Ayahuasca and Intention, Part 2

I stated that my own intentions surrounding ayahuasca have been clean. I think that's a fair assessment. Unfortunately, until pretty recently they were also unrealistic and unsustainable.

I conceived of my present journey as being equivalent to draining a vast pool of trauma and the negative emotion surrounding it. In that process, my own experience of growing re-traumatization was to be ignored. It was the price demanded by this nebulous and ill-defined concept, "healing". I needed to be a dauntless spiritual warrior, limitless in my capacity to absorb pain.

This approach stopped working. A few months ago, as the intensity of my experience began to reach an unbearable level, I started considering the possibility that drinking ayahuasca was just too much for me. I considered stopping.

I talked with some very wise and trusted friends in my community about this. They were unanimous: they told me to take a break. They told me to rest and take care of myself and assimilate the vast amount of material I'd already been given to work with.

They also told me to ask the spirit of Ayahuasca for what I want. To set an intention.

This is the crucial point for me. In my life I have been an addict and alcoholic. I have gotten used to viewing substances as just that - substances; objects that I use to achieve a particular result. The notion of entering into a dialogue with the spirit contained within these plants has been a new one for me. At first it seemed strained, even false.

As it turns out, my friends were right on both counts. Taking a two-month break from drinking ayahuasca was absolutely crucial, allowing me to absorb, process, and integrate the information I had already received. Setting a clear intention for what I wanted to get out of my next ceremony was also vital to my continuing on this path.

"What I wanted" isn't even the correct phrase. I had asked for help with that before - "Give me guidance on this or that particular issue." What was different this last time was that I made requests regarding the "how" of it. Specifically, I asked that my next ceremony be as gentle as possible. That it not leave me broken afterwards. That it show me that this path I've chosen truly is manageable and sustainable in my life.

I was delighted to find that I got my request. I've now had 3 ceremonies in a row that have been gentle and nurturing in a way I didn't know the medicine could be. This experience has been hugely illuminating for me.

Growing up in an abusive home conditioned me to think of myself as powerless - an object at the mercy of the whims of crazy people. 12 years in 12-step programs, though helpful in many ways, reenforced this notion of powerlessness drastically. More and more, I am coming to see it as incompatible with medicine work.

This idea of real, meaningful agency in my own life is a new one for me. Assimilating it is both exhilarating and scary. It forces me to examine the payoff I've always gotten from my distress - if I'm a victim, I don't have to take responsibility for my own life. If I'm a victim, it doesn't matter what intention I set - the result will always be me getting hurt.

This fundamental lesson I learned as a child was a lie. Recovering from it is the central part of my healing at this point. The medicine will accept nothing less from me.

What then is my intention for working with ayahuasca? Today it sounds a little like the following prayer:

"Please gently clean and illuminate me so that I may live to my fullest potential and help show others how to do the same."

God bless you, whoever you are.

Ayahuasca and Intention, Part 1

I think it's natural to ascribe our own motives to other people. Unfortunately, it is also incorrect.

My motives in approaching ayahuasca have been straightforward and clean: to heal trauma, gain direction in my life, and manifest the full potential that God has given to me. To fulfill my Destiny rather than succumb to my Fate. To harm none, and to help as many as possible.

I like to think that they are the motives of the curandero, the healer.

The overwhelming majority of people I encounter on this path are very similarly motivated. In fact, in the medicine community I have consistently met some of the most decent human beings I've had the privilege to know.

With one or two exceptions.

On occasion I have encountered someone in ceremony who just doesn't feel right. It's always a jarring experience: What is he doing here?

I can't really know for sure. However, I have a guess.

There is another path opened up for us by these plant allies: that of the brujo, the witch. It's not a very nice one. It is an amoral path, one which seeks only one thing: power for its own sake, expressed primarily through domination over others.

It is the path my father chose. It is the path often celebrated throughout our society, from boardrooms to battlefields to street corners to cell blocks.

It is the way of the sociopath. On it, our fellow human beings are not other manifestations of the Divine who deserve care, consideration, and love in their own right. Instead, they are objects to be used and discarded as necessary in the pursuit of personal aggrandizement.

