Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Today it's my pleasure to invite Nissan to the Brainforest Café.
He has an interesting life. He started his career as a medical doctor and began his work as a general practitioner in an urban community clinic system.
He then specialized in ophthalmology and practiced in a small town for 30 years.
He became dissatisfied working strictly on the physical level and received training in gestalt psychotherapy and had a small private practice.
He became interested in the field of natural vision improvement which combined his interest in vision with present moment embodied presence.
A reading from a tarot card psychic suggested the need for working in and with the spiritual realm to facilitate the natural vision work and suggested there were some gifts for him in shamanism.
His wife had had a powerful experience at a ceremony with Don Jose Campos and encouraged him to explore ayahuasca as a method to open himself spiritually.
He had two very different but powerful experiences with Don Jose and participated in a plant dieta in the Amazon in 2005. With Don Jose, he received what he interpreted as an initiatory experience and felt called to be trained as a vegetalista.
He embarked on the training under Don Jose and Don Lucho's guidance and began leading ceremonies in the US in 2009 and in 2011 began leading plant dietas in the Amazon.
He continues to lead ceremonies in various locations in the US and occasionally Canada, and also leads dietas in the Amazon twice a year.
So, Nisan, welcome to the Brainforest Café.
[00:02:20] Nissan: Thanks for inviting me, Dennis.
[00:02:22] Dennis McKenna: Thank you. Thank you for being here.
So tell me a bit about your life's journey. A little more detail than that in the introduction.
What led you to this place in life where you felt compelled to call to become a vegetalista, which I assume is far outside your normal cultural background or interests. So you are coming to this not as an indigenous person, although I don't want to assume anything, but you're coming to it as well. As I say, sometimes we're all indigenous to earth, Right?
So tell me your story, Nissan.
[00:03:09] Nissan: It's kind of hard to know how far back to go, but, you know, I was raised as a reformed Jewish in the reformed Jewish tradition and pretty much hated every.
Every second. I was in Hebrew school and was a rebel there. I spent a lot of time out in the. Out in the hallway, you know, getting kicked out of class.
[00:03:31] Dennis McKenna: So always a good sign, right?
You were an edge pusher.
I take that as a good side.
[00:03:42] Nissan: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it. That way.
I was a top student in the regular school. So it was an interesting experience being the bad kid in Hebrew school, but it wasn't for me.
And the name I use in ceremony, Nissan, happened to be the name that was given to me in Hebrew school.
It's a Hebrew month where it's the month, the celebration of miracles. That's where the. That's when the seder occurs.
So I was really turned off to religion and I think spirituality altogether, you know, early on and, you know, started working with.
With plant medicines and synthetic medicines. And I was always surprised how much I learned about myself and the world working with these medicines. It was intriguing.
I think, in medical school is when I did most of my experimentation with those kind of medicines.
I ended up medicines, synthetic, an mda. Do you remember mda?
[00:04:58] Dennis McKenna: I do. I'm old enough to remember mda.
[00:05:03] Nissan: I had some big experiences with that.
I got into medical school and I was interested in the concept of holism, you know, taking care of the whole person, you know, body, you know, emotions, you know, spiritual, you know, the spirit of the person. And so I went into family medicine, you know, thinking that's where I'd find it.
And I don't know, maybe I wasn't at the greatest program, but I was pretty disillusioned. You know, mostly what I was doing was writing prescriptions for medicine that I didn't feel good about. The patients didn't feel good about taking them, and I didn't even feel like I was taking very good care of the physical body, much less anything else.
But it was a concept that I embraced, holistic medicine, but I didn't find it in family medicine.
[00:05:58] Dennis McKenna: You were interested in holistic medicine, but the medicine you were practicing was anything but holistic. So you were disillusioned. May I ask you where you were studying, what institution?
[00:06:11] Nissan: I was at the University of California in San Diego.
[00:06:15] Dennis McKenna: Okay.
Yeah.
[00:06:16] Nissan: Really, I felt like I was my master. My field of mastery was colds, okay?
Stuff that went away on its own, and everything else was better taken care of by the specialist.
So anyhow, I went in a completely different direction. I went into ophthalmology, and I just wanted to fix things with my hands. I didn't want to write prescriptions for medicines. I just wanted to fix things with my hands.
And that felt like it was pretty much on track. But I never really felt like this is why I came to Earth to be an eye doctor. But it was pretty good. I helped a lot of people and had a nice practice in there. But Eventually I became disillusioned again, just working on the physical level to just didn't seem to be where I was at.
So I got trained along with my wife in Gestalt psychotherapy, the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, which was one of the older schools of gestalt medicine.
My wife, who in the book I call Lucy, had already been a practicing Gestalt therapist, but hadn't had the formal training.
So together we got trained. And the part that really excited me was body centered therapy, bringing the body fully into the therapeutic field.
And often we would work without words, just with the body. And it really felt like that was getting somewhere, that was really getting somewhere.
So I had some powerful experiences myself with that and with others as well.
