there are people in there who are having extremely intense experiences. and then there s stan who has been kind of sitting there just stoically the whole night. it s hard to tell how or if ayahuasca has affected him. one person tripping hard is roman. his very physical performance contrasts sharply with the first-timers who struggle to keep it together during this five-hour ordeal. but whether anyone will experience real healing will have to wait for the light of day. i ve been around a lot of people who ve been under the influence of various drugs. i myself have been under the influence, but i ve never experienced anything like what i experienced last night. the ceremony and the ritual were so elaborate, but the people here are emphatic about the fact that ayahuasca is not a drug. it s a medicine, they say.
the armed forces because if you take time to think you can be killed. so it s engrained into us, cause, you need to have an effect right away, because you can die. so it s about creating a space between that cause and effect to give you time to think and pause and breathe. and ayahuasca has been helping me do that. it s a long process. it s not going to happen in just a few journeys. are you hoping that by continuing this work you ll be able to get to a place where you can communicate with people? i hope so. that s my hope. i have my faith in the medicine. but the thing about it is, i don t communicate with humans at home. i speak to maybe two humans a month, and that s about it. that s all the communication i have. but i have communication with mother ayahuasca. i play by flute, and i communicate off that realm. and my cat. is a spirit being called mother ayahuasca really speaking to bob? and could such messages actually be helping him? from what he s told me about his history,
journey. smoking is nothing to do with the healing powers of ayahuasca. has nothing to do with the spirit world, the vision world. you think those beings up there are smoking and you since the war have been prone to serious anger issues. was the anger tonight similar to that anger that you ve felt all these years? yeah. i think so. but i knew i had to get out because i knew i was close to slipping into the combat mode. sometimes you can just black out, have a flashback and before you had familiarized yourself with ayahuasca, what might you have done? that s why i m alone all the time. because i know somebody s going to kill me or i m going to kill somebody or i m going to end up in prison. maybe that s why i stay alone so
in the peruvian amazon today gringo shamans are replacing healers who once had exclusive knowledge of the forest. they re part of larger changes here, some good, some bad. you said an interesting frayed. you said we prostitute ayahuasca. yeah. there are some who might say you prostitute ayahuasca. you re this white guy from kansas out here sure. making money off of ayahuasca. sure. how do you respond to that? i tell all the foreigners, we re all guilty of exploiting ayahuasca here. all of us, me included. i could make a lot more money if i wanted to. i m not about making money.
believe in difficult times in my life consciously and subconsciously they will be with me protecting me. i just know that. while ayahuasca might be protecting roman s soul, it s been having a field day with his body and mind. like magic mushrooms ayahuasca contains a psychedelic agent called dimethyltryptamine, or dmt. dmt accelerates and enhances communication in the brain between areas responsible for sense of self, emotion and perception. scientists believe this induces a dream-like or hypnotic state that triggers personal revelations and new ways of thinking about old trauma. for stan that would mean coming to terms with haunting memories of abuse dating back three decades. so how was it? it s really hard to explain. i think i made big progress last night. the most profound thing was kind of connecting with when i was