30. The Storyteller's Chair

I have just been reading a friend's blog in which she explains that she only writes about bad stuff because the positive stuff makes for very boring reading. In general, I would have to agree with her. No one wants to know how great a date was, but everyone enjoys reading about a disastrous date.

However, I also think it is important to acknowledge, once in a while, that there are reasons for hope and for optimism in the world. I came across one such yesterday, as I went to look around the recently refurbished playground in the tiny village in which I am currently living, out here in the Engadine Valley in Switzerland.

There is a new pulley system which my 12 year old nephew loved. There is also a rather ingenious wooden sculpture of a large ant which you can climb up and sit on. However, I was most struck by the storyteller's chair in the corner of the playground, and the little circle of seats surrounding it. The chair itself has a niche carved into it for storing the wood-bound storybook. The stories are printed on weatherproof cards and the original Romantsch version - with pictures - is translated on subsequent pages in French, Italian, German and English. Romantsch is a little known dialect which developed from the Latin spoken by the Roman legionaries who were stationed here. It is still spoken in this valley and a few neighboring ones, by a dwindling number of people. I am happy that people are proud of their language, that they are sufficiently open minded to tell their stories in four other languages simultaneously, and that they still believe in the importance and value of storytelling.

If you walk down the Spinas valley, there are five more of these storyteller's chairs, each with a different storybook.

There are many places where this could never happen. However, examining this storyteller's chair, I felt that all was right with the world.

29. First Solo Ayahuasca

On Saturday June 19th I did my first solo Ayahuasca experiment.

The day before I had been on a long hike up over the snow covered Fuorcla da Val Champagna (2500m). Climbing the last 100 metres took over an hour - I kept breaking through the snow, sometimes up to my waist. Exhausting work, but good exercise.

On Saturday I rested. I ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast, a Greek salad and two nectarines for lunch and a few cashew nuts mid-afternoon. I placed a vomit bucket next to my beanbag and laid out a few of the ritual cigar-cigarettes from Iquitos. I built a fire in the hearth at 20.00, then I set light to the palo santo wood which Otilia the shaman had given me. The fragrant smoke of this wood is used like incense by Amazon Indians; it is also said to banish evil spirits. I walked around the house, fumigating with a piece of smoking wood and seriously questioning my sanity. However, I didn't want to take any chances.

I was, I must admit, a little nervous. People have been known to do crazy things under the influence of Ayahuasca. I was all by myself in the house. What's more, I did not know how strong the brew was which I'd brought back from the Amazon. I had 500ml which was supposed to be sufficient for 6 doses. I decided to be careful and to give myself a half dose of 50ml.

At this time of year it does not get dark until 21.30/22.00. I spent a couple of hours thinking about what I hoped to get out of the Ayahuasca experience. One thing I would like to glean is convincing firsthand evidence of a spirit world - the experience of a dimension which is inexplicable to science as we know it.

I took the Ayahuasca at 20.56. It was less viscous than I remembered, less noxious and a little bit fizzy. Presumably it had started to ferment. Then I sat on a beanbag, opposite glowing cinders, for an hour. It slowly grew dark outside. I put on a CD of icaros, the traditional Amazon songs and chants. I felt nothing out of the ordinary, other than hunger and boredom.

I waited another hour. Still nothing happened. Then I decided that the dose must have been too weak, or the brew I had bought was a fake. I got up, switched on the lights and made myself a hearty meal. I felt shortchanged but decided to compensate with a spliff and a line of ketamine. I then settled down to watch another episode of The Wire. I had a sense of unfamiliarity about both the program and my surroundings. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the episode and was able to go to sleep immediately after.

I have boiled the Ayahuasca brew again in order to burn off any alcohol from fermentation. I read online that it is advisable to do that. Next time I will administer a larger dose.

28. Experimentation

If you read my post about Cronbach's alpha, you will know my feelings about the field of psychology as it is taught at my current university. I find it stultifying and infantilising. However, there are other schools. One in particular appeals to me because of its humanistic emphasis, and because I could complete the degree by distance learning. I would only have to attend two week long conferences a year, both in San Francisco. However, if I were to go ahead and complete a doctorate then I still need to write a thesis.

