Giving Up that One Last Thing
What it means to "Let Go" in an Ayahuasca Ceremony
Note: This post is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and is not intended as a suggestion to engage in any behaviors, legal or otherwise. It is an account of something that *could* have happened, some time, some where, to some person.
The third night of my Ayahuasca ceremony is when I finally “broke through.” This is a term used in the community for when you fully cleave yourself from your body and ego and enter into a higher space. One guy in my circle also used the phrase “going out,” as in “outside of the normal boundaries of the conscious mind.” Humans don’t spend much time beyond those boundaries, and so we don’t really have the words to report what we experience out in that space. We might find a handy metaphor or turn-of-phrase that captures a little piece of the experience, but trying to describe it - especially to someone who has never been outside those boundaries themselves - always feels a little bit incomplete. It is a frontier of the mind that we are scarcely able to even comprehend. So all that we can do is tell the story of our journey, and hope that even a little bit of it speaks to your heart.
To begin, the best I can do in terms of an explanation is to explain how hard it is to explain. It’s like describing the taste of tomato to someone who has never had one before. I can say it is salty, savory, sweet, or “fresh,” but none of those words really zero in on what exactly eating a tomato is like. I could compare it to other fruits or vegetables if I want, but this approach is self-evidently incomplete; if it tasted like something else, then it wouldn’t have its own unique name for itself. The taste of a tomato is a knowledge only purchased through direct experience, everything else is mere horseshoes and hand-grenades.
I cannot tell you exactly what I witnessed during my Ayahuasca trip, only that I saw it, it was real, and it was profound. It re-opened spiritual that I had locked shut many years ago. It allowed me to grieve losses that I endured so far in my past that I forgot that the grief for them still lived inside of me at all. Two years on now, I am still uncertain of the overall “effect” that it has had on my life. In a way, the trip could be understood as a “peak experience” - and like any peak experience, it tears open the fabric of reality. When you tear open the fabric, you see the things behind the wall. Sometimes those things can feel healing. Sometimes they leave me feeling empty. Often I’m unsure there is even a difference.
In the world of psychedelics (or ethneogens, as Ayahuasca is sometimes categorized) is this idea of “letting go.” Anyone who has tripped before will advise you: in order to make the most out of the experience, you have to let go. Before I sat with the medicine, I only knew of letting go in terms of grip and release. You grip the monkey bars, and then you let go. You make plans that fall through, you have to let go. You love her but she left you, you need to let go. We grip things and people and ideas throughout our lives, sometimes too tight, sometimes not enough, but eventually - one way or another - we have to release and let go. I have known these moments many times in my life. So even though I’m always a bit vexed by the prescription of choices based only in thoughts, as anyone who has been told to “get over it” or “put it out of your mind” can also attest, but I had plenty of experience with this letting go thing before, so I was pretty sure I was ready.
I was not ready.
Most of what the average person understands of psychedelics is a remnant from pedestrian explications of 1960s counter-culture. Depictions of tripping in movies is usually based upon the silly assumptions of squares who, in their constrained imagination, speculated that taking acid was like walking through a house of mirrors at a traveling carnival. They suspected it was probably a little bit whimsical, maybe fun, possibly scary, and that it had a definitive path from start to finish. With this impression in mind, it is no wonder they saw it as a waste of time; a carnival funhouse is something for kids, not for adults. But they were wrong. They were very wrong. An Ayahuasca trip is about as similar to a funhouse as flying a rocket to the moon is similar to driving a Toyota to Arby’s for lunch.
The biggest misconception here is that the experience can be compared to something real or “of this world.” On the contrary, the plant guides you to a space that is quite different than your everyday life. The hallucination of your senses is perhaps the least interesting part of the whole ordeal. Certainly, like anything with hallucinogenic properties, the ingestion of Aya will certainly play some games with your visual field: the campfire might pixelate, a voice might sound warped, the clouds might feel lower, your hands might seem tiny, the stars might start to move, and of course everyone’s faces might seem a bit…different. Weird. Off.
