ancestor with the chimpanzee, something extraordinary happened to us less than a hundred thousand

years ago, which, by the way, is long after we'd become anatomically modern. It was a

kind of emergence into consciousness less than a hundred thousand years ago; really

less than forty thousand years ago, when we became fully symbolic creatures. And this

great change has been defined as the single most important step forward in the evolution

of human behaviour; is intimately associated with the emergence of the great and transcendent

rock and cave art all around the world. Over the last thirty years, research has been lead

by the professors at David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South

Africa, and many others, have suggested an intriguing and radical possibility, which

is that this emergence into consciousness was triggered by our ancestor's encounters

with visionary plants and the beginning of shamanism.

If you analyse the cave art - there's not time to go into the details here - but there

are so many details that make it clear that this was an art of altered states of consciousness,

of visions. Plants like the amanita muscaria mushroom and psilocybin mushrooms appear to

have been directly connected with this sudden and radical change. So to investigate this

possibility when I got interested in this mystery, I went down to the Amazon where there

are still surviving shamanistic cultures today; and where they drink the powerful visionary

brew: ayahuasca - of which the active ingredient is Dimethyl Tryptomine (DMT) which is actually

closely related at the molecular level to psilocybin. Now, normally DMT cannot be activated

orally - when we encounter it in the west it's generally smoked. There's an enzyme in

our stomachs called Monoaminoxydase which switches off DMT on contact. But in the Amazon

they've gotten around this problem, they say it was the spirits that taught them how to

do it. The DMT in the ayahuasca brew is contained in these leaves from a plant that they call

{{chakruna}} in the Amazon, and there they mix it together with this vine. And out of

the 150,000 species of plants and trees in the Amazon, this is the one that contains

a Monoaminoxydase inhibitor, which switches off that enzyme in our stomachs, and allows

the DMT in the leaves - when the two are married together and cooked in water - to be absorbed

orally and takes us on a four hour journey into extraordinary realms. Now, it's no joke

to drink ayahuasca. The ayahuasca brew has a foul, foul taste - really, really hideous

- and a dreadful, dreadful smell, and after you've drunk your cup you'll find within 45

minutes or so that you're sweating, that you're feeling nauseous. Pretty soon you may well

be vomiting, you may have diarrhoea, so, you know, nobody's doing this for recreation.

And, I'd like to add that I don't think any of the psychedelics should be used for recreation.

They have a much more serious and important mission with humanity. So, we're not doing

this for fun, but what draws people to ayahuasca again and again to brace themselves for this

experience? (and you do have to brace yourself) is it's extraordinary effects at the

level of consciousness. One of those effects has to do with creativity, and we can see

the creative cosmogenic impulse of Ayahuasca in the paintings of Ayahuasca Shamans from

Peru - like the paintings of {{Pablo Amaringo}} here those richly saturated colours, they're

amazing visions that they reproduce. This creative impulse has also spread to western

artists - many western artists now have been deeply influenced by ayahuasca and are also

painting their visions. As these paintings show, another universal experience of ayahuasca

is the encounter with seemingly intelligent entities which communicate with us telepathically.

Now, I'm making no claim one way or another as to the reality state of these entities

we encounter, simply that phenomenologically, in the ayahuasca experience they are encountered

by people all over the world. And most frequently of all, the spirit of ayahuasca herself, mother

ayahuasca, who is a healer - and although she's kind of the mother goddess of the planet

she seems to take a direct personal interest in us as individuals - to heal our ills, to

want us to be the best that we can possibly be, to correct errors and mistakes in our

behavior that may be leading us down the wrong path. And this is perhaps why - and it's an

untold story really - ayahuasca has been fantastically successful in getting people off harmful addictions

to hard drugs such as heroine and cocaine. {{Jacques Mobbit}} of the {{takiwasi clinic}}

in Peru brings heroine and cocaine addicts out there for a month, gives them twelve ayahuasca

sessions, and they have encounters with mother ayahuasca during those sessions that lead

them, not to wish to take heroine and cocaine anymore, and more than half leave completely

free of their addiction and never return to it and don't even have withdrawal symptoms.

