Ralph Metzner was a pioneer of the psychedelic movement. Although less well-known than his Harvard colleagues Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), Metzner went on to become an internationally recognized researcher and teacher in the area of consciousness. His books include The Psychedelic Experience, Maps of Consciousness (both now out of print), and, more recently, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Mythology of Northern Europe (Shambhala).
This essay previously appeared in the British journal Resurgence. In it, Metzner describes a trip to the Mexican rain forest, where he samples the ceremonial intoxicant balche. His experience there leads him to an understanding that turns our familiar worldview on its head.
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— Ed.
A key theme in the political rhetoric and media punditry of the seventies and eighties was the Cold War confrontation between what were called the “First World” and the “Second World.” These two worlds were said to be competing for the political allegiance and economic alliance of so-called “Third World” countries, which were seen as needing “development” in order to bring them to the levels of prosperity assumed (falsely) to be prevalent in the industrialized First and Second Worlds.
Now, in the nineties, this “balance of power” has collapsed. What we have instead is one remaining military superpower, with its politically aligned yet economically competing trading partners, constituting the so-called First World, or the industrialized North. The former Second World is no more; Russia and its erstwhile client states, including Eastern Europe, are rapidly turning into Third World countries, whose cheap labor and as yet unexploited natural resources can become fodder for the industrial-growth machine of the Northern First World. This is what is referred to as “the triumph of capitalism.”
The East-West political dynamic, backed by military force and the threat of nuclear force, has been replaced by a North-South economic dynamic, also backed by the threat of military force. The continuing exploitation of the Southern Third World by the Northern First World (which used to be called “colonialism” but is now called “development of emerging markets”) is encountering growing resistance, however, particularly in the Southern countries, whose people can clearly see the nature of the beast.
A significant aspect of this resistance has come from the world of indigenous societies, sometimes called the “Fourth World.” Politically encapsulated within larger nation-states and living by subsistence economies, indigenous people do not participate voluntarily in the industrial-development process, yet are threatened by exploitation and extinction. There is a worldwide movement afoot to protect and preserve the rights and cultures of the Fourth World. Between 200 and 600 million of the earth’s people belong to indigenous societies, comprising as many as five thousand different languages and cultures. Environmentalists and conservationists have increasingly looked to indigenous societies as models for the sustainable stewardship of natural resources. These people are the miner’s canary of the human family: in direct dependence on nature, they are the first to suffer the effects of pollution, degradation, and exploitation.
When, on January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed into law, the Zapatista Liberation Army occupied several towns and villages in the Mexican state of Chiapas, demanding that the government recognize the Indians’ rights to their lands and grant them autonomy and equal participation in the democratic process. A series of military and political moves and countermoves ensued, which have led to the unraveling of the ruling party’s seventy-year stranglehold on power, the collapse of Mexico’s stock market and economy, the political disgrace of former President Carlos Salinas, rampant inflation, and mass unemployment.
This past January, I visited one of the villages of the Lacandon Maya, in the rain forests of Chiapas. I was in Mexico for a seminar on psychoactive plants organized by the Botanical Preservation Corps, a group dedicated to gathering and preserving traditional knowledge of medicinal and psychoactive plants. Among the faculty was the German anthropologist Christian Rätsch, who had lived with the Lacandones for two years and spoke their language fluently, and who therefore acted as our guide.
On our journey, we traveled from the First World, through the Third, and into the Fourth; in the process of doing so, I came to a new appreciation of the complex and precarious cultural dynamics that constitute the real present-day world order.
Flying into Mexico City, I saw a thick, poisonous, yellow-brown blanket of smog and numerous smokestacks emitting plumes of even thicker smoke. Mexico City is the largest urban conglomeration in the world, home to masses of impoverished rural immigrants living in unimaginable squalor. At the same time, it is an outpost of the North’s industrial-financial empire, where wealthy Mexican and multinational corporate elites, with their armies of managers, lawyers, accountants, and bankers, pursue ever increasing profit opportunities through intensified exploitation of natural resources, currency and financial speculations, and assorted marginally legal and outright criminal forms of trade, primarily involving drugs and arms.
From Mexico City, we flew to Villahermosa, industrial capital of the state of Tabasco, where tens of thousands of protesters organized by the opposition party were occupying the plaza in front of the government building and demanding the resignation of the recently and fraudulently elected governor. Such conflicts are expressions of the ongoing divisions between the ruling elites and the disenfranchised masses, between the centralized nation-state and the outlying rural populations, and, more generally, between the First World center of capital and industry and the Third World periphery of peasants and indigenous people.
