Under certain circumstances one is actually better informed concerning the real world if one has taken a drug than if one has not.
—Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods
The lush and verdant jungle outside the plane window extends forever. A dark brown river winds its way through the canopy with no sign of houses, roads or civilization in any direction. I reek of eighteen hours of international travel and looming dread and excitement of a journey into the unknown. And then there it is, emerging with no warning: a sprawling and disorganized maze of a city belching black clouds of smog into the greenery. We touch down in Iquitos, a city born during the colonial rubber boom, as a staging point for expeditions and a necessary supply depot for the plantations and missionaries who transformed the Amazon a hundred years earlier. It holds the distinction of being the only landlocked city in the world that is completely cut off from terrestrial transportation networks. The only way to get here is by plane or boat. No roads or railways connect it to the rest of Peru. It’s an island surrounded by a sea of jungle. Or, less charitably, Iquitos is a tumor on the lungs of the world—a cesspool of third-world squalor that mars the most diverse ecological habitat on Earth. Every year its borders expand a little farther into virgin territory.
From the airport, my photographer, Jake Holschuh, and I pile into a compact taxi stuffed with five or six other people. The radio blares Spanish ballads. Jake draws a long drag on a cigarette. Someone in the front seat shares a sweaty plastic bag of sliced guava and chili. I pick at the fruit. My head bobs along with the ruts in the road as I fight to stay awake. Part of my brain is a little concerned about my level of fatigue. It’s been a long day already, and I know it’s going to be an even longer night. In about an hour, we arrive at a white iron gate with the words “Trocha Amazonica” spelled out above it.
I peer into the property to glimpse a woman in a white translucent dress and a wild mane of black hair walking toward us from behind a tin-roofed hut. She beams a wide grin and chirps out a greeting in her Peruvian accent. “Es-cott, yes? We have been waiting for you.” She spills over with musical optimism and excitement, like an old friend, even though we’ve never met before. There’s a crackle in the energy about her; she feels alive and expansive. If I were sailing on a small boat in a gale, she’d be a spit of solid land that I would head toward. Equal parts safety and ferocity, in her presence I feel as if I’ve come home.
I feel safe. And I’m glad, given what I’m here to do. Luz Maria Ampuero—or Luzma, as she prefers—will be by my side for what I’m guessing will be one of the most difficult journeys of my life. I’m here to imbibe the traditional medicine and hallucinogenic brew known as ayahuasca.
I’ve waited a long time to try ayahuasca. I first read about the spiritual brews used by Amazonian shamans in graduate school, where pasty-skinned authors explained the strange effects of plant medicine. I’d pored over travelogues from the fringes of the psychedelic revolution, where sunburned pioneers traveled to Peru, Colombia and Brazil on the hunt for chemical-induced transcendence. They drank bitter concoctions and vomited. They had visions of other worlds. They met ancestors and aliens. They watched as jaguars devoured their bodies. And then reported meetings with dark gods. They spoke of reliving trauma from their pasts and coming out stronger for it. The stories were as powerful as they were strange.
And I’m not the only one fascinated by the tales. Today, ayahuasca holds a special place in the minds of many people. Spiritual adventurists believe the psychoactive potion evokes spiritual transcendence and destroys addictions. They claim an ayahuasca journey is capable of reorienting our perspective to the world. It’s the go-to transformative drug of the moment. And while it’s definitely not mainstream, it’s not on the fringes anymore, either. The medicine gets name-checked in celebrity memoirs, in the pages of top-tier scientific literature and on experiential podcasts all over the world. The hope of ayahuasca is simple enough to explain: If the lifestyle that has kept us indoors and away from nature has failed, then maybe the best way to connect with our ancestral roots is through one of the few remaining unbroken rituals to our pre-modern past. Ayahuasca fills the bill not only because it’s so unfamiliar, but because the experiences it delivers are so often life-changing.
But since I’ve never experienced ayahuasca for myself, these stories ring empty; they’re only words. I’m here because I think it could be a wedge into my own psyche. I suspect ayahuasca has much to teach me about hacking our nervous systems and living a bolder life. Time and again, I’ve found ways to use environmental stressors and sensory pathways as wedges that orient my mind in new ways to the outside world. I’ve seen how altering any one of those frames creates corresponding changes in my underlying biology. Ayahuasca offers something even more radical. It isn’t just a chemical intervention, but a fully immersive experience. I feel as if all my Wedge exploration has led up to this moment. I anticipate that this ceremony will pack it all into one. It will have the ritualistic elements of the Arctic sauna, the sensorial muting of a float tank, the altered chemical channels of MDMA, the anticipation of a potentially dangerous experience, and a healing pathway far outside the bounds of the medical mainstream. This trip is the culmination of years of striving to isolate different interfaces with my nervous system. If each of those frames were notes I was learning in a song of my own body, this ceremony is a symphony. This is big.
Wedges will be everywhere—from the change from first-world comforts to third-world spartanism, the reduction of my ordinary sensory palate in favor of the sounds of the jungle, the fear of the unknown, the rhythmic drumming of a shaman’s drum, the ícaros he sings to invoke spirits, and my own response to a hallucinogenic compound in a ritual brew. If the training I’ve done with the Wim Hof Method, breathing, kettlebells and heat was learning to walk, ayahuasca means learning to run. It’s not a path for everyone. Hell, I wasn’t even sure this drug was on my path.
That is, not until I had a dream.
The dream came about six months ago. I’d been reading and researching ayahuasca, and along the way contacted everyone I knew who had ever been to Peru. I found resorts and shamans who advertised their authentic rituals online. They all said that they were the real thing and other shamans were suspect. Nothing felt quite right. In June, I reached out to Javier Regueiro, who’d written a book called Ayahuasca. He gave me Luzma’s email, and I wrote to her immediately. But all I got in return was an auto response saying she was “in the jungle” and too hard to reach. Months passed, and I gave up on her.
Then, one cold winter night, I fell asleep in a shabby hotel room in a Colorado mountain town after giving a lecture on the Wedge. While unconscious, this dream arrived:
I was in a cabin surrounded by lush and verdant jungle. A beautiful, dark-haired woman stood at a table in the kitchen with a knife in her hand. Later I’d realize that this was the same woman that I thought I met during my vision while I was pushing the limits of breathwork in Elee’s class earlier that year. Now she was cutting something brown and plant-like. I watched as she put the cuttings into a black sticky liquid. Then she looked up from her work and locked her dark brown eyes with mine. She invited me to drink ayahuasca with her. But before we could begin, she told me that I first had to prepare my body for the medicine. I’d have to change my diet and eat only the blandest foods. So I ate a potato. And she smiled. She said I was ready.
Then I woke up and looked at the ceiling for a minute, the dream still strong in my mind. I thought the woman in the dream was the same woman my unconscious had conjured during Elee’s Wim Hof workshop in Denver. Then I rolled over and grabbed my phone off the hotel nightstand. I had one email. It had come in at 6:21 a.m., roughly the same time that I would have been dreaming. It was from Luzma, saying she thought I should come visit her teacher Tony in February. This was the first time that I’d ever heard from her. If I’d been waiting for a sign for the right person to take ayahuasca with, this was a billboard of neon lights. I marked my calendar and started making plans for a trip south.
That, in short, is how I ended up at the Trocha Amazonica, finally face to face with Luzma—the dark-haired woman of my subconscious. She skips over to me and gives me a hug.
“I’m es-sorry if I’m es-melling. I’m working with a new plant, and Tony won’t let me use soap while on dieta,” she says, continuing her smirk and casting a lighthearted scowl back over her shoulder to, presumably, the place where her teacher holds court.
In the context of these ceremonies, dieta—Spanish for diet—is the tool that shamans and imbibers of traditional medicine use to heighten the effects of the ritual. Similar to the magic of the potato hack or flotation tanks, dietas involve cutting out stimuli from the outside world so that that the sensations that the medicine invokes in the body are more apparent. The more bland the dieta, the more powerful the experiences should be, and the easier to tune into subtle sensations. For people taking the ayahuasca brew, this means cutting out pork, salt, oils and other heavy foods and having a mostly bland diet of vegetables, fruits, fish and chicken.