The same incredible healing work was being done by a doctor in Canada by Dr. {{Gabor

Matte}} until the Canadian Government intervened and stopped his healing practice on the grounds

that ayahuasca itself was an illegal drug. Now, I have some personal experience of this

- I've not been addicted to heroine or cocaine, but I had a 24-year nonstop cannabis habit.

This started off smoking the herb, and naturally vaporising it, but the basic truth is that

for 24 years I was pretty much permanently stoned - and I enjoyed being stoned, and I

felt that it helped me with my work as a writer, and perhaps at some point it did, but when

I first encountered ayahuasca, I had already been smoking cannabis for 16 years. Almost

immediately, ayahuasca started giving me messages that this was no longer serving me, that it

was leading me to behave in negative and unhealthful ways towards others. Of course, I ignored

those messages for years and years and went back to being stoned 16 hours a day. But that

negative behaviour that ayahuasca was pointing out did actually get worse and worse - I don't

want to put down cannabis and I believe it's the sovereign right of every adult to choose

to smoke cannabis if they wish to do so, but I think I was overusing it, I think I was

abusing it, not using it responsibly. I became more and more paranoid, jealous, possessive,

suspicious, I was subject to irrational rages, I often made the life of my beloved partner

{{Santher}} a misery. When I went down for my regular encounter with ayahuasca in October

2011, I was given the most unbelievable kicking by mother ayahuasca. I was put through an

ordeal, it was a kind of life-review. It's not an accident that ayahuasca is "the vine

of the dead". I was shown my death, and I was shown that if I came to death - and what

awaits us after death - without having corrected the mistakes that I was making in my life,

that it would be a very bad thing for me - and actually, mother ayahuasca literally took

me to hell, and that hell was a little like this "Hell" painted by {{Heronimus Boncture}}

- a truly terrible place and a little like the place that the ancient Egyptians called

the judgement Hall of Osiris, where our souls are weighed on the scales in the presence

of the Gods against the feather of Truth and Justice of Cosmic Harmony. And I was shown

that the path I was walking - my abuse of cannabis and the behaviour associated with

it - was going to lead me to be found wanting in the judgement, and that I might face annihilation

in the world beyond death. So, perhaps not surprisingly, when I came back to England

later in October 2011 I gave up cannabis and I've never smoked it again since then. Actually,

again I'm speaking only personally with no comment on others' use of cannabis, it's as

though a monkey has been lifted off my back. I'm liberated in incredible ways, far from

my creativity being inhibited, I find myself writing much more productively, much more

creatively, much more focused, and much more efficiently as well. I've begun to be able

to address those negative aspects of my behaviour which cannabis had revealed, and hopefully

to make myself slowly - it's a long progress - into a more nurturing, more loving, more

positive person. This whole transformation - it really has been a personal transformation

for me - was made possible by this encounter with death that mother ayahuasca gave me.

That leads me to ask, what is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter,

the material science in the west says that we are just meat - we're just our bodies -

so when the brain is dead, that's the end of consciousness, there is no life after death,

there is no soul; we just rot and are gone. Actually, many honest scientists should admit

that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don't know exactly

how it works. The brain is involved in it some way but we're no sure how. It could be

that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity, if you

hold to that paradigm then of course you can't believe in life after death - when the generator's

broken, consciousness is gone. It's equally possible that the relationship - and nothing

in neuroscience rules it out - the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal

to the TV set, and in that case, when the TV set is broken, of course the TV signal

continues. This is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions; that we are immortal souls temporarily

incarnated in these physical forms, to learn and to grow and to develop. Really, if we

want to know about this mystery, the last people we should ask are materialist reductionist

scientists; they have nothing to say on the matter at all. Let's go rather to the ancient

Egyptians, who put their best minds to work for 3,000 years on the problem of death...

