by Ross Heaven
To regard one state (normal consciousness) as real and our “hallucinatory” world as unreal and without value may, therefore, be quite wrong. Such a distinction presupposes that there is actually a separation between the two states, that one exists in reality while the other is in some way false or abnormal. Shamans see no such division.
The curanderos of the Andes believe instead that the information given to us by San Pedro (or in dreams, meditations, and visions) is as valid, or more so, as that received from ordinary perception and thought. Furthermore, such information is given to us precisely so it can be used in daily life: not ignored, denied, or regarded as lacking in merit or purpose. To deny our dreams, after all, is to dismiss a third of our human and spiritual experience.
For San Pedro shamans the visions and insights gained from the plant are there to inform our everyday behavior in the real world so we can make changes, heal, or do whatever else is necessary to improve and enhance our lives. The changes we make as a consequence of our visions mean that we become new people and closer, in one of those shaman’s words, to our real essence as “true human beings.” In turn, these life changes mean that we start from a new perspective the next time we drink San Pedro, and so the process of spiritual and worldly advancement continues.
Archaeological and anthropological evidence points to the same unified view of life and healing on the part of ancient curanderos just as much as their modern-day counterparts, and to their perception of reality as a combination of the material and immaterial so that one informs the other.
Peter Furst writes that the shamanic worldview does not include the notion of duality or opposing forces that split the world into two, the sacred and the profane.16 Instead, there is no purely physical world and no absolute and self-contained otherworld that is wholly of the spirit. On the contrary, the curandero, in his healing rituals, seeks to find unity and balance in the interactions between all the forces of the world through a vision that can inform—and transform—his patient’s life, leading to an improvement in his existence.
This view of the world is flexible enough to incorporate even seemingly competing or contradictory elements; a person might find as a result of his visions that he is right and wrong, good and bad, blessed and cursed all at the same time. A new, more creative and open understanding of reality can then arise and the behavior of that person (and the outcomes that stem from it) can change as a result of the information San Pedro has given him. There is a very real sense then in which our visions are our reality, even if science cannot explain to us why or how.
THE BIRTH OF ENTHEOGENS
To differentiate plants like San Pedro (which provide the user with a visionary experience that may also include important real-life outcomes) from hallucinogens like LSD that had become so popular for recreational use in the 1960s and 1970s, the term entheogen was coined by a group of ethnobotanists including Richard Evans Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson. Both men were plant pioneers themselves who are particularly known for their work with ayahuasca and “magic” mushrooms.
Schultes and his colleagues felt that hallucinogen was an inappropriate term, partly due to its use by psychiatrists and medical doctors to describe states of delirium and insanity. The word psychedelic, in more popular use at the time, did not seem a better alternative because of its similarity to words like psychosis, which again implied that visionary or mystical states were a form of madness.
“In a strict sense,” they wrote, “only those vision-producing drugs that can be shown to have figured in shamanic or religious rites would be designated entheogens.”
The use of the word drugs in their definition is unfortunate because it has connotations of its own of course: “to be drugged” and, therefore, out of control, and so forth. Perhaps substances would have been a better choice. But still, the description as a whole is useful as it moves us out of the arena of recreational drug use and attaches a sacred value to a discrete and particular group of mind- and state-altering substances.
The literal meaning of the word entheogen is “that which causes God to be within an individual,” or “which creates the divine within us.” Perhaps “that which stimulates or reveals the divine or causes us to remember our own divinity” would, again, have been better still and certainly truer to the experience of San Pedro. These nuances, however, are less important than the fact that a definition was now available that set sacred plants apart from mainstream drugs.
Their emphasis on ritual and religious use (or what we might call sacred purpose) also made a distinction between shamanism and science: the former focusing on the divine and potentially life-changing aspects of such plants, the latter concentrating on reductionist logic and procedures that often missed—both physically and spiritually—the ways in which sacred plants actually worked.
Physically, as well as its mescaline content, San Pedro contains a range of compounds that have effects of their own.*4 By concentrating only on mescaline scientists may tend to miss or devalue their contribution to the experience as a whole.
Some of these compounds are sympathomimetics, or substances that mimic the effects of adrenalin and noradrenaline, the so-called fight or flight chemicals that are released naturally by our bodies to prepare us for action when reality shifts and we feel uncertain or anxious. Perhaps it is these, more than mescaline, that give rise to our sense of awe and the awareness that we are in the presence of something mysterious and more powerful than ourselves, which are common feelings under the influence of San Pedro?
A further consideration is that other plants—or, indeed, other substances—might be added to the San Pedro that is drunk in ceremonies, such as when healings are conducted for participants who have suffered a magical attack from a sorcerer. In these circumstances additives might include purgatives like tobacco, psychoactives like misha and datura (used by shamans, according to Furst, as “a drastic form of shock therapy”), or powdered bones, cemetery dust, and traces of soil from sacred sites and archaeological ruins.*5 17
In other ceremonies, while the San Pedro remains pure, other plants and medicines may be administered separately during the same ritual, such as the singado (tobacco and alcohol) and contrachisa (an emetic made from other cactus parts that do not contain mescaline). It is reasonable to suppose that these may also have an effect, however slight, on the San Pedro experience even though they are not mixed with the brew itself, because they are ingested during the same time frame. Their effects, however, have not been studied.
