PREP
Journey 1: 3g syrian rue and jurema tea. Nothing is felt for 90 minutes, and I decide I should probably pre-dose the harmala from now on. For a brief second I consider going to bed and trying again another night, but for some reason I am headed to the fridge to measure out another 3g/20g dose of tea. There is no doubt in my mind that the first dose of jurema was wasted, so I slug another 3g/20g dose of brew. I was half-convinced that I had screwed up the brew completely, and would feel nothing at all.

TERROR
Within 20 minutes, I am at a +++. I went from feeling a little fuzzy to unable to see across the room because the visuals are so intense in a matter of seconds. My first thought to my situation was the fact that I had now consumed 6g of syrian rue and 40G of high quality jurema. I immediately enter a 'bad trip' and decide that I need to just knock myself out, "Sleep it off" I tell myself; hilarious, in hindsight that I thought I could sleep through that.

I run to the medicine cabinet and decide a high dose of melatonin should do the trick and dump some into my hand. I come to the startling realization that I can't read the dosage on the bottle, or even remember what a standard dose of melatonin even is. "Not like I can OD on this stuff" dump several of them into my hand, but the pills look like they are floating in the air above my hand and separating, like mitosis, multiplying at an exponential rate, there are thousands of them in my hand. However, I can only feel three of them, which I swallow immediately. I desperately try to recall if I have ever read a trip report of someone consuming 40g of jurema, and I wonder how the hell I decided 20, let alone 40, grams would be an appropriate dose for a beginner, since most reports are in the 8-12g range, with some claiming OOBEs and hyperspace entities @ around 10g.

What if the melatonin makes it stronger? Maybe I should just throw it back up. I run to the bathroom and stick my finger down my throat, I gag a few times and manage to vomit up a pill or two, but absolutely none of the jurema brew; damn my technique for producing such a clean, nausea free jurema. I look up and see myself in the mirror, my face immediately morphs into something alien, animalish, a combination of the two. A cross between a wolf and an insectoid alien from another dimension, trying to snatch my body for its own demented purposes. My features are constantly morphing into new interesting creatures, so I get the hell outta the bathroom and lay down beside my sleeping girlfriend in our dark bedroom.

I close my eyes to 'try and sleep' and enter a rotating tunnel of geometric imagery, similar to what I had seen happen to the pills. I see basically the same design, within itself, within itself, ad infinitum. This geometry is all rotating around a central fixed point that I feel like I'm falling into when I close my eyes for too long. Interesting, but I want the experience to stop. This isn't what I wanted, I wanted something that I could control: some light visuals, spiritual revelations, communion with elves, maybe. All I feel is intense terror and the constant mantra "I took too much, I took too much, I took too much, 40g was way too much." Somehow, I manage to realize that there is potentially anywhere from 100-400mg of DMT saturating my neurons, and can't recall hearing of anyone insane enough to ingest the upper end amount, EVER.

I wake up my g/f and explain my dilemma, managing to mumble something about ayahuasca and being scared that I took too much. Unfortunately, it's 1 AM and she has to be awake at 6AM to work a 12 hour shift, so I get no sympathy from her. I think she might have even told me to "Just go to sleep" at one point, but some pretty heavy audio hallucinations kicked in around then, so I could have imagined it. I hear a train whistle that I'm pretty sure is real, but the sound of the whistle shatters into an infinite amount of other sounds. Each sound vibration that shatters from the original whistle continues to shatter itself into millions of more sounds; like a sound fractal. I try to close my eyes to ignore the sound, and it works: all the sounds of sounds of sounds of sounds suddenly extinguish themselves as if following the direction of a symphony conductor and ending at the exact same time, and converge into a single low frequency hum.

I actually manage to enjoy the still-escalating CEVs for a few seconds before I detect a hostile presence in the room. I open my eyes and see some type of insectoid being floating in front of my bed. I am terrified, but he seems not to notice me. He is just sitting there, doing what insectoid aliens do, like he was meditating or something. His face looks like the first form my face morphed into when I was looking in the mirror. He doesn't seem to be trying to hurt me, but I am unnerved by his presence. I close my eyes to try and ignore it, and the CEVs have increased in intensity. I begin thinking about the concept of time, about how it doesn't exist; we are all so obsessed with 'what time is it', but it's all relative. I feel like I've been tripping for hours but it's only 1:05 AM, I've been altered for less than half an hour. I just want it to stop, I beg the alien to make it stop but he continues to ignore me, he just sits and meditates as if nothing is going on. I ponder bugging my girlfriend again, maybe she can talk me out of tripping.

