Ayahuasca

Dear S,

Do you ever feel cheated about God?

This isn’t a rhetorical question: ask yourself right now, because there are some days I do. Every time I walk into church I’m happy to see the people I love — but where's the God I love? Where are the miracles? Where's the knock-you-off-your-feet inspiration that makes you follow a guy three days into the desert and not bring any food? Where’s the guy who knew Jesus — who was taught by Jesus — where's anybody who literally walked with Jesus?

I don’t want to just hear about Jesus. I want to hear Him. I don’t just want a lecture about the Holy Spirit. I want to know I feel Him. These days of hearing an echo of an echo of a letter from a prophet aren’t quite doing it for me. We’re told An adulterous generation asks for a sign and that much is certainly true. But did you ever ask yourself what of the generation that doesn’t? What if an adulterous generation never needed proof of God — no visions of angels, no healing the sick, no raising the dead? Are we "better” believers just because nobody speaks in tongues now? Or are we involved in an elaborate con game — the saccharine, pantomime, shadow-puppet of the Spirit? The one with no sustenance and half the flavor?

This last year when I heard about the Being of Light — the one people are meeting as they die — I believed in Him because people touched Him. And those who touched Him said He was the best thing that ever happened to them. He’s been telling us all kinds of things about who we are and what we mean to Him and what we fail to do and how to fix it. Because of Him we're feeling things we've never felt before. These stories are all so real to me I can almost feel them myself. So I worship that. I’m all for Him because He’s more than a book or a lecture or a doctrine*: He’s an experience. And He loves us. And some of us can feel it.

But how do I get in real-life, right-in-front-of-me contact with Him like the others did? Short of dying itself, a mystery.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining here. I’ve been calling out for help, mostly about my character, and been getting it. I’ve been calling out in thanks, and my whole being responds by feeling it. I ask for forgiveness and I hope I’ve been dealt it. But this is as far as I’ve gotten. It’s enough to get me by, but I’m an addict of sorts and I’m getting antsy — curious — restless. I want to see my Father and tell Him I love Him and to hear Him say it back and that He’s with me. Hearing other people say it about Him isn’t enough. Wondering if He really means it about me isn’t enough. And I’m tired of hearing about the Holy Spirit and wondering if I already hear Him or if I’m just talking to myself. Go ahead and ask people at church this question. If you're honest, you won’t get an answer you like.

The Gospel itself should make people so ecstatic they throw everything away. I believe Christians should look wild and romantic and psychotic like Saint Paul. But they don’t — I don’t. And that bothers me. What I want is to get knocked off my feet like Saint Paul and turn into a madman. I want to feel God’s presence so powerfully that everything else in life for the rest of my life feels like a shadow. I’ve been there for short moments, but it always goes away, and you wonder when it’s over if what you felt was even real.

I know I feel this, anyway. But the question is, don’t you too?

Yours,

-J

*A nameless bearded old black man made a point to me this week. He asked, do you know your parents, or believe in them?

Language is a tricky thing, he said, and notice when we use "belief.” It’s when we doubt something. We don’t believe in our parents because we know them. We don't “believe in” anything we know. We only believe in things we don’t know. "Belief” is a tacit confession that we don’t actually know it for sure.

My dream is to not say I believe in Jesus, but to say, with the confidence of a child, that I know Him.

**I wrote this essay because over the past week I heard the Being of Light isn’t the only divine being in the universe. I'm told people have been taking ayahuasca, and they’ve been reporting contact not with themselves or “the universe,” but with a cosmic Serpent.

Accounts vary, but the general idea is that once you take this drug the chances you’ll meet the Serpent is high. This Serpent will tell you all kinds of things about yourself. Maybe she'll tell you she loves you, maybe that you messed up. Maybe she’ll show you where you went wrong and what damage you caused your loves ones. Maybe this will make you cry like a baby because nobody has ever shown you yourself and what you really did before. Maybe she’ll tell you, like she told Mike Cernovich, that she’ll re-write your whole DNA and make you a new being**. Maybe you’ll feel loved like never before, and that as she wraps herself around you and looks into your eyes you’ll feel an inner peace, like she gave to Graham Hancock. Maybe it’s the inner peace of a mother and child reunited. Maybe it’s the inner peace of asphyxiation.

Mike Cernovich says, in his recommendation for The Cosmic Serpent,

When ayahuasca hits your system, you feel it moving through your body like a serpent. During an encounter, the ayahuasca told me, “I’m altering your DNA.” This was bizarre. I hadn’t read the cosmic serpent nor any other books on ayahuasca. I went into the experience “blind” to it. [...]

