A TRIP NOT TAKEN China Galland

“SINCE YOU’RE GOING TO BE IN BRAZIL, why don’t you think about taking ayahuasca?” a new acquaintance said to me. “There’s a village in the Amazon that you can only get to by boat. I know someone there who would escort you and introduce you to the villagers. That’s the way to do it.” I was preparing to fly to Brazil and Argentina in the fall of 1995 to complete the research and interviews for my book, The Bond Between Women, A Journey to Fierce Compassion.

She assured me that she had taken ayahuasca several times, spending as much time in the jungle as she could. Being with people for whom sacred ceremonies with ayahuasca were a way of life had changed hers. It was not weekend recreation. It was “the real thing,” she said emphatically.

She promised to send me some articles about the movement in Brazil. Two religions had grown out of using ayahuasca, distinct from traditional indigenous practices: the Santo Daime, founded roughly in 1940, and the União do Vegetal (UDV), which came about in 1961. As the use of ayahuasca made its way to the north, both to the US and to Canada, its context was changing again, she explained. That’s why she was encouraging me to go into the Amazon, to the source. That was the proper environment for the experience, with the sounds of the rainforest and the smell of damp earth surrounding you.

I agreed to consider her offer. I was tempted. It sounded like a rare opportunity, to travel by boat up the Amazon to this tiny village. She explained that I could participate in a ceremony in Rio too, there was a church there, but it was a very different kind of ceremony than the kind they did in the jungle. She preferred the jungle.

More and more people I knew in the San Francisco Bay Area were trying ayahuasca—all Buddhists of one school or another—people in the Diamond Heart training, performers, writers. Another ayahuascaero encouraged me as well. A respected spiritual teacher, he had been to Brazil and connected with the grassroots movements that had grown from a rubber tapper’s visions of a Green Virgin in the jungle in the 1930s. He vividly described to me his own passage through a terrifying night on ayahuasca and its subsequent remarkably positive resolution. His description was long on the spectacular and varied special effects produced by ayahuasca, a source of delight for him and a curiosity for me as listener.

His talk of a Green Virgin got my attention. I had been researching Dark and Black Madonnas and potential cross-cultural counterparts like Black Taras for years. The central Tara in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition is the Green Tara. Was this Green Virgin her counterpart? I was tempted to investigate.

Then I thought back to an afternoon in 1989 in the midst of a Kalachakra initiation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in Santa Monica. He was discussing the vows we were about to take as part of the initiation. He counseled us to consider them carefully and to only take those which we were prepared to keep. One of them was the vow to not use intoxicants. Not having had any alcohol or drugs for eight years at the time, I was delighted to take this vow. It showed me how Buddhist practice could undergird the practice of sobriety. Taking that vow in particular reinforced my commitment to the sangha of sobriety and its practices. I joined an ancient fellowship with that vow, and its recitation was deeply satisfying.

By 1995, I had fourteen years of sobriety. Could I take ayahuasca now? I knew that several teachers maintained that the vow not to use intoxicants actually means not to abuse intoxicants. Lots of Buddhists who had taken those vows used them with nary a thought. Others, like Thich Nhat Hanh, with whom I’d also taken vows, were quite strict and maintained that the vow not to use intoxicants was just that, a vow not to use alcohol or drugs, including psychedelics.

I knew that ayahuasca wasn’t addictive; still, it was clearly outside the box I had drawn around sobriety. I had never been tempted to pick up a drug since I joined the “community of recovery.” I could count the number of times that I wanted to drink or use drugs on my right hand, but this—ayahuasca—was a temptation. It didn’t fall so neatly into the category of substances that drove people into recovery. I’d never heard or read about anyone who had become addicted to peyote or mescaline or mushrooms. Perhaps it happened. I didn’t know. For me, it was a gray area. The few times in my life that I had taken psychotropic drugs had been very positive—one time in particular.

I was living in the mountains in Colorado in my twenties. A friend came over to take me out on the town that evening and brought mescaline to take beforehand. (I think it was mescaline, it might have even been peyote.) I got nauseated, the nausea passed and we went into town. I found myself walking down a familiar street, but in another dimension. I had no hallucinations, I saw nothing out of the ordinary, and yet I saw the extra-ordinariness of each and every person. I felt as though I was seeing into the heart of everyone I encountered, whether it was a person crossing a street, the waiter who brought us our dinner, or the friend who was with me. Each person, in his and her own way, was brimming with love. The curtain of samsara had been drawn back and I was in a state of bliss. I had the distinct sense that I was being shown something; I was being given a great gift, a profound teaching, a demonstration of the fact that all that goes on in the world is love. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything looked the same as it always had, only it wasn’t. I was changed irrevocably, given insights and understanding that it would take me years to find my way back through to touch again.

I got sober in 1981 and fourteen years later, I was being encouraged to try another psychotropic. It was a deeply attractive offer. I spent weeks wrestling with the idea. An experience I’d had early in recovery weighed heavily on my mind.

