Sophia Rokhlin is the coauthor of When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance. She also serves as the director of the sustainable ayahuasca cultivation program at the Temple of the Way of Light, a traditional plant medicine retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon. This episode Sophia joins Ross and Alexsandra to introduce us to the traditions of shamanism and discuss the fundamentals of ayahuasca, and how ayahuasca tourism impacts indigenous communities.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season two of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com slash nori podcast. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what nori knots are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club? Get special access to nori events. Go take a look at patreon.com slash nori podcast for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori.com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Alexsandra Guerra. Thank you for being here, Alexsandra.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: We are excited to do an episode in the quote unquote theology series that we’ve been talking about for a while now. And we wanted to do something a bit different. So I had a friend of mine, Sophia Rokhlin, who’s an anthropologist focused on the intersection between humans, nature, Can you tell that I just read a bio and got stuck in my mouth a tiny bit? This happens sometimes.
Unknown speaker: That’s okay. Photographic memory.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and sometimes it’s a little more natural than others, but we are so happy to have you here with us because we both just read your book that you co-authored with Daniel Pinchbeck, When Plants Dream, Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism, and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance. So thanks for being here, Sophia.
Sophia Rokhlin: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we want to be broad in how we’re thinking about the intersection between theology and climate change. And we’ve encountered a number of people who have participated in ayahuasca ceremonies who are at the very least influenced by this intersection between Shamanic traditions and animism and what is often called New Age beliefs. Although New Age feels a little pejorative. Is that just me bringing my bias to it? Or is there something wrong with that term?
Sophia Rokhlin: I mean, you can’t really see it without seeing crystals and sort of, yeah, all those kinds of things. I prefer spiritual, but not religious. That’s what Pew Religious sort of theory, like the Pew calls it that, yeah. S-B-N-Rs, spiritual, but not religious. Yeah. That’s a real term, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s in the book too. And I wondered if what’s the intersection there with being agnostic or being like present oriented versus some of what you talk about in the book here is people who do believe in spirits and entities that are communicating with humans and they’re using plant media to do so. It seems like there’s a big gap there. I wonder if that’s if that concept is just too broad, but maybe that’s the best that Pew has gotten so far.
Sophia Rokhlin: I mean, I’m not sure Pew is specifically relating to, you know, speaking about the quote unquote, you know, psychonauts or the psychedelic community when they, when they created that term, but more than anything, just the grand exodus of people leaving the sort of the church amphitheaters and moving into, again, like crystal shops, sort of these other alternative sort of small mystical, more mystical roots of relating to each other. Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: I almost prefer it that way where it’s broad, spiritual, but not religious. And it doesn’t get any more distinct than that because once you label something, you lose the essence of that thing and you get lost in these labels and you just, yeah. So I prefer that they keep it that way. Don’t go further, Pew, leave it the way it is.
Sophia Rokhlin: It’s also interesting, like people love to throw the term religious around. And I actually, my minor in undergrad was a religious study. So we, you know, Ceaselessly kind of picked this term apart. And it really, just like shamanism, it’s kind of an umbrella term that is used to describe just a number of sort of human behaviors. I mean, more than anything, I’ve come to think of religious as more than anything as sort of a social ecology or a structure. So, certainly what the times call for, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. That’s a great teaser for where we’re going to go in this episode. There’s a lot in there that we want to talk about, but maybe we should start at the beginning here and define some of these terms. I’m not sure that people may know exactly what we mean by shamanism. What exactly is that? One of the comparisons I’ve heard for this too is that there really wasn’t, this could actually not be true, this might be apocryphal, but when the British came to India as colonizers, they saw all these indigenous traditions around various gods and they just cultivated.
All of it Hinduism because the area was called Hindustan, right? So they’re just like, this is all Hindu. But of course, there’s a great deal of diversity. So is shamanism like that as an umbrella term? And then also, is there a relationship to with animism? And what is that? How do these play together?
Sophia Rokhlin: Great question. So yes, shamanism, I’m glad that I have a chance to elucidate this because this is an anthropologist’s dream to kind of untie the clumps that are made when we talk about shamanism. So shamanism is a term that was sort of invented by early explorers in the 19th century in the sort of this near the Arctic Circle, actually. And they were working with communities. And so they broadly sort of described their terms as shamanic of the Tungus people, actually. So from there, that became a term that was written in the literature by anthropologists.
But in any case, shamanism is today used to And that could broadly define a sort of art or a technique or actually a lifestyle whereby a person or a group of people have a communication with the invisible. So these are bridges, they’re sort of intermediary characters that kind of bridge understanding from the visible realm to the invisible realm. Trance, through the use of psychoactive substances, through ritual, all of these different things are tools to go and retrieve Important and useful information from the ancestors or from the deities or the spirits that we do not see and from there bringing that information back to the community and in a way they’re kind of and in many cases traditionally they were seen as you know actually keystone mediators between the environment or the broader ecology and the human ecology.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that’s a good working definition there.
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah, and then animism, I could get a bit more into that as well. I mean, I would say animism fits into shamanism, but animism more broadly is a sort of a pan, I would say, indigenous perspective whereby people are ascribing a sort of an agency or a life force to every biotic being. Every being that is made up of organic matter has some sort of a memory structure Has some sort of an agency, has some sort of a will, and is playing an active part in the ecology of things and in the interconnectedness of all beings.
So, you know, an animist perspective might understand or see that plants are actually actively, you know, seducing us or repelling us. And it’s sort of a more enchanted perspective, which a scientist could also hold, too. It’s just it’s a sort of a spectrum. There isn’t a clear definition.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think those are great places to start for people to broadly anchor how we’re talking about this phenomenon and its increasing popularity in the West or the global North that is happening. And it seems like the nexus by which this is happening is And I don’t know, it seems like that has been growing at least through, I don’t know, since I became aware, but I think in college, I knew people were starting to talk about this. I think I had seen books about it, but now it’s seemingly everywhere.
