice versa. So Peru is actually doing pretty well and the government policy uh which is everybody wears
00:26:47 ►
a mask all the time everywhere and two masks in stores airports and airplanes it seems also to
00:26:56 ►
work that’s that’s interesting that it does work isn’t it I’ve sort of been hogging the conversation
00:27:02 ►
I know Charles has some questions you want to ask. So I’ll let Charles here jump in.
00:27:24 ►
validity of indigenous knowledge as a second way of knowing and as a compliment to science. And listening to your journey, this 35-year journey from being a young white vampire in the
00:27:31 ►
jungle to being an ambassador who is bringing, you know, Raphael Shanchari with you in developing
00:27:39 ►
this book, the world has changed. The receptivity towards these ideas have changed. So can you speak
00:27:45 ►
a little bit about the shift in cultural attitudes towards seeing the validity of Indigenous knowledge
00:27:52 ►
in ways that we in the West or North can be sensitive to integrating and dialoguing with
00:27:59 ►
this knowledge? Yeah, I think that in the last few decades, there’s been a lot of Western people and including medical doctors, psychologists and others who have been able to test the, let’s just say the Amazonian of purging. Ayahuasca is known as La Purga in the Peruvian Amazon.
00:28:28 ►
You know, most Europeans and North Americans kind of, they don’t like to vomit. They don’t
00:28:36 ►
like to talk about vomiting. Sometimes they don’t even know how to vomit. You know, it’s not polite conversation. And it’s certainly not part of
00:28:47 ►
the therapeutic arsenal of Western medicine. In fact, you know, now that Western medicine is
00:28:52 ►
studying ayahuasca, they say the only adverse side effect of ayahuasca is vomiting. I mean,
00:29:00 ►
they consider medicine, Western medicine has a tendency to consider vomiting as an adverse side effect.
00:29:10 ►
Well, in the Amazon, purging is good.
00:29:17 ►
They like to clean out the tubes occasionally.
00:29:20 ►
It’s true.
00:29:21 ►
We’re talking about a place where there’s a lot of stomach parasites. But what has even been studied now is that you can take Westerners and get them to do the purge with ayahuasca. toxins, but painful memories, negative energies, psychic garbage, quote unquote.
00:29:51 ►
You know, so that even though it’s kind of off the radar of Western medicine, it’s something
00:29:58 ►
that you can try empirically.
00:30:01 ►
In other words, it’s not untestable.
00:30:26 ►
And so it’s empirically testable by people. And I think that people have come to see that there is value in that. it would have seemed like superstition that somehow melodies can impact, you know, one person sings a melody and it can impact on the experience of another person having taken a powerful
00:30:33 ►
hallucinogenic substance. But yes, this is true and you can experience it. And Amazonian people
00:30:43 ►
have known it for a long time and they practice it.
00:30:45 ►
They also think you have to prepare the body before this experience. All these things that
00:30:50 ►
used to be considered as like superstition by, let’s just say, classical Western science.
00:30:57 ►
It turns out that if you have the experience, you can see that there is real underpinnings to this. So dieting before
00:31:07 ►
the experience, purging, listening to certain kinds of music, all this is central to the
00:31:16 ►
therapeutic experience of working with this medicine. You know, so I think that’s also why there has been a change. I think it’s also true that there’s enough people in the Western world asking themselves questions about Western medicine, Western lifestyles, you know, like, is materialism and shopping really going to sort of make us happy until we die? Or, you know,
00:31:46 ►
maybe there’s some other path. So I think the more people have come to question things in
00:31:54 ►
Western culture, the more they’ve been willing to go towards a radically different culture and
00:32:00 ►
check it out. And then one of the things that’s very interesting about your approach to this too,
00:32:05 ►
is that you’re bringing a body of nuance into the discussion that you’re describing. For instance,
00:32:11 ►
the Western culture idea about anthropomorphizing ayahuasca as grandmother. In this book,
00:32:18 ►
Plant Teachers, as well as in your interviews, you’re saying, well, not so fast. You know, the indigenous tradition looks upon this in a more mutable way, in a more fungible
00:32:32 ►
way, you know, not so fast.
00:32:33 ►
This is a intervention that is practical as well as spiritual.
00:32:38 ►
So I guess, can you speak a bit to some of the stereotypes or the biases that we in the West have placed upon ayahuasca
00:32:46 ►
in contrast to its indigenous use and ways we can perhaps have a more nuanced relationship
00:32:52 ►
with this intervention?
00:32:54 ►
Yeah, thanks for the question.
00:32:56 ►
I’ll try to keep the answer simple but true.
00:33:02 ►
I think really the heart of the problem is that in Western cultures,
00:33:08 ►
and when we speak Western languages like English, we tend to have dichotomous concepts
00:33:17 ►
that are impermeable. So good and evil, nature and culture, subject and object. These are all things body and mind.
00:33:30 ►
They are defined in opposition to each other so that there can be no mind in the body and no body
00:33:35 ►
in the mind, etc. Nature is everything that culture is not and vice versa.
00:33:50 ►
is not, and vice versa. In Indigenous Amazonian concepts, anyway, it’s a lot, it is more nuanced,
00:33:56 ►
and there’s always a little bit of dark in the white, and a little bit of harming in the healing,
00:34:12 ►
and it’s a lot less absolute. Well, for a long time, Western culture looked at Indigenous people and said, they don’t have real knowledge. They don’t have real religion. In fact, they’re just primitives.
00:34:20 ►
And that’s about it. So in other words, they’re close to nature. Nature is not so good.