And then eventually I found this field of natural vision improvement, which not many people know about. It's not well thought of by the medical establishment.
And people go in a lot of different directions with that. Many people do get into the eye exercises to lessen our dependence on glasses.
But really what excited me was the work of Rosemary Gadam Gordon. She did this work called Seeing from the Core.
It was really about.
Well, she used the phrase being at home behind the eyes and being really visually present.
And it seemed like that combined my interest in vision with my interest in present moment experiences.
Gestalt therapy being very present, moment oriented. And like most of my life, I've been looking for ways to increase the percentage of time that I'm in the present moment.
And so I started doing experiential workshops with this, guiding others to basically be relaxed in the body, to be breathing and being really at home behind their eyes and using the eyes as strictly receptive organs, not going out and grasping for images. People with visual problems often use the eyes in a very relaxed way. They're straining to try to see. And this was the opposite of that.
[00:09:52] Dennis McKenna: Right.
I can speak to that personally because I've had a lot of issues with my eyes all my life. I was severely myopic as a kid, so I had big thick glasses back in those days when that was the solution to that.
And then that I've had, I have to shout out to ophthalmology and the skill of ophthalmologists, which I respect greatly because it's very specialized. And I've had two detached retinas in my life and all kinds of things like that. And if it was not for the high tech medicine, I would be blind today.
Now I'm only partly blind. You know, I actually can see pretty well, but you know, I have lots of issues with vision, and so I'm grateful that they for the high tech medicine that was able to, you know, correct these essentially emergency situations when, as you know, when a retina detaches, it's an emergency, it has to be dealt with immediately.
So just saying, I have known ophthalmologists and respect ophthalmologists, so you were in a good field, but we could move on. It was not satisfied for you, or it was and then it wasn't. Perhaps.
[00:11:22] Nissan: Can we just stay with you just a little bit about your eyes?
[00:11:25] Dennis McKenna: Sure.
[00:11:27] Nissan: I didn't know that, Dennis, that you had had retinal detachments and you had one in each eye.
[00:11:33] Dennis McKenna: Yes, at different times. I had one in 2001 and then another one in the right eye.
We got to the doctor in time and he was able to correct it. As far as I know, it was perfect surgery.
And the second time I did not get to the doctor quite in time. So although I eventually got the operation, it was a different doctor, completely crazy circumstances, which I won't go into. But basically she was not able to completely reattach the retina, restore it. So I have, in my left eye, I have basically no peripheral vision, which makes for some interesting moments on the freeway and things like that. But otherwise I'm functional, you know, I can see out of both eyes.
Take a lot of trouble, you know.
[00:12:33] Nissan: Yeah, well, you know, nearsightedness is a probably multifactorial condition, and often people have a strong family history of high nearsightedness.
Do you?
[00:12:49] Dennis McKenna: Yes, yes and no. Interestingly, Well, both my brother and I were very biopic. Very. And if there's a genetic component, it didn't come from my father because my father prided himself on how excellent his vision was right up until the moment that he died. He had excellent vision. He was a pilot, so he was very functional. My mother was not severely nearsighted, as far as I know, but she was nearsighted.
And somehow both my brother and I, we just got the wrong genes, I guess, because he was myopic and I was even more myopic back in childhood. So, of course, all this could be corrected with glasses and eventually with contact lenses.
I never got along well with contact lenses.
I just. They were just too uncomfortable. But I do mind with glasses, you know, I'm not a hazard to most people most of the time. Although, like I say, there are moments on the freeway that are a little dicey sometimes. But, you know, you adapt. One adapts, you know.
[00:14:13] Nissan: Well, that's one of the.
There's a generalization that.
That interested me in this natural vision world was that nearsightedness can be like a reaction or an adaptation to fear and farsightedness to anger. This is just a generalization.
So I started when I was practicing ophthalmology. I just started asking the patients, what was going on with you and your family when you got your first pair of glasses? And I was amazed how many people said something to the effect of, well, we moved around a lot, and we moved to a new place. And I was a new kid in school, and I was kind of shy, and I spent a lot of time in my room, and my world kind of came in, as did my vision. And so I'm just curious, what. What was going on when you got your first pair of glasses?
[00:15:15] Dennis McKenna: Well, it was so long ago, I hardly remember. I mean, I was not.
Both Terrence and I got our glasses really early. So I must have been six or maybe even five when I got my first pair of glasses.
So my memory of those days, I mean, it was not. My childhood was not particularly stressful. I didn't feel that it was. There may have been a fear component because my brother was four years older than I was, and he was very invested in torturing me, you know, psychologically and physically, as big brothers will do.
So there was certainly an element of fear in my life, but not his, because he was the older one, he was the dominant one.
I don't know what his excuse was, but maybe fear was a factor here.
Never really connected the vision problems with fear, but now that you mention it, it's possible.
And the idea being behind your eyes, I think that's a very interesting concept because.
