My Initiation into the spirit of Ayahuasca

by Paul Levy

I was first introduced to the spirit of ayahuasca in the mid-nineties, when a South American shaman who had never been out of the jungle before came to where I was living to give a teaching about his culture’s most sacred medicine. He had a big jug of ayahuasca next to him as he gave his talk, and he would sometimes cradle it as if it was his most holy possession. The bottle seemed like it was simultaneously his infinitely beloved child, and his most treasured consort, as well as his precious mother and supreme guru all at once. We innocently came up to him one by one to get initiated into the spirit of ayahuasca, and he simply touched a little bit of it to our forehead. It was a very simple, but powerful, and very dreamlike, ceremony. Little did I realize that the ayahuasca genie was out of the bottle.

            A little while later I had the following dream: I am drinking ayahuasca and spontaneously singing the icaros, the sacred songs invoking the spirit of ayahuasca. It is as if I am simply a channel for some energy or spirit to sing itself through me, as if I was discovering a new voice within myself. The songs were simultaneously creating themselves through me while at the same time it was as if in singing them I was remembering something I had known long ago. At a certain point, the ayahuasca takes effect, and I start having a full-blown psychedelic experience in the dream. Shamanically journeying on the wings of the creative imagination, I was lucidly dreaming that I had taken ayahuasca, having apparently created that experience for myself. Or, more accurately, it felt like the spirit of ayahuasca was dreaming itself through me.  

            Upon awakening, I found this experience to be simply amazing and mind-blowing, as I had just experienced how my mind had literally created a dream of a turned-on universe. I had just dreamed a dream in which I was using the power of the dream to create reality so as to wake myself up. There was something very important about how my voice was the channel through which the spirit enlivened and inspired itself, singing itself into incarnation.

A few months later I connected with ayahuasca in its full-bodied form, which is an experience that does not easily lend itself to words. I can say that my ayahuasca experience was very much like my dream, as if my dream was a precognition of the actual experience. I ingested nonlocal ayahuasca before I drank the localized version. One thing I remember very vividly is the feeling of my DNA lighting up, as if there was a hidden light encoded in my very cells which had been activated by the medicine. The whole situation was very dreamlike.

Instead of focusing on the particular mind-blowing visions and experiences that happen on ayahuasca, when I get to the bottom of what animated all of my ayahuasca journeys, it always come down to the same thing. As if tailor-suited to my unconscious, ayahuasca has its own unique way of revealing to me that as long as I am trying to “solve my problems,” I have already missed the mark. Thinking I have a problem is a viewpoint that is reinforcing the seeming concrete, existing in stone, reality of the problem, as well as relating to my situation as problematic in nature. Sacred medicine such as ayahuasca always get down to the same thing for me – showing me how in this moment, and this moment, I am the very one who is retrieving, calling forth, investing in, and literally creating the apparent problem that I, with the best of intentions, then go about trying to heal in a diabolically self-reinforcing feedback loop. This dynamic is of the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which I am using the creative powers of my own mind to influence reality so as to entrance and imprison myself, which is a form of madness. I imagine, deep down, to the extent we are asleep, that this madness is an archetypal situation that is similar for everyone. Ayahuasca was ultimately bringing awareness to how I am actively participating in the creation of my own lack of freedom, so that I could potentially dream it differently.

            The spirit of ayahuasca taught me about itself. One of the many things my experiences with ayahuasca revealed to me is that it is a “nonlocal” spirit, which means it is not constrained by the conventional laws of space and time. Being nonlocal, the spirit of ayahuasca is not bound by matter, which is to say it is not solely contained in nor constrained by its seemingly liquid, physical form. Being nonlocal, the spirit of ayahuasca is multi-dimensional, which is to say that its drinkable form is but one of its various channels of incarnating itself.

We seem to enter into and become acquainted with ayahuasca’s nonlocal field of influence when the time is right. For me, the spirit of ayahuasca was able to shape-shift, first manifesting as the original shaman with his bottle, then incarnating as the dream of drinking what was in the bottle, and finally materializing as the actual event of taking what was in the bottle into myself, as if receiving holy communion in the flesh. Being nonlocal, the spirit of ayahuasca was revealing to me the nonlocality of both the universe and myself, which is to say my own lack of limitations in the realm of the divine, creative imagination.  

            Ayahuasca is a medicine that heals the disease of modern humanity, an atrophied imagination. Ayahuasca stimulates and works through the organ of the creative imagination so as to actualize its very real effects. Ayahuasca introduces us to the reality of the psyche, which is to say it announces itself in the channel where what is imagined has a real effect on what is happening. Ayahuasca helps to collapse the boundary between what is real and what is imagination, as the imagination seems more and more real, and the real, imagination. From the point of view of the divine imagination, which is reality itself, what is primary and most real, if we can speak in such terms, is the imagination itself.    

My encounter with ayahuasca initiated me more deeply into the nonlocal field which underlies our world and connects everything with everything else. The spirit of ayahuasca taught me, just like in that dream where I journeyed with ayahuasca, that we are literally moment to moment creating our experience of ourselves. The spirit of ayahuasca, both in the sleeping dream as well as in the waking dream, was revealing to me that it is our own mind which ultimately and fundamentally creates our experience. My dreamlike experiences with ayahuasca introduced me to the fact that the living spirit which animates ayahuasca is to be found inside each one of us. Just like my dream, I can imagine that I’m drinking the nonlocal, holy sacrament right now, and can’t help but to sing its song.