Drops of Transcendence
Revisiting the Ayahuasca Realm
Three months after my first ceremony, I was sitting in a yurt, awaiting the continuation of my journey into ineffable states of being. I felt prepared, composed, and ready. Then, my neighbor sprayed some Agua de Florida, and the scent sent me spiraling into an intense, visceral flashback. I had a panic attack.
Three months ago, I remember waking up on a Sunday, after drinking the second cup of ayahuasca. The experience of the previous night was immensely overwhelming. An epistemic shock. “I will never drink ayahuasca again!” seemed a certainty.
Yet, in the days after that first ceremony weekend, I reconsidered. How would a second immersion feel? My mind and nervous system should recognize the realm, allowing me to be more coherent and have better recall. Chris Bache described this process of acclimating to transcendence, thus allowing one to travel deeper and deeper into the “insanity” behind the veil. He told me:
But as the indigenous traditions show us, with repeated immersion, it becomes less overwhelming and more coherent, and then the beauty of the night sky truly emerges.
Sitting in the yurt, before the scent derailed me, I pondered the three months since the last ceremony. It is remarkable how day-to-day life has the capacity to dull even markedly profound experiences. I actively had to recall those two previous magical nights, with varying degrees of success. Not that I think I fully failed at integrating, but life continues relentlessly. Some physiological changes included needing less sleep, a reduced tolerance for cold (despite practicing cold water immersion for years), and a new weight optimum.
The familiar and complex scent of the Agua de Florida vapor exploded into an overwhelming and intense presence. Then, an embodied memory took hold. I suddenly remembered something I had suppressed for three months. I remembered being in this state of intensity for a long time during the second night. An almost unbearable state of being. Every aspect of the experience inhabited my being, a full recall. “I can’t go back to this state! It is too much!” The crushing presence, the felt insanity, the darting entities.
My heart sank. How could this be happening an hour before the first ceremony night was to begin? Triggered by a random and benign act of my neighbor. I felt an urge to get up and quit. “Sorry, I just cannot do this. It is too much for me.” I went outside, took some deep breaths, and some Bach rescue remedies.
My intention for this second ceremony weekend was to travel with love — explore the transcendental realms. I quickly realized that I was absolutely in no way ready for this. At all! My new intention was now to simply trust the process. I surrendered. And so I went back into the yurt, sat down, and gave up. One of the facilitators opened with the following observation and advice. “Regardless of how experienced you are, every ceremony can be an intense struggle. You may feel the urge to give up and walk away. But don’t! Ayahuasca knows how to help you. The reward is always worth the ordeal.” I felt reassured.
The thick brew was yet again hard to drink. My body shuddered even hours later. The ceremony began. Chanting and drumming. After about half an hour, the effects manifested. Gently. The awareness of my body dissolved. I could still feel my hands and arms, but it was not clear exactly where they were located in space. After about two hours, I felt in control and in a state of sobriety again. However, this feeling was short-lived. The intensity would keep returning, accompanied by light visual sensations until the end of the ceremony. The emerging theme of the night was healing. A lot of tears. My sorrow. The sorrow of the world. An insight emerged, later expressed as: We must learn to love ourselves first and then the world.
The next day I felt refreshed, despite only sleeping for a few hours. It was a beautiful summer day. I felt quite proud of myself for not giving up the night before. However, the coming night still worried me. Last time, the trajectory was similar. A gentler first night, and then an unbelievably intense, psyche-shattering second night. As we are told, the first night opens a portal which is then crossed during the second night. The rest of the day was calm. Resting. Walking in the forest. A massage. Cacao ceremony and circle. Back to my tent to focus and relax.
In the three-month period since my first immersions, I experienced two other recalls. The first time was when I worked with THC again, in the post-integration phase. For some indigenous cultures, cannabis is also understood as a powerful plant teacher. And it is advised against working with two teachers at the same time. During the familiar THC immersion, I suddenly felt a strange sensation. As if my body was being permeated by a crystalline energy structure. I felt distinctly that this was a new unfolding, remnants from the ayahuasca energy. The second recall was at a nightclub, the first time clubbing with friends again in quite some time. At one point, on the dancefloor, I felt the energy swirling around me again, with great speed and force, in a dramatic, vivid way — a vision of the eternal dance of humans around a fire, ecstatic and explosive. “Ah yes, I remember. This is ayahuasca.”
Stepping into the Tornado
Sitting in the yurt, awaiting the second night. I felt quiet and trusted in what would unfold. My intentions were simply calmness and clarity. And so, for the fourth time, I ingested 10 milliliters of ayahuasca. After about thirty minutes, my bodily sensations dissolved. Then, the visions manifested again, and the ayahuasca realm unfolded around me. Now, much gentler and quieter. I was fully aware of what was unveiling. No rainbows or colors this time. Only beautiful black-and-white motifs. Featherlike patterns and symmetric arrangements.
I perceived a dome of energy erect around me and stabilize. I felt as if I was wearing some sort of headdress. A few of the featherlike entities from three months ago darted around me. But less intrusive and intense. I was back in the ayahuasca reality. However, it was a calmer and more sympathetic disclosure. I could fully enjoy the entire ceremony. The phases of embodied and energetic struggles I faced the first three times did not emerge. Dancing, joy, gratitude. Serenity. What wealth of experience. What breadth of immersion. What a gift.
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I was happy to have resolved the tension that had apparently been inhabiting my psyche since the first ceremony weekend three months ago. That experience really took me to a limit of my being. Now, ayahuasca feels more like a friend, not an ordeal to be endured. My heart has been opened.
