1. What is the Ayahuasca, and how does she work?

The Ayahuasca, Yagé or Vine of the Dead (among many other indigenous names) is scientifically known as the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, but is most widely known as an entheogenic, healing, halucinogenic, psychotropic brew comprised of boiling together the banisteriopsis vine with the chacruna leaves (Psychotria viridis), although other plants containing DMT and other substances may be used dependent on the location and tradition as well as the biodiversity of the area.She has been used for thousands of years by indigenous people in spiritual ceremonies throughout Amazonia. The brew was academically discovered by western science in the 1950's by Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes in Colombia and was later found to be used throughout Amazonia. Since then it has been studied extensively for its extraordinary psychotherapeutic and spiritual qualities by many scientists, psychologists, medical psychiatrists, anthropologists, ethnologists, medical research institutions and spiritual seekers but remains still a mystery on many levels and widely misunderstood. Many extensive tests have provided irrefutable evidence through amazing results in curing or alleviating drug, alcohol and other addictions, depression, obsessive behavior as well as a wide variety of psychological and psychiatric issues as well as random results in curing or alleviating real, often chronic physical conditions. In the last couple of decades her popularity has increased worldwide, not only for its comprehensibly reported healing properties but also for its ability to act as a catalyst for significant spiritual and emotional openings as well as an expansion of consciousness, compassion and love, providing a multitude of spectacularly heartfelt insights. She is consumed in a reverential ceremonial manner, with a shaman, vegetalista or ayahuasquero or a group of master ayahuasqueros and ayahuasqueras assisting and guiding the ceremony while singing the Icaros, sacred ceremonial, chants, songs and invocations.

For many, she is a miracle drug with almost magical healing powers, for others she is a gateway to spirituality and consciousness, to some she is a curiosity or a flamboyant psychotropic drug experience and to the indigenous people she is also a goddess, a spirit, a holy and magical vibration. She is considered the queen of the psychotropics, despite having the capacity to provide on many occasions a severely uncomfortable, physically and emotionally disagreeable and frightening experience to the point of intense suffering and her capacity to also provide what seems like nothing at all. Scientifically, we know that the Banisteriopsis caapi vine acts as an inhibitor to allow the DMT (dimethyltriptamine - a substance produced by the body mainly by the pineal gland, associated with feelings of open heart, religious and spiritual experiences and wild hallucinogenic trips) to be ingested orally.

But the Ayahuasca experience is much more than a DMT experience and much more than any other psychotropic experience and this is why, despite the fact that the vine acts to permit the DMT to enter the bloodstream without being broken down in the stomach, containing harmaline, an MAOI inhibitor and thus supposedly a facilitator rather than an active ingredient, in every single culture where the brew is consumed it is called by the theoretically non active ingredient, the ayahuasca vine.The Ayahuasca differs from any other psychotropic experience in five distinct ways:

a. The Ayahuasca is largely dosage indifferent. Although the effect of every drug is influenced by the subject's psychological condition, the environment where the drug is consumed and the subject's physical condition, body weight and dietary particulars, the influence of all of these factors may influence the experience under a particular dosage by a maximum of 30-50%. For example, doubling the dosage of a psychotropic such as LSD can have an additional subjective effect ranging from 30-150% more intensity, but there will be a noticeable increase in intensity. With the Ayahuasca however, you can take five times the dosage and have zero effect and other times you can take a minuscule amount and have an extravagant effect. We say “largely dosage irrelevant” because there can be an analogous difference in effect at times, and at other times there can be even a disproportionately inverse effect. The intention and the psychological condition of the subject dominate the effect, rendering dosage ineffective in determining the experience.

b. The Ayahuasca can bring you to a face-to-face conversation with your subconscious- your alter ego. Although this may happen randomly and on rare occasion with other psychotropics it is a common occurrence in a properly intentioned and guided ceremony. Insights can be delivered verbally, visually and symbolically or by spontaneous emergence from within.

c. The Ayahuasca affects all of our sensory organs. She can cause not only vivid, realistic hallucinations affecting sight, sound and body sensations but it can also produce compound body feelings affecting touch, olfactory sensors, gag sensors etc. and can provide hallucinations of being touched, breathed on, entered or being operated on that are fully immersive with smells, sounds, visions and internal sensations to match. She also heavily affects our chronosensors, something that other psychotropics also achieve. Again, all of the above may occasionally under rare circumstances occur with other psychotropics, but they are common to the Ayahuasca experience.

d. The Ayahuasca gives access to ALL of our memory banks. Once more, with other psychotropics memories may randomly surface but in the Ayahuasca experience 100% of our memory banks are accessible with proper technique and strong intention. There are 4 categories of memories that we usually have limited access to:

