Interview Jeremy Narby, part 2 of 4

I: Yes, perhaps the smoked DMT experience is simply too short to reach such a stage. By the time you've worked through all your inner stuff and you're ready to go deeper, the effect has worn off.

J: Another thing that Benny Shanon says that is interesting, also when trying to get an idea of what ayahuasca is is that in his experience, and in that of many other people, ayahuasca is like a school. Your first session is lesson number one, session number two is lesson number two, etc. Then there are semesters. You note that once you've done 30 sessions and you look back, the first ten sessions were like the first semester, and so on. You do a 120 sessions, like Benny Shanon has done, and you're getting close to your doctorate. The point is, in lesson 89 you don't learn about stuff that you've learned about in the first 88 lessons. It always goes further and deeper. The third semester builds on the first two semesters, etc.

I: Did you ever drink only Banisteriopsis caapi?

J: No.... Actually, the reason I'm in this field at all, is that I'm an anthropologist and activist for the rights of indigenous people, and in particular western Amazonian people. My experience as an anthropologist in the place that I've mainly been working for the last 23 years, is the central jungle area of the Peruvian Amazon, this is Ashaninca, Shipibo, this is like the Bordeaux of ayahuasca. This is ayahuasca which is Banisteriopsis caapi combined Psychotria viridis, and perhaps some additives, maybe a leave or two of toé, datura, maybe some tobacco, maybe some coca, depending on the brewer. There's always Banisteriopsis and Psychotria in this area. And I must say it's by far the ayahuasca I prefer.

I: So you've tried another one?

J: I've been in the lower jungle, where Psychotria doesn't grow. They use Diplopterys cabrerana as the source of DMT. I find that a lot more vomitive, and it's definitely more difficult to prepare. I've had some very deep and visionary ayahuasca produced with Diplopterys cabrerana, but the point is that the indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon don't prepare just pure Banisteriopsis, to my knowledge. I've heard of this in the Colombian Amazon, but I haven't been there.

[We're both silent and pondering]

J: There's a thing I think that needs pointing out, and once again Benny Shanon does it quite well, and there's no point in not repeating something that seems important and correct. Ayahuasca usage takes you to an understanding that contradicts certain important presuppositions of western academic culture and knowledge. Integrating ayahuasca into a western existence is complicated.

I: Yes, that's true. I was just going to pose some questions around this. It seems like a lot of the hard work in this area is being performed by young, western people who want to have these experiences they've read and heard about. They're usually taking it by themselves, or in groups of people who share similar experience with these things, which is usually quite little. Do you think this is safe, or would you suggest a guide or something else?

J: Well, that's a complicated question for many reasons. I mean, I don't think life is safe. I think the whole obsession with safety in western culture is becoming disgraceful. However, I am for people being fully informed before they make their decision. I am for, what's it called..., safety belts in automobiles. It's better when people don't die when they have car accidents, obviously. It's true, ayahuasca is a power tool. I think it could be compared to a power outboard motor boat, and you go riding on the high seas of your psyche. Yes, it can be dangerous. I have no advice to give anybody, just because I'm not in the game of dishing out advice. I think the world is beyond taking advice.

That has to be made clear. People do what they do and there's no stopping them anyway. You can't tell people to do things and hope they are going to listen to you. Essentially anybody is welcome to do whatever they want, as long as they don't harm other people. However, if people are actually seeking advice and saying "Well look, I don't really know about how to do this, what would you recommend?” what I would recommend is the following.

Make a quest out of it, go to South America. Yes, you're going to have to work and make some money and buy a plane ticket, yes, I think we should pay ayahuasca shamans appropriately, because I think they're more efficient than western psycho-analysts or psychologists, so why shouldn't they deserve at least half of what a western psychologist gets? Yes, half of the experience is the singing of the shaman. I don't know any western shaman that I'd like to take ayahuasca with. I think I'd always prefer to do it with an indigenous practitioner, just because they're more experienced.

The ideal way of doing it is in a place where it's part of the culture, with a practitioner who knows how to brew it properly and who knows how to administer it properly. And then it's not for entertainment and it's good to go into it with a question. That's what my advice would be.

I: But do you think this can go on forever? I mean, all these planes that keep flying...

J: Well, if you want you can take a boat.

I: To me it doesn't feel very likely that this is technically possible, that within the next couple of years just everyone who wants to drink ayahuasca can go to the rainforest.

J: You may be speaking out of Holland where it's legal. Everywhere else it's illegal, even in Switzerland. So, I wouldn't want to advise anybody to do anything illegal. If the question is "It is legal in Holland to drink ayahuasca, I don't want to get on an airplane to go to South America, and I do want to try ayahuasca, what do you recommend?", and this is another question, what I would recommend at that point is choosing the right shaman, once again. I think it's good to be well-accompanied, it's like this supersonic hallucinogen and you're a passenger. Knowing how to pilot that supersonic hallucinogen is a profession and it takes years to get good at it. Sure, you can take it by yourself, and that's the risk you're taking, but my advice once again to a lay person who's seeking to do ayahuasca for the first time, is do it with a shaman who knows how to prepare it well and who knows how to administer it well.

