[music] [birds chirping] Eight years ago, I was drawn to the mysterious Amazon and made a documentary about a tribe defending their ancestral territory against oil companies. [music] Enticed by the mystery of ancient knowledge, I'm returning eight years later with my new family to meet some of the keepers of the knowledge, the medicine men, the tribal shamans. [music] I'd heard about a sacred vine called ayahuasca, which enabled the shaman to have visions of the future and communicate with the spirit world and the natural kingdom. I knew that historically, altered states of consciousness have been an integral part of many cultures, and in tribal societies, these states have often been induced by taking hallucinogenic plants, with the shaman acting as the spiritual guide. [music] I was curious as to why the United Nations had outlawed ayahuasca, and I wanted to experience the ayahuasca ritual and gain insights into the shaman's world. My journey would lead me head-on into the global war on drugs. [music] Every society chooses a small number of substances, no matter how toxic, and enshrines them in its cultural values, then demonizes all other substances, and then persecutes and launches witch hunts against those users. I am thrust into life-threatening situations between worlds of opposing values. [shouting] And I experience realities I never even dreamed of. [singing] Ecuador lies on the equator, on the western side of the Amazon basin. We touch down in the capital, Quito, which is nestled amongst volcanoes high in the Andes Mountains. [music] This trip into the Amazon was set to be more challenging than my last. This time I had Jasmine, my one-year-old daughter, and my wife Willow, who was six months pregnant, traveling with me. I've always believed that the Amazon is the wildest place on earth, and I had to see it for myself. Half of Ecuador's population is indigenous, and there are 12 distinct language groups, as well as some uncontacted tribes. With its diverse climates ranging from snow-capped mountains to lowland Amazon rainforest, Ecuador is one of the most biologically and culturally diverse countries on earth. [music] Ecuador has a long history of hallucinogenic plant use, with the San Pedro mescaline cactus in the mountains and the ayahuasca brew in the Amazon. [music] We were warned that the road leading down to the Amazon was perilous, and a year before, a bus went off the edge, killing everyone on board. [music] [birds chirping] Eight years earlier, while filming the Wurrani Indians cutting a demarcation line around their territory, I met Flavio. [flute music] Flavio is a shaman and a warrior, fighting hard to preserve his land and way of life from the oil companies, the colonists, and the encroaching outside world. [flute music] [speaking in foreign language] Flavio's father, Rafael, is a Shwa warrior and an ayahuasca shaman. They've organized workshops on their community, where the local shamans share their culture and knowledge with the youth. Rafael is determined to pass on his ancestors' culture, knowledge, and land to his children. The shamans are the spiritual guides and the medicine men of the tribe, who have vast knowledge of the jungle plants and their medicinal uses. [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] Pablo Amaringo is also an ayahuasquero shaman, who paints the visions he's had during ayahuasca rituals. This painting represents the two plants necessary in preparing the ayahuasca brew. Out of the ayahuasca vine comes a black snake with a yellow aura. There is another snake called the chacruna snake, which penetrates the ayahuasca snake, producing the visionary effects of these two magic plants. In this vision, a defeated king from a remote tribe in Peru rises from his grave to tell his shocked wife that he has grown a vine from his hair, which is to be called ayahuasca, meaning "vine of the dead." He said you must mix this vine with the chacruna plant, which will allow you to see sound, to have visions, and develop your psychic abilities and acquire deep knowledge from past cultures. In scientific terms, the ayahuasca brew consists of two main active ingredients, beta-carboline from the ayahuasca vine and the extremely powerful dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, from the psychotria or chacruna plants. Normally DMT is destroyed in the gut, but you take it in combo with beta-carboline and then it's active. It was discovered by Amazonian Indians millennia ago and not discovered by Western science until 1956. During my research for this journey, I met author and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna. Terence was so inspired by his spiritual adventures with these Amazon shamans over the last 30 years, he wrote several books on his experiences and philosophies. He became a world-renowned speaker, advocate, and expert on plant-based hallucinogens and shamanic rituals. Shamanism is about going into the realms of death, transcending the body, transcending space and time. What the psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve the illusion of separateness. Raphael invited us to an overnight ayahuasca ritual at a sacred site in his ancestral territory, deep in the headwaters of the Amazon. Willow didn't want to drink ayahuasca because of her pregnancy, but she still wanted to come for the adventure. The wildness, the sense of mystery and intrigue was enough to capture me. It was a journey into myself to discover my personal boundaries. I had no idea of the extent of the challenges that lay before me. I felt enormously protective. I came first and saw the tiger's footprint. The tiger of the lagoon. We measured the tiger's size. From here, the footprint, to here. Head. Tiger. Very big tiger. Embarrassed tiger. We just saw a jaguar prince and apparently it swims in the river and eats children. We're traveling in the jungle with a baby. We're just going to walk through the mud for three and a half hours. We're going to walk through the mud for three and a half hours. We've just done a three and a half