One of the strangest components of the tribe’s pharmacopeia was a thick liquid compound they would let me try only once. It was reserved for the use of veteran shamans and I only earned their trust to sample it after many weeks of attentive study and participation in their daily rites. They called it ayahuasca, and never would reveal its source to me, although from what I observed as they prepared it— a daylong process which involved both rendering and cooking— it seemed to me to include both plant and animal extracts. I was the only person to use the substance on this occasion, with the shaman and two apprentices attending me, and only after a two-day fast as the sun went down on the second day.

At one of their holiest places, near the river, I was instructed to strip to a loincloth and kneel, while both my wrists were secured in loops of rope that were held by the two apprentices. The substance, contained in a gourd, was raised to my lips by the shaman as he uttered an indecipherable chant. It gave off an odor that was almost unendurably foul and I gagged once as it neared my face; one of the reasons for the fasting, I realized. Tilting back the gourd, he poured the substance into my open mouth all at once and I quickly choked it down, attempting with all my might to ignore the urgent signals my body was giving me to reject it. I realized the other reason for the fasting; it hit my empty body with paralysing force and speed. My nervous system immediately felt as if I’d set it on fire and sweat seemed to simultaneously squirt from every pore of my skin. I closed my eyes in terror, my heart pounding, and as the substance overwhelmed my conscious mind I lost all track of time, or of even being in time. I believe I almost immediately vomited but no longer possessed any way of knowing how quickly this happened, or, indeed, if it did happen.

When I opened my eyes, two things occurred: I realized that I was no longer where I thought I had been, and at the same moment no longer knew who “I” was. My vision was both clouded and somehow enhanced, and at some level I registered that what I was “seeing” was not what was physically in front of me. I also knew that the veil of “reality” had been rent, split or torn away and that I was looking into a different or perhaps deeper dimension, one that either underlies ours or that coexists with it side by side, separated by the thinnest margin imaginable, one that our relatively primitive neurology prevents us from perceiving.

As I “looked” deeper—an inadequate description for a kind of seeing that involved all my senses, although not necessarily on the physical level—I realized there were living beings before me in this field of energy. As they drew closer to me, I realized that they could “see” me as well and that my presence had drawn their interest. This alarmed me slightly, as I could not discern their intent. They might have been angelic or demonic, or perhaps hybrid creatures, and there were many of them moving toward me, tall and humanoid. I realized that their interest in me felt cold, reptilian, neutral but shading toward malevolence, lacking all compassion.

A shining figure, much taller than the others, suddenly appeared in their midst and it gave off a violet light so bright and powerful it washed away everything else in my field of vision, nearly “blinding” me. I cannot honestly remember anything else about its appearance, which may or may not have been humanoid—my memory holds it closer in shape to a sphere that emanated a powerful impression of “beauty,” but in an almost purely abstract sense. The other figures seemed to either defer to this figure or recoil from it in fear; it occurred to me that the figure might have been drawn to me by some protective instinct. As the other figures withdrew or receded, the new figure moved closer, and as it neared, all my own fears subsided and I felt a benevolent calm wash over me, an energetically soothing rush of peace and then a sense of joy that swelled up in my chest until I thought it might burst. A wholly inadequate phrase arose in my mind at that precise moment to fully describe this experience, and it was this: I am in the presence of “god” energy.

The next thing I remember: waking, lying face-down in the mud beside the river, alone and naked, the ropes still loosely attached to my wrists. It was dawn, light filtering through the forest canopy. I rose and staggered back toward the village, shivering and drained, but still carried and filled by the joyous wonder I had experienced. The shaman welcomed me by the village’s central fire, smiling, and they wrapped me with a blanket, sat me down in the shaman’s hut and gently let me sip from a bowl of water and fed me some kind of bland root paste. I felt weak as a foundling and unable to speak. The shaman sat down beside me and leaned in and repeated the same phrase to me, more than a few times, which, roughly translated, I heard as: “You are reborn into a new world.”

Dr Lawrence Jacoby looks like Terence Mckenna

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vOg0HyJpvI - Jimmy Scott-Sycamore Trees (Twin Peaks)