Pick one of these three options: One. I want to die from heart disease. Two. I want to die from ­cancer. Three. I want to die in the arms of my beloved after great sex and a long life

If you picked No. 3, the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you. And if you live to be 85 years old, you have a 50 percent chance of having Alzheimer’s disease. We are in the grip of a conspiracy spearheaded by food companies, pharmaceutical concerns and a medical establishment determined to ensnare you from cradle to grave. But did you know that people in the Amazon or rural China do not die from cancer or heart disease? They die peacefully in bed.

In my late 20s, I left a prestigious teaching position and my own research laboratory at San Francisco State University to explore the tributaries of the Amazon River. I’d had enough of academia and eager students wanting to read about indigenous cultures. I wanted to visit undiscovered villages and explore ancient civilizations firsthand. My travel expenses at that time were paid for by a pharmaceutical company hoping to find the bark or root that could become the next great cure for cancer or heart disease. After all, the jungle is nature’s pharmacy, filled with exotic plants with powers yet to be discovered, and I was one of the few medical anthropologists exploring the Amazon.

During my travels, I saw how Amazon peoples live in harmony with their environment. Whereas the farmer needs to work an average of eight hours every day to meet the caloric needs of his body, the ­Amazonian needs to work only three hours to get the same nutritional value from nature. This left them many hours of the day to do what all of us do when we go to the rainforest—be in awe of its beauty and commune with nature.

They had no masters making them build pyramids or castles. Instead, they became consummate explorers of consciousness. In the jungle, there is little call to outer exploration. Every patch of jungle looks just like every other. No faint shore calls you, no mountain pass waits to be crossed, no distant port lures you. The shamans were consummate explorers of an inner landscape during their states of shamanic ecstasy.

I spent many months paddling to villages that had seldom seen a white man, and wherever I went, I found no cancer or heart disease. The two greatest killers of Western civilization were not present in aboriginal societies. To top it off, I met no one with dementia or Alzheimer’s. People died of old age, infections and accidents. Many died peacefully, in their sleep. Clearly, the Indians knew something about health that we Westerners didn’t know. What was their secret?

The shaman believes that when you enter shamanic ecstasy you create the conditions for health, and healing happens naturally. ­Illness is seen as an imbalance in a natural harmony that occurs when we’re disconnected from the invisible side of nature and have forgotten its existence. What’s more, when you are ill, it’s possible that you’re experiencing the consequences of imbalances that you personally had little role in creating. It could be because of the actions and deeds of your parents and grandparents, which can have an effect lasting for many generations, based on an idea we call epigenetics.

My sponsor could not contain his disappointment that I hadn’t discovered the ingredient for a blockbuster bark that would make all of us rich and save some lives at the same time. Unbeknownst to them, or to me at the time, I did find an ingredient that prevents cancer as well as many of the ailments of civilization. I learned there was an ingredient to lifelong health that could be found in the virgin rainforest but would not fit in a backpack or be turned into pills. It was shamanic ecstasy.

This was at the Upper Madre de Dios River, nearly three decades ago. One day I was invited by the shamans to participate in a ceremony with the legendary “vine of death.” But first I had to take the earthly medicine, the cleansing herbs and weeklong dietas, or fasts, to detoxify my body and ­repair my brain. Then I could begin to explore a reality that has been hidden in plain sight all along.

At the time, I had difficulty understanding why I had to ingest the foul-tasting plants, the barks and leaves that would make me purge from both ends of my body and break out in a feverish sweat. Years later, in the laboratory at San Francisco State University, I learned that the dieta was rich in Omega-3s that repaired the region in the brain responsible for learning—in my case learning an entirely new worldview—including how to live healthfully and stress free. The plants were natural anti-­inflammatories that turned on major detox pathways and switched off the death clock that ticks away inside every cell in our body. They stimulated more than 500 genes that create health and switched off more than 200 genes that create disease.

Thankfully, you can find these ingredients that repair our broken brains and detox our body in your local health-food store. The dieta was the necessary step required to enter the state of consciousness—known as shamanic ecstasy—in which all healing can happen. It was only after that evening ceremony on a pristine sandy beach at the edge of the river that I began to comprehend what the shamans were saying.

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew; the main active ingredient active is ­dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a compound nearly identical to the neurotransmitter ­serotonin. The fact that there are receptor sites in the brain for this molecule suggests that we produce it naturally. DMT is found in all living things, from trees to horses to eagles. Everything that has DNA has DMT. We produce abundant DMT in two notable instances: during shamanic ecstasy, and at the moment of our death.

 " I spent many months paddling to villages that had  seldom seen a white man, and wherever I went, I found no cancer or heart disease."

The word “ayahuasca” means the “vine of death” in the Quechua language. Legend says it brings you out of the ghost-like ­existence where you have been spending most of your time into a life in which you are truly alive. Back then, 30 years ago, I was not prepared for what I would experience. Who I was—anthropologist, white male, modern man, son, explorer—would all be forcefully stripped away from me. Everything and everyone I thought I had been I sloughed off like crusty dead skin. And then, after no one was left to interpret or reason or catalogue or annotate the experience, absolute clarity enveloped me, and I realized I was much greater than any of those roles; I was a part of all of creation. Insignificant, yet indispensible.