hour walk through mud. And I'm seven months pregnant. And I've still got three and a half hours to walk. We've been told to be very careful of snakes because there's apparently a lot of them around here. And they were going to build a plastic house but we asked them to build a house out of mud build. And so it looks like we're going to have a traditional hut made in a very, very short time. I felt how my modern lifestyle had allowed a sort of separation to develop between myself and nature. Through their actions I could see how these forest Indians were still directly connected with the natural environment. I felt like I had journeyed back in time. I felt privileged to be able to participate in this ancient ritual. [Speaking in foreign language] I knew that drinking ayahuasca could be a very intense experience, that it tasted foul and often it made you vomit. I was feeling apprehensive about how it would affect me. Millions of people take ayahuasca in the Amazon. It is the largest psychedelic religion on earth. The waking world and the world of the dream become one. So then it becomes the function of the shaman, the gadfly, the go-between to carry information back and forth between these worlds. Everything sounds really loud and alive. It feels like the whole forest and everything in it is aware that we're here drinking ayahuasca. I'm seeing iridescent rainbow spirals and complex geometric patterns. It feels like I'm being bombarded by some sort of ancient knowledge, universal consciousness that I don't understand. [Birds chirping] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] [Speaking in foreign language] In many countries around the world, people are now running their own unique style of ayahuasca rituals to open a doorway into this shamanic world. What you see, I think, is the morphogenetic field, the invisible world that holds everything together. You don't have to spend 20 years around the ashram. Ayahuasca to me is a very, very feminine spirit. It's a feminine experience. It's an experience of let go, of surrender, of nurturing, of love, of light of the heart. It's a holographic library. It speaks to you in visions. It communicates through pictures. And also, you're very sensitive to sound in ayahuasca. Sound can influence wherever you go, so we use sound as a navigator also. You use your intent and you use sound. [Music] Ayahuasca can be seen as a doorway, a link between the dimensions. It can give you all kinds of, let's say, shamanic information. It can give you a look into the animal world, the spirit world, the world of insects, the world of plants, the world of minerals, the galactic world, the cosmic perspective. And ayahuasca is like a deep immersion into that kind of experiential understanding of unity. And this unity is liberating. It's a transforming experience. Ayahuasca teaches that we are it. We are nature. We are not separate from it. [Birds chirping] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] [Spanish] (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) - The Amazon Indians have lost more than their claim to ancestral lands. Military-backed oil companies have pushed roads through their territory, and their land is being invaded by colonists and outsiders. Their culture is undergoing massive upheavals, and the people look to their shamans for vision and guidance in these rapidly changing times. (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) As threats to the Amazon people change with the times, the shamans use ayahuasca to gain insights and strategies to fight new enemies. (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) - Well, this is part of the blockade now. There's a lot of military going through here, and the indigenous people are being held off by the military. (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) (sneezing) (sneezing) (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) - I'm convinced that in its native setting, ayahuasca is a telepathic drug. I mean, small groups of tribal people are taking this thing and making group decisions based on group hallucinations, based on the collective database of the tribal group. They're seeing the information from a higher dimensional space. - On this ayahuasca journey, I was given deeper insights into the shaman's world and their intimate relationship with nature. I saw how the shamans, through their visions, were able to communicate with the planet as if it were a conscious living entity. (speaking Spanish) (speaking Spanish) - In 1971, largely in response to the popularization of psychedelics in the United States in the '60s, such as LSD, magic mushrooms, and marijuana, the United Nations drafted the Narcotics Convention, which was signed by all of its members prohibiting hallucinogenic plants and chemicals. Without any real scientific research, DMT and other hallucinogens were placed in the Schedule I category, along with heroin and cocaine. Dealers in these substances faced between seven years and life in prison, and in some countries, even death. Except in Brazil and Peru, ayahuasca rituals are now banned in every United Nations country on Earth. In Brazil, 80 years ago, an Amazonian shaman introduced rubber tapper, Romando Sierra, to ayahuasca. Romando became a shamanic healer and later established the Santa Demi religion, which is an unusual combination of Christianity, ayahuasca rituals, and nature worship. Today, the Santa Demi Church has over 15,000 members in Brazil and many centers around the world. The Netherlands is a signatory to the Narcotics Convention, and in October 1999, the government raided a Santa Demi service with 70 people in the congregation and arrested the two spiritual leaders. I went to the Netherlands to meet Brazilian Yatra Silveira de Barbosa, who established a number of Santa Demi centers in Europe. In my country, it is legal. Ayahuasca in South America is being taken in the same way, ritualistic way, for healing, for spirituality, back to 500 years before Christ, that we know as a fact. I cannot understand this way of