I flew to Peru last year with stars in my eyes. I was confident that I was headed to some spiritual Shangri-La, a rainforest Eden filled with light and beauty and devotion to the highest ideals known to our species.

Then I landed in Iquitos. Those who have been there will know what I am talking about. For those who haven't, all I can say is that Iquitos is a cross between a Mexican border town and Telluride, Colorado, but with Rocky Mountain kind bud replaced by the most powerful psychedelics in the world. Untuned motorcycles roar down the streets at all hours of the day and night, unwashed street kids harangue you incessantly with cheap wares, hippies follow their ayahuasca diets at earth-toned cafes, and millennia-old indigenous sacraments are hawked right next to degenerate thrill-seeking.

A friend at the workshop related that he was approached by a dealer on the street with the sales pitch, repeated over and over like a mantra, "Ayahuasca, girls, cocaine......ayahuasca, girls, cocaine....."

Separately, or all at once?

A good friend of mine has worked extensively at one of the ayahuasca centers outside of Iquitos. He describes how, in the Shipibo culture that is the basis of so much of ayahuasca shamanism, becoming a shaman is really just another trade, like becoming a carpenter or plumber. If we carry that analogy through, then ayahuasca itself is not something mystical or unknowable - it is simply another tool, like a saw or wrench or hammer.

I think there's something to this view. I know that, as I have related in earlier posts, I first approached this path of plant medicine with a lot of misconceptions. Probably the biggest one was that ayahuasca would magically lift all of my spiritual sickness from me and suddenly fill me with light.

To again quote my friend, if that were true then all of these Amazonian shamans would be enlightened beings akin to Tibetan Lamas. A review of the literature surrounding ayahuasca tourism disproves that pretty quickly, what with the various allegations of shamanic rape, robbery, black magic, disposal of inconvenient tourist corpses, etc. My friend confirms this in more prosaic form, with his descriptions of the petty, ordinary back-biting and drama that many of the shamans apparently engage in as a matter of course.

It's easy to look at Westerners eager for spiritual awakening through the medicine and scoff at them as naive and foolish. Certainly there's an element of that in this whole pursuit. We must temper our enthusiasm with awareness of reality. But at the same time, I think there's something really beautiful in approaching ayahuasca with idealism and innocence and purity of heart. Let us be wise as serpents but gentle as doves.

I think she responds well to it. The problem is that she seems to respond to darker motives, as well.

I am coming to view ayahuasca as one of the most powerful tools on the planet for manifesting human intention. Which brings me back to the title of my post. What intention are we bringing to our work with this tool, this sacrament, this divine being?

God bless you, whoever you are.

#24

Two weeks ago I had my twenty-fourth ayahuasca experience. It was almost exactly a year to the day since I drank for the first time. That makes pretty simple math: for the last year, on average, I have drunk ayahuasca twice a month.

For this man, that's a lot.

I have been challenged and confronted with trauma and age-old patterns of dysfunction and despair. I have been shown the myriad ways in which I have sold myself short, ignored my soul's higher purpose, believed lies about my own powerlessness and insignificance.

It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

Lately it has been getting harder. I appear to be getting taken to the deepest levels of my soul's wounding - the wounds that were so enormous and cruel that they left me with a simple, brutal choice - leave my body and bury the hurt all the way down, or be utterly destroyed by it.

I took the first choice. Thank God I did. As a grown man, apparently strong enough to finally feel it in its entirety, I have felt almost completely overwhelmed by it. Some days I can barely function. As a child it would have, without question, either killed me or driven me insane. My little boy's container was simply not strong enough to withstand its full force.

Lately I've been seeing homeless mentally ill people in a new way. These days when I pass by a bearded, unwashed man on the corner, gibbering to himself and begging for enough money to silence his demons for a few precious hours of oblivion, the first thought that comes to mind is, "Oh you poor man. You poor lost soul. What happened to your precious, innocent little boy that drove him so completely out of himself?"

