Accessing The Higher Self With Ayahuasca — Visions and Teachings
Tags: This Happened To Me, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Psychedelics, Life Lessons

Death

I remember that it felt like death. I remember losing my mind like it wasn’t even possible to let go of my own identity. It’s as if my idea of self was erased, it journeyed me into a dark abyss moving farther from my physical body. I saw spirits dancing as the shamans were playing some sort of spiritual mantra. They were talking to me, like someone I knew for a long time; telling me all my dark thoughts. They were a reflection of myself.

The Journey

On a dry October weekend of 2017, I was scheduled to attend a spiritual ceremony that I had no knowledge about other than what I have read on the internet. Knowing myself as someone who would take an interest in exploring fear and the unknown, I decided to give this experience a shot.

An Ayahuasca Ceremony is a one (often three) night experience that involves drinking a brewed plant tea blend under the guidance of a shaman. The tea includes a substance known as DMT (n-n-dimethyltryptamine), known for its psychedelic, hallucinatory and more often than not, mystical visions. DMT is naturally present in our bodies and is heightened when we experience the very essence of death. I have read a lot of anecdotal reviews about this spiritual ceremony, most of these accounts share that it is a way to get to know oneself better, and to get a connection with one’s higher Self. A person can even face his own demons while he trips out, something I never would like to see nor experience. The ceremony allowed me to speak with my subconscious, opening all the desires I’ve ever wanted to see. Since I have taken extra measures by reading about other people’s experiences, I went to the ceremony with a bag of expectations behind my back. Should I need data to back up the actual experience, I knew it was there to keep me from getting paranoid about the nature of the experience. I was advised to give an intention before drinking the sacred Ayahuasca tea. The intention is to determine what the visions might appear on the trip. Without any knowledge of what it would turn out to be, I simply said, “Show me what life should be like and go easy on me.” Fasting for a week is required to have a very meaningful and spiritual trip. It is normal for people that drink it to vomit due to its acidic properties.

As I vomited what felt like the last remaining liquid inside my body, I released all my negative energy, or Ego, or maybe all the desires and pleasures I wish were part of my natural Self… like it was all gone. It was symbolic and sacred. Tribes from Peru have done this practice as a form of cleansing the soul. I may have thrown my negative energy out verbally, for all the people in the ceremony to hear. There was one instance when I just had to release all the sexual tension I was feeling towards the shaman, a woman, in the ceremony. I pointed at her and commanded her to orally stimulate my genital. As part of the ritual, shamans (even the less experienced ones) were also required to drink the sacred tea, which allowed them the ability to get a better intuition on what the participants were feeling. Dumbfounded from her own psychedelic episode, she came closer and seductively asked what I really wanted her to do to me. A part of my consciousness was telling me not to say anything. Everyone was in the same room as I witnessed the embarrassment I was making out of myself. The sacred ayahuasca tea taught me that there is nothing to feel ashamed about as I was just expressing myself, trying to release all the pleasures I was craving at the moment. At least I knew then that what I did was of good-will to procreate, that I had good intentions. It is in our nature as humans to express ourselves that way, which new age society is preventing. I could have hurt her, but I didn’t because it was not part of my subconscious intention.

No one is perfect. We are all flawed. Cleansed and healed from the negative energy, vomiting them all away felt liberating. My ego was being stripped away, and I was being told by the substance that I didn’t need it to define my identity. I was able to observe my usual thinking patterns and needed some personal reframing. I feel better like a person reborn from all energies merged into one body — just One mind and body.

The Psychedelic Experience

The earlier phases of my journey felt like my spirit left my physical body. Colors of green, red and yellow were all I could see regardless of whether or not my eyes were closed. I saw the eye of providence and an image of a pyramid, both of which were dancing in translucent colors. The figure kept staring right into my soul as if it was observing my very being. I felt fear and amused at the same time.

In retrospect, I feel like the all-seeing eye is always present in any psychedelic episode because we see the nature of a person just by looking at him straight into the eye. Stare into one’s eyes and you can see right through his very soul. This is our subconscious’ way of telling that the eye sees through one’s spirit, and the power of intense judgment is by giving someone the eye. Our eyes are massive tools for seeing, but what often comes with this ability is our general idea of judgment towards others, which is bound by materialism.

The Spirit Realm

Towards the middle of my trip was when I felt my spirit lingering in the spirit realm. The shamans, who acted as mediums between the physical and spiritual realm, were responsible for keeping me near the physical realm, so I would not be lost in the abyss. They each had a role in getting access to the Unknown. The lead shaman was responsible for opening the gates. For some mystical reason, he had the ability to attract spirits and energies in the form of playing an instrument and chanting rituals. His role in the ceremony was to bring me back whenever I got lost; he guided me when things went astray. The second shaman was my ‘spiritual guide’. He was like a friend in my own journey. His role was to see what I was seeing and acted as a supporting entity with whatever my spirit did in the realm. Even if my soul felt alone in the abyss, it knew he was there all throughout. Scary as it may seem, I felt both dead and alive at the same time.

