In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe and his good friend Chris talk about their trip to Peru, Ayahuasca, and why Chris changed his name from Chris to Aubrey. Also, we talk about the weirdest thing we've ever done with ayahuasca and why it's one of the most potent psychedelics known to man. And of course, there's a story about how a guy named Chris got into a fight with the Peruvian government. Joe and Chris also talk about how they met, and how they became friends. And how they ended up on a trip to the Amazon jungle with a bunch of root eaters. And they talk about what it's like to be on a psychedelic trip in the middle of the night in the rain forest in the Amazon. This episode is brought to you by The Fleshlight. If you go to TheFleshlight.net and enter the code ROGAN, you will get 15% off the number 1 sex toy for men, Holla at your boy. Don t be scared, don't be scared. You can shoot loads at a discount! You can also get a discount on your next purchase at your local Target or Best Fiends store, where you can get 20% off your entire purchase, plus free shipping and free shipping throughout the month of January. Thanks to our sponsor, The FUELlight.co.nz, we'll be giving you 15% of your purchase when you use the code "ROGAN" at checkout, plus a free shipping on your first purchase, and a discount code "JOEJOGANATION" when you enter JOEJANE. You'll get 10% OFF your first week of the month, plus an additional $5 and a FREE shipping offer when you buy your first month, and an extra $10 discount when you redeem the code is in the second month, you'll get a maximum of $35.00. We'll be shipping anywhere in the US, JOBRYAN. JOE JOBAN EXPERIENCES. The JOBEYE Experience, we're giving you $10 and $10,000 gets you get $5,000, JOERogan Experience, and they'll get $25,000 shipping and $20,000 in the JOBANE EXCLUSION when you sign up for JOE'S PRODUCED. I hope you enjoy this deal!
00:00:02.000The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by The Fleshlight.
00:00:06.000If you go to JoeRogan.net, click on the link for The Fleshlight and enter in the code name ROGAN, you will get 15% off the number one sex toy for men.
00:01:29.000I mean, we've really gotten deep into who Duncan is.
00:01:32.000Man, I know Duncan so much more over this last year.
00:01:35.000It went from going to a comedy club and saying hi to somebody, like, oh, how was your week, to actually digging into this person for two to three hours.
00:01:42.000Yeah, finding out their thoughts on everything.
00:03:43.000They don't know what its real true function is, but they do know that it is the most incredible hallucination-creating, visionary, psychedelic experience known to man.
00:03:58.000It's a struggling, incredible experience.
00:04:00.000But it's not orally active because it's in so many different plants that if you got it orally from eating it, man, people would go on DMT trips all the time because it's in all sorts of different grasses and plants and usually in a combinatory state with a bunch of other, whether they're active or non-psychoactive ingredients.
00:04:25.000Like some plants actually contain 5-methoxy dimethyltryptamine, which is another form of DMT that's just as, actually more powerful but unique and different than the regular DMT experience.
00:04:41.000What ayahuasca is, is the shamans of South America figured out, and no one knows how long ago they figured this out, whether it's a thousand years, ten thousand years.
00:04:51.000It's all guesswork, because there's no written history of it.
00:04:56.000The reason why it's not orally active is your stomach produces something called monoamine oxidase, and that breaks down dimethyltryptamine in the oral form.
00:05:05.000So once it gets to your stomach, where any...
00:05:09.000Like marijuana, when you eat it, it would get into your bloodstream.
00:05:13.000Well, it can't because the monoamine oxidase crushes it.
00:05:16.000So what they figured out how to do is take the root of one plant, the leaves of one plant, and the vine of another plant.
00:05:23.000And they don't even grow near each other.
00:05:25.000They're on completely other parts of the jungle.
00:05:28.000And there's over 100,000 different types of plants in the jungle.
00:05:33.000So the fact that they figured out how to do this, and thousands of years ago, and when you ask them, who knows?
00:07:26.000Well, I guess if you do it right, it kills people.
00:07:30.000Maybe with the boiling fumes or something like that.
