The reason why I came to have opinions about this topic, almost 20 years ago, I started working in a documentary project about ayahuasca. Back then ayahuasca was a lot less well-known than it is today. We knew so little that we actually thought that it would be possible to make a film that would be a sort of family picture of all the ayahuasca traditions, the different churches, the different indigenous groups. We wanted to make a film where you could see everybody, like a family album of all the different manifestations of ayahuasca. We were young and ignorant, after we set off on this quest, it took us a number of years to realize that it was going to be impossible. The world of ayahuasca traditions is too rich, too diverse, there were too many manifestations to fit into one film, 10 films, or maybe even in 20 films.

The positive thing that came out of our attempt was that we visited many different groups, spent time with them, interviewed them, drank ayahuasca with them. We were trying to understand how each of them felt about ayahuasca, how they worked with it, what was different about them. In the process we were exposed to a very wide sample of what is a very wide spectrum of traditional uses of ayahuasca. This is this is how I came to collect many stories about traditional uses of ayahuasca, some of which I’ll share some of you today.

Accumulated wisdom / accumulated expertise

One idea I’ve come back to again and again in these 20 years is the concept of accumulated wisdom or accumulated expertise. It seemed to me that was what I was finding in all the different traditions, a lot of accumulated expertise. This made me think not just of indigenous people, but also other examples, like the way the Mediterranean cultures make wine, or the way all we ride bicycles, or drive cars. These are all examples of accumulated expertise. The result of many years of collective trial and error, which builds into a system of rules that serves of minimize the problems and maximize the benefits of a practice. If you think about how many things had to happen before we could drive cars, from where the steering wheel, break pedal and the accelerator are, to the white lines painted on the roads, the road signs, the driver licenses… All of these systems were slowly developed through decades of collective work, to arrive to a today where many people can drive cars very fast and quite safely. Of course accidents still happen but we can say that compared with the past we’ve greatly minimized them.

This is what I mean by accumulated expertise or accumulated wisdom and this is the lens through which I am going to approach Ayahusaca traditions in this particular piece. I know this is a very limited and a very limiting lens to look at something as big a traditions. Traditions, specially indigenous ones, are much more than good safety practices, they are cosmology, mythology, they are collections of people’s culture and feeling. So, I want to recognize how incredibly rich tradition can be, before I focus on this very limited aspect of it.

I spent a number of years looking at the practices of people who have been using ayahuasca for a long time. This fascinated me because I come from a culture, Western European culture, for which psychedelics are very new. There’s debate on whether in a remote past Europeans might have had a relationship with substances similar to ayahuasca, but there is no debate that if that was the case, it’s been long lost. So that means my culture has very few points of reference from which to understand psychedelics.

Every time people have a new technology, object or practice, for which they have no points of reference they tend towards experimentation. They just try different things to see what happens. If I gave you a book and you didn’t know what a book was you might think it was an object that is good for sitting on, or you might think that it is something that you can use to keep the door open, or you might think that a book is a very useful thing to make a bonfire, or even as some sort of toilet paper! This is what I mean by experimentation, when something is completely new, and you don’t know how to approach it, you experiment with it, put it in terms of something you already know, or both.

As an example I’ll tell a personal story. The first time that I took a plant teacher in an indigenous context was in the year 2000, in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. I took morning glory seeds (ololiuqui ) with an indigenous healer. I was very excited because while I had read a lot about shamanism, I’d never experienced a traditional ceremony. It was only three of us, we took the seeds, and after some time the old man started turning to me and asking “Are you feeling it? Did it grab you already?” and then, when I said yes, he said “Very well now it’s your turn. You have to speak, you have to speak out loud ,and you have to ask God what it is that you want God to give you.”

This question triggered in my head a long chain of very confusing thoughts and reflections that kept me busy all night. I won’t go into detail, I will just say that I while the psychedelic experience that I was having that night was not entirely unknown to me, the application was. I had experienced states like that before, with my friends in Europe in the United States. I was familiar with this experience, but I had never ever actually considered that you could use this experience to think about what it was it that you wanted to ask to have in your life.