As I felt my thoughts grow darker, I had a very difficult time finding the light. I had seen spirits inside the room. One was beside me, the other standing across the room, and many more paying their stops in the attractive energy the shaman created. My intuition was telling me not to look them in the eye in fear of something worse than just gazing at them. Even up to this point in time, I am not even entirely sure if they were all human spirits, maybe elves possibly. All I know is that they were there in the moment of my active spiritual enlightenment. During the disintegration of my consciousness, I saw a wolf that guided me back to the lead shaman. It appeared to me when I lost contact with my guiding shaman and knew my spirit was being guided to absolute nothingness. A pitch-black hole of emptiness was excited to greet me at its gates. It may even be possible that the wolf might be my spirit animal, channeling both our inner instincts as living creatures and how I eerily resemble its characteristics toward the light. It looked like a brave creature. With the absence of others, I felt liberated and free to act on my own. With the group beside me, I felt a sense of community and teamwork. I was hallucinating and felt euphoria at some point on my trip. Later on, I felt a source of energy that brought me back to my physical body. The shamans were chanting, calling my soul just in time to see what it was like to be as close to the void without getting stuck there. It was liberating. I felt recollected with my conscious Being, but that didn’t last long.

The effects of my fasting were calling on me, telling me somehow that I needed to eat. I was vomiting what practically looked like dust. I informed the shamans about my craved hunger and they gave me a banana so I could still vomit some more. My hallucination was still present at this time, though I could still find a little bit of myself enough to say the right words. The fruit I was holding seemed larger than what would have been normal when seen by the sober eye. The first bite felt like bliss, like I was ascending my reality onto the fruit. The trip that felt like three hours in my mind, was in reality just an hour on the clock.

This experience had me thinking that time is just a concept. It does not exist within our minds if we choose to be in the present moment. The feeling of being recollected with my conscious being was short and sudden, then later on transcended into a mental loop.

The Mental Loop

This was the scariest experience I have ever had in my entire physical, emotional and spiritual life. As the term implies — the mental loop, my thoughts were repetitive. The experience was like going inside a room, only to find out that once I enter the doorway, I was led back into the thought of just about to turn the knob. Limbo, as some people may even refer it to. I found it hard to recollect with my thoughts because anything I wanted to think of was leading me back to that same original idea, like a magnet attracting whatever it is it can get. Think of the movie Insidious and the concept of Astral Projection. It’s eerily similar to what I encountered and believe me, it was real. This may have a connection with letting go of the ego. I had a very hard time letting go of a part of myself that it took me a long time to transcend to a higher Being. I was in a constant battle with myself, trying to avoid being selfless because I thought I valued that part of my identity the most. If I let go of my attachments sooner, the mental loop could have been cut short, but it didn’t because it was one of my most valued parts of my identity. This was the part when I heard my own demons speaking to me, telling me about things I should not be doing and habits I should not continue to do. Not the type of demon you see on horror movies, I’ve come to realize that the demons were a part of myself, a dark side of myself, speaking to me at the time of my hallucination. Eventually, I just had to let go, even if it literally felt like death, otherwise, I would have been stuck in the mental loop for a longer period of nonexistence. No living creature would like to experience it for one’s enjoyment and curiosity. Once I did let go of the fabricated version of the Self, I felt like a spiritual Being being transcended into a philosophical turbine of introspection and realizations on life.

The Stage of Enlightenment

When I just had to let go of everything, and by everything I mean consciousness in itself, I felt connected with everyone and was placed in absolute presence. Humans, animals, even plants. I got the realization that we are all connected from the same root with similar energies. I saw visions that cannot be seen by our very own human eyes. I’ve been blessed by the substance with the ability to see that humans should not act like gods because we are all equal. I felt like a god at some point in this enlightenment (call it false enlightenment as it sounds like it), being able to see how humans are connected with our ability to feel collectively conscious with one another despite differences. It felt good, but too much vision had me thinking, at the end of this all, we are still flawed humans. Similar to what our structure in this world is happening right now, people are driven by their egos. We think we are human when we feel stuck, when we feel pride when we are jealous when self-importance feels like our drive for success. That is how we want to act as gods when we manipulate the material. Anything pleasurable in excess is destructive, even desires more so. Ego has taken over our way of life. The visions I saw are correct, and it saddens me how we feel like this is the way to live. We cannot blame ourselves for this kind of thinking because we were raised with this mentality. That’s not to say that the Ego is the enemy. What I’m saying is that the Ego can be tamed.