Sophia Rokhlin: Cat’s out of the bag.
Ross Kenyon: Cat’s out of the bag. So what exactly is the link and is shamanism and animist beliefs, are they increasing as a result of ayahuasca use? Is this sort of how people are starting to think about things? Is it like a new religious movement?
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah. So, I mean, for anyone who doesn’t know, I guess I’ll just briefly define ayahuasca because for surprisingly, actually, we talk about it a lot, but we don’t know what it’s made of, where it comes from, who traditionally uses it. So very, very broadly, just briefly, ayahuasca is It’s a psychoactive concoction that’s made with two plants traditionally from the Amazon basin. Again, there are 400 communities or indigenous communities living in the Amazon basin with distinct sort of cosmo visions, ways of seeing the world, ways of interacting with plant matter. And about 75 of those that we know of work with ayahuasca.
And they work with this combination of plants for different purposes, everything from Divination and healing to actually more nefarious purposes like sorcery and witchcraft. My favorite example was a guy I interviewed who said, we drink the ayahuasca or uni. Uni means wisdom in Shipibo. We drink uni to figure out where our ladies are at night. Or divine the location of boars. So more than anything, it’s seen as like a tool. It’s not just the kind of healing panacea as it’s articulated in the West or in our culture and community. And so today we see now unknown thousands of people traveling to the Amazon basin in an attempt to kind of connect with ayahuasca and indigenous healing methods.
And this is, you know, I can talk about the impacts of that on community has been very mixed, but I think more than anything, the sort of, to me, what’s so interesting is that ayahuasca is uniquely adept at, I would say, helping us help ourselves at healing a number of these kind of nebulous illnesses that we experience in our cultures, like anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, all of these things that most of us in the West experience to varying degrees. And so the Shipibo, the community that I currently work with, most of the healers I work with will, actually all of them, will say that these illnesses in and of themselves, but rather symptomatic of something greater, which is our lack of connection to the rest of the natural world.
And all of these illnesses, anxiety, stress, you know, eating disorders is just pointing to a greater ecological rift that we’re experiencing culturally. And many people who come to the jungle find for the first time that there is what they experience as a sentience or an intelligence, or even just broadly a kind of a validity to working with plants and recognizing that plants in their own way have some sort of a personality. And, you know, a chemist might call this personality a property, right? A chemical property. But what I do is really work to bridge the understanding between the mystical, seeing plants having personalities, and the technical, having plants having chemical properties that are then translated as personalities, if that makes sense.
So more than anything, I find that people are leaving with an enchanted perspective of the world, a sense of interconnectedness, oneness. And I’m painting in broad strokes here, but that’s kind of the general takeaway that we see. And that’s quite interesting when we talk about just where we are today. With manifold ecological and economic crises unfolding here, this sort of almost a romantic pilgrimage to the heart or the lungs of the world in the Amazon basin where people reconnect with plants. So yeah, that’s the overview.
Ross Kenyon: You clearly love what you do, but I also like that you’re willing to simultaneously mock it gently. It’s a nice thing.
Sophia Rokhlin: I mean, I live in both of those worlds. I’m a big permaculture lover. And in the book, I actually talk about this methodology I’m adopting, which is, I don’t know, have you heard of the edge or ecotones before?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ve talked about edges before in the permaculture sense on the show. But you should explain it. Go ahead.
Sophia Rokhlin: I love it. I mean, so, you know, ecologists or biologists or even permaculturists have an image of a Venn diagram, right? Two intersecting circles. And then that kind of vesica, that intersecting part there is where, you know, we find the most important. And so an edge is a place where two discrete ecosystems meet together. So it could be the deep ocean and the shallow shore where the coral reef emerges, right? Or you typically find deer and an abundance of different creatures living between the deep forest and the meadow. They like those in between places.
And so the edge realms are sort of territories of confrontation and awkwardness, but they’re also places where biologists find speciesation, like the development of new species. And so I use this kind of edge analogy as actually something to look at socially speaking. So what we see with the global spread of ayahuasca is an intersection between A rational, pragmatic West and an animist sort of enchanted indigenous perspective. And what we’re doing here in sort of the intersection of these worlds is being in an, is mingling in an edge space, which is awkward, which is weird, which is new, but which I also hope and I actually see developing a third and sort of new point of view and way of being.
Alexsandra Guerra: That is such a good point. And, you know, one of the questions I had is in the context of the U. S. or developed Western nations, like we might treat this as taboo. Some listeners might have dropped off by now. Hopefully they didn’t. And think, oh, it’s just psychedelics. They’re just talking about drugs. But in the perspective of the originators of those people who are using this, it’s a medicine. It’s a tool. How are you approaching to overcome this gap or overcome this friction so that we can, I don’t know, make the edge maybe a little bit wider?
Sophia Rokhlin: So the friction being like a sort of cultural aversion to everything drug related?
Alexsandra Guerra: Is that kind of the... Yeah, I think there’s a complete taboo on this concept on hallucinogens and psychedelics and that it’s just some drug thing and You know, we could be saying it’s a medicine, but I’m sure others are thinking, oh, this is just you trying to make, you know, rationalize or make excuses for why you’re escaping.
Sophia Rokhlin: How do you overcome that? Well, first of all, I mean, you know, B, it is what it is, but you could gently point anyone in the direction of Forbes magazine or Bloomberg who are recently publishing projections of the psychedelic industry doubling in terms of, you know, potential to cannabis, to the cannabis industry.
Ross Kenyon: Which is already pretty big, I think, too.
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah. So, I mean, it’s, you know, so you could, you know, as soon as there’s, this is what’s so interesting to me is, you know, when you start to see potential for these things to be commodifiable, right? That’s when things start to get really interesting and you have sort of more traditional investors like the Mercer family and Peter Thiel kind of taking interest in psychedelics. So, I mean, and then again, you know, the science has been a great ally for me and my path in Kind of articulating the validity of these plants culturally, just because we do find that there is evidence, really replicable evidence of many of these substances.
