Robert Augustus Masters' Ayahuasca Journey

The following report by Robert Augustus Masters is from his book Darkness Shining Wild; here he describes a nondual experience resulting from ingesting Ayahuasca, a medicine used in the Amazon rain forest for millennia.

The ayahuasca I took - ayahuasca varies according to its preparation - was very thick, satiny, and brownish-black, heavily imbued with a pungently sweet, semi-sickening odor. It tasted much like it smelled, but I managed to down two hundred milliliters of it. Nothing significant happened for maybe half an hour...

Before I could do much...the ayahuasca kicked in. It was extremely strong, and getting stronger by the second. I remember saying something about how powerful it was, and then I...was so overwhelmed that I lost almost all contact with the world I'd known a minute earlier. As that world and its sustaining views - including those rooted in longtime spiritual practices - very quickly became but a fleeting speck on the periphery of the impossibly rich revelatory domain into which I'd been blasted, I buckled with huge awe and equally huge terror.

I thought of leaving the room, but could not move more than a few feet. So I remained sitting up, quivering with an indescribably strange feeling of recognition, periodically fearing that I'd made a fatal mistake in taking the ayahuasca. Who I had been before swallowing it was but the flimsiest and most unreal of memories. Nancy and I seemed to be not observers of – nor even participants in – what [was] happening. Rather, we were it – and had, it seemed, never really been other than it – the shockingly visceral and now devastatingly indisputable realization of which maddened what was left of my mind.

My world had not so much been altered as decisively replaced, both externally and internally...All we could do was ride out the storm.

For its first third (an eternity of about three hours) my ayahuasca journey was extremely harrowing, partly because of the considerable strain it placed on my body – I shook uncontrollably for almost two hours, violently vomiting a number of times – but mainly because of the often terrifying, unspeakably alien yet rivetingly familiar Wonder that was manifesting within and all around me.

The dazzling presence and implications of this Wonder, this reality-unlocking Unspeakableness, and my relationship to it made me reel; I could not convincingly stand apart from it, not even for a second, and strongly intuited that I never really had. When I somehow managed for a moment here and there to recall my life before ayahuasca, none of it carried any real depth or significance. That this didn't terrify me would terrify me for a moment, then bend me with animal awe, then pass from consciousness.

What was now my world – and seemingly always had been, while I'd been dreaming that I was elsewhere – pulsed with a power and knowingness that surpassed anything I'd ever before experienced. No outside, no inside. No time. Flames sprouted from the leaftips of my plants with shapely brilliance. The trees outside the sliding glass doors, blazingly vivid and so, so alive, were fused with the sky, as if all drawn with the same vast undulating brush strokes. The objects in the room were no different than the space between them.

There I sat crazily swaying and trembling, transfixed in an imagination-transcending, overwhelmingly sentient Chaos in which everything, including the nonphysical, was inseparable from everything else. The sky, dripping with terrible beauty, poured into my room like a tsunami, my body seemed to be about to die again and again, my mind frothed insanely, and I felt through all of this an enormous, intensely emotional knowingness, a primordial intimacy and recognition – at once prehuman and posthuman – that shook me like a rag doll in the jaws of a rabid monster.

Looking into Nancy's eyes was no different than looking into the room or out the windows. It was all, all, the same self-replicating, self-aware Unspeakbleness, beyond any conceivable framing. As its perspective and mine merged, I felt as if I'd never really been elsewhere. The Open Secret of it all only affirmed and deepened its Mystery. I was alternately terrified and awestruck. I wanted to escape it all, and I wanted to get down on my knees before it all.

Telling myself I had taken a drug – which I only could remember every ten minutes or so – had about as much effect on me as trying to stop a train by placing a marshmallow in its path. One moment I was convinced I'd gone completely insane and would shortly find myself strapped down in the local hospital ward, and the next I would gasp wonderstruck at what was being revealed. Finally, the intensity of it all faded a bit, and I was on somewhat familiar ground, albeit still highly psychedelic territory, grateful to have survived. The last two thirds of the journey were quite joyful, which perhaps accounts to some degree for what followed.

Not long after my ayahuasca experience was over – and it took days – I was ready for more. Sure, I had been very frightened in the earlier stages, but it had turned out very well, hadn't it? I felt profoundly enriched by the whole experience, and wasn't about to stop. My memory of times in the trip when my body became other than human or even mammalian – sometimes to the horrifying and seemingly very real point where I appeared to have no breathing apparatus, and was therefore about to die – were of little concern to me. Some of this was just hubris... -Darkness Shining Wild, pp. 14-16