The only thing that separates me from those guys is my constitution: my resilience and my ingenuity and my will to survive. I was clever enough to figure out means of tolerating an intolerable situation, and strong enough to implement them without fail.

Believe me, I say this not by way of self-congratulation. Merely precision. Whatever gifts I have were God's to give, and they appear to be part of his plan for me, part of my soul's purpose. I feel only compassion for those subjected to severe trauma who do not possess them. These people are grist for the mill of our global DeathMachine. I'm glad that God loves them, because virtually no one else cares in the least.

I'm not ashamed to say it: I pray with all of my broken heart for a world that cares for every single one of its precious children. I take it on faith that our species neither can nor should survive if we refuse this challenge.

That's the terrible gift I was given by trauma and abuse and neglect: a long-dormant, finally-emerging, desperately resisted Christ consciousness. The birthright of all humanity. If it's happening to you it's happening to me. We are all God's children.

There is no longer any wall I can build that will separate me from this spiritual reality.

And then there's the question of the here and now. The job to perform; the mortgage to pay; the lights to keep turned on; the daughter to raise. Yes, by God, I am fortunate enough to have these burdens and these blessings. And being constantly torn apart by ayahuasca can make it nearly impossible to fulfill them.

Failing in my responsibilities and giving up is a dubious luxury I do not possess: even if I were willing to condemn my own soul to that fate, there's no way I'd do it to my daughter.

And so, again, I must find ways to tolerate an intolerable situation: discharging my duties as a father, a partner, an employee, and an adult in American society who does not want to be homeless, with as much Grace as I can muster, all in the midst of a complete dismantling of my ego.

Lately I've been getting creative. I've been exploring energetic healing work: there appear to be some truly gifted lightworkers on this planet who are capable of performing spiritual surgery on us when the need arises. I've also been very consciously making new friends and reaching out to old ones. It's a two-pronged weapon: it gives me help in the present moment and it contradicts my old pattern of isolation, that tool that used to serve me so well and now keeps me locked in darkness and despair. I've been exercising like crazy. I've been sitting in steam baths. I've been praying and meditating and reading spiritual texts.

In short, I've been doing every blessed thing possible to help me make it through this ordeal. Just like I did when I was little. The difference is that today the ordeal is taking me closer to the light, rather than pulling me away from it.

So that makes it especially ironic that today my coping strategies include drinking less ayahuasca. For most of the last year drinking large doses several times a month has seemed manageable and useful. In fact, it has seemed necessary. That appears to be changing.

A few days ago I did something I haven't done once in the last year - I passed on a chance to drink. I was just starting to feel some ground under my feet after the last ceremony 2 weeks before, and I got the message loud and clear - "Don't go this time. Take a rest." And so I did, and I know that it was the right choice.

I'm not totally sure when #25 will be. I'll know when it's time.

God bless you, whoever you are.

To Thine Own Self Be True

On every AA chip is inscribed this motto:

"To thine own self be true."

In 12 and a half years of attending meetings, I never once heard this as the topic. That always struck me as strange. Or perhaps the reverse is true: what's really peculiar is that the saying found its way into the program at all.

The rest of the program is decidedly hostile to the self. "Relieve me of the bondage of self," says the third step prayer. "Selfishness - self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles," says the Big Book on page 62. Again on page 62, "...the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot..."

What could reconcile this seeming contradiction is more precise language, language that I have never encountered in the literature and only seldom in meetings. We must distinguish between the lower self, the addict self that brought us into the program to begin with, and the Higher Self, the manifestation of God within us.

Those of us who have struggled with addiction become painfully familiar with our lower selves. They get us loaded, make us act out shamefully, alienate friends and family, hurt our kids, lose our jobs, wind us up in hospital or jail. They demand more booze, more dope, more food, more sex, more attention, more glory, more possessions, more sympathy, more satisfaction. There is not enough of these things to satisfy them, ever. They transform us from balanced human beings into tyrants and gluttons and pariahs. Eventually they kill us.

The Higher Self is something different entirely. Before I drank ayahuasca, my awareness of mine was limited. I could gain access to him through prayer and meditation, playing music, connecting with loved ones, working the steps. But the connection was shaky and tenuous; the instructions I received were often unclear.

