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PLANTS FOR BRAINS:

A Skeptic’s Guide

 

I then pass the whole day in the open air, and hold spiritual communion with the tendrils of the vine, which say good things to me and of which I could tell you wonders.

—Goethe

 

Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between Western and Indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive Western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.

It’s not a metaphor. It’s how the world is.

—Jeannette Armstrong

 

I. Arrival

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The first word that flies into my mind when I step off the rickety boat through the rain onto the muddy bank of the Amazon and onward down a cut path is “undifferentiated.” Weird word, but it’s the one that lands. The forest is too green, too heavy for my eyes, a great thick expanse of leaves, overgrowth, an overwhelming cacophony of insect sounds. Sun might dapple through the dense canopy in places, though not that day, and no rain drops make it through from sky to skin. A soup of heat envelops me, it’s almost too hot and wet to breathe.

 

I’ve scheduled two weeks at a healing center in Peru, but will end up stuck in the jungle three full months because of Covid lockdown. In that expanse of time anyone’s system will acclimate to the environment, will identify more and more detail, the starts and stops of tree forms and bushes, small patches of muddy detritus where nothing grows, certain stumps that become points of reference and way finders. The shapes of the leaves are varied, fat and waxy, striated or spatulate. The barks of the tree trunks are miraculously individual. Back in my world there’s a single crayola crayon named “jungle green.” Here, after time, intricate nuances of green sort themselves: chartreuse, veridian, moss. My reference basically remains paint swatches, but the colors slowly start to become more a feeling sense than an idea, something emanating from the aliveness around me. Eventually it’s a mystery how it ever looked like one thing.

 

II. Blindness

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“Plant blindness” was defined in 1999 by research scientists Wandersee and Schussler as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one's own environment,” which leads to the inability to recognize the importance of plants at all. Plant blindness also includes “the misguided, anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals, leading to the erroneous conclusion that they are unworthy of human consideration.”

 

The relation between plant blindness and the climate crisis is an obvious one, though it’s not a human blindness but a Western one, Eurocentric, colonial, urban, capitalist. From what I’ve seen, even children in the Amazon basin may know their plants. It’s a knowledge my culture has lost. “Plant blindness" also clouds the perceptions of many scientists in my own culture who claim with utmost certainty that plants are merely dumb mechanisms. Plants, I learned with great shock through my lived jungle experience, are part of a higher intelligence that exists alongside and among us, part of the sentient force of nature. The Amazonians have believed this for thousands of years but the debate in the early 21st century in the West goes like this:

-Are plants conscious, do they have intelligence? 

-No, impossible because they don’t have a brain or a nervous system.

-But they recognize and care for their kin, make choices, communicate, remember, emit sounds in distress, here’s the scientific evidence for these things.

-NO, it’s not a REAL brain.

 

Nonetheless, scholars and scientists are reconsidering the brain itself as the locus of human consciousness. This was always a hypothesis and never something proven. Humans throughout time have been so very certain but so profoundly wrong—we Westerners have historically lost it when decentralized in the cosmic scheme, how dare anyone suggest that the earth is not the center of the universe. People freak out to the point of murder at every shift. “Humans are the only species on earth with imagination,” we say. “Humans are the only ones with language, with self awareness, who understand death.” We think we are stating facts but how do we know these things?

 

What if the path forward lies in recognizing we aren’t the premiere intelligence on the planet, we are not the most conscious at all. We are a specific kind of intelligence with thumbs, a central nervous system, and a dangerous propensity to shit where we sleep.

 

III. Emergence

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I’ve come to the jungle in the first place to treat complex post traumatic stress disorder with Amazonian curanderismo, a last ditch effort because my own medicinal culture couldn't help me. Frankly, I’m terrified of this wild forest, of heat, giant insects and snakes.

 

The healing systems across the Amazon basin are sophisticated, complex, and ancient. Most work with an enormous range of medicinal plants and the bark of ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), a flowering vine that when mixed with the leaves of chacruna (Psychotria viridis), forms a vision-inducing sacred ceremonial tea. Across the South American jungle the brew is almost always named after the vine and not the admixtures. In various and slowly vanishing tribal languages the vine is the center of healing: daime, yajé, kaji, bakko, kamarãpi, shuri, natem, kamalampi.