The Serpent is real. Whether The Serpent is good or evil or beyond good and evil is another debate totally.

Graham Hancock — an atheist — goes further in his introduction to The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name:

Drinking Ayahuasca is hard work. The brew tastes obnoxious—a mixture of battery acid, rancid socks, raw sewage, and just a hint of chocolate—and routinely induces diarrhea, intense sweating, and projectile vomiting followed by exhausting bouts of dry retching. The visions that accompany all this can sometimes be terrifying, and sometimes deeply comforting. Extraordinary swirling, scintillating geometric patterns provide an otherworldly backdrop, but the visions also routinely include encounters with intelligent entities, sometimes in human form, sometimes in animal form, and sometimes in the form of part-animal, part-human hybrids—known technically as therianthropes (from the Greek therion, meaning wild beast and anthropos meaning man).

[...] Very commonly these entities appear as serpents or as serpent/human hybrids, and “Mother Ayahuasca” herself, the entity believed by many to be the supernatural intelligence behind the brew, is frequently depicted in shamanic art as a serpent or as a serpent therianthrope. I have met “her” in this form many times. On one memorable occasion, for example, “she” appeared to me as a great boa constrictor twenty or thirty feet in length. She wrapped her coils gently around my body, laid her huge head on my shoulder, and gazed into my eyes for an infinity. She seemed very real to me—indeed more real than real—and her presence (despite the “natural” horror that we humans are supposed to have of serpents) was that of a deeply compassionate, utterly beautiful goddess who simply loved me for the longest while during which “she” repeatedly beamed into my mind what felt like a telepathic message—a very simple, very basic message delivered nonetheless with astonishing, breathtaking power—that I needed to be kinder and more nurturing to others.

[...] Many thousands of people have undergone encounters with “her” during Ayahuasca sessions and have had their behavior and their outlook profoundly changed as a result. […] We may be shown episodes from our lives in which we have behaved unkindly or unjustly to others, or been mean-spirited and unloving, or have failed to live up to our own potential. And we will be shown these things with absolute clarity and transparency, with all illusions and excuses stripped away, so we are confronted with nothing more nor less than the cold, hard truth about ourselves. Such revelations can be very painful. Frequently people cry during Ayahuasca sessions because of them. But they bring insight and give us the chance to change our behavior in the future: to be more nurturing and less toxic, to be more considerate of others, and to be more aware than we were before of the incredible privilege the universe has given us by allowing us to be born in a human body—an opportunity for growth and improvement of the soul that we absolutely must not waste.

This all sounds like people’s experiences with the Being of Light. But ask yourself: is this just how the Serpent introduces herself? And do people who follow her eventually turn into the Incas?

Who the hell knows. The big question is, why is the Serpent right around the corner and why do I have to die to see Jesus? Can I wait until I die to believe the God of the universe is going to change me — right now — into the New Man He always promised? To feel that I’m loved and claimed beyond anything I could screw up?

***As I’ve gotten older my take on the Bible has changed multiple times. When I was young, the Bible was the word of God. That means it happened as it was written. Then it became a fraud about God by men. This means a lot of what's written didn’t happen. Then I realized things didn't have to happen in order for them to still be true. This is taking things allegorically, like Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden. But now I'm wondering if I’m just a man, and that I don't know everything about the Bible. This happens when you thought the Serpent was an allegory, and now you realize it’s a literal being — and that it still, to this day, promises us the same thing.

Adam and Eve were asked, don’t you want to be like God? Don’t you want to know the difference between good and evil? And they said yes. And the Serpent delivered. They became new beings and were kicked out of God’s presence in the Garden. Thus we come to a new series of questions. Is the original sin just trying to reach harder for the divine than God Himself allows? Isn't this how we got Satan? And is the forbidden fruit ayahuasca?

But even more importantly than this: why is the God of the Bible so hard to contact directly? And why is the Serpent right at hand?

My theory — a developing theory, I insist — is that the reason we don't feel God and don't see His hand is because we rely too much on ourselves. Science killed this feeling, but it was mostly riches.

When you’re safe and doing well and planning and winning you don’t reach out as hard. And when things aren't dire you tend to rely on yourself. Cause and effect. The laws of physics. Wisdom literature and tactical prowess. God gave you a mind and you use it and your mind anchors you right here, right now. The more successful you become the more short-sighted you become. Life is the goal; and the harder you hang on to this life, the more you let go of the Life-Giver.