Particularly when you relate to psychedelics, because psychedelics, that's where the action is. Right behind the eyelids is where it's going on, the internal movie of visions and hallucinations and basically everything else.
So that's an interesting idea.
[00:16:57] Nissan: Yeah. Well, yes, about that time, I had a.
Basically a psychic reading from a friend who used the tarot as a basis of her reading. And then she'd go on from there. And she said, to do this natural vision work that you're proposing, you're going to need to work in the spiritual realm in a way that you're not familiar with. And I think she mentioned a few things, but I remember her saying, you should check out shamanism. I think there's something there for you.
So although I had tried ayahuasca in the mid-90s, there were two vetalistas from Peru, coming to the area near where I lived.
Christina Mendoza and Jorge Gonzalez, they had been coming there for years. And I got in just right at the end and it was, you know, people had prepared me for like, oh, you're going to hear screaming and crying and people throwing up. But it was. It was like a Morgan there, other than like they were singing the same song for four hours. And it was. I was. I would. I didn't feel the medicine at all. I drank two cups of this pond water stuff and it didn't seem like anything was happening in the room. And, you know, I didn't know at the time that that's unusual. You know, it isn't unusual for a couple people not to have much going on, but for the whole room, that's unusual. So I think their medicine was kind.
[00:18:26] Dennis McKenna: Of like weak medicine. Yeah. Surprises me. The one name you mentioned, Christina Mendoza, whom I haven't met, but she has a very good reputation. Very good. You know, I don't know about the other gentlemen that she worked with, but she is.
She's well respected in this field, so I'd be surprised if her medicine was weak.
But you never know, you know, where it came from, really.
[00:18:56] Nissan: Right.
Well, she seemed like a teenager at that time. She was quite young.
[00:19:02] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
[00:19:03] Nissan: So it was probably, you know, the other person's medicine.
[00:19:08] Dennis McKenna: Over time, she matured and became very much her own vegetalista. You know, she got her own chops, if you will, and did dietas and all that.
[00:19:20] Nissan: Absolutely, yeah.
[00:19:21] Dennis McKenna: So how did you meet Don Jose? I know Don Jose fairly well.
I've sat ceremony with him a few times. And, you know, he's been to the States. He's been.
I've met him in Peru several times and many people I know another figure in this area who is the real deal, in a sense. He's a real shaman, a real vegetalista. There's nothing charlatan about this man.
He's come by his knowledge and his skills honestly by doing the dieta, by doing the training and so on.
That's the tradition or that's the.
He was essentially your maestro. He was your teacher, your primary teacher.
[00:20:16] Nissan: Well, and Don Lucho, who had been Jose's kind of business partner initially. So the two of them have been my teachers and continue to be my teachers and friends.
So I got to work with Jose in 2005.
My wife had actually, in 2004, ended up in a ceremony in an unusual way that a person in our life that had done a little work for us Wasn't really a close friend came back from a dieta in Peru and said, you know, Lucy, it was very strange that in my visions during the ceremony, I kept seeing you, you know, sitting here doing the medicine with us. And Lucy didn't know anything about this medicine. But the next time Jose came to the United States, she had a very powerful experience with him.
And she said, you know, this medicine is known to open one spiritually. Maybe you want to check it out. Maybe all ayahuasca isn't the same. Maybe it matters who made it and who's leading the ceremony. And so that's why I went, so that I could do this natural vision work.
But my first experience with a dentist was I was really gifted with a classic entheogenic experience where this concept that I had already embraced, that I guess you call it pantheism, that everything is God in a different form.
You know, I had an experience of that. And, you know, as, you know, because you've worked with the medicine, you know, the medicine can give you a real lived experience of something that you previously had just really held as a concept or an idea.
[00:22:16] Dennis McKenna: Right?
[00:22:18] Nissan: It was a very, very profound, you know, kind of paradigm shifting experience. And I think at some point, even right then I went, wow, you know, what could be more powerful than holding space for people to have these very profound experiences?
Well, I guess I'll tell this story. So I did a Friday night and a Sunday night, and we were told not to have sex for three days, but I thought that was kind of optional.
[00:22:48] Dennis McKenna: Saturday, you broke the rules.
[00:22:52] Nissan: I broke the rule, which I don't think that the problem was so much I broke the rule, but I felt really guilty about it. And so I came into Sunday feeling really guilty.
And Dennis, I went into a hell, a hell zone. I didn't really believe in the devil, but I was, like, down in what seemed like hell. And, I mean, blood was dripping from the walls, and at one point, horns popped off my head and a tail and claws.
[00:23:20] Dennis McKenna: And you should have listened, right?
You should have listened.
[00:23:29] Nissan: To make matters worse, I thought, well, this isn't right. You know, I should be, you know, flying with the angels like the previous night. So I took another full, full cup. Back then, Jose gave everyone, you know, if you. If you came up for medicine, you got a whole shot glass. So you came up for anymore medicine, you got a whole shot glass.
[00:23:47] Dennis McKenna: So.
