We received an interesting synchro from someone who wants to remain anonymous. You’ll see why when you read the post.
+++
A few years back, I was at a friend’s house. We were both on a low dose of psylocybin mushrooms, and I was helping him brew up a batch of something I’d never helped make before. It is extracted from the root bark of a shrub from Brazil.
Maybe 15 minutes after I’d finished pouring the bark into the jar we were using, while we were waiting for it to dissolve, I got a text message from a friend … asking me if “there was a drug made from tree bark.” She had zero idea what I was up to that night (no one did). She’d just gotten into a conversation about magic mushrooms (which I was on at the time), which led her and the guy she was with to talk about other psychedelic experiences. The guy was saying that he’d heard of some crazy drug made from tree bark, and she thought I might know what the heck he was talking about, so she texted me to ask about it … while I was actually making the stuff!
Oh, and to clarify – the jar behind the phone in the pic is root bark undergoing the extraction process.
+++
Ayahuasca is also used by indigenous tribes in the Amazon as a rite of passage. In the past few decades, Western travelers have gone into the Amazon in search of native practitioners who would take them on an ayahuasca journey. Author and visionary Terrence McKenna used ayahuasca during one of his jungle excursions, he believed he had seen into the heart of the universe and discovered that the I Ching is a coded system about quantum time/space.
Years ago, when we led trips to the Amazon, one of our guides, Hugo, told us about his rite of passage, during which he encountered an enormous anaconda that talked to him. He’d found his power animal.
The ceremony and preparations for the journey took three days. When he finally drank the liquid from the bark – which he described as disgustingly bitter – he got sick. Everyone does. Over and over again until you think there is nothing left in your stomach. Then you throw up again. Then the visions begin.
After encountering the anaconda, another animal – a black panther – approached Hugo. He couldn’t tell what was a hallucination and what was real. He thought the panther was a physical creature and freaked out when the panther charged him and passed right through him.
We always wanted to try the bark ourselves, but in our three trips to the Amazon, we were the organizers, the ones supposedly in charge of the journalists who joined us. Maybe we should’ve advertised one of the trips as an ayahuasca journey. We probably would’ve traveled much farther than the Amazon on that one!