And again, I work specifically with ayahuasca. Reducing swelling and the amygdala, which has amazing potential for reducing people with acute post-traumatic stress disorder. I mean, there’s just a number of different studies that are showing that these plants do have tremendous potential for medicine and for healing. But it remains an edgy place. But I did, pun intended. I did just return from touring, you know, in the Bible Belt, actually. So going to these, with my book, going to these extremely kind of conservative areas and talking about plant medicine. And what I found, actually, is that the way that I’m doing it and just, you know, finding the right way to articulate these things is kind of a trans-partisan way.
It is simultaneously conservative and progressive. We’re talking about returning to these traditional things. We are talking about maintaining a sense of culture while at the same time also advancing beyond what we find to be relatively new stigma towards plants and plant medicine. What I love looking at are the archives of people called paleobotanists who study the history of plants and fungi in ancient human communities. We have evidence of humans. And so that’s what I love to look at and actually say. I actually kind of through like a discourse analysis perspective, look at all of the different media that’s coming out in relation to ayahuasca.
And very often you’ll find people talking about it as this like, you know, cool trend for Silicon Valley and da-di-da, you know, the entrepreneur’s edge, whatever, all that kind of stuff. And while I do find that sort of angle is kind of interesting, I do think that it kind of cheapens or obscures what’s actually happening, which I believe to be A real cultural shift, which is, I dare say, kind of inherent in us, you know, where we are like Graham Hancock is, you know, famous archaeologist and studies ancient civilizations in his essay, The War on Consciousness.
He says to some effect, if we are fundamentally conscious beings and we are not sovereign over our own consciousness, then I fear that we are sovereign over nothing at all. That’s good. Yeah. And that’s what I really believe we’re working with here is a fundamental returning to cognitive liberty. And seeing things from new perspectives because, you know, and this is where my personal opinion comes in. I think we’ve clearly dug ourselves into some very deep cognitive trenches and we could do with a little bit of reframing and, you know, plant teachers and allies certainly help us to do that.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh my gosh, yes. And it’s weird because what you’re bringing up for me is this weird balance. And this is, you know, written about in many religions and books like in the Bible. You know, Jesus always talks about humility. You shouldn’t have to show off, you know, oh, ayahuasca, you know, you mentioned Silicon Valley and people who are using this to, you know, become more enlightened. That irks me, it bothers me. But then it’s like, I understand, like, if you are, you know, I’ve done this myself. I went in December to Peru and it really fundamentally changed.
And I look at like these cognitive trenches that you described. Really just got me to be aware of them. And so I’m excited and I want to talk about these things, but it really irks me when it’s like I have to, I don’t want to, or it irks me when I hear other people talk about it like it’s this fantastical thing and I’m very showboaty about it because then that’s just the ego. And so one thing that I learned is that the ego is just something that gets in our way constantly.
And if people are talking about it in that way, I almost immediately distrust that they have a true connection with it.
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah. Like, and it points to our, you know, our parameters of validity, right? Like, oh, so-and-so celebrity has done it and so-and-so whatever. And this science validates it and therefore it’s true and good, right? And forget the thousands of years of tried and true practice that communities have been working with, you know? As long as Lizzie Lohan does it, it’s fine.
Alexsandra Guerra: And you say this in the book a lot, too. It’s like the West relies on a repeated scientific method where you’re able to get repeated results. And this is just on the other realm of that. Every journey is different. Every person is different. So anyways, but bringing it back, this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast. And one of the big questions I’m sure people have is, why are we even talking about this? Sophia, what do you think the role is that plants like ayahuasca play in addressing climate change by, let’s say, perhaps changing people’s awareness?
Sophia Rokhlin: I mean, that’s the big question. I have two answers. One is a kind of a more enchanted perspective, and the other is a bit more practical. So, I mean, the one that I find to be quite interesting, when I was writing One Plants Dream, I had the opportunity to interview over 80 people From different walks of life, from shamans to air quote shamans, legal professionals and all different people and a lot of what I call first generation users. So people who don’t have a cultural context or background for working with these plants and traditions.
And, you know, very often what I observed and in my personal life as well is people actually, you know, gravitating towards a more simplified homesteading kind of ecological worldview, right? Like many of my peers just went off to go live in the woods and have babies and, you know, start fermenting shit. Pardon my French, you know, but like, you know, just the people were really shifting in that kind of way. I like to look at it from the perspective of botany, actually. So plants have evolved to manipulate the world around them, right?
As a biologist would say that they’re sessile organisms, which means they’re unmoving. And in order to adapt to the pressures around them, they’ve actually become masters at the art of chemistry. And so plants we, you know, and in botany, we typically talk about two types of metabolites. So they’re primary metabolites. Which are basic, they’re responsible for cellular functioning, and then there are secondary metabolites. And these metabolites are chemicals that plants should develop Which send messages to the world around them. So bitter alkaloids tell an ant to go away, right? Or the smell of a rose lures in a pollinator.
And this is the world that we’re living in. And plants are actually in constant conversation and dialogue with us. So in this sort of invisible perspective, I’ve actually heard... People articulate the global spread of ayahuasca as actually a chemical SOS sent from the Amazon rainforest through this sentient plant being. If you look at the earth as a sentient marble, as water flows through and as animals migrate and as sand from the Sahara goes and fertilizes the Amazon basin, the whole globe is in constant conversation. And so from this sort of, you know, space view perspective, you can actually see ayahuasca in this sort of superhero narrative coming and communicating with the global north and telling everybody to be more ecologically oriented and conscious and, you know, be kinder and take care of each other.