From Villahermosa, a two-hour bus ride brought us to the small town of Palenque. There, street vendors of indigenous crafts were offering Zapatista puppets, complete with black ski masks and rifles: images of revolution commodified as folk art. At the seminar, in a hotel beautifully situated near the ancient ruins, we immersed ourselves in chemistry, botany, and indigenous lore concerning visionary plants and fungi. We also visited the ruins of Palenque, a classical Maya ceremonial city abandoned one thousand years ago. The Lacandones still refer to it as the “navel of the world.”
The Maya nobility called themselves halach uinic, “the true, original humans.” On a full-moon night, when the goddess Ix’chel — goddess of beauty, love, healing, herbs and flowers, women and children — bathed the bleached stones of the ancient temples in her ethereal radiance, we were able to enter the complex and sit in quiet meditation on the steps of the central temple, the fragrance of copal incense mingling with the smells of the tropical night.
The Lacandones — along with other surviving Maya societies in Chiapas, Yucatan, and Guatemala — have preserved many of the traditions and practices of their forebears. Until quite recently, small groups of Lacandones would regularly visit the ruins of Palenque and perform ceremonies in the temples, burning copal and singing invocations to their gods and goddesses. Like other indigenous people worldwide, they have preserved the spiritual practices, as well as the ecological awareness, of their ancestors. By contrast, in the industrialized, urban North, the increasingly dominant materialist worldview has led to severe alienation and a contraction of consciousness — what Indian writer and activist Vandana Shiva has aptly called “the monocultures of the mind.”
From Palenque, our little party of five people rode in a van the hundred or so kilometers to the village of Naha, one of three remaining Lacandon settlements. On the way, we passed through three army roadblocks, where solemn young men with machine guns questioned us about our destination, our origin, and how much money we had. The road became progressively narrower, eventually becoming unpaved and winding through open fields and dense tropical rain forest. We were leaving the Third World urban environment and entering the indigenous Fourth World environment of small villages by lakes or streams. We saw fewer and fewer cars and trucks, but the villages, including Naha, had an occasional satellite dish to pick up television signals — the long tentacles of the urban industrial center had reached here also.
Most of the remaining five hundred Lacandones still live in the traditional villages. When we arrived in Naha, several young men came out to greet us, maintaining a certain respectful distance, but laughing and talking with great animation and obvious pleasure. All the men were barefoot, wore long white robes, and had long, jet black hair that never turned gray with age. The women wore somewhat more colorful clothes, with bead necklaces and multicolored sashes and dresses. The Lacandones’ speech was delightful to listen to, even though I didn’t understand a word: it had a rhythmic cadence, with many glottal stops and rich vowel sounds.
Although some of the Lacandones had watches, these were worn like bracelets, for decoration. Television sets, radios, and other artifacts of twentieth-century technology seemed to play only a marginal role in their lives. Like other indigenous people, they are still connected to the natural cycles of sun and moon, wind and rain, growing crops and flowering plants. The Lacandones grow corn, beans, chilies, and squash, using the traditional slash-and-burn technique to clear the land; their diet is supplemented by occasional hunting expeditions for monkeys, tapirs, parrots, and other game. The Lacandones do not make decisions about when to plant or harvest or go on a hunt or hold a ceremony on the basis of complex calendrical calculations, as did their ancestors, the ancient Maya. Rather, they let the natural rhythm of the seasons and the needs of the community determine the timing of such events.
We spent the afternoon visiting several families, including that of old Chan K’in, who was said to be between 107 and 110 years old (he did not know his age himself, or care). He’d had four wives, dozens of children, and innumerable grandchildren. Two of his wives were still living — one in her seventies, one in her forties. The younger was carrying around a two-year-old child of the old man. Although not a chief — the anarchic Lacandones have no chiefs — Chan K’in was obviously a respected elder, and had a reputation far beyond his village for his extensive knowledge of traditional lore, chants, incantations, and magical practices. He is even known internationally, and anthropologists have brought groups of North American and European spiritual seekers to Naha to meet him.
We found him sitting on a cot in the middle of his hut, which, like all the huts in the village, had plain wooden-board walls, an earth floor, and a few simple pieces of wooden furniture. His mobile, expressive face was kind, with large, sparkling round eyes. Later, we saw him out walking, slowly, carefully placing his feet, assisted by a long wooden staff. I was reminded of Laotzu’s description of a Taoist sage: “He walks carefully, like a fox crossing a frozen river.”
The Lacandones have no way of saying “hello” or “goodbye”: when they meet, they just start talking; when they depart, they just walk away. It’s as if the bonds of family and friendship are not weakened by distance and therefore do not need to be reestablished. Although the Lacandones have extensive knowledge of edible and healing plants of the forest, for most healing they seem to rely on chants and incantations. There are no shamans or healers. Everyone learns to heal through singing, just as everyone learns to plant and harvest, to hunt, to gather, and to prepare food.