00:07:33.000The point is, it's amazing that these people figured out long before we were ever driving cars or sending emails, they figured out how to combine these two plants and make an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine that, in the words of the shaman, connects you to the spirit world.
00:07:54.000And the idea is that there is a world that is all around us all the time, but we just cannot tune into it.
00:08:01.000And it is a world of souls, and it is a world of the afterlife, and it is a world of non-embodied entities that are, to the experiencer, to the subjective person that's having this experience, they are As real, if not more real, than this life itself.
00:08:32.000So it's kind of a school of shamans that have been studying and training.
00:08:37.000And going to classes and things, led by a master shaman who's found out the best in South America, learned from them for 30 years, and is now trying to teach people here in the U.S. about it.
00:08:46.000So in order to get into this, this is kind of like the master class here.
00:08:50.000This is the finishing course, going down and taking the medicine down in the Amazon.
00:08:54.000So in order to get admitted, I had to write a letter, and they reviewed it, and did whatever they do to kind of approve me to go along.
00:09:02.000But eventually I was like, So did you have to go through any stages besides writing the letter?
00:10:40.000I've been watching a lot of that Jeremy Wade's River Monsters, so I'm just looking at this muddy brown water, thinking of these eels that burrow through people's flesh and sawfish and all those things that he's pulled out of there.
00:10:52.000But yeah, three hours up is two and a half or so up the river to this place.
00:12:31.000It actually got a little bit tougher when I was trying to speak about things that are not commonplace, like with the maestro, the head shaman.
00:12:37.000I mean, trying to communicate with him.
00:12:57.000And isn't that one of the names for the...
00:12:59.000There's two different churches, I believe, in North America that have won through the Supreme Court the ability to take ayahuasca in a ceremonial Christian religion.
00:13:47.000They were all super good-natured, but this is not the crew that I would bring on board like a seaworthy vessel if I was going to, you know, cross the ocean.
00:14:23.000And in a sense, a lot of people, whatever you become anything, you've got to fake it before you make it.
00:14:29.000You know, like, I've had this conversation with my friends about comics that are comics that are just starting out, and like, you know, that's not a fucking comic.
00:14:50.000It's even grosser than faking being a rock star.
00:14:53.000If you're in fucking high school and you're wearing black nail polish and you're growing your hair long, you decide to fake like you're a rock star until you become a rock star.
00:16:22.000But anyway, the point is we're at a gym and we're lifting weights and this girl has this cute little body and she's talking to him and Eddie is like, so what's up?
00:22:06.000I've had some DMT experiences that were so intense, I took years off.
00:22:10.000I was just like, whoa, I need to think about this.
00:22:13.000But DMT, the orally active version, is much slower and more gradual, and you can kind of tune in and out of it.
00:22:21.000You can get in the meditative state when it's full-blown, or as it's slipping away, you can get right back in there if you relax and tune into it.
00:24:01.000He integrates some of the Christian saints with some of the ayahuasca work, works with the masculine aspects, has a big bio of all he's accomplished.
00:24:10.000I was like, all right, whatever, but I'm not really going to be into the mixing of the Christian ideals.
00:25:33.000So you eat, you sit around and just wait for the party to begin?
00:25:37.000Yeah, I got to know my roommate and kind of wait for it, and then they talk about it a little bit, and then you have a few minutes to kind of gather yourself and get ready for the lunch.
00:25:52.000No, they have to boil it, boil one, boil the other, mix it.
00:25:56.000But each mystro has their own secret, perfect recipe that they've learned from...
00:26:00.000I would want to see them cook it because after the movie Altered States, that was one of the trippiest parts when the guy was cooking up the shit.
00:26:11.000Actually, there's a video I posted on my blog kind of midway down on warriorpoet.us that has actually the maestro that I work with and it shows some pictures of them boiling it with the big sticks.
00:26:21.000And it has like a big cast iron Yeah, big pots.
00:26:24.000Two different pots brewing side by side.
00:26:27.000One with the leaf, I think, and one with the vine.
00:26:52.000My fearless compatriots were kind of laughing and joking around.
00:26:56.000And I felt confident, but I was very calm.