What you do with a book when you don’t know what a book is? If you give a book to a person that has never seen a book, how long is it going take before they figure out the best possible use for it? If you give a car to someone who’s never driven, how long will it take for them to figure it out? I don’t have an answer to that, but what I can say is that after that night I became very interested in the traditional use of psychedelics, because for me it became a reference point. Just like if you were if you decided to make wine from scratch you might be well advised to look at the way the mediterranean people have been growing and making wine for centuries. Suddenly I realized that if one paid attention to people who have been using these plans for much longer than ourselves we can find a reference, whole set of accumulated expertise to maximize benefits and minimize dangers.

About dietas, set & setting

So today I would like to share two examples, of many, of this wisdom that I found particularly enlightening or clarifying. The first example has to do with the concept of the dieta. This concept gets confusing because the word refers to a couple of different things. There’s the Amazonian plant dieta, where a person spends a long time in isolation in a cabin in the jungle, taking plants. Today I’m going to talk about the other dieta, the dieta that happens 2-3 days to a week before one drinks ayahuasca. This is something that I don’t hear about so much nowadays, but it seemed like in the early 2000s there were endless discussions about this topic in the ayahuasca forums. While we were filming different traditions everybody we met agreed that a few days before you drink ayahuasca and a few days after you drink ayahuasca there was a number of things that you shouldn’t do, a dieta that you had to keep. This list was pretty much everywhere, however from one place to another the contents of the list changed. So in one place people said that you absolutely shouldn’t eat pork, in other places that you absolutely couldn’t have sex, or salt, or sugar. You couldn’t have papaya in some places, and in other places you could, but you couldn’t have beans… The lists changed from place to place and from tradition to tradition. You couldn’t really find a universal elements that everyone avoided, although some elements came up more often, like spicy foods, pork, and sex.

So, is there is a lesson here that can be learned here? I’ve spent many years looking at this and thinking about this. On the way I’ve often met more scientific minded people who dismiss the dieta, because they believe that the dieta is a sort of counter indication. For example, you cannot you cannot mix barbiturates with alcohol, because they potentiate each other, that’s a counter indication. So people think that if the dieta rule says that you cannot eat pork before drinking ayahuasca, and then you eat pork and you drink ayahuasca and nothing happens, then people think that the rule is wrong, or superstitious, an empty taboo. But I think that’s a short sighted conclusion, dieta restrictions are not counter indications, they are safety rules. Wearing a set belt is a safety rule, we’d never say: I went driving my car and I didn’t wear my seatbelt, and nothing happened to me, so why should I ever wear a seatbelt? It doesn’t do anything. I think dietas are closer to safety rules than to counter indications, like seat belts, they might not always apply, but they are always important.

Perhaps there is also a deeper wisdom, a deeper lesson that comes with the dieta, and which doesn’t have to do so much with the lists themselves, with the types of foods or situations to be avoided, but with a deeper understanding of what’s about to happen. When you engage with ayahausca are going to embark in what can be a very powerful, very significant experience, and the question is: how are you going to wrap this experience?

The more scientifically minded people would again say, what does the wrapping matter? This is about psychoactive substances having an effect on the brain for a limited amount of time. To these people I always say: what is the difference between giving you a gift by itself, or giving you a gift in a beautiful box with beautiful wrapping? If one is going to be deeply logical there is no difference between the two, the gist is the same, the wrapper gets discarded. But the thing is, human beings are not deeply logical. We live in a world that is not just made of atoms, it’s also made of symbols, of gestures, of intentions, of words. Humans live in a material world of physics while being deeply affected by inmaterial (and often abstract) things. That’s why when you wrap a gift with a beautiful paper, it makes the gift better for other humans, because now the experience involves not just getting the gift, but the process of opening it. I could say much more about this, but I’ll just say that gifts are wrapped because they we know wrapping makes gifts better, they become more special. Indeed, the wrapper is a way of showing that what it’s inside is special.

I believe what happens to people during ayahuasca is also special. Sometimes it is even very special, from that perspective, putting safety aside for a second, the dieta is also a gesture that says because something special will be happening in three days’ time, I’m not going to do certain things I normally do. This act is a sort of wrapper, a symbol, a gesture, an intention, a protection that feeds into the experience, wrapping the experience, and making its specialness more visible, better.