We were offered the opportunity to partake of balche, the ceremonial intoxicant of the Lacandones. The drink is prepared in a large dugout canoe from the bark of the balche tree (Lonchocarpus violaceous), which is soaked in water and fermented with honey. Hour-long incantations are sung over the drink: all the gods and spirits of the forest are invoked, especially the spirits of various poisonous plants, mushrooms, and insects, which are asked to enter into the drink to make it powerful and healthy. The Lacandones say balche makes them strong and gives them long lives.
The god-house in which the ceremony took place was a thatch-roofed structure with open sides. Inside were rows of blackened ceramic pots holding copal incense, each carved with the face of a deity. Partway through the ceremony, the chunks of copal resin were lit; they burned brightly, sending up great clouds of black smoke. From the canoe, the balche master filled a large gourd and from it filled each participant’s smaller gourd. One is expected to drink large quantities: several liters every hour for several hours. Balche is intoxicant, emetic, and purgative: from time to time one goes into the nearby forest to urinate, vomit, or defecate. Afterward one feels cleansed, lightened, and hungry.
The mood was festive, with much laughter, mutual kidding, and teasing. Only when the balche master sang songs to the gods did everyone become quiet and attentive. When, in a nervous mishap, I spilled my gourd on the leg, foot, and robe of the master, he laughed without the slightest hint of reproach. (I couldn’t help wondering how a priest would have reacted had I spilled a glass of red Communion wine on his white vestments during Mass.) There was much coming and going, animated conversation — including political discussions about the Zapatistas — and almost constant smiling and laughter.
Balche tastes slightly bitter and tart, but pleasant. After drinking about three or four gourdfuls, I began to feel a warmth in my chest. My head felt light, but without any hint of alcoholic wooziness. The feelings that gradually developed in the next couple of hours were not unlike those I am familiar with from therapeutic work with such empathogenic psychedelics as MDMA, which, unlike the classical hallucinogens, don’t produce perceptual changes or inner visions. It was a euphoric intoxication with strong feelings of comradely affection, which functioned to bond community members.
During the ceremony, I felt a profound admiration for the Lacandones, whom I didn’t know and couldn’t even understand. I also felt affection emanating from them toward me, and toward each other. Even those not taking part in the ceremony were included in this empathic web, as were the creatures and plants of the forest, and the whole world of sky and earth, rain and sunlight, wind and rocks and trees. Waves of positive feeling washed through the group, and the rhythmic sounds of laughter rippled and resonated until all of us were laughing in synchrony. Deep black eyes shone in dark, bronze-skinned faces. From time to time, one or another of the men would lean up against a supporting pole, fall silent, and look to some faraway place of dreams.
Gradually, it has dawned on me: we have got it backward in our conventional worldview. The world of indigenous peoples, like the Lacandones, is the real First World, because it has been here the longest; it was here first. The so-called First World of the industrialized North is first only in capital accumulation and military force. Those cultures that superimposed themselves on the enduring world of the aboriginal inhabitants are the ones that should be called second, third, or fourth. (With similar logic, some North American Indians have now begun to refer to themselves as “First Americans” or “members of the First Nations.”)
The lifeways of these “true, original humans” are much the same as those of my indigenous European ancestors in the neolithic village cultures of Old Europe: a mixed subsistence economy of farming and gardening, supplemented by hunting and fishing to add meat protein. Attuned to the cycles of nature, they revered the natural world and all the gods and goddesses who animated it and connected them to the invisible realms of spirits, ancestors, and dreams. Many such cultures have survived more or less intact to this day. Cultivating social bonds through shared food and drink and ceremonies of empathic intoxication was and is a widespread practice. Take, for example, the Polynesian kava ceremonies, or the old Norse rituals of reconciliation involving a shared “mead of inspiration.”
To consistently use the term “First World” in a manner that reflects the realities of historical development, rather than the realpolitik of military and economic dominance, would have a consciousness-raising effect on our thinking, I believe. The mixed farming-gardening village communities that arrived with the rise of grain cultivation around ten thousand years ago were truly the first form of human culture. In a large (though diminishing) number of areas around the world, these communities still exist, and even thrive. The Lacandones, for example, are not in any real sense “underdeveloped.” Their economy and culture are sustainably adapted to existing ecological conditions.
Of course, preceding the neolithic village culture was the even more original, primal world of the nomadic bands of paleolithic gatherer-hunters, which existed for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural revolution. These ancestors lived in a “wild” state and were even more dependent upon, and hence more attuned to, the ever changing cycles of nature than the settled villagers. (The Lacandon Maya economy combines elements from both layers, since the Lacandones both farm and hunt.) Perhaps we should say that the real First World is the combined world of indigenous people, made up of seminomadic gatherer-hunters and small gardening and farming villages. The overlapping historical development is preserved to this day in the layering of different strata of society, superimposed one upon the other or blended together, like the sediments from different geological periods in the layers of rock.