00:26:58.000I knew I was going into some pretty intense work.
00:27:01.000So we get in there, and then they do some of the opening ceremony type of stuff.
00:27:11.000So all of us are faced like spokes of a wheel towards the center of the room and we all have a puke bucket kind of near us because you know most people purge during this process it's part of the healing process and then he calls us up one by one kind of looks you know looks at you assesses and then pours a coconut pours the ayahuasca in like a polished coconut husk and you drink And it is thick and bitter and just tastes like earth and fire.
00:31:03.000So he only has, his tools are, he has his breath, which he uses more than anything, and then he has a kind of a branch with a bunch of leaves that he uses as sort of like a rattle, and those are his tools in his voice, in his whistling.
00:31:18.000And he also has some cinnamon sticks, which he chews at the end, but I'll get to that.
00:31:54.000So it starts going and you start to get that energetic activation, same as you do on mushrooms or something, where you know Something's about to happen.
00:32:02.000Your closed-eyed visuals start to splash with color and light and things like that.
00:32:07.000Your stomach starts to gurgle a little bit.
00:32:10.000So that was happening, and he started his Icarus.
00:32:12.000Starts slowly, kind of like it is now, whistling and building, building.
00:32:17.000And then, in about an hour, you hear the first person just retch, like...
00:32:23.000And it's not like just a gentle bulimic-style vomit.
00:32:26.000This is like years of rot just pouring out of every organ that they have.
00:32:31.000And they're half yelling, half puking when they do it.
00:33:28.000Another person started pretending that he could sing the Ikros, but it was like a kid that thinks he knows the words to a song.
00:33:33.000She was like two beats off and it was awful.
00:33:36.000And then another lady completely lost her internal monologue.
00:33:39.000And this culminated throughout the night and her finally saying, I can't tell if I shit my pants or if I didn't shit my pants, like over and over again.
00:34:06.000So that part, that part was rough in this first, in this first session.
00:34:10.000And then, you know, right as I'm starting to get, you know, get some serious visions, lady next to me, and I like shuddered and she puked all over my socks.
00:34:19.000So they pitch black and I'm peeling off the wet chunky wool from my feet and put them on the side and just curl back up on my mat.
00:34:33.000And it's kind of signatory for the way the rest of the night went because it was intense and dark.
00:34:39.000And, you know, what started happening is Snakes started coming in through the jungle.
00:34:46.000I had visions of snakes and they would look at me and then immediately start savagely going inside my body and eating my organs, eating my throat, going down my throat and eating their way out and exploding through my body.
00:34:58.000And I know enough from psychedelic experiences to just witness and allow and just let it happen.
00:35:03.000Because if you try and fight it, you're fucked.
00:38:02.000And that actually started to shake me a little bit.
00:38:04.000Because I've never had it myself work against me in that kind of magnitude.
00:38:11.000I've had visions of things before that were dark and I always worked through and I ended up feeling good.
00:38:17.000That was a more challenging experience.
00:38:19.000And then at a certain point, you know, I had to just apply the same philosophy and say, you know what, if this is the end, I'm going to have a fucking hell of a six months, you know, and I'm going to do everything I can and enjoy my life.
00:38:33.000And then finally at that point I was able to get a sense of peace and I felt myself getting sucked back down into the earth.
00:38:40.000Kind of like in the, the only thing I can describe is that movie Avatar.
00:38:43.000You know when the little fibers grow up around the body and it like connects it back down to the earth.
00:38:48.000I felt this deep relaxation just like right back down into the earth.
00:38:53.000And then you know that was kind of the end.
00:38:57.000That was the climax of this first experience for me.
00:39:00.000Did you get a sense that it was a purposeful trip?
00:39:03.000That the reason why it takes you on this destruction of your body and the snakes and everything like that, is it supposed to scare the fuck out of you to break you down?
00:39:35.000And I think part of the intent of what the shaman was doing, which meanwhile, by the way, is Icaros were growing in intensity and it was like the room was swirling with a voice.