For Luzma, working with other plants means even more restrictions. This month she’s come to the Trocha Amazonica to learn about a secret plant—it’s not ayahuasca, and she asked me not to name it—that will teach her a new way to heal people. Her dieta is even more restrictive; she tells me that she’s only taking one meal a day, has cut out all chemicals that might touch her skin, and will bathe only by using mud from a swimming hole near the shacks where we are staying.
I think of this dream as Jake and I sling our bags over our shoulders and follow Luzma up a small hill to a cluster of tin-roofed shacks. She points to one with a handful of stray cats and chickens wandering in front of it. “That’s where Tony lives. It’s also the kitchen,” she says. I notice that there aren’t any lights on anywhere. No radio. My cell phone fruitlessly pings the ether for service.
“We really don’t have nothing,” she chirps happily when she sees me finger my phone. For the next week, I’ll be here, and only here—blessedly extracted from the 24-hour news cycle, work emails, contact with agents, editors and incessant social-media interruptions that fracture my attention at home. The only thing that I’ll miss is being able to talk to Laura. Before I left, she asked me if she thought taking the drug would make me suddenly want to divorce her. It was a scary thought. I’d wanted to reassure her. But what could I say when the point of coming here in the first place was change? I power down my phone and take a breath of clean and unencumbered jungle air. I’m excited and scared at the same time, anxious that this could turn out wrong, yet hopeful that I’ll learn something new about myself. This week could change my life.
In my mind, I review the week ahead. I’ll sit for three ayahuasca ceremonies. The first one happens tonight, just a few hours after my arrival, while I’m still dizzy with jetlag. If I’m being honest, I don’t feel too great about jumping right in. I sort of want a little time to adjust to the new environment. But the three of us aren’t the only ones at the Trocha, and the ceremonies happen on a schedule that I don’t have any control over. As we make our way up the hill, we pass a cabin, where I spy a few people lazing in hammocks and around a rustic wooden table. They cast dour expressions at us as we approach. While Jake and I are effectively ayahuasca tourists—interested in using traditional medicine to explore our bodies and minds—most of the people who come to take ayahuasca with Tony are here for much more urgent reasons. In the hut are twelve Eastern Europeans—mostly from the Czech Republic and Slovakia—who greet us with only the faintest smiles and lazy waves. They’re uniformly thin, with visible ribs and sunken stomachs, all suffering from one life-threatening illness or another.
We do a few very brief introductions. Zuzana Tesarova has the pale, haunting beauty of a consumptive. I find out later that she’s been suffering from a rare form of Lyme disease for more than a decade and a half that makes her ultra-sensitive to light and almost unable to walk. Her skin is so light that it’s almost translucent. She tells me that she spent a year in a dark room because it was the only way to make the pain go away. Andrej Turba flashes me the charismatic smile of an event promoter. He was born with three kidneys, all of which started to fail at the same time a few years ago. He tells me that although he’s a candidate for an organ transplant, he’s opted instead for three sessions of weekly dialysis and a Hail Mary pass that maybe ayahuasca will reverse his organs’ degeneration. I see Martina Lupacova Svarcova reclining in a hammock. She’s an artist and spiritual traveler who is recovering from heart and ovarian surgery that sapped her strength. And then Lubomir Jankovych extends a hand. He’s a white-haired retiree suffering from prostate cancer, who later will tell me, “At home, ordinary doctors believe that there’s no cure for our illnesses, but there’s hope here that you won’t find anywhere else.” Together, all of their doctors predict steep declines, and in what is either a herculean effort of faith and bravery or a tacit embrace of their own mortality, they’ve come here as a last stop on a road to recovery or, maybe, death.
My compatriots all look like they’re in varying levels of pain. I sense that they don’t really want to talk. So we head to another hut to stash our bags. The hut—or, more accurately, the maloka—sits on five-foot stilts to keep it up and away from the bugs and flooded ground, and has an expansively high roof so that the heat floats upward, away from the beds. Smashed corpses of three-inch long cockroaches dot the rough-hewn floorboards, and our toilet is a porcelain pot that can only flush with a bucket of water.
Luzma smiles cheerily at the accommodations. “I can’t wait for you to meet Tony. He changed my life,” she says.
Luzma doesn’t seem to have much to do. Life at the Trocha passes by at an almost painfully slow pace. Long stretches of napping and idle soft conversations make up most of the days, with only infrequent frenetic healing ceremonies to punctuate the calm.
The first of those happens tonight in a maloka deep in the jungle. The ceremony will go from dusk to dawn, and Luzma advises me to be clear about the intentions that I take to the ceremony. She also says that once the invocations start, I should be ready to abandon my preconceptions. “Just see where the spirit takes you,” she says.
That seems easier said than done. If anything, all I have right now are the sketchy pre-conceptions based on books and friends’ stories. It’s hard to know what emotions lurk in my subconscious mind. I’m reminded of how a bad mindset after a fight with my wife turned a sensory-deprivation float into an excruciating experience.
I remind myself that I’m not only here for personal transformation. I’m here for the Wedge. The stakes seem bigger than ever. During my previous Wedge explorations, I maintained some control. I could exit the float tank. During the MDMA trip, I was safe at home with my wife. Now I feel a little out of control. I’m thousands of miles from home in a dense, remote jungle in a foreign country. I’ll be under the influence of a drug I’ve never tried before. I’m the type of person who needs to feel some control. I don’t do well with total chaos. The Wedge. The Wedge. I repeat those words to remind myself why I’m here—and to try to insert a sense of safety. I know it’s futile. I remind myself that at the deepest level, I’m on this journey to try to understand what I felt on Mount Kilimanjaro with Wim Hof almost three years ago. I want to feel connected to the environment. I want to feel the world outside my skin and connect it to a gut feeling. I want to be all the Russian dolls at once. When I began this journey a year ago, I had a way to understand these things intellectually. But now I want to feel them from outside my own perspective. I want the ayahuasca to make it effortless.
The Wedge allows a certain sort of communication between the outside world and the automatic parts of the body’s programming. Sensations link external stress to the mind itself. I know that if I choose to orient toward those sensations, it will alter how my autonomic nervous system responds and reacts to environmental stimuli. I can choose not to feel panic in the face of a threat, and my endocrine system won’t produce the adrenaline that it normally would. Whatever mental attitude I can muster intervenes in what should be an automatic process. I know that I have a measure of control over my internal programming. And I know that the insight doesn’t only have to look inward: I also explore the larger context, in which our bodies are simply facets of something incomprehensibly more vast than our own egos. On Kilimanjaro, I had a peek into another frame, one where I wasn’t investigative journalist Scott Carney, but a product of the environment—an integral piece of life itself. I want to feel all the levels of the Wedge together. I want to be the superorganism and integrate body, mind and spirit.
Maybe those are more goals than intentions. I’m also a little scared of going crazy, and maybe coming to a destructive realization that impels me to wreck the things I value about my life.
Luzma and I chat as the sun dips low and the evening mosquitoes make themselves known. She tells me that she knows everything is interconnected. Plants, she says, have spirits and can talk to us if we know how to listen. She says that the things you feel on a plant medicine aren’t just your body metabolizing a chemical, but actual messages between the plant world and the human one.
“In my opinion, the world belongs to plants, not people,” she continues. “The world has far more plants than animals, and for millions of years they have used animals to do their bidding—giving them fruit in exchange for dispersing seeds, oxygen for CO₂, and medicines to keep the humans at work. Plants have their own agendas that they work without us even knowing.”
Her description isn’t as far out as you might think. Some researchers have made surprisingly similar claims about plant consciousness. Ecologist Suzanne Simard showed symbiotic relationships between plants that exchange energy and information through networks of fungus in soil. Simard’s research catalogues how they respond to insect attacks and warn neighboring plants to ramp up their own defenses, and even expend vast amounts of resources to keep the root networks of trees that have lost their trunks alive, simply because they are related.11
But it became clear to me that Luzma had a very different way of viewing plants and healing than even the most flexible scientist. She believes that trees, grasses, flowers and fruits are actually talking to us all the time. The messages that I’m going to get from ayahuasca tonight aren’t just a chemical reaction in my brain, she notes; they’re the spirits of the plants made understandable. In a way, they’re from the spirit of life itself.