Actually, this indigenous First World, with its mixed farming and hunting economies, is preceded by an even older, primordial world: the world of prehuman nature, of animals, plants, land, water, air, and biotic communities, which provides support for every living being. This is the ecological substrate, the niche or habitat to which various cultures have developed more or less successful adaptations. So we could say that the indigenous or aboriginal cultures constitute the First World, if we keep in mind that, without the ecological substrate, this world would have no place to exist.
In this alternate developmental worldview, what then are the Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds? I suggest they are: the world of cities and towns (Second), the world of nation-states (Third), and the world of the global capitalist-industrial economy (Fourth). Each of these worlds has superimposed itself on the earlier cultures, and today they all coexist in interpenetrating layers. In an ecological sense, the later, larger systems are parasitical to the earlier, indigenous cultures: the flow of resources, including raw materials and food, is primarily from the indigenous world to the urban, national, and capitalist-industrial worlds, whereas military and political control is exerted in the opposite direction.
In our journey to the village of the Lacandon Maya, we traversed these different worlds, traveling backward in time, as it were, to an earlier, preindustrial, preurban culture, and sharing for a moment in its way of life, which is primarily original First World, but interpenetrated in complex ways by Second, Third, and Fourth World cultures. For example, the Lacandones participate in the life of the cities by going there to trade, buy furniture and supplies, or work part-time jobs; they also get a municipal water supply and electricity. City-based police or bureaucrats maintain administrative control with occasional visits.
We encountered the nation-state Third World when we passed through the Mexican Army’s roadblocks: they used military force to control movement into and through the territories occupied by the indigenous peasants. The relationship of the centralized nation-state to the indigenous populations living in peripheral, rural areas is purely exploitative and parasitical, because being part of the Mexican nation contributes nothing to the welfare and survival of the Lacandones and other Indian peasant groups. On the contrary, ever since the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, indigenous First World people have been consistently marginalized or exterminated, their land appropriated for the cattle ranches of the wealthy, who are supported by the military force of the central governments. Indian and peasant groups like the Zapatistas, who protest the theft of their ancestral lands, are branded “rebels” and criminalized.
A few weeks after our visit, the Mexican government sent fifty thousand troops with tanks, armored vehicles, and helicopters into the mountains of Chiapas to hunt down the Zapatistas.
Shortly after this aggressive crackdown, North American newspapers reported on a leaked memo from the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York to the Mexican government. The memo gave President Ernesto Zedillo an ultimatum: neutralize the Zapatistas, or international investors would pull out of Mexico completely, dooming its economy. The message only made explicit what many had long suspected: the now global power of the international financial and industrial corporations — the real Fourth World — to control the political and economic affairs of the nation-states: the real Third World. So-called free-trade agreements only provide the legal framework for the free movement of capital to areas of lowest labor costs and easiest access to natural resources, thus maximizing profit returns.
The multinational, capitalist-industrial Fourth World extends its reach all over the globe, searching for trees, animals, minerals, or fossil fuels to be converted into profitable commodities and sold to ever larger masses of “consumers” in all corners of the world. The tentacles of this Fourth World industrial-growth monster have even reached into the Lacandon village in the form of satellite dishes and color TVs. Still, the Lacandon Maya have been lucky thus far: industrial corporate scouts have not yet found anything in their bioregion to exploit. Many indigenous societies in other parts of the Americas have been devastated and destroyed by land-hungry cattle ranchers or prospectors for oil, gold, or uranium. The most likely threat to the Lacandones will come from logging companies looking for increasingly scarce tropical hardwoods such as mahogany.
The Lacandones have a prophecy about the end of the world. According to their lineage of prophets — of which old Chan K’in is the last representative — the world will be destroyed when the last mahogany tree is gone. Ecologists would say that mahogany is the “indicator species” for the Central American rain forest: its health or death is indicative of the health or death of the entire ecosystem. Thus, the ecologists confirm the prophecy: when deforestation has proceeded to the degree that there are no mahogany trees left, the forest — and consequently the habitat, the world of the Maya — will be destroyed. The prophecy tells that the burning eyes of the One True Lord, Hachak Yum, will consume the forest in flames. The smoke from the burning of tropical rain forests can already be seen from satellites miles above the earth.
The indigenous people of the true First World are preparing themselves for the final struggle. Many have only the remaining trees and land, and their children, to fight for. And so, we are told, the Zapatistas come out of the Lacandon jungle and declare: “We are the dead, rising to die again, so our people can live once more.”
