Ayahuasca: Rituals, Potions and Visionary Art from the Amazon

This extraordinary work covers the history, psychopharmacology, and traditional and contemporary uses of ayahuasca, as well as exploring various strains of artwork that this amazonian medicine has inspired. While there is much that could be said about this book, let me take up Adelaars' discussion of the distinct types of insight and paths of attainment that are to be gained from Eastern meditation practices and ayahuasca shamanism respectively. Adelaars gets to the spiritual core of the ayahuasca trance when he places the experience in contradistinction to Eastern meditation practices which seek to internalize silence. "The human mind is not silent. There is always a voice to be heard inside. It is part of the hardware of being human" (pg. 252). Rather than engaging in quietistic practices that allow one to slowly and gradually dis-identify with the incessantly noisy personal I, i.e. to recognize the illusory nature of the reified sense of self that is the cause of so much suffering, the Amazonian technique "to stop the babbling and chattering inner voice" involves throwing "oneself into a hurricane, in the dizzying vortex created by the ayahuasca effect. That all-encompassing experience shuts down the commentator as well, replacing it with another voice, the voice of ayahuasca, the voice of the jungle. Here, wisdom comes from outside" (pg. 253). The insight gained thereby serves to awaken the soul to interstitial realms of preternatural experience, allowing one "to cross the border between life and death, to meet the ancestors, to encounter the source of life" (pg. 253). It is no wonder then that ayahuasca is taken to be "the umbilical cord of the universe"; ayahuasca does nothing less than reconnect one to the "umbilical cord of the ancestral Mother of the Universe [who] feeds the drinker with wisdom" (pg. 253). This book, in short, serves to introduce the reader to the primordial realms of experience that ayahuasca in particular, and entheogens in general, unveil to those who are ready and willing to humble themselves in an effort to explore the endless realms of inner vision.