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This is the best representation of an ayahuasca experience I have found, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Like the icaros I mentioned last time, I have no idea what watching this video will be like for someone who hasn’t experienced the actual ceremony. I’ve seen videos that were supposed to ‘simulate’ LSD visions and they tend to not come across to me as anything more than, wow, that was a weird little video. I expect you may feel the same about the above. What I can tell you is that when I watched it the first time it really resonated with me. In actuality, the visions I had during the ceremonies weren’t especially like these at all, as far as I can recall. But there is something about the way this is presented (and it’s not just the graphics, it’s the whole mix of the music and the silences and the movement in the video) that feels very right to me. The first time I saw it there was actually a point (starting about 2:30 in, in case you’re curious) at which I could feel the mareación again, just out of reach.

Anyway, I’m sharing it here just on the off chance that it’s helpful, in any way, in understanding what I’m about to try and describe.

The brew for the second ceremony was the first of the batch we had helped to make that morning. I only drank about half as much as I did the first night. I was still operating under the idea that this really wasn’t much more than an extremely strong acid trip, and when I made the snap decision to go ahead and participate in the second night I figured a lesser dose would mean less nausea and I’d still probably have some interesting visions. What I didn’t really understand at the time was that for many people ayahuasca, once it’s in their system, affects them cumulatively. Another thing I didn’t know was that the batch we’d made turned out to be especially potent.

Initially, the second night was a continuation of the first. The room and everyone in it seemed connected in a very real and deep way. The visions were filled with brightest colors, psychedelic in the truest sense of the word. The room ebbed and flowed much as it had the night before, the noise of people purging swelling and fading in time with the icaros. But these things were only the earliest stages and if that had been all there was there wouldn’t really be much point in me having written all this. Very quickly, things got much more powerful.

For some, the night was rough. Behind me, the girl who’d asked if she needed to participate in another ceremony went through an absolutely awful experience. She spent most of the night crying and begging for it to stop, as Malcolm and the woman with the friendly face tried to calm her and lead her through it. I know one person who felt the night got away from Hamilton, that he wasn’t dealing seriously enough with what they felt was a palpable darkness in the room. Elsewhere, one of the Russian guests called out repeatedly to his friends (in Russian, I only found out later what it was about), who giggled around him, because he didn’t know where he was. Apparently, back where the bathrooms were the scene was especially grim, with people strewn all around the floor, lost in their own particular vision.

For others, though, the night was incredibly positive. I was one of them. The oddity of it is that I was still aware of what was negative around me, but processed through what was going on in my mind the tone was completely different. For those that I could hear clearly suffering I tried to extend myself towards them, tried to share the feelings I was having. The volume of purging that seemed to be going on in the back sounded almost comical at times, and the laughter that would move through the room after an especially loud burst of it said I wasn’t alone in thinking so. Hamilton’s icaros did seem to verge on being outright flippant, but in the end it was Don Alberto’s voice I was really following. I began to travel, and his icaros became like a rope to hold onto while walking, to remind myself which direction to go.

I read a description recently by someone comparing the LSD experience to the ayahuasca experience, and something they said really struck me. They talked about how LSD, peyote, and other psychedelics were still close to reality, that they embellish reality with their peculiarities. But ayahuasca takes you to another reality completely.

In other words, we’ve reached the point at which you’ll keep walking with me through this or else be unable to suspend disbelief.

I moved back and forth between several different vignettes, they seemed almost like different rooms and later that’s how I would come to refer to them. Actually, I say I was moving but I think it’s more accurate to say that I was still laying there on the mat and these different rooms moved through me. It’s also important to know that these rooms were real. They did not feel like hallucinations at all, there was solidity and atmosphere to them. Unfortunately, these days I have only the vaguest sense of most of them, faint flashes of memory I sometimes still get that I have no hope of trying to describe, but two of them still stand in my mind.