00:34:25 ►
Indigenous people are not so good. And what is good is western civilization and culture um well then we think it through and we see the contradictions now the tendency the western
00:34:33 ►
tendency is then to reverse that and to put indigenous people in nature on a pedestal and
00:34:38 ►
say ah in fact no indigenous people good nature good. But it’s just, that’s just the other side
00:34:45 ►
of the same coin of the same logic.
00:34:49 ►
If what we did, instead of just turning things around,
00:34:53 ►
instead of just turning our own logic around,
00:34:55 ►
we actually listened to the people in question,
00:34:59 ►
we would see that they have a different kind of logic
00:35:02 ►
and that it’s interesting.
00:35:07 ►
And if you listen to them, they’ll tell you, well, actually, first of all, that the whole idea of nature is a Western idea,
00:35:13 ►
this thing that is opposed to culture. In other words, everything that is not human.
00:35:20 ►
This is not an Amazonian concept. When you ask them about that, they say, look, we’re telling you everything is human. Plants and animals, there are people like us, they’re members of the same family. We’re just not that different. We’re all in this together.
00:35:43 ►
and listen to them and take their points of view into consideration.
00:35:49 ►
So they don’t make a distinction between nature and culture,
00:35:52 ►
between humans and other species.
00:35:57 ►
Some natural species are dangerous.
00:36:01 ►
Some are generous and can help you.
00:36:04 ►
Some can help you, but they can also harm you.
00:36:06 ►
In fact, these power plants or these plant teachers tend to be pretty ambiguous entities. And that’s also what the Amazonians will
00:36:14 ►
tell you. They say these powerful plants, when you ingest them, they put you into contact with
00:36:20 ►
the invisible level of life, which is filled with these essences that are common to all life
00:36:26 ►
forms, and that are fundamentally ambiguous. These entities that we can learn from and get
00:36:32 ►
information from, they can be used for healing, or they can be used for harming. And there is just a
00:36:40 ►
fundamental ambiguity in life itself, and in how we can approach it. And it’s important to
00:36:48 ►
take that into consideration. And so then here come the gringos. And this time around, they’re
00:36:55 ►
not missionaries. They’re not oil company executives. They’re not conquistadors. They
00:37:00 ►
want to take ayahuasca and have healing, except they’re saying, ah, yes, it’s all good.
00:37:06 ►
It’s all about healing. And they ignore the power part, the harming part, the sorcery part,
00:37:13 ►
the dark part that for Amazonian people is just obvious. So I think that in particular,
00:37:21 ►
it’s not that I want to impose Amazonian logic on Western people. It’s just that I think that in particular, it’s not that I want to impose Amazonian logic on Western people.
00:37:25 ►
It’s just that I think that when you have something like ayahuasca, which is complicated, powerful, deep, and you have people who have been using it for a long time and who have know-how about it.
00:37:36 ►
And then on the other side, you have people who know relatively little about it, that those who know the newcomers gain from listening to the people with experience.
00:37:48 ►
And they’ll tell you, look, it’s not all white.
00:37:52 ►
It’s not a fairy tale.
00:37:53 ►
It’s not only about healing.
00:37:56 ►
And it’s fairly ambiguous all the way down to the bank and back.
00:38:02 ►
And you and your co-author, Raphael, really do drive that home.
00:38:07 ►
There’s a great passage that Raphael says in the tobacco section, just as medicine is an activity
00:38:14 ►
and curing and healing bring satisfaction, for the plants it is the same. Malice is an activity
00:38:19 ►
they carry out for their own satisfaction. Piercing the human body in a way that causes
00:38:24 ►
loss of life is an activity for them. And conversely, medicine is also an activity that we develop to heal,
00:38:30 ►
give life, to make life longer. And in your conversation with him, where you’re really
00:38:34 ►
pushing back on him on a number of these concepts, you do make very clear that, you know,
00:38:39 ►
it’s not all light work and crystals. Yeah. And I think there’s even more there.
00:38:46 ►
For example, in different Amazonian languages, the word for medicine and the word for poison is the same word.
00:38:57 ►
They don’t make that distinction.
00:39:01 ►
In other words, the same thing can cure you or it can harm you. This often depends
00:39:10 ►
on the dose, in fact. So, and that concept, the Greeks had that concept, the word pharmacon,
00:39:20 ►
which gave pharmacology and pharmacy and so forth, is exactly that. A pharmacon is a medicine slash poison.
00:39:30 ►
So, and there we see once again, in Western concepts,
00:39:34 ►
medicine is one thing, poison is another,
00:39:38 ►
and that they can’t overlap in our intellectual categories.
00:39:44 ►
In Amazonian categories, it’s the other way around.
00:39:48 ►
So when you go back and forth between a scientific, a Western way of knowing and looking at the world,
00:39:54 ►
and an Amazonian way of looking at the world, actually, the same words don’t necessarily mean
00:39:59 ►
the same thing in one system of knowledge or the other. that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about it. It just means that we’ve got to be nimble, take it into consideration, and, you know,
00:40:09 ►
cognize the complexity. Right. So I have two, I want to open up to our audience,
00:40:15 ►
but I have two questions that are practical about ayahuasca that I’d like to ask first.
00:40:19 ►
One is that as the culture that is producing ayahuasca that you’re studying is not a monoculture,
00:40:25 ►
ayahuasca itself is not a monoculture.
00:40:27 ►
There’s many different varieties of ayahuasca.
00:40:31 ►
In fact, one of the pieces of research that you cited in the book is on average, 54% more
00:40:36 ►
DMT is found in brews from neo-shamanic facilitators than from those of indigenous Amazonian shamans.
00:40:44 ►
So for those that are
00:40:45 ►
listening to this and perhaps new to ayahuasca or aspiring to work with ayahuasca, can you speak to
00:40:51 ►
the nuance chemically and the different types of ayahuasca that are there that influence how
00:40:58 ►
the experience occurs? Yeah. Yeah. Once again, it’s a good question, and it’s going to take a complicated answer, but I’ll give it a shot.