That changed when I drank the medicine. In contrast to many people, I do not usually receive visual data from other dimensions. I don't "hallucinate" (I find that word inaccurate, but it's a useful shorthand). Instead, my ayahuasca experiences tend to take the form of conversations with my Higher Self, conversations in which he gives me instruction and I try to take it all in. In my first few experiences with the medicine, this sensation of a dialogue was palpable. I had the feeling of a beam of light running through my body, aligning all the different parts of myself and putting me in touch with the God within, emanating from my crown chakra.

Sometimes his instruction has taken the form of a gentle prodding - a suggestion, a nudge, an intuition - "Have you thought of it this way before?" Sometimes it has felt more like a board across my head - "Quit doing this shit. Now."

Whatever form the instruction has taken, it has never been wrong. Not once. Whether or not I choose to follow it is another matter.

"To mine own self be true."

Not my lower self, my addict self, my broken self. There's not enough booze or dope or porn in the world to glue that guy back together. He was on his last legs before I went down to Peru last May. Ayahuasca has finished the job. She's been like a wrecking ball, obliterating his last vestiges and clearing the way for the full emergence of my Higher Self.

This process is, by turns, agonizing and frightful and glorious. Sometimes it is even serene. It is definitely effective, and it is definitely real. I cannot urge it on anyone; I can only relate my own experience. I hope that is helpful to you.

God bless you, whoever you are.

Reintegration

I am coming up on my year anniversary of working with the vine and the leaf. It is a bittersweet memorial. To reflect on what compelled me to go to Peru last year and take the plunge into medicine space is to reflect on one of the darkest times in my life, a time I very nearly didn't survive. But I also remember the hope I felt in approaching this new discipline, a hope that was not in vain.

I had a tremendous misunderstanding of many aspects of the undertaking I faced. How could I not? Such a transformative and alien experience does not lend itself to communication through language. But there is one practical aspect that should have been emphasized far more clearly by those in a position to do so - reintegration. As I understand it, reintegration is the process of taking the insights and clarification that are granted by the medicine and putting them into practice in one's "real" life.

It is a crucial component of the process of learning from ayahuasca. In fact, I believe it is the central component. And as a rule it is given woefully short shrift.

It's easy to see why. It's not the exciting, flashy part. No serpent visions or rides on spaceships or trips to the rainforest. And, to be cynical, The Ayahuasca Adventure Fun Center™ is not going to make a buck from it.

Instead, it is the plodding, often grueling, ultimately beautiful effort to reconcile one's newfound clarity and knowledge with day-to-day realities. Or, sometimes, to change one's day-to-day reality so that it aligns more closely with received vision.

Reintegration literally means "making whole again." What does this suggest? It suggests that we have been broken by the experience.

I know that I have been. But the deeper truth is that I was broken long before I drank my first cup of ayahuasca. By a process of ego compensation and [mal]adaptation, I had tricked myself into believing my life was balanced. Ayahuasca continues to reveal to me just how wrong I was. It's not an easy thing to examine.

But in my view it's the true substance of the whole process: negotiating the tension between the delusions we have embraced and the truth revealed to us by the Queen of the Forest; between the fate to which we have resigned ourselves and the destiny shown to us by the light of the Astral; between the trauma and heartbreak of our past and the love and connectedness available right here, right now.

A good friend and advanced practitioner expresses it like this: sitting in ceremony is putting the oar in the water; actually moving towards our destination is what happens between the strokes.

I have related that my fondest wish for ayahuasca was that she would magically transform my life, with only secondary effort from me. That has not been my experience of her at all.

Just how far that was from true was revealed to me only weeks after I returned home from Peru. I left the States unemployed and almost completely broke, with a daughter to support. My fantasy was to go to South America, do the work, receive the wisdom and divine power, then return home and promptly land my dream job.

Instead, two weeks after I was home I found myself working in June in Texas on a framing crew with some of the most degenerate drunks I'd ever had the misfortune to be around. One day one of them stole my lunch. And I was supposed to rely on these guys to safeguard my life 25 feet in the air above a concrete slab.