1. Memories that are considered junk by the subconscious. Our bodies constantly record every stimulus that we receive through our sensory system whether we are aware of it or not. We constantly record video, audio, touch, smell and taste but also time, balance, motion and a multitude of other stimuli through our sensory organs, but most of the information is just dumped into a huge junk file filled with all data classified as irrelevant, unimportant or uninteresting to us. This is a necessary automatic function of our subconscious to prevent us from being overwhelmed by over stimulation and to allow our brains which have a limited capacity to process the information. Just by taking a ten-minute car ride we receive terabytes of data about every leaf, every insect, every house, car or person we encounter but over 99% of the information is discarded and not registered consciously. This is why, in some countries, the police use hypnotism and other practices to help witnesses access information that they are not aware they have recorded, for example in cases of terrorism or other serious crime scenes.

2. Memories before the ages of usually 6-7, the age where human beings have developed a filing and archiving system for their brains to be able to remember and access important information. Although there can be a few earlier memories to these ages, usually they are either memories of very important or emotionally powerful events or memories that have been reinforced through repetition by others such as parents and relatives. The rest has been dumped into the big junk file, mixed with every other memory.

3. Memories that have been blocked due to trauma, great emotional distress, guilt, shame or terror. These hidden memories are the main subject of the sciences and practices of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, where the patient goes through multiple sessions in long term therapy, whereby an environment of trust is created and through repeated probing by the therapist an effort is made to unearth blocked and buried memories. Under Ayahuasca these types of deeply repressed memories can be unearthed by a single ceremony rather than years of psychoanalysis. This is another reason why Ayahuasca is more and more valued as a psycho therapeutic tool.

4. Genetic or cellular memories. It is a scientific fact that the organic/biotic material on the planet is finite. Very little of it escapes the stratosphere and minute amounts of it enters without being incinerated by the friction of earth's atmosphere. Living beings are mostly carbon based and consume and metabolize other living or previously living matter into fuel, energy and chemicals. Whether the organic material is derived from plants, animals, insects or bacteria, any and every being eventually decays and its biotic/genetic material is used by other beings as fuel. When we actually burn organic material such as wood or oil for fuel, the ash is spread around through winds or water and is used as food for new growth. We exchange cellular, biotic material continuously through eating, drinking, breathing, defecating, urinating, sweating and all other living functions and statisticians evaluate that through global movement and dispersion of organic material every human being has held cells belonging to every other creature that has ever lived several times in our lives, including cells that once passed through the body of Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln or Attila the Hun! A man catches a wild pig and eats it, his refuse containing the pig's cells goes to the ground and the water table as well as in the air, a plant grows absorbing this material, is eaten by a cow in whose refuse it is taken by worms that can be eaten by a bird that travels far and is eaten by a cat that dies and falls in a river where it is eaten by salmon that travels to the ocean, eaten by a shark that....and so on and so forth for billions of years. Genetic material circulates through all living beings, holding genetic memories in their DNA that allow a deer, for example to know how to stand up and walk minutes after being born. This is why under Ayahuasca people can often experience being in another creature, an animal, an insect or another human being and experience memories from previous eras of evolution.

All these memories can be accessed through the Ayahuasca experience.

e. The Ayahuasca is a fully navigable experience. We have been exploring this and experimenting for over 10 years and in TierraMitica we teach people how to fully navigate the experience in order to achieve specific goals, solve specific issues and acquire insights relevant and useful for our lives rather than have flamboyant, abstract experiences. We help people make every ceremony count in the resolution of specific issues, particular to each individual through a set of techniques that allow them to fully navigate the experience and not get lost in it. The Ayahuasca works on the psyche like an onion, each ceremony peeling off and exploring another layer, eventually reaching the core, including unblocking specific repressed memories. A targeted approach “milks” the experience providing specific, relevant and supremely useful insights and deeply felt answers.