That’s a big thought—and one that I’m not entirely ready for. So I ask her what I should expect from tonight.
She paraphrases a medicine man, or curandero, whom she once asked the same question. “In the regular world, we live in a dark room, shining a flashlight on the parts of reality that our ego is most interested in. On ayahuasca, it’s like someone flipped the light on in that room, and suddenly all perspectives are visible. You don’t just see things from your own point of view, but you can access everyone’s point of view all at once,” she explains. I’m not sure I know exactly what she means, but the thought is appealing.
Perhaps one way to make sense of it is to go back to a 1992 book by botanist and psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna called Food of the Gods. McKenna is a sort of bridge between the West’s desire for a scientific understanding of the world and more esoteric spirituality. In his book, he explores archaeological evidence that seems to indicate how human evolution and spirituality are intertwined with hallucinogenic plants.
McKenna spent years traveling around India and the Amazon cataloguing and sampling various plants and shamanic medicines, and reasoned that the very first religious experiences that mankind had must have started by ingesting psychedelic substances—most likely psilocybin mushrooms. Early man, he argues, lived in climates where such mushrooms would have grown freely in cow and ungulate poop. Over hundreds of thousands of years, people must have come across psychedelic plants, eaten them, and had predictably otherworldly experiences. Though no written records go back more than 5,000 years, McKenna finds evidence for his theory in how shamanic traditions around the globe use psychoactive plants in their ceremonies, along with drumming, fire or total darkness to accentuate the effects of the drugs. His book contains pictures of early cave paintings that depict mushroom-headed men and horses with mushrooms for manes. From those images, he posits that there’s a tangible link between psychedelic mushrooms and early religious experiences.
McKenna sees psychedelics at the root of all the spiritual and religious institutions that eventually came to dominate humanity, and then he pushes his theory a step further. He argues that psychedelics could have actually helped change the way our brain structures function and may have spurred Homo erectus to communicate with language. Essentially, his argument is that psychedelics are what made us human in the first place.
This so-called Stoned Ape Theory of evolution (admittedly a terrible name) relies on the sort of logic that is impossible to prove through archaeological evidence. Many of today’s anthropologists deride it. But it makes sense to me that humans would have always had interactions with the plants and animals around them, and that the intense hallucinations we feel when we imbibe them today would be similar to the experience of our ancestors when they took them half a million years ago.
While no one has run any experiments showing that hallucinogens can create hereditary changes in brain structures, perhaps early humans found the insights they got on psychedelic trips useful, or holy, and just maybe some of their visions helped spark what we now know as civilization. After all, the effects of psychedelic plants would be noteworthy to any human that used them. It’s not crazy to think those experiences helped shape our early culture. McKenna believed that over the millennia, social and religious institutions started to downplay and even forbid self-exploration with hallucinogens that exist in many shamanic traditions in favor of the control and power afforded by more complex societies.
With all this in mind, I start to think that maybe the experience tonight will give me insight into the sorts of experiences my ancestors might once have had.
Just as I’m getting ready to duck back inside my hut and retreat beneath a mosquito net until the ceremony, Tony comes down the hill to sit with us. He’s dressed in a red Lycra Adidas soccer shirt, baggy jeans and hiking boots. At full height, he comes only to my shoulders, and his belly comfortably precedes him everywhere he goes. He’s an ordinary man who wouldn’t draw a second glance on any third-world street. But there’s something about his eyes and cherubic grin that convey a sense of contentment.
Unlike every other person that I contacted in my search for ayahuasca, Tony was the only one hesitant to bring me out. He prefers a low profile, and, since he knows I’m going to write about my time here, asks me to use only his first name, lest other people find out what happens at the Trocha.
A stump of a tree serves as his stool as he reiterates Luzma’s question and asks me about my intentions for tonight. Luzma translates my vague ideas about connection and consciousness to him.
He nods. Then he raises his hand in the air and makes what little eye contact is possible in the now near-total darkness. “You must know that what happens tonight is not theater. This is serious business. Though I look like an ordinary man—and not someone who wears feathers and fake headdresses—I am a shaman. Tonight I will work in the world of spirit,” he says, still trying to gauge why I would want to cross the globe to see him for something that wasn’t a life-threatening illness.
For now, I’m going to be open to whatever happens in the ceremony. I will suspend my disbelief and give the experience the full force of my mind. Maybe plants can talk. Maybe the world does belong to plants instead of humans. Maybe this is a gateway into a surreal world. Luzma suggests a mantra for me: “Whatever happens, say to yourself, ‘I’m willing.’”
I have the power to choose my own orientation, to willingly accept the sensations and mental changes of the ceremony for my own betterment. “I’m willing” is my wedge.
…
A few hours later, I start walking down a deep jungle path. It’s a new moon, but the Milky Way lights a bright swath across the sky. The jungle is alive with chirping birds, insects, frogs, creaking trees, vines, monkeys and god only knows what else. It sounds as if every creature in creation is deep in conversation. One animal calls out and a million buzzes and burps return in answer. I wonder what they are saying. Our headlamps bounce off a muddy path for about fifteen minutes until I spy another maloka. I can’t say if I’m ready or not, but I feel that I’m on a path now that I absolutely won’t veer from until I know where it leads. I creak open the door and see about ten people lying down on cheap foam mats circling the edge of the structure. A single candle in the center of the room provides some flickering light that casts deep shadows up on the roof and along the floor. Jake and I find places in the corner and put a couple buckets within easy reach. The buckets are for our vomit, an unfortunate inevitability for most people who take ayahuasca; we want to have them easily at hand if they’re ever required.
Tony arrives about half an hour later.
He’s holding a two-liter plastic water bottle that’s about half full of a viscous black syrup. He finds a seat on a cube of wood on the west side of the room and fiddles with a bottle of scented water known as agua de Florida and a clutch of unfiltered cigarettes that were on the floor.
The room hums with silence and anticipation.
Time passes slowly until Tony lights one of the cigarettes, gets up onto his feet and blows giant puffs of tobacco smoke in the four cardinal directions. The smoke is the signal of the ceremony’s beginning and is a ritual for purification. Luzma whispers to me that the tobacco cleanses the room’s energy and invites spirits in. When he sits back down, he whispers a few words into the open plastic bottle and blows more smoke into its aperture. There’s no other fanfare. We’ve begun. And I have no idea what’s going on.
Tony taps his feet gently on the floor in a rhythm that starts as a distant rumble and then grows with the subtle intensity of a heartbeat. He purses his lips and whistles equally as softly. It’s a simple tune that I almost remember from my childhood, but not one I’ve ever learned. The whistles turn into a chant that might be Spanish or the indigenous language of Quechua—or maybe they’re just sounds that come to him out of the ether with no meaning in particular.
It goes on for a while, and when he’s sung enough, he motions to a rail-thin man to his left and indicates that it’s time to drink the potion. The man gets up and kneels in front of Tony. He’s holding out his hands in a clasped gesture of prayer. Tony grasps the man’s bony fingers and they whisper to one another. Tony is asking some sort of question. Once he’s satisfied with the answer, he pours a flimsy plastic cup full of the black liquid and holds it up to the light of the candle. Judging that the dose is insufficient, he pours a few drops more. The man drinks, scowls at the taste, and makes his way back to the mat.
The process continues for every person in the room.
I watch as Luzma takes a cup in her hand, looks at the amount, squints her face into a screw and shakes her head no. Tony pours some back into the bottle and offers her what’s left. She downs it in a quick movement like she’s taking a shot. Within seconds of getting back to her seat, I see her rinse the taste from her mouth with water from her bottle.
