The Light Within

Within me, within my friends, within my teachers, within my home and within YOU

You

You don’t need me. You don’t need anything you read. You need neither Hollywood-fueled propaganda nor Pfizer-funded news. You don’t need Ayahuasca, or a human teacher, or a sign. What kind of sign are you looking for, anyway? Imagine this sentence is that sign, or better yet, imagine that the sign is the looking itself — whatever resides within you, seeking. I’ll keep writing, because I’m a narcissist, but there isn’t much more to say. I’ve probably already said too much. Whatever song you’re longing to hear, you’re free to stop pretending you’ll find it amongst the birds, on the radio or in a blog. You’re free to sing it to yourself.

Adora

“Falling in love with your potential — I think that’s what it’s about. We’re making up our story each day. Indulge whoever you really are right now, and be that. Whatever is true on the inside, feel that. Feel your experience in life fully.”

Adora is a woman I just met three days ago, and this morning she’s been sharing musings like these with me. We’re sitting in the clouds, atop a hill overlooking the Andes mountains, where we’ve convened a humble Vilcabamba writer’s group.

When we met, Adora and I tracked closely and related on many levels: We’re both budding writers beginning to share their internal words, and we’re both sensitive souls who are picky about the company we keep. We tend to feel the energy of those around us, and so spend a lot of time alone, but nonetheless crave the presence of other creatives from time to time. Writing ideas flow from such presences, yet actual writing flows from ourselves. When we can be our True Selves with other people — being ourselves authentically, as if we’re alone — magic can ensue.

In the matrix of modernity, as I called it in last week’s blog post on gender and societal structure, we often wear inauthentic masks. A mask of concocted personality hides the vulnerabilities of our real selves, and proves necessary to our survival in a competitive world of dominance hierarchies and social status games. The mask is what drives us to post a perfectly-angled, smiling selfie to social media, even when the truth of our authentic self is that we’re depressed, seeking the dopamine hit of validating “likes” while anxiously fearing judgment. Obviously, dichotomies like mask vs. authentic self, or like matrix vs. authentic reality, aren’t strict binaries of black and white. We live in grey areas; some enlightened beings share radiant authenticity amidst the chaos of big city modernity, and some people live their whole lives in the sticks without ever truly understanding themselves. Authenticity isn’t about absolutes, because absolutes aren’t absolutely true. Authenticity is about the ever-changing reality of what’s true within — within us, and within a moment. That sentence felt true when I wrote it a moment ago, but maybe I’d write a different sentence tomorrow. I write only what’s authentic to me now: what I feel, what I see, and the trends I observe.

In my observation, the trends of modernity are toward artifice and superficiality. Pixels arbitrate almost all the knowledge we believe we have in this information age, and algorithms (a.k.a. the ideologically-bent tech companies who control search and social media) arbitrate our notions of truth. The internet of things (of which we’re becoming a part) creates layers of illusion that fill Mark Zuckerberg’s wetaverse dreams, and constitutes the perfect stomping grounds for technosheeple to don masks in the form of false online personas. Masks of face diapers may adorn today’s humans in public, but our masks of personality cover our authentic selves in private, as well. In fact, I believe most humans today are so imbedded within masks of personality that they, themselves, have forgotten who they really are.

Aya

The weirdest thing about being high on Ayahuasca is that, amidst this disorienting and otherworldly experience, you feel more “yourself” than ever. The psychedelic “trip” doesn’t feel unreal; rather, it feels realer than real. It feels so real that, rather than questioning it, you instead question the reality of the baseline state of consciousness — the consciousnesses stifled by masks, construct and persona. Mama Aya ruthlessly, yet lovingly, makes you face yourself and your masks. She makes you realize you’re just a selfish primate playing games, she makes you see all of your bullshitting (of others and of yourself) and she shows you that despite all that fallibility, you’re still worthy of love. She sees you — ignorance, foibles and all — and she loves you anyway. After enough time and work with the medicine, you see yourself — in all your shittiness — and you love yourself anyway. She loves You, and You love You, because You aren’t you. You aren’t the small self the matrix created; you aren’t your Instagram profile, the jokes you stole from someone else or the bravado you adopted to shroud your painful insecurities. In accepting that you (the small self) are nothing more than a joke, it becomes clear that You are so much more than you ever imagined.

This is how we come to know our True Selves: we pick apart the falsity of our small selves until there’s nothing left to pretend. We get real. We discard our mask and we discover our presence.

The power of Ayahuasca is that she allows a group of people, protected within a sense of community, to all get real, all together. You see prim and proper girls puking their guts out. You see grown women literally shitting the bed. You see middle-aged men crying like little bitches. You see yourself crying like a little bitch, and you’re free. Whatever point there ever was in wearing a mask flies out the window. Whatever silly notions your small self had, of being invincible or of being in control of your emotions, die. Aya puts a gun of authenticity to your head, and gives you no choice but to be who you really are.

Then you find yourself sitting in a circle, among a dozen or more people being who they really are, and you tap into something powerful, something encoded in ancestry, some part of our DNA that we forgot about. Sharing, being heard, listening, accepting and being accepted — alongside authentic humans sitting in a circle, within which everyone can see everyone — these are the lost tribal ways of our past. Returning to who we really are allows a reconnection to the authentic self, but just as importantly, it allows authentic connection to others — not mask-to-mask, but human-to-human. After decades of numbness and superficiality, some matrix refugees find the authentic connection for which we’re evolved to be genuinely unfamiliar. I found it to be nearly revolutionary. Granted, I’d begun cutting through my masks through meditation, and even through the ascetic experience of Survivor, which provided enough suffering to engender deep bonds with other contestants. Yet, Survivor epitomizes paradox, combining co-survival with a game of deceptive manipulation, and combining the raw authenticity of island life with the rank artifice of television production. And even meditation was limited in its mask-breaking capacity, because after practicing vipassanā for thousands of hours, I found that I was wearing a mask called, “serious meditator.” When I shared guided meditations on Instagram and my podcast, I felt pressure to speak in a soft meditative voice that wasn’t exactly my own, but was the voice of Western mindfulness culture. Psychedelics were what it took to truly pierce the veil and give the small self called Spencer the death blow. So, thank you for that, Ayahuasca.