 

On my first day in the jungle I meet Guido Rimachi whom I don’t yet know will be my teacher and brother on the crazy, impossible path that will unfold for me over years… like something with a mind of its own. He and his two assistant shamans wear black watches and backpacks, have cell phones. Sometimes they text before the ceremonies start. They sit in three rudimentarily constructed wooden chairs at the front of a circular temple with a floor of dry, cracked jungle earth. I am constantly afraid bugs will crawl out of the cracks. 

 

Guido is in his fifties, has straight shiny black hair parted down the middle with bangs hanging down to his eyes. He is a beautiful man, short in stature, big on wisdom. He grins like he’s five. I look in his eyes and wonder in whose hands I have placed my well being, but I feel reassured by his presence and the steady deep way he looks back at me. Guido is a descendent of the Aguaruna people and calls himself a curandero, not a shaman. He, of all the 15 Peruvian indigenous medicine people I will work with in the ensuing years, including Q’ero, mestizo, and Shipibo, is a pure healer. These, it turns out, are not so common in any culture. His approach is based in humility, love, and the agency of his patients. I will witness Guido nearly die twice in service of helping others, once for me.

 

Ceremonies are held four nights a week. The tea is ritually poured and distributed person by person, including to all three shamans. Then we lie back and wait for the “mareación” to open, the altered consciousness and visionary space of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca enters in different ways, sometimes it’s a slow rising of energy with visions and patterns, sometimes overwhelming energy, sometimes vomiting. “La purga” is considered a good thing since it moves energies out of the body as well as toxins. Throughout the night Guido and his assistants sing icaros, the healing songs of the plants.

 

What I see that first night with ayahuasca is that these shamans can siphon massive power in ceremonies while being gentle to the point of tenderness. They are shining points on a fulcrum of energy and spiritual force. It’s astonishing. Next, I am dumbfounded by the sense of a presence with me. I am not alone in my own skull. I am sharing my consciousness with someone else, with ayahuasca. I hear a voice say, “You are a being of great power. You are Guido’s counterpart. You can help a lot of people.” In my guts and marrow I deeply trust this voice, it comes to me as profoundly healing and beautiful, a divine force. But I’m aghast at the content. The whole experience shatters everything I, as a former academic and agnostic, ever believed and I want to crawl under the bed and not come out. It will turn out, of course, that this “power” is entirely different than anything my own culture has defined. It is more about what I can withstand and contain than what I can do or take. What am I big enough to witness? 

 

That first night I’m also shown I will not be leaving in two weeks but will be there for months. To this I think: “HELL NO.” Absolutely not. Six days after this vision, on March 15, 2020, Peru closes its borders due to Covid and stops all flights out of Iquitos, the only nearby city and the largest in the world with no roads. I have no choice about leaving, I am stranded for months and will be shown and live out impossible things.

 

People have since asked me was it literally a voice, and this is hard to describe. It’s like word-forms coming in my head that aren’t me. People ask, how do you know it isn’t you. I answer that it feels internally as plain as a different person physically sitting with you—its knowledge, sensibility, even its sense of humor—none of it is you. Almost all the people of the Amazon, regardless of geography or language, say this is a being, the spirit of the plant ayahuasca and the mother (in some cases father) of the jungle. 

 

Ayahuasca shows people vivid movies in their minds, has been called “the tv screen of the jungle”—it’s so strong we have no choice but to completely relinquish control of our minds and bodies. One curandero likens it to drinking a bible, like swallowing a Book of Knowledge all at once (be careful what you wish for). The scenes are so powerful they seem more real than reality: of a long dead relative speaking from the beyond, of spirit “surgeons” operating on the body, of past romantic relationships, of scenes from a parent’s childhood or something long buried in our own. People encounter death, the divine, scenes from the future, ego shattering, visions of the entire cosmos, the birth of a star. 

 

I either see these things myself or witness others with their own versions. The visions and messages I get are like bread crumbs dropped, like clues to decipher as in every fairy tale ever written, every mythical story; the intelligences underscoring our world speak in riddles. Every time one of my ceremony visions ends up matching the future, shock blasts through me. I’m shown things that will unfold in an hour, in a day, in months, only realizing as they happen that what I was shown would be real. I receive hundreds of visions from ayahuasca, utterly misunderstanding most of them. My brain cannot grasp and discernment only develops over time. But the world as I understood it before is undone, changed and enchanted. The term “more-than-human” takes on a new meaning, this intelligence is far more intelligent than I am.