Fortunately, I guess, my time with that outfit was limited: I got a hernia 4 weeks into it. As I prepared to go in for surgery, hoping that somehow my Obamacare insurance wouldn't leave me utterly destitute, I raged at God: "How can you do this to me? I'm trying to know you, to do the right thing! Why are you punishing me?" I felt even more despondent than I had before I left.

The shock of having gone from my edenic, transformative experience at the workshop in the middle of the Amazon to this stark, brutal North American reality was almost more than I could bear or comprehend.

"This," I thought, "is not what the video testimonials promised."

And yet it seems to have been precisely what I needed. Through it, I reached a place of surrender and trust in God around work and money that has culminated in a complete transformation of that area of my life. I have never been as prosperous as I am today.

And yet.....

I find myself wondering if these things could not have been accomplished in a more gentle way. So many questions are raised by this. For instance:

1. What is the real efficacy of flying to a foreign country thousands of miles away, immersing oneself in a completely alien and bewilderingly powerful transformative experience, then returning home and trying to manage or adapt to or abruptly leave one's previous life, a life that has remained unchanged in one's absence? Is this even wise to attempt?

2. If indeed a radical break from one's day-to-day life is necessary, can there really be no more provision in it for reintegration at the ayahuasca center itself? What if these centers abandoned all profit motive? How much more fully could they facilitate their patients' healing?

3. When can we finally and completely abandon this "wicked and evil enterprise", as Graham Hancock puts it, this "War on Drugs"? It has crippled mainstream thought so utterly that most Americans cannot make a moral or practical distinction between ayahuasca and crack cocaine. The limitless possibilities that will present themselves! Ayahuasca centers in Northern New Mexico, or the Texas Hill Country, or the redwoods of California! Plant medicine communities flourishing in the light of day! Such a vastly increased scope of healing work!

4. Why must our society be so exploitive and cruel and barbaric and crass that returning to it after a spiritual awakening can feel like a death sentence?

This, to me, is the central question of all. Make no mistake: I do not see ayahuasca as some sort of lifestyle accoutrement for the affluent. She is a teacher, and she is the birthright of all humanity. I don't think it's any accident that she has appeared to teach so many at such a pivotal moment in the planet's history.

She is calling us to heal first ourselves and then the world. Nothing less can possibly do.

God bless you, whoever you are.

What the Medicine has Taken from Me

"Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of the truth."

- Ludwig Borne

Understandably, we tend to focus on the things that a spiritual path gives us. Peace. Centeredness. Compassion. Transcendence. Acceptance. Love. 

We are less inclined to point out that which it takes away.

One of the hallmarks of humanity is our adaptability. We have settled almost everywhere on the planet: from Greenland to the Sahara; from the Andes to the rainforest; from neolithic villages to polluted cities with 20 million inhabitants. We have lived as hunter-gatherers, as subsistence farmers, as tradesmen, as artists, as factory workers, as computer programmers, as soldiers, as criminals. We have savored life lived in true spiritual community. We have resigned ourselves to guard duty at Auschwitz. Perhaps we have even enjoyed it.

Given enough time and repetition, anything can come to seem normal.

This presents a terrible dilemma to those who have experienced severe trauma. Our natural state as human beings is freedom, love, joy, curiosity, connectedness. Sustained negative experience that we are powerless to stop, such as childhood abuse, incarceration, rape, and war, turns this basic reality on its head.

Another defining feature of humanity is our need to make sense of our surroundings. If our world makes sense, then it is not accidental. If it is not accidental, then we can hope to exert some sort of control over it.

Thus, when we find ourselves trapped in an unbearable situation, the thought eventually takes root: somehow I must have caused this. I deserve this. And if I deserve this, I most certainly do not deserve freedom, love, joy, or connectedness.

Thought begets action.

