After six million years of boredom, the evolutionary ascent of our species from the last common
ancestor with the chimpanzee, something extraordinary happened to us less than a hundred thousand
years ago, which, by the way, is long after we'd become anatomically modern. It was a
kind of emergence into consciousness less than a hundred thousand years ago; really
less than forty thousand years ago, when we became fully symbolic creatures. And this
great change has been defined as the single most important step forward in the evolution
of human behaviour; is intimately associated with the emergence of the great and transcendent
rock and cave art all around the world. Over the last thirty years, research has been lead
by the professors at David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South
Africa, and many others, have suggested an intriguing and radical possibility, which
is that this emergence into consciousness was triggered by our ancestor's encounters
with visionary plants and the beginning of shamanism.
If you analyse the cave art - there's not time to go into the details here - but there
are so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness,
of visions. Plants like the amanita muscaria mushroom and psilocybin mushrooms appear to
have been directly connected with this sudden and radical change. So to investigate this
possibility when I got interested in this mystery, I went down to the Amazon where there
are still surviving shamanistic cultures today; and where they drink the powerful visionary
brew: ayahuasca - of which the active ingredient is Dimethyl Tryptomine (DMT) which is actually
closely related at the molecular level to psilocybin. Now, normally DMT cannot be activated
orally - when we encounter it in the west it's generally smoked. There's an enzyme in
our stomachs called Monoaminoxydase which switches off DMT on contact. But in the Amazon
they've gotten around this problem, they say it was the spirits that taught them how to
do it. The DMT in the ayahuasca brew is contained in these leaves from a plant that they call
{{chakruna}} in the Amazon, and there they mix it together with this vine. And out of
the 150,000 species of plants and trees in the Amazon, this is the one that contains
a Monoaminoxydase inhibitor, which switches off that enzyme in our stomachs, and allows
the DMT in the leaves - when the two are married together and cooked in water - to be absorbed
orally and takes us on a four hour journey into extraordinary realms. Now, it's no joke
to drink ayahuasca. The ayahuasca brew has a foul, foul taste - really, really hideous
- and a dreadful, dreadful smell, and after you've drunk your cup you'll find within 45
minutes or so that you're sweating, that you're feeling nauseous. Pretty soon you may well
be vomiting, you may have diarrhoea, so, you know, nobody's doing this for recreation.
And, I'd like to add that I don't think any of the psychedelics should be used for recreation.
They have a much more serious and important mission with humanity. So, we're not doing
this for fun, but what draws people to ayahuasca again and again to brace themselves for this
experience? (and you do have to brace yourself) is it's extraordinary effects at the
level of consciousness. One of those effects has to do with creativity, and we can see
the creative cosmogenic impulse of Ayahuasca in the paintings of Ayahuasca Shamans from
Peru - like the paintings of {{Pablo Amaringo}} here those richly saturated colours, they're
amazing visions that they reproduce. This creative impulse has also spread to western
artists - many western artists now have been deeply influenced by ayahuasca and are also
painting their visions. As these paintings show, another universal experience of ayahuasca
is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities which communicate with us telepathically.
Now, I'm making no claim one way or another as to the reality state of these entities
we encounter, simply that phenomenologically, in the ayahuasca experience they are encountered
by people all over the world. And most frequently of all, the spirit of ayahuasca herself, mother
ayahuasca, who is a healer - and although she's kind of the mother goddess of the planet
she seems to take a direct personal interest in us as individuals - to heal our ills, to
want us to be the best that we can possibly be, to correct errors and mistakes in our
behavior that may be leading us down the wrong path. And this is perhaps why - and it's an
untold story really - ayahuasca has been fantastically successful in getting people off harmful addictions
to hard drugs such as heroine and cocaine. {{Jacques Mobbit}} of the {{takiwasi clinic}}
in Peru brings heroine and cocaine addicts out there for a month, gives them twelve ayahuasca
sessions, and they have encounters with mother ayahuasca during those sessions that lead
them, not to wish to take heroine and cocaine anymore, and more than half leave completely
free of their addiction and never return to it and don't even have withdrawal symptoms.
The same incredible healing work was being done by a doctor in Canada by Dr. {{Gabor
Matte}} until the Canadian Government intervened and stopped his healing practice on the grounds
that ayahuasca itself was an illegal drug. Now, I have some personal experience of this
- I've not been addicted to heroine or cocaine, but I had a 24-year nonstop cannabis habit.