During my journey, I met the spirit of Gaia, our living planet, who showed me that what we call the “real” world is the hallucination. The goddess revealed to me that everything I believed to be reality was a ­distortion of the truth I sought. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to meet the spirit of Mother Nature. The anthropological literature and the popular legends are full of stories like mine, and those of you who have tasted the vine know what I am talking about.

By the following morning, the lessons taught to me by Gaia, the lucidity and clarity I had been shown by the goddess, became notes in my journal. All I could recall viscerally was the foul taste of the medicine, the violent retching, the beauty of the cosmos and the now-faint voice of Gaia. The plant opened the door, but I had to travel through it. Chemical ecstasy was not the way.

Today, ayahuasca experiences are offered everywhere, and many people report sublime visions from their urban ceremonies. And often, as the wisdom fades, only the postcard insights are left. You remember something huge happened, but the brain cannot hold on to the oneness of the experience. Many-ness slowly crept back, and the luminous web of reality soon collapsed into the everyday landscape in which nothing seemed to be rel
ated to anything else. Like a postcard from a magical country we visited: The beach is beautiful, wish you were here.

The reason we cannot hold the experience of oneness achieved during shamanic ecstasy is that the poisons in our food, the toxins in our water and air and the processed grains in our diet have broken our brains. And the brain and nervous system is the vehicle through which nature and Spirit communicates with man. At least while we are in a physical body. The ancient Egyptians mummified every part of the body except the brain; that, they drained away through a straw. They understood that we would have no use for it in the afterlife.

When your brain is broken, you cannot enter shamanic ecstasy. You need the chemicals to take you there, and then you forget. You cannot hear the voice of Spirit or dialogue with nature. Yet even in those brief visits, you can upgrade the quality of the information in your luminous energy field (LEF) that surrounds your physical body. The LEF is the software that instructs the hardware, your DNA, to grow a new body, which ages and heals differently. When your brain is broken, you cannot upload the codes to heal and grow a new body. Instead, you are doomed to live out the genetic fate you inherited from your parents and replay their psychological dramas over and over again in your own life.

Mitochondria are the energy factories at work within your cells. They impact your moods, your vitality, your aging process, even how you might die. They are also in charge of eliminating old cells and replacing them with new cells. The mitochondria are influenced by the foods you eat, the amount of calories you ingest and the availability of specific nutrients. Since they are oxygen breathers, they produce and are damaged by free radicals. Mitochondria regulate the switching on and off of the genes that produce malignancy, health or disease.

Before agriculture, our diet was nutrient dense and calorie poor. Our mitochondria had all the nutrients needed to thrive and keep us healthy. Our diet was rich in antioxidant fruits and berries as well as nutrient-rich veggies. After agriculture, our diets became calorie rich and nutrient poor. The new calories came from grains—carbohydrates the body turns to sugar and then fat.

Our bodies don’t recognize processed grains, particularly those rich in gluten, as “food,” since it takes 40,000 to 50,000 years for our DNA to adapt to a change in our diets, and grains have been around for less than 10,000 years. The grains can trigger an inflammatory response and a leaky gut, where food particles can pass into our bloodstream through the gut lining, a membrane only one cell thick. And while our blood is designed to transport nutrients, it is not intended to carry undigested food. These fermenting bits from our last meal trigger an autoimmune response and produce inflammation, mucus, brain fog and lethargy, while the inflammatory cytokines they produce damage mitochondria in the brain.

Anthropologist Jared Diamond describes agriculture as “the worst mistake of the human race.” We are living the dreadful effects of this mistake. Twenty percent of the population will die of heart disease. One in four Americans will die from cancer. And these diseases are largely preventable.

Shortly after the last ice age, as the world religions started to flourish, humans in Asia begin to cultivate rice; humans in the Americas, maize (corn); and humans in ­Europe and Mesopotamia, wheat. The faithful prayed “give us this day our daily bread…” For the first time since the dawn of humanity,

our brains began to run on sugars (carbohydrates) derived from abundant grain crops.

Prior to farming, we nourished our bodies and brains with the proteins and fats from a shore-based diet rich in Omega-3 fatty acids and other brain nutrients, as well as vegetables and nuts. The little beef we ate was organic and grass fed. All the veggies were fresh. It was only at the end of summer, when fruit was ripe, that we ate sugars. Then insulin stored these sugars as fat to help us through the long winter ahead.

Primitive man ate only 1 percent whole grains; the rest was meat, veggies, fruits, legumes, nuts, etcetera. But modern man consumes 59 percent refined grains and 18 percent refined sugars and sweeteners, leaving only 23 percent for what used to make up the bulk of our diets.  With the domestication of grains, we begin to live on sugars year-‘round. And sugars, together with the inflammatory and allergic reactions caused by the new grain diet, damage the regions of the brain (the neocortex and prefrontal lobes) that are involved in shamanic ecstasy.