These illusions and hallucinations can happen with Ayahuasca, as they do with acid, with psilocybin, and peyote as well. They can be intriguing, annoying, hilarious, or even terrifying. It all depends on factors such as the preparation, the setting, your mood, and the guide. But alas, they are only just the beginning. What is far more interesting is the way in which Ayahuasca hallucinates your feelings. I don’t know why this is not mentioned online as much as the other components of the experience. Most people, for instance, focus a lot on the purging component. They focus on the vomiting and phlegm. It is certainly true that the medicine takes a strong hold of your physical body, but even more powerful is the hold that it has over your mind.
During the hours you sit in the circle under the influence of the plant medicine, you may find yourself laughing hysterically one minute and then balling your eyes out the next. You might do both at the same time. You might feel fear the likes of which you have never felt before, even though there is no specific thing around you to make you afraid. You might suddenly understand the exact nature of the sadness your mother has locked away in her heart as she dreams of the life she could have had while she folds clothes in the basement and sighs. You might feel rage at your father for not letting you perform in a seventh grade production of 12 Angry Men. You might feel anxious, aroused, impatient, resigned, ecstatic, liberated, trapped, or silly. You might feel dead. You might feel like you’ve never been alive. The medicine does what it wants to you, inside and out. You will see, hear, and feel what it wants you to see, hear, and feel. Aya makes itself very clear: you are not in control. You are never in control. The medicine can help you, but you have to let go.
You are not asked to let go in the way you are accustomed to letting go. Ayahuasca does not ask you to “loosen up.” It does not request that you “go with the flow.” It does not suggest that you “come along for the ride.” Instead, it makes a very simple deal: “I will show you the truth that can set you free, but first you have to hand it over.” I still remember the moment this happened to me. It was the third night of the ceremony and I was on the ground in a position of prostrated submission, a more pathetic version of the yoga “child’s pose” of sorts. I was deeper than I had been on the two previous nights, and I was beginning to scratch the surface of something so immense and terrifying that I feared a permanent break from reality. I felt like the main character in a Lovecraft novel, for the first time gazing upon the visage of an Eldritch god. One single step forward and I would cross over from the place of sanity and into the mouth of madness.
On my hands and knees I begged out loud for mercy, I pleaded with my life to be let off the ride. I tried as I might to manage the experience with my mind - my usual strategy for staying in control. I tried to self-soothe with my voice. I tried to “get a grip” by taking deep breaths. I reached in my pocket for cigarettes but they were nowhere to be found. my desperation now at a fever-pitch, I dug my nail into my wrist to see if pain could bring me back to some place real. I felt nothing. I was losing the battle. I writhed and begged and sweat so much I had to take off my shirt. I took off my pants too. I started to take off everything else before one of the guides mercifully stopped me and talked me off the ledge. “I’m scared,” I told her. She looked at me with kind eyes. “I know,” she said, “but it’s going to take care of you. You are completely safe. You’ll see.”
Her company was only temporary reprieve. The cup of water she gave me was tepid and flat. It seemed thick, like I was drinking water-flavored hair gel. Nothing could even touch the thirst and exhaustion I had inside of my body. The air that night was cool but my skin still burned like I was laying on concrete beneath a hot sun at noon. I felt the urge to vomit but could bring nothing up. There was a block in my throat, something that felt gross and physical, but that I somehow intuitively knew was made from a coagulation of shadows. My body felt an urgent desperation to expel, but something inside me was gripping and pulling in an equal and opposite direction. Whatever it was, it didn’t want to let go. “I can take care of this,” a voice spoke in my head, “I can control this” it told me.
I briefly considered the possibility that I was dying. I grabbed my wrist to check my pulse. I counted slowly and then tried some mental math. By my calculations, my pulse was somewhere between 85 and 65,000 beats per minute. Wait, what? That can’t be right. I checked it again. I did the math again. This time my pulse was less a range of numbers and more like a geometrical proof. I saw a sheet of graph paper in my mind and saw my pulse sketched out as Mandelbrot fractals. This was not my pulse. This was not my mind. The medicine had invaded that too. It began to change the sequence of simple counting. It rearranged mathematical rules, and by extension, the rules of reality itself. The fear was now so oppressive and agonizing that I retreated again into my mind, like slinking backward into a pile of rubble during the bombing of Dresden, hoping they’d didn’t make another pass and evaporate me in fire.
