Coming back to the Origins: Ayahuasca.

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Hello Steemian. I’d like to tell you in the following story, the spiritual and eye-opening process I began several years ago. Although there is plenty to talk about, I want to share with you the beginnings of my journey and my first experience drinking Ayahuasca or Yage. I will be sharing more of my experiences in future posts!

Before anything, I would like to clarify that English is not my mother tongue. You might find some grammatical mistakes. However, I translated my story the best way I could and I’ve posted more stories and articles in both Spanish and English here: @elorigen, so don’t forget to subscribe. I hope you enjoy it!

THE BEGINNINGS

I am a pretty average guy. I was born in a normal family in one of the big cities of South America. When I was a little kid I always lived captivated by the idea of the existence of extra-terrestrial beings. The perception I had about them was rather terrifying and I used to freak out every time I heard the stories of appearances and ufo’s sightings. Despite my reactions, I remember every time I was outdoors playing with my toys looking up to the sky and wonder a lot about what lies beyond the clouds.

My parents raised me on religious grounds. As I was growing up, strict rules at school and church made me feel I didn’t belong to that traditional ambient. However, as the years went on, I tried to focus on what I had methodically been taught: a high sense of responsibility and belonging towards my studies and my conservative family. In fact, and contrary to what my parents expected, I wasn’t a good student because I enjoyed more letting my imagination go wild. I was good at it. This made me suffer a lot because sometimes I just didn’t care about my obligations at school. I remember my teachers telling my mother how disperse my mind was and that if I didn’t work hard to change that I would be a failure in my adult life.

I always idealised a different environment to live in, mainly because of the religious teachings my parents tried really hard to indoctrinate their children with. These lessons were, off course, taught with good intentions but they were always an obligation. In those years, I used to feel awkwardly obliged to follow the rules and the life style I grew up in and therefore, I couldn’t do what I truly wanted to do. Now that I think of it, those rules were no more than mental barriers stablished to supposedly save my soul from going to hell.

A TERRIBLE HEADACHE

From a very young age I had suffered from migraines. An illness of which I couldn’t find any cure nor a possible explanation about its causes. Currently, there are millions of people suffering this silent but annoying and painful illness. Although it is associated to the non-stop modern life style, there isn’t a clear and definitive cause for it. In my case, after a long time carrying this burden, I found myself immersed in a dilemma: I could accept the illness as it was and live with it for the rest of my life or find something to cure it. Thus, I began my search with a visit to the neurologist with hopes that modern medicine could help me. After my first visit to this specialist, a series of cerebral examinations took place to determine the cause of my migraine episodes. Along with these tests, I was medicated some tablets which I took for almost 10 months. In the end, the final conclusions were that I should use corrective medicine every time I get the migraine because there weren’t preventive options.

In all honesty, I was deeply disappointed with the neurologist. I really wanted to solve my problem and thought traditional medicine was the answer to find the roots of this illness. After thinking about my options and not being really convinced but rather wanting to try my luck, I decided to give alternative medicine a go. Due to my religious beliefs, I was always skeptical about fringe medicine but I was determined to put an end to my problem even though it was a step into the unknown. I began with acupuncture sessions which were later complemented with electricity therapies. My first impression was quite positive because the doctor made me feel comfortable and relaxed. As the sessions went on, she was able to spot an area by my ankle linked to my vision which according to her, was the source of my migraines. From this diagnosis, she gave me some recommendations such as avoiding looking straight to flashing lights (the most common symptom of migraine is a visual aura that creates sparkles which block the vision) and being careful with my eating habits.

From that moment on, I had concluded that what the doctor was doing was good, at least there was some progress; but to my surprise in our last session she told me she had come up to the conclusion that my problem was more psychological. She even went further and mentioned that this issue might’ve had to do with an episode of my childhood. Her opinion generated in me a lot of mixed feelings because I had never thought my problem could come from a psychological state nor that it had to do with my past. I decided then to study and do some research about the relationship between psychology and migraine. I found articles related with cerebral and psychological analysis and eventually (and fortunately), I came across with something very special: meditation techniques. At this stage, meditation was completely unknown to me because it wasn’t quite what you would do in a conservative religious environment. Nevertheless, I started to carry out a personal investigation on everything I could come across about meditation.