2. How does the Ayahuasca work on an energetic level?

To explain this, we need to explore and explain the energy world in a simple and understandable way. Bear with me, do not tell yourselves that you cannot understand this, it will be presented in an easy, simple way. We will start by the most famous mathematical equation, one that has been popularized extensively through posters, graffiti, T-shirts, cups and many other ways, Einstein's E=mc2, also called the mass-energy equivalence equation, used for many purposes including that of converting units of mass to units of energy. There are many complicated interpretations, variations and evolutions of the equation which is an intrinsic part of Einstein's theory of relativity, but basically it means that energy and mass are the same thing but at different speeds. At the speed of light, something is mostly energy with infinitesimal mass and as the speed is lowered the mass increases and the energy is reduced. Even simpler, if we could accelerate an object such as a ball to the speed of light it would be light and if we could decelerate light we would get measurable, weigh able mass. Mass, physical objects are basically energy going too slow and energy is mass going too fast. This is the reason why the Large Hadron Collider or else the CERN accelerator, the world's largest and most expensive machine was created, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometers (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 meters (574 ft) beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva. Many more are being built around the world as a result of its success to find the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle needed to confirm the Big Bang theory for the creation of the universe. Basically this giant machine spins light beams around this huge circular tunnel in counter directions allowing them to collide at four predetermined points equipped with a variety of sensors. By slowing energy beams abruptly energy is momentarily slowed down dramatically thus allowing it to turn into mass, subatomic particles that can then be observed and studied.

Thoughts and emotions travel inside us as electrical impulses through our nervous system at the speed levels of energy, being comprised of mostly energy and infinitesimal mass, same as electricity and light. With Ayahuasca, thoughts, feelings and emotions are slowed down in relativity to our perception and are converted to actual perceived mass. This is what the demons and creatures that we interact with and pass through us during an Ayahuasca ceremony are, manifested thoughts and emotions. The form they take is dependent on our individual and collective cultures and the particular symbolism we attach to every “taste” of particular thoughts and emotions. A westerner perceives death, for example symbolically as something black whereas eastern and Asian cultures such as the Chinese and the Japanese perceive death as something white. Similarly, terror can be perceived as being attacked by centipedes in one person, wild dogs in another or being buried alive in another. Since we are unaccustomed in perceiving our thoughts and feelings in a physical form, our brains subconsciously use the universal language of symbolism to perceive them. In another analogy, in the now outdated pickup, a needle travels through grooves of different depths engraved on a disk of vinyl, transforming these varying depths into different electrical impulses. These electrical impulses can be used to activate a magnet pushing air through a diaphragm in the case of a speaker and produce sound, music. If however these electrical impulses are channeled to a device with a set of lights of different colors turned on by different electrical impulses, the vinyl record produces a light show, and if connected to pumps a water show: they are all different manifestations of the same exact transmission, the same vinyl record. This is also why different people receive the insights and answers of the Ayahuasca experience in varied ways. Some hear the answers, some see them written on a wall or the sky, some get the answers through symbolic visions same as in dreams and some just feel them surging through them and emerging spontaneously. By distorting our time perception, the Ayahuasca converts our internal worlds, our thoughts, feelings and emotions to a magical, real, physical world translating our internal world into a magical dimension governed by symbolism. Our conscious brains think and operate with words, the playing ground of our frontal lobe or neocortex, the human part of our brains, the place where our higher functions are processed, whereas our subconscious brains operate with symbolism, the language of every living being, the primitive language of communication since before the first humans ever existed, since the beginning of life. The Ayahuasca creates a bridge between our primitive, animal, subconscious parts of our brains and our human, higher function cognitive brains and allows us to communicate in a two-way comprehensible manner.

3. What is the vibration of the Ayahuasca?

All our thoughts and emotions are because of a belief or a system of beliefs. Although we tend to think that what we spontaneously think or feel is “us”, our essence, our self, in reality every single thought and emotion is created by our beliefs. If we believe that airplanes are dangerous we experience fear and constriction in an airplane and if we believe that worms are dirty we are disgusted by them where some indigenous people are delighted and consider them a gourmet experience, to name some of infinite examples. The defining influence of beliefs on our thoughts, emotions, automatic reactions and physical bodies has been widely explored and acknowledged by science and is constantly confirmed by our human experience. The placebo effect is recognized by all, and no drug can gain approval by the authorities unless it passes extensive placebo trials. Most drugs that have gone through years of animal, clinical and human trials fail at the placebo trials, and the power of propaganda, indoctrination, induced fanaticism, brain washing and advertising has been acknowledged since the beginning of human civilization. Everybody knows what a good pep talk can achieve, and in every sports movie there is a moment when an inspiring speech or an insight turns losing teams into winners. People walk on fire unhurt, and perform amazing feats aided by their beliefs, while others fall ill because of them. In the last few decades scientists have been experimenting and focusing on the determining effect of our belief systems over our thoughts, emotions and bodies, and many, like biologist Bruce Lipton who through many books and especially “The Biology of Belief”, go so far as to propose that our beliefs not only determine our thoughts, emotions, chemistry and physiology but can even alter our DNA.

At the same time, every disagreeable thought or emotion is due to a paradox, a phenomenon acknowledged by science as cognitive dissonance. In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to their beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values. In short, internal contradiction, paradox, causes distress.