00:41:08 ►
This is also something that Western knowledge brings to the table, almost surreptitiously, because it’s a presupposition.
00:41:29 ►
science wants to know what the active ingredient is and it wants to sort of isolate it because once you have the molecule then you’re in business and I mean that literally also you can you know
00:41:36 ►
patent it turn it into a pill or something and and then and voila you know and so they did that with uh with curare for example um and invented uh
00:41:47 ►
muscle power paralyzing substances tubocurarine in the 1940s and um so the question was with ayahuasca
00:41:57 ►
um so what is the active principle and um so they looked into this and and in the early 1970s a Swiss chemist and a Swedish chemist
00:42:09 ►
found DMT in some ayahuasca brews that they sampled and so they posited that this might be
00:42:18 ►
the active ingredient because it was already a powerful and known hallucinogen.
00:42:24 ►
active ingredient because it was already a powerful and known hallucinogen.
00:42:31 ►
They also found, but the DMT actually wasn’t contained in the vine called ayahuasca,
00:42:34 ►
it was contained in the bush called chacruna or Psychotria viridis.
00:43:00 ►
Well, the vine contained other alkaloids, beta-carbolines, haramine, harmaline, tetrahydroharamine, but they didn’t seem to be, and these were vaguely hallucinogenic, but they didn’t seem to be present in the brews that were sampled in large enough quantities to actually bring about psychoactivity.
00:43:06 ►
So it seemed, everything seemed to be indicating that it was DMT was the active ingredient. Well, wait a second. First of all, it means that the Indians were wrong. They’re saying
00:43:11 ►
the key ingredient in ayahuasca is the vine. And the scientists were saying, no, no, the key
00:43:17 ►
ingredient is contained in the bush that is sometimes in the leaves of the bush that is
00:43:22 ►
sometimes added to it. And, you know, the Indians are wrong because they just don’t have electron microscopes.
00:43:29 ►
And then in the early 1980s, Dennis McKenna and his colleagues, they put it together.
00:43:38 ►
They said, look, these beta carbolines that are in the vine, what they actually do is they are MAO inhibitors that stop the DMT from getting
00:43:48 ►
dissolved in the stomach. DMT is normally not orally active. Here we have the solution, which is,
00:43:57 ►
yes, it is DMT that is the active ingredient, and the molecules in the vine are simply there to
00:44:03 ►
protect that molecule from stomach enzymes.
00:44:06 ►
And this allows the DMT to get into the blood and then to go into the brain.
00:44:11 ►
And so this is a very elegant explanation.
00:44:14 ►
The molecular fit is perfect.
00:44:16 ►
And voila, and this became the orthodoxy.
00:44:20 ►
Except that there were all kinds of ayahuasca brews that did not contain DMT.
00:44:28 ►
They were also visionary, more subtly, less spectacular images,
00:44:36 ►
but still lots of ideas and points of view that come across with simply vine only.
00:44:44 ►
points of view that come across with simply vine only.
00:44:46 ►
Then so the vine itself,
00:44:48 ►
harming,
00:44:49 ►
harming,
00:44:50 ►
tetrahydro,
00:44:50 ►
harming,
00:44:51 ►
and together,
00:44:52 ►
not isolated,
00:44:55 ►
working with their entourage effect.
00:44:58 ►
You can try a pure vine extract. You can read what Evans Schultes wrote about it or Wade Davis.
00:45:02 ►
People have had pure vine extracts and described their visions.
00:45:07 ►
They’re less spectacular than the DMT brews, but still.
00:45:12 ►
So just the vine is already a complex cocktail.
00:45:16 ►
And then it’s made or it’s used by Amazonian people to reveal the properties of other plants so that by definition, you can add
00:45:25 ►
whatever plant you want to it. So if you add tobacco, the brew will also contain nicotine.
00:45:31 ►
If you add datura, it’ll contain scopolamine and so on. So actually, ayahuasca means cocktail.
00:45:42 ►
Ayahuasca means cocktail.
00:45:48 ►
There is no standard cocktail by definition. What cocktail is, it’s a mix.
00:45:50 ►
It’s made to have stuff mixed into it.
00:45:52 ►
Sometimes it contains DMT.
00:45:56 ►
Well, the Westerners kind of fell in love with the DMT explanation.
00:46:01 ►
They kind of thought that, so this is real ayahuasca.
00:46:05 ►
explanation. They kind of thought that, so this is real ayahuasca. Real ayahuasca is when you activate DMT from the bush with the beta carbolines from the vine, and then you have this spectacular
00:46:13 ►
visual experience. This is ayahuasca. And then so Westerners have come to expect that to be
00:46:22 ►
ayahuasca. They kind of ask for it. When you
00:46:25 ►
give them more subtle brews that have less DMT in it, they’re saying, this isn’t strong. I’m
00:46:30 ►
not getting my money’s worth. So yes, eventually this has led to a situation where in places where
00:46:36 ►
there will be Western clients, people make sure that there’s enough chacruna in the brew and
00:46:42 ►
enough DMT in the brew. And so this has even been studied.
00:46:46 ►
You take samples from indigenous people
00:46:48 ►
or samples from where they attend to Western people
00:46:51 ►
and you find a lot more DMT in the ayahuasca
00:46:53 ►
prepared for Western people.
00:46:55 ►
Then you get, I find it really problematic.
00:46:58 ►
So I’m happy that science is now finally studying
00:47:01 ►
ayahuasca seriously.