I thank Ayahuasca for so much more than just an experience of ego-death. I thank her for showing me that death itself isn’t worth being afraid of, and for bringing me back to my first-ever meditative insight, that in fact, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I thank her for loving me through all my flaws, and for allowing me to discover a self-love I’d never known before. I thank Ayahuasca for all the awe-inspiring visions she’s shown me, and also for teaching me that visions ain’t shit:

Once, during an Aya ceremony in Guatemala, I had an extremely vision-heavy journey where images, fantastical colors and symbols just kept coming. Most of my journeys have been light on visuals, but this one was bombarding me with sights of sacred geometry, human archetypes and incomprehensible flashes of things I couldn’t categorize. I found my mind trying to make sense of it, questioning: “what’s the significance of this?” Ayahuasca kept serving me increasingly vivid visions, but my mind wasn’t generating any takeaways, lessons or insights. I asked the spirit of Aya: “What does this mean? It all looks really amazing, but… what’s the point?” The visions started getting more whacky and cartoonish: jesters, carnival-game-looking objects, multicolored lights strobing wildly. “I DON’T GET IT AYAHUASCA. What’s this supposed to show me? WHAT’S REAL?” As soon as I asked “what’s real?”, a hand appeared, formed into a fist and facing away from me. The hand slowly rotated 180 degrees, and its index finger slowly extended into a pointing gesture; it was pointing back at me.

Instantly, I understood. I am real. I am the only thing, in fact, that I know to be real.

What I see, hear, feel, taste, smell and think is comprehended only within myself. Everything perceived externally has an internal correlate, and is rendered sensible inside of my mind. I know that these external “things” are being perceived, but I can’t prove that they exist outside of that internal perception. I can’t disprove the possibility that it’s all hallucination. Hell, if Zuckerberg gets his way and we all end up living in virtual reality pods, it will all be hallucination. What if it already is, we’re already living in the “metaverse,” and we’re only being introduced to the “metaverse” as a concept so that we can be brought up to speed about our reality? We could all just be pre-awakening Neos, sitting in a vat of goo and being harvested by machines. As René Descartes concluded in Discourse on the Method, the text engaging in “Cartesian Doubt” and producing the (in)famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” we can call all of our sense perceptions into question. The mouth-sounds we hear when someone speaks mean nothing, except for what we’re programmed to believe they mean. The pixels you’re looking at mean nothing, but they signify letters to you, and those letters signify words to you, because language is what you’ve been programmed to see. Visions mean nothing. Nothing means anything, except for what we decide it means. In a sense, then, our external lives are just a manifestation of our internal worlds. We’re responsible for all of it, because we’re the ones ascribing meaning to it. Deriving meaning from the outer culture rather than from ourselves, and wearing masks we adopted from that external cultural matrix, is nothing other than a disconnection from the authentic Self — from the Real.

Among the thousands of lessons and blessings for which I thank Aya, I thank her most sincerely for getting me in touch with my True Self. Whereas my small self had a bunch of ideas, hopes and fears about plant medicine before my first ceremony, today my True Self has a real relationship with Aya. She was a second mother to me, delivering the second chance at childhood she promised back when we first met in April 2019. She was the most inspiring teacher — plant or human — I ever knew. She’s a true friend, a trusted advisor, and even the next-tree neighbor to my home in Ecuador:

And yet…

I used the past tense when I wrote that she was a mother and a teacher. After sixteen ceremonies over thirty-one months, I don’t know that I’ll ever drink Ayahuasca again. Looking at the beautiful vine in the picture above — the plant responsible for some of the most profound spiritual insights of my life — I realize that this vision, too, means nothing. This vision is one of a majestic vine, a sacred plant teacher, because that’s the reality I ascribe to the sight. Ayahuasca is me in vine form, and I am Ayahuasca in the form of a man’s meaning-making. The visions Aya has shown me mean nothing in a vacuum, and Aya herself means nothing in a vacuum. She means a tremendous amount to the non-vacuumed, relational human being writing these words, and that’s precisely why it might be a good idea for that human being to stop looking to her for guidance.

Maya

If Aya was a second mom, Maya is a third mom, and she tends to regard Aya as a jealous new stepmom regards an old stepmom always pestering dad for child support. That’s not really true, but hey, words aren’t really true, and those words made me chuckle. Maya encourages me to move on from plant medicine work, but not from a place of Taoist dogma. She does dig the Dao, and she does consider herself a follower of the Buddha, but she doesn’t deny the usefulness of plant medicine. She herself has experimented with, and benefitted from, plant teachers like Ayahuasca and San Pedro (fun fact: Maya and I technically don’t live in Vilcabamba, but in “San Pedro de Vilcabamba,” a smaller neighboring town with the namesake of the psychedelic cacti that grow all over the place here). Maya will tell you that these sacred plants have helped her, but that much like any teacher or teaching, they aren’t to be clung to.

In the interview I just released on my podcast, Redeeming Disorder, Maya talks about one of the most famous parables in Buddhism — a lesson I also emphasized in the closing paragraph of my master’s thesis. We find this lesson originally in the Sutta Pitaka of the Pali Canon, but Maya encountered it mostly in the Zen monasteries of her homeland of Korea. It is called the “raft parable,” and the story goes:¹

A man traveling along a path came to a great expanse of water. As he stood on the shore, he realized there were dangers and discomforts all about. But the other shore appeared safe and inviting. The man looked for a boat or a bridge and found neither. But with great effort he gathered grass, twigs and branches and tied them all together to make a simple raft. Relying on the raft to keep himself afloat, the man paddled with his hands and feet and reached the safety of the other shore. He could continue his journey on dry land.