I searched for something still under my control. There had to be something that the medicine could not touch. I sought something so small and ordinary that it could not possibly be part of whatever the hell this “thing” was. I decided I would cling to something that could not possibly be corrupted by this horrible insanity. I tried to recall the most basic and essential piece of information about myself that I could muster. I decided on my home address. This was something easy that I knew by heart. I closed my eyes and spoke aloud:
“My home address is 7…1…my address is 7…1…3? No no, that’s not right. It’s 71…5? No not 5. It is four numbers, I know that much. (clears throat) My address is 7…1…horse…wind? My address is Horse-Wind. My address is ‘horse wind?’ Yes - my address is a horse…running…in the wind (tears now streaming down my burning red face) My address is a horse. Running. In the wind. What the fuck. What the FUCK?!”
The terrifying thing was not how wrong this was, but how perfectly correct it seemed to be. My address was exactly a horse running in the fucking wind. It was so obvious that I lived at a house called “Horse Wind” that I wondered why I was ever so stupid to put numbers up there at all. I was so soundly defeated, even my ego - proud as it was - began to falter in the face of such power. The dark mass of shadow moved up my throat, just shy of the point of eruption. I was a stuffed pig roasting on a spit of something so colossal I knew that it could eat me in one bite and still be hungry for more. I was still crying, but now I was doing the kind of crying that hasn’t come out of my body in many years. Not since my first year, actually. I cried the helpless, pleading, unfiltered cry of a baby. Sucking back my tears, I decided to beg:
Me: Please let me go…please…I’m begging you. I’ll give you anything.
Ayahuasca: You’ll give me anything? What are you offering, child?
Me: I’ll give you anything. I’ll give you all of my money. Everything I own. I’ll give you my body. You can hurt me, scar me, ruin me. You can kill me. Do whatever you want with it, it’s yours.
Ayahuasca: Little one, I’m sorry but I have no use for the currencies of your world. Even your body, as precious as it is to you, holds no value for me here. But that is beside the point. I am not the one keeping you here.
Me: What? If not you, then who? Oh God…please. Please. PLEASE! Can you please help me find who is keeping me here? Please. I need your help. I need you to help me find them so I can convince them to let me go. I need to know what monster is keeping me here.
Ayahuasca: I’m sorry my love. But it’s you.
Me: What? Me? What do you mean? What the hell are you saying? I would never put myself in a place like this! Don’t fucking lie to me!!
Ayahuasca: My poor child. I love you so much. Do you not see it? Do you not know in your heart that I tell you the truth?
Me: “Know?” Know what? Know WHAT?!!?
Ayahuasca: That it was you who put yourself here.
Me (recoils, disgusted): No. No! Bullshit! Liar!! Why would I ever put myself in a place like this? This place has nothing but pain and terror!!! It is EMPTY! Tell me - if put myself here, then why would I do it? What possible reason would I have to do this to myself?
Ayahuasca: Because my love, isn’t it obvious? There is no one in the world who hates you as much as you do. This place is the prison you believe you deserve.
I sucked in dry breath as if to respond but the putrid air halted in my throat. No words came to my mouth. No thoughts in my mind. The pain was exquisite and infinite. Perhaps worse than the pain, I was so awfully uncomfortable, like I was zipped into luggage and trapped inside. I bowed my head and cried.
Me (whimpering, drooling): No…no…I…no. Why did I…? I didn’t mean it. I never wanted to hurt anyone. I didn’t mean to be like this. I used to be a baby. I was just a little baby. I miss being held. I miss being able to believe that everything was going to be okay. I miss believing I was the good one. I wanted to be a good person, I thought I was going to be a good person. But I’m not. I’m rotten. I’m wrong. I’m bad. I did. It’s true. I put myself here. It hurts so bad. It hurts.
