What I Found on My Fourth Ayahuasca Trip

A couple of weeks ago I did ayahuasca for the fourth time, a practice I try to keep every three or four months.

It took place at my therapist's house, who is also an astrologer, and our work has always been rooted in symbolism rather than in conventional psychotherapy.

That's his expertise, and it's also my preference, because at some point I discovered that I understand the world, and myself, far better through symbols.

Symbols speak directly to the unconscious, and it's from there that they reshape the way the psyche runs.

The same thread runs through the rest of my practice: meditation, magick circles, and the casting of sigils.

Sigils are a very old technique for programming the mind, working from the unconscious and slowly reshaping the conscious one until the two are no longer strangers to each other.

Because whatever moves in the shadow is steering you regardless, and you never notice it's there.

During a trip, small illuminations begin to surface. I start to see that the many voices in my head are not one single me, but different I's, the way the Fourth Way describes them, and that a great deal of what I struggle with in daily life is being run by one of them without my consent.

Inside the trip I can watch them take shape in real time, and hear what they've been trying to say underneath the noise.

Some of them are warning me. Some are asking for help. Some simply need to be held. But every one of them is trying to be heard, often in disordered and extreme ways.

An ayahuasca trip, at least the way I use it, is being fully conscious with full access to the unconscious.

So this last time I began doing something new. Whenever one of those realizations about my own psyche arrives, I build a sigil right there, in the moment, with no physical support at all.

I tell my own consciousness: this magickal key you've just found, hold on to it. Feed my psyche with it from the unconscious, quietly, over time, like a small dose in the water of my mind, so that it slowly transforms me.

And also send it back to me as a whisper when I need it. When I'm reacting. When something that I cannot see is driving me. Remind me of this magickal key.

Which brings me to something larger.

Ayahuasca, along with other ancient plants and substances, sits among the most powerful medicines available to a human being, and we have barely begun to develop them.

We're pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building AI, and much of that goes toward doing what we already did, only faster. More productivity, more wealth, more drugs for health, longer lifes, more abundance.

What would happen if we pointed even a fraction of that intelligence at how the psyche actually works? At how the conscious and the unconscious come together.

At how these plants reconnect parts of the mind that have been switched off. At what exactly takes place in there when someone comes back from a journey as a different person.

We could be seeing advances far faster and far deeper than anything we're getting out of hardware.

And we might find another way to measure the evolution of humanity altogether. Not the Kardashev scale, measuring how much energy we can harness as a species, but how integrated the psyche of each human being has become.

Human beings with a whole psyche.

With a unified mind we could manifest every power we're currently trying to build with hardware: telepathy, travel to the stars, self-healing and far more than that.

And with a new kind of mind, manifest a new era for all of humanity.

If you're working at the frontier of AI, plant medicine, esotericism, psychology and technology, I'd love to talk and see how I can help.