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RON SIEGEL: I use a very useful analogy which helps simplify and explain what goes on inside the brain when someone is having an hallucination. Think of a man sitting in a study and he's looking out of the window and he sees the people walking out on the street and the traffic moving by. And as night falls and he looks out of the window, he can no longer see out, because it's completely dark. But let's say he has a fireplace behind him and he stokes up the fire and the fire burns brightly and he turns around to look out the window. He still can't see out because it's dark, but he sees a reflection of himself in the glass and the furniture reflected, as if it came from the outside. The analogy is that the window is the window of our eyes and our ears and our senses to the real world. And the fire is the degree of electrical excitation that many drugs can produce in the brain. So when it's dark at night and not much is happening, and the fire roars brightly, and have a lot of LSD in your brain, let's say, you may no longer see the real world, but you see the furniture of your own mind, your
memories, your images, your fantasies, reflected as if they came from the outside. Some people become like Alice, going through the Looking Glass, and they believe all of this stuff is really there. The good news is that as soon as the fire dies down and the drug wears off, where it's counteracted by another drug, perception returns to normal and you begin to see your own reflection again and you begin to see the room.
NICK RANKIN: Ron Siegel's clear example is the materialistic scientific way to see this
brain-event. But it's not how the old ecstatic shamans think. They do step through that window, or penetrate the membrane to the other side. The hallucination is true, says Christian Ratsch.
CHRISTIAN RATSCH: For me it's so clear and obvious that the plants contained something which might be called a spirit or a soul or subconsciousness and when I ingest such a plant I have the feeling that this part of the plant uses my own consciousness to express itself through me.
NICK RANKIN: What you've just been saying confirms exactly what Terence McKenna was saying to me, in that in evolutionary terms the plants need animals, not only to propagate their seeds, but to communicate - because animals can move and plants can't. So are you saying that part of the story of the shaman is that the plant is teaching the shaman?
CHRISTIAN RATSCH: Of course, and the shamans view plants as teachers, as masters,
and as allies and they say: if I take a plant, the spirit of the plant will talk to me and I can ask the spirit: what are you for, what is your purpose, what can you do, can I use you for healing or can I use you for something else? How to prepare the plant - all that stuff - and so there is a dialogue between the shaman and the plant. And the shaman learns from the plant and then he later can use this knowledge to use the plant wisely and I think that is the best view for understanding psycho-active substances and plants - that they are teachers and we learn from them, and what we learn from them is very important for ourselves, for our community, for the earth and maybe for the whole universe - we never know.
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