 

I spend most of my days alone in my hut in the sweltering heat, except for meals in the kitchen building, ceremonies, and group meetings with Guido to discuss what’s happening for each of us, what the ceremony visions mean, our questions. Many of us are anxious, constantly checking our cell phones for news of Covid, lockdowns, our loved ones. There is no electricity here but there are cell towers and a solar powered phone charger. It’s always full of cords, no one wants their phones dying. The jungle itself is far from the pandemic chaos, we don’t wear masks, but there are scary times when the wooden boats don’t make it to us with food and a period where the villagers of nearby Santa Maria decide by vote that pouring bleach over people coming back from Iquitos will wipe out any possible Covid. Second best is dunking in the Amazon, clothes and all. 

 

White-faced tamarin monkeys come by my hut, line up one by one and look in at me curiously. The groundskeeper shoots one and eats it for lunch. I glimpse its skinned body on the counter near the sink, hear the thudding machete so heavy it reverberates  again and again through my own body. I see leaf cutter ants, toucans, hummingbirds and blue morpho butterflies. In one short week I am covered in mosquito bites. I count the angry red welts in a square inch on my ankle and multiply it to calculate maybe 150 bites, math was never my strong suit. I become an expert at killing them in my hut lest they gorge on me all night. Once I kill eight in a row without missing. I hear vivid bird calls, especially at dawn and dusk, but to me chirping monkeys sound like birds, deep-throated birds sound like mammals, intense jungle frogs sound like birds. We visitors can’t parse this in the same way we can’t recognize plants. 

 

On the other hand Guido knows all the birds to the degree he can tell by their song they’re pregnant. One night there is something calling he says is not a bird at all, not a being of our world at all, but a spirit crying out. Not a good one. The first night it comes, before I learn about it, I witness him and shaman Jack point with arms outstretched in exact unison, as if their hands are tied to the same cosmic string, aimed towards the sound. They look concerned and only tell me about it the next day. I never learn more (I’m too afraid to ask) but it calls through the jungle night a few more times.

 

It takes me three weeks to tell Guido I’m his counterpart according to my vision, but when I finally do, sweating, disbelieving, and uncomfortable, he already knows and says with a serious expression, “Siiiiii!” My mouth falls open in shock. He tells me he and I have a special connection, that I am extremely sensitive, it’s as if I have been drinking ayahuasca for years not weeks. He already knows that my ceremony visions are showing me how to help the other visitors at the center. I see what they look like in trauma and then as their core radiant selves along with information about their next steps towards some healing. I've been shown that emotions, physicality, and spirituality fracture in injury and must conjoin for healing, but Western medicine leaves the spirit part entirely and considers undesirable emotions a physical disorder of the brain. In my life I’ve also omitted the spiritual part, but now I am in literal dialogue with an impossibly powerful mystic force. Ayahuasca tells me I will have a direct line for the rest of my life but I’ll have to learn how to hear it because it will be fainter once I’m out of the jungle.

 

Guido tells me I need to stop helping others and focus on myself so I can receive healing. He also already knows something else, that the ayahuasca presence stays with me outside of ceremonies, speaking in words and showing me images. This is not normal, it’s too much. He has me stop drinking the sacred tea many nights though I go to the ceremonies anyway.

 

I will experience again and again in the next years the shamans knowing much of what happens to people in ceremonies and beyond. Ayahuasca shows them, me, many of those who partake. My poor addled, empirically-stunted brain screams, “How! How is all this possible?”

 

Once, in ceremony, I am flown over the jungle floor, experiencing its literal pain for the burning, chopping, terrible human deforestations. I’m charged with a ferocious urgency, even more intense because of my new relationship with nature. 

 

After three months in the jungle I finally get evacuated on a tiny outboard boat and then a chartered humanitarian flight. I am a changed person, more than by anything else in my life. With new eyes I realize most things in my society are built wrong and backwards, from suburban architectures to corrupt, lumbering governments to cultural constructs. Humans have lost the plot. Still, I look around with a lightness, an open heart; the world is magical, everything is potentially alive. It’s as if a set of bizarre, unfamiliar antennae sprout from my core.

