My Ayahuasca Ceremony Experience

My friends have told me that I'm a very stable tripper. My friend Duncan once had a bad time on shrooms, thinking that all the blades of grass were judging him after I told him to shut up, and he sped off down the road repeating loudly "I do it because I like it." I was able to shift between a seeing god mentality to being practical about saving my friend's life, and after that was resolved I enjoyed the rest of my trip. I once walked into a Bank of America after being up all night on acid, wearing a blue-stained Army of One t-shirt, a black neon hawaiian shirt and a faded blue stripe on my face, and I had a completely straight faced conversation about BoA's international wiring terms to Argentina, which caused this cute Ethiopian girl to start cracking up at the end of the conversation when I said in monotone: "thank you, this is something I'll be considering."

Robert Anton Wilson has told me that there are 8 circuits of consciousness - I had previously lived on the seventh at the max. He also suggest that DMT, the active ingredient of Ayahuasca, is the nuerochemical key to the ultimate level of consciousness.

The thing had been built up in my head for years. In college I could score almost anything but DMT was far too exotic for Virginia Tech. I had to move to South America before it would become available to me. Going into it I wasn't sure whether it would be a tumultuous vision quest or a detached, out-of-body experience like my grandpa experienced on ketamine and scotch before deciding he'd rather blow his brains out than live with my grandmother. I was most afraid that I wasn't sufficiently detoxified and that my 300 pesos investment would be for naught. These were rather like the fears one has before losing one's virginity, until you find that you're (hopefully) with someone you love and everything is just awesome, fears were not needed. In this case, I was about to have sex with god.

On the subway three juggler kids were performing, a little girl and two boys. I had a glass bottle of coca-cola full of water that I was going to drink during the ceremony, I let the kids drink it instead and gave them ten centavos, even though I could have given them twenty pesos. The one kid wanted to keep the bottle, just to have something, but I told him I needed it and he gave it back.

I arrived at the house, a couple blocks off the Malabia subway exit. The house has a buena onda, skylight, couches, bean bag chairs, wind chimes, scented candles, stuff like that. There was a loft room where we all stashed our shoes, an entry hall with the atrium skylight and a main room where the ceremony took place. They had taken out all the furniture that was there from my contraindications interview a few weeks prior, there were little mats lined about, a pillow for each, and red and orange vomitus buckets tucked to the sides along with a liter bottles of water. People were advised to bring their own sleeping bags. I was immediately struck by the demographics of the people there, I at my age of 24 I was probably the youngest person in the room. These were not teenage psychonauts, these were mature human beings bearing the weight of decades of life experience and seeking to have a resolution forward. Clearly we were in for something of a different tenor than a party drug.

Geronimo is a young shaman with much lighter skin than I expected and short dread-locked hair, he politely greeted everyone. When I met him I asked "sos Geronimo?" and he said "lo mismo" with the kind of basic grace you'd expect from a wizened diplomat. We all sat down and he laid out the rules, during the ceremony nobody is to talk to each other or interact, the bathroom is around the corner, breakfast will be at 8 and we can all talk then. Simple and respectful, and in retrospect the whole thing had this vibe that you are an adult taking care of your own detox, respecting the rules and taking responsibility for your own experience, but they will be there to help you in any moment. I saw a used 2 liter Pepsi bottle filled with a thick, purple concoction, like the syrup for Grape Soda with the consistency of cough formula. I asked the lovely young woman sitting next to me if that was the Ayahuasca, she informed that it was. When I was asked her about the experience she said "es tu proprio" and "no esta en el mente, es en el corazon." All I could do was try to get a good stretch in so as not to waste precious brain cycles thinking about unnecessary aches and tensions in my body during the experience.

Two little girls helped in the ceremony, they were probably about 8 and 6; both wearing pink outfits with pastel-green socks. The 8-year old wreathed our heads in a fragrant tobacco while the 6-year old playfully bent her toes against the ground in rhythm to Geronimo's blowing over the Ayahuasca bottle. It was like The Holy Mountain meets Disney, but overall wholesome and family friendly. He then poured the mixture into a little China cup and the 8-year-old came over to offer it to me first, I look at her, shrugged, took it by one hand and threw it back. The taste was bitter, like everyone says, but I didn't think it was so bad. I'm the tipo to chase whiskey with beer and put tobasco sauce on everything, so maybe I'm outside the mean. The cup was returned, re-filled, and passed out to everyone in turn. When everyone had been served, the lights were cut and Geronimo began his chants.