thinking. You're going to jail for seven years or 15 years because you are running a ritual, which is too much. So this is gonna be our first ritual, with our doors closed. So there is a risk that the police might come here. The doors downstairs are totally locked. It's like you put the lights on. Everything that's in the darkness will show up, and you can work with that. So actually makes you closer to yourself. It brings you in contact with God, which in you, it brings you back into your heart space. It's impossible to use as a recreational, first because you throw up like crazy. You don't really enjoy every moment. It's not something that you take and you go to a party because when you drink ayahuasca, you really come in touch with your inner most, and it's not all the time flowers. There is a lot of soreness. We've been healing people of physical diseases, like cancer, psychosomatic diseases, depressions, drug addiction, heroin, cocaine. ♪ I wanna be free ♪ ♪ Go free like a flower in a bee ♪ I've been addicted to cocaine and heroin since I was 16, and went through many, many different treatment programs, and none of them worked. Basically, it just helped me go inside myself and look at why I was using. People need to know about it, and it needs to be legal. It needs to be able to go on and happen, because without it, I would be dead right now, and I know many, many more people would be dead right now. We understand the problem, and it's not the case to send people to jail, but to send people into treatment. The Narcotics Convention also banned virtually all scientific research into psychedelics and their possible clinical applications. Before the ban, some psychologists, such as author Stanislaw Grof, were using psychedelics as a therapeutic tool, accessing deeper levels of consciousness to unlock traumas with very positive results. I think it's a great tragedy of 20th century science that the original excitement about exploring consciousness and mental illness generated by the discovery of LSD gave way to establishment paranoia and repression of drug-using populations. Drugs might actually cause people to wake up to some of the abuses and scams that were being run by late modernism and capitalism. (crowd chanting) We are supposed to live in a narrow canyon of consciousness, walled in between awake and asleep. (crowd chanting) So this is the Dump Square in Amsterdam, site of many protests. And the protest behind me is one to try and get Hiawassa legalized. (guitar music) ♪ Let the way of the heart ♪ ♪ Let the way of the heart ♪ ♪ Let the way of the heart ♪ - We have the right to choose who we are. We have the right to choose our gods. And we have the right to be. Viva Hiawassa! - Viva Hiawassa! - As we enter the new millennium, we shouldn't have to be dealing with religious and spiritual persecution. Something we should have left behind in the Dark Ages, but unfortunately, the Dark Ages are still with us. So we have to make a stand. - We have fundamental law, and we have also the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that people have liberty to have freedom of religion. And we have seen this also in the United States, where they gave the freedom to the Native American church to use the Paiute cactus. - In my country, in Brazil, we had the same thing happen in a case that lasted for eight years. But not a case as the police, the investigators were scientists, anthropologists, doctors. And after eight years, we won the jury by unanimity. So they took Ayahuasca out of the Opium Law. And we want to have the same here, because we really have the right to have our own religion. - There's a lot of international pressure on the Dutch government to conform in the drug policy with the other European countries and the United States. The big war on drugs. - Due to the war on drugs, in America alone, there are currently three quarters of a million people spending around 5 million years behind bars, costing over 60 billion US dollars. America spends more on its prisons than it does on its schools. - Change the law, change the law, change the law. - The so-called war on drugs, which is really a war against other people's values. It's a continuation of cultural genocide and all the other efforts made by the phenomenal success of capitalism to shove its agenda down other people's throats. - People's minds, like their bodies, must be a domain free from government control. - It is a civil rights issue. - Change the law, change the law, change the law, change the law. - This psychedelic dimension is part of the human birthright. - No plant should be illegal. These things should not even be talked about as drugs. - The big drug and biotech companies have been sending their bio-pirates to the Amazon for years to steal and patent shamanic medicinal knowledge. And in 1988, a variety of ayahuasca was patented. The patent was challenged by a coalition of Amazon tribes. - We must not allow this ayahuasca to be patented. It is very sacred. Only indigenous people drink it. - The Supreme Court ruled that you can't patent a plant, that a plant is not an invention. - One of the active ingredients in the ayahuasca brew, DMT, is found in many species of plants throughout the world. In the Amazon, shamans have used DMT in their snuff rituals for thousands of years. The shamans derive the DMT from the hakula beans and the virola tree and absorb it through the nasal passages. The snuff is used to induce a trance, to see visions, to communicate with the spirit world and drive away evil spirits. There is an ancient Amazon legend about DMT which says, "In the beginning, the sun created various beings "to serve as intermediaries between him and earth "and created the DMT snuff powder "so that man could contact these supernatural beings." - The national symbol of Australia is the wattle. It's an acacia. The acacia ecology of Australia is jammed with DMT. And then, of course, the question was, "Well, do the aboriginals know about this?" (DEMONIC GROWLING) - I ask Paul Dillon from the Australian