From this perspective, there’s a lot to say about how modern psychedelic experiences are currently “wrapped.” There’s of course, a lot of talk about set and setting in psychedelic science, but when I compare some of the things I’ve witnessed in the traditions, with the skill on set and setting that I see on some Western psychedelic proposals… well

Proselytism, publicity and advertising

The second story has to do with proselytism (or, if you prefer advertising) that is, with this question: What should ayahuasca drinkers do about other people who do not know ayahuasca? Most Westerners have been drinking ayahuasca less that 15 years, so we’ve only had to deal with the question for a short time, but in places like Acre in Brazil, which is the cradle of the ayahuasca religions, some people have been dealing with the fact that you drink ayahuasca but your neighbors might not, for more than three generations... So, how do they deal with this? What is the accumulated wisdom of the Santo Daime around how do to deal with your neighbors / friends / family who don’t drink ayahuasca?

There a saying of the Santo Daime I like very much: “The Daime is for everyone, but not everyone is for the Daime.” It encapsulates a certain accumulated wisdom that could only come from real world experience: While the ayahuasca experience might feel as potentially beneficial for just about everybody, in fact it is not. Psychedelics are not for everybody, they never will be. Full stop. For some people they will always be a bad idea.

There’s a Daime practice that follows this insight, and that I find really insightful, in the Daime you’re not allowed to invite other people to come drink ayahuasca with you. Now, this doesn’t mean the Daime is not open to outsiders, quite the opposite, the doors of the temple are always open. In Brazil, pretty much anybody can walk in into a Daime temple and ask to participate, and after some questions and some screening, they will be welcomed in. So the doors are open, however, members of the church are not allowed to go to other people and say “I drank ayahuasca and it did me really good, and I think you should try it.” They are allowed to say “I drank ayahuasca it did me really good” they’re not allowed to say “…and I think you should try.”

Proselytism is forbidden in the Daime and in this way they stand apart from almost all other christian traditions, where proselytism is very much an encouraged act. Here is a christian religion that explicitly forbids members from inviting others to join! Some people have argued that this rule came out of the political situation in Acre in the 60s and 70s when the Daime religion was regarded with suspicion by the local authorities. But I think that there is a deeper wisdom in the rule, and it has to do with the understanding that the ayahuasca experience is potentially so life-changing, it can have such an effect on people’s lives, that nobody should take upon themselves the responsibility of telling others that this is something that they should try, or do. The decision to partake can only come from the people themselves. While the temple is open for anyone who is called to try, they should come out of their own accord.

I heard someone say once that the main contraindication of ayahuasca is NOT wanting to drink ayahuasca. You should never drink ayahuasca if you don’t want to, for there’s a big chance that it is going to be horrible. Sometimes I say that psychedelics are like a kiss, if you want a kiss, it can be the most tender, intimate experience, if you don’t want a kiss, it can be disgusting, intrusive and horrible. The kiss is the same, but for certain things, specially the most intimate, there’s a wrapper that changes everything, it is called consent. The deeper insight here is that the role of consent in ayahuasca, and in psychedelics, is huge. It can be the difference between a good and a bad trip. Daimistas, because they’ve been in this game much longer than us, understand that consent is key, and that when it comes to experiences potentially as life changing as these, out of precaution, one should not make recommendations.

To me, this is another example of how inspiring some of the practices that come from the traditions can be for us, even as we stand very far from their reality. This example has deeper implications, for example, when we think of psychedelics as prescription medicines, that is, psychedelics as medicines your doctor recommends you to take. Should doctors decide for you, like they decide you should take antibiotics? Or should there be a more careful dialogue? If a doctor prescribes a psychedelic to you, and you have a bad experience, will you blame your doctor? I would. But if I’d decided to take it, and then I had a bad experience, that’s different.

This story also has implications for advertising. Should psychedelics be advertised, that is, recommended to strangers? Again, the accumulated expertise of the traditions suggests that this should be considered carefully, because ayahuasca is potentially life transforming, recommending ayahuasca cannot be like recommending restaurants, vacation spots, or car brands. Indeed in our society most products that can be life changing, like complex financial products, alcohol, tobacco and others, cannot be marketed the same way other less powerful products are.

