Ayahuasca and Enlightenment
Q: Does ayahuasca help you find enlightenment?
Ayahuasca does not bring enlightenment.
It cannot.
It never has.
If this assumption were true, many people who drink medicine would be liberated. They are not. More often than not, people who drink medicine are inflated in their sense of self, in the ego, in their pride, goals, status, and achievements.
I know a lot of ayahuasqueros with huge egos. There are countless reports of abuses by people in positions of spiritual authority, including within ayahuasca lineages. Maybe that’s why some people are called to it—because of their great stubbornness. But by itself, it is not a cure-all.
One can have profound realisation and revelation with this substance that can be a catalyst for insight, for transformation, and for wisdom. Unless the seeds for insight and wisdom have been sown, however, these are not guaranteed. I have served thousands of people from all walks of life, and it is not black and white. No one size fits all.
Some people come from serious spiritual disciplines, and in the ayahuasca ceremony they are able to garner deeper experiences with greater insights regarding reality, as opposed to insights of mere interpersonal dynamics and healing.
Then again, some people with tremendous spiritual discipline come, and they already think they have it figured out, and spend the nights just dancing with their ego, puffing themselves up and never really seeing clearly. Still blind to their own deceit.
There are some who arrive without any philosophical or spiritual background. They come with great humility, and they stumble into the profound. I have heard such people say, "I wept with divine tears.” “I understand why people bow their heads and pray on their knees.” Or, “I was a rational person and deeply atheist, and all of a sudden, I was confronted by a great light that swallowed me and loved me, and in that dissolution, I was that love. Now I have to go home and reconcile that with my former assumptions."
There are so many directions that can come from drinking medicine, but it also depends on the preconditions of the individual, their karma if you will, how it is playing out. If one is less attached to the interpersonal ideas of healing (dynamics of self and other), then the revelation can be vast.
Consuming ayahuasca doesn’t guarantee that a person will all of a sudden be a saint. This is not what the medicine does. It can help clean, but only help. You must first ask for and accept that help. You must do the work. If you’re not looking for liberation, then it can’t help you in that direction.
Most people are just looking for relative healing, for relief, for some sense of comfort. For many it takes a while to dawn on them that there is no real satisfaction or comfort in this life until we resolve to know who we are.
If you want enlightenment, then you don’t need medicine to find it because enlightenment is just the realisation of what you are and who you are already.
You can utilise the ritual space for inquiry, to ask who the subject is, to retreat from objects and rest in the infinite space of awareness. You can use that realisation to see that the ritual space and substance are equal to that awareness and a dance within the same infinite space. You can utilise it as a way to be in embodied presence, to be in being, pure being.
To really understand that presence, however, you don’t need medicine at all. If you seek medicine looking for liberation, it might help you find it on relative levels; real enlightenment, however, is free of seeking. It is the end of seeking. It needs nothing. It is not in accumulation, it is not an experience, and it is not an object. It is the inward turning to realise that which does not turn. To see that which can not be seen.
That is the direct path. It is not to look at things, practices, or substances, but to look at what is looking and not look away.
This is why we say, “Drink less and learn more.” If the medicine is a great teacher, the direct path is the teacher's teacher. If you take that recognition to the ritual, then it is not you riding a wave; instead, you are just the ocean, sometimes waving, sometimes resting. You are not breathing, you are being breathed, you are not singing, you are being sung.