EMPATHY
I look over at my girlfriend and suddenly all is well. I see an energy emanating from her; the force is strong with this one. I think about the intense love she has for me, how I don't really appreciate all she gives me, how I don't think I really love her like she loves me. I don't think I have ever really 'loved' anyone, I am not worthy of receiving it, so how could I give it away? For the first time in my life, I can actually FEEL the love she has for me, it's penetrating every aspect of me, lifting me higher and higher into a euphoric state of awesome appreciation for her, for everyone in my past that has been there for me when I didn't necessarily deserve it, for the experience I am having that only seconds ago I wanted to end. I notice that the alien has disappeared, and I feel safe to walk out of the bedroom and lay down on the couch.

UNDERSTANDING
I am starting to come down at this point. I stare at a tapestry I have hanging on my wall, the image on it is Buddha sitting on a lotus flower surrounded by a village. I am in complete awe of this image. It's been hanging in my apartment for months, but I never really notice it anymore. My thoughts drift into spirituality again. I ponder the meaning of life, the necessity of death, reincarnation, karma. Ah, the karma! I imagine doing good deeds for people and I can visualize the ripples of reality altering themselves when someone accumulates karma, for better or for worse. I recall how I had mistreated someone several years prior, and have a series of visualizations of how that person's life had been affected by it, how I had been affected, how everyone either of us ever came into contact with after that was also affected negatively. I vow to make compassion and kindness a priority in my interactions with others.


POST
From the time the aya hit to the point at which I slept was less than 4 hours. I was coming up for 90 minutes, peaked hard, and came down relatively quickly over the next 90 minutes. The next morning, I wake up after 5 or 6 hours of sleep. I feel slightly fuzzy and contemplative. I go to Borders to play around with books and it's drizzling rain and cloud covered outside. Normally, this might kind of bum me out. Today, I feel grateful for the rain, for the cloud cover. I am grateful for the plants that are growing because of the rain, which in turn nourish me and allow me to live in this self-aware body and have awesome experiences like the night before. For the last couple weeks I have been slowly talking myself into consuming alcohol again (I am a recovering addict), but I no longer feel the need to after what aya has shown me. I realize that with a few more aya sessions, I just may never feel the need to ever chemically alter myself for any reason, why would I want to dull something that I have realized can be so beautiful: unadulterated experience of life. I make it another 3 months before finally taking that first sip of booze, which spirals into nightly abuse for the next 2.5 years (present day); I did one more aya session a week after the first and was terrified, this time completely alone and unprepared to deal with what aya was trying to get me to face, and was too scared to partake again. I decided to numb myself with alcohol rather than face the scary facts about who I am and why I do what I do, why I screw who I screw (hahah).

INTEGRATION
I tell my girlfriend a bit about the experience after she comes home from work, but keep it pretty much limited to what I learned about our relationship. I leave out most of the details, but ensure her that I wish I could take back anything negative I ever said to her, and that her love was not wasted on me. I also apologize profusely for waking her up in the wee hours.

Sometimes, as I'm about to fall asleep, on the line between sleep and consciousness, my visual field explodes into fractals, and I once again experience the empathy and love of life that aya taught me is inherent in all of us:

Fast forward a year, and the girlfriend is no more (my doing). I am abusing alcohol almost every night. I am with a new girl on this particular night (and only for this particular night) and we are finally falling asleep after a long night of abusing harmful substances and each other. As I drift into unconsciousness I experience a flash of fractals, and a series of concepts flow through my psyche in a millisecond: using women for instant gratification, turning something sacred into meaningless tag team masturbation, why? she could love me, many have, I rejected them all. I am unworthy of my own love, let alone theirs. what caused this? I know what caused this, I just don't want to deal with it; not many men do. feel the love, don't push it away. Roll credits.