The powers beyond the physical are immense. The intelligence, complexity, and speed are unfathomable. Barely discernible from a human point of view. All our clever philosophy and theology fade in comparison. Our felt cognitive supremacy appears silly and arrogant. Only mathematics seems to prevail as a sacred language. A dialect capable of capturing transcendence, making it accessible to rational thinking. A mapping between physical and non-physical structures.
Many psychonauts recount two distinct experiences. One is that the transcendental realm feels decidedly more real than reality rendered through sober waking consciousness. A remarkable contextualization of an ineffable and transrational experience. Then, many report a feeling of coming home. A memory returns, and one recalls a distinct and intimate familiarity with the realm. Ann Shulgin, wife of the biochemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, knew these terrains well. Together they diligently tested and documented hundreds of the new psychedelic substances he synthesized. She once remarked:
The funny thing is that, despite all the newness, there’s something about all of it that feels — well, the only way I can put it is that it’s like coming home. As if there’s some part of me that already knows — knows this territory — and it’s saying Oh yes, of course! Almost a kind of remembering — !
For me, the ayahuasca realm I was shown twice felt distinctly unfamiliar and alien. The black-striped white tentacle being from three months ago did not register as human or animal-like consciousness. The flashback triggered by the scent was a place of immense strangeness. The featherlike entities felt mischievous but foreign.
The psyche-shattering complexity I was shown that resides behind the veil is far beyond human comprehension, at the very breaking point of our cognition. To be precise, the human cognition that is conditioned by Western thinking. I assume the shamans have been navigating this alien terrain for tens of thousands of years, with great familiarity. The icaros they develop, which bring healing into the physical realm, are another testament to their craftsmanship and otherworldly knowledge. Yet, the Western mind could not resist the temptation to arrogantly dismiss shamanism as primitive superstition. And so one of the most sophisticated consciousness technologies humans ever developed was temporarily lost, preventing an entire society from becoming masters of consciousness.
The vast intelligence inhabiting and structuring the non-physical realms registers as pure insanity for our rational conceptions of intelligence. We usually can only see glimpses of it, manifested, for instance, in the staggering intelligence expressed in nature, or in the very cognitive capacity we so arrogantly claim as exclusively our own. Even our technology has begun to express intelligence, arguably channeled from the same source.
The thinker Rudolf Otto called the crushing, awe-inspiring, terrifying, and overwhelming experience of the divine mystery the mysterium tremendum. The realization of one’s own smallness in the vast, intricate, and complex web of existence. Awe and gratitude, humbleness and humility. This dichotomy of bliss and terror, of struggle and surrender, seems to be a universal template for the evolution of consciousness. It is an integral part of the path to happiness. Bache further explains:
[This is] why our scientific traditions shun the exploration of consciousness — it’s so damn hard! It’s scary to crack the shell of our mind.
The science journalist John Horgan, best known for his book The End of Science, also experienced both sides of this dichotomy. He described his visions with ayahuasca as follows:
The colors became ever-more-dazzling, the shapes ever-more-complex, until there were no shapes and colors any more. They yielded to something deeper and more fundamental than shape, color, syntax, thought: the metaphysical principles underlying all things, the machine code of reality.
However, the disclosure had its price. His visions were accompanied by a fear of losing his mind. He summarized his struggles:
After I threw up, I had a cosmic panic attack, in which I was menaced by malevolent, dayglo-hued polyhedra. I have no desire to repeat this experience.
Our physical reality is luckily very pleasant and predictable in its state of low-frequency. We can depend on its stability. In contrast, behind the veil resides high-frequency dynamism, speed, and an overwhelming informational richness. Radical novelty and change seem to persist there eternally. We can be grateful for the reducing valve of the brain, able to filter the influx of reality to the “measly trickle” of our sober waking consciousness, allowing us to function. And we should be deeply humbled by its capacity to open towards transcendence.
I feel deep awe and appreciation for the indigenous cultures which engaged with the intelligence in nature and beyond, discovering all the plant teachers. A great respect for the shamans cultivating and executing this knowledge, invoking the dance of transcendence. A profound appreciation for ayahuasca itself, this multidimensional and otherworldly healing and teaching agent. I am also very touched by the people participating in the ceremonies, willing to face their own shadow to heal. For some, this path is one of tremendous struggle on a long trajectory to happiness. This work requires so much courage.
One participant regularly experiences intense physical pain and deep suffering while immersed in the ceremonies. During a period of her struggles, I glanced over, sensing something. As I don’t wear my glasses during the ceremonies, I only see blurred images and outlines. However, I could see a distinct darkness enveloping her head. Another participant had a full breakdown after the second night. The next day, she shared that she had been in a state where she felt she had died. Only her body without her head remained. She then visited previous generations of ancestors, healing the trauma of a lineage afflicted by violence. Through tears of gratitude, she said that this was the most meaningful experience of her entire life. I can only lower my head in deep sympathy and respect. Others drank three cups a night and were gifted with blissful and joyous experiences.
The second night also brought an unexpected gift. I was shown my spirit animal, an insight that was repeatedly validated by synchronistic events in the days that followed. Synchronicity seems best understood as a mapping between the inner and outer worlds, instantiated through meaning. As such, it is an expected feature of a cosmos emerging from a field of pure awareness from within a transcendental multiverse, one that harbors meaning and purpose.
My future ayahuasca path is open. I do not know when I will commune again with transcendence. However, I do know that the gifts ayahuasca can offer us are exceptionally powerful, profound, and transformational. There is much work to be done.