 

I tend to broken familial relationships, old friendships, estrangements, not all but many. I share what happened with most of my loved ones, they believe me, but they can’t quite relate. A devotion to flossing my teeth without fail appears seemingly out of nowhere. I can witness my own embedded emotional reflexes, the maladaptive ones developed in a difficult childhood, and choose to behave differently for perhaps the first time in my life.

 

But most of all I look at plants differently, in a kind of shock. Does this peace lily know I’m here looking at it? What is that dandelion on about? What would their voices say in my head if I could hear them?

 

“How can I reach ayahuasca back in my world?” I ask Guido on WhatsApp.

“Go to nature,” he answers. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a rock, a river, a tree, become one with it and you will hear ayahuasca.” It’s shaman-speak, him trying to explain to the primitive Western mind a wisdom that sounds like a meme, maybe even a tired one. Even so, I struggle to overcome my skepticism and strain at the edges of my consciousness in the woods of US suburbs. I’m rewarded with a strong sense of communing energy from the trees and once with a walking-waking vision of the tree trunks as columns of white light. Strangely, even the stumps are lit up. When I take a trip to the Pacific seaside, Guido teaches me a specific meditation that allows me to see ayahuasca-like visions when I connect to the ocean. 

 

After those first three months in the Amazon I will return many times. It is an incredibly difficult path, there are several times when my life will be in danger. I will get very, very sick. I develop spiritual and material practices outside the jungle to stay connected. I read and watch everything I can get my hands on from anthropological papers to documentaries, herbalist books, indigenous writings, and accounts by others experiencing similar things as me. I’m especially interested in “bridge figures,” those who like me crossed a cultural and spiritual divide. My big question: can people of my culture learn to communicate with plants without ayahuasca? And, how can I pass it on?

 

I work with Guido and his brother to teach a Zoom class about shamanism and the plants, about cannabis as a teacher plant in a similar vein as ayahuasca. I learn from them as we do this and want their voices heard widely. The translation process from English to Spanish to indigenous shaman-speak and back is laborious.

 

 

IV. Bridges

 

As I painstakingly reconstruct my world view, I map out a kind of song and dance between Western science and traditional wisdoms.

 

The experiments of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard track ways in which trees communicate with each other through underground fungal “mycorrhizal” networks. Simard discovered trees exchange information, organic compounds, and nutrients and they especially recognize and help kin: a mother tree knows her babies. Simard works with and carefully credits First Nations who stewarded this information long before science figured it out, saying, ”I’m standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of knowledge.”

 

In the language of science, photoreceptors in plants allow them to detect brightness and color. They differentiate up from down, monitor wind, can sense predators, and orient towards light. Researchers have discovered plants seem to respond to music and emit sounds inaudible to the human ear when under threat. The same anesthesia works on plants as humans, so a doped up Venus flytrap can’t catch and eat its insects. How is this possible? Theories float towards cellular disruption, but there is no real or complete argument for anything. 

 

Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist at Southern Cross University, unapologetically straddles the (currently) opposable edges of science and her own otherworldly experiences with master plants in the Peruvian Amazon. She endures scathing ridicule but keeps publishing her experiments in high quality, peer reviewed scientific journals. She claims the plants showed her how to design the experiments—just as the people of the Amazon say the plants tell them all kinds of things.

 

But analytic materialists need objective evidence. In a 2014 experiment Gagliano dropped Mimosa pudica plants 60 times onto foam. Mimosa is commonly called the sensitive plant because its leaves furl up to the touch and retract from danger—and humans can see it. In a way visible to the human eye and publishable by science, the plants “learned” through a number of trials not to close their leaves when dropped. They remembered they weren’t in danger for a month or longer.

 

“Western science is a powerful way of knowing, but it isn't the only one,” says Robin Wall Kimmerer. As both a scientist and an enrolled member of the Potowatami Nation her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass tapped powerfully into the plant intelligence zeitgeist. In her native language, she says, it is impossible to refer to nature as “it,” while English is a set-up for nature as something outside ourselves.

 

Jeremy Narby, a white Western anthropologist who changed his own world view after experiencing the plants with the Amazonians agrees, ”You go to the Amazon and you ask people, how do you say everything that is not human in your language? They say we don't have a concept like that. In fact, in our view, all the other species are people like us.”

 

“People," like us. 

 

The English definition of person cites “individual personality” or “specified character” and “physique,” but in our current dictionary it includes corporations and not plants. 