THE MIRACLE OF MEDITATION

Consequently, after digging through the information found, I considered it was time to level up the theory and began to practice, supported by binaural sounds. These sounds are meant to help your brain by stimulating specific areas that are connected to the subconscious. I remember buying a half an hour session of binaural sounds from a web site that claims to do work with sounds and the human brain. The meditation kicked off with everyday sessions which at the beginning felt quite difficult and boring because it was really hard to keep myself awake and focused. However, after a while I understood that meditation was something more tangible, something more related with a scientific and logic procedure and it was then when it started to show positive outcomes.

I can now say that from the beginning of my meditation process until now, and after having suffered from migraine for about 18 years, it disappeared completely. This was a milestone for me because it had a huge impact on a conscious level. My meditations remarkably improved. I could meditate for longer periods of time without falling asleep or feeling bored. It was quite revealing as well. It helped me to notice that, apart from the fact it had wiped out all my migraines, meditation had changed my perspective about consciousness. At this stage I felt I had opened a door to an infinite world I didn’t know anything about and which always had resided within myself but for some reason I ignored. It was as if I had a million dollars in front of me and never saw them.

A LUCID DREAM

The next stage of my process had to do with practices related to dreams. I learned dreams are a way to connect you subconscious to your conscious. It took willingness and discipline to note down absolutely every single dream I had. In the meantime, a friend of mine told me about Ayahuasca or also known as Yage. A natural beverage made for centuries in the forest of South America by indigenous communities and used for some spiritual connection. Although I respected my friend, I thought he was a bit crazy and even drug addicted. Clearly, I didn’t have any idea about what he was talking about so I kept myself skeptical towards his invitations. After few months and to my surprise, I started to have dreams about Ayahuasca which represented itself in a form of a very old token full of information. My subconscious, through my dreams, was telling me that this beverage could show me an ancestral knowledge. However, even though I was getting these signs, I kept putting off the invitation.

Days went on and on the evening before my birthday number 33 I had a lucid dream that honestly, never had in my life. It was incredibly lucid. When I woke up from it I was still confused about what was real and what wasn’t. I found myself sitting on my bed, grabbing my head disoriented and thinking whether my dream was my reality or not. This was my dream: I was inside a coffin from which I could see some sort of waiting room. Everything was very luxurious around me, including the inside of the coffin. Unlike a normal funerary waiting room where the family gathers to say the last good bye to the deceased, there was only one person in there apart from myself. When I glanced up to see who this person was I realised he was me! My other self was dressed up with a very elegant black suit. He approached the coffin and look down at me as he took off his wrist watch and placed it on the glass right in front of my face.

I woke up agitated and looking around as I was coming back to the reality of my bedroom. I was shocked by the weird sensation of seeing someone so alike as if he was a clone of mine. I waited for a while trying to think about what I had just dreamt of but couldn’t make sense of it so I went back to sleep. The next morning, I woke up with the feeling that this dream had some significance in my life that could be related to life, dead and time.

Two days later my friend invited me again to an Ayahuasca ceremony telling me that this time, there was a high ranked ‘Chaman’ from a tribe in the Amazonas forest coming to precede it. I accepted his invitation knowing there was something waiting for me in that ceremony. I remember there was another friend who tagged along.

I asked him: “¿Are you ready for this adventure?”.

I was curious to see if he felt intrigued as I was. I think I was feeling the same way as when I went to my first acupuncture session.

My friend looked at me and said: “¡I’m ready, let’s do this!

In the country I live in, despite having ancestral indigenous tribes from the Amazonas, people who live in the big and cosmopolitan cities don’t really know them or pay attention to their culture and tradition. As for me, after defeating all the prejudice and misunderstanding about Ayahuasca, I believed my whole purpose was based upon breaking my own barriers and stepping forward to unknown terrains. Social limitations generate a closed cultural environment which diminish any kind of new beliefs.

This was the prelude to the Ayahuasca ceremony. By assisting, I went against what my family and friends thought. The lessons I’ve learned along all this long process the last years, have been greater than what I’ve learned from my family, society and religions.