When tradition is not enough

On the topic of advertising, I will present one last example that comes from a group working in Europe. The facilitators are not Amazonian, but they learned with traditional healers in Perú. As they did their work in Europe they encountered a similar issue: How should they grow? How should newcomers join the group? Here’s an example of a situation where the traditions cannot offer much in terms of accumulated wisdom, or accumulated expertise, because it is a new context.

What happens when you take ayahuasca out of the small communities out of which it originated? For one thing, in an urban context it’s much harder to tell good practitioners from bad practitioners. In the traditional community context people knew who had a good reputation and who didn’t, who cured well and who didn’t cure so well. Everybody knew who had three decades of experience and who only had three years, but as we move away from the communities of origin this is much harder to know, and this goes for not just the providers but also for the participants. In a community environment people usually know their neighbors, they know their story, they know their family, they know their particularities, they know their problems, they know their previous history, and the community also sort of knew how the brew affected people. If person was having problems with what we now call integrating, this would be known by the community. These are some examples of the things that are lost when ayahuasca traveled out of its traditional context and into urban contexts.

So the group working in Europe had undergone traditional training in Peru, found out that the training prepared them for many things, but not for certain new realities. Such as, how should the group grow? How should newcomers join the group?

The way they solved it is through what they call “sponsorship.” In this model someone can only join the circle by being sponsored by a existing member. Your sponsor is not just the person who introduces you to the group, the sponsor becomes responsible for the person that has come in, they vouch for them, they will help with follow-up, and they will stay in touch with the new member after the experience, to make sure the person is ok.

Two interesting things about this system. One, this system works without advertising, just word of mouth, which makes the group grow organically, through circles of trust, friends of friends. This system is slower than advertising, but improves screening, minimizes accidents and creates more cohesive groups. Two, it involves the entire group in the task of keeping track of each other. Why is this is necessary? Because in a traditional context people lived in communities where everyone could see how the rest was doing. If someone was having troubles after ayahuasca, they could hear through the neighbors. But in our modern urban societies even when the ritual is very much traditional, the context is no longer traditional. In our urban settings a group of strangers gets together for a weekend ceremony, and then disband, after the sessions their paths will not cross outside. In this context its is difficult to do the type of follow up that in the communities happens almost by itself. I believe it’s because reasons like these, because of this new context and because the new necessities that arise out of these new contexts, that we are also beginning to see the emergence of new sets of best practices. The accumulated expertise that comes from traditions is not in a static state, rather it is a process that continues.

I hope these examples serve to explain the type of thinking behind the work that we do at ICEERS around the globalization of indigenous plant medicines.

What do you think? Should doctors prescribe psychedelics? Should ayahuasca sessions be advertised? Should people follow dietas before taking psychedelics?

There's a question that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and it begins with a story.

Some years ago I was in an indigenous community in the Colombian Amazon. It was not easy getting there. It took a number of permits, a precarious flight on a single engine airplane, a hair-raising landing on a dirt strip, and a 5 day trek through the Amazon jungle. We walked, past dangerous rapids and sacred waterfalls to finally get there: An indigenous community that still practiced the Yurupari dances I’d only read about in books.

At this point I’d already spent more than 10 years studying what indigenous people know and we have forgotten about the most powerful plants in the world, but this... this felt like some sort of graduation trip, like I’d finally made it.

I felt enormously fortunate to be there.

That night everybody gathered in the gigantic communal house, the maloka, where I witnessed one of the most beautiful ritual plant food preparations that I had ever seen.

The leaves, which had been picked fresh that evening, were carefully toasted, ground, sieved and mixed with the ashes from another plant, which were delicately scooped into the bowl using a large feather.

When the ingredients were mixed and ready they were passed on to the payé (that’s their term for what we would call a shaman) who silently prayed over the bowl of food for a long time.

Then the bowl was passed and shared by all. Energized by this food they engaged in what looked to me as a form of harmonious politics. Yes. I said harmonious politics. I know it’s hard to imagine.

Sitting in the near darkness, illuminated only by a small torch, a topic was brought up. A single person spoke, while everybody else listened. People would reply, one person at a time. Different perspectives were presented, but there was no interrupting, no real debate, to me it felt like the topic was slowly being turned over, each speaker adding and subtracting until it reached its final form. An agreement that was unspoken, for it ended in a sort of silent consensus.