About fifteen minutes later, it’s my turn. I make my way over to Tony, and he asks me if I’ve done psychedelic drugs before. I tell him that I took psilocybin mushrooms a few times in college, and that the first time I tried mushrooms, I ended up in the hospital. In my psychedelic daze, I told a friend that I thought I was going to die, and he dutifully called an ambulance. They pumped my stomach. Cops got involved. I was wary of hallucinogens after that, but a few years later I tried them again. On that trip, I felt that I’d met something far greater than myself.
Tony nods, probably unsure what to make of my gushing. Then he pours a nearly full cup. He asks me to repeat my name and then whispers words into the brew. When he hands it to me, I look into the syrupy brownness and try not to smell it. I seal the back of my palate so I don’t take in any fumes, then down the contents of the cup like a shot and hand it back. I go back to the mat and watch Jake take his turn in front of Tony.
The brew has the consistency of used motor oil and a taste somewhere between rotting fruit and coffee grounds. The fluid coats the inside of my mouth and slicks down my throat. The taste won’t go away no matter how many times I swallow. Once the last of the lineup slurps down the noxious brew, someone gets up and blows out the candle in the center of the room. We plunge into inky blackness.
I know that ayahuasca is supposed to take about a half-hour before the effects kick in, but something is different almost immediately. Maybe it’s because I’m just so tired from the flight that any change to my body is noticeable. At first it’s like someone oiled the darkness of my closed eyes with a palette knife, moving swaths of paint over the flecks of blues, reds and greens that naturally populate my visual field. The darkness’s texture isn’t the same. The effect doesn’t distract me; rather, it pulls my mind inward.
Going into this experience, my biggest fear was that ayahuasca would change my relationship with Laura. Maybe the psychedelic would un-moor one of the most solid parts of my life, create a massive personality change and instigate a divorce. As the effects start to sink in, her face appears in my mind’s eye—not a visual hallucination, but more like turning my thoughts in her direction—and I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of pure gratitude.
I see the small actions she takes every day that I’ve grown accustomed to. Where I’m disorganized, she has the patience for details. She cooks (and, more important, plans out) meals a week in advance, where I would fall into routines of ramen or potatoes without her. I feel her generosity with time and willingness to accompany me on my rather ludicrous adventures. None of this is new to me, exactly. But the ayahuasca reveals her contributions from a different perspective. It’s almost as if I’m inside her mind seeing the world through her experience. I feel loved. And I also see the hundreds of ways that I help and support her: with her own writing and creative projects, encouragement in dark times and in good ones. She trusts me to have her back when she takes a risk.
Those initial fears of radical change are almost laughable now. Ayahuasca doesn’t open up an entire new reality; rather, it sends me into a place where I can see people, relationships and tendencies from multiple perspectives at once. It’s not ego-death, where my own identity disappears. Instead it feels like I have the ability to peek into places from outside my own boundaries. And the information comes fast. Sometimes an insight flashes by so quickly that I can’t examine and hold on to it. All I can do when this happens is rock back and forth on my foam mattress as my eyes flit left and right like I’m speed-reading a book.
About 45 minutes after gulping down the tea, something starts happening in my stomach that I can already tell I won’t have a lot of control over. One reason that ayahuasca will never make it onto the party circuit is that, in addition to its psychedelic effects, it’s also a purgative. That’s a polite way of saying that almost everyone who drinks it either vomits or has a bowel movement once it starts working its way through their system. The human body simply does not want the toxic-tasting mixture of plant sap inside, and it will do anything it can to expel the brew. I’m very thankful that the bucket is by my side.
My stomach churns the sickly sweet syrup, and soon I can taste it again in my throat. I grab the bucket in the dark and bend over its opening. Unholy moments follow. The taste of tannin, rotten fruit and burnt coffee erupt into my mouth, but this time add to it the mixture of bile and stomach acids. It’s horrible. Meaty. Fortunately, the horking is over as soon as it begins. I wash out my mouth with water. For maximum potency, drinkers try to hold back from the explosion as long as possible to allow the body to absorb a higher dose, but it’s clear that my time had come. Once my insides quiet down, my mind goes back into contemplation. Now, instead of examining the world around me, I start to look at my own personality and habits.
Ayahuasca first tells me my strengths. While I’m rarely the best at anything I take on, I have a sort of determination and faith that I can finish anything I start. This skill—maybe “mindset” is a better word—has served me well in the uncertain waters of a writing career. I weather the risks of my projects and think strategically about books and assignments that can take years to complete. Somehow I’ve managed to stay afloat in the uncertainty of my career, even thrive. But ayahuasca also tells me that my greatest strength is also a weakness. And then it takes me back to my childhood.
When I was a kid, I was always fond of games, especially ones that focused on strategy or storytelling. More than any other, I loved Dungeons & Dragons, a role-playing game that involves creating open-ended stories about elves, wizards and medieval fantasy adventures. I distracted myself from school by memorizing the rule books (there were a lot of them) and planning out games with my friends. The beauty of D&D was that there was no way to win a game; there was only the adventure of playing. Over time those interests morphed into playing video games in worlds made by designers whose goal was to keep players at their computers. While imagination in D&D is essentially free, the industry that develops video games promotes its titles by their potential for addiction. They even employ teams of neuroscientists to create rewards that keep people locked into their computers. In many ways, the fun part of being an investigative journalist is sort of like D&D: I get to do my research in far-flung parts of the world, uncover people’s secrets, and peer into subcultures that I ordinarily would never have access to. My journalist badge opens doors.
The less romantic part of the job is that there are interminably long stretches of time when simply nothing happens. I wait for assignments to mature, sources to get back to me and plans to align. My life can be 90 percent downtime interspersed with times of high-intensity, unadulterated excitement. Over the years, video games have filled in part of that downtime void, and I’ve found a few favorites—from strategic titles in the Civilization franchise to indie survival thrillers like RimWorld and, most recently, one called Dota 2, an hour-long team game that requires thinking ahead and mastering hundreds of characters, and only seems to gain in complexity the more I play.
I’ve dumped thousands of hours of my life into the digital medium of video games. It’s something that embarrasses me. The time isn’t productive—it’s someone else’s fantasy—but the games speak to a primal part of my psychology that needs stimulation. Games appeal to me because they keep a certain strategic part of my brain sharp, but the physiology of sitting in front of a computer contradicts what I know to be healthy. I rarely talk about my addiction, even though I can lose entire days to it.
In the darkness, Tony’s drumming grows more intense as the floorboards creak under the force of his rhythmic blows. I come back to the sound of his voice to anchor me. The place that games occupy in my life comes into view almost as a singular object: something that is more than a habit. It’s as if it fills a physical space inside of my body.
I can see that my best qualities (a steady, strategic mind motivated by excitement) intertwine perfectly with my worst ones (a predilection to waste time on tasks that don’t actually nourish my life in any tangible way). This realization may only apply to me. Certainly not everyone who turns on a video console has the same tendencies or relationships. But I know now that even though I’ve deleted games from my computer several times, the habit never went away, because I never found anything else that could fill the space they take up.
I gaze out into the pitch-black room, and I’m aware of a pillar of white light. It reaches down from the middle of the ceiling and comes to rest in the center of the room where the candle was flickering earlier. The swath of pastel blackness engulfs the space around me so that the longer I look at the column, the brighter it seems. And yet the column is strange: It doesn’t illuminate anything around it. I watch in timelessness until it fades away.
Tony chants for three or four hours. All the while, my mind races through fractal-like facets of relationships, long-ingrained habits, family histories and my desire to connect with the people around me. Tony’s voice crescendos and then peters out, only to regain its strength. He shouts in tongues with the voice of an old man, then parrots back a response in the cadence of a woman. I have my doubts that it’s a language at all. Eventually his strength ebbs into total silence. Only the sounds of the jungle keep us company.
Then he takes a deep breath and announces that the spirits have left.
The ceremony is over.
Jake and I drift off to sleep on our mats on the maloka floor. Eventually, blue morning light fills the cabin and I can see we are the only ones left in the room. Everyone else snuck out in the night. We clear the sleep from our eyes, and I ask him how the experience was for him. He describes personal things, then says that when the ceremony was about half over, he watched pillar of white light, about five feet long, in the middle of the room.
