Ayahuasca's Effects on Westerners

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Ayahuasca's Effects on Westerners

concerning my first experience on 'The Medicine'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 21, 2024

The most surprising part of my ayahuasca retreat came about when the 30 or so participants attempted to explain their experience in the integration session in the morning after having imbibed the medicine the night before. I never suspected that one substance could have such diverse effects on a group of what I took to be 'everyday people.' Practically everyone had had a very different experience to report from that of their neighbor. One felt nothing except for an upset stomach. Another had psychedelic visions but of a very negative kind indeed. Yet another reported that she existed in a state of absolute bliss thanks to ayahuasca. A fourth said she had heard the voice of her deceased grandmother consoling her. Another said he felt a sense of great power. Another that she cried throughout the experience, but that they were tears of wistful joy. And yet another reported that he had screamed loudly and insistently, an outburst that I well remembered and thanks to which I thought for a few minutes that the entire retreat was going to be shut down by the materialist police at any moment.

These accounts all differed from my own exciting but peaceful experience, in which I saw multicolored circus scenes that were eternally morphing into new arrangements, and threatening at any moment to reveal the ringleader, whom I sensed to be a female who was hiding chameleon-like beneath the intricate geometrical patterns, her facial features occasionally becoming clear at the corner of the scene, as if she were peeking at me from behind her colorful handiwork. I took this surreptitious surveillance on her part to mean: 'I've got more to teach you if you will only come closer. That's it, just let yourself go, and I can show you so much more!' It was an enticing offer, but it was worrisome at the same time, since her initially alluring grin would occasionally morph into something less friendly, in which she seemed to be laughing at me and not with me. This reminded me of the trickster god of the American Southwest or of the notoriously equivocal verdicts of the Oracle at Delphi. (By 'multicolored,' I do not mean to say that one perceived object was red, another blue, and yet another green. All discernible objects, or even mere points thereof, were pulsing with light and emitting a rainbow of luminescence, thanks to which the picture as a whole made one think of a house at Christmastime for which the homeowner is spending a fortune on electricity with the express goal of catching the attention of passersby. In other words, I could easily see why Terence McKenna ¹ called ayahuasca 'the television of the rainforest.')

But the biggest takeaway for me was the sheer malleability of reality - how any existing arrangement could be morphed with the help of an inspired mind into something uplifting and powerful. I found that I could control what I was seeing, at least to some extent, by mere willpower, by merely WILLING to see THIS rather than THAT. There was a small framed picture at the retreat whose caption caught this feeling I was having with the words 'Thought becomes things.' I think that this is what the guy probably meant when he said that ayahuasca gave him a sense of power. It takes our existing reality and does all sorts of fancy tricks with it, like a magician turning our handkerchiefs into endless novel shapes and patterns - thereby implicitly telling us: 'Hey, you can make your own reality, you do not have to accept the definitions of others.'

This would surely not have been the takeaway message for ritual use of ayahuasca by Andean tribespeople themselves, but perhaps it is inevitable that a westerner, raised in the values of humanism, would read the medicine-inspired message in this way.

More about my experience

During the beginning of the intoxication phase 'on ayahuasca,' I made an observation that I am sure Joseph Campbell would have appreciated:

It was not just myself personally who was dragging his feet and trying to avoid taking the ayahuasca medicine seriously: I felt the weight of the entire western colonialist mindset bearing down on me, trying to keep me from 'going native.' I was a westerner after all, shouldn't I behave like one? And yet if I wanted to take my experience to the next level, if I wanted to hear from the Goddess herself and not just look at her organically stylized face, I felt that I needed to stand up and move to the pounding percussion and live the experience fully in bodily action - which would be a response so unusual for me as an introvert that I would no doubt have needed to get to know my neighbors far more intimately before thus engaging with the medicine on that more visceral level. Besides, the retreat was really not organized in a way that would encourage such self-expression. We were free, at least in theory, to stand and dance, but the floor was crowded with attendees, each on their own sleeping pad, each of whom had their own private vomit bucket within reach, and the last thing I wanted to do, even in my intoxicated state, was to knock over one or more of these buckets and thus dampen the experience for others in more ways than one.

True, we were invited to go out back, where there was a bonfire surrounded by candles which delineated a safe area for congregating, but it was a frosty night and so the few who took that option quickly made a beeline for the fireside camping chairs.

Some other revelations 'on ayahuasca'

I felt at some point that the music WAS the drug. When the music ceased temporarily, I started entertaining sober thoughts... but when the drums, flute and guitar kicked in again, with the powerful Spanish-language vocals of curandero Taita Jhon, I felt like I was being given another 'shot of the drug.' As the drums crescendo'd, the medicine's effects rose inside me as well. The music WAS now the drug itself and its effects could be turned on and off - and/or directed - by the musicians themselves.

One other observation

The vividness of the visuals increased dramatically in the process of purging, that is, as I was throwing up into the cot-side bucket provided for that purpose. In the process of doing so, I saw (or sensed) a highly stylized smiling face looking on approvingly amidst a background of complex leaflike imagery. It was as if the goddess (if I may give her that appellation at least provisionally) was pleased to see that I was 'playing ball' and was more than ready to reciprocate by supplying potentially educational visions, tailored, apparently, to my own personality -- given the previously stated fact that no two attendees seem to have experienced the same thing while under the influence of 'the medicine.'

Ayahuasca

Thank God for Soul Quest

Notes:

1: McKenna, Terence. 2026. “History Ends in Green.” The Library. 2026. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/history-ends-in-green. (up)

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The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?

Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.

Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...

There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."

If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."

There are endless creative ways to ward off addictions if all psychoactive medicines were at our disposal. The use of the drugs synthesized by Alexander Shulgin could combat the psychological downsides of withdrawal by providing strategic "as-needed" relief.

Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.

MDMA legalization has suffered a setback by the FDA. These are the people who think Electro Shock Therapy is not used often enough! What sick priorities.

Just saw a People's magazine article with the headline: "JUSTICE FOR MATTHEW PERRY." If there was true justice, their editorial staff would be in jail for promoting user ignorance and a contaminated drug supply. It's the prohibition, stupid!!!

There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Ayahuasca's Effects on Westerners

concerning my first experience on 'The Medicine'

Ayahuasca

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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