00:47:03 ►
But when you read in peer-reviewed papers,
00:47:06 ►
studies of ayahuasca that state
00:47:08 ►
that they’re working with standardized ayahuasca,
00:47:12 ►
meaning to say precise proportions of vine and chacruna,
00:47:17 ►
and that the only adverse effects are vomiting,
00:47:24 ►
they’re getting carried away by their own categories. And they’re
00:47:28 ►
certainly not paying attention to, I don’t know, the data and local expertise. I mean, any
00:47:36 ►
indigenous Amazonian expert will tell you that you can mix different plants in there, that it can be the vine itself, that purging is an important part of it, and so on.
00:48:05 ►
with their brain imaging machines on the one hand and the Amazonian experts on the other sit down and design research together where they and take into consideration
00:48:13 ►
both systems of knowledge. Thank you. Why don’t we make some room for anybody that has questions
00:48:20 ►
out there on Zoom. Anybody want to either raise your hand or jump in the question yeah justin go ahead yeah um i there’s a lot of things i could probably ask here
00:48:31 ►
um but um i i am noticing that you’re starting to see especially with the psychedelic industry
00:48:38 ►
and how you have such a thing here in the west you, that there are people being pulled in to, to, to consult,
00:48:47 ►
you know, like on advisory boards, that sort of thing. I don’t know if that’s happened with you
00:48:52 ►
yet, Jeremy, but if so, I mean, you know, what sort of like, what sort of like company would
00:48:59 ►
you probably considering your own experience, what would have to be a part of like, you know, the,
00:49:05 ►
you know, the business plan, if you will, the general, the general goals that you’d want to
00:49:12 ►
align yourself with, you know, where do you, would you like to see this go? And what would you want
00:49:17 ►
to see happen as this starts to become more thoroughly enmeshed in our own sort of version of civilization.
00:49:28 ►
Thanks for the question, Justin.
00:49:29 ►
Yeah, that’s a good question and a tough one.
00:49:35 ►
You know, I don’t want to kind of speak out against private companies or anything.
00:49:41 ►
At the same time, there’s something about ayahuasca that makes it a little
00:49:46 ►
bit different from other things. In other words, it’s a plant. It grows fairly easily. I’m talking
00:49:56 ►
about the vine itself. It does seem to have a lot of health-enhancing properties, you know, for the immune system and so on,
00:50:07 ►
and also for the brain.
00:50:08 ►
It seems to help new neurons be generated.
00:50:15 ►
It’s something that I think would gain from being widely available
00:50:22 ►
and not necessarily at a very high price. In other words,
00:50:27 ►
I’m not sure that the just the market is the best mechanism. And I think that indigenous
00:50:37 ►
Amazonian people, you know, before wanting to have millions or billions of dollars rain
00:50:44 ►
down on them from, I don’t know, a patent
00:50:47 ►
that might be granted to them for ayahuasca, which is actually pretty unlikely, but let’s just say.
00:50:55 ►
I think that what they would like is to be taken into consideration.
00:51:01 ►
They, you know, are not just consulted on a sort of a board or something but really be listened to
00:51:06 ►
um they could be made responsible for cultivating the plant and for uh making and and doing it
00:51:16 ►
differently instead of instead of putting it into an active ingredient make a sort of a complex
00:51:20 ►
plant extract that they’re not easy to standardize. They are pretty variable,
00:51:26 ►
but still making different therapeutic products that would be good for human health,
00:51:37 ►
that wouldn’t cost too much, and that would recognize where they come from and who has the expertise.
00:51:46 ►
So it would take a lot of maybe a new kind of company or a consortium of companies, or
00:51:52 ►
maybe this should go through a university.
00:51:55 ►
I’m not sure.
00:51:56 ►
You know, I know that there are university-based people in Brazil and in Czech Republic, for
00:52:01 ►
example.
00:52:02 ►
They’re working right now with indigenous people in Brazil
00:52:05 ►
to do basic scientific research on the brain on ayahuasca.
00:52:12 ►
And in a context where it is also being researched as an important antidepressant
00:52:17 ►
and where it seems to have remarkable results on depression.
00:52:22 ►
In other words, people with chronic depression take one dose of ayahuasca and experience a considerable improvement for six to eight months.
00:52:32 ►
And this leaves antidepressant medication in the dust, really. And this is a several billion
00:52:41 ►
dollar a year market. So, you know, there’s actual serious research going on
00:52:46 ►
right now. Whether it should be anything other than ayahuasca itself, in other words, the plant
00:52:53 ►
brew prepared by people who know how to prepare it, I’m not sure. I think that companies, once
00:53:01 ►
again, prefer to have active ingredients that they can patent.
00:53:13 ►
So, you know, I think that approach needs to be, it’s probably not the company that’s the problem. It’s just how these companies tend to work. So if you have people with Western know-how and capital
00:53:21 ►
that are willing to go and spend time sitting around tables and talking with
00:53:26 ►
different indigenous people about how to go about doing this in a way that is fair and just and
00:53:33 ►
ecologically responsible and humane and setting the right price for the medicine. And also ayahuasca
00:53:42 ►
is not just this thing that you give to people like carrot juice.
00:53:45 ►
It needs to be administered by people who know how to do it.
00:53:49 ►
Then there’s a whole kind of service
00:53:51 ►
that goes with the substance.
00:53:53 ►
Setting this up is going to be complicated,
00:53:56 ►
but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
00:53:59 ►
But I think we’re only just at the beginning of a process.
00:54:03 ►
And it’s probably important not to rush down the avenues we’ve already rushed down before in similar cases.
00:54:11 ►
Thank you.
00:54:12 ►
Rio, are you going to?
00:54:13 ►
Yeah, go ahead, Rio.
00:54:15 ►
Hi, Jeremy.