We’d seen the same light.
Yet both of us are fairly certain that it wasn’t really there; it was a vision that came from inside of us.
We walk back down the jungle path in silence, find our beds and collapse. When I open my eyes, it feels like days have passed. The sun hangs high in the Peruvian sky. My mind whirls from the aftermath of the night before. I feel compelled to write it down before it goes away, so I scribble my thoughts into my black notebook. I feel that if I can just capture the feelings and insights from that night, then there’s a chance that I can make changes. Jake is taking notes from his journey as well. We fill pages with ideas on how to implement what we learned from our experience. The inspiration comes almost automatically; we feel compelled to record. This is a common experience. Many people report that the most productive part of an ayahuasca trip isn’t the ceremony, when images and ideas move so quickly that it’s almost impossible to get ahold of them, but what happens over the next few days as your brain has a chance to process what it learned.
A few days later, I meet Peter Gorman, an investigative journalist and author of several books on Amazonian psychedelics. He sometimes holds court in the bars of Iquitos. He tells me, “For the next month, you’ll keep downloading new information from the experience. You’ll see, smell or hear something that you learned on your trip that simply passed by your consciousness too fast to recognize, and then pop, you’ll realize something you already knew.”
…
It’s time for a rhetorical question. What do you call something that makes people change for the better and heals illness? For much of my life, I didn’t understand the way that Native Americans used the word “medicine.” I’d heard of medicine men, medicine talismans and bags, but the notion that these things were somehow the same as what a doctor prescribed for me in a clinic jarred my understanding of medicine as something in the domain of hospitals and pills. In the Amazon and among shamanic traditions around the world, anything that alters your body or mind is a type of medicine. In this sense, the Wedge is medicine, too. Sensations and feelings direct the immune and nervous systems to respond and adapt to the environment. Most traditional medicines guide and create sensations and feelings that make a person stronger and healthier. And this is what the Wedge is all about: We manipulate the stresses we encounter, the way we feel the world, and the way we relate to those experiences in order to give our bodies direction in how best to adapt to the challenges we face. We can control our automatic biology by altering the things that influence that biology to react in the first place.
As mentioned in the chapters on heat, placebos and MDMA, Western psychiatric medicine is often hard to distinguish from pharmacology. Most antidepressants aim to suppress moods—to bring them into a narrow range of experience, removing both the highs and lows. We reduce symptoms of an affliction to make it invisible.
Indigenous medicine takes a different tack. Experience takes precedence. Instead of reducing symptoms, medicines like ayahuasca accentuate them. Psychotherapy in the Amazon involves facing, not suffocating your demons. It can be unpleasant and uncover ugly things that you’d rather not look at, but if you weather the experience, you have access to the root of the issue. To put it another way, if we bury our symptoms in the West, then in the Amazonian tradition, we expose the symptoms to sunlight in the hope of burning them away altogether.
Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t also try to understand the chemistry of ayahuasca through a Western lens. The ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi) itself contains two primary psychoactive chemicals: harmine and harmaline, both Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), which are chemically similar to some of the first antidepressants approved by the FDA back in the 1950s. MAOIs prevent the brain from cleaning out serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline from its neural pathways. And they worked reasonably well to level out moods until they fell out of fashion in favor of SSRIs a few decades ago.
In Quechua, ayahuasca means “vine of death” because of the visions of mortality that many people experience during their intoxication. And yet drinking ayahuasca on thier own doesn’t produce any noteworthy effects in most people. However, the brew we drank last night—the tea known around the world as “ayahuasca”—also contains leaves from the chakruna plant (psychotria viridis), which is where it finds its chemical fireworks. The chakruna plant has trace amounts of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, better known as DMT, stored in diamond-shaped nodules at the place where the veins of the leaves meet the stem. You may remember that I mentioned DMT in the chapter on breathwork as a molecule the body produces as it’s dying. Recreational DMT users typically smoke the chemical if they want to feel its effects. Taken in this way, DMT gives intense but brief trips, rarely lasting more than five minutes. On its own, DMT’s chemical half-life is so short that it’s hard for a person to take enough orally to have any effect. Indeed, a tea made only from the chakruna leaf doesn’t do anything at all.
However, that changes in the traditional brew, where the MAOI in the ayahuasca vine stops the brain’s ability to reabsorb and break down DMT, so that the psychedelic effects can last for hours. Without the chemical profile of those two plants working together, the neurochemistry would never produce any effects of note. And this leads to one of the most enduring mysteries about the brew: How did indigenous shamans thousands of years ago discover the properties of the two plants together?
The Amazon basin is one of the most biodiverse places on earth, with a bounty of more than 80,000 different plant species. An almost infinite number of vines, trees, fungus, flowers and fruits grow around the Trocha. A billion bugs flit unseen through its dense thickets. Amid all of this, chakruna and ayahuasca don’t look like anything special: just a green leafy plant and a vine that looks pretty much like any other vine. They’re plant extras in the Where’s Waldo? picture of a jungle. On their own, neither plant has any interesting effect—certainly nothing like the near-magical properties of when they come together.
Generations of anthropologists and ethnobotanists have wondered how indigenous people in the Amazon discovered the preparation in the first place. Was it random chance? Did a shaman or cook happen to boil the two plants together and feel a mystical effect? Maybe. But with all of the Amazon’s poisonous creatures and plants, simple trial and error would be an unavoidably fatal process. What we do know is that archaeological evidence suggests that the ayahuasca preparation we use today goes back to at least 500 B.C. Chemical analysis of Andean mummies discovered the presence of harmine in the preserved hair follicles, leading researchers to assume the mummies had imbibed some version of the ayahuasca brew in their lifetimes. There’s no written record of how the two plants came together, no hard evidence that will make every expert agree. But Tony has a theory. He doesn’t think ayahuasca got discovered at all. Instead, he says, “the plants found us.”
A few days after the first ceremony, Tony says he wants to show me how he prepares the brew. It’s a long process, but he hopes it will give me insight into his traditions. Jake and I accompany him into the jungle to a spot of muddy ground about halfway between our maloka and the ceremonial hut deeper in the jungle. Here, a giant cauldron on an iron grate hovers over the burnt leftovers of a hundred campfires. We haul a few fifty-pound bags of dried ayahuasca vines from his stash spot in the forest. He tells me to cut them up into small pieces and then break them apart with a mallet. It’s hard work, and it isn’t long until blood blisters form on my palms from the impact.
After an hour of pounding, Luzma makes her way to the fire and we take shifts reducing the vines to mulch. When the ground is thick with vine bits, we pour buckets of water into the cauldron and bring the mulch to boil over the fire until brown foam bubbles up from all sides. Luzma sings a song over the brew and shakes a shaman’s rattle in the pillar of steam. She calls to the spirit of the vine for a potent concoction.
Once it’s boiled for a few hours, Tony says it’s time to gather the chakruna leaves. He grabs a machete and leads me into the jungle. It’s impossible to move more than a few feet in any direction without breaking down a vine, plant or small tree trunk with a slash of the short sword. The jungle burbles with thick and thorny plants that make ribbons out of the legs of my pants.
A vulture circles overhead, perhaps hoping that we leave will leave a meaty snack in our wake. It takes a while, and we zigzag around the jungle looking for a plant that seems to be in hiding. Tony stops next to a tree that soars four stories above us and points to three interlaced vines that, to my eye, look like every other vine that we’ve hacked through to get here. “This is ayahuasca,” he says turning it over to show how the plant’s strands form a double helix, reminiscent of the DNA stored in every human cell. It’s an interesting coincidence shared by many vines all over the world. However, we have enough ayahuasca already, so we move on. He hacks his way forward and points out plants by naming what sort of effect they have on human biology. One broad leafy shrub is good for the prostate and doubles as an aphrodisiac. A few feet away he finds a small tree and scrapes off an inch or two of bark, revealing the yellow sap inside. He hands the branch to me and tells me to rub it on the blisters on my hand. In a few minutes, the pain is gone. The next day, I’ll notice that the blister has vanished altogether. Jake has similar wounds on his hands, but he doesn’t use the herb. His won’t go away for weeks.