[00:23:49] Nissan: So that just, you know, increased, you know, the hell that I was in. And my particular hell was that every issue or insecurity I'd ever had in my life just came back and was just in my face and I couldn't turn away.
And I was just beating myself up from being such a flawed human being.
And it was horrible. It was really horrible. And it didn't resolve at the end of the ceremony. I was just laying there in a puddle and no one could really console me.
And it was really a horrible night. And back then, Jose's pre ceremony talk was about one minute long. He'd say, the ceremony is going to last for four or five hours. Don't talk to each other, don't touch each other. There'll be multiple servings of medicine.
But he didn't mention that, you know, if you're in a bad place, it's going to go away. You're going to, you're going to get your normal state of consciousness back. And I was afraid that I had messed my mind up forever with this horrible jungle juice and that I was.
[00:24:58] Dennis McKenna: Going to need to be concerned right when that happens.
But that's part of the problem. That's part of the process of healing. I mean, to go through these.
The classic shamanic sort of traditional trope or theme is in shamanism, the shaman becomes torn apart, completely destroyed, literally. I mean, then visions of being dismembered and all of that. Those are very common in shamanism. And that's part of the initiatory process. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but that's, I mean, that's what ayahuasca does and to a certain extent, other psychedelics as well. I mean, if you want to put it in the language of neuroscience or the contemporary way of looking at this, which I in no way say is an adequate way to look at it, but they talk about the default mode network and, you know, psychedelics. You're deliberately disabling the default mode network.
That's the whole point.
You're disabling all these habitual behaviors and thought patterns that we inhabit all the time so that we can function. You're going to a place where you're dropping all that and you have to be open to whatever happens. It's really about surrender, as you know, surrender to the medicine.
And the medicine is not always kind, you know, and in your case, in this particular case, it was not kind to you, but there was a reason for it, right?
[00:26:47] Nissan: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:26:48] Dennis McKenna: Well put.
[00:26:50] Nissan: So in the sharing circle, the next day, you know, I shared with the group and Jose, you know, what my experience was. And I thought I was being punished by ayahuasca for having had sex the night before.
And Jose normally would just kind of sit there falling asleep. You know, he thinks that, you know, people in our part of the world talk way too much about themselves, and, you know, they're not in the present moment. And, you know, I think he's. He's onto something here.
But he kind of. Everything had to be go through an interpreter, so it was very tedious. But. But he really kind of woke up. And here I'm crying and telling him this, and he's looking at me, he's laughing. And I couldn't. I was incredulous. How could this guy be so callous that I had the worst night of my life? And he's laughing.
And then when I said, I think that the punishment was a little excessive, he laughed so hard he fell off his chair.
I wanted to punch him. And then he looked at me. And I didn't speak Spanish back then, but it seemed like I was understanding him as he was speaking Spanish. He said, everyone has a hell zone. Everyone has this place, and it's good to go down there. He said, yeah, I've been drinking for 30 years, and I still go to that place. But I go with curiosity to see, like, okay, what issues are still there.
And I know I'm going to come out of it.
So that was a little helpful, but still I needed a little.
I had to go to a therapist just one time, and she was quite helpful.
One of the things that was most distressing that second night, Dennis, was that I felt so alone the previous night. I was just surrounded by spirit. They were all over the place.
And in that hell zone, I was just alone. And I thought I had lost my privilege to ever be in communication with the spiritual realm because I had had sex.
And she just put out the possibility that maybe spirit is always there. It's just. You cut yourself off. You didn't think you deserved it.
And I think that was it. And that was all I really needed.
[00:29:19] Dennis McKenna: Closer to what it is. Yeah. The spirits, whatever you want to, if that's how you want to characterize it, they do not abandon a person, but they might let you think they've abandoned you. And that's part of a necessary perception. And then as you move through the experience and as you come down and as you integrate it, you realize, well, they were always there.
This was kind of a test, you know, I mean, and I think as a. As a physician, you more than most people, although maybe everybody realizes this, but healing involves pain. You know, very often it involves pain. And the pain can be a therapeutic thing. It could be cleansing, and that's.
Sometimes it's not. But I think in a lot of ways, especially spiritual pain or distress is a cleansing process because you're deliberately entering into a place where everything you thought you knew is open to question and none of it's valid anymore. So you have to reforge your worldview to a certain extent and reconstruct it.
But the point is, if you do that, you're stronger afterwards.
So it is a cleansing.
It is a reorganization of this default mode network, which I think is very. I don't like the term, but it's a revolution reconstruction kind of of your worldview.
And it's like if you're a building, you're getting run down, things are going wrong, the plumbing doesn't work, there are leaks in the roof and this sort of thing.
But these experiences give you a chance to get out the hammer and nails and kind of put yourself back together in a way that's stronger than you went into it. And then with that, knowing that having that power, you're a better healer for other people. And that's clearly a path that you've gone down. You've learned the dietas and the caros and the entire procedures of vegilisma. So you have these tools now, and you're able to help yourself and other people.