00:41:02.000So that first experience, so after he comes by, the shaman comes by, he asks me, you know, I say, you know, I managed to muster something like, I told him I was dead, good and dead, and he just laughed and kind of, that was, I think, when we He started to give me a little bit of respect because the rest of the room was just crushed.
00:41:24.000I was crushed too, but at least I was able to sit up and deal with it a little bit.
00:44:49.000It's like you get brought to the heat of the battle, and then you just ignore it and shut your eyes, and it goes away, but it sticks with you.
00:45:24.000It seems to me that just jumping right into an ayahuasca trip without any previous psychedelic experience is like taking no martial arts classes and fighting in the UFC. It just seems ridiculous.
00:45:36.000Wouldn't you want to build your way up slowly, smoke some salvia, eat a brownie, slowly dip your legs into the river that is the psychedelic experience?
00:45:45.000Because the ayahuasca experience and the DMT experience is supposed to be the two most powerful that you can ever have back to back.
00:45:52.000One being a bit more on the spiritual side, the ayahuasca.
00:45:56.000Supposedly because it's longer and not as intense, it sort of connects you in a way that you can interpret better than the DMT flash.
00:46:05.000The DMT flash a lot of times is so mind-bogglingly alien that There's no words for it.
00:46:13.000You come back with a lot of confusion.
00:46:15.000There's some message in it somewhere, but it takes a while to decode.
00:46:18.000I talk to them about smoking DMT as well, and I'll get to that when I get...
00:46:21.000I kind of have to set up kind of the paradigm first, and then I'll tell you what they said about smoking DMT versus taking ayahuasca.
00:46:27.000So did you go right back in the second day?
00:46:53.000I felt like I learned some valuable lessons about You know the importance of the physical realm and I feel like I conquered some deep fears about cancer and shit that was going on like it was it like I'm not worried about that anymore like it took me there to overcome it and you know really that first night for me was you know I call it my death it was like the old parts of me that night died you know anything weak was killed off by the ayahuasca But it's funny, you said that, you know, the UFC analogy.
00:47:21.000I wrote in my blog, it was like I was kind of with a bunch of karate black belts.
00:47:26.000And, you know, they took ayahuasca and just got punched in the face.
00:47:29.000They were like, what the hell is going on here?
00:47:32.000You know, they didn't really, you know, they had the training.
00:47:34.000But it's different when you're in a street fight, you know, and that's...
00:47:38.000I didn't have the training, but I've been in a few brawls in my day.
00:47:41.000So I think that that ends up being a bit more important as far as being able to handle the experience.
00:47:47.000But then, you know, at another point, the second night, I wish I did have some of their training because I got an opportunity To do some cool shit, but I just didn't know what to do.
00:48:03.000The people from the first session, a lot of them ducked out, but there was new people who wanted a strong experience, so his legend started to spread in the camp.
00:48:11.000So we had a few more people, probably 15. And I went up to him beforehand and I said, you know, Maestro, I said, Medicina Fuerte, like I wanted a strong dose.
00:48:21.000And he looks at me and he smiled and he remembered that I handled the last one pretty well.
00:48:25.000So when it was my turn to go up, he fills the cup to the brim, like to the brim.
00:48:29.000And, you know, I look at it and set my intent.
00:48:32.000And my intent was to See how far I could go.
00:48:35.000Like, I wanted to go back to that place he showed me at the end of the session, and I wanted to experience joy and happiness in that side of life, the opposite side, and just see where it could take me.
00:48:44.000And that was really my goal in doing that.
00:48:46.000And I picked up some tips from some of the other shamans about how to set kind of your own spiritual armor and kind of prevent things from interfering and taking you off your intent.
00:49:14.000You know, take little gems from the visions you see, things like that.
00:49:18.000At some point, some eels came out of the water, and they started coming after me, and it was much like the snakes.
00:49:23.000And I looked at the eels, and I was able to kind of mentally stop them with the armor, which is a trick, you know, opening your witter kocha, it's called.
00:49:32.000And I was like, ah, sweet, they stopped.
00:50:09.000It felt like every cell and neuron in my brain was completely synced in perfect alignment and glowing radioactive and I had no top of my head on.