Tony tells me that he never formally studied the plants of the jungle from other curanderos, but learned the pharmacology by listening. Every plant, he says, has a spirit, and if you can get quiet enough, you can hear them speak.
“Like in English?” I ask.
“They speak to me in Spanish, but to you, maybe yes, to you in English,” he replies, adding, “They mostly speak in dreams.”
My eyebrow can’t help taking an incredulous posture. So plants are multilingual, I think.
Tony tries to give an example. Suppose, he says, he has been on his dieta for a little while and decides to take a walk into the woods. Every plant in the jungle has a message, and the forest is a symphony. In order to listen to any particular note, he says, all he has to do is touch a plant that he’s curious about, and in minutes, or perhaps in a dream that night, the plant will tell him its secrets. It will tell him how best to use it. If for some reason a plant just doesn’t want to open up, then he blows tobacco on it to loosen its tongue. However, if the plant is extremely stubborn, he might choose to sleep next to it for a night or two and ask it for help. “Eventually, they all speak.”
Okay. So it isn’t the scientific method. Maybe it’s the intuition of a wizard. Or, less charitably, the ravings of a madman.
A few swings of the machete later and he smiles in triumph.
“Chakruna,” he says, pointing to thin spindly twig of a tree that I couldn’t tell apart from any other plant that we’ve hacked our way through today.
He swipes it down in a single hit and gives me a branch of leaves to pluck. Tony points to a small pouch at the base of where the stem connects to the ribs. “That’s where the DMT is,” he says. We fill a bucket full of greenery in a few minutes. Then we walk briskly back to the camp. He dumps the leaves into the boiling water and mashes them below the surface of the brown foam with the end of a broken stick.
Now all we have to do is wait until the watery brown mixture reduces into a sticky syrup.
So we wait.
And wait.
Four hours later, we’re still waiting for the brew to concentrate.
Another hour and we’re all a little grouchy.
It’s taking longer than any of us wanted it to.
Our eyes are drab with boredom. Luzma has long since tired of singing to the medicine. And then seemingly out of nowhere, Tony breaks the monotony of watching water boil by grabbing a dry palm frond and thrusting it into the heart of the fire. When the papery leaves ignite, he holds it above his head like a torch. He walks away from the pit and then back down the path back toward the huts.
We call out to him, asking what he’s doing, and he shouts back, “We need rain!”
Thirty feet later he comes to a dying palm tree whose once-lush foliage now hangs dry and dead by its sides. He touches his torch to the tree and flames arc up the trunk and into the canopy.
Luzma, Jake and I are still a good distance away, but the temperature in the grove rockets upward, taking the already oppressive tropical heat into another register. Barely taking time to observe his work, he walks toward two other dried-out palm trees by a reservoir on his land and ignites another conflagration.
“But…why?” I stammer as burning embers cascade down around us.
Tony returns my stare with an equally mystified expression as if to question my sanity. Isn’t it obvious? it seems to say. When it’s clear that I really don’t understand, he points to the two small reservoirs and asks me to notice how low they are.
They’re low. It’s true.
“Without rain, we’ll run out of water in a few days,” pausing for me to fill in the rest of the sentence myself. He sighs when I don’t.
“We sacrifice the trees to call the rain.”
He says a few words in Spanish that Luzma catches, something about how burning the trees will eat up oxygen in the area and form new clouds, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
I look up into the perfectly blue sky and wonder if I’m going mad.
In a matter of a few minutes, the trees’ foliage burns to embers. Their charred trunks stand alone against the sky. Tony goes back to tending the fire as if nothing happened.
Night eventually falls on the Trocha, and the brew still isn’t concentrated enough. There will be another ceremony tomorrow night, but we decide to let the fire go out and start up again in the morning. I look up into the sky to see billowing cumulus clouds. They don’t look dark enough to me to hold much rain.
I make my way to the hut and close my eyes to drift off to sleep. That’s when I hear the first drops of water on the thatched roof. The drips quicken into a patter, and then a full-scale deluge. It comes down so fiercely that the water falls through gaps in the thatch above me. Drips make their way through my mosquito net and onto my face. The storm keeps up all the way until morning, and when I come outside, I see that the reservoirs are filled to the brim. The most obvious explanation is, of course, that we are in the rainforest—and there’s no reason to seek out any more complex reason than that for the storm. But when I see Tony later that day, he simply smiles and touches his finger to his forehead in the international sign for “I told you so.”
I don’t quite know what to think about Tony. Is he a prophet or a charlatan? A madman or a messenger? Perhaps that is the wrong question. With my second ceremony looming, I hope to have a more powerful set of visions than I did on my first night. I still want to understand something more about my own consciousness. For better or worse, Tony’s my guide.
The next day passes slowly, and by night I make my spot in the opposite corner from where I was for the first ceremony. I sit next to Luzma. She says that even though she has drunk ayahuasca a hundred times before, she’s always nervous before a ceremony: “Every time is different. And Tony says he is going to give me a ‘bomb’ tonight. I don’t feel like I need a bomb.”
A bomb: a giant dose.
Hell, I wonder if I want a bomb. I mean, it would be interesting, right? The chance to go as deeply as possible all at once? The thought makes me scared and excited at the same time. My stomach clenches tightly, like I’m about to drop from the top of a roller coaster.
The night has a familiar rhythm. Tony arrives last, sits for a while and then begins by blowing tobacco smoke into the air. He starts chanting, and I rock in my seat along with the rhythmic drumming of his feet on the floor. He starts offering up the medicine by candlelight, and I’m the first one in the lineup. I sit down in front of him while he whistles a prayer into the plastic bottle. He tells me that the brew tonight is much stronger than the one we had before. He hopes that tonight will be powerful.
I take the cup from his hand and down it as quickly as possible, trying not to taste it on the way down. I didn’t think it was possible, but this tastes worse than before. My face puckers into a screw while I make my way back to the mattress. I’m holding back from gagging.
When everyone is full of the concoction, someone blows out the light and we plunge into darkness for a second time. Tony stops chanting for a moment and seems to scan the room. It’s so dark that I can only see the ember of the rolled cigarette get faintly brighter when he pulls in smoke. He releases the breath with a soft shoo.
As the ember descends, I sense his breath transform in the air. I write “sense” because it’s not quite sight. It feels more like the memory of a sight. This invisible cloud of smoke transforms in my mind into a ghostly figure of a Native American man in a full feather headdress. The vision whooshes through the circle, anointing everyone with sacred smoke, then evaporates in a cloud. The image passes so quickly that I don’t realize I’ve seen it until it’s already gone. There’s no point in trying to make sense of it.
This must be the beginning of something profound, I think, eager for more.
But nothing comes.
For the next thirty or forty minutes, I just sit in the dark, waiting for something, anything, to happen. But there are no visions. No geometric patterns. No spirits communicating from beyond. I don’t even have any interesting insights about my family or friends. All I feel is the rumbling in my stomach and the taste of the concentrated vine syrup creeping up my throat. My body wants to expel the ayahuasca, but I hold it in, hoping that I just need to absorb a little more of the chemical.
But there’s nothing I can do. My hand reaches for the bucket almost of its own accord, and when it’s in front of me, my stomach turns upside down and brown sludge erupts out of my mouth. It’s made all the more noxious with the taste of my own bile. The taste makes me want to vomit again, and the purging alternates between cycles of relief and then the foul taste, which makes me want to purge again. It’s painful. Physical.
And then it’s something else altogether. As I hunch over the plastic bucket, I realize that I’m not exactly expelling poison from my stomach.
I’m vomiting up video games.
The puke splashing into the bottom of the bucket isn’t bile; it’s three decades of electronic addiction. Whatever I realized in the ceremony a few days ago congealed inside of me. And now it’s all coming up in a watery sludge. I puke out the cycle of winning one game and my immediate desire to start another. I hork out the accomplishment they make me feel. I purge decades of subtle neurological training that the industry has spent billions wiring into my head. I barf it all out until my ribs hurt from the hollowness. It concentrated in my stomach, and now I’m kicking it all out of my body like it was poison.