 

Dr. Kimmerer continues, “The story of intelligences other than our own is one of continual expansion. I am not aware of a single research study that demonstrates that other beings are dumber than we think. Octopi solve puzzles, chickadees create language, crows make tools, rats feel anxiety, elephants mourn, parrots do calculus, apes read symbols, nematodes navigate….” 

 

Mayan-schooled shaman Martin Prechtel, self described “half blood” European-Native American, pushes the language angle even further: “When I was a child, I spoke a Pueblo language called Keres, which doesn’t have the verb to be. It was basically a language of adjectives. One of the secrets of my ability to survive and thrive in Santiago Atitlán [Guatemala] was that the Tzutujil language, too, has no verb to be. Tzutujil is a language of carrying and belonging, not a language of being. Without to be, there’s no sense that something is absolutely this or that.” Many Native languages also contain more verbs than nouns, allowing for a world of aliveness, animacy, and movement whereas English is more thing-heavy, more static, mechanistic, and linear.

 

This is an old question, what embedding-from-birth in any language does to our capacities to perceive—and connect in general.

 

Linguistic relativities aside, the idea of language as only human has also been falling apart. Sonia Shah, a science writer dismantling human exceptionalism, writes in The New York Times, “In recent years, an array of findings have also revealed an expansive nonhuman soundscape, including: turtles that produce and respond to sounds to coordinate the timing of their birth from inside their eggs; coral larvae that can hear the sounds of healthy reefs; and plants that can detect the sound of running water and the munching of insect predators. Researchers have found intention and meaning in this cacophony,” and “with each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded.”

 

What if once upon a time my people, Europeans and their descendants, shut it all down—or had it beaten out of them. What if plants (and other beings) are not only intelligent but can communicate with us, not only communicate but teach, not metaphorically but beyond our wildest imaginings? What if beliefs about divine nature among the Amazonian curanderos, the Andean paqos, the Hopi, the Wixáritari/Huicholes of Mexico, the Japanese Shinto, the Aboriginal Australians are literally true. What if their workaday worlds and languages, don’t contain the barriers and qualities of separation English and the Romance languages do, the languages of the conquerors who have dominion over earth. How difficult is it to relearn for those of us trapped in a material way of seeing. “Difficult,” say many (not all) indigenous nations who’ve closed down sharing their beliefs with colonizers knowing they’ll be further abused and simply absorbed into the contemporary spectacle.

 

 

V. Singing of the Plants

 

Although spiritual beliefs vary across all geographies and languages of the over 400 tribes in the Amazon basin, the core beliefs about plant beings are largely the same—they are all conscious and “master plants” can heal and teach humans. Not all plants are master-teacher plants and they’re not just the ones like cannabis and angel’s trumpet (brugmansia) that are historically and globally considered magical across the world. We recognize these plants because our minds are altered, we call it “hallucination,” something that according to our definition is imaginary. Not real. But in the Amazon many master plants are not hallucinogenic, some teach humans through the other means, through the complex spiritual practice called “dieta.” They open the realms of the spirit and are the guides in a training program for shamans and have been for thousands of years.

 

Treat them with respect, say the people of the jungle. They know things we don’t. While many adventure-seeking foreigners come wanting fancy visuals of sacred geometries, there’s a deeper call: form a relationship with the plants. At 500 million years old they are our older earth-siblings.

 

Though the belief the earth has songs is found throughout history and around the world, the Amazonians differ in saying they are directly taught songs by the plants in dieta. This process has been described as a literal, insistent, and clear melody that enters the person’s consciousness, a mystic ear worm melody. Once learned, the  icaros—other names across the jungle are eshuva, rao bewá, mariri—are sung, chanted, or whistled to call the spirit of the plants for healing, to weave sonic designs of energy between plant, shaman, and patients. These songs are not performative in the way Western musicianship is, it took me time to understand this. At first I thought they were charming and simple. I didn’t realize the atonality, ragged edges, and vocal strangenesses were intentional. Icaros are prayers and invocations delivered in trance, they come from a guttural soul space within the singer but are the enunciations of plants.

 

Aside from the songs, master plants may also speak to humans in shades, colors, feeling tones, whispers, dreamy images, dreams themselves, in tongues as glossolalia, perceptual shifts. In order to learn the language of plants we need only open to the possibility, not believe first. I did not and it’s too tall a requirement. It takes patience and devotion to recognize their language and at times most of us Westerners think we are making it up since it occurs mainly in the interior and subjective space. Yet so many of us have now seen and experienced similar things.

