Over the past 2 years I have mostly taken a distance from my ayahuasca experiences, both in the fact that I have only used ayahuasca once over the past 2 years, and in the fact that I have not re-read my narrative descriptions of the ayahuasca experience over the past 2 years. However, over the past few days I have been going over again some of the narrative descriptions of my ayahuasca experiences and I felt that they were interesting enough and informative enough to share in a blog post (the first event was previously posted on Hubski here). I think that they are insightful in two main dimensions:

1) I think the visions as phenomena that are possible for a human being to experience are in-themselves of value, and are interesting purely in-themselves (without looking for anything “deeper” or “behind” the images). I rather think they are important just as a fact that the human mind or “human cognition” can be experience such states (i.e. that a human subject can “experience eternity or immortality” as such). What is that about? For example, on what grounds can we say that the “visionary experiences of immortality” are “less real” than “variation and selection” or “physical laws”?

2) The power of these states (for good and bad) exerts a type of “virtual causality” (what Deleuze I suppose would call the “quasi-cause”) on the mind of the subject. In this sense, after developing some distance from the experiences in-themselves I have come to view these experiences as simultaneously “sacred” (in some sense) and at the same time incredibly dangerous if not approached with the highest levels of seriousness. From my perspective the “experiencing in-itself” is enough to lead to “irreversible mental transitions”.

I would say that the most salient feature of living “life after ayahuasca” is that “the closeness of language” becomes more “real” (what I have come to think about as a type of “nominalist realism”). Also, the difficulty in the processual transformation of “visions” into “narrative” becomes “more complicated” because the visions are in some sense “too much” (which may be why I feel that some of my work is now becoming “too abstract” to be "comprehensible").

If anyone is interested in literature on the phenomenon I can send. Also, I know that others have experimented with psychedelics, so if anyone has feedback or anything to share about the nature of these experiences I am incredibly open and interested. Or if any current theories in cognition and social theory speak to these experiences I am interested. Much of my independent theorizing on the nature of this phenomenon is still in its infancy.