[00:32:04] Nissan: Yeah, well. Well put about ayahuasca and pain. And I think in my case, it was extremely humbling as well.
I thought I was a pretty experienced psychonaut, could handle pretty much everything. I thought I had, you know, knew my issues, had done work on them and that, you know, I was pretty together. But that experience was extremely humbling. You know, I. I realized, you know, I had done some work on a lot of things, but there was still lots to do. And I wasn't as together as I thought I was. And I came out of that much humbler.
I'm still working on that one. But, you know, being a physician, you know, it's easy to be arrogant. And so even my wife said, wow, you are a much better husband now. You know, prior to that, I, you know, would. If I had messed up or, you know, done something, you know, stupid or hurtful, I kind of laugh it off. I blame, you know, blame someone else and not really own it. And afterwards, after that experience, it was a lot easier to say, wow, I really. I was a jerk. I'm sorry. You know, you're right.
[00:33:23] Dennis McKenna: And so it forces you to look in a mirror in a way, and you may not like what you see. You may not, you know, some of the warts and scars that you see may not be pleasant to gaze upon. I often say about ayahuasca, you know, it does have this feminine character to it.
I mean, it's a projection, of course, but it's really like talking to your wise old grandmother or somebody. A very wise feminine wisdom. But she won't hesitate to hit you upside the head, if that's what you need.
And sometimes we all need that.
So that's a gift in a certain sense. I mean, she'll hit you upside the head, but it comes from a place of compassion in the same way that maybe your real grandmother is going to say, well, I'll whip the hell out of it, but it's really for your own good.
That's the way it works.
And then afterwards, you realize, yeah, I needed that.
That was something I needed.
[00:34:43] Nissan: So, Dennis, years ago, I had a participant in the jungle in a dieta, and he felt like he was getting beat up night after night. And he told me one night he went in and he was just pleading with the medicine. He said, ayahuasca, please be gentle with me. And when it came on, spirit said, gentle? You want gentle? See, other guys, we're the truth guys.
But as you know, you know, it seems like this, you know, I mean, I. I talk about plant spirits, but I don't actually know. You know, it's just a term. But there's some consciousness, some intelligence, you know, that we seem to be working with as well, that I call plant spirits, and has a zillion different faces. And, you know, a lot of them are that warm, loving, compassionate grandmother, but can come in like a wrecking ball as well.
[00:35:43] Dennis McKenna: And sometimes even in the same session. Other times not. I mean, some sessions are like pure hell realms, hell journeys, like you had. Other times, it's all sweetness and light, happy hippies, fuzzy bunnies.
Not with ayahuasca, but with some psychedelics. But.
But these are necessary processes that you have to deal with. It's part of the process of evolution into the vegetalismo state, or it's part of the learning process.
If you hadn't experienced these painful experiences, you would not be able to help other people, right?
Which I think in some ways makes it a little different, actually quite a bit different from what we call conventional medicine, because there is no expectation that the doctor has to undergo pain in order to heal their patients.
But maybe they should. Maybe they should have to experience that. I think there are doctors who for example, oncologists who themselves get cancer, they can appreciate from that experience much more what their own patients are going through. And I think it makes them better healers. It makes them.
What it comes down to is it's all about empathy. It's all about if you can feel another's pain.
That's a process of stepping outside your own pain and your own reference pain and feeling it from that person's perspective. And in this current world, with all the vitriol that's going on, at least in the social media sphere of the dialogue, we need more empathy. I mean, empathy is a good thing.
There's not enough of it.
[00:37:56] Nissan: I totally agree.
And Dennis, every experience I've had as a patient, I think deep in my ability to be compassionate doctor as well, because it's really being different. It's quite a different experience being at the other end of the scalpel, at the pointy end.
The end is a different experience. Yeah.
And being vulnerable, you know, being a patient is a very vulnerable experience.
So I think it's good for the doctors to experience being quite vulnerable as well, I think.
[00:38:35] Dennis McKenna: So at least to appreciate what their patients may be going through.
Medicine is, as it's conventionally practiced is very much.
Although I'm not a doctor, so I can't speak personally, but it seems to me that in conventional practice it's very much at arm's length. It's like you're the patient, I'm the healer, and I'm transmitting this energy to you through my skills or whatever manipulation it is.
But there's no reciprocal exchange in humanism and the kinds of therapies that you're involved with. There is a two way.
I mean, the ventilista can take on these energies and that's part of the healing process. I mean, they're able to effectively, they can take this burden. I think there's a folk song that says something like, pack up, pack up your sorrows and give them all to me.
That's kind of the mantra for shamanism in a certain way.
[00:39:49] Nissan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had those two ceremonies and then I went down to the jungle.
I think it was the organizer that really impressed me when she said that I'm.
Out of all her different experiences in life, you know, the ones that she had in the jungle on Dieta were the most profound.
And so that led me to going into the Jungle in 2005.
