Jungle Love life in Iquitos.

I’ve been thinking about a line that Lee Smith said once in a writing class that good fiction brings forth news of the spirit. Dispatches from other lives, and insights into who we are, as a people.  I’ve always remembered that. Reading a good book, especially fiction, is an intimate experience. It lets you inhabit, for a time, a perspective or experience that’s outside of the world that you know.  You could say it’s a way of leading many different lives.

I’m thinking about this because I’m writing a book that examines the realm of the spirit, through the subjective lens of people who travel to the Amazon in order to take part in ayahuasca sessions. There has been a lot written about ayahuasca, and the trend seems to be growing. There was a writer here on assignment from Vanity Fair recently, and just the other day a feature piece on ayahuasca appeared in the Washington Post. The Washington Post! But readers, there is good reason for this. Ayahuasca is the next great frontier in the evolution of consciousness. It is a big neon sign pointing the way to the future. I truly believe that. And as its popularity grows, and more and more people break open their heads with ayahuasca in order to experience a larger reality, the more it can be understood in the context of the way we live now.

Why do I assign such an important role to ayahuasca? Because it is a master teacher. It can heal you, show you the future, and most importantly, show you who you really are. But more than all of that, it seems to have been designed by a divine hand. It can introduce you to states that are not unlike what I imagine enlightenment to be–it can give you temporary access to states of mind that are so far advanced from our normal state, that describing it starts to sound like science fiction. But it’s not. It’s a sneak peek into the potential consciousness of a more evolved human race. That is to say, I believe that as a species we are still trending upwards, getting smarter and more efficient at thinking with each passing millennia.  I suspect that ayahuasca is the most powerful tool in the carpenter’s kit, pure molecular engineering genius hidden a plant that lifts the veil between this world and the next for a few hours, and lets you experience, for example, things like telepathy and astral travel and psychic communication with a whole array of different spirits.

Believe me, I know how crazy this can start to sound. But frankly I don’t care. Ayahuasca is not for everyone, only those who seek it out. If you’re really curious about the possibilities of the human brain, you have to leave behind a lot of preconceived notions about what ‘mind’ is, and what it is capable of. When I go looking for news of the spirit, I want to learn something new… something newsworthy.

There’s a definite taxonomy to the spirit world—you’ve got the spirit of mother ayahuasca herself, then you’ve got the souls of deceased people, then there are aliens and transdimensional extraterrestrials, healing spirits, angels, evil or demonic spirits, and a great number of entities that defy any easy definition.

This is all terra incognita. Everyone who drinks the brew has to decide for themselves what is real, and how to put a value on it. Besides actually drinking the stuff, which I do not do very often, most of what I have learned has come from reading books on the subject, and talking to lots and lots of people, novices and experts alike, to hear about their experiences. It’s a bit like the cartographers did during the age of exploration—they couldn’t visit all these places themselves, but they met with every explorer who returned to port, made a copy of map that the explorer had sketched along the route, and stitched together all those different pieces of the whole, until a coherent picture began to emerge.

The picture that I have assembled is very much in keeping with the world of quantum mechanics. For example, objects can be in two places at once. Particles have memory– matter once joined and then separated can act as though still one, even though they may be a great distance apart. And perhaps most importantly, there is a unifying principle of non-locality at work—in the zero point field that makes up the fabric of the universe, all matter and all information is stored in such a way that it can be accessed instantly from any point. Physical distance is not a barrier at all. In fact, it is an illusion. Prior to the 20^th century, these notions would have been considered absurd. But now it’s considered cutting edge science.

In ayahuasca, I have experienced 180 degree vision. I have mentally been in more than one place at the same time, sometimes moving simultaneously between as many as half a dozen distinct places or mental projections. I have left my body and seen it from above. I have experienced astral travel. And I have communicated psychically with a host of different spirits. These are the types of confessions that, in days past, could cause one to end up highly medicated, or locked up in a padded cell, or both. But now they are the confessions of a growing number of citizen psychonauts, brave amateurs from all around the globe who drink ayahuasca and come in contact with spirits and intelligent entities of seemingly infinite variety. They’re all out there, swimming in a vast ocean in which the fabric of all sentient beings is intertwined. Perhaps that place has always been there, present but out of sight in the deep water, while humanity wades in the shallows.

In ayahuasca, the questions “where am I?” and “who is here with me?” are often the same question. And so drawing a map and taking a census are really two sides of the same coin. Once you know the lay of the land, you can begin to get a sense of the population. I imagine that, in times to come, measuring the cartography and taxonomy of ayahuasca will be an exponential leap forward towards mapping the hinterland that lies between physics and metaphysics.  The indigenous indians of South America have known how to navigate the spirit world for thousands of years. That’s what shamanism is, and it was all self-taught, through centuries of trial and error. And now, in our quantum age, this ancient practice is finally having its coming-out party with the modern world. Or rather, the modern world is coming to the jungle. Because in order to make any progress, you have to get out of the lab and into your own mind. You can’t make a map, in this case, without seeing the territory for yourself.

The thought of ayahuasca getting exposure to a wider audience is exciting. Until recently, I would have said that all the weird, dissociative ‘out-there’ qualities of the ayahuasca experience were enough of a social taboo to keep it from ever catching on. But now that National Geographic and Vanity Fair and the Washington Post are on the ground reporting, it’s fair to say that the ayahuasca phenomenon is going mainstream. And that’s a great thing, because the more that smart, serious people experience what’s possible in the human mind, the less it will seem strange and, well, alien. As Terence said, nothing human is alien to me!

So my hat is off to those in the vanguard of human curiosity, the bearers of torches at noon, all the citizen psychonauts who come to the Amazon to experience ayahuasca, and the inner frontier, for themselves.