Graham Hancock

So I think all civilization arises out of shamanism. And shamanism is a naturally scientific endeavor where experimentation is undertaken and exploration and investigation of the environment around us. And what I'm suggesting is that one group, perhaps more than one group, went a bit further than other groups did and used that study of the skies.

develop navigational techniques and and were able to sail and explore the earth but that ultimately what lies behind it is the same curiosity and investigative skill that shamans are still using in the amazon to this day and and i do see them as as scientists in a very proper use of the word but do you think something like ayahuasca was a part of that process

Yes, ayahuasca is the result of shamanistic investigation of what's available in the Amazon. Of course, ayahuasca is all the fad in Western industrialized societies today, and some people see it as a miracle cure for all kinds of ailments and problems. And perhaps it is. Perhaps it can be in certain ways. Ayahuasca itself is not an Amazonian word.

It comes from the Quechua language, and it means the vine of souls or the vine of the dead. But the ayahuasca vine is only one of two principal ingredients in the ayahuasca brew. And the other ingredient are leaves that contain dimethyltryptamine. And there are two sources of that. One is a bush called Cicotria viridis. That's its botanical name. They call it chacruna in the Amazon.

And its leaves are rich in dimethyltryptamine, DMT, which is arguably the most powerful psychedelic known to science. And the other source comes from another vine, Diplopteris cabrerana, which the leaves of that vine also contain DMT. So the ayahuasca vine on its own is not going to give you a visionary journey.

And the leaves that contain DMT on their own, whether they come from diplopteris or whether they come from chacruna, are not going to give you a visionary journey. And the reason they're not going to give you the visionary journey is because of the enzyme monoamine oxidase in the gut that shuts down DMT when absorbed orally. Basically, DMT is not accessible orally.

unless you combine it with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. And that's what I mean when I'm talking about science in the Amazon, because there's so many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands different species of plants and trees in the Amazon, and they've gone around and they found just two or three of them that put together can produce these extraordinary visionary experiences.

to arrive at that. Exactly, exactly. To realize that this is something very special. And then to use the principles there to find another form of it. So ayahuasca is the form that is made with the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of the chacruna plant. But yagé,

It's made from the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of another vine, Diploploris cabrerana, which contain not only NNDMT, which is the DMT that everybody's pretty much familiar with these days, but also 5-MeO DMT. And the Yahé experience, which I have also had, in my view, is more intense and more powerful, almost to the point of being overwhelming, than the ayahuasca experience.

But the result of this sophisticated chemistry that we find taking place here is a brew which is hideous to drink. The taste, I find it quite repulsive. I almost retched just smelling it in the cup, but then unleashes these

extraordinary experiences and it isn't just pretty visuals it's the sense of encounters with sentient others that there are sentient beings that somehow we're surrounded by a realm of sentience that is not normally accessible to us and that what the ayahuasca brew and certain other psychedelics like like some psilocybin mushrooms in a high enough dose can do it as well

LSD can do it, but ayahuasca is the master in this, of lowering the veil to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing other realm, other world. And of course, the hardline rational scientists will say that's just all fantasies of your brain. But I don't think we fully understand or even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is.

And I remain open to two possibilities, that consciousness is generated by the brain, is made by the brain in the way that a factory makes cars. But I also am open to the possibility that the brain is a receiver of consciousness, just as a television set is the receiver of television signals. And that if that is the case, then...

we locked into the physical realm we need our everyday alert problem-solving state of consciousness and that's the state of consciousness that western civilization values and and and and highly encourages but these other states of consciousness that allow us to access alternative realities are possibly more important.

It may be apocryphal, but it was reported after Francis Crick's role and his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix, that he finally got it under the influence of LSD. There's the classic example of Kerry Mullis and the polymerase chain reaction. He said he got that under the influence of LSD.

So the notion that the alert problem-solving state of consciousness is the only valuable state of consciousness is disproved by valuable experiences that people have had in a visionary state. But the question that remains unresolved is those entities that we encounter, and not everybody encounters them, and you're certainly not going to encounter them on every ayahuasca trip.

There are ayahuasca journeys where nothing seems to happen. I suspect something does happen, but it happens at a subconscious level. I know that shamans in the Amazon regard those trips where actually you don't see visions as amongst the most valuable. And they say you are learning stuff that you're not remembering, but you're learning it anyway.

These sentient others that are encountered, what are they? Are they just figments of our brain on drugs? Or are we actually gaining access to a parallel reality, which is inhabited by consciousness, which is in a non-physical form? And I'm equally open to that idea. I think that may be what is going on here with ayahuasca.

But the other thing is that there is a presence within the ayahuasca brew, and she is present both in ayahuasca and in Yahé. And that's one of the reasons why the shamans say that actually the master of the process is the ayahuasca vine, not the leaves. It's as though the vine has harnessed the leaves to gain access to human consciousness.

And there, if you have sufficient exposure to ayahuasca or Yahé, you drink it enough times. I've had maybe 75 or 80 journeys with ayahuasca. you definitely start to feel an intelligent presence with a definite personality, which I interpret as feminine and which most people in the West interpreted as feminine, and they call her Mother Ayahuasca.