Do you want to think about cleaning your body? This means not eating a lot of fatty food, a lot of salty food and so forth during the week leading up to the session. That's like, you clean yourself of the fat and salt, just like you would clean your windscreen if you go driving up in the high Alps, just so you can see the view better. Some people go for a drive across Switzerland and they forget to clean their windshields. They still make it across the country, but it's just less interesting.

Yes, it's deep water. I don't think you can tell anybody that ayahuasca is not risky. It *is* risky. Even if it's good ayahuasca and well-administered and you've prepared your body well. Some people are, let's say, more sensitive than others. Even without being borderline schizophrenics, they can be extremely imprinted by the experience. I know of one anthropology student who was studying with the Shipibo. She had a hard time shutting off her visions for eighteen months. Once she got back to Paris, she says that she'd lie down in the late afternoon and she'd be submerged with hallucinogenic imagery again, and it was like a TV set that wouldn't shut off. It completely changed her life. She says she doesn't regret it. After eighteen months she got back to stability, and she decided to study healing once she'd finished her doctorate in anthropology, which she did brilliantly at. She's back in Peru now, she's taking ayahuasca again, she's well, she's a luminous and smart person. But still, eighteen months without being able to turn the TV off is rough.

Another thing, I have a friend of a friend here in Switzerland. This is another kind of thing that can happen. This guy didn't know what ayahuasca was, hadn't heard of it. A friend said "There is this European fellow who lives in Peru, he's going to be here in Switzerland, up in a chalet in the Alps, tomorrow night, and if you want you can come and experience ayahuasca." The guy thought it was something like smoking a joint, and so he went up with his friends and he swallowed this stuff. To cut a long story short, he experienced his death for hours. It completely changed his worldview, he says. He was enraged, because he didn't want his worldview to be changed. He thought it was a scandal that he hadn't been informed of this beforehand. It took him a year to get over his rage. The fellow has since gone on to take ayahuasca again, and moved on, but I think the point is well-taken.

It's not just a neutral thing where you invite somebody along and they experience it and it will take them into a strange place and then the next day things will get back to normal again. It can modify your way of looking at the world. Until you drink it, you can't know how it's going to affect you. You can't know if it's going to take you to a place that you're going to have a hard time getting back from. You are putting your psyche at risk when you take strong hallucinogens, and ayahuasca is one, even if it's biological. Actually advising anybody to do anything is risky. I think the advice is: be aware of the risk, inform yourself, read books and think about it. I think the advice with any hallucinogen is, if you have a little voice in your head telling you "Oh, but today is maybe not the right moment," listen to it.

I: Hmm... In general.

J: Yeah, that's true with LSD. If all your friends are going to take LSD, but a little voice in your head says "Um... I'm not sure if I want to do this", it's old hippie advice, listen to that voice.

I: Well, I don't want to fully disagree, but I know that in my case this voice can also be caused by something else. Sometimes I have this voice saying "Maybe this is not a good day", but there would be another voice going "Yeah... It's never a good day" and then you turn out never using these substances for a long time, while you know they can be beneficial for your life.

J: Well, yes, I see your point of view, but I think when one is in the business of advising people, one should air on the prudent side. So what, you end up spending yours not taking hallucinogens. If that's what your little voice is saying, then that's your decision. And then when you finally get to the point where you can't stand not taking them anymore, then you are ready to take them. But, who am I to say that you should or should not do this? Only you know, so listen to yourself.

Meanwhile about bad trips, I know what you are saying when you say you don't really think they exist, but for me it was pretty clear, when you take some LSD and the next thing you know you're sort of bummed out in a corner having weird thoughts about yourself, and you're panicking and you're thinking about your parents or whatever, and you think somebody has died, you know, it ceases to be an enjoyable experience. And suddenly you're sort of not well at all and in a difficult place. I've been there a bunch of times, I know some other people who have been there a bunch of times, I have learned how to accompany people who are in that kind of place, and, yes, it's true that often the so-called bad trips are the ones that teach you the most about yourself, that's true. And in that sense they're not bad. And I think a lot of people have said this. But still, I think doing away with the concept of bad trip is a mistake, if only because when something like a bad trip occurs, if we don't have the concept, what are we gonna call them?

You know, I had a friend who loved taking psilocybin mushrooms, and one day she had a girlfriend come over and this other guy, and they took, well, too many mushrooms. And the next thing, the two girls, who were about 18 or 19 at this point, had developed a certainty that the guys was the devil and was going to murder them. And then they started hallucinating pools of blood, and all kinds of stuff. So, you know, they had a sort of psychotic reaction or whatever - paranoia, bad hallucinations, it was a bad trip by however you wanna call it.

They came down from it and back from it and so on, but they said that for years after this, whenever they ran into this guy, who was guilty of nothing, except having a sort of a sinister gaze or something, you know, with his pupils all dilated. They said it took them years to be able to feel at ease in this guy's presence again. So it was a deeply traumatic, bad trip.