And so that’s one very interesting thing. And that’s one of the arguments I kind of love. And then from the other perspective, I mean, this is a bit more of a materialistic and maybe even a cynical argument, you know, Capitalism is constantly looking for new material to accumulate. And as we are infinitely sort of creating new products, even from thin air, from carbon, right? It wouldn’t surprise us that some of the most seemingly uncommodifiable things like ayahuasca, the sort of barf potion, is suddenly being vetted to be kind of added into the global marketplace.
And we do start to see that, you know, we see that there’s a Tremendous global interest in these plants. And there’s nothing new about it, really. It could just be one plant in a series of other psychoactive plants that have been fueling the Western economy. And what I like to think about more than anything is, in a way, there’s nothing strange about the global spread of ayahuasca. Western civilization has been fueled by ... by our appetites for psychoactive plants for centuries now, like tobacco, sugar, coca... Coffee, you know, all of these different plants figure into like a pantheon of different substances that have fueled economies, that have built colonies, and even, I would say, kind of shape our personalities.
You know, like the first banking systems were developed in London in coffee houses. And I love to think about that, you know, because before that, there was only the church and the bar, right? There was the church and the tavern. And coffee was this sort of third substance that allowed for a new type of consciousness to emerge. And that’s where the scientists and the rebels and the politicians met. And in a way, I mean, we live in a very coffeed culture, you know, that frequency, that sort of the personality or the properties of coffee shape and kind of color the way that we are.
Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: I absolutely just want to touch on what you were saying. Everything like 100% is so spot on, really resonates with me. And I don’t think you went far off on a tangent at all with regard to the SOS from the Amazon to the Western world. And just to share my own perspective on this, you know, working at Norway, we have the Reversing Climate Change podcast. Climate change is like literally in every Dialogue that I have every day and having done it and come back, you know, you say this in the book, it’s kind of a catalyst for transformation of, you know, Westerners.
And I feel that way. And I’m like, wow, how do I really reconnect? And I think that it is this bridge, right? When you talked about shamans being a bridge between these two worlds, the spirit world and the material world, but ayahuasca itself being a bridge between The world that is being consumed and then those who are consuming it, the ones who are on the other side so far away and so disconnected. The disconnection that we have to our food and supply chain is a perfect example of that. So I’m giving you validity and I’m going to get off my little here because it just really rang true for me listening to what you were describing.
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah, it’s funny, you know, you’re just talking about the supply chain and it’s I find that in just like anecdotally, you know, in psychedelic experiences, I’ll often find, you know, I’m very privileged to work at a center where I am sort of supporting people in their first ayahuasca or psychedelic experiences, you know. And they’ll hear them whisper under their breath, you know, water, and just having like a really fundamental, essential conversation with what water is, you know, like, holy crap, and the trees are breathing and water is and just it’s kind of this like a unveiling or the sort of cleaning of the windows.
And, and like you were saying, you know, with the with how abstracted and disconnected we are from our There is something about, I would say, these threshold or these kind of out of body or deal experiences that some of these psychedelics offer us that kind of put us back into our human suits and really kind of force us to reckon with what it is to be human and to be more aware and even grateful of the fundamental needs that we have as human beings. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I also want to unpack a little bit that first angle that you took. And I imagine that when people hear the idea of psychedelic drugs, hallucinogens or entheogens, there’s another term for this, which is taking God inside, in my understanding. They probably think about the 1960s. They’re thinking about LSD and the influence that had on music and popular culture and flower power as a political movement. To what degree is this a useful model for understanding what’s happening now with it seems like parts I know various cities in the United States have been legalizing mushrooms.
Ayahuasca is increasing in popularity, and it sounds like it’s projected to grow quite a bit still. So to what degree do you think we should understand what is happening now in light of the 60s, or is that going to mislead us in some ways by over applying it?
Sophia Rokhlin: That’s interesting. So I’m on tour with a comedian named Shane Moss, and he has a great little bit on it. You know, he says that in the 60s, the use of psychedelics was closely tied together with the civil rights movement. And he noticed that and he makes this kind of joke, you know, that people started hugging a little bit too much. And it’s good to keep the people sort of separated and fighting amongst each other if you’re in a position of authority. So this is a kind of a conspiracy perspective on the war on drugs, right?
This idea that, you know, we actually don’t want people bonding together and being too friendly amongst each other because it’s much easier to sort of overthrow the powers that be. So that’s, you know, that’s one perspective. And I would say, I mean, I do think that, you know, an increasingly voracious global marketplace very much figures into the way that we are seeing psychedelics move today. You know, even today we see new conferences and quote-unquote psychedelic experts who are no more than a year into it and they’re just seeing it as a new investment opportunity.
And I think that once, you know, there is this sort of undeniable new industry that’s opening up that suddenly washes away any kind of stigma we had around it, right? Money speaks louder than any sort of fears that we may have had. And I mean, that’s what’s so interesting to me about seeing, you know, John Boner and people who are like traditionally very conservative and actually big, you know, people who are responsible for putting people in jail for using marijuana, then being some of the greatest investors in hemp farms and firms.
So there’s these contradictions that exist. But as soon as you start seeing money come into it, you know, the stigma magically vanishes. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And one of the debates I understand that came out of the 60s as well was whether or not this became a sort of lifestyleism kind of choice. Do people drop out and start fermenting things, as you put it? Or does this translate into some sort of, you know, broader political movement, like Abbie Hoffman, like sort of chastising hippies and be like, come on, guys, we got to we got to make something out of this moment.
Sophia Rokhlin: Mm hmm. I mean, I wasn’t there in the 60s, so I could never really say. But what I would say is that I think it’s interesting how we’re seeing If you look at it like in bubbles, you know, of bubbles of discord and unrest, there’s the 60s. And this is, again, maybe the sort of the second wave of cognitive liberty, right? People saying, hey, this is our consciousness. We can be free. We can see things the way we want and we can shape worlds this way. And I think that this is maybe like, again, another wave of that.