All the master plants including ayahuasca seem to design visions and teachings for each individual person in combination with the plant’s attributes, personality, set of powers. There is a merging of plant and human. This is obvious even to the materially-minded, it happens when we eat. In science we study, delineate, and accept the health benefits in chemical terms of herbs and caffeine, of ginger. Our culture designates these things to the chemical and mechanical realms only. “Ah,” we analyzers say, “Ayahuasca visions are all due to DMT.”  The brain is futzing around with itself and some molecules. But this is no real answer, it’s a conceptual wall.

 

 

VI. Dieta

 

It’s my second time in the jungle and the third master shaman I’ve worked with. He is slight, grumpy, graceful, in his early 60s, and of Shipibo-Conibo descent. He wears a giant ostentatious gold watch and dresses like an LA hip hop artist. He’s a soccer fanatic and sponsors a team on the grounds of his healing center, a sprawling compound of thatched huts spread over a white sandy clearing in the jungle. He has a darkness to his countenance which I try to overlook but will unfortunately learn too much about. His singing in ceremonies is powerful, otherworldly, he’s a kind of Amazonian Mozart in the inventiveness, breadth, and depth of his icaros. But, unlike Guido’s, his ceremonies are filled with visions of creepy insects he tells us we need to dispel ourselves. I am naive, I believe him. Many of us visitors see them.

 

The others are an entire range of human seekers, two older white ladies from Marin, CA, an older black IT professor from Chicago, backpackers in their 20s, two gorgeous queer Parisians, Peruvians from Lima. A herd of more than 15 chihuahuas bounds around the grounds, some like to cuddle whoever will have them in the hammocks. 

 

I am here to do a one month diet with a master plant, a wondrous Amazonian fig tree, ojé (Ficus insipida), that grows to enormous heights with a massive trunk and muscular buttress roots spreading above ground.

 

The “dieta” is an ascetic shamanic practice found throughout the Amazon where food and stimuli are severely restricted, no sugar, salt, oil, alcohol, sex of any kind, spices. I eat only the blandest of foods for a month, fish, rice, lentils, potatoes, oatmeal. Social contact and cell phones are limited. Initiates ingest their master plant most mornings—mine is the tree’s white sap in a shot glass—and spend time in quiet. The process is described differently by different tribes and shamans, but several things happen at once: the human puts their energy and attention towards the plant, the human suffers, learns discipline, and enters a heightened state of sensitivity that can receive the plants. The body is purified. European anthropologist Silvia Mesturini Cappo explains, “Training with teaching plants means ‘meeting’ them regularly, spending time with them and getting to know them well. It is a relational training. It means negotiating relational ethics and subtleties. It implies learning to meet with radical otherness.” Guido puts it another way, “Sacrifice something to get something else.” He does not mean this lightly.

 

After one week the fish and rice become repulsive and unbearable to eat. Around the tenth day food taste no longer matters. Three weeks in people can start fainting from lack of salt. Traditionally shamans across the Amazon would diet a full year in isolation, sometimes longer, some did not survive it. The cost is high, the results are beyond precious.

 

Different plants confer their own varieties of healing, shamanic, or spiritual abilities. Across the Amazon ojé is known as a parasitic that also clears away emotional or spiritual parasites and energies such as addictions. I have the typical dieta experience in isolation facing traumas and dark shadows of myself and the world. This is what you sign up for. When I first “meet” ojé after about a week of dieting, the tree comes in like a beautiful beam of light starting in my head and traveling through my body down my core. It’s so positive and wonderful I cry. I have a sense of whiteness, of branches, of a gentle presence, of something aligning with my spine, a second parallel column like a tree trunk. Over the next year as the dieta settles, this will turn into a visual of braiding, like the tree’s white column is merging with mine. When it’s the plant and not my own wandering mind, a clear image comes out of nowhere, a sensation or flash, like being visited by something once again that’s not me. 

 

Westerners and tribal people alike report many varied encounters with plants in dieta, some see colors as if from inside a flower, some see a humanlike figure or simply an image of the plant, one saw a budding baby tree at the end of a dark tunnel. Words I would use to describe ojé are lightening, brightening, clarity. One not-me image floats in of an old-fashioned twig broom sweeping away my mental dust. 