So that experience that I had that I interpret as being an initiation was this that, you know, Jose would ask at the beginning of the ceremony. Who would like to have an opportunity to sing a song or play an instrument?
So I raised my hand, but I didn't actually have a song, but I wanted to contribute something. So when my turn came, he came up to me and gave me the shakapa leaf rattle made from the shakapa palm.
[00:40:56] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:58] Nissan: So I just shook in, and I had, you know, a few notes that I would alternate between. And I was shaking the chicapra. It felt like it was shaking me. It was, you know, it was pretty intense. And when I was done saying, I laid down and expected Jose would come and retrieve his. His shakapa.
But he was doing something with a maraca or drum or something. And so I just held it as I was laying there. And then I had this experience of this kind of spirit being coming from the left and was instructing me to take the handle end of it and touch various places on my body. And it said, you've been initiated. You were a keeper of the light.
And that was all it said. And then it was gone. And I was very perplexed. You know, what. What does that mean? And did that really happen?
So as I started coming down in the ceremony, I thought to myself, well, how ridiculous. You know, I came to the jungle thinking that something mystical and magical was going to happen. And I just fabricated, you know, hallucination. And then that voice in my head came back, was kind of loud and a little angry, saying, you were initiated. Remember that?
[00:42:23] Dennis McKenna: Right. You came, you had the expectation, and it happened, but not in the way you thought it was going to happen, which is always how it presents itself in a certain way. So you went to South America several times, and you did many dietas.
What was your experience of those dietas? Why did you do those? And what did you learn from these teacher plants that you were.
I assume you were doing it in a traditional way. You were in isolation. You were working with these plants with or without ayahuasca. What did you learn from this? What did you learn about yourself and these teacher plants?
[00:43:11] Nissan: Right.
Well, you know, when I shared with Jose that I had had this experience, he was very nonplussed. He said, oh, big deal. He says, you know, many people, you know, keepers of the light. What are you going to do with it? And I said, well, I want to do this work. I want to be a vegetalista. And he said, oh, God, why would you want to do that? You're already a medical doctor. You're helping people. And I said, well, just working on the physical Level doesn't, doesn't interest me anymore. I want to do this. And he kept talking me out of it. And I, I said, I want to, I'd like to study under you, you know, be your, your student. And he said, I don't, I don't take students. He said, that's not how it works in this. He said, I don't decide if it's work for you. The plants decide, the plant spirits decide. And one never knows if they're interested in having you assist them.
And one just needs to jump in and, you know, come down to the jungle, you know, at least every six months and work with different plants.
Said, you got to do your personal work first and then see what happens.
And I said, well, isn't there a book that I could read? You know, I'm used to, you know, having a curriculum, you know, and a teacher, you know, that will test me at the end to make sure I know it.
He said, no, there's no books. It's all experiential and this is how it's done. And so I felt like I was learning. I learned enough about myself that even if the plant spirits didn't want me to in that role, it was still worthwhile. So I started coming down every six months and I'd work with different plants and oh, he said, the plants will do 90% of the teaching and someone in physical form like me. And you know, I asked Don Lucho if he would be on my team as well.
They'll do the 10%, but that the plants do 90%.
I don't know if those figures are exactly right, but I think that in the dietas, I believe that the plant spirits taught me the essence of this work, but the form of it, like how to do a coracion, an individual healing over someone, you know. Don Jose taught me that, you know, and teach you how to make the medicine, you know, about dosage and things like that.
So, you know, when you ask me what did I learn from the, you know, if I'm doing all those dietas, you know, that's a big, a big question.
But I would say that in, in general, the medicine is about.
One time it.
[00:46:23] Dennis McKenna: Let me, let me ask you this. Were there, you did dieta with a variety of plants. Were there certain plants that you were drawn to that you seem to have a more solid connection with, with other plants that you worked with? Didn't really resonate with you that way.
Was there a sorting out process in this where you, throughout these experiences, you came to rely on Particular plant medicines, Plant teachers, other than ayahuasca, of course, which was kind of a constant.
But some of these other teachers, were there ones that you worked with and got the message that, yes, this is an ally, this is someone.
Some things, an entity say that I can rely on.
And this other one over here, that's not really my thing.
It doesn't have the right vibe or whatever.
Did you find that in this variety of plant medicines that you worked with over time?
[00:47:37] Nissan: Yeah, that's a very interesting question, and that's very true.
I often talk about the plants as kind of being like human beings. You can be introduced to a perfectly wonderful human being, but you just don't really have the chemistry.
And I feel like it's the same way with the plants.
Well, one of my favorite plants is Shihahuaco. And did you ever see a Shihahuaco tree?
[00:48:09] Dennis McKenna: Not under that name. Do you happen to know what the scientific name is?
[00:48:15] Nissan: I don't, but it's the biggest tree in the part of the jungle where I go. It's one of those massive trees that the roots, in a way, start way up high and, like, buttresses it goes.
[00:48:30] Dennis McKenna: Probably Ceiba pentandra, possibly one of the tallest, biggest trees in the Amazon.