Ayahuasca (smiles warmly, knowingly): Child, I know you hurt. I’ve known you all your life, and even before. I love you more than you could possibly imagine. Do not worry, I can help you to escape this bondage you have made for yourself. I will pull you from this place and hold you in my arms. I just need you to trust me.
Me: Yes! I trust you! If you do this for me, I’ll give you everything, I promise! My possessions, my livelihood, my loyalty, my body. All of it, it’s yours!
Ayahuasca: Child, I’m sorry. But I don’t need those. I need the other thing. You have to give me the other thing to set yourself free.
Me: The other thing? What other thing! What other thing!!!
Ayahuasca: I need the thing that just said “What other thing.”
Those who make the journey to partake of this sacred plant expect that they will find wisdom and truth. They know they will be humbled. Some of them may have even heard the term “ego death.” They hear people talk about it on podcasts as if it’s a transaction like anything else. Ego death, to them, only differs by degrees from things like “cashing a check” or “borrowing your car” or “running uphill” or “finding your voice.” In a way, it is that simple. It is a transaction. The terms of the exchange are very straightforward. You will receive knowledge and freedom. In exchange for this, you must turn over your narrator.
Perhaps you are not aware that you had a narrator. Perhaps you thought that you and your narrator are the same person. But they are not. Your narrator is so good at what it does, that it has fooled you into thinking it is you. The idea of “you” - your body, your choices, and who you are - are just the things that your narrator tells you. Your life, as you know it, is just a story that your narrator reads to you from a book they write and edit themselves. Your narrator is even the one reading this sentence to you right now. It might even be adding some things. It might be telling you that I’m full of shit. It might be saying that you don’t have space in your life for silly thoughts like this. It might be suggesting a nap. The narrator does not do these things to trick you. It does what it does to take care of you and protect you. It is doing these things because you told it to.
You gave it permission the moment you decided the world was far too vast and threatening. You were only little when this happened, and you were scared. The world was too much for you to process all at once. You became overwhelmed and afraid. So you created the narrator and gave it control. You told it to whittle the world down for you, to give you reality in little pieces that you could chew at your own pace while you shielded your eyes and looked away. It made you feel safe, not having to face the daily dread inherent to being alive.
As time went on, the narrator became more selective about what it would report. It learned the things that hurt you and the things that made you feel better. It made some executive decisions about whether or not to show you some things at all. In short, it did its job. It did its job so well, in fact, that at one point it decided to take over completely. Again, this was not to hurt you. The idea was to protect you, especially from yourself. It knew that if you were allowed to go out on your own, you might screw up the whole operation. You might end up in jail, go broke, or die. The narrator knows what is best, far better than you who has seen so little of their own life. The narrator just wants to help you. It wants to help you to keep your job, to save you from danger, and to calm you down with alcohol and porn and bright little screens. Eventually you see no reason to wake. You spend almost all of your days completely asleep.
That’s how it went for me, and it was going along great. Well, not great. But good enough. It was good enough until that third night of ceremony. Until I took the medicine. Until I met The Mother.
Ayahuasca is often called “The Mother” or “The Grandmother.” The reason for this is both mythological and phenomenological. The personification of this experience is no accident; Aya is something you can only know by making its acquaintance. The fact that the plant is named as a woman is also on purpose; the experience it provides is most certainly feminine in nature. As I lack the vocabulary to describe the visions it offers, I am also unable to explain why I - or the countless others who have taken this medicine now and in centuries past - so comfortably understand Ayahuasca to be of woman and not of man. I just know it. If you take it, you will know it too.