Just after I stopped drinking I was invited to a no-alcohol party. I agreed to go, knowing that I needed to meet more people for whom alcohol and drugs were not an option. I needed to surround myself with them and I did. The only problem for me was that I knew no one at the party and I was overcome with loneliness, suffused with grief. I went out to my car and put my head down on the seat and wept inconsolably, not knowing what for. To say that “my skin didn’t cover me” was a trite and nonetheless remarkably precise description of how I felt. I didn’t know how to be with people without alcohol, especially people whom I didn’t know. Alcohol hid my discomfort. Now it was visible, painfully. I didn’t fit, inside or out.

One of the women from the party came out to my car and found me crying. After much talk, she convinced me that I needed to come back inside and marched me into the house, sat me down on the couch and brought me a cold drink. Before I knew it, everyone at the party, fifty people or so, had come into the room and sat down. The party turned into a twelve-step meeting and there it was again, right in front of me, only love happening, pouring into me, pouring in and out of each person.

I let go and simply sat before these people I had never met and wept. The love in the room held me like a fireman’s blanket held a terrified child who had just leapt out of a burning building. The sorrow I felt became ecstasy and I found myself experiencing a depth of experience and a high that was greater than anything I had ever felt before. What was different was that I stayed in that highly exalted state. There was no diminishing of the experience, no coming down, no wearing off of a drug. Hours passed, the afternoon became evening, still I was in that altered state. When I went home, it was past midnight. Still I was ecstatic, as high as I was the first moment of the experience. I sat alone in the quiet of my living room, treasuring each moment, not knowing how much longer it could last. My three children were soundly asleep. I stayed up until probably three that morning, at least twelve hours later, the intensity undiminished in any way, though I was becoming physically tired. I knew that to go to sleep was to take a risk, but finally I was tired enough to realize that I had to let go, even of this bliss.

When I woke up the next morning, I was in a normal frame of mind. The altered state had disappeared. My head was clear. I had been given another gift, an immersion in a state of mind that was completely accessible without drugs or alcohol. I had only my Zen practice and my newfound sobriety. Whatever happened that afternoon came pouring out of the universe like warm golden honey, suffusing the world, even its daylight, with warmth and radiance. After twenty years of sobriety and to the day of this writing it has never happened again, and that is fine. The experience was so powerful that I remain grateful to have even had it once in my life.

After the suggestion to consider taking ayahuasca, I thought carefully about my choices. I imagined going to Brazil, changing from a jumbo jet to a smaller plane to the northeast, then taking a Piper Cub to a jungle airstrip, being met by this woman who invited me to join her, then stepping into a small outboard boat that would take us upriver to the village. There we would spend three to five days. It would be fascinating. Might I see a Green Virgin? Might I have another experience like the one I had in early sobriety if I took ayahuasca?

And I thought about the aftermath, about the inevitable comedown from the potent tea we would drink. After the ceremony, after the dancing, the singing, the insights, if I were to have any. What would I have?

I would have another exotic experience to write about—there was guaranteed drama in just getting there. But as I sat with the possibility, I realized that for myself, not for anyone else, but for me, given the vows I had taken, given my years of sobriety, to choose to use ayahuasca was a contradiction in terms. To take it meant that I could, at will, for a certain amount of money, produce a guaranteed high for myself. It would be consumer-oriented spirituality. I would be in control—the when, the where—I would buy the experience.

In contrast, my experience in early sobriety was so astonishing for the very reason that I had no control over it. I couldn’t buy the access to it. That blessed state came from sources not my own and found its way to me through other people. The deep love that underlies all things came gratuitously, freely. It was what the mescaline had let me have a taste of so long ago; paradoxically, it took using nothing to experience fully.

It was humbling to realize that I might never in my life have that experience again and that I had no control over it. I decided that my task was to be faithful to my vulnerability, to my lack of power over this moment. If that love ever happened again, wonderful. If it didn’t, that too was wonderful. I sensed that for myself—under the circumstances I was in, at the time I had to choose—my motives were not pure. There was ego attached, a desire to feel powerful, a kind of spiritual seduction going on, fueled by the potential of commanding a psychic experience to happen. The tea guaranteed a trip.

The more I thought about the jungle, the more I realized that I had been subtly uncomfortable when people who had used ayahuasca described their experiences. There was a focus on the display of awesome powers, on sensation. It reminded me of the warning against becoming attached to spiritual powers, to the fireworks. What wasn’t as obvious as the drama of the experiences was whether or not these people had been transformed by it. Were they more concerned about others, more generous, more heartful, more active on behalf of others? I couldn’t tell, nor did they report anything to me of this nature. I had no way to know nor had I known them enough beforehand to see a change.

Though I was enthralled by the stories people had told me, as I weighed these matters, the power of my own experience was undeniable. That golden afternoon at the party when I’d become high while sober was a high-water mark in my spiritual life. I could not deny it.

I did not go to the jungle.

That time.

Nor have I since.

One day at a time.