Divine Ayahuasca
photo by edgar duvivier
Like every child growing up by the sea, I was wiped out by waves many times. The experience of being unexpectedly caught by one and whirled inside it during some seconds of mental void, when I’d see neither end nor beginning to the “tornado” of liquid darkness I was in before managing to slowly regain my bearings amidst the foam of the exploded water, taught me to get back on my feet, walk out of it dizzy, shaken, but reborn. That was when I looked at the world around me humbly and apologetically. The safety and triviality of the comfortable sunbathers sitting up on the sand contrasted with the hesitation and respect I’d walk on it with, like they were an audience ridiculing my reverential unsteadiness. But I was rid of self-importance and only felt a grateful relief for breathing again. I also felt free. Free from myself.
This experience became a recurrent metaphor for crucial situations in my life, such as my encounters with ayahuasca. The plant medicine is unpredictable and catches you by surprise before it liberates you to see the whole picture: the sea, for which all waves let go, annihilated in the nervous whiteness of their explosion to merge back in the infinite blue. Ayahuasca is a wave, the sea, and the love between them; the freedom to split and the mighty force of return that makes each cease to be for the sake of the other; of their communion. The wave, an inviolable force that separates itself from the source, becomes revealed as the euphoric, gentle foam of reencounter, rediscovery, and freedom for new separating beginnings.
To talk about it literally, ayahuasca puts an end to the rigidity of the concepts we understand reality with, eliminating our bearings and causing a visceral upheaval that makes us feel we are at the doors of death, to finally resurrect us in humbleness and gratitude for a sacred vision of things. But to leave triviality for sacredness is not easy. The plant medicine must destroy and create us anew, and each is given the lesson individually deserved. It grants us a mystical experience by ridding us of earthly patterns; liberated from their relativity, we glimpse the mightiness of Love.
Ayahuasca is healing in the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. It makes us realize that they are one indissociable thing, such as the wholeness with which the world reappears to us after we’ve been sucked in and released by a wave. Ayahuasca showed me that my mind, my physical constitution, and all the events of my life, reconciled through its loving eye, are one synchronous moment.
Ayahuasca is the truth of the poetic and the cosmic dimension because it does away with the survival-oriented context we see creation through and which splits everything in function of what is good versus bad for us. As a deliverance from this utilitarian, temporal context, ayahuasca reconciles opposites in grace. It unveils what is immense but has no size, what is distant yet visceral, and what is inaccessibly deep as the most poignant presence. Ayahuasca is purity: it knows no compromise of means for the sake of ends; no transition of the detestable pragmatism that rules life. Whatever is in ayahuasca absolutely is. Ayahuasca teaches us to see, in a basket that is full, our single daily bread, the one given by God.
When rescuing the sacredness of each and of the whole, ayahuasca taught me that the individual is not a part of everything, but he/she Is, with everything. A wholeness living with the Whole. One end mirroring the other.
Who knows if divinity is not the endlessness of this reflection? The all-embracing generosity that inspires us to say, with the poet Alexandre Manuel Thiago de Mello, that We are stars of a single moment, but our sparkle alters the order of the firmament . . .