The common name given both to the space and the practice I witnessed is mambeadero. When I compared it to the politics of my people, and the scenes that can sometimes be seen in our congresses and parliaments, this mambeadero felt to me like a higher form of civilization. Indeed I felt that, until that night, I hadn’t understood what “being civilized” could actually mean.

There are two sacred plants around which mambeaderos are structured. Both are well known. One of them, mambe, which gives name to mambeadero, has by dry weight, almost as much calcium as milk, and almost as much iron as spinach.

The common name of this plant is coca, and since 1961 it’s banned worldwide, together with one of its alkaloids, cocaine.

Now this might come as a surprise to many of you. For many of us outside of South America, coca is not associated with food, much less with harmonious community relations, quite the opposite. For us the coca leaf, banned and transformed into cocaine has turned into an insidious curse that has brought great troubles in the form of addiction and incarceration, criminal violence and corruption. We’ve all heard these stories, we may even personally know people who have suffered such problems. Yet not one of these things were present that night in the mambeadero, quite the opposite.

So, how is this possible? How is it possible that the same plant can be a blessing for some cultures, and a curse for others? This is the question that I bring before you today, and the question that I’ve been thinking about all these years.

What I found in my studies is that the story of coca is not unique. This pattern, a plant that is a medicine for an indigenous culture, travels to the West and becomes toxic, has repeated itself with a number of other powerful plants.

Tobacco is the second plant that is used at mambeaderos. And not just in mambeaderos, tobacco is the most important shamanic plant of the americas. It is held in the highest esteem by indigenous peoples all over North and South America. In these cultures tobacco is considered a medicine, an ally. In gatherings tobacco helps human beings think well and to speak with serenity. Tobacco is passed around to enable agreements and seal peace treaties. It is said that tobacco smoke can elevate human prayers to the realm of the spirits. As such, tobacco is regarded as a very powerful entity that must be treated with great respect.

When Europeans came in contact with tobacco 500 years ago our relationship to it ended up being very different, and so were our rituals. Tobacco did not become a tool to make peace, much less to pray, instead Tobacco quickly became a product, popular beyond all imagining, spreading all over the world, creating whole new markets, culminating with the invention of commercial cigarettes.

Instead of a blessing, tobacco became a toxic product of compulsive use, the number one cause of preventable deaths worldwide.

So what is it? How is it possible that one culture’s sacred medicines can be another culture’s poisonous drugs? Think about it. When we say something is sacred it is because it is important, good, revered and must be protected, when something is considered a poison it’s because it is bad and harmful and must be kept at a distance.

If the same plant can be a blessing in one place and curse in others I think it safe to assume it is not just about the plant, but about what is done with it.

So what is it that indigenous people know and we seem to have forgotten about the most powerful plants in the world? I asked this question to shamans and scientists, leading thinkers and indigenous peoples. I traveled a dozen countries and three continents looking for answers.

Today I bring to you one exception, and one explanation. The exception gives me hope, the explanation, I think the explanation makes us all humble.

So first the exception. In the Amazon I found another powerful plant preparation revered by more than 100 indigenous groups. It has many names, but it's quechua name is ayahuasca.

While we have known tobacco and coca for hundreds of years, the globalization of ayahuasca is very recent, just a few decades. Yet its popularity is growing quickly, and today one can find something like this in countries very far from the Amazon.

This is an image of an ayahuasca ceremony.

Now, is it taking place in the Amazon, or outside of it? Unless you were there, it could be difficult to tell, and that’s the point. A group of people outside the Amazon gather to drink ayahuasca, led by a person who has experience and training, who determines the dose, and is responsible for what happens to everybody during the night. This person will perform some sort of ceremonial act, usually involving music, which will direct and modulate the experience of the entire group. If we were to describe a traditional ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon, from Indigenous groups to the Brazilian ayahuasca religions, every one of the things I mentioned would also be present.

There is something very significant happening that is not obvious at first sight. Ayahuasca is being globalized not just as a product, but also as a form of community practice. This means that people in the West are using ayahuasca in similar ways as people in the Amazon, and this is a historical change. This had never happened before.

So after 500 years of traditional indigenous medicines being put to mediocre (or appalling) use by Western societies, we seem to be facing an exception. This is the exception that gives me hope. Because it shows that we don’t have to be stuck on a pattern. Maybe we can do things better this time?

