I’ve been meaning to write about the ongoing revelations that have been facilitated through my encounter with A Course in Miracles (ACIM) and ayahuasca. It’s important that I do this now for the purposes of greater clarity, both for myself and for you.
Yoga helped bring me to ayahuasca, and ayahuasca brought me to ACIM. To me, ACIM is the Master Teacher that has elucidated both yoga and ayahuasca. The word “elucidate” means “to shed light on,” and ACIM has certainly served as a guru for me in recent years, bringing light to the dark places of my own awareness.
How did yoga bring me to ayahuasca? Quite simply, it helped me get beyond fear and rigid beliefs, enough that I was open to ingesting a substance whose effects I had no idea about. For the first 35 years of my life I resisted any type of drug or alcohol, and was quite the “purist” when it came to my body and the spiritual journey. I judged people that did any kind of substances to help themselves, just as for a long time I looked down on meat eaters, overweight people, etc. What it really came down to was that I was scared and so I judged. It seems that I needed ayahuasca and ACIM to help me to see that.
Overcoming the mental barriers to trying a substance like ayahuasca was huge. Ayahuasca then helped remove other mental blocks. A big one was the image I had of myself as a “yogi” and the somewhat rigid way I viewed what that meant. I had for many years been the ascetic, purist yogi who denied the world and the body, and human emotions to some extent. I was slowly being opened to a more tantric approach, one that was more embracing of everything and open to any “tool” for awakening that might come my way.
Ayahuasca quickened that process of seeing how the asceticism and discipline of my early years had served its purpose. Now was the time to let go of the rigidity and “just say yes” to life as it was presenting itself to me.
I have written in some detail about an ego death experience that came through a rather strong dose of ayahuasca. That experience showed me the power of the ego to keep us in our suffering. Many people on psychedelics will experience either heaven or hell, and Aldous Huxley’s book Heaven and Hell highlights this. Well, the night that I had that experience I went to hell, and saw no way of getting out. Even after the session, for weeks after I still lived in a state of hell, of deep despair to the point of seeing no point in going on. Again, others have experienced this with psychedelics. John Lennon, for example, gave up LSD because he was having too many experiences like that. And the other night during a session, a young woman wanted to kill herself because she saw herself as the most demonic creature that was holding up the salvation of the world. I explained to her that is exactly what the ego wants us to believe and was able to talk her out of it.
I’m not sure I would have been able to explain all of that to this young woman had I not encountered the Course (ACIM). Indeed, in light of the Course, I could now make sense of my ayahuasca experiences, and I want to highlight the following: I don’t think I would have truly gotten the Course had it not been for my revelations with ayahuasca — it’s almost as if they complement each other. In other words, ayahuasca takes you down the rabbit hole to give you the experiences towards which the Course is pointing. If you’ve never seen the depths of the ego and how far its illusory power truly extends, it’s very unlikely that the Course will resonate with you. You don’t need a psychedelic to show you that, of course – a traumatic relationship could also do that too, for example – but psychedelics do have that potential, and they can be ingested consciously to access those deeper, usually hidden dimensions of the psyche.
For me, ayahuasca in light of the Course has been interesting indeed! And now I’m getting closer to revealing the “revelations” that I want to share here. Essentially, post-ACIM ayahuasca has shown me that what the Course is sharing is all true and actually can be experienced.
So, what have I experienced?
The Course’s metaphysical philosophy is essentially that we are still at home in God in a state of perfect Unity (Love), and we have merely forgotten this, trapped in a false idea of separation and all that spawned from it. This whole universe which we take to be so real and to be our home is not. We must unlearn everything that we learned because the learning of the world is ego-based, which is another way of saying fear-based. At the heart of all of us is a primal fear of the retribution of God – we fear that God will punish us for the sin of separating from Him. Yet this is just the ego’s false projection of what God must be because the ego is based in the idea of separation and cannot see beyond it. Everything in its thinking will only reinforce the separation, at any and every expense.
The Course also says that time and space are creations of the ego and tools to maintain the separation. Beyond the ego is the truth which is eternity, and eternity means “no time, nowhere.” Heaven is the eternal Here & Now (“now” and “here” together make “nowhere”). The Course also teaches that as soon as there was that original “tiny, mad idea” of separation, there was an immediate correction for it. To put it simply, nothing happened. That original idea had no effect on God, Love, or Eternity whatsoever; it just continued on as if nothing happened, because nothing did, in fact, happen. It’s a paradox we cannot understand, so don’t try to! It’s an experience, and I’m here to tell you that I’ve had the experience, on several occasions, with ayahuasca.
In my most recent experience, I saw that all of this already happened and that we are all in a kind of movie that’s being played out. From the standpoint of eternity, all of this is already over. As Jesus says in the Course: “This world was over long ago.” We are all just waking up to this, and it must happen slowly and gradually because it would be too scary otherwise. We’re so deeply entrenched in the separation that to all of a sudden recognize that there is no “me” would be terrifying. It’s exactly why people do get terrified with psychedelics — they touch that place quicker than they’re ready for. They didn’t know what they signed up for! That happened to me early on and it wasn’t pretty, but I don’t regret it either. What doesn’t kill you makes you more awake and aware.
We’re waking up to the truth that there truly is only one of us. We are all IT, we all share the same mind, and there is no separation! The recent revelation I had with aya was that yes, when you wake up, everyone comes with you. In fact, the whole world is over, and there never was a world! This is one of the most amazing things about it all. The Course says this: There is only one of us that needs to wake up, and in fact, the process has already been completed by Jesus. We can now use him as an example and accept his gentle and simple method of returning to the place we never left. Please don’t forget that we are all Jesus. He is not separate from us, because again, we are all of one mind — there is no separation. Ultimately, Jesus is also an illusion, a symbol. There was no Jesus in reality, just as there is no separate me, no separate you. Only the non-dual oneness is real. To put it another way, only love is real.
What came to me is that there truly is nothing to fear because everything is a lesson to bring us home, and we are already home anyway! If you really knew that and felt that, even for a moment, you would never experience fear — at least not to degree you did before. This has been my experience. Fear sometimes comes up still, because in the separate dual state we usually find ourselves in, it’s nearly impossible to remember the nondual truth of existence. We’re inevitably bound to feel worry, fear, anxiety, etc. as we move in this world. When those feelings come up, remember that no, we don’t need to go there, it’s not real, and it will quickly dissolve.
The path is one of complete forgiveness, which means teaching yourself to see everyone and everything as you, because that’s the truth. To do otherwise is to deny God and to delay your own awakening back to God. It all ends with complete forgiveness, letting go of all that we are not, everything of the ego, and the total and complete acceptance of all that we truly are, which is only God, only Oneness, only Love. This process is simple, but for most of us, it ain’t easy! Again, why? Because of our deep investment in the ego, we are very afraid of the truth. But the truth is that if we could just look at the ego and realize its nothingness, we would be home free. Ayahuasca has really helped me in this process, and I don’t feel I would have gotten to the Course, or as quickly, had it not been for it. Given my intense and all-consuming desire to awaken, ayahuasca showed up in my life to help quicken the process.
