“YOU MONKEYS ONLY THINK YOU ARE RUNNING THE SHOW” : The Calling from the Spirits.
- Dr. Freddie Taborda
- Aug 1
- 10 min read
After ingesting Ayahuasca at a sacred ceremony in Brazil, Dennis McKenna -a world-renowned ethnobotanist- heard a voice, from the spirit of the Ayahuasca plant, that said to him: “You monkeys only think you are running the show…You do not think we are going to let you destroy the planet; do you?” (1) The issue in question, addressed by the spirit, was the arrogance and the ignorance of human beings in continuing to destroy the planet Earth, and the response that, undoubtedly, the world of the Spirits and the Earth have about it.
It is not about us, human beings. It is about the Invisible World, its relationship to us and our relationship to it. The emphasis is on what is there, yet it is invisible to the eye. The invisible may appear colorfully and with forms in dreams. The world of the unseen is not palpable, yet it has an uncanny way of making itself known to us. We have a sense that something is there, yet it is scientifically unverifiable. The theoretical framework of Analytical or Jungian Psychology, developed by Carl G. Jung offers modern man an excellent bridge to cross to the invisible world. He called it the unconscious, specifically the Collective Unconscious. He implicitly discovered that there is an ongoing bridge between the visible and the invisible through which we naturally interact with the Spirit World: dreams. Thanks to dreams, the invisible world may be visible, and the communication with the Spirit World can be seen and understood.
Let us keep this in mind as we hear the words of indigenous people and mystics in this brief essay.
“Religion? We do not have religion; we drink Ayahuasca (Yaje).” Don Alberto, Shipibo Indian, Peru
For some aboriginal tribes, Yaje -an entheogenic plant whose latin name is Banisteriopsis caapi- helps to make the invisible visible. Yage, also known as Ayahuasca, is a liana from the Amazon jungle in South America, that, when drunk under the guidance of an experienced Taita, the world of the spirits becomes manifest and visible and, by asking “La Planta” o “La Medicina” (which are other names of the Yaje), it can guide us psychologically through the visions and dreams that this plant triggers in people who drink it.
“We are taught to believe that the Great Spirit sees and hears everything, and that he never forgets; that hereafter He will give man a spirit-home according to his deserts…” Chief Joseph
The greatest modern tragedy is to confound the guidance of the unseen with the desire and wishes of the ego! The majority of people are unaware of the invisible world, especially of the unseen world within us. Western civilization calls it God, and they feel tranquil that they can call it God and that it is contained in a religious framework, be Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.
“We find meaning by abiding in God, faithfully trusting in God’s mercy and grace.” Julian of Norwich
A man had the following dream: “A medical doctor received a phone call. As soon as he answered the phone, he verbally invoked God as a greeting.” The healing factor within the soul of this man is deeply associated with the embrace and, especially with the manifestation, in his interaction with life and people, of the invisible world in the manner in which it reveals itself to him. In other words, when communicating with people and interacting with life, the invisible-the unconscious-the Spirits-God should be manifested at the forefront in his life.
“We believe that all places are full of spirits. These spirits, at certain hours, are not congenial one might say. And so when they are not in good humor, they attack people. One can speak of the evil wind of the cemetery, of the rivers and streams, of the cliffs, one can speak of the evil wind of the forest. So the world is full of spirits, sometimes even in our houses” ("Sayings of the Ancestors" by J. Holmes McDowell, 1989, p. 127) .
The place where contemporary people may experience the spirit world is in dreams. Not only do the spirits of the dead visit us in dreams, as fathers, mothers, uncles, or grandparents but, also, “the living spirits” reveal themselves in dreams, some of which come to help us or hurt us. Therefore, the importance of relating to them through our dreams and active imagination so that we can be guided by some of them and/or stay away from the malevolent ones. Reader, “Be mindful of the spirits that appear in dreams!”.