I have been thinking about possible thesis topics for most of this year. The fact that I have found it so hard to come up with something which really grabs me suggests to me once again that I am not truly cut out for this field. Such topics as 'Meta-analysis of treatments for veterans with PTSD' or 'Correlations between Depression and Foetal Alcohol Syndrome', while interesting on the surface, lose their initial attraction (for me) once you get into the statistical nitty gritty. It's probably different if you know someone who suffers from either condition, but I don't. Increasingly, I think that personal exposure to mental illness, whether in a friend, family member or in oneself, is the greatest motivating factor for a clinician. The wounded healer is an archetype that makes sense - I do think that ex-addicts probably make the best addiction counselors, for instance. But even then, a substantial degree of altruism is also necessary. I don't think I possess any of these qualities in sufficient quantity.

However, I am and always have been interested in existential questions. Of course, I recognise that is a luxury, but that doesn't diminish my interest. A spiritual dimension, and altered states of consciousness, are both areas which fall under the existential rubric. Over the last year or two, I have become increasingly fascinated by these fields. This is partly due to personal experience. The ten days I spent in the Amazon with the shaman, and the two Ayahuasca ceremonies I took part in, left me with a lot of unanswered questions. I did not return from the Amazon with conclusive evidence, even of a subjective nature, for the existence of a spirit world. Nevertheless, I felt I had experienced intimations of it. When there are many phenomena which are inexplicable to science, there comes a point at which an explanation which is not rigidly scientific may indeed be the most elegant and convincing. I feel I am approaching that point.

One of the few teachers at my university whom I have admired is my professor of psychoanalysis. We share many interests in literature and philosophy which do not play much of a role in the thinking of most psychotherapists today. I met this professor for lunch on a number of occasions. He told me that he had been one of the first students at my university when it opened in 1969. However, he quit after two years and went to train as an analyst with the maverick anti-psychiatrist R D Laing in London.

One of the requirements of my school is that we clock 45 hours as recipients of psychotherapy. I asked this professor whether he could recommend a psychoanalyst for me to see. My professor then asked me whether I would be interested in seeing him. I said I would; I have now seen him twice a week for the last six months. I told him about my experience with Ayahuasca and he told me that, when he was training to be an analyst, he used lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) once a week over a period of years and that it brought him 'great clarity'.

In the 1950s and 60s there was a lot of interest in the potential use of psychotropic substances in therapy. There were studies which administered LSD to autistic children and alcoholics. Due to poor methodology, the results of many of these studies are inconclusive (although only in very rare cases could the effects be considered harmful). LSD is thought to have therapeutic potential because it enables patients to unblock repressed material and to accept themselves for who they are. All clinical trials ceased in 1970 when LSD was made illegal in response to a political firestorm. However, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in the therapeutic use of LSD within the field of psychology. MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, recently held a large conference in San Jose, CA, and is currently financing clinical studies on the psychotherapeutic uses of LSD with terminal cancer patients in Switzerland, as well as similar studies using MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine - main ingredient in Ecstasy) for the treatment of PTSD in both Israel and Switzerland.

Furthermore, I am interested in the similarities between the mental states induced by meditation and those induced by chemicals. Through meditation, Tibetan monks are able to train the ego-transcendent right halves of their brains. In our frantic daily lives, we may be further than ever from those meditative brain states, but perhaps we can access them in other ways, some more desirable than others. The following link gives a fascinating insight into the experience of a neuroscientist who suffers a sudden stroke; the blood is cut off from her left brain hemisphere and she is forced to experience the world entirely through the underused right brain hemisphere -

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

So, before committing to writing a thesis on some aspect of psychedelics and psychology, I thought I ought probably to conduct some experiments on myself. That is partly why I have retreated here to the Swiss mountains for the summer. I can be more systematic and scientific about my experiences. I am assured of a minimum of distractions and I can control my diet very precisely. Also, this is a place I love, and hence I am at my best here. I think that these are all important factors when using psychedelics, particularly when using them with a view to learning and benefiting from the experience.

After spending a week with the shaman in the Amazon, I returned to Iquitos. Iquitos is the most populous city in the world that cannot be reached by road. Travel to and from Iquitos is by plane or by boat. It is a hot, humid, dirty and intense city. The streets within the city itself are dominated by thousands of motorised rickshaws. They are like swarms of noisy wasps. There is one street where fish are sold. By midday the gutters are knee high in fish offal. The flies delight in the glistening innards. The stench is indescribable. In the afternoon, when the market has packed up, the vultures do battle for the leftovers. Later in the afternoon there is often a downpour which cleans the streets.

