Love your blog. I just want to add that–in my experience with Ayahuasca in ceremony–I experience all three in fairly equal measure: hallucinations, empathy, and insight, sometimes simultaneously, other times at varying times throughout the course of the ceremony. Perhaps this may have something to do with the admixture? Also, in a recent ceremony I had very subdued hallucinations and more of a strong entheogenicc experience. All this with the same shaman, so the tea is never significantly different.

Thanks for the Work you do. :) Namaste

I was actually quietly stunned when I first entered an ayahuasca ceremony to find the landscape of the ceremony so familiar. I guess I would say it’s a bit like still being in a recognizable house with windows and doors etc., but the inhabitants have their own culture and art and music and interests. They have a different history and purpose and experience as a being themselves. Like me they have an established network of casually social and also more intimate types of relationships.

For me, the experience is more akin to relating to a living being. What becomes important is polite and respectful introduction, quiet conversation in order to understand each other, gift giving and receiving, building trust through clear evidence of honestly held values, and acceptance of each others differences.

The medicines for me are clearly more conscious than I am. They can see and show me layers of reality that I can only witness in their presence.I treat them as both elders and as sacred because of the value I place on what I learn from them, about myself and about my life when seen through their teachings.

Thank you for your comment.

http://singingtotheplants.blogspot.com/2007/12/peter-gorman-on-plant-spirits.html

I feel whilst it important to examine these subjects from within the scientific world view, we need to develop a language of respect for the relationships we establish with these “chemical compounds”, or as I am sure your teachers would have it Steve, spirits.

Whilst I have difficulty with much of what Regardie called “cosmic new age foo foo”, i also feel that it clearly an arrogance to suggest we are the only sentience in our biospheres.

What we should not do is cede the descriptive terminology solely to chemists, regulatory agencies, and law enforcement. And I agree completely that we need a better and deeper understanding of the poetic and bardic descriptions of the sacred plants in the indigenous cultures that developed their use.

Thank you for The Teleomorph, which is, in my opinion, one the most interesting and enjoyable blogs on the Web.

There are a lot of interesting things to think about here. A very rapid tolerance, known as tachyphylaxis, is produced on repeated administration of mescaline and psilocin, the psychoactive metabolite of psilocybin; yet no such tolerance develops for the hallucinogenic effects of DMT. So, despite their similar tryptamine cores, there are significant physiological differences between psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine. At the same time, cross-tolerance occurs between mescaline and psilocybin, but not between either of these and DMT. So, despite their differing phenethylamine and tryptamine cores, there are significant physiological similarities between mescaline and psilocybin.

It may turn out that the three-dimensional descriptive scheme proposed here will turn out to be inadequate or inaccurate. But I think we need to stop assuming that all sacred plants have the same effect. I think that such an assumption — that the effects of dimethyltryptamine ought to be entheogenic, like those of psilocybin — may have been what troubled Rick Strassman in his original DMT experiments.

It is always good to hear from you.

However necessary a reclassification would be, at this moment it doesn’t seem like the scientific community would be willing to take steps toward this. Now I’m no scientist (yet) so I may not know what I’m talking about; while you make a good argument, it seems like the scientific community would not be willing to redefine these for a couple of reasons, one being that I don’t think they would rearrange classifications in which a lot of the evidence is from subjective accounts and two, because of the already existing bias against these substances. But I don’t know for sure, do you think there is enough existing ‘concrete’ chemical knowledge to prove that these classifications need to be reconsidered? Whatever the case is, it doesn’t mean we should give up the quest! More and better knowledge of these medicines will help society at large to understand that they are not inherently ‘bad’, and all knowledge is worth having.

You quoted, “the capacity of the mind to see more than it can tell, to experience more than it can explicate, to believe in and be impressed with more than it can rationally justify, to experience boundlessness and ‘boundaryless’ events, from the banal to the profound.” I just wanted to say, wow. That is a good quote you dug up. This is a very succinct definition of the overwhelming feeling I experience in many of my encounters with medicine. I will be saving that to use later. :-)

I wanted to let you know of an interesting journal that I have been reading for a while; it is the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. You may already be familiar with it but just in case- http://www.ethnobiomed.com/ there it is.

Great post, thank you!