Maybe. I also want to stress not all is perfect in Western ayahuasca rituals, and that there are still important issues to work out. Issues that we are faced with daily at ICEERS, the Foundation where I work. Issues of appropriation and commercialization, of benefit sharing, of sustainability of the plants, and also issues of ethical practice, of safety standards, of challenging experiences, not to mention the backwards legal situation. There is lots of work to do yet.

But I don’t want these issues to make us overlook the fact that this exception is a step in the right direction and -I believe- a sign of a significant shift taking place in our culture.

So ayahuasca is the exception. I also said I brought an explanation. Actually, in the many years of thinking about the paradox of these powerful plants I found many explanations from many disciplines.

People closer to pharmacology explained to me that above all, coca and cocaine are not the same thing, and that when you extract purified compounds you are dealing with a different substance, with different toxicity, different absorption rate and different abuse potential. People closer to the social sciences pointed out the importance of ritual, spiritual and cultural aspects. We don’t treat sacred objects the same way we treat illegal contraband. Others pointed out social and economic aspects, people’s living conditions, their degree of suffering, personal, social or historical, will hugely impact how much they will use or abuse certain substances. Yet others pointed to prohibition and remarked that when something is illegal it is difficult to advance towards a healthy relationship with it.

There were many other interesting and valuable insights, but at the end the most useful explanation I found did not come from science, but from mythology.

So I’d like to close my talk with a myth I was told which beautifully reflects this paradox.

It goes like this:

At the beginning of time, at the time of the First People, the Gods gave the People a Gift. This Gift was very powerful, but it came with a catch. Depending on the relationship that the people established with the Gift it could be good or bad. If the gift was approached with reverence and wisdom, it would bestow great blessings on the people. If the gift was approached with disrespect or with ignorance, the Gift would turn into a curse causing great harm and destruction.

Any of the plants I have mentioned could have been that Gift from the Gods. But the gift could have also been fire. Fire can keep us warm, or used to cook nourishing meals, or it can destroy entire forests and pollute the air. Is fire good or bad? The more useful question seems to be: How should we relate to fire?

For me and the foundation I work for, we would like to see one day in which these powerful plants are as beneficial for our societies as they are for the cultures of origin, because the examples I have given are just scratching the surface of the benefits these plants can bring.

But we might not be able to get this right by ourselves.

Imagine your neighbor has amazing technology. You get it for yourself but you don’t know how to use it, so it ends up just blowing up in your face. What do you think would be the smart thing to do? Would you approach your neighbor, humbly, and say hey, this is new for me, you seem to be good with it... Maybe you can help me understand a few things? Or would you use your significant political power to ban this technology, for your neighbor and for everybody, because if it’s dangerous for me, it must be dangerous for everybody?

More than half a century ago we didn’t take the humble option, but the world has changed a lot since then, and that gives me hope, hope that one day we will be able to undo these historical wrongs. And that one day we might live in beneficial relationships to these powerful plants, so that we might collectively learn to be -as some indigenous people say- in right relationship to the plants.

I chose to make this work my life’s work, because I believe that if we can figure out how to turn these powerful plants into a blessing instead of curse, maybe this can be a school for us, so that we can also learn how to collectively be in better relationships to other powerful entities that, precisely because they are powerful, also come with certain risks.

For example Artificial Intelligence is a very powerful new presence that could also be classified as a Gift from the Gods. Will it be a blessing or a curse? That will depend on us.

In that sense maybe we should call this myth the School of the Gods, instead of the Gift from the Gods. A school of what? A school where we might learn how to collectively be in right relationships, be it to ourselves, to other people, to powerful plants or powerful technologies, to other cultures, or to nature at large

..and that is a humbling skill that we will desperately need in these accelerating times.

Thank you very much.

BTW Here’s the video of this talk, which TED unlisted

Image credits

Image 1,2: The Coca Files ©4direcciones Audiovisual.
Image 3 @diana_rico_4d from The Coca Files ©4direcciones Audiovisual

Image 4: The Coca Files © 4direcciones Audiovisual..
Image 5: El origen de la Noche © 4direcciones Audiovisual.
Image 7,8,9,10 © by @richarddecaillet