A viscous string of spit dangles from my lip and I look back up into the blackness and feel a sense of relief. I wonder if it’s the start of a long-term change. When it’s all out of my body, I bring myself back to the constant thrum of Tony’s chants. I somehow know that ayahuasca doesn’t have any more messages for me tonight. The message, if there is any, is purely physical; I won’t be traveling into the depths of my subconscious or revisiting my childhood. So I fall back to my pillow and just listen to the chants and stomps until Tony tires just before dawn.
My experience purging up an addiction is relatively common among people who take ayahuasca or other similar psychedelics. Indeed, researchers first began studying the anti-addictive effects of LSD from the 1950s to 1970s, until the War on Drugs put an end to promising clinical research in the United States. In the past several years, however, the Food and Drug Administration has shown a renewed interest in psychedelics. While double blind and randomized control trials on their effectiveness are still in short supply, upstart clinics in South America as well as underground clinics in North America report an endless stream of cases where ayahuasca and another psychedelic plant called ibogaine completely remove their patients’ addictive tendencies.
Andrew Huberman once defined addiction to me as “the progressive narrowing of the things that give you pleasure.” And while I do not think that the neurological bumps of video games have blinded me to all other pleasures in my life, more serious addictions to drugs and alcohol can absolutely do that.
According to a 2014 review article on the state of psychedelic research on addiction by medical anthropologist Michael Winkelman, the early research on LSD and alcoholism was similar to what I just experienced in Tony’s maloka. “LSD sessions could produce a vivid awareness of one’s personal problems, presenting graphic images of the immediate and long-term deleterious effects of the alcohol. The recovering alcoholics often credited these realizations as providing the motivation to change their behavior.” He goes on to write that in ayahuasca ceremonies, “vomiting is seen as provoking an emotional release or unloading of psychological burdens, as well as provoking diverse emotional dynamics.” Various theories abound about what happens at a chemical level to stop addiction, and they unsurprisingly revolve around how psychedelics rebalance dopamine and serotonin levels.
While I’m profoundly moved by how the two ceremonies seem to have given me a new lens to understand my own tendencies, that morning I also walk back to my hut without the answers I’d hoped to find. I didn’t fly halfway across the globe into the Peruvian jungle to wrestle with my own demons. I wanted to understand consciousness. I wanted the sensation that I had at the top of Kilimanjaro, where the distinction between my body and the frigid air around me disappeared. I want to taste the continuum of all existence, not to turn inward.
Later that morning, I find Luzma lazing back in a hammock. Last night, in the total darkness, she says she saw a world of visions that came on so quickly, she doesn’t think she could ever articulate them in words. But there was a consciousness there. She felt the universe. She spoke with an alien intelligence.
“For me, it is always like this,” she says, explaining matter-of-factly, “I am sensitive.”
I’m a little jealous. All I did was vomit. She reads disappointment on my face.
“You know, I once held a ceremony with a man a few years ago who said he wanted to connect with the universe. Nothing happened when he drank. So I asked him about his relationship with his parents, and he just waved his hands in the air and told me that he didn’t care about that. His mother was a terrible person and he had already written her out of his life. Then I asked him how he thought he could connect with the universe if he couldn’t connect to his own family,” she says.
The parable hits home. If we are the environment, then all of the things that shape our experience of the world are part of the picture as well. I’m going to have to wrestle with myself if I want to understand anything bigger than me. I chew on the thought and Luzma laughs.
“Besides, it’s the medicine that chooses what we see. Not you. Or me. Or Tony.”
A little later, I walk to the kitchen, where Tony’s sister is preparing the day’s dieta of tasteless lentils, rice and some unseasoned chicken. I’m hoping that there’s a boiled egg somewhere on offer. It’s been about five days since I showed up, and just like with the potato hack, I’m not really hungry at Trocha. Bland food makes me just want to eat to survive, not to eat just for the sake of it.
There’s a bowl with a lone hard-boiled egg in it, and I start peeling back the shell. Tony is at the table, and he asks me how the night’s ceremony went.
I say I wish I had felt more.
He nods and says that he thinks the brew wasn’t very good last night. Perhaps too much ash blew into the mix when we cooked it over the fire. It could have interfered with medicine. He knows that I only have a few days left before I head back to America, and he says that he’ll give me a private ceremony, just me and the medicine.
“I want you to find what you came for.”
It’s an encouraging offer, and I eagerly accept it.
When my egg is gone, I meander back to my hut, still exhausted from the night’s purging. I’m low on energy and content to rest and reflect on the experiences from the ceremonies and have slow conversations with Luzma and Jake over the next few days. The tempo gives me space to reflect, write and imagine how I might bring what I’m learning back home. Meanwhile, Tony travels to the city of Iquitos to procure a different brew of tea.
Two days later, I walk to the maloka alone. The jungle feels sinister tonight. Every branch creak, bird call and rustling leaf conjures unseen dangers. After all, I have to remind myself that this is the home of the jaguar: a fearsome predator so powerful that it can fish an adult caiman out of a river and devour it. It’s also my last ceremony. My last chance for something big.
The floorboards groan when I step inside. I walk across the empty room and set up a place on yet another soiled mattress. The red light from my headlamp bathes the space in an eerie bloody darkness. I’m alone as a four-inch roach skitters across the ground in front of me. I check the bathroom and see that no one has cleaned it since the last ceremony. Feces and puke run up the sides of the toilet and the stink is almost unbearable. Worse still: There’s no water in the plastic barrel reservoir. So I take the barrel out to a nearby creek and walk it back half full.
I wait in darkness until I hear rustling outside the door. Tony’s flashlight seeps through the cracks of the entrance and then momentarily blinds me as he looks in my direction. He apologizes softly, and then his attendant lights a candle. Although I’m the only one taking the tincture tonight, he starts just as he did for the other ceremonies: humming to himself and whistling with his eyes closed. He blows smoke in the four directions and then asks me to take a seat in front of him.
“This is good medicine; I got it special for you,” he says, and pours out a full cup of the viscous liquid. I say a quick prayer, asking the gods of the cocktail for an eye-opening experience. Then I prepare to taste its foulness. The minute it touches my tongue, I know this brew is different; it’s lighter than the ones from previous nights and goes down smoother. I scoot back against the wall and sit back and wait for the visions to kick in.
And just like the night before, they don’t.
Tony chants his familiar simple sounds for a half-hour, but nothing changes. So I ask him for another cup. It’s one thing to take ayahuasca once in a night, but the second cup is worse. My body screams that I’m not supposed to do this twice. I gag. The bile churns in my throat, and it looks like I’m going to barf at Tony’s feet.
Suddenly aware of his peril, Tony acts fast. He grabs a bottle of orange-scented agua de Florida and holds it under my nose. Rich floral notes rise with the alcohol vapor. It distracts me long enough to control my reflex. To our mutual relief, I hold it down and then move against the wall.
Ten minutes pass before Tony pauses his chant and asks if I feel anything yet. It’s looking like another bust. Maybe the brew is broken. Maybe I’m just not the type of person to have visions.
So I try something new. I start doing the Wim Hof breathing—super-ventilation followed by full-lung breath holds. I quicken the pace of the air coming in and out of my lungs until I can feel tingling in my fingers and toes. If ayahuasca is not going to give up its secrets quietly, I am going to force the issue. Breath is the most fundamental wedge, and I’m going to draw on what I’ve learned over the past decade to make this experience as intense as possible. It’s the same breathing pattern I used in the yoga studio with Elee so many months ago, the one where I turned purple and caused so much alarm that she worried I might pop. But I reason that if this is the so-called “DMT breathing,” and DMT is the active chemical in ayahuasca, then maybe it will get things moving. So I take thirty deep breaths and hold with full lungs. I focus my mind on the black ether behind my eyelids. Then I contract the muscles in my feet, my legs, butt and diaphragm to push the breath upward past my shoulders and into my skull.
