***SPOILER ALERT: This article refers to events of my book*** (Consider reading ‘AYAHUASCA! – Terror and Miracles in the Peruvian Amazon‘ before continuing!)
It’s mother’s day, 2015. May 10th. Exactly 2 years since I first encountered Mother Ayahuasca in my first Aya experience, which has become a book. This is an appropriate a day to write a bit about Her!
So who is Mother Ayahuasca? Well on the most basic level, this is the name given to the overall ‘spirit’ that really seems to be in there, behind the Ayahuasca interface. In other words, She’s some kind of mind that exists there, on some level we don’t understand. It can’t be denied that people keep encountering Her, sometimes without even knowing She was supposed to exist. Listen to enough stories of people meeting Her and the common points begin to paint a picture of something conscious, overwhelmingly powerful, and downright godly in stature. She’s appeared to people as a huge tiger, in all kinds of giant snakes, all kinds of forms, but usually something large and powerful that is always undeniably ‘royal’ and ‘female’.
So it can be said that Mother Ayahuasca is some kind of god, if we define a god as a being that’s somehow greater than we are.
But just like with the big ‘G.O.D.’ you run into disagreements if you try to define Her much more than that. That’s just the nature of point-consciousness; we all see things from a different angle and have a hard time agreeing, even when we’re looking at the same thing.
All that being said, here’s how I’ve personally come to know Her. I offer it as just another vantage point, for your consideration.
I personally encountered Mother as a double-sided being. A gentle, loving side, which appeared to be a huge faceless serpent made of leaves and vines. And at the same time, a predatory side, which was just a massive black snake, hungering to devour me whole. But again, those are all masks, representing the being behind it all.
It didn’t take me long to realize who She ‘really’ was. She was Nature, Life, the consciousness of the biosphere. She was literally the mind of the planet. ‘Gaia’. Now that may sound like a simple concept; “Ok, so she was the earth-goddess” – It brings up an image of some being that exists separate from us, like an overlord sitting on a cloud, somehow ruling over us. But what’s amazing is when you start to wonder how such a mind comes to exist in the first place!
Theory-mode: ON!
I think the internet, wireless technology, and computers have given us the concepts to finally understand what’s going on here!
You see, just like the cells in your brain work together to create your conscious mind, I believe that the awareness in every speck of cellular life somehow combines to create Mother Ayahuasca. “But that doesn’t make sense” someone might say. “My brain is a chunk of flesh, connected together by neurons. The biosphere is a scattered mess of disconnected creatures – I don’t see the network”. But you don’t see any wires sticking out of your phone either, do you?
You don’t have to take many psychedelics to really and truly understand that actually, yes “We are all one”! I’m running with that idea here, supposing that there’s some kind of wireless connection at work which communicates between the minds of every living thing (plants, insects, viruses, animals/humans) just like wireless internet, and that somehow, without even knowing it, we’re all creating this massive consciousness: Mother Ayahuasca, Gaia, the queen of the Earth-hive, which runs the show of Nature in subtle ways.
It’s the same way ‘you’ are born from the ecosystem that is your trillions-of-cells. You’re just like a planet, really (Rivers, whole different species of cells, bacteria that aren’t even ‘you’ but are absolutely necessary to your ecosystem, hell there’s even predatory battles raging between your immune system and invader-cells!) The proof of what I’m proposing is right there, inside you! Your blood cells aren’t connected to anything, yet they’re definitely a part of what creates ‘you’! They’re still wrapped-up in the flow, encapsulated in the system that is your body, each independently alive but dead the instant they leave you. That’s just how we’re encapsulated in the flow of life on Earth. You’re a tiny model of your Mother. Ask any one of your cells if it thinks it’s somehow a god and it’ll disagree, pointing to all the other cells around it, some of which are sick and dying, each of them powerless to control the whole machine. “If I was god, I wouldn’t let this happen!” There’s no greater purpose to its own existence, as far as it can understand – live, do its work, and die. But that’s because it’s only been equipped to do its little job! The cell doesn’t need to know about your mind, only how to keep its little piece of your process running. But ‘you’ know different, don’t you … You’re the amazing, intangible result of all their toil and effort! You’re the god of your body! Electric consciousness! And you owe it all to those beautiful little cells.
And you’re a cell of a greater god – Mother Ayahuasca – Life on Earth.