There is another smaller, darker street which is the preserve of the witchdoctors, healers and magic men. All sorts of herbal remedies, medicinal brews, aphrodisiac concoctions, unguents, salves, leaves and roots are sold here. The vendors sit in front of the stalls but they do not hawk their wares as elsewhere in the market. They are more like reserved apothecaries, calmly awaiting the patient's inquiry.

I was after Ayahuasca. The first stall I asked at had the main ingredients - Banisteriopsis Caapi vine and Chacruna bark. However, they did not have any ready made. At the next stall, a boy was sent to fetch a bottle from the stall belonging to a shaman further down the street. I bought the bottle for the equivalent of about ten dollars. I was told that it contained sufficient Ayahuasca for 6 doses.

I continued down the street and perused the other stalls. One vendor was more talkative than the rest and we fell into conversation. He said that he too was a shaman from the interior. He asked me what I had bought and I replied that I had bought Ayahuasca. He asked me who from and I said I didn't know, a boy had been dispatched to get it. Then he asked if he could see it. I gave him the bottle. He opened it and sniffed it, then pronounced that it was a good brew. I was happy to hear this since, for all I knew, I could have been sold muddy river water. He then offered, as a favour, to ensure the best possible experience for me. I said he should go ahead. He hunkered down in the corner of his stall, removed the top of the bottle and started blowing smoke into it and chanting under his breath. I am not sure what this achieves, or how it achieves anything, but it is a ritual which I had also observed Otilia perform back in the jungle.

I bought some cigarettes off this man. They are more similar to cigars than cigarettes. Then he attached one of his labels for a different medicine to the outside of the bottle of Ayahuasca, in case I had trouble at customs. Fortunately I have not had any trouble - the bottle has accompanied me from Iquitos to San Francisco, San Francisco to London, London to Salzburg and finally over the border into Switzerland. I am not entirely sure what Ayahuasca's legal status is in any of these countries - quite possibly no one would care anyway.

*

I also wanted to buy some LSD to experiment with over the summer. I have used it before on a few occasions, but I have always found the experience confusing rather than illuminating. However, in the past I have paid scant attention to set and setting. I am interested in comparing the respective benefits and drawbacks of LSD and Ayahuasca.

San Francisco is reputed to have some of the purest LSD available. I made some inquiries and followed up on a couple of leads. However, as is so often the way with these things, it all came to naught. The community of drug users and vendors are, for the most part, an unreliable bunch.

I told my friend G about my difficulties. He suggested that I should accompany him to visit his next door neighbour, M. He thought that M would be able to solve my problem directly. So, I went to meet G one Sunday afternoon and together we knocked on M's door.

M's house is an old 3 floor Victorian in the Mission district. M opened the door himself. He is a man in his 60s with wrinkled, leathery skin, long graying hair and a lot of rather macabre jewelry. He proudly showed us round his house which appeared not to have been cleaned or tidied for half a century. On the ground floor, the walls were covered with framed works of blotter art. M has been a blotter artist since the 1960s - he designs the motifs which are printed on the blotter paper which is then dabbed with LSD, and from which the individual tabs are then cut. He also has one of the largest collections of blotter art in the world. A niche market, for sure, but an intriguing one.

Alice Climbing through the Looking Glass, by M

We climbed the stairs to M's dark, high ceilinged bedroom on the first floor. Every inch of wall space was covered with bizarre bric-a-brac: hundreds of dusty old apothecary's bottles, small stuffed animals, skulls, bones and psychedelic art. The room had the feel of a Victorian curiosity shop. M sat on his red velvet four poster bed smoking marijuana and holding forth. He told us that he had known Timothy Leary and, I think, even Albert Hoffmann, the father of LSD. M did seem to know what he was talking about; when I eventually asked whether he could help me get hold of a sufficient quantity in liquid form for me to take to Switzerland over the summer, he said I would be better off getting it from Sandoz laboratories. That is true - Sandoz is a Swiss company which produces the purest LSD for use by clinicians and researchers. However, you have to have a licence to buy from them, and as a student I am not eligible.