Every once in a while, I will be going about my busy day accomplishing the random tasks that we all deem so important in order to function as a human being, and I will have a flash of something I saw or felt during the experience, and slowly integrate it into my life. Today has been one of those days. I made the decision yesterday to stop abusing alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine; three substances that, as of 24 hours ago, had a vicious hold on my life experience. I woke up this morning thinking about my first aya experience, what I learned about life, and had to ask myself: why the hell would I want to escape from such beauty? I have been feeling the call from Aya the last couple of weeks. I feel like it is time to come full circle with my first experience: I was on the path to true healing, but got scared and turned to avoidance and alcohol to cope instead. I am ready to face myself. Aya has shown me that I can, that I already have.

This is the first I've ever written of the experience. I've mentioned snippets of the experience to some people here n there, but never anything this deep or detailed. I had actually forgotten a lot of the experience until I was inspired to sit down and write tonight.

Thanks for listening. I hope someone besides me can benefit from this report.

Namaste!

Oh brother, thank you so much for a most moving and wonderful report! I can't put in words how grateful I am that you once again have understood that nothing good will come out of hiding. You know, the real beauty is tough to deal with, but if you just use the power of positive thinking, you will be amazed what life has to offer!

Oh, and welcome to the forums, I made you a full member.

it's awesome to hear about how theses kinds of things haveing positive impacts on people's lives. i know from experience that i have found so many useful things out about myself during CEV's it's incredible. this was an moving story i'm glad you shared it.

That was a great report. I too found the troubles in the seemingly-vomit free ayahuasca I made. Also I think it is traditional that should one dose not work, that shamans will continue to administer as many doses as you'll ask for. I'm also curious if you didn't redose if you still would have ended up tripping at all, cause when it comes to the digestion of psychedelics you never know when it can sneak right up on you, just when everything seems so normal...

It is one of the best reports about the healing abilities That Momma Aya provides us with. Dough she is tough there is always love in her embrace, just sometimes we are too scared to feel it.

Thank you so much for sharing it...

Thank you all for the kind words, and of course to Evening Glory for the 'promotion'

I hope that I am able to give back something on par with what I have learned here.

Peace

You're lucky you decided to throw up that melatonin. It would have made it much worse. Harmalas DO react with melatonin, and many people report in ways that are very unpleasant, even in tiny doses. If you took a couple of pills, that would have been a nightmare.

Welcome. Thanks for sharing your experience, it was a good read. Keep us posted on the next one

-safe journeys

Welcome. Very moving post. Thank you so much for sharing.

~

You opened up to a part of love that is key to being worthy of it, which is, FEELING the worth of it. When you feel the worth of it, you are also feeling your worthiness of it, because the feeling of worth is able to live in YOU. Congratulations. I have been in that spot before. It's kind of funny isn't it though, that those seemingly worthless people we have stepped over in our lives were the very KEY to our lives.... they are tokens of our own need to grow a heart, they twist in the wind of our cruel callousness because...because they show us how WE twist in the wind of our own lack of love. You don't have something until you appreciate it.



Yeah, this is the fractal Wheel of Karma. I see little ways of waking up to it, and sometimes I discount them quickly because of my self-inflicted "busyness", which is a pathetic excuse from the angle we look at together here. For example, this old lady here in this computer/internet cafe, she is the owner's mother, and she cleans it all the time, and she is very sweet. I always am nice to her, and she is very nice and soft, kind of like my own Grandmother, though this lady is Chinese and my Grandmother was not. Well, she was sitting next to me a minute ago, cleaning a keyboard, probably self-conscious that I might be annoyed by her, especially as she slightly taps the keyboard down a few times to clean it out. I realize I am tempted to resent the distraction of even the fact that she feels tense for worrying that I might be distracted!! I see that I am a rather cold dude for saying to myself "but I am concentrating on this, THIS, so I don't HAVE to nurture you and show you love just to alleviate your annoying worries", and this is while I'm reading your story, so I have a little extra ammo on the positive, and I say in my mind "what if I could really have a better universe by taking a break for a FIVE SECOND social visit. FIVE FUCKING SECONDS!!!!!!!!" ButI still don't do it, but at the same time I also don't pound away at the keyboard in a constricted and slightly annoyed mode, even though it wouldn't have been much....... Either way, IT ADDS UP. I'd say I tugged it back towards the light this time....