Now, what would he do with his makeshift raft? Would he drag it along with him or leave it behind? He would leave it, the Buddha said. Then the Buddha explained that the dharma [truth, or teachings of Buddhism] is like a raft. It is useful for crossing over but not for holding onto, he said.

Buddhism, Ayahuasca, my writing, my guided meditations, and all teachings of any kind — these are all just forms, or rafts that can help us to cross a river. If we equate the crossing of the river with the raft itself, our journey will stagnate. If we focus perpetually on a teaching, we miss the journey being taught about, staring at a pointing hand rather than at the Truth to which the hand points. Worst of all, if we become attached to a teacher personality — human, plant, alien, god(dess) or whomever — we disempower ourselves. Maya and I both believe that all teachers can be useful, but we also believe that ultimately, all teachers are meant to be let go of. Attachment to a teacher fundamentally strips us of our own inherent resourcefulness, and shrouds the truth that, no matter how unlikely it may seem, the answers we seek always lie within. Many teachers in the world of esoteric spirituality actually intend, whether consciously or subconsciously, to exploit their students by encouraging disempowering attachment. We will obviously do well to move on from those poor teachers, but less intuitively, we will also do well to move on from great teachers. The teachers who offer the most wisdom can paradoxically be the most dangerous, because they lull seekers into an externalization of their own wisdom, trapping them in a perpetual seeking that blocks self-empowered peace.

Nowhere is this trend more pernicious, from my observation, than in Ayahuasca circles. Fake shamans exploiting wounded wanderers for money (which is astoundingly common, especially in populated parts of Peru and South / Central America where Ayahuasca has become an industry) is the obvious example of plant medicine work gone awry. Yet, even the most earnest, well-meaning and real shamans can create rafts to which people unhelpfully cling. In my travels through the wild realms of spiritual seeking, I’ve met countless lost souls clinging to such rafts, from Buddhists who construe breaking the Buddha’s precepts as an unforgivable sin, to Ayahuasqueros who’ve drunk plant medicine hundreds of times and learned next to nothing. Sometimes people who do psychedelics every other week, never integrating what they “learn” into their lives, wind up more broken than when they started. In fact, enough of these people exist in spiritual communities to give the spirituality-curious great pause. Are we even meant to see beyond the typical baseline human perspective? Does unearned wisdom cause more harm than benefit? Why are so many meditators, yogis and plant medicine aficionados somewhat dysfunctional people? These are all very valid questions that you might be wondering.

There is no single definitive answer to them, but there are three phenomena I’ll point to as likely answers:

1. Selection Bias: Spiritual communities tend to attract people with wounds who are looking for answers. One could argue that such people are just sensitive to their vulnerabilities, and that seemingly better-adjusted people are numb to the wounds within us all. In any case, though, it’s somewhat rare that someone who believes he “has it together” feels compelled to delve deep into spiritual work.

2. Knowledge ≠ Embodiment: Finding powerful spiritual technologies like Ayahuasca or vipassanā meditation is no guarantee of growth. In fact, sometimes it can be the opposite: There’s a common trend in the developed Western world of “spiritual bypassing,” whereby people go through the motions of “spiritual work,” or escape their life and problems via retreats, merely as a way to feel like they’re being productive. They meditate and meditate when really, they should have been cleaning up their diet and making some friends. They go on Ayahuasca retreat, get high and see some cool shit, then go back to their lives as cognitively dissonant alcoholics. It happens all the time.

3. The Dark Night of the Soul: Finally, even for those who genuinely walk a spiritual path and grow, life often gets harder before it gets easier. Typical baseline consciousness is grounding in many ways; it enjoys the validation of a superficial culture, it promises fulfillment in ego gratification, and it “centers” us in a self that is the seedbed for desires. Satisfying these desires always yields a fulfillment that turns out to be fleeting, but insofar as we can remain in the illusion that getting A, experiencing B or accomplishing C will actually bring happiness, we can be content atop the ego’s house of cards. Spiritual work means collapsing the house and going through a process of painful disillusionment. As we wake up, we find ourselves without an anchor, susceptible to nihilism, disgust at the selfish desires that have always driven us, and misery in our predicament of perpetually scratching these animal itches. If we can endure our “dark night of the soul,” we eventually make peace with what it is to be human, but people who have walked the long path to that peace are rarer in spiritual communities than people who are still in the dark. A common analogy for spiritual awakening is that it’s like going skydiving and realizing there’s no parachute. You fall, reeling in terror, but you only panic until you realize that there’s also no ground.

Until one walks this path effectively, and until one realizes that there’s no ground, one will grasp at external things — substances, teachers, traditions, etc. — in the hopes that something will turn out to be a parachute. Genuine insights will sustain the spiritual ego, just as gratifying desires sustains the ordinary ego, but the spiritual ego is still an ego, and the spiritual seeker will eventually realize that a sense of lack underlies this act of seeking. Of course, seeking something new can repeatedly fool us into thinking that an external thing can cure our internal feeling of lack. There’s always something new — something we imagine might finally give us the answers that last forever, something we delude ourselves into believing will finally be it. We might realize that weed wasn’t it, and our spiritually transcendent romance wasn’t it, and our great vipassanā insights weren’t it, and our ego death and rebirth on Ayahuasca wasn’t it, but still find ourselves believing that, surely, the next new-new will be it. In my case, I’ve tripped on five grams of psilocybin mushrooms (the “heroic dose,” as Terrence McKenna called it), but never on ten grams. Maybe a ten gram mushroom trip is it. I haven’t done too much kundalini yoga or chakra opening; maybe that’s it. I’ve never tried smoking DMT, which can be much more dramatic than imbibing DMT via Ayahuasca. Maybe smoking DMT is it! I’ve also never tried Bufo Alvarius, the toad whose venom contains the psychedelic compound 5-MeO-DMT, which is supposedly 4-5x more powerful than DMT. Maybe 5-MeO-DMT is it!