National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre about the dangers of DMT and other hallucinogens. - We did a call-out to DMT users, asking them for their experiences. Interestingly, every single caller we had emphasised that it was a drug that they were not going to use again. They found it very intense, quite unpleasant, and they really weren't prepared for the experience at all. The most harmful drugs in society are definitely the legal ones - alcohol and tobacco. Tobacco kills almost 20,000 Australians every year, and alcohol is up around 4,000. And the hallucinogen drugs, none to my knowledge. But I suppose they're drugs that we do need to know more about. We need to know about the psychological effects. I think more research needs to be done. - The only legal scientific research into psychedelics and DMT since the Narcotics Convention was conducted by psychologist Dr Rick Strassman in New Mexico in 1990. He concludes, amongst other things, that DMT is naturally released from the pineal gland during birth, death and other naturally occurring psychedelic states. - The strongest drugs are the ones most like ordinary brain chemistry. The most extreme case being DMT. DMT only lasts seven to ten minutes, and yet it's the most profound dislocation of reality that you can undergo. (Dance music) I thought I knew a lot about psychedelics before I encountered DMT, and it showed me that I knew virtually nothing. And I took three, four very large inhalations. My impression was of falling forward through some kind of tube that was fluctuating. This space was filled with beings, entities of some sort, creatures made of light, and they were jumping in and out of my chest. And I thought I must have died, that this couldn't happen to somebody and come back. You cannot go further than this into the Bardo and return. (Siren) The shaman is someone who has seen the beginning and the end. It's the most challenging, enlightening, astonishing, terrifying, joyous, strange thing in the world. I don't mean to scare anyone off, but these are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. People should be very careful. The shaman offers an immense example of courage. While I was making this film, Terence was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I asked if he had one message to share from all his experiences, what would it be? Sheer curiosity is the thing that I've always let carry me along, and I have no regrets about any of this. I think it's worth the life to put these issues in front of people. (Music) Willow was now nearly eight months pregnant and suffering from dizzy spells and headaches, so we searched out a shaman named Enrique, who lived by the Amazon River, who we heard used ayahuasca mainly as a tool to heal people. Enrique and his family have established an indigenous foundation to help preserve his ancestral territory. Part of the finances needed to run the foundation he gets from offering ayahuasca rituals for eco-tourists. Doctors in Ecuador, in Blanco, in Puyo, already know the shaman. So when they can't, with the shaman's indications, they just go and clean. (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) Usually the shaman and the patient will drink ayahuasca. (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) Felt like he was sucking up blockages and negativity and stuff, and just sucked it out of my crown. It was like an auric cleanse. I feel like he can read the internal aspects of my body. He can read my body like a book. It was like he had all of his lineage there, working through the sounds he was making. (Whistling) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Whistling) I felt that when these shamanic plants were used with the correct preparation, guidance and ritual, they could be powerful tools for healing and personal transformation. (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) I had an ayahuasca, but I had a healing from him. I've been having a lot of movement and a lot of pain and a lot of faintness, and he said that I need lots of minerals and vitamins. I wanted to see if this baby is a boy or a girl, and he says it's definitely a boy. (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) After returning to Australia, we all became quite sick. We tested positive for amoebas and parasites. I also spent four days in hospital, unable to walk due to a problem in my spine. Oh yeah, and we did have a baby boy. We named him Shaman. In Ecuador, thousands of people were evacuated as a number of volcanoes began to violently erupt. (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) What it brings is an empathy to the destruction of the planet. You know, the cutting of a rainforest is suddenly no longer completely abstract. It's actually something you can feel and relate to, and all political change begins with a change of feeling and value. We have become a toxic force in planetary biology. There is going to have to be a radical transformation. Human future will be designed on how conscious we are able to make ourselves. If we can change our minds, we can take hold of this process and halt it. (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) My journey into this mysterious world of the shamans of the Amazon lasted three years. I'm left wondering whose interests are really being served by keeping illegal these shamanic plants that can help you connect with yourself and the natural world. And how is it that humanity is allowing such unprecedented destruction of nature? Meeting the shamans and taking Ayahuasca opened me to a world I never imagined. A world that challenged my current concepts of reality and made me question my life's purpose and my relationship with everything. (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Speaking Spanish) (Music) (Music) (Singing) (Singing) (Music) (Music) (Speaking Spanish) (Music) (Music) (Music) (Music) (Music) (Music) (Music) (Music) (Music) (Music) (Music) {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 4.31 sec Transcribe: 4821.49 sec Total Time: 4826.45 sec