Among the Inga tribe in Sibundoy, Colombia, the world of the spirits is called Huayra. The two main sets of spirits are the spirits of the forest or Sacha Huayra and the souls of the departed or Animas Huayra. The spirits of the forest are animals, vegetation, and natural forces in the forest, and they live apart from human beings. According to an Inga native:
“They say that the spirits of the forest can send a very difficult sickness. They are not very friendly and people greatly fear them. The spirits of the forest, they say that they live there, that they are native to the forest. They never were human beings, but at times they must attack human beings” (J. McDowell, 1989, p. 129).
Pablo Amaringo (1938-2009) was a Curandero and, subsequently, a Visionary artist, who left the world a legacy of visual representations of the many Spirits he had the opportunity to encounter in his journeys to the Spirit World, with the help of Yage. As he stated:
“Every tree, every plant has a spirit. People may say that the plant has no mind. I tell them that the plant is alive and conscious. A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive. The channels through which the water and sap move are the veins of the spirit.”
(Pablo Amaringo at http://www.thethird-eye.co.uk/ ).
Musilli (1987), in his article, The Importance of the Jaguar and the Cayman in South American Iconography, Religion, and Cosmology, paraphrases Reichel-Dolmatoff about the help from the jaguar to connect with the world of the spirits. The basic idea is that, through the use of tobacco and painted images of jaguars, a shaman can connect with the world of the spirits:
“Simply put, the jaguar was believed to have given tobacco to the people, and his image was carried on by humans through the wearing of painted bark tunics. These bark tunics combined with the use of tobacco helped produce the jaguar state of the shaman which was necessary to enter into the world of the supernatural” (p. 45).
A Jaguar (Credit: Earth.org. Pixabay Photo)
Von Hildebrand (2024), in his book, “El Llamado de Jaguar” (The Calling of the Jaguar), briefly describes the interaction between the spirits and human beings, especially between spirits and some Miriti and Apaporis chamans from the Amazon jungle, after some aboriginal people discussed the idea of creating a Nature Reserve for the protection of Amazon land. The advice about the creation of a Nature Reserve, from the spirits to the shamans, was primarily physical, not verbal, and Von Hildebrand described it in the following way:
“At eleven o’clock, at night, after having conversed all day [about the idea of the creation of a Nature Reserve], Guarana told us to rest and to sleep. Besides being tired, this interlude was necessary because chamans use the night to meditate upon ideas and to receive advice from the spirits. Next morning, we were told that the omen from the spirits were positive. “They have been “marked well.” “What does it mean that “they have been marked well?”, I asked Jaime.
“When a chaman meditates on an idea, the chaman thinks about the idea and asks the spirits if the result of the idea is going to be good or bad, if there will be a problem or not, if it will cause any death or misfortune…..The spirits answer him with signs, marking parts of his body” (p. 223).
A Brazilian Indian Woman in the Amazon (Credit: filipefrazao/Istock Photo)
Turner (1997), a well respected anthropologist and professor at University of Virginia, wrote an article titled, “The Reality of the Spirits” in which she described her process of coming to terms with the existence of spirits (what I describe as ‘The Ontology of the Spirits’):
“My research was developing into the study of a twice-repeated healing ritual. To my surprise, the healing of the second patient culminated in my sighting a spirit form. In a book entitled Experiencing Ritual, I describe exactly how this curative ritual reached its climax, including how…the traditional doctor bent down amid the singing and drumming to extract the harmful spirit; and how I saw with my own eyes a large, gray blob of something like plasma emerge from the sick woman’s back….Then I knew the Africans were right. There is spirit stuff. There is spirit affliction; it is not a matter of metaphor or symbol, or even psychology. And I began to see how anthropologists have perpetuated an endless series of put-downs about the many spirit events in which they participated -”participated” in a kindly pretense” (p. 2).
Turner (1997) makes a persuasive case of the importance of “going native,” that is:
“To reach a peak experience in a ritual, sinking oneself fully in it really is necessary. Thus, for me, “going native” achieved a breakthrough to an altogether different world view, foreign to academia, by means of which certain material was chronicled that could have been gathered in no other way” (p. 2).
