DOSE:

oral

Ayahuasca

(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

65 kg

By the time this very experience happened, I had drunk Ayahuasca 6 times. 3 of them, vomiting had aborted the experience and so I turned to eating extracted DMT and harmaline alkaloids.

This was around the 5th time I was eating the extractions.

My first experience had been absolutely amazing. I had reached a state of absolute, unimaginable bliss and peace of mind. And it had pretty much cleaned the slate after 10 years of unhappiness.

So I thought that Ayahuasca had already shown me the extent of its power. And I was certainly hoping for something similar again, but not really imagining that it could go much further.

I had no idea.

This 10th or so Ayahuasca experience turned out to be the one most important event of my life, past and future, regardless of what may happen in the future.

- Coming up :

I planned to stay home on this Sunday night to enjoy an Ayahuasca trip in my room. When comparing to usual recommended doses, it appears that I either have a natural tolerance, or that my extractions are rather weak. So the amount of DMT I took is not really relevant and maybe not wise to disclose.

I had to up the doses over time to learn how much of this specific batch I needed.

The effects often take really long (up to 4h) to begin for me. I was already feeling a very nice euphoria, colour enhancement and slight alteration of sight when some friends passed by. I like to be alone when I take psychedelics, but since it was coming up quite slowly, I received them gladly. Over the hour they were here, the effects increased little, so I was started to think it would be a light trip.

However, around 30 minutes after they left, the effects grew stronger. All along I had been busy on my computer, but the usual thought process that invades my head when on Ayahuasca started. Ayahuasca makes me think and marvel about many different things, and makes meenjoy this thinking. The music that was on sounded absolutely amazing. It was shocking! How on earth could they make music that sounded so good?! I wondered if those specific sound waves happened to be tuned to trigger euphoria in the human brain.

I was still intermittently dozing of the thinking process and going back to my computer until I found myself laughing out loud 'I can't see anymore'. My vision had become totally kaleidoscopic. And I also started to feel drained of all energy. So I just bent over my desk and rested there, not thinking much, because my mind was getting more confused each second. I didn't feel weak as after an effort, but as if something was magically leeching all energy from me.

I mastered the force to lift my head, and woosh! fast strands made of orange/yellow hued hexagons overwhelmed my vision. I always get very similar visuals on Ayahuasca, only patterns, whereas I also see entities on smoked DMT. However, I can imagine how those strands could be interpreted as snakes by someone a priori wishing for a 'shamanic-like experience'.

At this point, I became absolutely overwhelmed by the experience. I didn't have any clear thoughts or any realization of who/where I was or what was happening.

I was lost in Ayahuasca hyperspace, with my mind dissolved and swimming in a sea of visuals.

- Climax :

Then it happened. The most important instant of my life.

I found myself standing up. Clear headed, seeing the room. Not aware of what had happened in the last instants/minutes. And I felt the birth of the universe!

The impossible appeared clear.

The most absurd and unverifiable thing possible appeared to me as the purest and truest obviousness :

Out of nowhere, the universe had 'chosen' to exist. It had created itself. I felt 'how stupid I am to not have realized it before!', the universe never needed anything to create it, it just created itself! It 'wished itself into existence'

Until this very instant, if I had been told that, I would have been totally unsatisfied by such an absurd and incomplete explanation. Yet, a few seconds later, I understood it, I felt it, I was convinced by it.

Some things can't be explained, they have to be understood

An example I read was about very young kids who are shown 2 glasses of different shapes, one full, the other empty. The full one was emptied into the other one and the kids were asked in which one there was more water. And the little kids didn't know. The experience was repeated every day, until one day came the answer 'it's the same', as if it had always been obvious.

It seems as if one day as a child grows up, the connection finally set up in his brain to allow him to understand that if it's the same amount of water, the shape of the glass doesn't influence.

The realization about the birth of the universe felt the same. It had been under my nose all my life, but I couldn't understand it. And Ayahuasca had been the medium that allowed me to understood it as clearly as the little kid who suddenly has the right connections in his brain.

I know it sounds loony. But it only sounds loony because I'm unable to share the realization that I experienced any more than you can explain to the little kid until he understands by himself

I felt it as if it were one of my own memories. I felt the emergence out of non-existence and understood how it was possible for matter, space and time not to exist. How it was possible for even such things as mathematical truths not to exist, because there was just no setting for them to exist in.

Those were created with the birth of the universe and the universe keeps creating all the time.

It created the rules it would live by.

It created elemental particles. Then created the form these particles would take when combined together. Then created life, created emotions.

When a so far non-existent compound is synthesized, do its chemical properties appear out of nowhere or were they already inscribed in the fabric of the universe?

The universe keeps creating itself, because it's a new born.