 

The next time I encounter ojé I’m in my hut fretting and darkly ruminating in a habitual negative mental loop. The same gentle presence arrives. I experience a subtle shift, then a change from a dark despair color on an emotional grayscale to a somewhat lighter one. It feels as if a leafy plant finger is flipping a switch. Relief pours in, my mind unclenches, it is a different sensation than I’ve ever experienced. Every object of my fretting is lighter, fresh angles on my issues are instantly available. It is a kind of mental and energetic “lift lift lift.” It never happens again, instead I’ve been shown a possibility and learn to aim myself towards it when I’m struggling. Of course it does not work every time. But the not-me presence has concretely shown me something, and… taught.

 

The following year, I do another one-month dieta, with piñon blanco (Jatropha curcas), said to bring light as pure as baby breath. Pre-diet this meant nothing to me. Often the only information available about specific plants for foreigners is a few words on the web site of a jungle center, like, it “facilitates connection with the unseen world.” Arguably they all do this. The shamans mostly speak minimally of what the plants do; it’s the same translation issue between multiple languages and species and an ineffable lived experience far out of range of my culture. 

 

Piñon blanco, a shrub curiously star shaped in its growth patterns and possessing the most remarkable white bark, first shows itself to me as a bright white tonal space centralized in the mid section of my forehead, the so-called third eye. During this diet the voice of ayahuasca says, “health of the organism” and I understand the organism to be me, my inner ecosystem as well as the larger one I’m embedded in, micro to macro all swirling together. The concept of biological multiverse is not unfamiliar, but I understand and live it in my body on a new level. I learn the importance of integrity differently, perhaps the single most important part of a dieta, the slippery slope of its loss and soul fracturing can occur in increments of tiny dark choices. Mistakes are inevitable, accountability is not.

 

The spiritual opening piñon blanco enables in me is massive. The term the Amazonians use is “initiation.” One night in ceremony I walk outside the temple to the restrooms. Out of nowhere a force with the strength of a thunderclap shockingly slams inside my body, shaking the roots of my teeth and nearly toppling me. It is the most terrifying dislocating experience of my life, as if another being has taken control of my limbs and is moving me like a marionette. There is no grace, it’s incredibly clumsy and awkward as if the thing entering me isn’t fitting correctly. It whooshes through all my organs one at a time. I stagger alone in the night and struggle back to collapse on the temple floor so that the shamans and assistants hurry to tend me. I am entirely lucid, enough to recognize this force that’s entered me is actually not trying to hurt me. But this is not the muscle spasms or involuntary movements typical of ayahuasca, it's something entirely else.

 

For hours over the course of the night the visions show me being born in a powerful, beautiful, blazing white light. I am simultaneously writhing and seizing on the mat in the temple and in another realm, being delivered anew by the cosmos. I see myself as both a crumpled white being, wet with delivery, and in the other realm a kind of primal form whose essence should not be spoken or shared. It is agonizing and ecstatic. We can only sustain so much from this mortal coil, this is the limit for me. There are two more rebirth ceremonies after this, the plants speak to me of love in one voice and say, “We will always be with you.” They show me a glimpse of their world in tones of blue and white, the greatest delight I’ve encountered in my days on earth. This is a sparkling chattering, delicious joy, but they also show me something that resembles a swirling vortex of the dark side. 

 

The Shipibo shaman knows what has happened for me, he sees at least some of it in ceremony. I pepper him with questions he mostly avoids. He only tells me, “Now that you have had this vision you will experience tests and trials when you leave the jungle.” When I go back to Iquitos I meet Guido for lunch. He is proud and happy about the initiation but also says there will be trials. “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” he says, ever the optimist (It will be worse than bad).

 

In a final ceremony, each dieta it is “closed” by the shaman, sealed energetically, the contract completed. A seed has been planted in the interior of the human. Mine will sprout in my consciousness, the dieted plants grow inside me and with me. They will both mature over time and, in the tradition of almost the entire Amazon, these plant spirits will become my allies for life. And, I still recognize the tone and presence of my plants in my dreams and meditations, sometimes when I take breaths and pause, sometimes out of nowhere.