THE CEREMONY

The day of the ceremony finally arrived and after picking up my friends by 8 pm, we headed to a farm located outside the city. It was a cold night with clear skies and a beautiful full moon. When we arrived, we were introduced to other participants but didn’t talk much because we wanted to look around the place first. We could tell some people were a bit nervous and had high expectations about what was happening that night. We entered a ceremony chamber called ‘Maloca’, which is an indigenous house made from clay, wood and straw ceilings, specially arranged for celebrations. I remember once we were inside this place, there was a bonfire right in the middle and we were spread around it forming some sort of circle. In the crowd, I spotted an old indigenous man in his seventies, 1,60 centimetres tall who was wearing special indigenous robes. I didn’t know who this man was, but I’d assumed he had to do with the ceremony. After a while, we had some time to walk around the place and go back outside where we chatted for a bit longer. Everybody was getting familiar to this ambient and the longer we were in that place, the more relaxed we felt.

After waiting for about one hour, I remember the Chaman, who turned out to be the old man I’d seen before, started to change is robes and put on some ceremonial garments. All what he was wearing was very colourful. Necklaces with all sorts of colours and shapes, with animal’s teeth and a very tall green feathered crown. Once he was done with it, he pulled out a cigar and began to smoke as he remained very quiet. Surrounding him, there was a group of young men who, I learned later, were his disciples. Suddenly, one of them stood up and began to announce the beginning of the ceremony. Next thing I know, we were sitting down in a circle and were given instructions in case of an emergency (and by emergency I mean vomiting or getting sick to the stomach). Then the group was told to form a line to receive the ‘sacred medicine’ as they called Ayahuasca. When it was my turn to drink this beverage, one of the Chaman’s helpers was holding a bottle half full of a brown liquid which he poured into a recipient the Chaman was holding with both hands. With a straight face, he was giving indications to his disciple to pour certain amount of Ayahuasca, which brought me to the conclusion that everyone gets a different measure depending on what the Chaman considers enough for each participant. Here I was about to drink Ayahuasca. Right before I did so, the Chaman held up the recipient, mumbled some sort of ritualistic sentence and placed it on my hands and blew it. Then I proceeded to drink its contents. It was very bitter and had some fermentation flavour.

Ayahuasca ceremonial cap - www.santodaimecolombia.org

Once I drank the contents of the cap, I went back to my seat and waited until my friend came back to sit next to me. Whilst we were sitting down, we didn’t say anything for a little while as we were, I think, thinking about what we had just done. Then we started to nervously ask each other about what we were feeling. We were feeling alright but there was this funny sensation in our stomach that was a bit weird. We even joked around asking one another if we had already seen a ghost or something like that. We waited up until everybody in the room had drunk it and gone back to their seats. As if I was being hypnotised, I don’t remember clearly at what point I began to stare at the flames in the bonfire located in the middle of the room but suddenly, the place fell in a deep silence.

THE TRANCE

I started to feel nauseas and my head was spinning around as if I was drunk. I think the bitterness of the drink made me feel sick so I went outside and found a spot to throw up between the trees. It is attributed to Ayahuasca to have cleansing benefits, so after a while being outside, I finished vomiting and went back inside with a relief sensation in my stomach. Once inside I wanted to sleep so I laid down on the floor near the bonfire. I closed my eyes but a weird numbness spread all over my body. After probably ten minutes trying to sleep and with my eyes still closed, I started to see very vividly colourful geometric patterns and symmetrical forms of all kinds which were moving and reducing as more appeared. I later learned that those geometric shapes are called fractals.

Geometry seen in a Ayahuasca ceremony

I had the strange impression of being connected to those geometric forms as well as with everyone who was in that room with me. As my mind was taken over by these hallucinations, I tried to get up and sit on the chair next to me but I didn’t have enough strength to do so. I tried again and suddenly, I heard a female voice saying: ¿why do you get up? ¿what do you do it for?. Every time this female voice asked me those questions my body weakened more and more to the point that I couldn’t move or use a single muscle.

Then what I was witnessing began to be attractive and amusing at the same time. As I was getting immersed in it, I payed attention to every single detail of it as if I was watching a very interesting movie. I lost the sense of time. At this stage I started to have a deeply analysis of myself. Questions flooded my head as I felt the urge to find their answers. The questions were of all kinds of topics and were related to my job, my profession, my parents, my childhood… There was one question after another in a seamless loop. The questions and thoughts were coming and going in a faster pace to the point where I couldn’t believe how fast my brain was working. Then a huge stream of thoughts activated in my brain without restriction or anything that could stop them. I answered all my questions. When I had the intention of asking another one, I already had the answer. I started laughing because I found it funny that without having formulated the question which I didn’t really know what was about, I had the answer for it!

