The chemistry of Ayahuasca

According to chemists ayahuasca is basically a vehicle for delivering DMT in a form that can be more easily remembered and reflected upon. There are two forms of DMT. One form is produced by the pituitary gland during deep rapid eye movement sleep as well as at the transitional moment of death. This form of DMT produces the ordinary dreams that all people have at night as well as the visions associated with near death experiences. The problem is that very little can be retrieved from these processes because most dreams are almost immediately forgotten or are remembered in a very vague or hazy form. A closely related form of DMT occurs naturally in a variety of plants consumed by humans. The problem is that the stomach almost immediately neutralizes this DMT through what are called MOI. As a result any DMT that goes through the stomach has no effect. To get around this some fans of psychedelic experience in the west have smoked the dry leaves, flowers or bark of plants containing DMT. This experience produces a very intense hallucinatory experience that lasts 7-10 minutes. But when it is over the person cannot recall or retrieve much of what they experienced. Enter ayahuasca. The drink ayahuasca is a mix of plants containing DMT and Banisteriopsis caapi. What Banisteriopsis does is to inhibit the MOI allowing DMT to pass through the stomach unsuppressed and so to allow the inducement of visions to take place unhindered. By allowing the DMT to be digested the caapi allows the DMT to be experienced more slowly, less intensely and over a longer period of time. Hence the perception of this digested DMT can be remembered and reflected upon. If the form of the DMT produced by the pituitary glan produces nightime dreams that are forgotten, then the DMT that comes from plants combined with the MOI inhibitors in caapi produces “waking dreams” that can be reflected upon and remembered. If ayahuasca “visions” are simply waking dreams produced by a form of DMT that is very similar to that produced by the pituitary gland causing dreams while asleep then the question of what is perceived in ayahuasca visions becomes similar to the question of what is perceived in dreams. Under the heavy influenced of Sigmund Freud, western thinking understands dreams as suppressed memories of past experience. Runa thinking, by contrast understands both the dreaming of normal sleep and the waking ayawaska dreams as a form of communication between the self and others that has been suppressed and or encoded. The similarity between the two traditions is that dreams reveal something hidden suppressed or encoded. The difference is that western thinking sees dreams as something solipsistic. They tell you something about the hidden memories and complexes of the dreamer. According to Runa thinking by contrast both dreams and ayahuasca visions communicate information that cannot otherwise be known about other people, other species and the external world. Questions: What purpose does the DMT in plants serve for the life of plants? What purpose does the DMT produced by the human pituitary gland have for humans? in plants serve for the life of plants? Are there similarities between the purpose of the DMT produced by the human pituitary gland has in humans Although it used to be thought that the DMT served no purpose and was perhaps simply a byproduct of something else. But scientist know think that the DMT is part of what allows plants to communicate. What purpose does the suppression of DMT by the MOIs have? Perhaps it shields human beings from sensory overload giving them the privacy of exclusion from this plant communication. Perhaps it helps to put up a wall of privacy between species that is necessary for humans to focus on their more limited immediate conscious lives. If this were the case then ingesting the DMTwould lessen the barrier between species heightening inter-species communication or intersubjectivity.