I know that as a boy experiencing severe, full-spectrum abuse, I explained it by taking responsibility for it. I coped with it by finding ways of leaving my body: fantasy; refined sugar; violent imagery; pornography; rage; music; alcohol; street drugs. That these methods were usually shrouded in secrecy fit perfectly with my belief that I was a shameful creature who had no place in the light.

AA and the 12 Steps did a great job of removing the substances from my life. They were pretty easy, really: they were outside of me. I received a shock after a couple of years sober when I realized that my real addiction was to my own body chemistry: the hits of adrenaline and dopamine I received throughout the day from secret lust, or righteous judgment, or morbid preoccupation, or a fit of rage.

Just how deep the roots of that disease went were beyond my power to comprehend. Just how high a price they exacted from my soul was unknown to me.

They were also beyond the power of the Steps to heal. I worked the 12 Steps on my porn addiction for almost four years. I got a lot of value from it. Admitting my shame in a public forum reduced its power over me; hearing stories similar to my own let me know I was not alone; writing inventories and inviting God into my sexuality began the process of healing that part of my being.

Unfortunately, those things did not actually grant me sobriety from the behavior. Last May I flew down to Peru with about 3 weeks clean from pornography. After my last slip I felt a wild, superstitious terror engulf me: Mother Ayahuasca would see through me as a fraud and a charlatan and punish me horribly for demeaning the feminine principle in such a coarse, vulgar way. Sheer fright kept me clean those last weeks.

In Peru I drank ayahuasca 7 times. It had some really obvious results: all of the emotional catharsis and insight; the profound sense of healing in ways I'd never felt it; a self-love that I had been unable to imagine; a powerful new awareness of my own strength and resilience.

The things that left me took longer to notice. Pornography topped the list. A lifelong habit, or one that spanned back to at least puberty, was simply lifted from me. I still can't fully explain it. The closest I can come to articulating it is to say that its true cost was revealed to me, and I could finally see that that cost far outweighed the fleeting rush I had sought for so many years. My compulsion to use it has been removed.

Others were just as significant:

1. My (lifelong) preoccupation with warfare (books, movies, documentaries, museums, anything available) has left me. Within 2 weeks of my return, I got rid of a stack of books on World War II and the Holocaust. On the advice of my shaman, I picked one of the darkest ones and burned it. Again, I can't explain it. I just lost my taste for it.

2. I completely lost interest in firearms. For some dark, subterranean reason I had begun amassing a collection of them over the last few years. I'm no longer interested in expanding it. Sold one, haven't touched the rest in months, don't know if I will again.

3. I am far less likely to indulge anger and judgment in my daily life. From chance encounters with rude motorists to dealings with my ex-wife, I seldom feel inclined to give into rage. This one isn't completely gone yet, but it's a lot better than it was.

I could expand the list quite a bit, but you get the idea. The coping mechanisms that I cobbled together as a boy to survive my nightmarish circumstances no longer serve me as a grown man. I had known this for years, but before my encounters with the medicine I had had pretty poor luck in ridding myself of them.

Ayahuasca changed all that for me. Drastically. I can almost imagine her as a gardener, pulling out all of the weeds that have choked my blossoms for as long as I can remember. The process is painful and beautiful and magical and almost more than I can bear. The trouble is that these patterns became so ingrained in me that I thought they were me. Having them ripped out of me feels like losing parts of myself. In fact, it is: the lower self that I constructed in order to survive is being completely demolished, making room for a Higher Self that I can only dimly conceive.

I can't wait to meet him.

God bless you, whoever you are.

Ayahuasca and its Container

I am a traditionalist. Not blindly; not slavishly. But I am inclined to respect the customs and forms of those who have followed a particular path long before I came across it. In my Tae Kwon Do practice I always address my instructors as "Sir" and "Ma'am", and I wouldn't dream of stepping onto the mat without bowing to the flags first. When I was a kid in the Episcopal church I took a lot of pride in being an acolyte and carrying the banners in the procession to the front of the church. When I learned carpentry I deliberately sought out skilled, old-fashioned journeymen who taught me the right way to do things. The way their grandfathers did it.