Gura

To show you where such a train of reasoning can take a person, I now need to tell you a cautionary tale: this is the story of a man named Leo Gura.

Leo had humble beginnings as a YouTuber back in 2013, creating content in the space of self-help. I discovered his channel in August 2015, shortly after an enormous experience of looking to something external (winning Survivor) for happiness, only to have my hopes crushed. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but my ego was starting to die, and I was turning to the internet for answers. In Leo I found someone talking about intensive meditation, but in a way that differed from most Western practitioners, who speak about spiritual practice in an almost-compulsory soft, flowery, feminized “dharma voice.” Leo advocated meditation, but in a brash, no-nonsense and practical style that allowed my masculine energy to hear him. He spoke of meditation within the context of self-help, lauding it as a sort of “ground-zero habit” that could support all other habits — going to the gym, honing skills and the type of self-improvement that appealed to my ego at the time. Leo released a video encouraging his audience to commit to meditating every day, no matter what, and I was persuaded. I began practicing every day in late 2016, and the past five years of deep exploration and spiritual awakening have followed largely because of that decision.

Leo’s an interesting figure for me, because I do have to thank him for that initial inspiration. Who knows what my path would have looked like without it? And yet, Leo also epitomizes the point of this blog post — that external influences can offer us a helping hand, but that we’re ultimately meant to let go of them. Only internally can we find the guidance of our higher selves, and ultimately, the spiritual path is one we must walk alone.

I watched a lot of Leo’s videos in 2016-2017, but in 2018, I started to question whether he was a useful guide. When I went to Lumbini, Nepal to go on vipassanā retreat at a monastery, a funny synchronicity emerged; I checked Leo’s YouTube channel, curious what he was up to, and he had just announced he was doing a monthlong meditation retreat as well. “Sweet,” I thought: “I’ll go get enlightened in Nepal, and then see how my guy Leo’s retreat went afterwards.” I didn’t get enlightened at all, but I did do the deepest spiritual work I’d done yet, and then I spent another very rewarding month staying in hostels and trekking through the Himalayas. Leo, on the other hand? He quit his meditation efforts after two weeks because he “wasn’t getting the results he was hoping for” (basically defeating the point of a practice aimed at accepting the present moment as it is), and he pivoted to doing psychedelics during the second half of his retreat. I knew he’d been experimenting with mushrooms and 5-MeO-DMT, and his experimentation had actually opened my mind to trying psychedelics myself, but quitting a meditation retreat to do them repeatedly? This didn’t seem like a wise or skillful approach. I stopped following Leo as a guide at that point, but I continued to check in on his channel every few months to see how his path was unfolding.

I saw an increasingly psychedelic-obsessed, isolated, confused and angry man, and every time I checked in, I found myself wondering, “how the hell did I take this guy seriously?” Leo’s path went from motivating, to confusing, to concerning, to clearly wayward. And then, in 2020, Leo’s downward spiral reached a crescendo:

This deranged man took 5-MeO-DMT — arguably the most powerful psychedelic on earth — every day… for thirty… consecutive… days.

When I told my first Ayahuasca shaman about this utterly reckless consciousness experiment, she just shook her head and said, “yeah… he’s never coming back from that.” Indeed, outside of the 0.0001% chance that Leo is actually a deity incarnate (nowadays he actually claims, repeatedly, “I am God”), he’s likely broken his mind forever. He still makes YouTube videos, and has effectively built a career around preaching to a cult-like audience that praises everything he says. He claims to have attained far more wisdom than Jesus, the Buddha or any other human ever has, and if anyone offers him a reality check in the comments section, he simply calls them a fool.

It’s easy to spectate on this descent into egomania and assume we’re many cuts above Leo’s tendencies, but I believe there’s a little Gura in all of us. Leo is the exemplar of a tendency within all humans — to rely on the external (e.g. psychedelics), yet believe the fruits we find (e.g. unearned, unembodied wisdom) belong to us. He also exemplifies an erroneous way of thinking that I believe we’re all susceptible to: the “Guru-Fool Fallacy,” as I call it.

The Guru-Fool Fallacy lulls us into sorting every person who vocally shares opinions into one of two boxes — either guru, or fool. Leo’s audience sees him as a guru, and hangs on his every excessive word (his weekly videos run hours and hours). Followers fuel his own self-perception, too, enabling Leo to genuinely consider essentially every other human to be a fool relative to himself. This is not what I mean when I write about “the light within.” As soon as we think we have no darkness within, our human body becomes a vehicle for that darkness to drive — a playground for our shadow side, which inevitably exists. Leo and his channel are an extreme example of branding people gurus and fools, but the same dynamic affects all of our perceptions to some degree. The wounded wanderers who find their way to Ayahuasca circles and meditation retreats are often looking for someone who has all the answers. The spiritual seeker who searches externally for “the answers” craves a guru, and thus must determine which sources are trustworthy and which aren’t. The seeker must separate the wheat of an enlightened being (presuming there even is such a thing) from the chaff of fools.

It also makes sense evolutionarily that humans would be primed to quickly brand someone as trustworthy or untrustworthy — fellow tribe member or enemy, friend or foe. I’ll link a video I linked in my last blog post again, starting at the point where clinical psychology professor Mattias Desmet adeptly explains the phenomenon of “mass formation,” and how humans are hardwired to bond socially over a shared mythos. Desmet speaks about the mythos around the Covid pandemic, but the concepts apply to our beliefs and bonds in a more general sense, too. Agreeing on a shared story is fundamental to human social cohesion; we feel a need for those in our “tribe” to agree with us, and to give us a sense of comfort by validating the way we see the world. It’s difficult for us to accept that someone could have a lot of wisdom if they espouse opinions we don’t like, hence today’s polarization and echo chambers, whereby wrong-think quickly brands dissident voices as “foolish.” If we’re spiritual seekers, we badly want to meet someone we can consider a “guru,” but our evolutionary tribalism makes us prone to either blindly follow a Gura-like figure, or to call people fools as soon as they undermine our personal mythos. I’ve been guilty of thinking within this simplistic binary myself. Many times I’ve found myself listening to a potential “guru,” resonating with everything she’s saying, only to eventually hear something I disagree with and want to swiftly write her off as a “fool.”

