Journey Beyond The Illusion

I began all my pre-journey activities like laying out what I was going to pack and checking in with my doctor, but this journey was different. I would be traveling to one place and staying there instead of traveling every two or three days like all my past adventures. My mind was distracted, what is Ayahuasca? Was I investing all this time and money for a true spiritual experience or would it be nothing more than doing hallucinogenic drugs in the jungle? Could one even know the difference between a spiritual experience and hallucinogenic drugs? I have a very logical and analytical mind and I was struggling with how I would come to a definitive conclusion on what was about to happen? Or was the opening sentence of John Gribbin’s book "In Search Of Schrodinger’s Cat" true?

With the exception of alcohol I’ve never done any kind of drugs and have no experience in the visionary arts. I’m not religious but I am spiritual and have always felt a very close connection with nature. Here’s what I knew before boarding my first flight from Seattle to Los Angeles as I started my journey.

Ayahuasca contains Dimethyltryptamine (or DMT). Some call this the “Spirit Molecule” while others call it the most powerful hallucinogenic known. But here’s the thing, just about all living things, plants, animals, and even you and I are all producing DMT. However the body naturally breaks this down, which is why we are not all walking around talking to reptilian creatures with hundreds of eyes right now. The shaman is a master chef and will take the right amount of the Ayahuasca vine and boil it together with the right amount Chacruna leaves which contain a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. This allows the body to absorb the brew through our stomach and in to our bloodstream rather than breaking it down. With over 10,000 vines and over 80,000 leaves in the Amazon many will tell you that history has no idea how the indigenous people figured out this magic combination, but that’s not entirely true and I was later given this answer. Deep in the very center and well protected area of the brain we, along with most vertebrates, have a gland called the pineal gland. This is the only gland to span both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. It receives the second most blood flow in the body only behind the kidneys, and it is where we produce the serotonin DMT. Throughout history this gland has been referred to as the principle seat of the soul, or more commonly the “Third Eye”. So could this whole thing actually make sense in a spiritual way? Is spirit the life force of all living things fueled by DMT, suggesting that there are spirits all around us in every plant and animal? Is the soul the personal recording device capturing all of our experiences over all of our lifetimes, connected to the physical self from the pineal gland? Does every vertebrate then have a soul? Or am I over analyzing everything and this was going to be nothing more than the ultimate mind fuck?

I buckled my seat belt in Seattle and thought that we might be flying directly to Peru instead of Los Angeles as the announcements were both in English and Spanish. Turns out we have lost Los Angeles to Mexico and after seeing the cloud of pollution as we approach LAX that’s fine with me. I changed planes and boarded my 8 hour flight on LAN airlines to Lima, this time the Spanish announcements felt appropriate. We landed around midnight and after clearing customs and immigration I went in search of a row of seats in the airport that I could lie down and sleep in as my flight to Iquitos would not leave for another 5 hours and 40 minutes.