00:54:16 ►
Two questions kind of related to each other. other when I was doing my first work in the Amazon 1980 uh 1882 one of the things that we learned
00:54:29 ►
and we went there looking for uh to work because of the extinction of plant species
00:54:37 ►
um a big thing of course that Krantz and Schultes were behind. But what we found was that actually one of the
00:54:46 ►
biggest losses was when a shaman died, that a whole lifetime of knowledge disappeared with him
00:54:54 ►
or her. And the question that in thinking about it just right now, I thought could relate because
00:55:00 ►
you’ve been down there, is that at the Girona Conference, the third International Ayahuasca Conference in Girona, 2019 now,
00:55:11 ►
there was a group of indigenous people there, very well represented.
00:55:17 ►
And one of the things that was happening was the killing of shaman
00:55:21 ►
and really the destruction of these peoples beyond even the ecology.
00:55:29 ►
So I’m wondering in that context, if you could talk a bit about what is going on now and what
00:55:35 ►
is happening with that knowledge, because obviously there’s a lot of focus on ayahuasca,
00:55:42 ►
but there’s a whole range of medicinal plants that are known
00:55:47 ►
in the Amazon and maybe don’t get as much interest, but you can speak.
00:55:56 ►
Yeah, yeah, well, thank you. Thank you for these questions. I think I was talking with Luis Eduardo Luna, who was really the first anthropologist to emphasize the importance of following the diet and so forth in his Vegetalismo book in 1986.
00:56:19 ►
And he was saying, because he was there maybe doing his field work four or five years before I was,
00:56:27 ►
so in the late 70s, in a nearby area. And he noticed, just like I did when I got there, that
00:56:34 ►
the knowledge about ayahuasca and these other teacher plants and medicinal plants was really
00:56:42 ►
waning. And people didn’t want to talk about it to outsiders.
00:56:48 ►
The young people weren’t really that interested in it with a few exceptions. And it seemed Luis
00:56:54 ►
Eduardo Luna thought that his four old informants were like the last dinosaurs and once they
00:57:00 ►
disappeared that it was going to be gone. So he was studying it almost with that in mind,
00:57:08 ►
so that if they disappeared, that something would remain.
00:57:13 ►
Well, fast forward 20 years,
00:57:15 ►
and the place is crawling with people from all kinds of countries
00:57:20 ►
that have come to become apprentices of the people who have expertise
00:57:26 ►
to follow diets. And it’s oddly, the large, great majority of the apprentices are non-Amazonian.
00:57:36 ►
There really has been a huge internationalization in terms of who is studying with ayahuasca masters.
00:57:48 ►
And this interest, like this strong interest by hundreds or even thousands of Westerners
00:57:56 ►
willing to go down there and suffer and diet and learn and vomit and so forth.
00:58:03 ►
Well, this is not only a good source of income, it also puts a value
00:58:09 ►
on the knowledge in terms of the young indigenous people are saying, look, if these gringos are
00:58:14 ►
coming, and they’re interested in it, there must be something there. You know, it’s something
00:58:21 ►
that’s also a kind of a strange inheritance of colonialism, which is, for example, in Peru, which is a country of enormous natural beauty and resources.
00:58:31 ►
It took international tourists coming and saying, wow, the Amazon is beautiful.
00:58:37 ►
It has lots of plants. And this is important for the Peruvians themselves.
00:58:42 ►
I’m talking about people in the big cities, to start valuing it.
00:58:46 ►
And only, you know, 30 years ago, Peruvians in Lima dreamed of going on vacation to Miami.
00:58:52 ►
Now they go on vacation to the Peruvian Amazon and they go to the eco lodge. In other words,
00:58:58 ►
you know, somehow the Western world has had a tendency to set the tone.
00:59:06 ►
And in this case, it’s been useful to ayahuasca shamanism and let’s just say this indigenous systems of knowledge because it has put a value on it.
00:59:34 ►
You know, so people criticize ayahuasca tourism, but still, I think that there is something there that has been quite valid. There was another part to your question, but it’s escaped me. I just want to make sure everybody gets time while Jeremy’s here. Melissa wants to know about how the impacts of Western intervention are currently situated. Are you seeing any mitigation of the adverse effects of Western intervention in the region, or is it just same as it ever was?
01:00:02 ►
By Western intervention, you’re talking about oil companies?
01:00:05 ►
You’re talking about oil companies,
01:00:06 ►
impacts of visiting,
01:00:08 ►
destructive influences of Western intervention, yeah.
01:00:12 ►
Well, you know, Western,
01:00:14 ►
let’s just say,
01:00:15 ►
look at illegal gold extractors
01:00:19 ►
in the Peruvian Amazon
01:00:21 ►
and in the Brazilian Amazon.
01:00:24 ►
Most of them are not Western in the sense that you’re thinking.
01:00:29 ►
You know, I mean, these tend to be poor, landless people
01:00:36 ►
from the country itself.
01:00:38 ►
You know, they’re maybe not indigenous to the Amazonian part of the country,
01:00:42 ►
but they go in there and they weren’t born there.
01:00:47 ►
They don’t know the particular river,
01:00:49 ►
but here, there they are and they’re sifting it
01:00:51 ►
and they’re putting mercury in there
01:00:52 ►
and they’re just trying to earn a buck and survive.
01:00:58 ►
And that’s the best way that they know how to go about it.
01:01:02 ►
And there are no big obstacles on them doing this.
01:01:06 ►
And so it continues.
01:01:08 ►
Well, that’s gold extraction.
01:01:10 ►
And it really does hit certain regions very hard indeed.
01:01:15 ►
Then there’s the oil companies.
01:01:17 ►
Well, some of them are Argentinian.
01:01:19 ►
Some of them are run by the Peruvian government.
01:01:21 ►
Some of them are Canadian.