Yeah. And it is a plant teacher. And it's the tree that, when you're on the river and you look out over the jungle, it's mostly flat, but then there are these enormous trees, much bigger than anything else standing above the canopy.
Those are definitely Ceiba pentandra, or also called Kapok is another term for them. And those are used as plant medicines.
[00:49:11] Nissan: Well, I think that one is Lapuna Blanca.
That's also a massive tree.
[00:49:19] Dennis McKenna: That could be. That could be it too. Right, right.
[00:49:23] Nissan: Well, I'll just tell you a little bit about my experience with Shihahuaco and its relationship to its name, actually. And that name is not Spanish. It's from some tribal language.
So like many of the plants that we die with, we work with the bark.
So some bark is scraped off and boiled, and we drank that. And so in the Dieta with Shihahuaco, I had, I think, the most profound healing experience maybe of my life, where it really was kind of healing this wounded inner child. It was. It was related to a wound I had had with my father, you know, who wasn't very present for me, you know, in my life early on at least, and a very, very healing experience.
And after that experience, I felt more whole. W H O L E, than I ever had in my life.
And I also received an Icaro in a different ceremony where I just saw the spirit being above me, and it said, I'm teaching you a song. Pay attention. And it came back three or four times in that.
In that ceremony to make sure I, I had it.
And.
And Jose, it said something about the name that was significant.
And not that long ago, I found out that the name Shihahuaco means a hole, H O L E.
And the center of that tree, you know, if it's cut down or blows over, there's a hole in the center of it.
That's where the name comes from.
And isn't it interesting that the tree that has a hole in it seems to be able to find out the holes that we have inside of us and fill them up and help us feel whole. W H O L E. Whole.
[00:51:35] Dennis McKenna: In effect, Yeah. W H O L E. You find the holes and it plugs them.
Right.
So that sounds like that is a powerful plant ally for you. Do you continue to work with that one?
[00:51:51] Nissan: Not so much personally, Dennis. Although I do have a tincture that has a little bit that now and then I drink. But it's one of the plants that I serve in the participants in the Dieta.
I use my intuition and questions that they answer in a online questionnaire before coming into Dieta, and that's one of my favorites to serve people.
Each vitalista has a main team that he or she works well with, and so Shihahuaco is one of them. Lapuna Blanca is another one that I love working with.
That's a big, very big tree.
I think that's the Kapok that you were talking about, and that's known to love teaching human beings. So, as you probably know, certain trees are the master teacher plants, and they have the ability to interact with human consciousness. And other ones, I think, work better. Our work more profoundly at the body level. They're strengtheners. They, you know, improve the immune system. You probably know about, you know, some of these Uña de Gato and, you know, and plants like.
[00:53:11] Dennis McKenna: Is another one.
[00:53:13] Nissan: Chiric Sanango and Bobinsana is often the one that we start with.
[00:53:17] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, yeah.
Well, it sounds like you.
You've done very well. You've actually acquired the skills. I think you can honestly say you're a curadero or a vegetalista.
And even though you're outside the cultural, you came to it from outside.
This is always with me. And I think everybody who's not within the culture, who did grow up in that culture, they always are confronted with the question, you know, do I really belong here? Is this really, it's not my tradition, you know, should I, am I co opting it or am I misappropriating it?
And I think there's no, there's no rule about this, you know, I mean, other people could look and be judgmental about it. What's important is your own experience. And if you feel that this is where you need to be, then that's all the validation you need. You don't really have to look beyond that to say I should be credited.
You attained the qualifications by doing what you're doing.
And you express that in your practice. What you bring to people and whether you're a gringo or an Amazonian person or whatever you are, those are superficial things.
Again, at the end of the day, we're all human beings and we're all immersed in this biosphere.
And we're like it or not, in connection with these plant teachers. We just, some of us know it, most of us don't, you know, but in the sense that we're all part of this web of life. And I mean, I'm like you, I'm a panpsychist. I believe that everything is intelligent, you know, even down to the molecular quantum level. I think that bind and intelligence permeates reality. It's as fundamental to reality as the Planck constant or something like that. It's just built into reality. We just don't actually, we're not able to see it. But these medicines help to perceive what's always there.
So in that sense you work with these plants and you can see that, you know, the vegetalistas will say, you know, you mentioned that working with these plants is like being introduced to a person. And they would, I think, totally agree with that. You know, they'd be the first to say these plants are people. You know, they don't look like people, but they are people, they're actual entities.
And of course, someone trained in the sciences and trained to be reductionist and all that would dismiss all that in a certain way. But they're missing that aspect of experience. And I think at the end of the day, the only thing we have is experience.
So that's usually my response when people say, well, these spirits you encounter all of these things. Are these things real? Well, yes, they are, because you experience them. Anything you experience is real in a sense that you experience it.
Then you can get down in the weeds and argue about, well, is it inside, is it outside?