Most of what M was saying made sense. However, at times he would get side-tracked onto material which was much less convincing. For instance, when I asked him why he had so many flasks of water covering the floor, he replied that he wanted to be prepared for the rising sea levels which would precede the end of the world in 2012. He then got up and fished out a book to show me. The book was published by a Freemason's lodge around 1900 and apparently drew on ancient and mystic sources to provide irrefutable evidence of this imminent apocalypse. M spoke with somewhat fanatic conviction on this subject. It did make me think that I have to be careful with my own experiments this summer. Overuse of psychedelics, like overuse of anything, is not beneficial.

When we asked whether M could get hold of some LSD for us, he replied that he could but that he required us to undergo a test of suitability first. He said he was unwilling to give LSD to people he didn't know well and who might have bad experiences which could end up getting him into trouble. He added that he is already on the CIA's wanted list. However, his reasoning seemed sensible in principle. When I asked what the test of suitability consisted of, he said that he wanted us to get high with him, but that it would only last about 5 minutes and that he would know after that. I tried to glean more information but M became evasive. Nevertheless, he was confident that he was able to get an insight into my psychic health in those 5 minutes, so we made a plan to meet the following Sunday with a view to conducting this mysterious initiation.

Since I had a friend staying with me the following weekend, I ended up having to rush to M's house rather tired and hung over after a night of drinking and a day of hiking. I stopped at G's on the way to pick him up. G and his brother R were entertaining guests who had come for a dinner party. G said that he was not in the mood to undergo this initiation but I persuaded both him and his brother and girlfriend to accompany me.

We knocked on M's door and, following another mandatory appreciation of his blotter art, he lead us back up to his bedroom. He appeared a little disappointed that I was to be the only initiate but gamely set about making preparations. He informed me that he and I would both take one hit off his pipe. He pulled out what appeared to be a crack pipe and started loading the bowl with a few small yellow crystals. When I asked him what they were he replied evasively that this was an endogenous substance - it occurs naturally in the human brain. At this stage I began to suspect that the crystals were N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the active ingredient in Ayahuasca. The natural occurrence of DMT is correlated with out-of-body and near-death experiences.

I took one long drag from the pipe, closed my eyes and leant back in my chair. I found myself catapulted almost instantaneously into a parallel universe. I felt I was part of a great river of consciousness. I heard a maternal voice and felt like a baby again. And I felt a great calm. I lost all sense of place and time. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was M's face right up next to mine. He winked conspiratorially at me and made me think of a leprechaun. Then I looked across at the sofa where G, his girlfriend and his brother were all observing me with interest. It took me a few seconds for me to remember who they were. I told them that I felt fine and that the experience had been a positive one.

In the meantime, M had got up to prepare something at his desk. He returned with two Pez sweets and placed them on my hand. He said that I should be careful because they were still wet, but they were my reward. I still felt befuddled and asked him what they were but he again got sidetracked. Suddenly I realised that they were Pez sweets soaked in LSD. I quickly removed them from my hand before I absorbed the LSD through my skin.

We all left a few minutes later. G and his brother and girlfriend had to return to the dinner party they were hosting next door. I had to drive to dinner with other friends in a restaurant uptown. I said goodbye to M and thanked him. I still wanted to get hold of a larger quantity of LSD but I thought I would drop by his place the following week to discuss it. I then drove uptown. The DMT had in no way affected my motor coordination and I felt very lucid. However, I also felt slightly shell shocked, as if I had climbed down from a high peak in a howling blizzard and had just entered a snug mountain restaurant with contented lowlanders warming themselves around a hearth fire.

I have subsequently done some online research about DMT, or 'the spirit molecule', as it is also known. I found the following to be an excellent resource:

http://wiki.dmt-nexus.com/DMT-Nexus_Wiki:Health_and_Safety

As I wrote earlier, DMT is the active ingredient in Ayahuasca. The following is an interesting link about Ayahuasca:

http://wiki.dmt-nexus.com/Ayahuasca

I also enjoyed this video a lot. The psychology of Piers Gibbon, the posh presenter, is rather fascinating. His relationship with the smug Texan is intriguing, and the Shamanic phlegm and millipede episode at the very end is both revolting and baffling.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3887330534813813733#

Finally, this follow up online chat with Piers Gibbon is also quite interesting:

http://www.piersgibbon.com/online-chat-on-channel-4-i-found-the-transcript/


I think I will have to add pure DMT to my list of substances to be investigated.