You know, we are, it’s bubbling back up to the surface. And I think now more than ever, as people are really looking to I mean, more than anything, I work with people who are deeply unhappy with life. And they’re unhappy because they’re making a lot of money, but they’re living deeply unfulfilling paths. And they find that working with psychedelics and plant medicine helped sort of orient them more eternal pursuits in life, like childcare and animal rights and planting trees and these sorts of things. Yeah. It’s beyond anecdote at this point.
It’s unbelievable how many people I’ve seen going in that direction. I can’t say I can make a clear parallel, but I do think that if, Lord forbid, we were to see some sort of a great political squelching of the psychedelic movement now, it would just bubble up again in another few years. I think that we’re returning to something deeply fundamental. Absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. Yeah. I think if that trend continued as you project, I could see that having potentially some implications for climate change or people feeling more connected, and that would be a good thing. But then you’ve also alluded to some of the problems that as this becomes a mass phenomenon rather than something that you had to be a pretty brave traveler to experience this 50, 60, 70 years ago, it wasn’t just sort of a casual thing you could book online. Of course, there But I’ve also met people... Okay, so this is one of the things I like in the book too, is I like when people don’t take themselves too seriously about some of this stuff.
And you definitely rib some of the excesses of this cultural movement or milieu that you’re a part of. And I have definitely met people who are new agey in this kind of way, but they’re also a bit like there’s a spiritual one-upsmanship to it that I’ve noticed. And I’m just sort of like, what? I have a hard time. I don’t like people like that, basically. I... I don’t really know how to interact with them and it feels really, really weird. I don’t understand why this happens. So that’s one thing. But there’s obviously more than just annoying social dynamics that I’ve observed.
There’s also big problems with what happens when ayahuasca becomes a commodity. What happens to the environment in which it is produced? What happens to indigenous communities who sort of become... I’m sure there are some that are like almost Potemkin villages now that are just there to... They’re not like natural in the way that people want indigenous communities to be. Of course, people have a fixed idea of what it means to be indigenous. It’s sort of fixed and out of time entirely. But what is changing with this sort of mass phenomenon of ayahuasca?
Sophia Rokhlin: There’s so much I could unpack in that. I loved both. I mean, I would love to just go over the two parts. I think there was sort of this spiritual elitism that we see emerging with the use of psychedelics and, you know, the holier than thou. I’ve, you know, vomited myself into illumination. Oh, lowly worm. He’s so conservative. You are, you know, the white robes at Burning Man. It’s a look, yeah. I mean, you know, I think what I find so interesting actually is the phenomenon of generally, you know, white folks going into the Amazon and receiving a two week or maybe a two month training and then sort of certifying themselves as shamans and going out and, you know, serving the people of the world with their medicine.
And I mean, this I find to be not only a bit pretentious and silly, but actually quite dangerous. And I do work with communities who actively kind of condemn this sort of behavior In the Amazon basin, we find actually sort of a tradition called a dieta or a diet. And this can be sort of interpreted as a shamanic university whereby people observe these ascetic rites of going into the forest for traditionally two years, five years, and sometimes even 10 years and fasting and really working with a minimal amount of intake and taking these plants and receiving messages from the plants.
So when you come out of this process, this is sort of your doctorate degree, right? And so you compare that to somebody who spends two weeks kind of whatever in the Amazon, and that’s very offensive. And not only is it offensive, but I like to think if you’re going to go deep sea diving, bring a real scuba diver with you. Somebody who, if you’re discovering the deep trenches of the consciousness, make sure that you have someone who knows how to get you out of there safely. So that’s not a joke.
So that’s a that’s a note on the kind of the spiritual elitism and the and more than anything, you know, the Western proclivity to like validate our experience, you know, like mom and dad, I went to the Amazon for five years. I’m now a shaman. Right. Like, what do you have to show for it? You kind of have to create some sort of an identity around it, which is which is a little awkward and a true contradiction. And again, that’s like a part of this edge place, you know. And in terms of, I mean, the impacts on indigenous and mestizos or mixed race communities in the Amazon with the global interest or ayahuasca tourism, this is a great question.
And I would say it’s mixed. It’s very yin yang. On one hand, I think more than anything, what people are upset about is this sort of false shamanism, right? This kind of like training for two weeks sort of thing. And there’s also the case of people going and squatting indigenous villages. Like they just show up and they’re like, give me your stuff, you know, and that’s not common, but that’s actually why actually centers are quite important because it’s not appropriate to just show up in someone’s house and just ask for their sacrament, right?
Alexsandra Guerra: Wait, what?
Sophia Rokhlin: They just show up? I mean, yeah, I’ve heard in Brazil, I’ve heard some anecdotes of, you know, some dreadlocked individuals coming and just sort of hanging out and it being a bit of an awkward situation and not knowing quite how to get people out. It’s not very common, but it certainly has happened.
Ross Kenyon: I saw something like this when I was in Nicaragua and passing through and there was a guy that I ran into who’s wearing the woven parachute pants of the indigenous people. I don’t see how that is a proper understanding of spirituality. And I could be wrong. I could be being judgmental, but it really bugged me.
Alexsandra Guerra: Those are the randos, like the edge cases, and we’re using the word edge a lot, but the outliers, really, because if you look at any group, any type of classification of many people, you’re going to have a distribution of people who are super conservative and people who are super crazy about it, and I think that’s just the nature of things. So it would be nice if we as a species would stop being so reductionist and being like, oh, look, I found this one. N equals one sample size. All people who do ayahuasca just are vultures.
Not that you’re saying that. I’m not trying to say that.
Ross Kenyon: No, no. But yeah, there are some silly examples. And it sounds like Sophia has found people squatting and just showing up.