01:01:24 ►
None of them are particularly
01:01:26 ►
admirable. And the further away you get from the gaze of the international world,
01:01:36 ►
the more the old oleoducts are leaking. And they leak once, they leak twice, they leak a thousand times. You have areas where there’s just permanent input of oil into the ecosystem. You have some of the most contaminated, the Achuar people on the Corrientes River live probably further away from the industrial world than anybody on earth, but they have the highest levels of heavy metal in their blood
01:02:06 ►
because the oil companies that have been operating there have been pouring back
01:02:10 ►
formation waters. Formation waters, when you pull oil out from the subsoil of a rainforest,
01:02:17 ►
for every gallon of oil, you get nine gallons of water contaminated with hydrocarbons and heavy metals. And so they were extracting like
01:02:29 ►
200 million liters of formation waters every day and just throwing them into the river
01:02:36 ►
for 35 years. It’s like a million bathtubs every day poured into one river. Well, the people who live there and
01:02:49 ►
meanwhile, the money that comes out of the soil, the oil becomes money. It’s like half the wealth
01:02:53 ►
of Peru. None of it stays there. There’s not even a health post. They don’t have aspirin. There’s no
01:02:59 ►
doctor, no schools, no nothing. These are just Indians living out in the middle of nowhere.
01:03:05 ►
no schools, no nothing. These are just Indians living out in the middle of nowhere. All they can do is fish and hunt, except all the fish and all the game are completely contaminated,
01:03:11 ►
and they themselves are contaminated. You know, this is just like an ongoing scandal. It’s been
01:03:17 ►
an ongoing scandal since 2007. The government said they tried to do something about it.
01:03:24 ►
I mean, you know, Indigenous Amazonian people are always on the front line protesting, often against oil companies and against mining companies, some of which are Western, others of which aren’t.
01:03:36 ►
It’s, you know, extractive industries.
01:03:38 ►
I mean, they could be Chinese.
01:03:40 ►
They could come from the east, the west, the north or the south.
01:03:43 ►
They could come from the east, the west, the north, or the south.
01:03:49 ►
I mean, Argentina is in the south, but it’s still extracting.
01:03:54 ►
Its companies are still extracting oil and not in a particularly – it’s actually pretty difficult to extract oil out from under a rainforest
01:03:57 ►
and do it in a clean way.
01:04:00 ►
And it would certainly cost a lot more than it does.
01:04:03 ►
So, you know, why hasn’t it changed? Follow the money.
01:04:08 ►
So this, there were a couple other questions, but Jeremy, a time check. How are you on your time? Do you need to be wrapping up or can you stay for a couple more questions?
01:04:16 ►
Yeah, okay, let’s do two questions.
01:04:18 ►
Okay, I saw Chris and Ian both had their hands up. Did you withdraw or do you still want to ask? First one to unmute gets it. Go ahead, Chris.
01:04:24 ►
had their hands up did you withdraw or do you still want to ask first one done you gets it go ahead chris my my question just mostly related to as you were talking about people from all around
01:04:31 ►
the world coming in and try you know trying to learn this knowledge but also that the
01:04:41 ►
the old shamans had said this is a tool that can be used for good or for ill,
01:04:47 ►
and they were reluctant to share it with outsiders.
01:04:50 ►
I’m wondering if there’s some issue with people,
01:04:58 ►
with false shamans.
01:04:59 ►
And also, I’m also trying to run that past
01:05:03 ►
my American Western filter of am I being too judgmental and trying to have there be some true religion and some definite lineage that needs to be verified in order to be valid.
01:05:16 ►
Let’s narrow it down to a question, Chris.
01:05:39 ►
Well, is there in fact a true lineage that needs to be followed to be valid, or is there, or is, I understand it’s a set of tools. So, is there a bad way of doing it, or is any spread of this information a positive thing.
01:05:40 ►
Thank you. Yeah. Once again, a complicated one.
01:05:45 ►
I’ll give a brief intro.
01:05:50 ►
Let’s see.
01:05:51 ►
I think that around the time that I published The Cosmic Serpent, which was 95 in French and 98 in English,
01:06:06 ►
the cosmic serpent, which was 95 in French and 98 in English. I actually had it translated into Spanish before it came out in English so that people in Peru could read it, and in particular
01:06:10 ►
indigenous Amazonian people. And I was kind of worried that they might think, who is this
01:06:17 ►
white boy coming in here, taking our shamanic knowledge and lining it up against molecular biology, whereas we didn’t ask him to do this, and imposing this kind of, you know, new way of reading our knowledge.
01:06:32 ►
I was afraid that because 10 years previously, when I’d been living with people, they were kind of reluctant to talk about it that much.
01:06:46 ►
talk about it that much. Well, I took the risk, wrote the book, had it published,
01:06:53 ►
sent it down to Peru. And to my pleasure and surprise, they all seemed to like it. And they all seemed to like it because they said they felt that taken seriously by saying, look,
01:07:01 ►
this Amazonian knowledge is on the same footing as molecular biology, except we just don’t realize it.
01:07:07 ►
They thought, ah, yes, at last we’re being taken seriously.
01:07:10 ►
And also, I think at that point, and several people told me as much, they realized that getting recognition of their territories, which was one of the things I was helping them with, was important.
01:07:23 ►
But they also needed recognition of their systems of knowledge.
01:07:27 ►
And that if the broader world didn’t recognize that their knowledge had validity,
01:07:33 ►
then they weren’t going to survive.
01:07:34 ►
And this is a realization that they came to.