This started off smoking the herb, and naturally vaporising it, but the basic truth is that
for 24 years I was pretty much permanently stoned - and I enjoyed being stoned, and I
felt that it helped me with my work as a writer, and perhaps at some point it did, but when
I first encountered ayahuasca, I had already been smoking cannabis for 16 years. Almost
immediately, ayahuasca started giving me messages that this was no longer serving me, that it
was leading me to behave in negative and unhealthful ways towards others. Of course, I ignored
those messages for years and years and went back to being stoned 16 hours a day. But that
negative behaviour that ayahuasca was pointing out did actually get worse and worse - I don't
want to put down cannabis and I believe it's the sovereign right of every adult to choose
to smoke cannabis if they wish to do so, but I think I was overusing it, I think I was
abusing it, not using it responsibly. I became more and more paranoid, jealous, possessive,
suspicious, I was subject to irrational rages, I often made the life of my beloved partner
{{Santher}} a misery. When I went down for my regular encounter with ayahuasca in October
2011, I was given the most unbelievable kicking by mother ayahuasca. I was put through an
ordeal, it was a kind of life-review. It's not an accident that ayahuasca is "the vine
of the dead". I was shown my death, and I was shown that if I came to death - and what
awaits us after death - without having corrected the mistakes that I was making in my life,
that it would be a very bad thing for me - and actually, mother ayahuasca literally took
me to hell, and that hell was a little like this "Hell" painted by {{Heronimus Boncture}}
- a truly terrible place and a little like the place that the ancient Egyptians called
the judgement Hall of Osiris, where our souls are weighed on the scales in the presence
of the Gods against the feather of Truth and Justice of Cosmic Harmony. And I was shown
that the path I was walking - my abuse of cannabis and the behaviour associated with
it - was going to lead me to be found wanting in the judgement, and that I might face annihilation
in the world beyond death. So, perhaps not surprisingly, when I came back to England
later in October 2011 I gave up cannabis and I've never smoked it again since then. Actually,
again I'm speaking only personally with no comment on others' use of cannabis, it's as
though a monkey has been lifted off my back. I'm liberated in incredible ways, far from
my creativity being inhibited, I find myself writing much more productively, much more
creatively, much more focused, and much more efficiently as well. I've begun to be able
to address those negative aspects of my behaviour which cannabis had revealed, and hopefully
to make myself slowly - it's a long progress - into a more nurturing, more loving, more
positive person. This whole transformation - it really has been a personal transformation
for me - was made possible by this encounter with death that mother ayahuasca gave me.
That leads me to ask, what is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter,
the material science in the west says that we are just meat - we're just our bodies -
so when the brain is dead, that's the end of consciousness, there is no life after death,
there is no soul; we just rot and are gone. Actually, many honest scientists should admit
that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don't know exactly
how it works. The brain is involved in it some way but we're no sure how. It could be
that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity, if you
hold to that paradigm then of course you can't believe in life after death - when the generator's
broken, consciousness is gone. It's equally possible that the relationship - and nothing
in neuroscience rules it out - the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal
to the TV set, and in that case, when the TV set is broken, of course the TV signal
continues. This is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions; that we are immortal souls temporarily
incarnated in these physical forms, to learn and to grow and to develop. Really, if we
want to know about this mystery, the last people we should ask are materialist reductionist
scientists; they have nothing to say on the matter at all. Let's go rather to the ancient
Egyptians, who put their best minds to work for 3,000 years on the problem of death...
