In many years of sitting with Ayahuasca, she has shown me things I could not have imagined and things I cannot forget.
A vision received in ceremony is not like a dream. A dream fades. You try to recall it in the morning and it dissolves. A vision received from the plant stays with you. It sits inside you, whole and complete, sometimes for years, until the moment arrives when you understand what it was showing you.
I have been slow to bring these visions together in one place, because each one deserves its own full telling, and I have kept putting that off while I dug through the history trying to get every detail right. So instead, here are the most important ones, in short, so the record is complete. Each one will be expanded into its own full story later, one by one.
At Rustler’s Valley, around the fire, in about 1997, I became a spider and climbed a giant web of psychedelic art, experiencing the energy of Shiva the creator destroyer.
At Marimba House in 1999, I asked to see the goddess Princess Marimba, and that night the moon sang to me, the stars danced, the earth itself seemed to breathe.
Also at Marimba House, in about 2001, Ganesha appeared to me. She has shown me Ganesha three or four times now, in different ceremonies, in different years and places, always unmistakable, including once in the leaves of the trees above me at a place called Sambaqui in Florianópolis, where I sat in ceremony with friends, and once on a beach in that same island, where the vision of Ganesha on the beach introduced me to Sérgio and the Santo Daime community on the island. Another time he came to me as a spider with the head of an elephant, and explained to me aspects of the internet.
She has shown me Yemanjá, the Queen of the Sea, twice. The one I remember clearly was at Sambaqui in Florianópolis in 2006, when she came first as a mermaid and then as a woman in a blue dress. It was among the deepest visions I have received, and I tell it in The Night I Met the Queen of the Sea.
At Sunmoon Lodge during a ceremony with Yawa Bane, Archangel Michael appeared in ceremony with his wings and his sword, walking into the space and healing with his sword.
In the Santo Daime church in the Western Cape, Mestre Irineu appeared to me in rugby gear, explaining the rules of life and ultimately showing me that my work is different and that the structure I was following needed to adapt.
And once, in a ceremony I will never forget, in the forest of São Paulo, next to a waterfall, while I was drinking Ayahuasca, she came to me as the Queen of the Forest, presenting herself as an air hostess, walking the aisle of a plane with a tray of little cups, offering ayahuasca to me for testing. She had a smile that knew everything.
She has shown me the Jiboia many times, most notably the time the great white boa constrictor of the forest entered the ceremony room at Sunmoon Lodge and wrapped around a person who was going through a cathartic release in that moment.
She has taken me up into space and shown me the Earth from above, small and blue and breathing. She has shown me the pyramids from the sky and from the desert floor. She has shown me patterns that have no name in any language I know. She has shown me spaceships. She has shown me people, some of them living, some of them not.
The Merging of Humans and Machines, which you can read on my blog, is one of those visions. She showed me that in 2011. It took fifteen years for the world to catch up.
Every one of these visions has had a profound effect on my life and the teachings they brought me. Looking back, I am not indigenous to the forest, and I did not receive these the way people who live there do, or people who receive direct teachings from those who do. What came through to me was shaped by what I already believed internally. In the early years, that leaning was towards Buddhism as a set of principles, because the people I was already working with in sound and sweat lodge and vision quest carried that same mindset. That was the first ceremonial understanding I received. Over the years since, that has changed through contact with different religious groups and with the native peoples of the forest and their own cosmology. And now, many years into working with these medicines, I find myself coming back to this moment, to what these teachings mean to me particularly, today. This is my opinion only, what has happened for me, internally, in the spiritual world that was shown to me.
One thread runs through all of it that I want to write about. In the Sangoma tradition in South Africa, there is a practice of honouring the ancestors. My understanding of honouring a statue of the Buddha is much the same, honouring what a person can become, and honouring those who came before. We do not worship the ancestors, we honour them. We do not worship the Buddha, we honour him. Looking at the Buddha, seeing how balanced and intelligent he is, and chanting his name in song, invokes the space we wish to become. It is an honouring of his pathway, and a desire to follow it because of the good it brought. That distinction matters to me, and it will run through everything I write from here.
Each of these visions is its own story. Each one was shown to me in a specific ceremony, in a specific place, at a specific moment in my Journey of Asazi.
Some visions belong only to the ceremony, to the people who were present, to the space that was held. Those are not mine to share. But these are mine, asking to be told. I have held them for a long time, and now it is time to write about them.
Writing these stories takes time. If they mean something to you, you can support my writing here.