In reality, no one is purely one or the other. It would be easy for me to say Maya Choi (one of the most “enlightened” people I know) is a guru and Leo Gura is a fool, but there does exist blindness within Maya, and there does exist wisdom within Leo. He understands some things about life, reality and spirituality that she doesn’t. Every partial human perspective is bound to have blind spots, and every partial human perspective is bound to have light within it. Life would be a lot easier if it really were black-and-white, and we didn’t have to reconcile with the truth of grey areas. I would love it if I could definitively land on a belief with respect to everything going on in the world right now, but the truth is that I can’t. Genuinely pursuing truth requires an open-mindedness that precludes almost any definitive conclusion. I can’t conclude that Leo is an absolute fool, or that Maya (or even Aya) is a guru. I can turn inward and trust that the answers lie inside, but I can’t definitively conclude that there exist no external teachers who will benefit me as I proceed on my path. I must believe in the light within me, yet also recognize my shadow and remain open to receiving wisdom in the most unexpected of people and places. Having realized over the past twenty months that the conventional wisdom of my old home country (and the narrative spun by its corrupt media) is mostly a crock of shit, I must remain open to revising my worldviews. I must remain open to the absurd. And trust me: absurd beliefs abound in my new hometown.

Vilcabamba

“We are all one.”

“Humans don’t require food and water; that’s just a paradigm. ‘Breatharians’ can survive solely off of sunlight, air and prana [life-force energy].”

“I’m currently embattled in complicated conflicts with three-letter agencies, nefarious alien races and 4-D AI consciousnesses. They took me to a psych ward after my last Ayahuasca retreat and injected me with hallucinogens to evaluate me as being crazy.”

“I talked to a victim of MK-Ultra mind-control, and he showed me classified documents that tipped me off to the plandemic before it happened.”

“We’re living in flood times, and Vilcabamba is Noah’s Ark.”

“We’re living in the end times, and the Covid vaccine is the mark of the beast. This is biblical — book of revelations playing out before our very eyes.”

“Reptilians have infiltrated all the highest levels of government. The Covid tyranny is the worst in the commonwealth countries, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, because they get their orders straight from the lizard queen.”

“Dragon families, royal bloodlines and everyone else left in charge by the Anunnaki are conspiring to depopulate the earth based on the Georgia Guidestones.”

“All of humanity is being enslaved and subsumed into an AI hivemind.”

I couldn’t make this shit up. The quotes above are a short highlight reel of the outrageous claims I’ve overheard in Vilcabamba, which is a haven for conspiracy theorists. Don’t get me wrong; there are all kinds of people here — local Ecuadorians, renowned osteopaths, healers of all stripes, mystics, tourists, transients, retirees, artists and people who can’t be categorized. Kooky expats don’t comprise all of the town, but at the same time, they’re prevalent enough that I’ve questioned my decision to live here more than once. I’ve questioned my own sanity, because after all, the people around us are essentially mirrors of our internal world. I came here, though, because I questioned the sanity of living in a big American city, too. Is it more insane to have the beliefs above, or is it more insane to routinely wear a face diaper, socially isolate and accept the precedent that people must inject into their body whatever the government tells them to? Truth be told, I think we’re all insane at this point.

The Vilcabambans who’ve told me the things making up my “overheard in Vilca” highlight reel haven’t struck me as particularly unhinged. They’ve seemed more “with it” than Joe Biden, at least. I don’t believe most of the things Vilcabamba conspiracy theorists say, but I also don’t view them as necessarily crazier than your average FOX-brainwashed or CNN-brainwashed American ingesting junk food and spending ten hours a day on screens. I wish I could take the intellectually lazy shortcut of assuming all conspiracy theories are 100% wrong, and sometimes I even wish I could take the intellectually lazy shortcut of assuming they’re right, but I can’t. A “plandemic” still seems pretty out-there to me, but the idea hasn’t been debunked, and the yearlong censorship of the Wuhan lab leak theory (which now appears likely) doesn’t exactly engender trust in the mainstream media’s narrative. Fauci (apparently) lying to congress about his NIH funding gain-of-function research that could have created Covid doesn’t exactly engender trust in “the science,” either. Trust in the “vaccine” has also plummeted, particularly in light of waning effectiveness requiring boosters, explosions in heart issues like myocarditis, and the fact that we’ve never had longitudinal data on the shot’s effects. The data that is coming in, like that on mortality and vaccination status from the British government’s Office for National Statistics, is not reassuring:

Some readers have pointed out that the age profiles of the vaccinated indicate that the chart above represents vaccination helping mildly. Maybe so. Maybe the shots do indeed diminish the severity of Covid. Yet, does that warrant railroading entire populations into a paradigm of perpetual boosters with waning effectiveness and no longitudinal data? What are we ultimately doing to our immune systems, and is this really wiser than are natural remedies (of which there are many; my shamans in the Amazon have healed their Covid using plants)? If most people getting the Omicron variant are vaccinated, and if the shots do next-to-nothing to reduce transmission, why are “vaccines” still being pushed as a moral obligation for the greater good, rather than being viewed as a personal choice? Why are these questions forbidden?

