Joe Rogan | Ayahuasca is Amazonian Science w/Graham Hancock

And I go into the issue of ayahuasca in this book because, first of all, ayahuasca is itself another example of Amazonian science. As you and I and many of the listeners and viewers know, the active ingredient of ayahuasca is DMT, dimethyltryptamine. But dimethyltryptamine is not normally accessible through the gut. We have to smoke it or vape it to get that rocket ship to the other side of reality. And the journey lasts what, 10, 12 minutes, not much more than that, sometimes quite a lot less. What ayahuasca does is it makes DMT available through the gut. The reason it's not available through the gut is because of an enzyme in the gut called monoamine oxidase. That switches off DMT on contact. The ayahuasca vine, which is one of the two ingredients of the ayahuasca brew, the other ingredient is leaves that contain DMT. The ayahuasca vine contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, which switches off the enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT to be accessed orally, which produces a rather different journey from the smoked or vaped DMT trip. It's a much longer journey. It's four or five hours. It allows you to integrate and to interrelate with the strange landscapes in which you find yourself amongst. The entities that you encounter, I'm not making any claims about the reality status of those entities, but what I am saying, and it's a fact, is that people who work with DMT and ayahuasca do encounter what they construe to be entities who communicate with them intelligently. So somebody in the Amazon, out of 150,000 different species of plants and trees, selected two that are not psychoactive on their own, but when put together, create an extraordinary visionary brew. Ayahuasca means the vine of the dead. What it's connected to in South American religious and spiritual thinking is what happens to us when we die. The Tucano, who are an Amazonian people who work regularly with ayahuasca, I mean the Tucano actually will give a teaspoonful of ayahuasca to a newborn infant. They feel ayahuasca is so important that there is a hidden realm around us, which we are not normally aware of and we need to be aware of it. Ayahuasca is an important part of that. In their ayahuasca journeys, the Tucano shamans experience visions and they will then come back to an alert, normal, problem-solving state of consciousness and they will paint and depict their visions. What's intriguing, and I go into it in the book, is that quite a number of the Tucano paintings of the other world, of the afterlife realm, of the entrance to the other world, are geometrical and they look exactly like the geoglyphs. So I'm beginning to wonder whether these geoglyphs were part of a system of spiritual ideas concerning what happens to us after death and what we need to do in this life to ensure a beneficial outcome. And oddly enough, that same system of ideas is found in the Mississippi Valley. In the Amazon, it involves particularly ayahuasca and the belief that the ayahuasca journey takes you to the afterlife realm and a journey along the Milky Way. In the Mississippi Valley, the mound builder sites up and down the Mississippi Valley, particularly Moundville in Alabama, exactly the same system of religious ideas associated with geometrical constructions. That on death, the soul, they're very specific, ascends to the constellation of Orion, transits from the constellation of Orion to the Milky Way, makes a journey along the Milky Way, which they call the Path of Souls, and encounters challenges and ordeals where the soul must account for the life that it has lived. Then we go to Egypt, and what do we find? The same system of ideas. The soul must rise up to the constellation of Orion. There's a narrow shaft cut through the southern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which targets directly the lowest of the three stars of Orion's belt, widely accepted as a star shaft or a soul shaft. The soul would rise up through that shaft, get to the constellation of Orion, which stands by the banks of the Milky Way. It would then transit to the Milky Way, which the ancient Egyptians called the Winding Waterway, and it would make a journey along the Milky Way where it would be confronted by challenges and ordeals. Very similar idea to the Tucano, very similar idea to the Mississippi Valley. As far as we know, none of these cultures were in contact with one another. Either we're dealing with a huge, unbelievable, extraordinarily detailed coincidence involving architecture and ideas, or we're looking at the legacy that was inherited in all of these different places from a remote common ancestor. And I believe that that's what we're looking at. What do we think the people from the ancient Mississippi Valley, that culture, what do we think they were using if they weren't using ayahuasca, or do we think that's what they were using? Well, that's an interesting question, whether visionary substances are the only way to get into altered states of consciousness. And I would say they are definitely not. Of course, there are visionary substances which are used in Native American vision quests. I've had the privilege of peyote ceremony with the Native American church. I've never done that. What is that like? I loved it, actually. I thought it was amazing. It doesn't overpower you in the way that DMT or ayahuasca does. It's much gentler. It's much more ... You feel much more integrated and connected with nature. Your thought processes are quite clear. It felt just like a very beautiful and healing experience. And I love the ceremony that I'm inside a teepee with 30 or 40 other people. There are specific roles that are assigned to those different individuals. One will keep the door. Another will be responsible for the fire, which is a work of art in itself. Just gazing into that fire and the glowing embers is enough to induce an altered state of consciousness on its own. Incredible drumming, which drives your state of consciousness into a kind of peak experience. This is a technology for accessing other levels of experience and other levels of reality. It's clear that the Native Americans had a number of advanced technologies in this area. The Sundance doesn't use a substance, but it uses austerity. It uses pain to drive an altered state of consciousness. The objective in every case seems to be, let's just for a while get ourselves out of the narrow rigid frame of the alert problem-solving state of consciousness. We all need that. It's incredibly useful. Hunter-gatherers need it just as much as people in cities need it, but it's not the only state of consciousness available to human beings. Maybe that's one of the big mistakes that we're making in our culture and was not made in shamanistic societies.