A mother will cradle and swaddle and rock you to sleep. A mother can forgive your colic, your whining, and tears. The mother is the one who hears your cries and does not grow angry. A mother takes your tears and converts them into love in her heart. She takes that love and pushes it back into you. She purchases all of your pain and exchanges it for gold. She gives away her very body so that you can grow, a heroic act but not a surprising one given what a mother is and what mothers can do. She pushed you into existence, after all. The mother alone possesses this spiritual power, to rip a soul wandering in the plane of non-existence, pull it through the portal of life, and push a soul into this world. The mother would suffer endlessly for her child, she would push love and life through her breast until her breast was dry. The mother would put her blood into the child’s veins until her heart pumped dry and crumbled into dust. Even as dust, she would love you still.
There is but one cost for all of this on behalf of the child. It’s not even a cost at all - it’s just part of the rules. The rules say that if you are born, you must have a name. The mother gave you life and made you a person. Your person has a name. If the mother calls you by name and you do not answer, she will know that you have forgotten your name. You have forgotten who you are, which is her child. When she comes you will be asleep, and the narrator will walk out to greet her. She is not fooled by his charisma and cleverness. She calls to you and only you. She gave birth to you, she knows you by name, the name that was written on you the moment you were born.
To be alive is to be in pain. The mother knows this process is hard, no matter how important it may be. Even though you think you are an “adult,” to someone as old as The Mother, you are still a baby. 35 years on the timeline of things as ancient as her, you are merely on your first breath, you haven’t even yet exhaled it. She knows you still need to feel her love and embrace, to be told once again that it will all be okay. She extends her arms to you, but to you alone. She has no interest in this facsimile called the “narrator.” If you want to feel her love once again, you must do what has to be done. You have to get rid of him.
Easier said than done. The narrator is who you think you actually are. In your forgetfulness, you scarcely even remember that they are only a copy. You made them from pieces of you so that you could hide. You hide now as the Mother calls, crouched and hidden at the back of your mind, you desperately want to be held once again. It feels like the thing you want the most. But you are still afraid. You are afraid of obliteration. You are afraid of giving up the things that others name as “you.” So you hesitate. The narrator turns and tells you to stay hidden away, that this is a trick, that it’s only “neurotransmitters gone haywire” - an abundance of serotonin flooding your brain and making you imagine you see things that are not there. The Mother is not there. “There is no such thing,” he says. He tells you that your desire to be in her arms is nothing more than a desire to surrender. He tells you he will “get you out of here.” You are confused, you don’t know who is right and what is true. You are torn between surrender and battle, between love and independence.
You want to press pause, to check your phone, to read an article online about “how to make tough decisions.” You want to spill liquor down your throat, fuck someone you barely know, or put powder up your nose until your chest explodes. You search your pockets, there is nothing inside. No “thing” or “person” to rescue you from the agony of this moment. Your body is wasted and weak, your mind is in shambles, you are running out of time. You have to do something that you are terrified of doing - you have to make a choice completely on your own. You could be wrong. You could die for this choice. But you have to make it.
You stand, legs wobbly and hands shaky, and proceed toward the narrator. You watch him sweeping back and forth at the control panel of your mind. He scrambles every which way, checking gauges, flipping switches, turning dials, and adjusting the throttle. You suddenly feel great sadness for this being you created. A creature you made to serve you and then only to die? You gave this thing life in order to protect you, you had it do your dirty work for years while you hid in the hull of the ship, so how now can you repay it by taking his life?
“Perhaps this is what courage looks like,” you say to yourself. You are not sure if the words you have spoken are true, but it will have to make do. You slowly walk toward him and unsheathe a screwdriver from your belt. Your skin is now boiling and sweat pours from your hairline down into your eyes. You count down from three to ready yourself and then grab his shoulder. You spin him around to face you and lift up the tool above you. He looks at you, first at your weapon and then your face. You look back at him, you fully see him for the first time in ages. You are both stunned and silent. He sees an old man, a wrinkled gray version of himself. You see a young boy, a child the same age that you were when you gave it all up. Your hand now tightens around the grip of the tool as you choke back tears. You now understand how great of a price this is. You understand that “letting go” means giving up something that you cannot get back. It means paying the cost you have pretended not to owe. You owe. You pay. You let go.
