Michael Langevin on Plant Medicines of the Amazon (Interview Archive)
Let me start with a clarification. At the Monroe Institute, nobody is handing out substances. The work there relies on audio technology to guide people into altered states, or to help them locate those states on their own, and the method is surprisingly reliable. Shamans across Latin America have taken a different road for centuries, as shamans everywhere have, reaching for plants and brews that shift the mind and spirit. Sometimes the trigger is nothing more elaborate than drumming or singing, which can tip a person into that other state of consciousness.
Ayahuasca has been spreading lately. You see it catching on in Europe and, from what I can tell, in parts of the United States too, though as far as I know it remains illegal here. It comes from two vines native to the Amazon. Cut at the proper moment and boiled together into a tea, they open the door to a string of very powerful experiences. Fasting beforehand is wise.
The first time I drank it, I hadn't fasted, mainly because no one warned me to. The result was brutal. I vomited, my bowels let go, my nose ran, even my ears leaked fluid. I was convinced I was dying, and at the worst of it I wanted to. That is not an evening I would sell to anyone as a good time. But once I came out the far side, something had changed. I looked at my own life and the ordinary world around us and saw a kind of paradise, thick with potential, with widened awareness, with the chance to live by better choices. That shift is why I have gone back and taken it since.
San Pedro is a different plant, a cactus in the same family as peyote, which many Native Americans in this country use. It grows as a long cactus branch, and you can buy it openly in the markets of Cusco and much of Latin America. A thin slice leaves you feeling pleasantly lifted. A bigger piece sends you, as people in the '60s would have put it, tripping. Your perception bends and you begin to see the patterns running through your life, a sense of cosmic awareness, a reach beyond the usual limits of what you notice.
Jimson weed grows wild and also gets brewed into a tea. It shows up more in Ecuador than in Peru, and it is used in Mexico as well. People often describe a feeling of flight under its influence, or the odd and remarkable sense of being something other than human.
All of these grow throughout the Amazon, and I've done a fair amount of traveling through it. My book Secrets of the Amazon is coming back out in Kindle form next month, and much of it deals with experiences like these. One thing to keep in mind: every village is its own small world. Each village shaman keeps to his own plants, his own preferred medicines.