Back Before Science Explained Away All The Magic

As a child our minds are open and anything is possible. We have imaginary friends and we believe that a rocket ship made out of a cardboard box will take us to outer space. As we get older, we incorporate everything that we are taught into our reality, and slowly our sense of what is possible begins to narrow. We no longer spend time with our imaginary friends, we no longer believe that our cardboard rocket ship will take us into space. We are told there is a specific way that we are supposed think and be. Science begins to explain away the magic.

So what happens to those of us that don’t fit in, that don’t want to accept that the world is just a compilation of the things we have been told? We seek alternate answers, perhaps we feel the calling of religion, spirituality, or teacher plants. For me, I felt the call to the plants.

The spirit of Ayahuasca teaches us all in a very individual way, she tailors our experiences just for us, giving us exactly what we need at that time. In his book The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms, Don Jose Campos says, “Ayahuasca is unique. Sometimes, I laugh at how mysterious she is and how she shows you your own mystery.” For me, Ayahuasca stripped away my ego, took away my need to control the world around me. She taught me to surrender completely to the moment, allowed me to freely explore other realities, and helped to being me back to that place in my life before science explained away all the magic. There is a science to Ayahuasca and how the medicine interacts with the chemicals in our brain to open our mind, but I don’t believe that we can truly understand without the actual experience.

The experience of other realities caused a fundamental change in me, in my perception of the world. I find that if I pay attention, I can still see the interconnectedness of everything, I can still see the energy that holds us all together. The spirit of Ayahuasca has entered into me and broken the barriers that I had put up to shield myself from world. For me there is no going back, no way to unlearn the lessons Ayahuasca taught me.

In returning home, I came to realize that, although I had changed, the world I was returning to remained the same. There was a period of adjustment that needed to occur when re-integrating back into “real” life. I went to the grocery store and the experience overwhelmed me. The lights were too bright, everything looked shiny, almost cartoonish, and I began to realized just how fabricated our society is.  Ayahuasca created a fundamental change in the energy that flows through me, and it is now my responsibility to keep this new energy flow in place. It is important to remember the freedom I found in Ayahuasca, the freedom to be completely in the moment, to keep my mind in that place where all things are possible.