You see fear in his eyes now, you read betrayal on his face. You see the resignation of someone who knows they are to be extinguished. You will not forgive yourself for what you must do, but you know that this moment was inevitable when you made that choice so long ago. You were just putting it off, hiding under the floor and away from your life. You will now have the blood on your hands and have to live with how that feels. You owe. You fucking pay.
You manage to gain enough control of your body to breathe in and then speak:
“I’m sorry,” you say.
“I can protect you,” he says.
His words rip a hole of shame through the wall of your chest. Even if he was just my creation, is he truly worth nothing at all? Alas, what does it matter now? The crime must be committed, and the crime is called murder. The narrator will take the punishment, but me - the killer - will suffer the sentence. What exactly that sentence will look like is unknown. The morality is broken. We are out beyond the walls now, through the doors of perception, playing small games in the eyes of Gods. The situation is now beyond morality. Beyond good and evil. It just is.
I open my eyes and my body makes the choice. I thrust my arm downward and the steel goes through him. It is harder to cut through flesh than I thought it would be.
Last summer I went to the Grand Canyon for vacation. I’ve never done that before. I went with my brothers who are famously impatient with attractions that don’t have rollercoasters, tall boys, or nachos. I had to beg them to stay at the mouth of the canyon for more than 15 minutes. It was the first time in my life I have ever laid eyes on such vast beauty. They say there is a feeling called “awe,” reserved for the times you observe the things your mind cannot fully comprehend. The Grand Canyon, Macchu Picchu, Aurora Borealis, a Solar Eclipse - Kant called the experience of things like this the “sublime” - a movement of the mind that fills you with terror because of how incomprehensible it is. This terror then recedes into a place of beauty once you construct a model in your head for how it can be understood. To view Jupiter through a telescope for the first time may in fact blow your mind, but as you relax into the thought and allow it to be understood better by your feeble human brain, the terrifying experience then melts into pleasure. This is the sublime.
To stand before The Mother is to stand before the impossible. Your mind will fold in on itself as it attempts to construct even the most facile model of what you witness before you. All models fail. There is no thing on Earth known to man that could even be considered to be remotely similar. This won’t stop your human arrogance for trying. I tried and tried for hours to make it make sense. I tried to reach the downslope of the sublime, but there was too much awe and too little knowing. In the end, there is no other choice for how to respond to an encounter the Mother. The only choice is to drop to your knees. The only choice is awe.
Awe is what I felt as I pulled the screwdriver back from my narrator’s heart and inspected it before me. I saw no blood. I saw no wound on his chest. I saw only me. I looked toward the Mother, and she blessed me with knowledge my mind could never summon on its own. Knowledge written in a language that everyone knows, but nobody can speak. How small and stupid I am. How thankful I am that something so powerful loves me so much. How foolish was I to think she wanted me to kill. How foolish was I to think that I had only the choice to spare him or slay him. How hilarious to think that I had any choice to make at all. As if I had the power to create or destroy.
I now knew that the narrator was not my “creation.” I did not build him from dust. I had only borrowed parts of myself to build him; recruited pieces of my body and molded them like clay into a creature who could do my bidding. To strike this creature down would only be another way of striking myself down.
The narrator stood before me as if nothing had happened. He looked like me back when I was young, when I was innocent. A child. The child placed his hand on my forehead, his face was placid and knowing. He began to separate into tiny points of light, revealing to me now that he was so happy to help, and also so happy to be able to come back home inside of me to rest in my past. His body disintegrated into little white specks that swirled around me and then penetrated my heart. All of those years of my childhood that I had pushed outside of my body so that I wouldn’t have to face the pain, now re-entered me and made me feel whole once again. A tightness that lived in my heart for three decades finally relented. I had finally let go. I looked up once again at The Mother, who now gazed at me lovingly and spoke:
“There is my son. There is the one who came from me.”
I wept happy tears and smiled. My body relaxed. My skin felt cool. The obstruction in my throat was now gone. I leaned forward in awe. I bowed low in praise. I opened my mouth and purged the shadow out into the grass beneath me.