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I think, Ross, you said something very interesting about, I think you said in a self-conscious way, you said, you know, the way that people want Indigenous people to be. And I think that’s a very interesting point that maybe you were pointing to what I wrote in the book. You know, it’s We in the West have a very romanticized idea of indigenous people living in some sort of an unmoving, untainted, we call it a pre-lapsarian. So that’s some nice theology terminology for you. Before the fall kind of environment in the Garden of Eden and yada yada.
I could go on. When in reality, you know, we actually know that the Amazon basin itself ecologically has been shaped by small scale agriculture. And we know definitely that at least for the past 400 years, Western influences have dramatically shaped the sort of the psychic and the political landscape of Latin America. So there’s not, it’s not like, you know, a couple of tourists, quote unquote, are going to come in and shape, you know, totally change indigenous people, nor would that necessarily be a bad thing, right? It’s like, I think more than anything, what, what the conversation that comes up with the global, with the commodification of ayahuasca and, you know, Ross, you were asking, what’s the impact of ayahuasca tourism in these communities?
I mean, I look at it from a perspective of understanding that these economies are entirely based on petroleum extraction, palm oil extraction, and corporate agriculture. And these are the livelihood opportunities that people have before them. And so what I find to be an interesting aspect of this global ayahuasca spread is that communities For the first time, actually, in an intercultural context, are celebrated and revered for their ancestral knowledge and practices and appropriately compensated for their wisdom and their intellectual property. So, you know, it’s very much a mixed situation, but more than anything, I think, you know, Western people that I speak with often say, Oh, but what’s happening to the people in the forest is that, you know, they’re modern people just like us.
And indigenous doesn’t mean frozen in time. It just means that they have a deeper connection to their landscapes through hundreds or thousands of years of co-evolution with it. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not adapting and they don’t have needs just like us.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you for sharing that, Sophia. Yeah. I needed to hear that. I think a lot of people needed to hear that.
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah. Thanks for hearing it. And I think more than anything, you know, what’s interesting is then to pan back to the perceiver, right? Like the Western person. And again, I’m painting broadly here, but you get what I’m saying. You know, the person, again, to kind of poke fun at the movement, like at Burning Man with the Indian headdress and this kind of look, you know what I’m talking about. But actually seeing, having a bit of sympathy for that sort of neuroses and actually looking at it as like, Not only just poking fun or rafting on somebody else’s culture, but saying that there’s, I believe that we actually, all of this shamanic fetish points to our own personal desire to be closer to environments and to have a connection with the invisible.
And that being said, to remember who we are as humans, In a broader ecology of things. And so it could just be seen as this weird aesthetic trend that’s happening. But I also see that it points to sort of a desire that is just poorly and insensitively sort of represented. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe it is a new romanticism of the 19th century industrial revolution is taking over and people want to go back to nature. We’ve had multiple cycles of this, at least in American history. I’m sure there are versions of this that have happened throughout world history. Maybe this is just the latest one of those. And sure, it’s missed some important nuance and been inappropriate in many ways too. But I understand that there is a spiritual illness. If that’s not woo, it’s at least semi-woo. But I think it’s true. And you can find this in people like Wendell Berry too.
Or even if you read conservative authors, they’re also worried that we have nothing to do except work and then yell at each other on the internet. That’s basically the only two things that we have to do. People don’t go to church. They’re not in bowling leagues. They’re not doing anything else. Yeah. So, yeah, I think there is something that’s lacking and maybe ayahuasca, and you describe this as experience-based spirituality, which is, I think, a little bit of a pejorative framing, but I understand what you’re trying to say with it. But you’re saying that some of these word-based spiritualities that are based on texts rather than experiences are giving people like a new way to develop community or experience the divine or something like that to fill this gap that we’ve somehow lost.
Is that broadly how you see things?
Sophia Rokhlin: I mean, you know, I think that might be the first time that I’ve said experience-based. More than anything, I like to think of it as actually mysticism, right? And mysticism by definition, or how we generally understand it, is a direct, you know, relationship to the divine. So not intermediated by, not mediated by some sort of a, you know, clergy member, anything like that, but having a direct relationship to divinity. Ross, you mentioned the word entheogen earlier. In Greek, it means generating the divine from within, entheogen. And that’s what we’re looking at really, having our own personal experience with whatever it is that we define as divine.
And I think that is important, you know, because it puts things into context and we could go into conspiracy theories About why it was structurally sort of a positive thing for authority structures to rely on having divine or sacred information secret, right? But in this case, we see that people can have a relationship to it on their own. But yeah, I might have missed the mark there with what you were saying.
Ross Kenyon: No, I think it’s probably on point. My larger point, too, is I think I agree with you that even if these cases that are, you know, like clear bright line cases of cultural appropriation that strike basically everyone as being.
Unknown speaker: I love a good cult. I love it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, exactly. New religious movements come to be in times of social strife. This is a way I’m thinking of like Black Elk Speaks or something like that, like the ghost dance of like indigenous people in North America as being a way of reclaiming strife. Some sort of agency to work through contemporary issues in a new way. And I wonder to what degree is ayahuasca sort of like filling this hole or this new age, shamanic, animistic kind of faith tradition that’s emerging in a sort of Pan indigenous way. God, this is the most most terminology I’ve ever dropped in a single question.
Sophia Rokhlin: But do you understand what I’m trying to say? I think I catch your drift. Yeah, I think I catch your drift. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I think what we do find and again, you know, for anyone who’s not familiar with the kind of the colloquialisms in the ayahuasca world, as it were. People refer to plants as master plants or teacher plants, which does kind of have a religious ting to it, I suppose. But you know, throughout the Amazon basin, communities refer to a certain group of plants as master or teacher plants.
And this again implies that plants have a sort of Or they have something to teach, which is a very interesting and animated perspective. And I certainly think for the environmental and cultural pressures that we’re dealing with as a species constantly in a phase of, as we’re always evolving, really, we are finding new ways to frame and understand our relationship to the rest of everything. And I think that, again, what I mentioned earlier about The Shipibo and the Sequoia, another community that I’ve worked with, say seeing depression and illness and anxiety and all these things, not as illnesses, but as pointing to something that is culturally incorrect with the way we interact with the world.