After taking the elixer I immediately felt a sense of alteration, but I couldn't tell if it was just anticipatory jitters or a real chemical interaction. Then I started to wonder if I was going to get the experience, a concern I remember having shortly after taking mushrooms and LSD in the past, how little I learn. I just figured "no expectations, keep doing the prana yama." Geronimo's chants became more fierce, more passionate. I kept filling my lungs and slowly releasing them. I started to see faint black-and-white closed eye visuals of aymptotic cusps and centipedes, of dawns and horizons and big bangs. And before I knew it I got everything I ever wanted and more, and I was getting higher than Holy Fuck - as advertised.

It was not a hallucination. It was not a vision. It was like being held by god. It was like having sex with the universe. It was an honest, sincere consummation of everything; supreme ecstasy, an ascent into heaven. Geronimo's throat wobbling was the music of the spheres. Since DMT is produced by our pineal glands and released three times during our existence - birth, puberty and death, I was basically experiencing the awe of death preemptively. And the evangelion is that death is beautiful, death is the path to awe, death is eternal life. I saw my entire life ahead of me, the growth of my son, the love I will share with some woman out there and the other kids we'll have, working the earth, the bi-cameral local government and me and my friends having cervezas while the other political party, our wives, conspire in the other room. I felt overwhelming compassion for all humanity and a profound desire to make love every single day until I blissfully die.

Then I heard everyone start puking. The girl told me that the first time she took the sacrament only two out of twenty vomited. Well, this must have been a particularly strong batch, because everyone was puking up roses. The delicious nuances of their upchuck reflexes was the most hilarious thing I'd ever heard and I let out this satyr-ish belly laugh. Geronimo belched loudly. I laughed at that too. Then I farted a little bit.

I then decided to focus and ask the plant for some answers that I had wanted. Ever since I was 18 and I learned about both DMT and the form of programming known as the memetic algorithm, I've had the dream of building a software engine that can produce interactive content dynamically, it goes by the name of Directions-Thoughts-Materials or DMT, and I've sought out the chemical as a means of understanding directly what would be involved. I realized I already had the architecture pretty well defined, so I asked what kind of authoring language would the engine require. Geronimo's chanting gave me that answer. I received the keystone that will begin a year's worth of work. The authorship language will be a form of chant. People can just chant into the mic and lay down lines of script that will define how a bunch of data spins into a battlefield or a cathedral or a valley which is then populated with warriors or lovers or farmers, or really whatever the hell you want to come up with. Then on your second pass you can go over the text with the keyboard and the dev environment would offer a sumptuous feast of inverse parsed accents that you can add to the "nam"s and "ni"s and "chihueps" and so forth and these accents will code the permutations on the resulting creation. Finally the wave form that your ending throat wobble takes (the "hei, wueya, wueya wueeeaya wueeeeeyaaaaaaaa") will spin the matrix of variables that balance the gameplay to whatever style you desire to imbue. Obviously making that work with real software, data structures and everything, is a tall order, but I have the user experience encapsulated, and it is wonderful. We could all be shamans with this engine, spinning universes and dramas and meaningful decisions out of our tender voices. This was less than fourty minutes into the experience, and already the pearl of my quest was obtained. Ayahuasca was a gracious host.

I leaned forward, prostrate, and I realized why Moslems pray the way they do. I also realized why Arabic men sometimes beat their wives and sodomize them, they're pissed off about living in the middle of the desert, very simple. I also realized that when you pray like that it doesn't matter where you live, you are surrendering to the great lord. I resumed my upright position and sat in a hindu meditative stance and appreciated why they do that. Geronimo came by and poured florida water over my hands causing them to clasp together and I appreciated once again from my childhood why Christians pray the way they do. I hit my head against the wall and touched the top of my scalp and realized why Jews wear Yamachas on that position. Later, Geronimo came and doused my head with water, touching that top-point with the print of his thumb, and I saw a great pyramid rising into an erupting pulsar of light. There is no religion, there is only god and a multiplicity of techniques that work.

Feeling bold, I then asked the plant what was in store for humanity in 2012. The plant answered me honestly, "isn't it obvious? Humanity is on the verge of receiving Holy Death." I think what that means is that regardless of whether we all die in some massive extinction event, or there are a bunch of wars and disasters and lots of folks die and the survivors have a better attitude about living, or we have this Singularity where everything is coming up bubblegum and we all get to live forever, we will embrace the paradox of death and wake up. From this point on, death became the overriding theme of the night.

