As some of you might remember, our very own Maastricht had a religious experience after taking ayahuasca.
After doing my own background reading, I thought I might want to try it for myself. As it turned out, the group she had done her ceremony with was having another ceremony on November 26, which fell right on a holiday weekend (Thanksgiving) for us Americans.
Everything lined up perfectly to make this trip happen. I managed to take a few days off before Thanksgiving and a few days after the holiday weekend, which gave me a little over a week to travel. I found a discount plane ticket and clear, easy-to-understand information about how to prepare for my journey (or, rather, both journeys–the geographic and the mental.) So off I went.
Unlike Maastricht, I did not see God. What I got was a series of tasks that acted kind of like tutorials in the sublime, forcing me to perceive things in new ways. At the end, I got to see the awe-inspiring nature of existence, including the oneness of all things in the universe, and the miraculousness and limitations of my own small existence. (I realize I might not be expressing myself all that clearly, here. I’m still working on a good narrative account of my journey with ayahuasca. Getting the right words to convey what happened keeps eluding me; giving you guys the executive summary version of my travels is even harder.)
Deciding to take ayahuasca was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’m still learning to integrate the things I learned and experienced into my day to day life, a task that’s proving oddly challenging but very rewarding.
Anyway–I’d be happy to take your questions. Ask away.
That is so great to hear ! I’m very curious about what you experienced. And I know it is hard to put the experience into words. Would you be okay if I shared some experiences as well ? I’ve been on a second trip, three months after the first.
One more question. Was there, for you, an “other” guiding you during the experience? Apart from the tripsitters, I mean? Or did it feel more like an experience you had, just you ?
A lot of people who have taken aya, start regarding it as something sentient. Something or someone. They talk about “Mother Aya” or “plant teacher”. How did you feel about this kind of talk beforehand, and now, afterwards?
Do you think that "other"is still “there” outside of an aya trip?
Well, I could have done it in or near where I live, but it wouldn’t have been legal. That, in itself, didn’t bother me so much, but one of the components of ayahuasca can have nasty interactions with a lot of different types of medication. I was super-cautious about making sure there was nothing in my system that would have caused a dangerous reaction to the ayahuasca, but I wanted to know that I could get medical care without any trouble if something went wrong.
The trip wasn’t that expensive, BTW. I got discounted tickets and stayed in hostels for most of my time. Going to the Netherlands was actually cheaper than a trip to a lot of places within the US would have been. (From what I’ve heard, my total expenses were less than I might have paid for a local ceremony, anyway.) Besides–the gifts I received were more than worth the time, effort, and expense.
This time, I didn’t go with a group ceremony, but a much smaller group, three people. The other two cancelled last minute, leaving me an unexpected private session. ( Now that I can compare, I think I prefer a group. More energy.) My ceremony leader was a RN,and used to work in an old folk’s hospital. She had often done the night shift there and said, half jokingly, that her job was basically the same, only, much more rewarding. Sitting with people who may become disoriented, irrationally emotional, emotionally vulnerable, and who may need help. Only here, her clients were usually profoundly grateful afterwards and often reported back how their lives had changed for the better.
She had first taken Ayahuasca two years ago, in Doetinchem, the same place I’ve been. After the session, she re-united with her divorced husband. Together, they decided she would quit her nursing job and do this instead. She learnt the ropes in Doetinchem, and then decided to set up shop in the south of the Netherlands.
Like a true night nurse, she neatly lodged what happened during the session. She told me that one of her clients thought he had thrown up for hours, and with her log, she could show him it had been in total under ten minutes.
She made the Ayahuasca brew herself. Bought the plant material online (that’s completely legal, both here and in the US, by the way). She selected and prepared the material and boiled it for several days, paying careful attention during that time. She told me she sometimes stirred the drink with a special dedicated intent if she knew beforehand what her clients journey was about. (If she was a witch, I’m sure she was a white one ) She tested the drink usually on herself. Even a very small quantity could tell her if it was well prepared.
Most of my trip this time was me being in a kind of angelic therapeutic environment. There was a kind, wise, mild angelic presence, (shapeless and mostly wordless) that answered my questions about myself. It is hard to say how, exactly, it answered my questions. It showed me an image, made me relive a brief memory seen in a new light, or it just gave me the direct, pure, gentle understanding. Most of it was expressed in the feeling you get when you finally understand something in all its simple clarity. Now, two weeks later, those answers still make sense, although it is, in the daily stress, not so easy to keep them in mind.
For a brief while, at the start of my trip, reality fell away.
I’ve seen this described often, but as a remark, it doesn’t make much sense if you haven’t experienced it. I can’t even write it down without an inward eyeroll, so maybe I can explain it with an example.
Example, or methaphor. Think of your life, all the time you have in your life. How overwhelmingly much time you have ahead of you. And at the same time, how little time it is, because it marches on, and on, and your time will end. That is really reality, right? Scary, and overwhelming, when you really stop and think about it.