Analytical Psychology and their practitioners -Jungian Analysts- deal frequently with the invisible world. We have called it the unconscious. But there is more in that invisible world. Fortunately, Jung left the door open to study an additional area of the invisible world: the relationship between the Unconscious and the Spirit World. Hopefully we, as analysts, are not going to look at this area of study just from a symbolic/psychological point of view but, also, from an ontological point of view through which we finally grant spirits an ontological right to exist. One way of doing it is, for example, fully participating in a sacred ceremony of Ayahuasca, where the experience and visions produce by the plant may soften the hardcore scientific approach towards the spirits, the dead, and the spirit of the ancestors towards another reality that coexist and probably determine us: the existence of the Spirits.
Rock Art from Chiribiquete (the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon Jungle or the Sistine Chapel; of the Ancients). Credit: Pinterest.com/Sergio
Let us listen to the Ava-Guarani (“Inhabitants of the Forest”) indigenous people from Paraguay about the world of spirits and dreams. Taborda (2010) showed previously the relationship between spirits and dream images.
Ava Tape Miri (“Little Seagull Man”) -a shaman from the Ava-Guarani tribe- described how he became a shaman and developed his relationship with the Spirit World:
“My [deceased] father began appearing in my dreams. He set a crown of feathers -the corona that all shamans wear….Sometimes he sang to me and said: ‘I am leaving this song for you.’ My father always come from the East, where the songs originate and where it is also the home of God” (p. 28). (2)
As Ava Tape Miri continue his preparation to become a shaman, he described the help that he received from spirits, through dreams:
“After I began praying and dancing a lot, I had a dream that four dead shamans came to me from the West, where the sun goes down. When I say that they came from the West, I mean that their spirits came from that sacred direction. Each spirit gave me a song. I did not know these shamans when they were human beings on earth. They only came to me in my dream. These shamans spoke to me: ‘We come from where the real father lives. He is the one who sent us to you…We are here to carry you with us.’ Then they took me to another space. I felt as though I had died and I was seeing things from another world. I was taken to a large field not of this earth. It is in another place in space. There were many birds that ate special fruits. The shaman spirits said, ‘Now that you know this place, you should listen to this song.’ Then they sang a sacred song as I watched the sunset….A very bright light came to me, and then spirits who have human-like bodies arrived…[T]he chief shaman said, ‘We will now send you back to earth where you will stay awhile to help others” (p. 29-32).
Ava Tape Miri, like Taborda (2010), described the relationship between spirits and dreams:
“As a young shaman in my community, I continued to have special dreams. The spirits taught me all that I needed to know in these dreams…[I] got “to the place where the spirits and many primeval animals reside. Wild cats, birds, and eagles will try to catch the dead people’s spirits. The Gods live here, yet evil is always around. The primeval animals are sort of evil spirits which are present to scare the human spirits…In my dream the spirit said, “Well, my son, I have shown you how things are. Now you know what is here in the world of spirits. You must go back and tell your family and the whole world. This is for the people who believe. Do not worry if some do not believe you, because this is only for those who believe” (p. 32-35).
The last two sentences, from the previous paragraph, reveal a profound truth about the reality and the existence of the spirits: some people believe in spirits, and some do not. The effort of trying to convince people of the existence of spirits, or the Great Spirit, or God is clinically and analytically useless. Therefore, for the believers, it is meaningful to know that the spirits of the plants, such as the spirit of the Ayahuasca, will not let “the monkeys only think [they] are running the show…and destroy the planet.”
References
McKenna, Dennis (2019). “What the plants are telling us.” Presentation at the World Ayahuasca Conference/ICEERS
Keeney, Bradford. (Ed). (2000) “Guarani, Shamans of the Forest”, Vol 4, Profiles of Healing, Ringing Rocks Press
Taborda, F. A. (2010). Spirits and Images in Dreams: A Comparative Analysis Between Archetypal Psychology
and Shamans' Healing Practices (Doctoral dissertation, Roosevelt University).
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