I pride myself on my honesty about what I do and don’t know, as well as on my open-mindedness, and I remain open as ever to being wrong about my “vaccine” skepticism. I believe in the science of (conventional) vaccines, after all, and have received more vaccines than 99% of humans. I just haven’t received this one, because at no point has the risk of Covid seemed greater to me than the risk of the mass-scale medical experiment we’re living through. Do I take comfort in a bunch of crazy expats, whom my monkey-mind might label “fools,” making the same decision? Of course not. Do I take comfort in people like Maya Choi and Becca Tzigany, whom my monkey-mind might label “gurus,” making the same decision? A little bit, but not much. I ultimately believe this is a personal decision for every person to make individually, which is why I’ve never shouted my perspective on the matter from the rooftops. I’ve never been an “anti-vaxxer,” unless you define “anti-vaxxer” to include those who oppose the government mandating medical procedures, in which case your definition is absurd, and anyone who doesn’t meet it is a sick, sick puppy. With the CDC changing it’s definition of “vaccine” ahead of the “pandemic,” simple terms with strong connotations (e.g. “anti-vaxxer”) are more weaponized than ever, which is why it’s more important than ever that we shirk name-calling and open to nuance.

What pains me the most about the “vaccine” is that it has exacerbated heartbreaking trends of polarized division and hatred that were already at a fever-pitch in our society. The animosity between republicans and democrats, between different races and between men and women was already bad enough, but now the climate around Covid has made our descent into vitriolic tribalism official, and made our journey out of it nearly impossible to envision. The “unvaccinated” are being barred from polite society in much of the developed world, and here in Vilcabamba the “vaccinated” are even shunned by many. As all of my loved ones other than my mom have decided to roll up their sleeves, I’ve been firm in my commitment to love all humans unconditionally, and to never turn my back on someone due to their decision on a matter that is genuinely unclear. My last blog post was about the dominator system — a matrix of mind-control permeating the modern, developed world — and how it thrives on sowing division, as patriarchy and feminism have done between the sexes. The solution to the division not only between men and women, but in our world at large, is coming together as one humanity.

I wish I could say that I know it’s possible. In the developed world, the narrative that insists the Covid shot is absolutely essential to health is winning, and I’ve had to leave that world. Modernity censors my beliefs — that we all have an innate healing capacity, and a robust immune system that can build natural immunity to something like Covid — to such an extent that I’m not sure I can be my authentic Self in a major U.S. city. Modernity thrives on denying the light within, and externalizing our truth, meaning-making and personalities to such an extent that my soul screams, “ECUADOR FOR LIFE!” At this point, having lived totally mask-free (free of both face diapers and masks of personality) for about half a year, I don’t know if I can go back. Still, I’ve held onto the U.S. in my heart, and I’ve held onto the hope of living a double-life with my partner between Vilcabamba and Chicago.

GoodbAya?

I actually had a flight to the U.S. booked for one month ago, right after an Ayahuasca retreat spanning from October 31 to November 3. I figured this two-ceremony retreat would be well-timed right before delving back into the matrix of Chicago, but I went into it unsure if I really wanted to keep going with plant medicine. Even before planning the retreat, I was questioning whether I’d ever drink Ayahuasca again, and whether I’d continue using psychedelics in general. I certainly didn’t want to end up on the path of Leo Gura. I’d also met many a lost soul posing as an Ayahuasquero, and despite having incredibly profound experiences with Aya, I was starting to get the sense that plant medicine is forward-leading for only a temporary period. I was questioning whether Aya remained a part of my path in my waking life, consciously, and my subconscious was also exploring the question in my dreams. On August 18, I dreamt that I was at the setting of an Ayahuasca retreat with my first shaman and many familiar faces from her circle. It didn’t feel right, and I wasn’t sure if the issue was the circle, the space, or all of plant medicine work as a whole. I tuned into my doubts about whether journeying with Aya again was a good idea.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, an androgynous but vaguely feminine voice spoke: “Next time you journey with me, I have a message for you.”

“Who is this?” I asked the only question that occurred to me. Having dreamt vividly and often lucidly for years, I can tell when dream content is just my psychological mind-stuff, and I can tell when it’s something more. This was something more.

“Ayahuasca.”

Tingles ran through my body at the response, because I wasn’t sure I’d “hear” anything back. After a moment, I asked, “Should I journey with you again?”

No response.

It was a poor question, because “should” is a poor word, and I got the sense that Aya would never tell me to journey with her or not to; the decision had to be mine. Knowing she had a message for me, though, made it an easy decision. I wanted to hear what la Madre had to say, so I planned a retreat for right before my scheduled return to the U.S. At such a crossroads and with so much of my life in upheaval, I couldn’t think of a better time to connect to my authentic Self (as Aya facilitates so naturally) and tune into my intuition. I went into the retreat stressed and scattered, because I was scrambling to finish the M.A. thesis on which I procrastinated for a year and a half. The final draft of my thesis happened to be due on the same day as my flight to the U.S., and as I powered off all my devices on October 31, I was prepared for an extremely hectic few days (of finishing the thesis while finding buses from Tena to Quito, and making my way to the airport) to commence November 3. When I began the first ceremony on November 1, though, Ayahuasca delivered her message loud and clear:

Stay in Ecuador. Ecuador is your home. Do not return to the U.S., and do not take the dark energies that are out and about in the world right now lightly. These energies are incredibly powerful, and right now, you are weak. It’s okay to be weak sometimes. You’ll be strong one day, and you’ll be ready to take on the world one day, but that day is not in the immediate future. Stay. In. Ecuador.

It’s not as if any of this was explicitly verbal, but this is what was conveyed somatically, emotionally and energetically by Aya. There was little doubt in my mind that this was the message she told me about in the dream, and there was little doubt in my mind that I’d do well to heed it. Aya was emphatic.

I listened to her. After the retreat I skipped my flight, upset my girlfriend (who was planning on being reunited within the week) and decided internally that I’d stay in Ecuador for at least the remainder of 2021. I returned to Vilcabamba, finished my thesis and carried on with life, though I was sad to be cut off from my loved ones. This sadness intensified around Thanksgiving, when my extended family (the “Reiman” family, from whom I took my middle name turned first name) had a huge celebration in Wisconsin that I missed. Maya softened the blow by inviting me to a rag-tag Ecuadorian expat Thanksgiving at her friend’s house, but I was nonetheless very bummed. I questioned Aya — whether I should have listened to her, and whether I was sure that “she” came to me in my dream and delivered this message in ceremony, rather than my (possibly deranged) subconscious mind. Could I be missing the holidays, disappointing my family and jeopardizing my relationship all because of a delusion? Have I gone crazy?