00:51:01.000Kind of like just a cleanse you know like I had a different perspective on it so each one would bring me more like happiness until finally it reached this ecstatic state which was about 10 minutes of just pure straight ecstasy like every cell of my body felt better than it ever had Before.
00:51:19.000It was like the exact reason why we were given physical forms was to experience some kind of pleasure like this.
00:51:25.000The only thing I compare it to, and every time I make this analogy, people ask if I nutted my pants, which I didn't, but it felt like that moment of orgasm stretched for like five minutes, ten minutes.
00:55:39.000And that was at 3 o'clock in my line of vision.
00:55:42.0009 o'clock there's some kind of terraforma and kind of universal stars and but it was like boom like everything everything else was completely gone everything else I could see kind of vague outlines in white light you just got a software update yeah for sure but this is the fucking this is another crazy factor I would turn my head to the left you know turn my head 90 degrees and still the shaman's at three o'clock the terraform is at nine o'clock It did not matter which way I turned my head.
00:56:34.000They call where I was at that point the eighth dimension.
00:56:38.000And the reason why is that's the penultimate dimension.
00:56:42.000That's the last one before the ninth, which is oneness with all creation, which is just unification with all life, all creation that ever was, that ever will be.
00:56:52.000Pure solidarity with God, with the universe, whatever you want.
00:56:56.000Is that supposed to be what you're hitting when he blows the cinnamon smoke on you?
01:00:48.000Anyway, when you hear yourself saying this, you hear yourself describing it, surely part of you must think how preposterous and ridiculous this must sound to a skeptical person.
01:01:33.000But if you can control your mind, if you are what your mind believes it is, then if he thinks he's cleaning out his body, his brain will think he's cleaning out his body and it might actually have something to it, you know?
01:01:51.000I was there and I have to report it honestly.
01:01:54.000I feel like that's my mission to come back.
01:01:57.000And I feel like it's one of the reasons why it happened to me so I could talk about it and talk to you guys and get it out there.
01:02:02.000But the next thing I did was I looked at my business.
01:02:07.000Very lucidly looked at all my marketing channels and different things, thought about AlphaBrain, thought about the different things, thought about, you know, very, very conservative Republican-type thinking about my life and my business.
01:02:20.000And I saw some channels that I was working hard to produce, and I was like, there's no resources there.
01:02:24.000And I could physically visualize, you know, where there was pools and these tubes that were feeding like a giant machine.
01:02:30.000I was like, well, I'm trying to build this tube to this Pool of resources, but there's nothing there.
01:03:38.000When they first discovered it, when they started bringing it back to the Western world, they tried to call it telepathine.
01:03:46.000Because of shared experiences, but because of the scientific rules of nomenclature, because they isolated the compound as harmine already, one of the compounds, they went with that because it was the first description of it.
01:04:01.000But they were going to call it telepathine because of the shared experiences.
01:04:05.000There were some husband and wife couples in different huts that did, that were witnessing.
01:04:10.000witnessing one would just witness the other's entire experience and be like, they would try and talk to each other about it and be like, Yeah, I know, I saw the whole thing.
01:04:18.000But as far as like the group in my setting, it seemed to be more closely linked to family, you know, family ties or relationship romantic ties, things like that, not necessarily what So the shared experiences are with people that already have a relationship?
01:04:33.000That's what seemed to be happening in this trip.
01:04:36.000Yeah, you're already tuned in together.
01:04:38.000Well, you know, there's that feeling always when you're in a relationship that you become a part of that person.
01:04:43.000I mean, I think every deep, intense relationship that I've ever had, you feel like it's more than just two people hanging out together.
01:04:52.000Somehow or another, you connect on some...
01:04:56.000I don't want to say spiritual energy, some sort of intangible level, which is why breaking up is so painful because a part of you is literally missing.
01:05:08.000You don't feel right because some of you is missing.
01:05:11.000So that would kind of make sense that those are the type of people that would have a shared experience because they literally have their souls are somehow or another connected.
01:05:19.000They have some sort of an inexorable bond.