 

 

VII. Braiding Ways

 

Science estimates there are 10 nonillion viruses on planet earth, 20 quadrillion ants, at least 2 trillion galaxies with 100 million stars average per galaxy, numbers so incomprehensibly large they register as infinite to our brains. Amazonian plant medicine lets us live another version of infinity, the mystic infinity, oceanic boundlessness, ego dissolution, universal interconnectedness, transcendence of time and space. Experiences of the numinous, the mystic, have been closely linked in science to human health in both symptom reduction and improved quality of life. According to an ever increasing number of sources, healers in the Amazon have cured the most impossible maladies Western medicine can’t, from PTSD to rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, even some cancers. Many shamans speak of the real cura as a form of spiritual awakening. The white man has forgotten how to dream, it’s said. We have forgotten the songs of the earth, its language, and so we are destroying it. 

 

I am nothing if not a product of my culture and there’s been a duel nearly to death between my Western analytic skepticism and budding animist spirituality. I needed to live the power and intelligence of the plants in extremity to open my mind. I now understand myself as having been possessed of “spirit blindness,” ingrained in me from birth. “A modern person’s body,” says Martin Prechtel, “has become a battleground between the rationalist mind—which subscribes to the values of the machine age—and the native soul. This battle is the cause of a great deal of spiritual and physical illness.” For me it’s taking many more years to learn to perceive in these new ways. 

 

At first I believed this miracle of Amazonian plant medicine could save the world if only it reached enough people. Inevitably it’s as complicated as every spiritual cosmology in all of history and while the plant teachings appeared to me to be perfectly designed, Western people with their specific and socially constructed individualist egos can leave this terrain with confusion, ungroundedness, trauma, even messiah complexes. Many foreigners arrive with the extractive mentality of global capitalism and leave the same way, appointing themselves shamans after a few ceremonies to charge fees. This corruption has grown to the point of a 2025 declaration from the 5th Indigenous Conference of Ayahuasca by more than 30 tribes of the Amazon: “We repudiate all forms of commercialization of ayahuasca, which have come to form a global market transgressing ethical boundaries.” 

 

There is also an ancient war in the jungle between those who work with the plants to heal and those who deliberately harm for greed, for money, from jealousy, for revenge. They are dark shamans, called brujos in Amazonian Spanish. The destructively murderous parts of human nature take over even here and even in these beautiful plant presences. 

 

Some Peruvian healers, like Ashaninka Maestro Juan Flores of the Boiling River or Puma Fredy Quispe Sangona of the Q’ero, are urging Westerners to learn and diet the plants where they live, connect to their local medicines outside the jungle. The gardens of plantly delights are everywhere, dandelion grows out of the cracks in sidewalks. Oak, rose, and lavender are other master plants that proliferate around the globe. Some contemporary Amazonian shamans democratically merge various global spiritualities into their work and lives, they are animists who believe Jesus must have done a dieta (forty days and forty nights in nature and he came out healing), teach about chakras, describe earth realm as dualistic, use voodoo words for spiritual maladies, go to Western doctors for appendectomies or antibiotics. 

 

I witnessed first hand one of my shaman friends, Guido’s brother Lucho who also built and owns his healing center, get diagnosed with terminal liver cancer by a Western doctor in Iquitos. I saw the grim fear in his face on a video call shortly after he heard. He had reached the jaundice stage. “If it’s my time, it’s my time,” he said, but he’d started a healing process with plant medicines including hercampuri (Gentianella alborosea) and ayahuasca. In the next months he healed completely. Hs doctor was shocked. I wonder how, in repeatedly working with these powerful healers of the jungle, have they not seen there’s more to this than they know. While most shamans understand Western medicine in its strengths and limits, this understanding doesn’t flow both ways. Liver cancer wasn’t even Lucho's first terminal diagnosis—nor his last. Not understanding why a curandero would always be nearly dying, I asked him “Why do you get so sick?” His answer: in healing himself he learns how to heal others. Once, I might have wondered where he got the strength. Now I understand.

 

“Does the earth love you back,” Robin Wall Kimmerer has asked her university students and describes their stymied expressions, how none can bring themselves to think it. She says, “Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” This is what I learned in the Amazon. My dreams due to my dietas have expanded to a level that resembles a mareación, as real a reality as my waking one but filled with wisdom I otherwise lack even when they’re nightmares. They are the greatest source of magic through several years of bedbound illness, and in my dreams I contact the source of love whose channels were opened for me by the plants.