The worst blow came during the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when dwarf wheat species were introduced. This new variety of wheat has saved the lives of a billion people around the world. Yet the genetically modified grain contains nearly 20 times more gluten than the earlier domesticated varieties. And gluten is the part of a story with which we are all familiar, as we recognize our own sensitivities to bread, pasta and the rise in celiac disease. If the microorganisms in our gut track are out of balance or if we have leaky gut or food allergies, we are unable to digest properly and can develop autoimmune disorders. Roughly 75 percent of our immune defense cells are located in the gut.

Meanwhile, the rulers and priests of Egypt, the Mayan lords and Incan kings, continued to eat a protein- and fat-rich, fish- and plant-based diet, while their pyramid building slaves and soldiers lived on bread, rice and corn. The fats our Paleolithic ancestors consumed provided the superfuel the brain required to repair the hippocampus and achieve shamanic ecstasy, and their plant-based diet protected them from the high incidence of dementia, cancer, diabetes found in today’s civilized world. Our Paleolithic ancestors lived long, disease-free lives. The average was 33 years. Yet if you made it past 15, avoiding all the perils and illnesses of childhood, odds were that you would live another 40 years or so. After the arrival of agriculture, the average human lifespan dropped dramatically to 20 years.

Accompanying the change in the fuel for our brains when we switched from fats to grains was a profound change in our psychology. Man the hunter became man the warrior. Blood sports became popular in coliseums and bull rings. Men left the family for the wheat fields and for wars to protect their fields. The father was absent from the home and the women became the property of men and the breeders of strong boys.

" After the arrival of agriculture, the average human lifespan dropped dramatically to 20 years. "

Shamanic medicine works by upgrading the quality of the information of the luminous energy field that instructs your molecules, cells and genes. The LEF is the software that informs DNA, through the hardware, which is the brain and nervous system. The LEF has been depicted as the aura around Christ and Buddha. It’s the blueprint that organizes the physical body the same way that a magnet organizes iron fillings on a piece of glass. If you change the blueprint, the body changes. When you repair the blueprint, the body heals.

The shaman understands that we are flesh and blood as well as the energy field that infuses the physical body, guiding its growth and repair. The mind-body connection we have been talking about in the West was never forgotten by indigenous people, who understood that emotions, thoughts, the environment and the invisible world affect our LEF, thus influence what is happening in our bodies. The way to heal the body is by upgrading the quality of the LEF. Then the body can stop manifesting disease and start creating health.

But you need a healed brain to do this. The chemicals produced by our ordinary stressful lives, cortisol and adrenalin, are powerful steroids that will keep us trapped in a predatory mind-frame fighting for survival, mired in strife and away from ecstasy. And these steroids da
mage the hippocampus, which is rich in cortisol receptors. You need a healed hippocampus to turn on your brain’s innate production of DMT.

" Today, instead of going to God, we go to the doctor. They may be experts in disease yet often know little about health."

The first task is to repair your hippocampus with Omega-3 rich foods and supplements. We used to get our Omega-3s from fish. Today our fish is farm raised and devoid of Omega-3s. You need three grams a day, mostly DHA. (Breast milk is 40 percent DHA, crucial for the developing brain.)

Then you need to eliminate gluten and dairy from your diet, at least for a month to allow your immune system the opportunity to reset. If you are going through a healing process, you need to be off all grains. This will reduce the inflammation in your body and turn on the genes responsible for longevity and health. Next you need to detox, from the very inside of your cells. Broccoli seed extract, curcumin and resveratrol turn on the detox pathways and the innate production of free-radical scavengers inside the cell.

Then you have to repair and strengthen your mitochondria, the fuel factories and feminine life force inside every neuron and cell in the body. At that point, you will be primed to experience shamanic ecstasy and create exceptional health. You do this using energy medicine to heal the luminous energy field that is the matrix of all life.

In the West, we have identified many illnesses, and only two kinds of people—men and women. In contrast, the shaman believes there are many kinds of people and only two kinds of ailments—the illnesses of God and the illnesses of man. The illnesses of man are the product of envy and jealousy, of “bad vibes” and toxic energies as well as exposure to natural toxins, from snake bites to poison berries. The illnesses of God cover everything else. To heal these, you must go to God, sit across the dinner table from Him and negotiate for your health. You then will be shown the aspects of your life that need to return to harmony and the lessons you must learn in order to heal. And you can best visit with God during shamanic ecstasy.

Of course, we can pray at any time. But a face-to-face with God (others would say “Gaia”) is something different. In the West, only the prophets of old spoke directly with God. For the shaman, everyone with a little talent and a heroic discipline can do this, once you have detoxified your body and brain. Otherwise, the shaman has to journey to meet Spirit on your behalf.

Today, instead of going to God, we go to the doctor. They may be experts in disease yet often know little about health. I think that nothing beats meeting God personally, and that we must learn to do this if we are to take charge of our health