I accepted my own death, but then I started to think about some blog posts on this guy's survivalist site and I ended up getting the notion of someone pointing a gun at my head... in my head, and I couldn't get it out. I started thinking about what that would be like, then I started thinking about what I would feel if my yet unborn son had a gun pointed at his head, and I started to think, if it my was me on the other side of the trigger and pulling it meant eliminating that risk to my family, would I do it? Could I end another human life? I decided that I could, but if I had to give away ten million dollars to prevent myself from ever being in that kind of position, I would.

The weight of the hammer of a gun hung in mind my as infinite, as a halving of a halving of a halving. It was the same sensation I had when I was a child and I would have nightmares of an infinite tower that could not be climbed or two strangers on an infinite desert plane barely missing each other and by chance, dooming themselves to an eternity of solitude. I thought about Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and how these cultures bathed themselves in death rites as a way of anesthetizing the paradox, cutting off heads and throwing them down steps, while the priests know astronomy and math to pull the strings and the stern Catholics look charming in comparison. Geronimo went into an impassioned chant and I pictured starving mothers in Somalia with breasts deflated over a caved-in rib cage and eyes filled with "why?" I thought about what it would mean to be truly "safe" from those who might want me to share what I have, to pull the trigger consistently and with precision, how I would hate to be good at that, how I felt sorry for the soliders and the mercenaries who resigned themselves to professional butchery. I experienced the last minute of the life of Cho Seung-hui. I rolled the word "death" and "muerte" over my frontal lobe, tasting their textures, comparing the connotations of those sounds to the Japanese idea of death which is more of a rebirth, which seems only practical in a culture where at one point (two, now that I think about it) a hundred thousand people just evaporated in a flash of white light and a million anime plotlines would be born from the ashes. I weighed whether it is better to have the Christian mentality and guard your life and that of your family and produce as many new lives as possible and be like that, or whether its better to acknowledge that all that life-loving behavior is just what your brain wants you to do and we're all just floating around a big electron and it doesn't really matter whether someone shoots you and your kid in the head or not, which I imagined is the attitude of a lot of the people getting the poorest lot in this world.

I found myself at the brink of enlightenment, filled with love, bounding out of the socio-sexual moral circuit into the higher circuits, to the very higest, and being dragged back down to the reptilian paranoia of kill or be killed in the name of an unborn child. But then I realized, I can do better.

I realized that there's two ways this global deleveraging, this global transformation, can play out: either the gulf between rich and poor goes exponential and lots of people get shot in the head, or smart traders and people who have lots of money can act as conduits, taking it out of the markets where government bailouts have nowhere else to go and bringing it into the real world, investing it in sustainable human happiness. That's the easiest way that this process can go on peacefully. Imagine if a mere 10% of hedge fund managers decided to donate just half of their monstrous winnings to things like the proliferation of grass-based agriculture, renewable energy, water and transportation infrastructure, sponsoring children to become happy adults instead of desperate potential killers. We're already talking about a couple hundred billion dollars. That alone could make a tremendous difference, if applied intelligently. We can make this happen. We are the ones we've been waiting for.

I changed from being a person hanging on to fear and selfishness to being a person fully embodied with intent to make my life the best it can be and then leverage that to helping everyone I can. If I make 20k shorting Eurodollar Interest Rate Futures, I'll spend half of that sponsoring street kids in Buenos Aires. If I make 200k following silver or natural gas or palladium I'll spend half of that building infrastructure in rural Argentine towns. If I keep winning I'll keep giving more and more until the money itself is worthless.

I couldn't sleep. I just hung out, thinking about what I wanted to do, about the women in my life, about my son, about gentler things than Holy Death. The sun slowly arose. I got about forty minutes of sleep. Then the little girls and their mother returned to administer breakfast. We all sat around and feasted on fresh fruits, on bread with that chocolate-like substance that has no refined sugar in it, on mate and tea. We talked. It was human and divine. With much adieu I left and took the subway back home to write all the things that I had in me to write, to tell my dad that he was a great father, to get back in touch with old friends, to scream to the trading blogs I frequent that the secret is not caring about the numbers and then giving it all away. I saw a poor kid juggling on the subway and I slipped him that 20 peso bill with no fanfare.