Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (48 page)

In addition, Strassman had begun a relationship with an American Zen
Buddhist monastery in the early 197os, which provided ongoing spiritual
training and support. Many monks shared with him the importance of their
earlier psychedelic experiences in choosing a spiritual lifestyle, which supported his emerging theories regarding psychedelics and mysticism. Buddhism also stimulated many of the ideas guiding the studies, providing the
model for developing a new rating scale for DIM effects and informing Strassman's method of supervising drug sessions.

A disastrous conversation with a monk who knew little about psychotropics coincided with the terminal illness of the monastery's leader and the consequent lobbying for succession. The monk condemned Strassman's work,
which caused formerly supportive monks to either turn silent or reverse longstanding support. The issue came to a head when Strassman published an article linking psychedelics and Buddhism in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
In this article, he said, among other things, that "dedicated Buddhist practitioners with little success in their meditation, but well along in moral and
intellectual development, might benefit from a carefully timed, prepared,
supervised, and followed-up psychedelic session to accelerate their practice."I°S The head temple called on Strassman to stop his work, which further
wore down his remaining desire to continue the research. Several months
after moving to Canada, he ended his work and returned all drugs and the last
year of grant support to the federal government.'°6

Strassman Redux

Strassman, after a hiatus, has now returned to hallucinogen research, joining
with toxicologist and neurochemist Steven A. Barker to found the Cottonwood
Research Foundation, whose projects include developing an ultrasensitive assay to detect naturally occurring tryptamine hallucinogens in humans, in both
normal and nonnormal states, and an assessment of the effects of ayahuasca in
a group of normal volunteers, with the goal of developing treatment protocols in
collaboration with drug abuse treatment facilities.,

Strassman is still struggling with his earlier findings, which he describes as
truly paradigm challenging and which, he says, he could not adequately integrate into his scientific worldview.2 He has now collaborated with anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, a pioneer in the study of mestizo shamanism, and Ede
Frecska, a psychopharmacologist who has worked with ayahuasca, to produce a
volume of essays focusing on the use of psychedelics to journey to alien worlds.
Here he focuses on reports of what he calls invisible worlds experienced by
his earlier DMT volunteers, including their reported contacts with alien beings.
These reports, he says, went far beyond any scientific training he had brought
to the research. But he has had to accept, he now says, that the reports were
descriptions of things that were real-that they occurred in reality, "although not
in a reality we usually inhabit." He now hypothesizes that DMT, like a telescope
or microscope, allows us access to a world previously unknown to our everyday
perceptual apparatus .3 He is, he says, teetering dangerously on the edge between respectable science and pseudoscience.4

NOTES

1. Strassman, 2007b.

2. Strassman, 2007a.

3. Strassman, 2008, p. 76.

4. Strassman, 2007a.

This is an intriguing story, on many levels. For Strassman, it was important
to note the effect of the experimental set and setting on the outcome of the
DIM experiences. To the extent that the scientific protocol-and, importantly,
its funding-depended on a hospital environment and biomedical approach,
the setting may in fact have been subversive of long-term personal change.

But is long-term personal change what DIM is even about? With his own
preexisting biases, both Buddhist and countercultural, Strassman thought
that spiritual transformation was the end point of the hallucinogenic experience; he was unsettled by the frequently reported contacts with otherdimensional beings. Perhaps the hospital setting was less important than
Strassman's own unmet expectations. Perhaps DIM-like ayahuasca itselfis not a psychotherapist but a teacher, leading where it intends-not to some
sort of enlightenment, not to self-improvement, not to community volunteer
work but, rather, into the dark and luminous realm of the spirits.

DEFINITION OF HALLUCINATION

The term hallucination was apparently first used in its current sense in 1832 by
French psychiatrist Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol, who wrote that a hallucinating person has "the complete conviction of a sensation currently perceived, where there is no corresponding external object within the range of
the senses to excite that sensation.", This classical definition has been generally repeated. A hallucination is "perception without an object" ;2 "an internal
image that seems as real, vivid, and external as the perception of an object";3
"a sensory perception that has the compelling sense of reality of a true perception but that occurs without external stimulation of the relevant sensory
organ."4 Such definitions, we may briefly note, are naively metaphysical; the
nonexistence of a perceptual object is taken to be unproblematic.

The definition has been further refined. A hallucination has been defined
not only as occurring in the absence of an appropriate stimulus, and as having
the full force or impact of a true perception, but also as being "not amenable to direct and voluntary control by the experiencer."5 A phenomenological account of hallucinatory experiences, in contrast to both imagination and
memory, lists five significant features: a hallucination is involuntary, arising
without express volition; believable, appearing with the force of a present perception of empirical reality; vivid, rich enough in sensory qualities to claim
committed awareness; projected, experienced as "out there," externally to the
perceiving self; and paranormal, "tinged with the pathological," competing
with ordinary perception.'