That’s what we’re talking about here. And so for people, for thousands of people with no cultural context to suddenly start saying things like master plants and teacher plants and mean it, I mean, that’s significant. I think that’s very significant. And for us to I would say reawaken at the risk of being a little woo about it, you know, to the reality that plants are in dialogue with us and we are living and breathing in a living and breathing world. That’s what we’re working with here. And I think that anything that develops More of a sense of empathy and connection and relatedness to the natural world around us is a very, very useful perspective to hold.
And you know what? Even if it is all made up and we’re just talking about some crazy, funny trend, I don’t think it hurts because frankly, humans are meaning-making machines and we tell ourselves stories and whatever story is compelling enough to have us act more kindly and more compassionately You know, with the rest of the world around us is a good one that I will certainly sign up for.
Alexsandra Guerra: Amen. I was thinking that yesterday. I was like, you know, because I have thoughts. I’m like, how much of this is like really real? Because we’re always looking for that validation. Totally. And it’s like, what does it even matter? What does it matter? Yeah, totally. What does it even matter if the end result is I live a more compassionate, present life?
Ross Kenyon: Mm-hmm.
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s not a problem.
Ross Kenyon: They call that no regrets policy, right?
Sophia Rokhlin: I love it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. One of the other interesting complexities that you and Daniel add to just how people understand indigenous faith traditions is people think about ayahuasca as something that is just thousands of years old, or it’s just been there Yeah. We continue doing a theology series on Reversing Climate Change. Are we going to have Hinduism and Ayahuasca episodes and Judaism and Ayahuasca? Is there going to be is there just going to be more and more blending? Do you think in the future is basically is it going to go the way of food and just everything’s gonna be fusion in the future?
Is that going to be the way it is?
Sophia Rokhlin: It’s all edging. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, exactly.
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, to me, this question of religious syncretism, I actually structured the book with Daniel in this way where, you know, we conducted a series of interviews and I learned Let the subjects arise. So actually by circling the words that came up the most in interviews, I dedicated different chapters to those. So we had a whole chapter on religion and specifically ayahuasca and how it interacts with different religious mindsets. Right. So we have, you know, Christians and people, you know, observant Jews. We have people from Hindu traditions, all different sorts of backgrounds.
And what’s been so interesting to me was actually seeing that there wasn’t a sense of like, oh, ayahuasca clashes or doesn’t work with it. But if anything, actually ayahuasca bringing people closer to the archetypes or the saints or the values that are celebrated in their respective areas. Cultural and religious upbringing, which was so fascinating to me. I interviewed two men who articulated feeling the presence of Allah in the room in ayahuasca ceremonies. Or I remember being in a room with two women. One woman was moaning the name of Ganesh over and over and over again.
And she was having a total relationship with her So, I mean, I think more than anything, ayahuasca is quite interesting. There was an interview with a, or a diary, sorry, from a Jesuit missionary who was one of the first people or Europeans to actually talk about ayahuasca. And he articulated the ayahuasca as a visual solution to a personal riddle. So in this way, ayahuasca having a tendency to speak to us through the symbols that we already know. And in that way, it will speak to us in terms that are familiar.
And if our familiarity is Jesus or is Ganesh or whomever, that’s who we convene with. And that’s who transmits the lessons to us, which is quite interesting for mysticism, as you will.
Ross Kenyon: I should have asked this earlier, but it relates here now, so I’ll throw it in. But if ayahuasca is a tool that helps indigenous men in particular, I guess, keep track of their wives at night, as you’ve mentioned, or it helps hunters, it sounds like this can be used as a tool and be He’s somewhat divorced from the more life-altering, blend-into-the-universe kind of aspect to ayahuasca. Do you think if Silicon Valley people are using it to get a leg up in business, is that really any different from people using it to become better hunters?
Is that not just maybe a new form of hunting?
Sophia Rokhlin: What a fantastic question. I mean, I would maybe pan out to psychedelics more broadly. I would say that psychedelics have been... Let’s look at LSD-25. You know, it was vetted as a great mind-altering and controlled substance, famously. You know, there are records by MK Ultra who, you know, looked at the ways that we could weaponize LSD. So, of course, it didn’t work very well. But that’s not to say that I couldn’t in the future. So, I mean, I would, and as I mentioned, ayahuasca in the past has been used for nefarious purposes, sorcery, enchantment, witchcraft, these sorts of things.
Well, I like witchcraft. I wouldn’t lump it into that kind of puddle. But I mean, yeah, if you could say, you know, what is the difference between communities hunting and modern day communities in Silicon Valley hunting, as it were, right? I don’t know. What I do know is that I think that there’s something very profound about the ordeal aspect of these plant medicines. And when I talk about these plant medicines, I refer to peyote, ayahuasca, and iboga, for example, and mushrooms. And the idea really is that a friend of mine in the Native American church, he said it best when he said, White people’s medicine makes you feel good and then makes you feel like crap.
Our medicine makes you feel like crap and then makes you feel really good. And I believe that there is something about the ordeal or the initiation or the difficulty that comes with being forced to look within and do the hard work, which is probably across the board beneficial. And that’s not to say, I mean, again, I’ve met many people along the path who I find to be extremely deluded and egotistical and who are still drinking a lot of ayahuasca. But I do think that there is, you know, myself at times too.
You know, the ego is a very, very powerful horse. But I think overall there is positivity to be gained. It’s a positive thing to look within and to sort of exercise one’s demons in a good context. But the thing that kind of, I would say concerns me is, you know, as we talk about ayahuasca and plant medicines becoming, let’s say, more popular, what’s implied is really the privatization and the commodification, right? The sort of making something replicable and sold over a marketplace and not unique, right? What I fear is that we will lose the ceremony in these things, when in fact I think the ceremony is actually the real medicine that we are experiencing today.