My questions were answered one week ago, when on November 29, the president of Ecuador announced a travel ban for anyone (even Ecuadorian citizens) who can’t show proof of vaccination against Covid. This rule went into effect December 1, and when I learned about it November 30, I realized that going to the U.S. would have meant being unable to return to Ecuador. Had I ignored Aya’s warning, I would have been estranged from my home, my land and the retreat center I’ve yet to build on it. Maybe this mandate will be undone, maybe I would have been fine being stuck in the U.S. and maybe I’m just a moron with long-Covid who should have gotten the “vaccine” months ago, but I doubt it. Aya corroborated what my intuition had been saying all along, giving me the confidence to listen to the light within. Or Aya corroborated the latent confirmation bias within, and the entire story I’ve laid out here is rife with delusion. I can’t prove that it’s the former, and I can’t disprove that it’s the latter, but I do have to pick a story to believe.

Between these two options, I choose to believe in myself, and to trust my instincts. I could forgive myself for my instincts being wrong, but ignoring my instincts that turn out to be correct would be much harder to accept. Of course, a third option could be to ignore my instincts, and just do what Aya says. Externally this would look identical to the option I’m going with, but internally it would be quite different. I’d be outsourcing my truth to Aya, and sending myself the message that rather than within, the answers lie without. As soon as Aya contradicted my instincts, rather than corroborating them, I’d be as the henpecked husband a decade into marriage, who buries his instincts and defers to his “better half.” It would be easy for me to conclude from these last two journeys with Aya that I need her; she saved me from making a life-altering blunder! Why wouldn’t I continue to do plant medicine work and receive guidance from above? Because there is no “above.” There is no “below.” There are our instincts, there’s the noise around us, there are decisions and there are consequences. I choose to live with the consequences of following my instincts and heeding the light within. Always.

In spiritual work, a recurring dichotomy emerges between the “absolute” and the “relative.” The relative is our monkey-mind, our animal drives and our social conditioning. The absolute is the Godhood that is part of us all, though never the whole of us. From the absolute perspective, even the consequences of our instincts and decisions aren’t inherently meaningful. There’s no “above” and “below,” no “good” and “bad,” no “right” and “wrong,” no “should.” We are relative humans, and so we must make moral judgments, even though God (the absolute) makes no judgments. God is fine with pandemics, murder and famine, as evidenced by the fact that these things happen. Humans are very much not fine with these things, nor “should” they be, because despite the Leo Guras of the world, we aren’t God. We are of God, but our perspectives are partial and relative; we have goods, bads, rights, wrongs and even those dreaded shoulds. As primates with severely overdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, we lead a precarious existence as animals harboring notions of the divine, and we must strike a paradoxical balance between the relative and the absolute. The relative says that the relative is all that matters, while the absolute says that neither the absolute nor the relative is more important than the other. Aya, being the closest-to-absolute being I’ve encountered, is self-negating in the same way that the absolute doesn’t prioritize itself over the relative. She would never tell me that I should journey with her, or that I should listen to her; she just offers me insight into the consequences of how I’m living my life. She also doesn’t pretend that the insight she offers me is only available to me through her; like any great teacher, she empowers me to find insight within myself.

Whereas the mainstream media encourages us to outsource our truth to it, and to its incredibly unscientific notions of “the science,” Aya would never encourage that we outsource our truth — to her, or to anyone. Ironically, she uses her absolute (relatively speaking) perspective to get us in touch with our relative human selves, and with our authenticity. As we discard layer after layer of our matrix-dwelling small self, we discover that the True Self is the relative version of us who embodies more of the absolute — our connection to the divine. Aya gets us in touch with our authentic human nature to such a degree that beneath all the humanity that isn’t authentic, we find our connection to God. Meditation, on the other hand, reveals the inauthenticity of our ideas of self directly, getting us so in touch with the absolute — the reality of No Self (“anatta”) — that we emerge as relative humans who are more selfless. No Self and True Self are just flip sides of the same coin, as are meditation’s movement toward an absolute perspective (which makes us “better” relative humans) and Aya’s guidance toward a relative authenticity that helps us better embody the absolute.

The complementary interplay of these “ascending” (to absolute perspective) and “descending” (to relative authenticity) paths is why I view practicing meditation and drinking Ayahuasca as the two wings of my aeronautical spirit animal. Perhaps other plant medicines and practices constitute further sets of wings, because truth be told, I always felt like having a single spirit animal is a scam (I like to think I have four: the eagle, the bat, the macaw and the dragonfly). Yet, for about a year now my vehicle has been off-balance, because the plant medicine wing has heavily outweighed the meditation wing. This imbalance began with the most profound experience of my life, when during my fourth Ayahuasca ceremony I had the experience of death and rebirth, the story of which I’ve already told. I try to hold this experience more loosely now, because my mind has made very much (probably too much) of it. I’ve spent a fair bit of time over-analyzing certain details of what happened, like why the divine light I saw before being reborn was in a shape like a cross:

I didn’t become a born-again Christian, but I did start slacking on meditation practice, and falling into a false belief that my seeking was resolved. It wasn’t.