Our world is a chaotic place. We base the values of other people based on social ranking. We were conditioned since the day we set foot on this planet that this way of living is the only way to live. Living life fully doesn’t make any sense if we keep the same routine on obtaining materialistic possessions over and over again. It is just a cycle of obtaining useless materials to impress other people who are also doing the same to impress people they don’t know. With this way of living, the idea of being selfless is removed from our very nature. We live in a world structured by capitalism, where profits are important to gain something from someone else’s value. We were raised thinking that a nice car, a beautiful wife and a good job would gain us someone else’s respect, eventually ignoring the main value: the mind’s ability to understand and learn from others.

If we get attached to our ego and let it consume our day to day living, we get to live a life of jealousy and dissatisfaction, because we are always in search of something that would make us feel superior to other people. The media has been keeping this kind of information from us all along. They keep telling us that materialistic attachments are important to satisfy our needs because we fear that we may not be connected with others if we don’t have this specific need to buy something. This is what I mean when people act like gods when they manipulate too much on the material. This is the very desire of capitalism. Fear sells. That is why we crave for material possessions. If the metric to having a good life is based on material wealth grounded on this earth, then that is not a very good way to live. In fact, there is no good life. There is no good life, without experiencing first the bad. This is what the sacred tea Ayahuasca has been teaching participants time and time again. Balance — benevolence and malevolence, it is within our nature to feel both. Our goals should be about developing the Self through constant learning and improvement from personal experiences and learnings from other people. In this way, we are able to maximize our ability to feel the true meaning of being human, loving others unconditionally. However, this is our reality where we know that people are ego-driven. We cannot change that fact. What we can change is our potential to respond to them without fear of being judged in value based on their metrics of living a good life. In the end, it is our self that makes us human, we can act to change their way of thinking, but it is up to themselves to live by what we preach. We are only limited by the simplest acts of kindness, but it can go a long way.

Balance in life is very important. Balance is key to handling a satisfying life. Ego, the natural self, the pleasures and desires in life, the negative energies: all these should be in equal proportions. Anything exceeding the other will lead to an unsatisfying craving in life. By stripping away our ego, desires and pleasures, we become selfless as Aya taught me how we should be as living creatures, to ascend to higher consciousness. We become higher beings if we let go of the idea of the Self, giving up our desires and worldly materialistic attachments. Without attachments, we are able to see the truth in our humanistic nature: that is to be loving of one another and to be accepting of each other despite our inequality based on our upbringing. If we strip away our desire for personal gain, I am certain that we will feel much more altruistic and free, in the process of attracting love like moths to a flame.

In Search of Meaning

The ego will always be within us as it is part of our human nature to feel these desires in life. It feels good to feel valued by our material possessions. We cling onto ego because it feels good. Pleasure is the easiest and fastest form of gratification we can achieve. It feels like a quick high when we have new things to often brag about. Pleasure feels good, but it’s only as quick as the fastest car we can buy. That is why we feel like we can never get enough of what we can possess. Money empowers us and makes us think that we can achieve greater things.

Three years have gone by since attending this ceremony and I still live by this principle: we get to choose how we remain associated with these desires or let go and let live. Life is an everlasting rollercoaster of temptations and pleasures, which we can never avoid. However, if we become open to others, not thinking about taking advantage of them for personal gain, we become selfless. We are able to see the world within our own universe: that life is not meant to be feared from what people view us to be. Life is meant to be understood from the universe within our minds. We should not let others define our identity because if we know (and love) ourselves well enough, there won’t be any constant search of approval from others.

The Message

I hope you take my philosophy with a grain of salt because each life experience is different, though we will always end up with the same burial ground. That is just how the world works. We grow old and die, to make room for a better version of ourselves. Death is earth’s best innovation. It is the only way for us to strive for positive change. We never had the same upbringing, but as humans, our nature is to feel the same, to feel One with everyone. The mind is also a part of the body.

I thank Ayahuasca for the very life-changing spiritual experience. For those who are still deciding whether or not they should widen their horizons, I highly recommend exploring your thoughts. The experience is not for the most upright people, but it would definitely help them the most as they get to learn more about themselves, especially the thoughts that can’t be heard by the conscious mind. Life is about love, and not the ego running it around. The ego is a distraction and a lesson in itself… That attachments don’t define who you are… That it is just a validation of one’s identity. Be selfless. Be loving. Be accepting. I hope to see your views in the higher state.

Disclaimer:

This article does not promote or recommend the use of illegal drugs. Many of the substances referenced to in the content are illegal in many countries. This article does not constitute medical advice. As always, please consult your doctor before taking any medicine.

Disclaimer from the Samadhi.today Publication: This article is written by its author. The author is fully responsible for its contents. Most plant medicine and psychedelics are considered to be drugs or high-risk drugs (Schedule 1 substances) in most countries and possession and offering is a criminal offense, punished by the local authorities. Please be advised and take into consideration all the legal aspects before participating in any way.