and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare for what we will confront
after death. The ancient Egyptians expressed their ideas in transcendent art, which still
touches us emotionally today. They came to certain very specific conclusions: that the
soul does survive death and that we will be held accountable for every thought, every
action, every deed that we have lived through in our lives, so we'd better take this precious
opportunity to be born in a human body seriously, and make the most of it. And in these inquiries
into the mystery of death, the ancient Egyptians weren't just exercising their imaginations;
they highly valued dream states, and it's now known that they used visionary plants
like the hallucinogenic blue water lily. It's interesting that the ancient Egyptian 'tree
of life' has recently been identified as the {{acacia mellotica}} which contains high quantities
of DMT, Dimethyl Tryptomine, the same active ingredient that we find in ayahuasca. Now,
it's difficult to imagine a society more different from the society of ancient Egypt than our
society today. We hate visionary states in this society. In our society, if we want to
insult somebody, we call them a dreamer. In ancient societies that was praise. And we
have erected huge apparatuses of armed bureaucracies who will invade our privacy, who will break
down our doors, who will arrest us, who will send us to prison - sometimes for years - for
possessing even small quantities of psilocybin, or substances like DMT, whether in it's smokable
form or in the ayahuasca brew. And yet, ironically, DMT is, we now know, a natural brain hormone
- we all have it in our bodies and it's just that it's function remains unknown for lack
of research. It's not as though our society is opposed in principle to altered states
of consciousness, I mean, billions are being made by the unholy alliance of psychiatrists
and "big pharma" in overprescribing drugs to control so-called syndromes like depression
or attention deficit disorder in teenagers. We have a love-affair in our society with
alcohol; we glorify this most boring of drugs despite the terrible consequences that it
often has. And of course we love our stimulants, our tea, our coffee, our energy drinks, our
sugar, and huge industries are built around these substances which are valued because
of the way they alter consciousness. But what all these approved altered states of consciousness
have in common is that none of them contradict or conflict with the basic state of consciousness
valued by our society, which I would call the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness,
which is good for the more mundane aspects of science. It's good for the prosecution
of warfare, it's good for commerce, it's good for politics, but I think everybody realises
that the promise of a society over-monopolistically based on this state of consciousness has proved
hollow. And that this model is no longer working - that it's broken in every possible sense
that a model can be broken. And urgently we need to find something which can replace it
- the vast problems of global pollution that resulted from the single-minded pursuit of
profit, the horrors of the nuclear proliferation, the spectre of hunger that millions every
night go to bed starving - that we can't even solve this problem, despite our alert, problem-solving
state of consciousness. And look what's happening in the Amazon, the lungs of our planet, this
precious home of bio-diversity. The old growth rainforest being cut down and replaced with
soya bean farms so we can feed cattle so that we can all eat hamburgers. Only a truly insane
global state of consciousness could allow such an abomination to occur. I did a back-of-an-envelope
calculation during the Iraq War, it seems to me that six months expenditure on the Iraq
War would have solved the problem of the Amazon forever; would be sufficient to compensate
the people of the Amazon so that no single tree ever needed to be cut down again, to
garden and to look after that amazing resource. But we can't make that decision as a global
community. We can spend countless billions on warfare, on hatred, on fear, on suspicion,
on division, but we can't get together the collective effort to save the lungs of our
planet. And this is perhaps why shamans from the Amazon are now mounting a kind of reverse
missionary activity. When I've asked shamans about the sickness of the west, they say it's
quite simple: "You guys have severed your connection with spirit. Unless you reconnect
with spirit and do so soon, you're gonna bring the whole house of cards down around your
heads, and ours." And rightly or wrongly, they believe that ayahuasca is the remedy
for that sickness. And many now are being called to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca, and
ayahuasca shamans are traveling throughout the West offering the brew - often under the
radar, often at personal risk - to bring about consciousness change. It's true that the message
of ayahuasca, the universal message, is about the sacred, magical, enchanted, infinitely
precious nature of life on Earth. And the interdependence of material and spiritual
realms, and it's impossible to work with ayahuasca for long without being deeply and profoundly
affected by this message. And let's not forget that ayahuasca is not alone, that it's part
of an ancient worldwide system of the targeted, careful, responsible alteration of consciousness.
It's recently been shown by scholars that the {{kykion}} used in the Eleusinian mysteries
in ancient Greece was almost certainly a psychedelic brew. That the soma of the vedas may well
have been a brew based on the amanita muscaria mushroom. [more rapidly now, more fervently
-CD] We have the DMT in the ancient Egyptian 'Tree of Life'. We have the whole global cultures
of surviving shamanism and what it's all about is a state of consciousness that's designed
to help us find balance, harmony - the ancient Egyptians would've called it "ma'at with the
universe" - and to remain mindful that what we're here to undertake on Earth while we're
immersed in matter is fundamentally a spiritual journey, aimed at the growth and perfection
of the soul - a journey that may go back to the very origins of what made us human in
the first place. I stand here invoking the hard-won right of freedom of speech to call
for and demand another right to be recognised; and that is the right of adult sovereignty
over the consciousness. There's a war on consciousness in our society and if we as adults are not
allowed to make sovereign decisions about what to experience with our own consciousness
while doing no harm to others, including the decisions to use responsibly ancient and sacred
visionary plants, then we cannot claim to be free in any way, and it's useless for our
society to go around the world imposing our form of democracy on others while we nourish
this rot at the heart of society, and we do not allow individual freedom over consciousness.
It may even be that we're denying ourselves the next vital step in our own evolution by
allowing this state of affairs to continue, and who knows, perhaps our immortal destiny
as well.