This is hard to explain. You might find it crazy, like something that doesn’t make sense, but I can tell you it was the most amazing sensation I have ever felt and experienced! At that moment, I felt there was no point asking anything at all because my brain was working in such a way that I had ALL the answers! I went through all the possible topics I could think of. From my personal, family and material life to the Universe and this world and how we are connected as a one big spiritual entity. It was an endless stream of information and I couldn’t believe my brain was capable to do such a thing.

THE HOLOGRAM OF PHYSICAL REALITY

At some point in this trance, I remembered I was in the ceremony so I opened my eyes and looked around. It was difficult to keep them open. When I stared at the walls, I noticed everything physical surrounding me was made of a kind of web that resembled a honeycomb structure. Everything was made of this geometric structure which wasn’t static but rather in a constant motion. When I looked up at people, in a really strange way I could feel and see what they were feeling and seeing. I know it sounds inconceivably odd but I could even get in their minds and read their thoughts. Everybody was connected to each other in a seamless coordination. Part of me couldn’t really make sense of what was happening but it was undeniably real. With the last bit of strength remaining in my body, I managed to get up and sit on the chair next to me. From this perspective, I could pretty much see everything. Some people were very quiet; others were crying or talking to themselves but everybody was in a some kind of trance.

Visible hologram during the trance

I wanted to go back and keep exploring that unknown geometric world I was immersed in before, so I tried to focus on the shapes and forms. This time, they started to look smaller and distanced from me as if the place had got bigger or I had shrunk. They also became to look like inside of an engine’s gear in a constant motion. I’m trying to explain with words what I saw, however, I don’t think I could really explain exactly how it was. With my eyes closed, I realised all what I was seeing was my own structure, my body, my soul, my consciousness; It was like contemplating the very complex structure and the million transistors of a microchip in the microscope. In the middle of my visions, the Chaman walked pass me several times and every time, he would blow over my head making a rhythmic sound. But he did it on a spiritual level because I then noticed that in reality, he remained seated about 8 meters away from me all the time. From that moment, I understood that he was attentive to everything that was happening around me. He even modified part of the geometrical structure I saw, as if he could fix or adjust something in the complexity of my consciousness.

Fractals

RE-ORIENTING MYSELF BACK TO THE REALITY

I think the progress I gained when I interacted with my subconscious during this ceremony, was remarkably enhanced by the process of remembering my dreams. I’ve heard some people can lose control in this interaction. For this reason, it’s essential for these types of ceremonies the presence of a Chaman or The Old Master as they also call them. They play an important role as spiritual guides for those whose level of elevation of consciousness is low. I also found interesting the variety of people from all ages and backgrounds attending to this ceremony. There were some kids not older than 10 or 11 who, in small proportion, drank Ayahuasca. They stayed very quiet and in silence most of the time, and the Chaman came several times to check on them. I felt a profound love when I saw these kids having their own spiritual experience and when the Chaman welcomed them to this reincarnation through their connection. I just can’t imagine what kind of abilities these kids could develop from such a young age.

Chaman’s astral projection - www.0nly-goodvibes.tumblr.com

There was another episode in my trance that felt like nothing I had ever sensed before: my mind was in my hands. I could see and feel like having thousands of dreams in a split of a second. All these images were passing on in front of my spiritual eyes in an extraordinary speed and the thoughts and conclusions about them, came from very powerful processors. This event reminded me of a scene from the second Transformers movie when Sam Witwicky, after touching the Allspark, received in a vertiginous speed all the information contained in a book of Astronomy. With all that secret and new knowledge, he concluded Einstein was wrong! Now I understand where writers in Hollywood get their ideas from.

https://youtu.be/2hJ0ku475Pc

To be honest, I feel happy because I have discovered more about what I have believed for many years but hadn’t been able to experience: coming from a theoretical baseline to such an intense, vivid and explosive practice. I have shared with you my experience because I discovered my true mission. We aren’t on this planet and have the life we have just for a random reason; the Universe and the Origins of every extra-terrestrial being, astral and physical entity, have such complex structure that is impossible to understand on this level. However, this is not the end. There are a lot of new connections with superior levels that we can experience. As for myself, I continued my process with this amazing elemental called Ayahuasca. I can’t wait to tell you more about my stories of other ceremonies I went to. Thank you for reading and big thanks to @jerrybanfield for letting me to be part of this great movement!

Remember: You are your own master. We only help you to find it.

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