Working with a single extract and concluding that the part is equal to the whole may be one of the biggest errors made by scientists—although it is all too common in plant medicine research.
Scientific research—with measurement as its operating principle and goal—must also, by definition, discount the spiritual (as well as the emotional, individual, and psychological) experience of anyone who has ever taken San Pedro, mescaline, or peyote, because spirit (and personal experience) cannot be effectively measured but is subjective and anecdotal only. What scientists really measure in their laboratories, consequently, is a notion they have of “what is really going on” at a structural or chemical level. And so the reality of millions of people who have used plants for spiritual, emotional, or physical healing for thousands of years must be more or less ignored.
The philosopher Karl Popper wrote that the first principle of scientific method should be “falsifiability.” To qualify as science, that is, every experiment and every law that scientists arrive at must be capable of being disproved and hold up to scrutiny so that consistent results are always produced despite this. Not many of science’s discoveries truly fall into this category, and, therefore, come closer to scientific opinion than scientific fact. It is highly unlikely that an injection of mescaline sulphate in a lab will produce the same quality of personal experience as a San Pedro ceremony in the Andes (and, in fact, research within the latter environment has not yet even been conducted) but science presumes it so, continuing to discou
nt the spirit and the validity of spiritual experience in a way that sometimes smacks of arrogance.
The scientist’s position in this is not unlike that of Peru’s famous son and mescaline explorer, Carlos Castaneda, when he first met his shamanic teacher, don Juan Matus. “I told him that I was interested in obtaining information about medicinal plants,” Castaneda writes in The Teachings of Don Juan. “Although in truth I was almost totally ignorant about peyote I found myself pretending that I knew a great deal and even suggesting that it might be to his advantage to talk with me.”18 Once he had met Mescalito, the spirit of the plant, under the tutelage of don Juan, however, Castaneda quickly realized how little he actually knew about anything.
It seems to me, therefore, that the experiences of individuals who have taken part in genuine, real-life, not lab-based healing events and opened themselves to San Pedro are preferable on every level to the conclusions of scientific observers about the supposed workings of our brains or the rods and cones in our eyes. For that reason, this book contains several firsthand accounts of healings, written by participants themselves, so you can make up your own mind about how San Pedro works and what it may be capable of.
OTHER EARLY WORK WITH MESCALINE
Another early account of mescaline exploration comes from the British medical doctor and author, Havelock Ellis, and appeared in The Contemporary Review of January 1898 under the heading “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise.” Although it is presented as scientific enquiry, it hints once again at a deeper truth to be found beneath and beyond the scientist’s fascination with “visual phenomena” for, just as Castaneda discovered with don Juan, what begins as an objective exercise can become a subjective and emotional experience.
Ellis writes, “The first symptom [sic] observed [upon taking mescaline] . . . was a certain consciousness of energy and intellectual power,” which suggests an actual change in body and spirit and in thought patterns and thinking, not something that can be dismissed as a “hallucination” at all. This was followed by “kaleidoscopic, symmetrical images . . . a vast field of golden jewels, studded with red and green stones, ever changing. At the same time the air around me seemed to be flushed with vague perfume—producing with the visions a delicious effect—and all discomfort had vanished” (my italics).
If the sentence above suggests a healing element to the visionary experience, Ellis’s next observation hints at an emerging spiritual relationship to the world at large, where some other aspect or quality is apparent in objects that are otherwise familiar and ordinary: “[My] visions . . . were extremely definite, but yet always novel; they were constantly approaching, and yet constantly eluding, the semblance of known things” (my italics).
This is the presque vu experience described by Klüver. It is a sensation well-known to those who have drunk San Pedro: that there is a unique personality, an almost Platonic quality or essence that exists beneath the forms that things take, or more prosaically, that there is more to reality than we know. It is as if the spirit or energy within things and between people is revealed to us and we understand that their identity—and our own—is more fluid than we have been led to believe while their spiritual essence is constant. “Who are you?” (or rather, “Who am I?”) becomes one of the most important questions we can ask of ourselves and others and of all other forms around us.
One of my participants during a 2008 San Pedro ceremony said something similar in the account she later wrote of her experience:
I was able to perceive a more subtle web of energy. . . . When I rejoined my fellow travelers I could observe how our energies interact and how connected we are to each other and to the physical world. We are constantly sharing portions of our energy fields. With every encounter, we exchange information and energy and we come away changed just a little bit. This realization made me aware of my influence on others and theirs on me and I became careful with my interactions. I became conscious of speaking only the truth and of keeping my intentions pure. I was also aware of the energy [of] other people and how it affected everyone. One friend came in enthused by the mountains and his enthusiasm sent ripples of excitement through the group.
