🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that would rather ask the plants than ask ChatGPT. (We get better answers and much better hallucinations.) 🌿

Rebekah Senānāyaka went to the Amazon and never really came back. (Philosophically, at least.) After years of fieldwork with Indigenous maestros, she's now writing her doctoral dissertation on interspecies communication. As in, talking to plants. And according to her, they talk back.

We asked Rebekah what it means to communicate with plants, what she’s discovered about ego dissolution across four different psychedelics, and what Amazonian maestros know that Western science hasn’t grasped.

Three years ago, Oregon became the first state to legalize psilocybin services.

Colorado followed. And then...

Yeah, most people had no clue what to do with that info. (Womp womp)

Which is fair. Admittedly, “it's legal now” leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Like, where do I go? Who's guiding me? How much does it cost? What else can I expect?

And that’s why we just launched Althea Experiences. We think you should know what you’re signing up for.

The brand new marketplace is live with seven curated, bookable psilocybin experiences, each with details and prices listed as clear as day.

It all started when my uncle Ranil returned from a trip to the Amazon. He told me all of these incredible stories about the jungle and its rich vegetation. He's a systems ecologist who developed a method used in over 20 countries for regenerating forests to their native state, so these weren’t a typical tourist’s travel stories.

My ten-year-old imagination was going wild. He looked me in the eye, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Would you like to go with me one day?”. I pictured myself on canoes going down the river in this whole world of adventure.

That image stayed with me. And that conversation put a little seed into my heart, which, by early university, had grown into a plane ticket to Latin America. It wasn't really a decision. It felt more like finally showing up somewhere I was always supposed to be.

When I arrived and started moving through the Amazon, I realized I wasn't following people. I was following plants. I was tracing where they were grown, how they were used, how local and Indigenous peoples related to them. I didn't know it yet, but I was doing ethnobotany. I went back for a year, then again for a three-month research trip, and then another full year for my doctorate. All of it traces back to that one conversation with my uncle.

Growing up in Melbourne, it never crossed my mind that a plant could offer guidance. Then, in one of my first ceremonies, a maestro came to me and said, “Go and ask ayahuasca some questions. Ask it for guidance.” I was young and open, so I did. I asked questions in my mind and the visions shifted in response.

While writing my doctoral dissertation, I realized that beneath the altered states, beneath the rituals, it was all really about one thing: interspecies communication. That is at the heart of the rites of apprenticeship in Amazonian traditional knowledge. The altered state is not the goal. An altered state is just one of the containers through which a human being develops a relationship with plant intelligence.

What helped me understand this most was watching my maestro work. He always deferred to the plants. He would say, “Ayahuasca will tell you what plants you need to take next, and we'll follow that.” There was always another intelligence at work. He gave me the literacy to access it by instructing me on what to eat, what to avoid, and how to stay safe. But the intelligence itself came from somewhere else.

For my master's degree in cross-cultural psychology, I developed what I called the Multidimensional Ego Dissolution Assessment, a psychometric tool to evaluate ego dissolution experiences across four classical psychedelics: mushrooms, LSD, DMT, and ayahuasca. I deliberately separated DMT and ayahuasca, because they are often conflated, and ayahuasca is an incredibly complex brew with many compounds interacting at once. I specified “mushrooms” rather than psilocybin for the same reason.

I created a new assessment altogether because the existing tool at the time had only eight items and measured ego dissolution unidimensionally. That never sat right with me. The self is quite complex. Psychology recognizes at least two distinct layers: the narrative self, which is your sense of identity, and the embodied self, which is your felt sense of being in a body. For example, think about sensory deprivation tanks. Floating in pitch black with half a ton of Epsom salt dissolves your bodily feelings completely, but you still know who you are. That is a completely different type of dissolution from losing your sense of identity after ingesting a psychoactive plant. So I built a 34-item structure that captured six dimensions: dissolving of identity, experiences of eternity, dissolving of the physical body, dissolving into environment, clarity about life and purpose, and pleasure.

What I found was that ayahuasca and DMT clustered together at the higher end of dissolution across four of those six factors, while LSD and mushrooms coupled together at a lower intensity. All substances showed high scores on insight and pleasure. I asked participants to self-evaluate their most profound experiences, irrespective of dose, which meant someone could have had a small amount and still reported something deeply significant.

They know so much, and Western science is constantly catching up. That is, in many ways, one of the core philosophies of ethnobotany. Traditional knowledge already understands what Western science is only beginning to articulate.

What strikes me most about my Amazonian colleagues is their humility. Not as a personal virtue, necessarily, but as something the environment demands. When I did my fieldwork, I lived in a structure with no walls and often had nothing between me and the jungle but a mosquito net. At any moment, nature could take over. There were days I was stranded in the middle of the mountains because the rain made it impossible to leave. It is very difficult to maintain a high ego in that context.

Of course, the Amazon is not a monolith. There are many Indigenous cultures and groups with very different relationships to the natural world and to plant medicines, and that includes uses that are not healing. But the colleagues I work most closely with share this humility and an attentiveness to something beyond themselves.

In the Amazon, rituals are not simply ways of making sense of the world, the way Western interpretive frameworks often describe them. They are not just psychological regulation or cognitive scaffolding. For my Indigenous colleagues, the whole point of ritual is to facilitate communication with plants, to ensure the biochemistry is working well, and to maintain safety. That gives rituals real weight. If you violate them, the consequences can be severe. My colleagues take this seriously in a way that is difficult to translate into Western frameworks without it sounding superstitious, but it is not. It has a very tangible logic.

What a beautiful question. I think it’s the right one to ask. The reason Amazonian practitioners use these practices is to facilitate communication with plant intelligence. Even if you strip away all the altered states and mystical experiences, simply being in relationship with the natural world can be healing and reconnecting in its own right.

What that might actually look like is finding a specific tree and visiting it the way you would visit a friend. Recently, before giving a conference presentation on an Amazonian medicine called Chiric Sanango, I went to find an 800-year-old rimu tree here in New Zealand named Moko. I needed that kind of wisdom. I grabbed my bag and a book and went to sit with him.

When I opened the book, it fell open on a 1967 conference presentation by Richard Evans Schultes, the father of ethnobotany, describing Chiric Sanango. He knew about it, studied it, and chose never to take it. He wrote that more intensive fieldwork was needed. And there I was, having just finished a dissertation on exactly that plant. Something about sitting with an 800-year-old tree created the conditions for that connection to happen. The ways plants communicate are far subtler than how humans typically think and speak. All that is required is to slow down enough to receive information in a different register.

Dive deeper into her research, or learn about her uncle’s organization, EarthRestoration.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here.

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.