01:07:37 ►
They realized the importance of territory in, let’s say, the 70s and the 80s,
01:07:41 ►
and the importance of getting a recognition of their knowledge,
01:07:44 ►
perhaps a little bit later in the 90s. And so that’s, I think, an important switch. Everybody knows that shamans
01:07:54 ►
are ambiguous and that the same shaman can start off on the right path and then get taken up by power games. So nobody is like pure.
01:08:07 ►
And the more you think one shaman is above it all,
01:08:11 ►
actually, the more that shaman is going to have
01:08:13 ►
the temptation to abuse power.
01:08:15 ►
So people down there know about that fundamental ambiguity.
01:08:19 ►
So there can be people who start off on the right track
01:08:23 ►
and who end up being nasty sorcerers or worse yet, charlatans.
01:08:31 ►
I think also that people believe it’s kind of like, you know, with the guy who repairs your car.
01:08:37 ►
I mean, people who do a good job, clients are going to come back.
01:08:41 ►
And if they do a lousy job, you know, they’re not going to have too much work.
01:08:47 ►
So they’re not all that obsessed with like quality control.
01:08:51 ►
Anybody can say I’m a shaman. Here’s some ayahuasca. And then they start singing.
01:08:56 ►
And, you know, if it’s good, people will go back. And if it’s bad, they’ll say the guy’s an idiot.
01:09:10 ►
the guy’s an idiot. So, yeah, that’s, I think it’s, there’s not a big movement, and this is perhaps a weak spot of at least Peruvian ayahuasca shamanism, is that not only is it hard to
01:09:18 ►
standardize, it’s hard to get two ayahuasqueros to agree about much. You know, they tend to have power struggles
01:09:30 ►
between them. You know, they don’t have a sort of a corporation where they say, we need to
01:09:37 ►
define some standards here. In Colombia, they’ve done that. But in the Peruvian Amazon, I say getting Peruvian ayahuasqueros to agree would be like herding cats. So, you know, there too, it can be complicated.
01:09:55 ►
Ian, can you make your question very brief?
01:09:58 ►
I don’t know, Charles. Let’s see.
01:10:01 ►
I’m going to cut you off after two sentences.
01:10:03 ►
Let’s see. I’m going to cut you off after two sentences.
01:10:07 ►
First, first, I wanted to thank you for being here, Jeremy.
01:10:21 ►
It’s been a really informative talk. I would I would say that the reason that the Westerners we’ve heard that that Ayahuasca is the television of the jungle and we want the DMT because we want high death. My question is that in the same way the cultural context of plant
01:10:32 ►
medicine and shamans and various indigenous shamans, we don’t understand the cultural
01:10:39 ►
context in which ayahuasca is taken. Is it true that that in this is it similar that they don’t understand the
01:10:46 ►
context from which westerners or people from other parts of the world are coming from so they say
01:10:52 ►
here is the knowledge we wish to share and be taken seriously and they end up pouring that
01:10:57 ►
knowledge into leaky vessels who then run back to their various communities and go i found the
01:11:02 ►
answer to capitalism but by the time they get there, it’s all leaked.
01:11:06 ►
It’s leaked away.
01:11:07 ►
And so people get an idea of, oh, it makes you crazy or it makes you messionic.
01:11:13 ►
And that’s where the sort of the bad press comes.
01:11:17 ►
Yeah, that’s an interesting hypothesis almost, the leaky Westerner hypothesis.
01:11:30 ►
almost, the leaky Westerner hypothesis. I’d invite you to, as a kind of a short answer,
01:11:36 ►
even though it’s more like a comment on your comment, there’s a book called The Falling Sky that was written by David Kopenawa, who was a Yanomami shaman, and Bruce Albert, who was a
01:11:43 ►
French anthropologist, who was his scribe, as it were.
01:11:46 ►
And he has a chapter in that book called Merchandise Love, and in which he describes,
01:11:55 ►
he’s tried, Davi Kopenawa has traveled to Europe and North America several times,
01:11:59 ►
and he describes white people from his point of view. And he says, these are people of the merchandise.
01:12:07 ►
They’re obsessed with their merchandise.
01:12:10 ►
They dream about it at night.
01:12:12 ►
They always want more.
01:12:14 ►
They’re extracting minerals from the earth and then melting them together in big factories and producing more merchandise.
01:12:22 ►
And this obsession with merchandise will have no end.
01:12:28 ►
You know, that’s a pretty clear-eyed gaze on the extractive industrial world.
01:12:35 ►
So, but that said, I don’t think that Amazonians understand everything about Europeans,
01:12:41 ►
just like Europeans surely don’t understand everything about amazonians and um but getting together and talking getting to know each other sharing you
01:12:53 ►
know yeah I think that for example scientific verification where good old uh getting several
01:13:00 ►
scientists to conduct the same experiment testing testing it, trying to come up with
01:13:05 ►
sort of dependable protocols, you know, putting a little bit of method into it. This could be
01:13:11 ►
something that could be constructive for ayahuasca therapeutic practices. I think that Westerners have
01:13:19 ►
a part of the puzzle, and Indigenous Amazonians have another part of the puzzle and the the task at hand is to
01:13:26 ►
sit down together and think it over together and think about what i don’t know about the other side
01:13:34 ►
what i i would like the other side to explain to me it’s it’s also about simply having the will to
01:13:40 ►
to listen i think that’s one of the hard things for Western experts, is that listening is not
01:13:47 ►
something they’re good at. They’re good at talking, they’re good at explaining,
01:13:52 ►
they’re good at doubting, but suspending disbelief and listening, you know, this is not part of
01:13:59 ►
Western expertise. It actually is part of Indigenous expertise. The older the Indigenous
01:14:06 ►
experts get, the more they listen. In fact, sometimes they even listen with their eyes closed.