When the pressure reaches a spot in the center of my forehead, I see an explosion of color. Something has come unstuck. The vision starts out as a shimmering pattern of red and blue light and transforms into geodesic fractals, as if the rods and cones in my eyes have just crystalized. The shapes lock together—first around the periphery of my field of vision, and then they take it over altogether. As the hallucination grows stronger, my mind turns inward.
I start thinking about my mother.
First she appears in front of me like I’m watching a movie of her as an adolescent with a beaming smile on her face. The image, no doubt pulled from an archive of photos I’ve seen over the years, gets sharper and shaper until I feel myself transform. Now I’m not looking at her from the outside, but part of me is her looking at the world from her eyes. I’m feel myself as her, full of energy and looking forward to all the possibilities of life. A flash to a decade or so in the future, and I’m my mother falling in love with my father. There’s excitement and possibility in the air. Then it’s years later in a house full of young children. A beat and I’m growing claustrophobic, and my husband (my father) spends most of his time working at the hospital where he’s a surgeon. When I think about him, I flash into his perspective. Now I’m him, and I feel alienated from my family and proud of my career. I can see myself as him trying to connect with his children but realizing it’s a lost battle. My wife (my mother) has more time with the children and will always be closer. There’s a hint of jealousy because of it. Fast-forward a few more years and I’m my mother again, this time going through a divorce and feeling an almost endless expanse of freedom in front of me. I traverse decades of life experiences in a matter of minutes. I exist in multiple perspectives like a great living fractal.
The visions are difficult to communicate in language because they exist in a space beyond the ability to convey meaning. They come fast like snapshots that I have no time to process or dwell on. By the time I realize what I’m seeing, I’ve already moved on to another thought, in another place in the timeline. The brew has buried the lessons in my memory for me to process later. I’m both the observer and the subject of the visions. I’m me and someone else at the same time.
Just as I start to feel I understand something about my mother, I speed across generation lines again. Now I’m my grandmother at a Christmas party meeting a five-year-old version of myself. The boy (me) says something flippant, and I (my grandmother) warns the lanky child not to think that he’s too smart. A second later, I’m her lying on a deathbed in a hospital looking out at the world through a lens of dementia. The observer side of me apologizes for not seeing her in her last days. But there’s no time to dwell on that vision, because I’ve already moved deeper into my maternal history. I’m now my great-grandmother Minna—a person whom I never met and know almost nothing about save for a picture on the wall. I have a sense of purely existing and being in the world. The observer in me wonders why so many of the women in my family are forgotten.
The winds of time and genealogy pull me back down the trunk of my family tree. There are individuals in my roots whom I’ll never know but who all contributed to the person I am today. It’s strange to say, but I feel that some part of my conscious stores the perspectives of every person that came before me and that I can almost access them. Maybe I need more ayahuasca to go deeper. Or maybe they’re better left in my subconscious.
At one point over the last week, Luzma told me she believes that DNA stores the memories of our genealogical past, somehow twisted into the geometric forms of amino acids, nucleotides and chemical bonds. She says that the plant can be a sort of key that brings those memories into the front. Of course, no scientist I’ve ever met would agree that DNA can store memory—at least not the way I’m experiencing it now.
I opt not to explore the roots of my family tree much further than my great grandmother. Instead, I come back to Tony’s steady drumbeat. His strange song centers the experience and pulls me back to the present. He hums a short, childlike tune and then falls into silence. After a full measure, he asks me to sit down in front of him. So I crawl from my spot and make my way through the total blackness by touch and sound alone. I sit facing him, and when he starts up again, the vibrations of his stamping the floorboards course through my bones and wash over my body. The vibrations connect my body to his song. Every stomp reverberates through the loose planks into my body. I look into the blackness where I know he is, but cannot see, and I perceive his face as if it were the head of a buffalo. The beast flares its nostrils and bounces out the notes of his chant through the void between us.
I breathe in his song, and it takes me back to my ten-year-old self. I’m in my childhood bedroom looking out the skylight that was my window. The knotted carpet squishes beneath my feet, and there’s a pile of dirty clothes in the corner.
When was the last time I thought about this place? I ask myself.
The child me stands next to the bed and looks across the hall to my sister’s room. It feels like I am actually in that space and time again, filling me with the sensations of what it was like to be a kid. I gaze at her door and feel sadness and frustration at how much my sister dislikes me. Like many an older sibling, she is jealous of losing our parents’ attention. And even though she can be mean, I also feel how those emotions are part of a great life lesson where we were both teaching the other how to be human. It’s a good childhood, I decide as the observer. The insight ends that vision.
And now I’m back in front of Tony, exhausted by the travels. So I lie down at his feet, and the song becomes a physical thing. It travels from his feet through the floor and along my spine, so that I don’t know where the notes end and I begin.
I look up into the crystalized patterns that sprint across the blackness—the fractals of the ayahuasca hallucination—and feel an intense sense of gratitude for the experience. I may never know what to make of Tony or the world of spirits as it butts against my own rational mind, but I can choose to respect the process that brought me here.
Somehow the last few years of exploring my own mind and body have brought me to the feet of a shaman somewhere in the Amazonian darkness. It’s one of the most remote corners of the world, and I hear him invoking spirits that I know nothing about. His vibrations course through the deepest part of me. It is a sacred moment. And I try to inhale as much of it as possible into my body.
Time passes—I don’t know how much. Then Tony’s foot makes a final stomp onto the floor. His humming trails off into silence, and there’s a minute of eerie quiet. Even the jungle says nothing.
“The spirits say you are a good person,” he says.
In any other context, this would be the sort of thing that I would try to deflect. In the rational world, I don’t much like compliments and don’t generally believe in otherworldly spirits. But in this moment it fills me with joy. I feel relief that the spirits he talks to see something worthy in me.
We wait there a little longer, and then Tony says that he thinks the ceremony is over.
We walk together back to the maloka in the pitch darkness as the world of geometric shapes crowds around the periphery of my vision. I don’t fall asleep when I finally get back to my mattress. I stay up and think about what it all means, and I know that I’ll never find an answer.
…
I barely speak to Tony after the ceremony, and I say my goodbyes the following morning, getting ready for my trip back to the Northern Hemisphere. He smiles warmly to me, and we converse in what little stable ground we can find between our broken Spanish and English. He asks if I found what I came for, and I tell him yes.
And yet how can I convey it? Writing about ayahuasca is difficult, because whatever answers do come often don’t pair well with words. This is true of just about every aspect of the Wedge where the language doesn’t necessarily jump up from the pages of a book, but arises instead out of the sensations that we feel. It’s one thing to read about an ice bath, or to imagine what it might feel like to catch a kettlebell in midair as it transforms in your hands from a weapon into a dance. These are things you have to feel to understand.
What I can say is that, in the almost two years since I came back from the jungle to the time that I’m writing the words on this page, it continues to have a powerful impact on my life. I speak to Luzma every few weeks, mostly through messages on my phone. Sometimes I flash back to a moment of insight that I never had time to notice while I was bathing in blackness. Many changes are subtle; I didn’t destroy my relationship or start a new career. I haven’t filled my house with sage bushes, crystals and dense-smelling incense. Others are more obvious: I have almost no desire to play video games anymore. But that isn’t to say that I don’t know how easy it might be to get sucked in again; they’re as available as a high-speed Internet connection. I spent one week in December immersed in electronic bliss before quickly seeing the unhealthy tendencies in myself. I deleted them and haven’t gone back. I’ve instead filled that time with new hobbies—and even founded a tabletop D&D group with friends that meets once a week. The game from my childhood hits the same notes of high fantasy but has a social component that just couldn’t exist online. In other words, I have the tools to occupy the space left after my purge.
Sometimes I find myself whistling phrases from Tony’s childlike tunes in the middle of the day for no reason at all. I’m still breathing out parts of his song.
11 See the work of Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia that shows how trees share and disperse carbon through their root systems. She has a very accessible TED talk on the topic. Also, see the book The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben, for a more accessible description of plant relationships.