Ayahuasca Helped Find Lost Amazonian Children. Can Psychedelics Really Give You Superpowers?
On June 13, 2023, four young indigenous children, ranging from the age of one to 13, were found in the Colombian Amazon, after 40 days lost in the jungle due to a tragic plane crash.
The children, who come from the Huitoto tribe, were said to have been able to survive thanks to the ancestral knowledge of the jungle passed down to them from their elders.
Over the 40 days, a local, indigenous search team teamed up with Colombian armed forces – combining ancestral wisdom with modern technology – on a hunt to find the children.
When the indigenous group finally located the children, various of its leaders attributed this “miracle” to the use of sacred plants. Yagé (the name for ayahuasca in Colombia) was among them. The team had taken part in a yagé ceremony in the days leading up to finding the youngsters.
“That day we went to take the remedy [yagé] and we knew that there was no more time, that is why we did not give up but we stopped to renew energy and to renew our personnel; then I told them that we could not lose faith and that this was a divine test (…) We put aside all earthly spirit and our father creator guided us through the sacred plants,” said Eliécer Muñoz, a resident of the Jirijiri indigenous reserve, and a leader of the search team who found the young siblings, in an interview with infobae.
“The one who takes yagé sees far beyond what we see. He becomes a doctor, a panther, a tiger, a puma. He sees beyond because it is an integral medicine. He had the capacity to look,” Luis Acosta, a national coordinator of the Colombian Indigenous Guard, said in reporting by Colombian national newspaper El Tiempo.
When Ayahuasca Contained Telepathine
The story of the missing children is one of many similar stories. Indigenous communities in the Amazon and elsewhere believe that sacred medicines, some of which are psychedelic, can help you gain insight into aspects of both the material and the spirit world, including seemingly supernatural powers.
Some traditional healers in the Amazon believe ayahuasca can help them perform seemingly impossible things such as making a distant loved one return home, attracting fish, and causing destruction by fire, according to the book Singing to the Plants by Steve Beyer.
In the same book, Beyer tells of missionary and anthropologist Kenneth Kensinger reporting members of the Cashinahua tribe accurately describing in detail the Amazonian town of Pucallpa while under the influence of ayahuasca – despite having never been there nor seen pictures of the place.
Westerners picked up on the Amazonian beliefs: German scientists named a key molecule in ayahuasca “telepathine,” because of the indigenous association with telepathy.
The beliefs extend beyond the Amazon. In fact, in the Mazatec tradition of Mexico, psilocybin mushrooms were historically used to ask for solutions to problems, find lost objects, or reconnect with lost loved ones.
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Understanding Foreign Languages
Many westerners also believe that psychedelics grant extraordinary powers.
For example: Learning to understand and speak a foreign language is no simple task. It often requires years to reach a proficient level. Yet there are numerous accounts of people being able to freely speak and understand a language that they usually aren’t able to while on psychedelics. One of these accounts comes from Emily Lutringer, a Licensed Professional Counselor and PhD candidate in International Psychology.
“A close friend of mine and I ingested LSD together in our 20s. There were other people present who did not ingest any substances. Very abruptly, I transformed internally into a young Mexican boy, and my friend into my grandmother,” explained Lutringer. “We then began conversing in fluent Spanish. Most of it was fairly mundane things, such as me (as the boy) begging her (as my grandmother) to let me have some sweets. Later, our other, sober friends who were present said this conversation went on for about a half hour, at which point we both abruptly switched back to our own selves speaking English.”
“One of those friends was also a native Spanish speaker. They told us the details of what we had talked about in Spanish. Neither my friend nor myself spoke nor understood more than a handful of words in Spanish,” she said.
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‘Like A Sixth Sense’
How was it that Lutringer not only channeled a language she usually doesn’t speak, but had the same experience as her friend?
“I am not sure of the answers, and I believe science will take a long time to find out how such experiences can be possible,” Lutringer said. “I have heard some theories regarding the energetic vibration that exists throughout the world and universe. We do know this exists scientifically, however, there may be layers of this field which we have not yet been able to reliably access and measure in a scientific way. These layers may be able to be tapped into and utilized like a sixth sense of sorts through the use of psychedelics to assist in being able to engage with such frequencies of energy.”
A friend of mine, Joshua Wait, had a similar experience. But this time while under the effects of a hash brownie.
“After eating a hash brownie on Zipolite beach in Mexico, I started to come up and slowly realized there was no way that what I was being affected by was just a hash brownie. Then it hit me that I must be experiencing some kind of flashback from the ayahuasca that had been dormant in my system from a couple of weeks before,” said Wait. “We were watching some performance on the beach with a lot of people talking in Spanish. At this stage, my Spanish really wasn’t very good and I struggled to understand basic conversations, but for some reason, I understood everything that was being said in this conversation that was happening around me.”
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Rationalists Speak
So, what’s really happening here. Is it true that psychedelics can all of a sudden turn you into a fluent speaker of a foreign language?
Manoj Doss, PhD, a psychedelic scientist at the University of Texas, speculates otherwise. “When you’re speaking another language and you’re drunk or inebriated, there can be fewer inhibitions, and you’re just less cautious about what you’re saying. And sometimes you don’t need to have perfect grammar for somebody to understand you, right?” said Doss.