Entheogens

For the classical psychotropics-LSD, mescaline, psilocybin-jonathan Ott,
R. Gordon Wasson, and others coined the term entheogen, intended to mean
something like "realizing the divine within" and referring to the primarily cognitive depth- or insight-producing nature of the LSD experience., The term was
supposed to apply equally to all the "shamanic inebriants," but, while it may
describe at least some of the effects attributed to psychotropic mushrooms and
cacti, the substances of most interest to those who coined the term, it seems to
me to fit uneasily with the vivid lifelike hallucinations of ayahuasca.

NOTE

1. Ott, 1994, pp. 91-92 n. 1, 1996, PP. 103-105 n. 1; Ruck, Bigwood, Staples, Ott, &
Wasson, 1979. See also Perrine, 1996, pp. 255-256; Stevens, 1987, p. 361.

AYAHUASCA AS A HALLUCINOGEN

There is no doubt that ayahuasca can produce hallucinations under any of these
definitions-visual experiences that are solid, detailed, three-dimensional,
animated, interactive, and embedded in ordinary perceptual space; auditory
experiences that are immediate, external, directional, locatable in space, and
often coordinated with visual experiences. Ayahuasca, then, can reasonably
be said to be a hallucinogen, a term I will use without apology, despite the fact
that the term has been deprecated and the term entheogen has been proposed in
its place.

SPIRITS AS MISATTRIBUTION

In recent years, a widespread consensus has been reached about the nature
of auditory hallucinations.7 According to this consensus view, auditory hallucinations occur when the individual misattributes inner speech to a source
that is external or alien to the self.' Hearing voices is thus really ego-alienated
inner speech.9 "The Voices were coming louder and faster," reports one person with schizophrenia, "startling me with their surprise visits to my brain.
Only I didn't know they were in my brain. I heard them coming at me from the
outside, as real as the sound of the telephone ringing.110

Most people take for granted the process of discrimination between our
thoughts and images and the things we hear or see. However, there are
grounds for supposing that we do not have a priori knowledge about whether
perceived events are internal to ourselves and generated in our minds or are
external to ourselves and generated by agencies other than the self.

The process of discrimination between these two kinds of events is known
as source monitoring and has been studied by psychologist Marcia Johnson and
her colleagues in a series of experiments with ordinary people.,, This work
has focused on judgments about the sources of memories, showing that human beings use a variety of cues when discriminating between memories of
self-generated thoughts and memories of real events-such cues as contextual information, amount of cognitive effort required, and consistency with
what is known about the normal behavior of people and the world. The observations suggest that discriminating between internal imaginary events
and external real events is best thought of as a skill and, like all skills, can
be learned, can be improved, and can fail. For our purposes, this means that
source monitoring can also be culturally mediated. Johnson's suggestion that
source-monitoring judgments are influenced by the inherent plausibility of
perceived events helps to explain how culture can shift the boundary between
hallucinatory and real experiences .12

A number of researchers have attempted to assess source-monitoring judgments in hallucinating people and nonhallucinating people. These studies
generally report that hallucinating people perform differently as source monitors than do controls who are not hallucinating. People with schizophrenia
who hallucinate, for example, have a more difficult time than either people
with schizophrenia who do not hallucinate or people without schizophrenia
in recalling whether they had thought up certain words by themselves or had
been read those words by others.13 These results may at least partially reflect
the impact of beliefs and experiences on source-monitoring judgments, rather than any gross deficit in source-monitoring skills. Remember that Socrates
let himself be guided by a voice that only he could hear and to which he occasionally referred as his daemon. Allowing his conduct to be guided by a hallucinatory voice was not a pathology but, rather, a crime; the daemon was not a
god recognized in Athens. In fact, the daemon probably cost Socrates his life;
it was the daemon who stopped him from defending himself at his trial and
from escaping once he was sentenced to death.14

Thus, a person with schizophrenia has lost the usual distinction between
what has been experienced and what has been imagined, between external
stimuli and internally generated thoughts and memories.' Here, for example,
is psychiatrist Harold Searles: "The deeply schizophrenic individual has, subjectively, no imagination. The moment that something which we would call
a new concoction of fantasy, a new product of his imagination, enters his
awareness, he perceives this as being an actual and undisguised attribute of the world around him.",' To say that the schizophrenic has no imagination is
basically the same as saying the person has no normally functioning imagination-that the schizophrenic takes the imagined to be real.