During my fifteenth Ayahuasca ceremony just a month ago, I had a vision of the Buddha, and came away with a sense that I need to get back to basics. I need to reclaim my beginner’s mind, let plant medicine go, go inward and practice. Perhaps I’ll be called back to Aya at some point; another dream or a strong intuition might compel me to return to medicine work. I don’t believe in drawing absolute lines in the sand, so I’m not necessarily saying goodbye to Aya forever. I spent many months attempting to draw lines in the sand with weed, declaring probably 50-100 times that a specific day would be “day one” of sobriety for the rest of my life. “Day one” ended up being almost three months ago, when I finally gave up on lifelong declarations and just made a commitment to stop for the rest of 2021. I’ll probably smoke weed occasionally in future years, and I may drink Ayahuasca again someday, but for now, I feel no more need for plant teachers, or for teachers of any kind. Letting go of attachment, I go on my way, thanking these plants for helping me through some difficult times that I wasn’t always strong enough to endure on my own.

And now here I am. I’ll face whatever comes next without plant helpers, and I’ll pray for the strength to persist. I’ve persisted through culture shock, deprogramming, personality deconstruction, heartbreak and being endlessly misunderstood, and while I have many helping hands to thank for this persistence, I also thank my own self. I thank the boy who threw himself into chess and developed his mind as a coping mechanism for emotional turmoil. I thank the teenager who didn’t kill himself, and who had the audacity to apply for Survivor — a wish and prayer for happiness. When I really think about it, my whole life has been a prayer. Please, gargoyles of Reddit, tell me what you know about a kid who had a dream and went and did it. I thank that kid. I thank the young man who turned the woes of being on TV too young into the introspection of a spiritual journey. I thank him for persisting through six months of intensive vipassanā retreats, and for having the courage to try psychedelics. I thank myself for coming to Ecuador, and I thank myself for staying in Ecuador. I thank the light within. I thank Aya, I thank friends like Adora and I even thank Leo Gura. I thank Maya for having me on her mountain, where I’m going today (after finishing my writing) to meditate for eight days.

Zen

It sometimes amazes me that all of the insanity of the past five years began with a simple decision to follow my respiration, counting breaths up to ten. I hadn’t started taking meditation seriously or committed to practicing every day yet, but I committed to practicing one day — the first day I meditated on my own volition. I’d chanted Ōṁ with my mom once when I was little, but I’d never truly given this woo-woo, millennia-old spiritual technology a shot. It was spring of 2015, and I was sitting in Osaka Garden in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, right here:

“In — ONE… out — ONE… in — TWO… out — TWO…”

“I wonder if I can win ‘Survivor: Second Chance.’ Maybe I should be posting more Instagram pictures to be getting more votes and ensuring I get cast. Wait… shit! I’m supposed to be meditating.”

“In — ONE… out — ONE… in — TWO… out — TWO… in — THREE…”

“This pregaming is super annoying. Although I like this idea Stephen and I have to start a fake Twitter account and tweet all forty potential contestants about the Culpeppers flying people to their Florida mansion to form alliances. I probably shouldn’t tell Shirin about that, although I do want to go deep into the game with her. God damnit… it happened again.”

This simple but incredibly difficult practice was showing me just how insane my mind was. I’d repeatedly start over, sometimes even making it to ten without getting completely lost in thought, but I couldn’t help but question whether I was even capable of controlling my attention. Had it always been this bad? It was borderline pathological. Was my mind always this scattered, and had I simply been oblivious to it until I sat down and tried to meditate?

Pretty much.

It’s been a long journey in the nearly seven years since I first took a crack at mindfulness, and while I’ve grown tremendously over those years, I’ve also lost something precious: the beginner’s mind. I’ve come to “know” a lot about meditation, practicing for thousands of hours and even writing a fifty-one page M.A. thesis about vipassanā, but the price I’ve paid for that is losing the fresh, open eagerness to practice that I brought to Osaka Garden on that spring morning. The practice I was doing, of following respiration and counting breaths up to ten, is a traditional Zen practice, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew that I was crazy, and probably always had been. I’ve only meditated alongside a group practicing in the traditions of Sōtō and Rinzai (the two largest sects of Zen) once each, but without knowing it, I’ve always been drawn to Zen. Its unstructured, non-conceptual, direct approach resonates with me, and when I read a footnote in Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha that referred to Zen’s intense individualism, I felt the resonance viscerally. I don’t believe the resonance comes from Zen being a “better” tradition than the Theravāda vipassanā I’ve practiced, than other Mahāyāna schools or than any spiritual tradition. Believing in a specific tradition — a philosophy or dogma external to oneself — being “correct” is the antithesis of harnessing the light within. Zen resonates with me because it decidedly eschews that externalization; it brings the practitioner repeatedly back to the beginner’s mind, and to his own self.

I don’t have any goals for the eight-day retreat I’m about to begin on Maya’s mountain. It would be nice to clear my inner compass, refine my intuition and emerge from the meditation with confidence in my direction, but I’m not hung up on expectations of those results. After so much goal-oriented vipassanā, during which becoming enlightened (whatever that means) became my end-all-be-all, I’m going to practice Zen simply to sit and to be. I have nothing to achieve, to do or to gain. I already have an absolute Buddha-nature within me. I also already have a relative chimpanzee-nature within me. Both are fine, just as they are. There’s a concept of “sudden enlightenment” in Zen, which contends that enlightenment is available to us in an instant, right now, in this very moment. Many misinterpret “sudden enlightenment” as meaning that we instantaneously transform from conditioned chimp into fully realized Buddha in a moment, but that’s not what it means. It simply means that in any given moment, we have what we need. Buddha-mind is available.

As long as we’re human beings, we will remain both the chimp and the Buddha, both the fallible small self and the Christ Consciousness, both the relative and the absolute. I’m the guy who feels the need to write, and I’m the guy who could feel utter contentment sitting at this table, doing nothing. Some compulsion to do will probably continue to arise so long as I’m flesh and bone, but I also know that from the perspective of God, I can just be, and that can be okay. My being contains all that I seek — the self doing the seeking, and the Self who already holds the light being sought. Now I practice Zen, knowing that “Zen” is just a word, and that my true practice is the light within.

1. O'Brien, Barbara. "The Buddha's Raft Parable." Learn Religions. https://www.learnreligions.com/the-buddhas-raft-parable-450054.