I9
Other Dimensions
A few doses of the liquor distilled from segments of Banisteriopsis caapi,
mixed with leaves from the bushy plant Pychotria viridis, quickly open
inner vision to the world of Steiner's "very useful elemental beings"
and beyond. But one needs a certain fortitude to go this route because
it opens at first almost invariably onto a landscape of huge anacondas,
fierce jaguars, and all manner of spidery and creepy beings.
This strange world is not, however, the world classified by ethnobi-
ologists and chemists as hallucinogenic-meaning one that produces
visions that have nothing to do with reality.The ayahuasca-induced re-
ality is, if anything, even more real. From the descriptions of those who
have imbibed the liquor it is, to all intents and purposes, a window into
the astral world of theosophist and anthroposophist. It may indeed be
close to the drug employed by hierophants of the ancient mysteries.
For thousands of years Indian shamans in Colombia, Peru, and
Brazil have been drinking the ayahuasca brew as a tool to diagnose ill-
ness or to ward off impending disaster, to guess the wiles of the enemy,
and to prophesy the future.They believe the vine to be both an ally that
can guide people to light and truth and a teacher that can provide new
guidelines for relating to nature.
The brew, as explained in more or less orthodox terms, adjusts and
reorients the nerves, meridians, and internal energies that regulate the
connections among mind, body, soul, and spirit. It is professed to have a
natural relationship to the brain, one that turns a key and opens the door
into a wider consciousness. "On the one hand it produces certain neu-
rochemical actions based on its molecular properties-its alkaloids; on
the other hand, divinities inherent in the component plants help us rein-
tegrate with a system of knowledge that goes back to man's origins."