Ellis gave mescaline to an artist friend who, it might be assumed from his account, also underwent a healing on a physical and spiritual level. “The first paroxysms . . . would come on with tinglings in the lower limbs, and with the sensation of a nauseous and suffocating gas mounting up into my head. Two or three times this was accompanied by a color vision of the gas bursting into flame as it passed up my throat.”
These “paroxysms” and “tingling” are consistent with the physical sensations I have often experienced in ceremony, and I have concluded at these times that San Pedro is “checking me out” and scanning my body for weakness. They feel like mild cramps or jolts of electricity as the cactus spirit courses through the body. In the example Ellis gives, these illnesses and imperfections are then released through a vision of gas and flame. This would certainly be interpreted by a shaman as a form of healing—a spirit extraction where negative energies are removed—and not just an idle fantasy. Some of the healing accounts related by participants in my ceremonies (reported in this book and its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Journey to God) are of a similar nature.
The outcome of the example above is recorded in another passage from Ellis: “My body lost all substantiality. With the suddenness of a neuralgic pang, the back of my head seemed to open and emit streams of bright color; this was immediately followed by the feeling as of a draft blowing like a gale through the hair in the same region.”
This sensation of “breaking open the head,” to use the words of Daniel Pinchbeck,19 is consistent with the visionary plant experience and with the shamanic extraction of illness; it too is a true hallucination where healing takes place through the removal of pain, experienced as streams of colors and the entrance into the body of a new energy, like a wind that blows away the cobwebs of our self-limiting beliefs and leaves us with healthier and more empowering ideas about who we are and our place in the world. “Henceforth,” says Ellis’s participant, “I should be more or less conscious of the interdependence of body and brain.”
Ellis concludes that:
Mescal intoxication differs from the other artificial paradises which drugs procure. Under the influence of alcohol, for instance, as in normal dreaming, the intellect is impaired, although there may be a consciousness of unusual brilliance; hasheesh, again, produces an uncontrollable tendency to movement and bathes its victim in a sea of emotion.
The mescal drinker [meanwhile] remains calm and collected amid the sensory turmoil around him; his judgment is as clear as in the normal state; he falls into no oriental condition of vague and voluptuous reverie. . . . Further, unlike the other chief substances to which it may be compared, mescal does not wholly carry us away from the actual world, or plunge us into oblivion; a large part of its charm lies in the halo of beauty which it casts around the simplest and commonest things.
This latter statement is, to me, central to the San Pedro experience. Whereas ayahuasca sweeps us away from ordinary reality and into the spirit world, San Pedro brings us closer to this world and exposes its beauty to us. As may become apparent in the chapters that follow, it is this experience of beauty (in the world and in ourselves) that may in fact be the most profoundly healing and life-changing gift that San Pedro offers.
A NEW SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM FOR EXPLORING THE SAN PEDRO EXPERIENCE
When the English novelist Aldous Huxley was first given mescaline by Dr. Humphry Osmond in 1953, he concluded that it allowed man access to mystical states by overriding the brain’s “reducing valve.”
Huxley was quoting the ideas of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson, who hypothesized that the brain acts as a filter for memory and sensory experience so that our conscious awareness does not become overwhelmed by a mass of largely useless information that is mostly irrelevant to our survival.
Bergson developed the co
ncept of “multiplicity” to explain his theory. This suggests that our moment-to-moment experience of the world is built (or invented) by us through our selection of specific information from “les données immédiates de la conscience” (“the immediate data of consciousness”). These data are both internal and external and include the memory of every experience we have ever had along with the perception of everything that is happening anywhere and everywhere in the universe.
Most of these data are unimportant to us, however, and some of them are even contradictory, so it would simply overburden and confuse us if we had to try to make sense of it all. It may even be detrimental to our survival if every split-second, life-or-death decision had to be made consciously while pondering the millions of options available to us.
Bergson believed, therefore, that the primary role of the brain, in the face of this multiplicity, is to act as a filter or gate for memory and sensory experience so we select what is useful from the range of data available according to the situations in which we find ourselves. In this way we construct the world by rejecting some of its information and embracing that which remains.
In a nutshell, what Bergson was saying is that the mind is capable of knowing everything—so clairvoyance, psychic abilities, self-healing, and encyclopedic knowledge (amongst other things) are all perfectly natural and available to us. Knowing what Julius Caesar was thinking at the moment of his death, however, or what is happening now on the farthest star in our solar system is of no use to us if our objective is simply to safely cross a road. To protect us, the mind “gates” this information so we are left with what is useful to us now.
Literally, therefore, we are self-limiting beings and there are things, forces, and energies around us at this very moment that we cannot under normal circumstances perceive, because our brains do not allow it. If these filters were bypassed, we would be capable of remembering and experiencing everything from a richer, fuller, and more “cosmic” perspective.