But it's when you're at wit's end that you see Him. Thus the apostles and prophets threw themselves on God’s grace and God caught them. Christ said to look at the lilies of the field and Americans almost never believed Him. Was He commanding it because He wanted us to relax — a cosmic Baloo? Or was He commanding it because if we didn’t bank on Him, we couldn’t see Him? I see people every now and then say a prayer and launch into the unknown. It’s these people, generally, who report the loaves-and-fishes miracles.

But even then the case isn’t open-and-shut. A Christian says he sees the hand of God. A Roman would say fortune favors the bold. When you’re not responsible for what happens, whether you blame Jesus Christ or Lady Luck, you’re going to get a surprise. What you see is what you're looking for.

So I have a second theory. If you read the Gospels one aspect of humanity sticks out. It’s that God Himself can be standing right next to you and if you’re not careful you could miss Him. Even if you think you’re looking for Him you might miss Him. Paul himself says some men have entertained angels without knowing it.

What does this mean? That the entrance of God into a life is usually controversial — and like all real controversies, there is an argument for and against: not that both are equally true, but that both are effectively persuasive. And maybe you’ll see Him and convince yourself you didn’t.

So maybe pray not that you’ll see Him, but that when you do next time, you’ll know who He is.

****I haven’t tried ayahuasca, but I’ve dabbled plenty in ecstasy and mushrooms and amphetamines and acid; and although none of these have introduced to me to any beings, the practice of Silva Mind Control introduced me to a number.

To most of you this might sound insignificant; but what this means, to me, is that I got in contact with some intelligence that wasn’t human. I was in a trailer park snorting meth around 2002 and going through a junkie’s library. Most of his books were stupid, but one stood out to me — a short paperback that promised me control of a mind. I thought it meant other people’s. The book meant I could control my own.

To a fool such as myself this came as a big disappointment. Who the hell wants to control his own mind? I thought. But as I got into it he taught me how to slow myself down and meditate — how to manage the frequency of my own being — how to get myself to a frequency where I could pitch myself suggestions. And he taught me, when I got myself to this frequency, how to get in contact with a spirit guide.

I tried hard to hear the spirit guide’s voice. I thought maybe, laughably, it was a Scotsman with a thick brogue, or maybe a voice like Bill Cosby. This was me trying to force what wasn’t there. But when I finally got a message there wasn’t a voice at all. It was a number.

43, it said. I kept waiting and again the number 43, and again. That was it. I was baffled, to say the least. I thought I’d wasted my time. I thought maybe I’m supposed to die at 43 — which is still a possibility. I asked my middle-aged roommate whether 43 meant anything to him and he said no. But he was an idiot anyway, and I didn’t know where else to look. So I shelved the book and never looked back until last month.

It was then, about 20 years after the incident, that my wife randomly said 43 meant something. I don’t even remember how it came up, but she was goofing off on the internet and said 43 meant enlightenment. Go ahead and look it up. It means creative energy and a spiritual drive. It means being heavy on introspection and a chasing of certainty and perfection. The vibe is positive and the general trajectory of the number is up. It wasn’t me at the time, but it’s the man I became.

Another incident makes me think I touched something otherworldly. In 2006 I was in the throes of a suicidal heartbreak and dating a girl I never loved named K—. She had cute blonde bangs and nice curves. She was into occult stuff like tarot cards and wanted to do a reading for me. I finally agreed and she pulled me into her room and read me the cards. I don’t remember the specifics of what she said, but the general gist of it was this: that I would take off on an adventure, that I would find the woman I was supposed to be with, and that I would master all my obstacles. Needless to say, K— wasn't happy.

Whether or not this reading is true forever — particularly about the obstacles — is beside the point. I left her for Seattle the same year and met my future wife and began writing. Since 2008 I've been chasing God and my whole life, since then, because of God’s grace alone, has been a giant climb upward. And I’m convinced that in the end, I’m going to meet Him, and that meeting Him will be the most beautiful experience in my entire life. That’s a victory that transcends everything else. Even if I die in a gulag I still win.

What I’m getting at isn’t that occultists have all the answers. But they share the same universe we do and the spirits are real and intelligent — and if we have a word from them, not all of them are pointing in the wrong direction. I just wonder, when God seems to be silent, where I’m supposed to be pointed. The Christians say He gave us a book — and maybe that’s enough. Forgive me Lord for not being content with everything you give me, but I want to see you and talk to you or one of your angels in person.

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