and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare for what we will confront

after death. The ancient Egyptians expressed their ideas in transcendent art, which still

touches us emotionally today. They came to certain very specific conclusions: that the

soul does survive death and that we will be held accountable for every thought, every

action, every deed that we have lived through in our lives, so we'd better take this precious

opportunity to be born in a human body seriously, and make the most of it. And in these inquiries

into the mystery of death, the ancient Egyptians weren't just exercising their imaginations;

they highly valued dream states, and it's now known that they used visionary plants

like the hallucinogenic blue water lily. It's interesting that the ancient Egyptian 'tree

of life' has recently been identified as the {{acacia mellotica}} which contains high quantities

of DMT, Dimethyl Tryptomine, the same active ingredient that we find in ayahuasca. Now,

it's difficult to imagine a society more different from the society of ancient Egypt than our

society today. We hate visionary states in this society. In our society, if we want to

insult somebody, we call them a dreamer. In ancient societies that was praise. And we

have erected huge apparatuses of armed bureaucracies who will invade our privacy, who will break

down our doors, who will arrest us, who will send us to prison - sometimes for years - for

possessing even small quantities of psilocybin, or substances like DMT, whether in it's smokable

form or in the ayahuasca brew. And yet, ironically, DMT is, we now know, a natural brain hormone

- we all have it in our bodies and it's just that it's function remains unknown for lack

of research. It's not as though our society is opposed in principle to altered states

of consciousness, I mean, billions are being made by the unholy alliance of psychiatrists

and "big pharma" in overprescribing drugs to control so-called syndromes like depression

or attention deficit disorder in teenagers. We have a love-affair in our society with

alcohol; we glorify this most boring of drugs despite the terrible consequences that it

often has. And of course we love our stimulants, our tea, our coffee, our energy drinks, our

sugar, and huge industries are built around these substances which are valued because

of the way they alter consciousness. But what all these approved altered states of consciousness

have in common is that none of them contradict or conflict with the basic state of consciousness

valued by our society, which I would call the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness,

which is good for the more mundane aspects of science. It's good for the prosecution

of warfare, it's good for commerce, it's good for politics, but I think everybody realises

that the promise of a society over-monopolistically based on this state of consciousness has proved

hollow. And that this model is no longer working - that it's broken in every possible sense

that a model can be broken. And urgently we need to find something which can replace it

- the vast problems of global pollution that resulted from the single-minded pursuit of

profit, the horrors of the nuclear proliferation, the spectre of hunger that millions every

night go to bed starving - that we can't even solve this problem, despite our alert, problem-solving

state of consciousness. And look what's happening in the Amazon, the lungs of our planet, this

precious home of bio-diversity. The old growth rainforest being cut down and replaced with

soya bean farms so we can feed cattle so that we can all eat hamburgers. Only a truly insane

global state of consciousness could allow such an abomination to occur. I did a back-of-an-envelope

calculation during the Iraq War, it seems to me that six months expenditure on the Iraq

War would have solved the problem of the Amazon forever; would be sufficient to compensate

the people of the Amazon so that no single tree ever needed to be cut down again, to

garden and to look after that amazing resource. But we can't make that decision as a global

community. We can spend countless billions on warfare, on hatred, on fear, on suspicion,

on division, but we can't get together the collective effort to save the lungs of our

planet. And this is perhaps why shamans from the Amazon are now mounting a kind of reverse

missionary activity. When I've asked shamans about the sickness of the west, they say it's

quite simple: "You guys have severed your connection with spirit. Unless you reconnect

with spirit and do so soon, you're gonna bring the whole house of cards down around your

heads, and ours." And rightly or wrongly, they believe that ayahuasca is the remedy

for that sickness. And many now are being called to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca, and

ayahuasca shamans are traveling throughout the West offering the brew - often under the

radar, often at personal risk - to bring about consciousness change. It's true that the message

of ayahuasca, the universal message, is about the sacred, magical, enchanted, infinitely

precious nature of life on Earth. And the interdependence of material and spiritual

realms, and it's impossible to work with ayahuasca for long without being deeply and profoundly

affected by this message. And let's not forget that ayahuasca is not alone, that it's part