Every computer or automated machine is governed by an operating system, a core set of instructions that determine how it will perceive, act and react. In all living beings, including humans of course, the operating system is comprised of instructions engraved either through instinct and genetics, life experiences and learning from parents and other similar life forms, or through mimicking behaviors that appear to be successful. Every life form’s operating system, the instructions that determine what it will feel, think or how it will react, are simply

conscious or instinctual, unconscious beliefs about what most serves each being’s survival and well-being. All other creatures however, do not experience shame, guilt, remorse, social angst, lack of self-worth, depression. This is because the belief systems of all other beings are not paradoxical, they hold little or no contradiction.

But human belief systems are incredibly paradoxical; all biologists agree that reproduction is essential for life to exist, and so is a sense of self, for the purposes of self-preservation, in order for each life form to have as a priority their needs to eat, drink, avoid danger etc., but at the same time every single human belief system, every religion, every culture vilifies sexuality, declares it a sin, something base, vile, immoral, dirty and every belief system vilifies equally the sense of self, the ego. Selflessness is the biggest virtue and self-sacrifice the most admirable act, while selfishness is the most horrible accusation. As for sexuality again, our greatest sin and shame, it can be permitted only under a multitude of rules, if it is discreet and if nobody enjoys it inordinately, lest they be called dirty, promiscuous or sluts. Is it a paradox if functions and characteristics intrinsic to life and inherent in every human being and every other life form are considered bad? What about paradoxes such as “make yourself proud, make your family proud, make your country proud” and at the same time “pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and humility is the greatest virtue”? So make yourself proud but be humble! What about “it is too good to be true” meaning nothing good can be true, or “it is too simple to be true”, meaning truth is only something complicated that you can never comprehend? How paradoxical is that? The list is endless.

The Choice OS Mythic Voyage, same as the Mythic Voyage before it, produces spectacular and guaranteed results by working with the participant's belief systems, exposing paradoxes that are pertinent to particular issues that the participant wants to resolve, showing experientially how the particular paradox affects them and helps them make clear choices that effectively resolve it. Practices that help people systematically discover and expose more and more of their paradoxes sets people on a path of being in ever diminishing internal conflict and produces ever increasing happiness, inspiration and direction in life and turns them into architects of their own software, self programmers. For years, the Ayahuasca has intrinsic to the process, since besides the opening of the heart, the mind and perception that allow people not only to move to alternative realities and thus also beliefs about reality, she is also the place where paradox cannot exist. This is why, when the ceremony is done with particular inquiries and strong intention the paradoxes that arise to the surface cause great distress, physical pains, diarrhea, vomiting and potentially terror or anger. We normally avoid to see our paradoxes clearly through hazy, vague and complicated beliefs, denial or loss of interest lest we face the repercussions of our cognitive dissonance. In the Ayahuasca, hiding and avoiding the paradoxes is impossible unless you change intention or wander off unconsciously. The Ayahuasca is the part of us that actually makes sense, a place of no paradox. The paradoxes, unable to be contained, transform into demons and monsters that devour us.

4. How you can produce, feel and experience the vibration of the Ayahuasca without drinking the Ayahuasca brew:

Following years of extensive research and experimentation we have developed techniques to stimulate the natural production of DMT from the Pineal gland and with it a high emotional state while at the same time confronting the person by a huge paradox that they are harboring. While this is taking place we introduce an acute time perception distortion, similar to that which happens under Ayahuasca, by inducing oscillations in thought patterns melding the past, the future and the present, distorting the time/space reference points of the individual by inviting them to contemplate in rapid succession past, present and future realities while vibrating them at an ever higher emotional state until they start experiencing their thoughts and emotions in a physical reality, making the coexistence of conflicting realities excruciating, pushing them into a place of resolution. Of course the above is just a short, simple explanation of the techniques. People not only achieve spectacular, life changing insights in 15-20 minutes rather than the 4-5 hours of an Ayahuasca ceremony but also experience the same physical sensations as with the Ayahuasca, down to a tendency to purge. However, since they are not actually drinking any substance and not consuming any chemical, they have none of the side effects of the potion or the counter indications that exist for several physical conditions such as heart problems or gastrointestinal issues. In addition, they discover that it is within their capacity and capability to experience this magical place at will, and they can never attribute what they felt to a drug experience if ever they lose trust in their own internal insights.

Does what we do take away the magic and divinity of the grandmother Ayahuasca? Absolutely not, it rather serves to incorporate her, to make her part of ourselves, to embody her wisdom and open heart and to make us one with her, not needing anymore anything external such as a potion to connect us with her. Magic is science yet to be understood.