Telepathic Messages and Heightened Intuition
Another way in which people claim to have experienced supernatural powers while under the influence of psychedelics is through telepathic communication or heightened intuition to others’ internal states.
Heythem Naji, psychologist and tripsitter, explained that “during my trips, I find myself becoming an emotional barometer, picking up on even the subtlest shifts in the feelings and needs of those around me. It’s like I suddenly have this heightened sensitivity, able to read the room in a way that I cannot without.”
“Friends often comment that during these trips, it’s as if I know exactly what they need at any given moment. It’s an empathic ability that goes beyond the everyday. Is it supernatural? Well, it’s certainly beyond what’s considered ‘normal’,” he said.
This heightened intuition is also evident in wilka ceremonies, explained Jue Karollys, a Colombian medicine man. Karollys leads ceremonies with huachuma (San Pedro) and wilka (a psychedelic snuff which contains bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT), as well as sweat lodges and kambô.
“You can experience very impressive levels of telepathy and it happens to me a lot with huachuma and wilka, and with wilka in particular,” explained Karollys.
“When you are really in the state of the wilka you can see very clearly what is happening in a person. Even where an illness might be coming from, for example, if it’s something hepatic. You experience levels of empathy where you can really perceive perfectly what that person is feeling and thinking.”
According to Karollys, anybody can develop these powers. It’s a matter of a lot of training and cleansing.
“It’s not like people who have experienced it are superhuman. No, it’s just that you paddled hard enough to be able to get to those water currents. And by doing so, one begins to uncover other drawers of existence, of such a deep mystery that lives in us, in our bodies, in our psyche,” he said.
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Research on Psychedelic Paranormal Experiences
It’s not just in shamanic circles and in conversations with psychonauts where we hear about psychic or paranormal experiences while under the influence of psychedelics.
David Luke is a psychologist and researcher at the University of Greenwich. Luke conducted a review of studies done on psychoactive substances and paranormal experiences, ranging back to the 1950s.
Through surveys, Luke found that around 50% of people who have had a psychedelic substance experienced telepathy while under the influence of the psychedelic. Telepathy and precognition – being able to anticipate an event before it happens – were the most widely reported types of “psychic” phenomena.
Psychedelic thinkers and writers widely considered as crucial to the emergence of psychedelic study in the West – such as Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond – were also involved in testing the possibility of paranormal powers through psychedelics.
In Huxley’s 1954 book, The Doors of Perception, he suggests that psychedelics help us bypass “filters” in the brain that prevent us from accessing memories and previous sensory experiences. Essentially, what psychedelics may be able to do – according to this theory – is cause the “reducing valve” of the brain to quiet down and open up our awareness to everything we’ve ever experienced and everything that’s ever happened in the universe.
In a 1962 follow-up survey of LSD-psychotherapy clients, 78% of them said they believed telepathy and precognition warrant investigation.
One 2020 interview study on psychedelic telepathy experiences found that 16 out of 40 participants reported psychedelic telepathy.
Eileen Garett, a psychic and “trance” medium who collaborated with Humphry Osmond on psychedelic research, said she used psychedelics to enhance her abilities: “I have had psychic experiences which occur at the height of the LSD experience. I believe the drug has made me a better, more accurate sensitive when I perceive, hear, think and feel.”
Can We – Or Will We – Ever Be Able To Explain This ‘Psychedelic Magic’?
The question of what’s real (or what feels real) but can’t be fully explained, is a tentative one. There’s no doubt that people have supernatural experiences on psychedelics that feel like the truth to them.
To know if there’s any merit to these theories, we have to “reality test” the beliefs that emerge from a psychedelic experience.
Doss, the psychedelic researcher, argues it’s here where we have to pay attention to the concept of “processing fluency. “
Processing fluency refers to humans’ cognitive bias towards things we can more easily process and understand. We tend to like something if we can easily comprehend it. Fluency misattribution happens when someone assigns truth to something on the basis of it being easier to process.
Doss argues that psychedelics are a fast route to creating strong semantic memories (i.e., what we know to be facts, or the truth). “We have to be careful what we semanticize, what becomes facts to us. There’s a reason why it takes a little bit to develop a semantic memory,” he said.
“It’s this misattribution of processing fluency. I think psychedelics might heighten the processing fluency of faces, people, or thoughts… they might even increase that misattribution process itself,” argued Doss.
An Open Question
Does a mistake in “processing fluency” explain some of the experiences described above? Maybe. Maybe not. The important thing, argues Doss, is that the person doesn’t let their newfound “magical” powers start to guide their life in a way that could potentially do harm. Even the most hardcore believers of magic and voodoo will tell you not to take everything that psychedelics such as ayahuasca tell you so literally.
There are many things about the psychedelic experience that remain a mystery to modern day science. As Lutringer, the Licensed Counselor, argued, that’s not to say that we won’t one day be able to understand them through a materialistic lens. For now, though, supernatural abilities remain just that. A mystery. And in many cases, a cool story to tell.