Yeah, it's amazing how you could think that ANY TIME YOU WANTED, but it seems like it was not a thought to be had before your experiences. Now it is as if you could say "what the hell, this is OBVIOUS.... These are the facts of LIFE, and LIFE is good when it rains!!!". It's like, until certain clogs and issues aren't dealt with in the right way, the brain circuitry just won't indulge in certain thoughts, even though their complexity and factuality are RIGHT THERE in hindsight. It's because the motivation is not tied in to think them, they are choked off by undercurrents of fear which focus the mind away, whereas now they are seen as ways of saying what is positive in your experience, which you are fully ready to appreciate, so you can express it easily.



Yeah, that's the key. Fear is not only the opposite of love, but the antithesis. You bring it out well here, because you could very bluntly say that you 'feared the love' which is so strange, isn't it? But we FEAR the love, that's why we push it away. We don't trust it, we don't trust the the universe is good, that we are good enough to have a good universe and people who's love is real and good. We choose that for ourselves, then we create it!!!


Yeah, it's good to say "look, I didn't become a bodhisatva overnight yet, but I AM integrating this stuff, here and there still counts, and it is adding up, and most of all, I APPRECIATE it and have FAITH in it enough to acknowledge it, pour a little water on it, and not through the pot out because I don't have a 2 meter Sativa plant overnight.


Good stuff, dude. Helps me to analyze your stuff, I hope you could find a nugget of something useful in my analyses and comments. I really love to dig into these phenomena whether they are mind or anothers, because it helps me grow too. The power of self=improvement has LOTS of ripples, don't it?

Hyperontosis, thank you for the comments. They definitely did help me. I like the way you interpreted: "I will have a flash...and slowly integrate it into my life." I hadn't thought of it from that perspective, but you're absolutely right: it all adds up. Lots of little things is just as much value as one big thing. I would actually argue that it is worth more, since many little things is more habit inducing than one big isolated thing. This is true with positive as well as negative actions, of course.

I kind of went into the experience expecting spiritual revelations that would turn me into someone extraordinary in 4 hours. Although I saw extraordinary things, it's taken over two years to fully integrate those lessons into my life. Only now do I feel prepared to journey again; ready for the next lesson. And for the record, my view was skewed from the beginning; no one can 'become' someone extraordinary because we are all already. Now I seek to realize the extraordinariness (is that a word?) that is inherent.

Thanks for the intense report. I especially like the fact about it that you did not turn into a saint over night. It made it feel very genuine. These experiences are plateau experiences basically revealing to us what is always present but which we are not always aware of. It's not as easy as it seems while on the substance, to take this knowledge with us or make use of it afterwards.

We all are extraordinary beings, we all are divine in a sense (IMO). Our higher selves are staring out of our eyes always, yet somehow it is not in their nature to take action forcefully over the more primitive layers of our psyche. I find this interesting. There are many theories as to why, personally I go with - it has something to do with survival and protective mechanisms that are partially outdated and can be cast off now. Should be.

I imagine this process to be something like a condensation of energy, creating a bose-einstein condensate when our wave-functions begin overlapping and there is no difference between separate entities any more. But cooling doesn't really do justice to the wild energy I experience whenever I find myself in that kind of a state. The divine is not serene and calm, though it is that too, it is bewildered and energetic. It is wild, untamed.

And most of all, I find, lots of times we feel we cannot forgive ourselves for certain things that we have done to ourselves - like ignoring certain aspects, or denying communication with the benevolent higher selves - The higher self does not forgive because there is nothing to forgive. There is nothing that you can ever do to offend it, to hurt it or to turn it away. There is sadness sometimes, I think, when it feels we are veering from our true path, but never injury or anger. These belong to much lower levels, perhaps tricking us into thinking they are higher ones. The ego does that sometimes. Smoke and mirrors...

This being said, I've often felt that people trying to talk me into doing certain techniques to reach a higher level of whatnot etc were insulting my own capability of being what I truly am. As though I needed a technique to feel connected or divine. I keep thinking, if I need a technique, then how can it be real? How could it be mine? Normally all I have to do is choose to feel it, because it's right here, I have the evidence! The only problem is, that that choice is a hard one to make. Because if we do, really feel it, all the time, so much we deem important at the moment would become utterly meaningless. I mean thoughts, ties, values, material things, self impressions etc. Things not easily let go of.
What we think is our self would dissolve... and it has this insane self-preserving mechanism, that makes it nearly impossible to make that choice... nearly.

Don't know if this philosophising means anything to you. Hope you recognize yourself in time. Hope I do myself, too
Good Luck!
Love