Which are actually meaningless terms in a certain way because there really is no inside and outside. This is something that psychedelics, again, can teach one.
We're all one. It's all one.
We have to construct this illusion of separatism in order to be functional and have a point of view and be able to do the things that we do.
Anyway, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. You've had these experiences, perhaps, but people who haven't may wonder, what are these guys talking about? This sounds crazy, but it validates itself. The experience validates itself.
And people who don't have the experience can't really understand what. What is being talked about here.
Experience is the most essential thing.
That's the thing about psychedelics. I mean, it's something that you cannot productively or even cannot constructively talk about until you have taken it.
If you have not looked beyond the chrysanthemum a few times, at least once, then you're not really qualified to say anything about those experiences, in my opinion.
It's sort of like the people that built ground the lenses for Galileo's telescope.
They refused to look through the telescope, even though they built it, because they kind of understood that if they looked through the telescope it would completely shatter their worldview.
And they weren't prepared to give that up.
Well, that's what psychedelics do. They disrupt your worldview so that you can replace it with a better, more compassionate and more realistic worldview, more true to reality in a certain sense.
Anyway, I'm off on my lecture. I don't need to do that.
People are familiar with it, but you know what I'm saying.
[00:59:44] Nissan: I totally know what you're saying. I agree with everything that you've said. I've not heard that term a panpsychic.
[00:59:51] Dennis McKenna: Is that panpsychic? Yes.
It's not.
You said you were a pantheist.
This is a little different. Panpsychism is basically a perspective that says there is that the psyche component is really a component, a fundamental property of existence, and we have it. I mean, maybe it's more concentrated in complex collections of nervous tissue like human brains, but it permeates the biosphere.
And I view the biosphere as an intelligent entity on the macro level and everything in it.
That sounds almost like a theology in a certain way or a religious teaching. I don't view it that way. I'm actually a pretty reductionist oriented person. But my point is, if you look deeply into natural processes, you can perceive that There is intelligence there at every level.
And the psychedelics are a lens, actually, the psychedelics are a lens for examining reality in this way. It lets you step out of this default mode, network out of your reference frame essentially, and perceive things about nature that are always there, but we're programmed not to notice. We've evolved to suppress those things, put them in the background because they're perceived as not germane to our immediate needs, which is to get something to eat and protect, fend off the saber tooth tigers that are chasing you and those sorts of things. But it's always there.
And psychedelics provide a.
A special place and time to let all these defenses down. And then things come out of the background that you never noticed before.
And so in that sense, I think psychedelics can be compared to a scientific instrument of a certain kind. You have a microscope or a telescope, you can probe reality with those instruments and uncover aspects of reality that you had no idea existed until you looked through the telescope or the microscope. Same with psychedelics. Psychedelics is a lens for examining reality and it's very effective, as we know.
[01:02:41] Nissan: And there's a fair amount of false positives and false negatives with this medicine as well.
You know, that's something that some people at the beginning of their experiences believe everything that comes to them under the power of the medicine. And I think, as Jose and Don Lucho said, really maybe only 5%, I think they came up with that figure. 5 or 10%. Can you really believe?
So there's a fair amount of stuff I tell people you just put in the trash. You know, it's just interesting phenomenon, but don't bank on it.
[01:03:22] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, just because you have these experiences, there's no reason to completely lower your skeptical antennas or, you know, critical thinking and that sort of thing. I mean, it's a balance. It's a balance. But I think what psychedelics do, and ayahuasca particularly, but all of them, they remind us of how limited our sphere of knowledge is. Much more there is that we don't know.
And it's a humbling realization, but I think a very useful one.
Nissan, I'm going to have to end this, but this has been a fantastic conversation.
[01:04:09] Nissan: Thanks, I've enjoyed it very much.
[01:04:12] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. Is there anything we didn't say that you want to make sure we say?
[01:04:18] Nissan: Well, I did want to say that cultural appropriation that you mentioned. It's something I struggled with quite a bit at the beginning. Not only could I do this, but should I be doing this.
So having the blessings of my two Peruvian.
That list mentors was. Was really a critical thing for me, you know, that they felt, you know, like that, that I could do this, I should do this. And.
And really, you know, I don't consider myself the healer. You know, I.
I think that the. These invisible beings, you know, the. The plant spirits, I think that they're really the healers. I'm. I'm just assisting them.
And so does it really matter? You know, I mean, I'm, you know, Jewish or the Midwest, you know, I don't know that our form really matters, you know, that we're just. We're doing what the plant spirits can't do. They need someone to bring the medicine, you know, serve it, sing some songs, and be loving to the people, you.
[01:05:24] Dennis McKenna: Know, going through the facilitators of the healing. The plants are the healers. Right.
[01:05:30] Nissan: Fine.
[01:05:30] Dennis McKenna: Right. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time.
Really appreciate it. Excellent conversation, sir.
[01:05:39] Nissan: Thanks, Dennis.
[01:05:40] Dennis McKenna: Be well, okay? You too.
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