I saw through the eyes of a new born universe. A universe that's slowly growing and becoming self aware through its living organisms.

For 13.7 billion years, the universe has only been matter, but with the appearance of life, it now has the possibility to become aware of itself through its conscious components. As it has created matter and its characteristics, life and its characteristics, it's now progressively creating consciousness. It first appeared independently in individuals, but through this very kind of experiences and similar ones, individuals now feel the emergence of a consciousness common to all of them.

I had heard before Hicks' quote 'we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively' but hadn't understood what that meant.

Now I knew it, I felt it.

We ARE part of one unique consciousness. Only, we're not aware of the whole, as a flower on a tree can live and die independently of all the other flowers on the same tree. Or as a cell of your body can live and die without any interaction with a cell in another part of the same body. We are different eyes of the same universe. We all see and experience something different, but we're still parts of a same whole.

And Ayahuasca allowed for some instants to access this 'higher consciousness'. And as a consequence, i realized that our life is not limited to our human life. In fact, our human life is only a parenthesis within our 'real life', that of the universe. This life that seems to us so important is actually only a detail. And death is not the end, but on the contrary it releases us from the limitations of our human life and allows our consciousness to rejoin its complete self.

A thousand thoughts seemed to be racing through my head. But they were not classically constructed thoughts, they belonged to a different kind of mind. And I knew. I knew everything. I knew everything in a way that just can't be explained or described. If a cat was for an hour given the brain of a human, when he's back to its cat self, he wouldn't be able to describe what he had understood while having a human brain. And it's the same with this experience.

I know I've known everything... but I'm unable to describe it. I had tears running down my face from the realization... from the beauty of such knowledge. The universe was an open book for me to read its mysteries. I was not knowing things specifically, but everything at once, with a different kind of understanding. As when in a crowd, I can hear all the conversations at once, without paying specific attention to any of them.
That was absolute beauty, understanding of everything, contemplating the ultimate answer and explanation of the universe.

And then... in a second, it was gone I still had the tears on my face, and yet, I didn't know anymore. The book of the universe was not in a language I could understand anymore. It had escaped me. I was left knowing that I had known something, everything... but what was it?

As the trip slowly came down, I still had some fleeting hints of understanding coming back to me, and I kept pondering the implications of what had happened to me.

- Conclusion :

It's been 2 years already and my view of the experience hasn't changed from the interpretation I set for over the following days.

Should I consider that 'You were on drugs. You think crazy things when you're on drugs'?I should and I have. But it doesn't work.

Put simply, the question is 'have I really known everything, or has the drug tricked me into believing so?'

Well, one thing is sure : be what I have felt true or false, being granted 'absolute knowledge and understanding'... would have felt exactly the same.

So be it true or false, I am thankful for having experienced it exactly as if it were true. And it felt truer than truth itself.

One insight of the experience that I'm convinced to the core that is true is universal consciousness.

I had pretty much no prior knowledge of the concept and so I was certainly not biased in any way. And I was absolutely not looking for what I found, or anything else by the way. Yet, although there's no material proof for it, I felt it as surely as you know that you love someone, yet can't prove it rationally.

And finding so many other testimonies of people who felt this universal consciousness only comforts me in my conviction.

During the experience I thought about other people who had had the same realization. I wondered if I would just be able to recognize them. It felt it so strong that I really wondered if it would just stay on me and others as an aura that we would be able to feel. But unfortunately it doesn't seem so.

If all beings finally felt it, would we stay on this different level of consciousness?

Most other insights, I choose to believe (rather than know as certainties) had truth to them. And I prefer to think that if they are erroneous, it's my interpretation of a true message that is mistaking.

I believe so for the simple reason that with all the detachment possible and being very skeptic by nature, the experience still stays more convincing than rational thoughts of 'you were just on drugs'.

So, I was happily surprised to read afterwards that scientists consider that the universe may have created itself as a totally valid possibility. And I certainly don't feel crazy about believing so when more established theories include 'God created it, period. It's magic, don't ask'.

I read in articles about Ayahuasca that it 'answered your questions'. Reports show people with family problems who find the answers to those problems on Ayahuasca, people with addiction problems who solve those problems, and so on.

I had always seriously been wondering about the universe and its origin. Did ayahuasca show me the specific answers to what was puzzling me? What more valuable tool could there be then! Or did I just get them randomly, as I could have had answers to matters I didn't really care about?

In French, the word enlightened (illuminé) is also used to mean 'crazy'. Now I know why. Someone who reached enlightenment will very obviously seem crazy to anyone listening to what he has to say.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 55308
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 14, 2006	Views: 24,711
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Ayahuasca (8) : Alone (16), Glowing Experiences (4)