Fortunately, nature has divided our time for us in years and days. That helps a lot to “structure time”. But as people , we’ve gone even further. We’ve divided time further, in weeks. We live from workweek to weekend, to holiday, workweek to weekend. Rinse, repeat. It is how we make time manageable, in livable chunks. But it is an illusion. A widely shared and elaborate illusion, that we’ve all arranged our lives around, but it IS an illusion. Maybe illusion is not the right word, maybe “voluntary conceptualization we’re really used to at this point” is better. But "illusion"is shorter, so I’ll use that.
When people who lose their job, they lose much of that illusion, that structure. Some find that liberating, most become disoriented.
Now take a moment and let go of that particular time illusion. Really think about your time here on earth. How grand, and yet how little it is. Let it sink in. Isn’t part of you glad that that you mostly don’t have to think about it this way? ( Comic on the subject). Now imagine ayahuasca wipes that illusion away like a cobweb. And not just that one, but similar ones, all in one swish. Big time.
“Weird” doesn’t even cover it.
As my reality fell away, I didn’t panic, because I by then I trusted it would come back. It had come back next time as well, as naturally as waking up.
I’ve wondered if experiencing reality this way is good for anything. I’m not sure. There is liberation in it, and a kind of majesty. It’s a grand place out there, beneath and above and through it all. But in everyday life, I have not yet found out how looking at reality this way is helpful, so I just don’t. (Apparently, I’m not ready to let go of my busy life).
Good question. It is not what I learnt, most of that is standard “be kind to yourself and others” stuff. Religion’s lessons also mostly boil down to that.
It is more about how it teaches, the feeling, the vision, the force that accompanies the content. And this stuff is really hard to put into words. As for myself, well… this is all a bit personal, but here goes.
I’ve got an inner critic. My dedication for this trip was to get her to stop scolding me and to get her to actually help me, instead. What I was shown, was that the critic was a kind of imaginary friend from my childhood. I made her up because I was lonely. And I made her criticize me so I’d get an illusion of someone being in control. And now she’s mostly a bad habit. And if she starts yapping, that simply means I am tired and lonely and I must start taking care of myself and must seek emotional contact with loved ones.
Told you. It’s not the lessons, it’s the way they are delivered.
Not to take away from your motives, objectives and experiences but it sounds to me like you contemplate concepts and struggle with doubts that all reasonable and self aware people contemplate from time to time in their lifetime. It’s not clear to me that adding hallucinogens to the mix is particularly helpful. Just not seeing the benefits, from a personal POV. But I find it interesting that this sort of experience is what more and more people seek out.
I’m going to start here. This isn’t everything, but I think this list at least starts to describe some of the gifts I received in the ceremony. I realize this list is long. In an attempt to help avoid the TL; DR phenomenon, I’ve bolded the main point in each part of the list.
**1) The right-brained functions in my brain were made more accessible and easier to tap into. **it’s easier for me to see things as they genuinely appear to me, rather than in terms of their functions, as parts of the categories into which I’d automatically sort them, or with the symmetry and completion that our minds often supply but that isn’t actually present in the things we’re looking at. (BTW–for those of you who are up on your neuroscience–I’m using the terms “left brained” and “right brained” to refer only to those two different ways of perceiving things, rather than to specific brain structures that make those ways of perceiving things possible. Apparently, the two modes of perception I’m talking about here aren’t actually neatly mapped onto the different hemispheres of the brain.)
One of the tasks ayahuasca gave me was to perceive things without automatically attaching words to them. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on language to structure my thoughts and experiences until I had my ceremony. Now I have more modes of perception available to me, which has made my life much richer. It also showed me how fundamentally different another person’s basic perceptions can be.
It’s also helped re-open my interest in drawing and painting. From childhood through my early 20s, I’d wanted to be an artist. In my mid-20s, I got sick; the vestibular nerve, which governs your sense of balance, stopped working. I was seasick almost non-stop for about a year and a half. Every time anything in my visual field moved, I was nauseous. It took a little over two years before I had basic mobility and functionality back.
Because I had trouble looking at pretty much anything, I didn’t do any drawing during that time. When I tried to draw again, I found I’d lost almost all the ability I’d had.
Ayahuasca has given me the ability to see again–the kind of sight I’d had before I’d gotten sick, the kind of ability to switch in and out of left-brained and right-brained perception that I hadn’t even realized I’d lost. I got a lot of other things from ayahuasca, but even if I hadn’t, this one gift would have been enough for me to be grateful forever.
2) Staying in the present has become much more natural to me, and that means I can’t just rush through much of my life on autopilot, the way I had before. I see much more beauty and interest in simple things. It also means I’m making some concrete changes to how I live my day-to-day life.
At the start of the ceremony, you tell the group what questions you’d like to have answered in your journey. Mine was, “I want, for once in my life, to be good enough. And I’d like to know what it is, exactly, that I’m good enough for.”
