Waking up to Ayahuasca – The Sacred Mother

For those of you who were blessed to have experienced the great miracles of the plant, a lot of what I will say will resonate with you on many levels. For those who are not acquainted with Ayahuasca, what it is and what it does, I have to admit from beginning that it’s very hard to give you either a complete picture or a succinct introduction. So please forgive me for trying.

Put bluntly, Ayahuasca is a brew reduction made from two different Amazonian plants, one of which contains the psychoactive molecule DMT. It has been used for millennia by tribes for physical, psychological and spiritual healing, accessing deep wisdom and attaining visions and guidance. For me Ayahuasca is a healer, a magician, a teacher and a key to inter-dimensional doorways. The experiences are hard to convey in words, partly because we have no conceptual correlates to them and because they are so rich and multi-dimensional that our language of the world can only flatten those experiences and divest them of their deeper meaning.

However I have tried to extract some recurrent themes from my notes and journal that go beyond my own subjective experiences of incredible healing, guidance and transformation. What I want to convey are those fundamental anecdotes that emerged from these recurrent themes. They are lessons on sacred truths about life and consciousness that are a message to all of us.

My very first experience baffled me. My waking consciousness was active – I could reason, think and observe yet I was at the same time dreaming, having visions, revelations and perceiving reality beyond my normal perception. I asked “how is this possible?”. I didn’t get an answer – I was the answer: The revelation that this is always like that. When we perceive the world through our normal waking consciousness we are just filtering out all the rest, except for moments of intuition, deep meditation and trance states. They are not separate, we are only applying filters. This was the first time I experienced the Self as a whole.

Everything in the multi-verses is consciousness. Matter is also imbued with consciousness, although consciousness varies in degrees. Consciousness informs matter and matter informs consciousness. My first thoughts about this revelation were that it gives justice to panpsychism, the view that consciousness is universal. it also explains why philosophy of Science and mind had been facing the elusive ‘hard problem of consciousness’, simply because they were seeing consciousness as an emergent effect rather than a fundamental property of everything.

One commonly shared experience by people drinking Ayahuasca is entering a state of non-duality or unity consciousness. In this state you know that separation is an illusion. All different forms of life and matter are interconnected at some basic level with the source – the universal consciousness. We cannot see it because the perception of separation is hard-wired in our brain. It’s the only way the brain can conceive the physical world. But the fact is that we are truly all one. The perception of separateness, reinforced by the ego-consciousness, has hindered us from conceiving certain truths that so many ancient spiritual traditions have been drumming for millennia.

This was a beautiful insight that left me in awe and took me some time afterwards to integrate and accommodate it in my normal view of the world. In one vision, I was seeing like billions of dots and filaments of light that also manifested the colour spectrum of white light at the same time.  They were moving through everything. I asked “what is this light?” The ‘answer’ was that it is love, a sort of energy frequency that runs through everything. It is the basic fabric of realities. It reminded me of concepts of ‘Tao’ or ‘God’. I appreciated the true meaning of the word ‘enlightenment’! I also understood that darkness is the blocking of this light and our disconnection with it. Clear out the blockages and it will flow again naturally and without judgment.

At the same time I was having the lesson of Light and Love, someone in the group distracted me. I passed a very quick critical thought about the person. Suddenly as soon as the thought passed through my mind, black ‘branches’ started growing in my vision and blocking out some of the light dots and filaments. Two lessons in one from the teacher Ayahuasca!

This is an insight that emerged out of several others. This consensual ‘reality’ we live in is a very dense dream. But it’s a dream nonetheless and the real purpose is to wake up from it – To get out of the matrix so to speak. We navigate through most of our waking life unconsciously, following pre-fabricated templates of action and response. It’s the same thing as our dreams at night. We are mostly unconscious in both apart from very brief and rare moments of awakening (Lucid dreaming in the case of night dreams). There are an infinity of dreams and realities we do not know of. This ‘reality’ is just one out of an infinity.

Attention is central to our conscious awareness. When you focus your attention on something, you open up ideas, learn faster, get solutions and achieve goals. Attention is laser focusing the energy of your awareness on something. Intention is focusing your whole consciousness, the full spectrum of your consciousness beyond your waking consciousness, onto something. Intention is not thinking, awareness or visualising imagery only, although these are part of it. Intention comes from an ‘open heart’ and that is where real power lies. Intention is fearless and lacks preconceptions or expectations. When you truly intend something, you are sending out a ripple in that web of interconnected consciousness and it will respond accordingly.

The will goes hand in hand with intention. You can have will without intention but cannot have intention without will. Will is when you are emotionally aligned with your intention. Will together with intention can truly bend reality and make even the oddest of outcomes possible.

When you experience your whole self outside the confines of the mind, you realise of your true power. You understand that there are no fears, beliefs, expectations or thoughts limiting you. The limits are broken and you awake in a complete different reality with very little boundaries. I don’t have enough space to describe what can be achieved in that state. The short end of it is that you are totally aware that you are a creator and not just a creation. The rules of the game change.

We have been subdued to fear, judgement and mental limitations of all sorts. We were made to believe that we are subject to fate, authority and scarcity. We were made to believe we are not free. But hell yes we are and experiencing the multi-dimensionality of your Self makes you truly understand how really free you are!

Above all, my experiences with the Ayahuasca were always ones of hope and trust. Immense love, magical beauty and great optimism. There was always a message of hope. I saw and experienced so many benevolent forces and enlightened conscious entities (most of which I cannot describe here) that are working together to elevate human consciousness from the shackles of fear and darkness. We are not alone,  I can promise you this.

– Gilbert Ross
(www.soulhiker.com)