Plants are power tools.

Stirred and shaken
The Guardian
March 12, 2005

Faced by difficult choices both in his life and fiction, and encouraged by the examples of Peter Matthiessen and Allen Ginsberg, Henry Shukman tried ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic, Amazonian vine.


"...In spite of its being one of the strongest hallucinogens known to humanity, ayahuasca is now officially legal in New Mexico...

"...So, five days later, ravenous and already light-headed with fasting, I found myself standing outside a dance studio in Santa Fe, along with about 40 others, as another watery, New Mexican twilight lingered beneath a high, glassy sky. We filed in and sat around the walls on blankets.

"The 'ceremony' would go on all night. The shaman and his white-robed helpers went round the room with incense and holy water, and everyone was given a small plastic bowl for the anticipated purge. After that came a glass of a disgusting, gruelly, riverine potion -- the [ayahuasca] tea itself. The lights went out. Some of the assistant shamans started to sing songs. Others mimicked the calls of Amazonian birds so well that the room seemed to echo like the rainforest, and I wondered if the drug was already taking effect.


See footnote at end of post

"The first effect was the appearance out of nowhere of geometric, multi-coloured patterns forming and re-forming in time with the songs. I could 'see' them whether my eyes were open or closed. They were embarrassingly hippie-kaleidoscopic, but there they were. The 'eye of the soul opening,' apparently: seeing in the dark.

"Then suddenly everything vanished. No singing, no kaleidoscope, no nothing. I felt that I had shot up out of my body and was floating in the midst of black, silvery space. It was silent and still, and I was completely calm. I needed nothing, never had and never would.

"Then I somehow became aware of a ruinous, exhausted tangle of four human limbs far, far below me, slumped on a wooden floor. Alas, I knew that somehow I was committed to that body, I had a responsibility to it, and it was drawing me back...

“'First time?' a silver-haired old hand asked me afterwards, as I stood blinking in the cold dawn, wondering where I had just been.

“Yes."

“Did you die?" he asked me.

"So that was what had happened. 'I thought I’d given birth to an asteroid,' I explained seriously. 'Except I was the asteroid.'

“'Uh-huh,' he nodded. 'That’s good. We are asteroids.' Right.

"Be that as it may -- and good or not -- that afternoon, the novel I was stuck on opened up like an Ordnance Survey map, and I could see the whole plot at last. I covered a giant sheet of A2 with notes and plans.

"Are there shortcuts in this life? Do those ancient tribes of Amazonia know things we don’t? The only things I could be sure of were that, with or without ayahuasca’s help, there would be months of hard slog ahead if I was ever going to finish the book. And that I hoped very much never to touch the stuff again."

Via Magpie {Ayahuasca and problem-solving}


Footnote

"The Americas are to the rest of the world a literal Garden of Eden, in the sense that the vast majority of truly hallucinogenic plants originate from there or were discovered and used there. This is somewhat of an irony for human culture, and [it has led] to a paradoxical situation in which the most powerful spiritual agents in nature have become accursed by an inexperienced, alien culture of conquest, only to become nearly lost to civilization as true endowments of nature for the betterment of humankind.


"In the Americas, psychedelic power plants have been, without exception, the object of veneration and worship in virtually every culture that has had access to them. This includes a spectrum of the most potent agents known, including sacred mushrooms from the ancient Mayas to the modern Mazatecs; peyote from the Toltecs to the Huichols; San Pedro cactus from the Chavin culture to Eduardo Caldero; ayahuasca, the vine of the soul from the Genesis of the world; morning glories; and even the frankly uncontrollable plants of the Datura family. We should take a lesson from these cultures' experiences, and try to understand why they held these plants in such spiritual esteem.


"Despite their powerful nature, the religious and shamanic use of these [plant] allies has served to place a natural care and respect in their use. This turns what could become an unhinged occasion into a carefully guided one, which happens only on ritually appointed occasions, over which the group and its leaders keep a watchful eye on all the participants and strict protocols operate. This, in turn, serves to unite the participants in a bond that is both shared with one another and with the infinite."


Here's just one example of cultural veneration of specific, sacred plant species, as detailed in an earlier post on ancient earthworks [like the Great Serpent Mound, which I mentioned earlier today].

Please refer to this link in order to read more
about shamanism and sacred plants.