So being in community, having this synesthetic experience where sound becomes shape, becomes meaning, where we’re in these curated environments that in many cases communities have been Tailoring for centuries, really, this ritual space that marks a threshold between the past and the future. And we just don’t have that in our culture anymore. Our rites of passage are marriage and death, really. We don’t have any of that anymore. And for us to have an opportunity for just a night to go in and look at oneself with a community of people whose only intention is to do just that, It’s very, very special.
And I fear that as we become more interested in making these things more widely accessible, we also lose that. And I think that’s the most special thing we have right now.
Alexsandra Guerra: Absolutely. I totally agree with everything that you’re saying. And one thing that struck me to Sophia is that you have to do the work. It’s not like you sit there and you take this medicine and then You sit back and relax and the whole thing cures you and it might be a little tough. Yeah, it’s tough, but you have to be presently working through it. You have to surrender. It’s this weird contradiction of surrendering and then also asking yourself and focusing on whatever it is that you need to be focusing on during that journey.
So it’s a great medicine. I highly recommend it. Thank you for your work in this. I’m so curious to hear more. You know, I went to Peru to do this, but traveling is a big deal. It’s an expense. There’s a large carbon footprint associated with it. Oh, yeah. So where can people go to do ayahuasca near them, particularly in the U. S.?
Sophia Rokhlin: I mean, that’s where I get stumped every time, you know. I think the carbon footprint and the travel is the greatest contradiction that I don’t sleep well at night with. Yeah. And technically speaking, ayahuasca is not legal in the United States as DMT, one of the sort of active chemicals in the brew is a schedule one substance. There are, I believe, three organizations in the United States who are legally allowed to use psychoactive plants as a sacrament. And if you are not a member of any of those churches, then you are legally, you know, you are out of your grounds there.
Interesting.
Alexsandra Guerra: So all of these ayahuasca centers, I’m hearing people telling me, oh, you could do ayahuasca in Washington or Miami.
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah. And you can. I mean, you certainly can, but just know that it’s not a legal thing. Interesting. Yeah. So that’s one thing that’s quite an interesting dynamic emerging. I mean, for better or for worse, there’s ayahuasca ceremonies all over the world. I was in I was in Kentucky. I was in Oklahoma. I was traveling through all of these places and people were coming up to me and saying, yeah, we have ayahuasca ceremonies here and there. So, you know, I think in every state at this point, there are several communities and groups that are working with it underground.
I mean, I also, as the kind of anthropologist that I am, I’ve always been, earlier on, I was really visiting all of these different sort of circles and communities, and I saw some very weird stuff going on, I’ll say. I saw people derailed. I saw inappropriate touching. I saw things that just didn’t feel good to me in the way that some of these things are run. So that’s the greatest thing. And I can’t really tell anyone to go to any one place. I’m obviously biased to my center where I work in Peru, the Temple of the Way of Light, which I believe works with the utmost integrity.
All of our profits go to a nonprofit, which is dedicated to reforestation. But again, I would say more than anything, and in the back of my book, I have a bit of a guide to it. Don’t go to the first people who are screaming it out loud on the sidewalk, right? To kind of make a call back to that humility aspect. Generally, if you’re calling too much attention to it, something might not be quite aligned with the intention there. And I would say if anybody is curious, generally setting the intention is surprisingly effective.
You’ll be surprised at how you’ll run into people who are, you know, talking about it. Your senses are more attuned to hearing it on the sidewalk or whatever it is. And not being afraid to ask questions to the facilitators or to whoever is supposed to hold space. Ask where they train, how long they train for, what lineage they work with, how many ceremonies have they done in the past. I think it’s extremely important to be inquisitive, to ask questions. And if people are holding back, then I don’t think that’s a good sign either.
I think anyone who is really proud of their work will be very happy to share what their intentions are and what their training is.
Ross Kenyon: Great. And if someone wanted to follow your work, you know, besides reading When Plants Dream, the book that you co-authored with Daniel Pinchbeck, what do you think is a good way for them to keep up with you?
Sophia Rokhlin: Yeah. So I guess I’m most active on, I mean, you can follow my website or on Instagram, which is just my name, Sophia, R-O-K-H-L-I-N. And also I’m doing a tour. We’re doing a 50-city tour called Head Talks with my friend, comedian Shane Moss, Which is a show about comedy and standup comedy and psychedelic science, actually. So we’re probably coming to a city near you this year. So you can just check out Shane Moss, M-A-U-S-S dot com and look up head talks and we do an awesome show. We’ve actually been sold out every show we’ve done so far, which has been fantastic.
Yeah. And in that show, I do a short 25-minute lecture, basically doing an overview of the book and talking about some of the things we touched on today. And it’s a really fantastic show. And more than anything, it serves as a meet and greet, actually. The idea is you come out to the show, but afterwards you connect to local psychedelic societies and environmental programs. And we’ve just had amazing groups show up. So it’s been very inspiring. And yeah, definitely we’ll be near you soon.
Ross Kenyon: Amazing. Well, we will have to say hi. Hopefully you’re coming to Seattle. I assume you are.
Sophia Rokhlin: I think we are. Yeah, I think we are. I don’t remember when, but I think we’re coming. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Great. If you liked what we talked about, all of those links are in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Sophia.
Sophia Rokhlin: My pleasure. Thank you so much for the great questions. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that was fun. Alessandro and I had fun reading the book and thinking about it and figuring that out. And thank you again. If you like what we’re doing here, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or on Stitcher. Tell your friends.
Alexsandra Guerra: And thank you so much for listening.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. And we have a Patreon, too, because we’re a podcast and now you are legally required to do so. So patreon.com slash Nori podcast. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori.
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