Here’s part of what I learned in response to that request. It wasn’t what I expected, but I think it was what I needed:
Each person is what they do. There is no immutable nature to any of us that manifests itself through our actions. Instead, there are different actions we choose, from second to second of our lives. Over time, those small actions, in the sequence of present moments we experience, add up to the whole of our existences.
Because there is no fixed nature to any one of us, that means there’s no such thing as being inherently not good enough, or inherently horribly flawed, or inherently better than anyone else. There are just different ways of being a person, and different actions people take from second to second. Each person has his or her way of being, including his or her way of perceiving the world, which might be fundamentally different from yours.
You don’t have access to all the different ways that others have their experiences, which means you have no control over other people’s judgements or choices. All you can do is choose good actions from moment to moment.
That also means that all the terms we use to describe people’s personalities or natures–“good,” “bad”, “beautiful”, “ugly”, “interesting”, “boring”, are really nothing more than value judgements we use to describe people. There’s nothing inherent about goodness, badness, beauty, or ugliness within a person; those terms are all just appraisals we make, from outside of that other person’s experience. Saying that someone “isn’t good enough,” in a fundamental sense, really has no meaning.
**4) We are all one, all parts of a whole. Hurting one person hurts that whole, whether the person you hurt is yourself or someone else. **
Hating another person is hating the whole. You can feel repugnance and anger at a person’s actions, but that person, themselves, doesn’t have an inherent nature for you to hate. You have to work against their actions, but having hatred towards them as a human being doesn’t make any sense.
As a side benefit, I’ve found this particular noetic insight very useful for political and social action. I have found that I’m much more productive and focused on meaningful actions when I’m not consumed by hatred towards people whose actions I disagree with.
5) I am deeply grateful for my existence, and at peace with my particular way of perceiving and structuring the world. Getting to exist is a miracle. Getting to exist with a body–that conduit for your senses, that thing lets you interact with other things outside yourself–is also a miracle.
What your body looks like is beside the point. Even more beside the point is anyone’s descriptions of what your body looks like. (I now think of trying to change my body to get other people to like it more as nonsensical–a way of thinking I never would have expected to have.) What matters is that you, unlike many people who never got to be born, get to have a body at all. That’s a miracle, for which I’m grateful every day.
Well, what I had was a fundamental shift in my frame of reference.
Some of the things I’ve listed might seem obvious to you. If you’d asked me about some of this stuff before I’d taken ayahuasca, I probably would have told you that I already knew about some of the concepts I listed in my last post. Others might not have made any sense to me. (Staying in the moment? What are you talking about? Aren’t we all in the moment, by definition?)
But there’s a profound difference between having an intellectual understanding of something and having a noetic, incontrovertible experience of it. I now really know, in a much deeper and more immediate sense, that we are all one. I now really know how little I can conceive of how someone else might perceive things. I didn’t know how limited my understanding of or experience in different ways of understanding the world was before my ceremony.
On a board dedicated to “fighting ignorance”, why is so much space being given to discussion of how enlightenment can come from taking an illegal drug?
Partaking of ayahuasca doesn’t show you god. It doesn’t send you on a journey anywhere. It doesn’t give profound insight into the Nature of the Universe. It just gives you hallucinations. Anything else is self-delusional. Sorry.
In other words, ayahuasca isn’t for you. Fair enough. It isn’t for a lot of people.
But you don’t get to tell me what my experience was or wasn’t. I’m the one who had that experience, not you. And discussing that experience counts as fighting ignorance, in the same way that any other “ask the ___” thread does.
It isn’t so much that your experience is in question. Clearly you experienced something you find quite profound.
I’m simply skeptical about the long term benefits of the experience. Particularly since the effects appear to be transitory, thus people find themselves going back for more. So perhaps it’s not actual knowledge that’s imparted but an induced set of temporary feelings?
Anyway, here’s some scientific research that’s been published by NIH on the various studied effects of ayahuasca. It supports the reported physical and psychological effects described by those who have used it. It also suggests that there may be therapeutic benefits for some while it holds significant risks for others. (Further research is needed and being carried out.)
It’s interesting that what’s well understood is the uptake mechanisms by which it works to affects brain chemistry. What’s notably missing is any supported evidence for the super-natural.
That’s an interesting article, Quicksilver. Very neuro/chemical/biotechnical.
From the abstract:
and I think they are 100% right on that count. And note how strange it is to see the word “spiritual” in there, in a medical scientific article?
As for the long term effects, I’'m not sure either. In my earlier thread, I cited a lot of studies that found no negative health effects in people who had taken ayahuasca for years, around once a month. Both their mental health and they physical health was better then in a control group. However, there might be self selecting going in in such a study.
But those results, and many like it, at least indicate strongly it has no negative long term effects.
) She tested the drink usually on herself. Even a very small quantity could tell her if it was well prepared.