One was peaceful and quiet. It was lit by a late summer dusk light that filtered through windows I couldn’t see and diffused the room with an ashy, colorless glow. My viewpoint of the room was from the floor, a floor that was made up of pillows. In a far corner of the room these pillows, which were also somehow burlap sacks, gathered together and formed a large chair that rose from floor to ceiling. The chair was shaped like an open lotus, if a lotus were a chair, each petal made of one of the plain, off-white burlap pillows. At the crown of it was a symbol I didn’t recognize, lines and shapes that placed together formed something like a spade or an upside down heart. The chair looked like a throne merely waiting for a Buddha. I loved it there. Of all the rooms that shifted before me, it was the one I most longed to return to again and again, though it never came when I tried to get there. Instead it seemed to arrive in those moments when the ceremony would peak and then begin to slowly subside into a brief rest. The sounds around me would begin to grow quiet and I would find myself laying there again before the lotus in “the waiting room” (the name I gave it later in trying to describe it to Sarah), happy and surprised each time, as Don Alberto’s soft whisper-whistle slithered its way around me.

I called it “the waiting room” because it stood in contrast to the other room I remember, one I will never be a good enough writer to describe effectively. I knew intuitively it was a kind of operating room. I floated in stasis, hovering but prone. Just now I started to say the room was dark, but realized that sentence would have several things wrong with it. The room was black, but not dark, I could see perfectly, well enough to tell that I couldn’t make out the outer edge of the “room.” Lines of light circled around me constantly, crisscrossing and shifting directions in angles and circles, a kind of living geometric display. I understood them to be living because they were the ones operating on me. They were beings I could barely comprehend, making up a sort of sacred mathematical sphere that surrounded me, made up of a multitude of beings I couldn’t distinguish one from another. The sensation of their presence was at once overwhelming and soothing.

I know that’s one of those annoying contradictions you often see in spiritual writings, but as they operated on me I felt sadness and joy in equal amounts. It was a painful discomfort that was overpowered by the immense sense of wonder at watching them work.

There was a sort of distance to their attention towards me, created, I think, by the fact that their consciousness was so far above mine. It was as if you, as a three-dimensional being, somehow felt compassion for a one-dimensional point, and had found a way to express that compassion to it. There would be a kind of necessary remoteness to the compassion that ‘point’ felt coming from you, separated as it would be from you by barriers it couldn’t even perceive.

They were aware of this distance between us from my perspective and tried, at one point, to reassure me. One of the shapes split off from the whole and moved towards me, a circle forming near my head. It “looked” at my face for a moment and a line formed across its surface, mimicking a smile. I couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of it, and somehow I knew that it scarcely understood what a “smile” was, only that it would comfort me. I was full of the inescapable knowledge that they loved me and wanted me to be better.

I would shift between these various rooms seemingly in time with the icaros, sometimes settling back into myself there in the ceremony hut, attempting to empathetically reach out to those around me who seemed to be struggling. At times my thoughts would begin to turn, my cynical mind would attempt to assert itself weakly, and outside in the jungle the same nocturnal bird from the night before would laugh its gently mocking laugh. Next to me, Sarah would laugh in response, the exact same laugh, and then it would ripple through the mass of people laying around me.

Cynicism, self-importance, they had no place there. We were all of us connected, the mass of us connected to the jungle, the jungle to the universe. Far above, the godhead looked down upon me and I was naked before it, aging, sad and overweight. But I saw my tiny body through its eyes and realized everything I hated about myself, it loved because it had made it so. It loved us all, because how could it do anything else?

The godhead stretched out a finger towards me, its tiny child, and poked me in the belly to make me laugh.

Next: I talk about a high school book report, the man who wrote Blade Runner, and possibly the happiest day of my life.

Previously:
Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru. >>
Part 2, in which I finally get to Lima and am a crybaby. >>
Part 3, in which I arrive in Iquitos in a dreamlike state. >>
Part 4, in which we journey into the jungle and I am afraid of water. >>
Part 5, in which I take forever to finally describe drinking ayahuasca. >>
Part 6, in which, yes, I am finally drugged. >>

Also, I’ve been updating my Tumblr account as I’ve been writing, if you’re a completist. >>

I was still very drugged. I didn’t understand how all of these people were walking around unaffected. Things weren’t quite as deep as they had been but my sense of the passage of time was still pretty messed up. Seconds and minutes seemed to expand and retract to suit their own whims. The room itself seemed to sway between well lit and still dark. And my nausea was still extremely real. I lay on the mat, with my stomach full of earthquake pills, only occasionally shifting position and trying not to make anything internal angry with me. Finally, my brain made a decision. Get up. It’s time. Get in the bathroom.