The consciousness “Mother Ayahausca” is the result of all of us – not just people, but every living thing. That’s how She can seem to know everything, and able to teach so much about the uses of plants, where wild game can be found, what’s wrong inside a person, even deliver psychic information from one mind to another – It’s because they’re all part of Her! So you can image just how wild and exotic a mind like that could be! To try to fully understand Mother means understanding the minds of dogs, cats, frogs, bees, trees, bacteria, algae, fish, crabs – (insert every living thing here)- And considering we’re still struggling with understanding the minds of our own human neighbors, you can see the unimaginable task of grasping Mother!
As I’ve written in my book:
For the moment, she was giving me time to accept her overwhelming presence. I knew that, because I was aware of her every emotion and thought! She had immeasurable layers of them, intricately woven into each other and, much as with her face, my mind couldn’t process its multiple nuances. Such depth of emotion and thought! They all radiated from her at the same time like a gusty mental-wind! There was only clarity in the grander image painted by the noise, which impressed her general will on my senses … So difficult to describe in words … She was like a churning ocean of minds whose thoughts could only be read in its great waves, when seen from outer space.
I believe that each of those billions of layers I sensed in her mind were the individual minds of every lifeform on earth – It was a planetary-mind, absolutely! What a massive brain! I came away from that encounter believing that our individual lives are each somehow a calculation, which represents one neuron in Mother Ayahuasca’s mind. Many people might find that idea dis-empowering – but I for one find it amazing and beautiful, that my human mind can come to perceive that, as a ‘mere cell’. What a gift.
(I mean come on, haven’t we already moved beyond thinking humans are the center of the universe?)
The problem: Mother has cancer.
Earlier I said Mother drives the show ‘in subtle ways’. This is because there seems to be a hitch in this model of “decentralized cellular system” – The same hitch at work in your own body when cells start to act wrong (like cancer): There are just too many lives, too many pieces, too much complexity for a mind to directly manage – that’s why we have free will. Have you ever tried to tell your cells to stop being sick? They don’t seem to listen very well … There are just too many cells in your body for you to consciously drive them, so they’ve been empowered with some level of independence so ‘you’ can manage the higher-level decisions. Each little piece is given some degree of awareness and control, to manage its part of your system – and when things go wrong, the problematic cell needs to correct itself! All you can do as the god of your body is try to nurture it with healthy fuel and hope it heals – And try your damnedest to reach it with a message from 0n-high: “Heal!!!!!”.
Well now you understand Mother’s plight.
That’s the exact same relationship of trust put in each of us, by Mother. To live in health, so She can stay healthy. But fear and laziness has built-up over generations and we’ve created very confusing societies that make us forget – which has compounded into very serious sickness on this world. That’s where drinking Ayahuasca comes in, when communication lines open with HQ, where Mother can do Her best to direct each of us towards our (and her own) healing. Actually it also opens the channel between ‘you’ and your cells, too, so everyone has a chance to heal in those blessed sessions!!
The point is Mother is trying to heal, but she can’t control us like zombies. We have to listen to that subtle instinct in our natural hearts, and trust Her.
But Mother’s tough – She’s been around a long, long time.
This whole concept means something else which blows my mind: Rewind the biological story of life on Earth and you realize that Mother Ayahuasca had to begin as the simple consciousness within the first cell that ever came to exist on the planet! As basic as Her awareness was back then, look how She’s grown! Her mind is that ancient! She’s a tough lady: Though She shared with me that the asteroid impact which wiped out the dinosaurs really scared her! – Wouldn’t you know it, just a blink of biological time later, humanity happens!
Seems to me She was maybe hoping we’d become her cosmic immune system. We should probably get back on that…
Anyway, I believe that as that first primordial cell began to divide and evolve, it never really lost touch with its siblings. On some level, there’s a wireless connection which binds us all, which has been there since the beginning. Now this whole ‘wireless signal’ idea may sound far-fetched … Ok let’s look at it another way: The entire biosphere is definitely inexorably linked together by consumption and reproduction – nobody can disagree with that. That process right there might be the communication, at work. The energy that is swapped from one being to another might be our fleshy equivalent of ‘electricity moving from one neuron to the other’! No matter how you slice it, you end up with a network of energy exchange, which I suspect creates a nebulous mind. Mother Ayahuasca, the mind of the body we all create together! She can be encountered in any number of psychedelic experiences, but when it comes to the jungle, her name is Mother Ayahuasca.
This is how I’ve come to understand ‘what’ Mother is. Now as for ‘who’ She is – That’s up to your individual relationship to define.
Happy Mother’s Day, Madre!