01:14:13 ►
And, you know, Westerners think, oh, he’s not even listening to me, or he’s nodding off. But
01:14:19 ►
actually, in their culture, it means, no, I’m really listening. Because when you really listen, you close your eyes.
01:14:27 ►
You know, so the two sides have different talents. And it’s not immediate to either side,
01:14:33 ►
how to go about understanding each other. You know, just a last example. In Canada,
01:14:39 ►
they’re trying to get scientists and indigenous experts to work together on questions like the ecology of rivers,
01:14:47 ►
to clean up rivers. Well, Indigenous Ojibwe people in Ontario, for example, they live on a given
01:14:54 ►
river. They’re actually not that interested in rivers in general. They’re interested in the
01:15:00 ►
river they live on. They know it. They know the place names.
01:15:05 ►
They know what fish live there, when they go through.
01:15:08 ►
They have great specific knowledge.
01:15:10 ►
They’re kind of uninterested in universalized general knowledge about all the rivers in the world.
01:15:18 ►
Western scientists come from another direction.
01:15:20 ►
I mean, they’re obsessed with universals and, you know, true knowledge has to be about
01:15:25 ►
the whole thing. And that’s not a crime, but it just means that these two kind of different
01:15:30 ►
approaches, when they actually meet and start talking about the health of the river, they have
01:15:36 ►
a hard time even getting on the same page sometimes because of that. So that’s where the
01:15:44 ►
work needs doing, is that not only does each side have to
01:15:47 ►
learn to listen to the other side, each side has got to learn about their own presuppositions
01:15:52 ►
about what they’re bringing to the table. Well, thank you, Jeremy. Jeremy’s book is
01:15:58 ►
Plant Teachers, Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge. It’s a good slim volume that has a lot more
01:16:07 ►
questions than we had time to get to today. So we’re really grateful for your time here
01:16:12 ►
and grateful for all of the work that you’ve been doing as a teacher and especially as an activist
01:16:18 ►
for these spaces. This is something that you don’t talk about so much in your books, but is
01:16:25 ►
definitely underlying it. So a couple of questions we got in the chat, just, you know, really briefly,
01:16:29 ►
if people want to get involved beyond just learning and studying, are there ways that
01:16:34 ►
they can contribute to activism or follow along your path and help contribute in their ways in
01:16:39 ►
making a difference? Was that a question? Yeah, very briefly, how would you recommend people get
01:16:45 ►
involved beyond buying a book? You know, I think that there are a million kind of like good causes.
01:16:52 ►
They can be close, they can be far. I spend my time, you know, looking after the Amazonian
01:16:56 ►
rainforest, which is 10,000 miles away from where I live, fundraising and so forth. But like just the fate of farm animals down the road would be
01:17:09 ►
a valid cause. Cultivating a garden, appreciating plants, teaching children about the importance of
01:17:17 ►
plants and other species, or women’s rights, minority rights, there’s diversity in the world is important and needs having a value put on it.
01:17:29 ►
And this can be done 100,000 different ways.
01:17:35 ►
And the most important thing is to use your own intelligence.
01:17:37 ►
In other words, not try to be like somebody else, but do what you really feel is important and needs doing.
01:17:44 ►
Because that’s what’s gonna be your fuel
01:17:46 ►
uh because it’s a it’s a long you know when you as an activist you kind of go against the grain
01:17:52 ►
and try to sort of change the way things are going so you got to go against the flow a little bit
01:17:58 ►
and it can be lonely you know so you need you, you need will. And so that’s why you, it helps to
01:18:06 ►
choose something that you really feel is important. And what that will be will really depend on who
01:18:14 ►
you are. Well, thank you for giving us all so much fuel today. We really appreciate you.
01:18:19 ►
We really appreciate your time. I know that we’ve kept you here longer than we promised. But
01:18:24 ►
this has been the most fascinating
01:18:26 ►
conversation we’ve had in the salon this year.
01:18:28 ►
So I do appreciate your time.
01:18:30 ►
Thank you so much.
01:18:31 ►
Thank you too, because the questions were all good and I just couldn’t walk out on it.
01:18:35 ►
So thank you.
01:18:38 ►
Well, we’ll get this podcast early next week and I’ll send you the link, but everybody
01:18:43 ►
is applauding.
01:18:44 ►
I see right now.
01:18:48 ►
So you can’t hear it, but thank you so much, Jeremy.
01:18:49 ►
We really appreciate it. Okay. Lorenzo. It was a pleasure. Charles too. Thanks.
01:18:53 ►
Well, since it’s now Friday,
01:18:57 ►
I guess that my plan to get this out early in the week kind of fell through,
01:19:01 ►
but well, here we are at last. Now, before I go,
01:19:04 ►
I want to let you know
01:19:05 ►
that our guest next Monday night, November 1st, will be Dr. Robert Flannery. Robert is the first
01:19:11 ►
Ph.D. in the United States with certified technical expertise in growing commercial cannabis,
01:19:18 ►
and he is the CEO of Dr. Rob Farms. Additionally, Dr. Flannery is the co-author, along with Ed Rosenthal and Angela
01:19:26 ►
Baca, of the Cannabis Grower’s Handbook, The Complete Guide to Marijuana and Hemp Cultivation.
01:19:34 ►
And I should also mention that Robert is an old friend of our co-host, Charles. Now, the following
01:19:40 ►
Monday, November 8th, our guest will be Nathan Cooper, who will be speaking about art, autism, and acid.
01:19:47 ►
And on November 15th, our topic will be psychedelic law for the people,
01:19:52 ►
with guest attorney Gary Smith and his associates.
01:19:56 ►
So I hope that you’ll be able to sit in on some of these conversations,
01:19:59 ►
but if not, I’ll eventually get them posted here in the online salon.
01:20:04 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:20:09 ►
Namaste, my friends.