I feel the same instinct in my ayahuasca journey. To begin with, I don't think it's an accident that I was called by these two plants - they knew me before I ever met them. I was not called by ketamine, or MDMA, or LSD-25, or pure DMT. I believe it was Graham Hancock who gave a marvelous description of smoking DMT. Forgive my paraphrasing, but he likened it to being in a bright shiny new building with no one else in it. Its spiritual and metaphysical space is very recent in human history - it is not well-explored or well-known. The same is true of all of these synthetic compounds.

They hold no interest for me whatsoever.

I mean no disrespect towards those who are called by these substances. I firmly believe that one of the pillars of the entheogenic revolution must be respect for all demonstrably productive and healing paths towards God. If your path was first synthesized in a laboratory 100 years ago, so be it.

Mine has grown in the rainforest for millions of years, and has been brewed and drunk by human beings for millennia.

I like that.

When I enter the ayahuasca space I feel the warmth and love and wisdom of all of those shamans and curanderos and sufferers just like me who have sought its instruction and healing for thousands of years. It feels safe and well-defined and reassuring.

Nothing less could possibly work for me. One of the defining features of my abusive childhood was its endemic chaos: the palpable sense that any godawful, crazy thing could happen at any moment. When I was an adolescent it left me with a need to leave my body as frequently and thoroughly as possible. Now it leaves me with a need for gentleness and structure in my spiritual path.

I had a real revelation after one of my first ceremonies down in Peru. It was given to me by a friend, a lovely Australian man who had already done several dozen ceremonies before our workshop. It had to be: one of the peculiarities of my own experience with ayahuasca is that I never experience visions, in the sense of seeing things from other dimensions with my eyes. Strange but true.

My friend does not experience ayahuasca in that way. One morning after a ceremony the night before, he revealed to me how he saw Jorge, the lead shaman and an absolute mountain of a man, casting a spell over our space at the beginning of the ceremony. He saw him spinning a web of protection over the entire maloka. He said it looked like a translucent seal, comprised of patterned blocks, spiraling out from the center of the room.

In that moment I gained a much greater understanding of the gravity of our undertaking. I came to understand that the shamans who guided us on our journey were the guarantors of our safety.

In drinking ayahuasca we are using an incredibly powerful tool. Like a table saw, or a firearm, or a bulldozer. Use a table saw improperly - chop a few fingers off. Use a firearm improperly - kill yourself or someone else. Use a bulldozer improperly - knock your house down.

The potential results of using ayahuasca improperly are easily as grave as these. A glance at the Iquitos Times last May informed me that about a dozen suicides in the region had been linked to ayahuasca over the preceding year. I have no trouble imagining why. I have seen enough instances of [controlled] mediumship at this point to know that spiritual entities certainly can enter us under its influence. With proper guidance, they leave before the ceremony is over. Without it is anyone's guess. For a description of my own experience with psychedelics and possession by a two-dimensional intelligence, see here.

It takes an incredibly powerful and experienced shaman to maintain medicine space. I have had the good fortune to work with a number of them at this point. I know just enough about their craft to know that I have tremendous respect for it. I also know that, at this point in my journey, I wouldn't dare attempt to use the medicine by myself.

In drinking ayahuasca we journey to another world. It is a beautiful, strange, mysterious place. It is filled with the possibility of healing and transformation. It is filled with instruction. It is also filled with danger.

Here be monsters.

To enter this world without sufficient preparation and guidance is incredibly foolish. I wouldn't journey to another planet without a guide. For a Westerner like me, entering medicine space is just as foreign. For me, having a trusted and experienced practitioner showing me the way is mandatory.

As with a number of other issues, I must disagree with Terence McKenna on this point. He strongly recommended ingesting entheogens alone, so as to be free of the constricting effects of culture. Perhaps it sounds like a good idea: with the proper set and setting, simply dose sufficiently to open up the direct connection to source, making sure that no outside influences can interfere with the communication.

I have my questions about its usefulness in practice. Well, in my practice, at least. Forgive me if I overstep my bounds. Perhaps his advice is perfect for you.

The trouble is, you may not know until it's too late.

God bless you, whoever you are.