My first ceremonies with plant medicines in 2020 were focused on my job. I had questions. Those questions surrounded a lifelong obsession with freedom and my professional dedication to that cause.
I always wanted my work to have meaning, and I had a sudden and profound disappointment when people chose to let politicians decide their fates for them, as happened in March 2020 with Covid. If freedom doesn’t matter to people, why focus my energies on it?
I was not completely convinced ayahuasca would provide meaningful answers when I arrived in Orlando, Florida for my first sitting with the medicine. Still, I hoped that maybe this exotic plant would give me some direction for my life’s next act, especially if public policy was not going to achieve anything meaningful.
My first ceremony didn’t provide any guidance. Instead, it served as a review of my personal life to that point, mostly a recounting of relationships, marriage, kids, and friends. Nothing came up that addressed the question for which I wanted the most answers.
The second ceremony got me closer but it was still very much about aspects of my personality: fears, pains, regrets, the things that people tend to avoid looking at in their more sober moments.
But it was the third ceremony, one held on a sunny day under the canopy of trees, that brought me clarity about my mission in life.
A song that was being played stopped on a single note, and everything and everyone froze. In a moment that seemed to extend several minutes, ayahuasca communicated very clearly the answer I’m not sure I wanted: that I needed to continue finding ways to help people retain their autonomy. I felt a responsibility for that effort, even if people didn’t understand or appreciate the necessity of the goal.
So I had my mission, and I felt its importance in every part of my being. What this journey didn’t reveal was how I’d accomplish the job.
In my experience, Mother Aya has a habit of unveiling answers a little at a time, and only as a person is ready, are answers unveiled. For the dedicated journeyer, such unveilings require additional “meetings” with this plant intelligence. I suspect it’s a way for the plants to judge someone’s dedication to the effort of learning.
So in June 2020, I returned to the medicine. “OK, Mother Aya,” I said. “You’ve shown me that I have a job to do. How exactly do I do it?”
When people describe their journeys with a plant medicine, especially ayahuasca, they often have trouble communicating what they’ve seen, heard, or experienced. It’s easier to describe the lessons these medicines offer up. After all, the lessons are the magic, not the weird things encountered along the way.
My experience with the medicine on this occasion was a trip through time, the history of humanity, and the very formation of governments. Aya showed me the vastness and complexity of the problem. She showed me the (often painful) reasons why society organizes into various governing structures, from monarchies to dictatorships and everything in between.
She showed me how even when those structures are built on the premise of freedom — including our own in the U.S. — they can be co-opted into something else entirely, one that is injurious to the elevation of humanity.
A barrier to broad reform in any country is how people come to believe in their governments and politicians as much as they believe in a divine being, and so we see this in any country ruled by a person, a party or parties, or religious faction. Such had become the case in the states, the medicine showed me.
“So what do I do?” I continued to ask. Still no answer.
More ceremonies. More conversations. More lessons. The answers to my questions did come, slowly over the span of the last four years.
I won’t share everything I have learned today, but I’ll say this much: Politics and their related political systems are a distraction intended to divide and enslave, and it has been used with cunning precision for thousands of years.
The answers to our problems won’t ever come from individuals elected or installed into power, or from the systems that they oversee. The path toward a truly enlightened and empowered human species will come from the individuals are willing to question everything about the myriad political institutions that stand in the way of our being fully free and fully human.