I: And she was already experienced with mushrooms?

J: She'd taken mushrooms seven or eight times and thought that they were just fantastic. And she would go to Bilbo the Hobbit-world and laugh all night long. After this bad experience she stopped taking mushrooms for fifteen years. But also, not just that, it also messed up this relationship with this other guy, even though it was based on hallucinations. I'm not sure that that experience, which was just frankly traumatic for her, was something that was particularly full of knowledge for her life.

I: I think if she would have taken with a shaman, and it would've happened when under the influence of ayahuasca...

J: ...and he would've looked after her and accompanied her and she wouldn't have been on that trip... That's the whole point.

I: Yes. She would probably have gotten to the point where she would understand why she got these feelings about this other person.

J: Yes. Getting back to the thing that you were saying about advising people and the risk and not the risk - people of my age, I'm fourty-seven, there were millions of us back when we were 17, 18, 19 and so on. We were taking LSD without supervision, without shamans around us, without knowing what we were doing, we did some stupid things. We went to rock festivals under the influence into big crowds, we had paranoia, we made all the mistakes in the book. And there was nobody advising us. So there was no space in the culture, or even the published counterculture, that would really tell you about the risks. So we had to discover them on our own, take the risks, have the weird trips and the difficulties, and learn by making mistakes, and essentially that's what got us to where we are now.

Those are experiences that led me to be able to understand the knowledge of indigenous Amazonian people a lot better when I was an anthropologist, but these psychedelic experiences have also enhanced people working in the computer industry, or in medical research, or all kinds of areas. So the fact is, that the folks who are 45 and older, are part of that generation. If we're going to turn around and say, now that we're getting grey hair "Oh, the young people should not experiment", in other words "The young people should not do what we did," that would just be ridiculous on the face of it.

This is not to say that I want to encourage young people to go out and make all the mistakes I made, and you can actually read things and learn by reading an interview, and thinking "Yeah, maybe it's not a good idea to operate an automobile while under the influence of hallucinogens." That's one of the things about the ayahuasca circle. The rules of the ayahuasca circle is that once you've swallowed the drink, they shortly turn the lights off and then what happens is between the shaman's song and your own brain. Ayahuasca etiquette is you're not supposed to bother your neighbours. And if your neighbour starts moaning or whatever, the shaman is going to look after them.

So this is an experience to be conducted in a quiet, secluded place, in the dark, and the point is not to commune too much with your neighbours. It's each for his or her own, it's a very personal thing, in fact. That's how you do it seriously, you dive into inner space and if you come in it takes you to outer space. So this is not about getting in the car and driving off to a rock festival. It has nothing to do with it.

I: Okay, now about the phrase 'ecodelic'. I don't remember where I first picked it up, but I do remember that it immediately made sense to me, that it means it manifests your ecological awareness. I want to start using it a lot more often, and ayahuasca is definitely an ecodelic. In certain ayahuasca circles, this brings up a certain paradox.

Many people in the west are drinking ayahuasca that is made from Latin American plants, and usually nobody knows where it really came from, how it was harvested. There's hardly any information about it, like with the normal food industry. I see a lot of people here in Amsterdam, or the Netherlands, drinking ayahuasca every now and then, and a lot of them are environmentally conscious. But then they do drink these vines and leaves of which they don't really know where it came from. What do you think of this?

J: It seems to make sense that the more you know where each thing that you consume and ingest comes from the better. However, for example, I like wine from Bordeaux. I like tasting them, I like experiencing them, I like the drunkenness that they bring about. I don't necessarily know the grape varietal of every single bottle of Bordeaux wine that I drink. Nor do I know exactly in what condition the grapes were harvested, or how they were vinified. Finally, do I need to know that or can I just taste the quality on my pallet? Actually, if I had to know everything there is to know about every bottle wine I drink, I wonder if there would be enough room in my head for other knowledge.

I'm joking. But what I mean is: does one really have to be a purist all the time and say "If you don't know what you're ingesting, then you shouldn't ingest it"? Well, I think clearly not.

But, the advice about "Know as much as you can about what you ingest", yes, obviously. It's true with cheese, it's true with wine, it's true with ayahuasca. It's true with chocolate for goodness sake. You know, for example "shade-grown in the Putumayo valley, harvested in 2005 by Don Ignatio and prepared with a little bit of tobacco" and so on and so forth. I think that the first thing to do if you are for example in South America and you go to one of these places where they're going to be serving ayahuasca, is to speak with the person who prepared it and say "Well, what did you put in it, how long did you boil it, where did the plants come from, in what pot did you make it?" And a key question to ask folks is "How much Datura did you put in it?"

There are all kinds of problematic aspects with Datura, because it can enhance the ayahuasca imagery and make the brew more potent. But it can also turn people into willing victims. And ayahuasca certainly takes your defenses down, and if you're in the presence of somebody less than scrupulous, and there is extra Datura in the brew, it makes you extra vulnerable to suggestion and to actually doing what this person wants you to do.

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