I stood up as slowly as possible and tried to get my reality legs under me. I made my way to one of the stalls in back and sat down. The stall was nothing more than a toilet with tile walls close enough to touch without extending my arms. I felt exhausted and drained, I think I would have been perfectly happy spending the rest of the night sitting there. I could hear the random conversations still going on in the main room. As I sat there, my nausea would come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Barely a flicker of the light from the lamp made its way to this section of the building, so it was dark.

It was really, really, very dark.

It was darker than it should be.

The tiny bit of light from the outer room that had been faintly reflected in the tiles was gone. I couldn’t even sense the closeness of the walls. Worse, it was hot. Even though I was in the middle of the jungle, throughout the ceremony I’d been surprised by how comfortable it had been, even cold at times. But now I was covered with an absolutely oppressive heat, a thick, unbreathable mass. I could still hear people talking, and somewhere inside I thought, I’ve gone blind. Somewhere else inside I thought that would almost be a relief. I couldn’t make my arms move to try and feel for the walls. Some sort of saline dam had opened its locks and sweat was pouring down my face. The walls were gone and I was in a pitch black nothing. A void. This wasn’t blindness. I was in hell. I was in hell and there was no song, no one was singing any more and there was no way to find a path back.

I sat there, too terrified to move, for hours. Hours that were really only a few minutes. I can’t remember how I broke the spell of the moment, I just remember that somehow I saw light again, the tiniest amount, and managed to prod my neurons just enough to start moving, to finally stand back up. I shuffled my way back to my spot on the floor.

The moment was completely gone now, like I’d been misdiagnosed with minutes to live. Oh, sorry, never mind that bit, you’re fine. I was shaken and confused, still covered with sweat and newly freezing. And still nauseous. Sarah lay next to me on her mat, still well under the influence, too, and we stayed in the ceremony building, along with a number of other people, until dawn. When the sun started to come up we decided to risk standing up again and trying to walk back to our bungalow. There I slept, if it can be called that, fitfully for about two hours before I woke to the sound of a large drum being beaten in the distance. It was time for breakfast.

Before breakfast we were offered the opportunity to help prepare the ayahuasca we’d be using the next two nights. This would be a really good moment for me to describe the process and how helping to ready the ingredients for their day-long brewing was a way in which to further connect with the spirits that we were interacting with. But I hadn’t had any real sleep in days, hadn’t eaten since noon the previous day, my back was hurting down into my leg and I was still a little nauseous, so all I can really say is I sat where they pointed and pounded ayahuasca vine with a heavy mallet for twenty minutes or so. I ate breakfast. I slept. I ate lunch.

After lunch we went back to the open shed where the ayahuasca continued to steep in a series of large pots. Don Alberto, with the help of a translator, was answering questions. As we sat there it started to rain, a heavy rain that still managed to be peaceful. A girl from South Africa talked obliquely about her experience the night before and wondered if, since it had gone so well, she needed to participate in another ceremony. As he listened through the translator, Don Alberto smiled, the kind of amused smile that only comes from having heard a question more times than you can count. Yes, he replied, there is more to learn.

I went to our room to lay back down and think about what I was going to do that night. After the first ceremony we had the option to not participate in the others. I’d had a really amazing experience the night before and was glad I’d done it. But it hadn’t felt life-changing. It had been more like an extremely strong LSD trip; the hallucinations, the distortion of time, it all had that same feeling, though with a bit more direction to it, maybe. I’d also had enough time for the jaded, cynical part of me to start working over the doubts. There was a back door to the kitchen with a light over the outside, just across from the ceremony hut, and it didn’t take much imagination to see how my DMT-affected brain could have turned that into a face. They were just hallucinations from a strong chemical, mixed with an exotic location, an unfamiliar culture, a lack of sleep and a neurotic brain that was never very good at dealing with most of those. The result was interesting to say the least, even fun, but I wasn’t sure it was worth feeling nauseous and debilitated.

I debated and slept, I walked to the common area and talked with a couple of people and the remaining hours passed more quickly than I would have thought. By the time we were back in the ceremony hut, as the sun began to set, I remained unsure of whether I was going to participate, right up until I took the cup from Hamilton’s hands and drank it.

Next: I sit here and try and think of some way to describe the second night, and we all see if I succeed.