DOSE:

1.25 shots

oral

Ayahuasca

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

Eleven of us sat in a silent circle in the dark room as the shaman seemed to be about to begin the ceremony. I had spent a week preparing for it, following all the directions I was given. I had not consumed any meat, dairy products, coffee, black tea, chocolate, overly spicy food, garlic, eggs, microwavable food, drugs, nor anything really sugary or salty. Also, as we had been instructed, I had not had sex or masturbated for over a week. And I had not eaten anything since 3pm; it was now midnight. This was relatively soon compared to yesterday, when I had fasted the entire day for the ceremony that took place that night. I thought that night was intense, but it was nothing compared to what I was about to experience.

The shaman, a large (but not fat), strong man from Spain with long black hair and a black beard led the ceremony. He had studied with three grandmasters from three of the remaining tribes that still practice shamanism in South America for about 9 years. He too, was to become a grandmaster one day. English was not his first language but it was good enough. He had a very calm yet powerful aura around him; you could just feel his presence in the room.

After sitting in silence for awhile, the shaman called us up in groups of three to snort some tobacco water. It burned and made all of us cough and sneeze profusely, but it gave us a powerful buzz that made us ready for the journey ahead. He then poured himself a shot of the black, extremely bitter ayahuasca that he had spent most of yesterday personally brewing. He asked us if we wanted to drink more “medicine” than we had for the previous ritual; I boldly volunteered. When he asked me if I was sure I was ready, I told him I thought my experience yesterday was weak, which prompted him to pour me an extra big glass. After we had each had our doses, he commanded us to lay back in our sleeping bags and rest.

After about thirty minutes of silent meditation, the nausea began to settle in; we became like fermented eggs about to hatch. Three trash bags had been placed by each of us to be vomited in if we got sick, which was apparently almost inevitable and part of the purification process. I felt like I was ascending a massive rollercoaster with an ominous drop ahead of me.

And all of the sudden, as I stared at the ceiling, WHAM, it hit me. It was like a new program was rapidly being downloaded, installed, and run on the computer that was my brain. Every image I saw told me something, it was like an alien language. Multiplying, circular creatures filled my visual field. It made me realize that DMT literally is the force that drives all life and evolution. Its existence from the perspective of everything that exists in the cosmos made me absolutely certain there was a divine universal spirit with an agenda that we can only try in vain to understand. The creatures resembled the forest god from the movie Princess Monanoke, the one that generates a myriad of plants out of its footprints that quickly grow and die with each step it takes. I became conscious of all the life around me and the unbelievably complex life going on inside me as I stared at the skin on my hands, thinking about the amazing processes going on in each one of my cells. This then expanded to images of the Earth as a living creature that created DMT to form life to act out an endless play to parallel the divine mind. We weren’t separate from God, we ARE God. God is everything. Every thought, feeling, and act any living creature does is an expression of God. And then I thought about technology. What was it in terms of evolution? It was tools we have made to aid us in communicating with one another, to more efficiently carry out our roles as the neurons of Earth, to strengthen the connections that we were to form as part of our purpose as sentient beings of information. My ego was shattered.

And then the round creatures came back. They morphed into tiny black snakes, which scared me as they reminded me of the bible. It was the snake in the Adam and Eve story that convinces Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, which causes the couple to realize they’re naked and be thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Maybe I had ventured too far, learned an unnatural amount about the world that a single human cell was not meant to know, and by doing so I was trying to play God. Maybe I would be kicked out of Eden by being unable to see anything the way a human was meant to see it because I had transcended the reality meant to encompass human life. Perhaps ayahuasca was not a divine medicine but a satanic potion, the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. Maybe my curiosity made me cheat the natural system and learn what one learns when they become temporarily one with the divine soul when they die, and the fact that I would still live after this knowledge was given to me was a glitch in the system.

And the images of technology returned. And then I saw things from the perspective of evolution at the beginning of time and realized I was born WAY in the future. And the world seemed like it did not have much time left. Maybe the Mayans were right and the world really was going to end in December. Even if it did not, the world was in terrible shape and surely couldn’t last much longer. The circular creatures returned, except this time they resembled the billions of humans that now live on Earth, multiplying exponentially and without reason. We had become a cancer on the Earth. We had gone on autopilot as reproducing idea generators and would kill the body we resided on for it. Images of population graphs that ascended at exponential rates came into my mind along with massive industrial cities that dumped waste into oceans, tumors of the Earth. We would kill ourselves by being unable to break from our individual egos, illusions caused by the inability to see the bigger picture. And I, at least in the body I currently found myself in, was a tiny creature born at the end of time.

But then the soothing chants of the Shaman calmed me down, and something told me everything would be okay. The chants overshadowed the sounds of people vomiting, and I truly felt that they were being healed by the powerful forces of nature. The fact that we exist meant there was a divine plan for everything, and even if everything died there was a beautiful place for our souls to reside in a nonphysical reality, a true Garden of Eden. To be afraid was to be an ego-obsessive fool.

As the Shaman began making beautiful sounds with strange rainforest instruments, the tiny creatures returned, this time resembling small dwarf-like creatures. They were just like us, humans, with jolly purposes. The idea of extraordinary humans like Einstein or Jimi Hendrix astounded me as amazing expressions of nature that stood out among the other dwarves. And then I thought about the fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and how they were imagined by humans, and thus expressions of the divine mind. And then it dawned on me that the very same method of imagination must have occurred on a divine scale to think of humanity. Images of villages and cities with various types of fairies, elves, gnomes, hobbits, dwarves, angels, and aliens came to me, beautiful expressions taken from the dreams of the divine mind. All art was a beautiful interpretation of the tiny creatures that inhabit the earth. And people, plants, and all life was God’s art. We are all nothing more than ideas.

And then I had thoughts about how it was our imagination and our potential for religious beliefs that set us apart from all the other animals. Communication through art and language made us diverge from other animals and evolve into what we are today. The fact that a species has evolved to a level of intelligence sophisticated enough to understand and discuss evolution was more proof of God’s existence. The existence of anything proved God’s existence.

I felt like I had died and been reborn. This then made me think about Jesus, and by no means did I think I was him, but perhaps his “death” was really an ego-death, and he is a metaphorical symbol to the true path to enlightenment and salvation: realizing that the ego is an illusion and tuning in to the will of the divine mind. Maybe a new messianic movement will begin and people will start to see that they are creatures that dwell on the domain of a unified spirit.

And with that thought I fell asleep. It was a deep experience that I don’t ever want to forget. I think ayahuasca can show anyone that we have a purpose for residing on this Earth. I don't think it should be taken without a shaman or guide to guide one through the powerful revelations that will be experienced.

Exp Year: 2012	ExpID: 95729
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Mar 12, 2020	Views: 1,565
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Ayahuasca (8) : Group Ceremony (21), Guides / Sitters (39), Entities / Beings (37), Nature / Outdoors (23), Mystical Experiences (9), Combinations (3)