We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now, O immortal one?
- Rig Veda (c.1000 BC)

One day later in the Amazon, Jonathon took us to see a Secoya family house that Gruppo Osanimi had raised funds to build in the traditional way. The knowledge to create such a dwelling had almost been lost - only Don Augustin, one of the elders, a small man with a gnarled face wearing a plain yellow smock, remembered the skills and the correct proportions from his childhood. No place like it had been built for forty years. The construction required a level of skill and attentiveness that modern methods had made unneccesary. The oval-shaped structure was designed to house several generations together. It was a huge single room, perhaps forty feet long and twenty-five feet high, with slanted ceilings and a peaked roof. The entire structure was held together by jungle vines used to bind the wooden beams together - not one nail. Nobody lived in the house, which needed to be smoked regularly so that all of the joints would bind properly. As soon as we arrived, Don Augustin and Don Emilio lit a fire in the center. They silently directed smoke around the interior. The house itself represented the Secoya map of the cosmos - it was symmetrical, with no doors to enter, and a series of central poles represented the cosmic axes. "Like the universe it has no beginning or end," we were told. Outside, there were plans to build a medicinal plant garden preserving the Secoya knowledge of botany.

Our group rested and napped in this house for a few hours - enough time to fully appreciate it. As I lay in a hammock looking up at the entwined beams, I slowly understood that it was one of the most harmonious structures I had ever visited. A sense of peace seemed to radiate from the building itself, affecting all of us. The Secoya hammock I was lying on was also, in its simple way, a work of art. The abstract pattern of its design suggested the interstitial geometries of certain parts of the ayahuasca visions. It was impossible to imagine a more comfortable container for the human body. Each of the hammocks required months of work. Gruppo Osanimi had been trying to keep alive the traditional method of weaving, which, like every aspect of the Secoya traditions, was threatened by the assault of the modern world. The speed of change turns the younger members of the tribe away from traditions that do not seem likely to guarantee them a future. But the options they are given - working for the oil companies or slaving in sweatshops - are also dead ends.

"The West destroyed the primitives because it could not bear the challenge they represented," wrote Alex Polyari, a member of Santo Daime, a Brazilian ayahuasca church. Cut off from our own archaic roots, we could not bear the natives' unity with the natural world, their attitude towards labor (it is estimated that tribesmen worked, on average, no more than three hours a day, and work for them was only a natural extension of tribal life, not alienated labor), or their direct spirituality.

The visit to the Secoya suggested, to me anyway, that human beings hold a particular place in the cosmic scheme of things. We are meant to be the gardeners of the planet, weavers of myth, explorers and journeyers into sacred realms. Part of our exploration requires developing technologies that are both spiritual and material, but right now we have become perverse in our essence.
Hypnotized by materialist greed, we are polluting and destroying wantonly, and this mindless destruction will haunt future generations for thousands of years.

According to every spiritual tradition, there is only one thing you take with you after death, and that is the level of development of your consciousness and your soul. Nothing else matters. The visions I have received from ayahuasca support the truth of thiis perspective.

Months later, in New York, I brewed a batch of ayahuasca for myself and two friends. This time I used the traditional plants. Having prepared ayahausca a number of times now, I have noticed that the experience sometimes seems to coordinate with the dreams I have the night before taking it, as the Secoya believe. The night before this particular trip, I dreamt I was sent an old-fashioned banker's check in the mail. I opened the envelope and the check had "Phantasticum, $2000" written on it.

What follows is my account of that trip:

I saw Don Caesario, the Secoya shaman, walking around his house, sitting on a hammock. He was there for me as a helpful and supportive presence. Then there was a mandala pattern, a shimmering disk swarmed by energy. This was a vibrating quantum event, an egg dancing in the midst of millions of worshipful sperm. Lattices wove around it in patterned formations.

The visionary colors were ecstatic hues of purple, violet, every element of the spectrum pushed into a kind of neon radiance. The visibility on this trip was excellent, but it was hard to slow down to examine anything closely. The speed of the encounters and transmutations was overwhelming; generally, phenomena in the "spirit world" seem to move at an incredible velocity. For a moment I visited Burning Man at night - that desert vista of laser beams and flame throwers, glowing art cars and costumed lunatics - then I zipped back to the DMT dimension.

Without thinking about it, I asked "the spirits," who seemed to be everywhere in the form of Tinkerbell-like shimmering pinpoints of wit and sentient energy, to build a rocket ship for me. They made it quickly, with gusto, welding it together at seamless high speed. I got into it and off we went. It was like I was at the head of a rollercoaster shooting across carnival landscapes, the dark matter of deep space. We rocketed across unknown solar systems, pinwheeled through sci-fi cities. The acceleration was tremendous. This was the cosmos as video game, a dimension that was real and illusory simultaneously.

I asked to see another inhabited planet and the spirits said, "Sure." They brought me to a large reddish planet. I descended towards a surface where gasses poured out of rocks with giant puffs and plumes. It didn't look inhabited at all, and I immediately sped away.

I visited the dakini living over my heart-chakra. Dakinis are part of Tibetan Buddhism. According to the Tibetans, dakinis are "sky walkers on emptiness," enlightened female beings that sustain us and teach us things. Everybody has one living over their heart. This dakini looked like a rock star, a figure of unleashed energy, rising out of my chest. She morphed from Tina Turneresque Diva to 1970s Rockette to 1920s flapper to multi-armed Tibetan diety over and over again. She danced with extreme exuberance and joy. She sprouted wings, horns, gossamer veils, furs.

Then my viewscreen filled with Buddha figures, a repetitive four-dimensional wallpaper of Buddhas filling everything. I went up close to one of them and it changed size - shrinking to the dimensions of a pebble, then exploding out to galactic scale.

An eagle-winged Asiatic faced being flew at my "Third Eye." When it hit me, I felt it as a physical sensation radiating out from the center of my forehead through my brain. He was golden-brown, with green-hued feathers. He had large wings, an Asiatic or Egyptian tinge, the body of a condor or eagle and a human head - this is only an approximation, as he kept morphing and self-transforming as I looked at him. (Was this Don Caesario in another form?)

I asked the spirits to show me "the land of the dead," and they brought me to a dark space flecked with rainbow fractals. I saw my father suspended in stillness, surrounded by emptiness, as well as R. Their stillness was a contrast to the rapidly transforming spirit beings. My father floated there in his clothes - tweed jacket, baggy pants, plaid shirt. He had the same air of fixity of purpose as he had in life. I felt he had a ways to go before reaching the "next level" that the spirits of the dead reach. This area was a vast waiting room where souls tried to devise their future existence. I went to another part of this matrix-like space, a grey area, where I found my grandmother waiting in limbo. Whoever runs this realm or kingdom of souls waited to find a new use for all of them, to recycle the dead back on earth. I thought that there would, eventually, be a new opportunity for them to try again. I realized that however much time it took in our dimension- ten years or ten billion - it would be no time at all in this suspended place.

I asked the spirits to show me Shakespeare. They said, "okay" (they are not always so accomodating). He was a magical being of great size and power, made of energy. There were a million spirits in the form of fizzy colored lights dancing around him, like tiny Japanese lanterns or candleflames, helping him as he wrote, his pen scrawling across the quantum Void. James Joyce was there as well - he was like a little pendant resting on Shakespeare's desk. I recognized that part of the artist's spirit went directly into their creations. Their spiritual power depended on the earthbound public's continued desire for their work. That is the deeper meaning of the artist's quest for immortality.

I tried to hunt for malevolent spirits in different quadrants of my own body. I reached for one insectile or scorpion-like being that amuses itself with torturing me, but I couldn't root it out.

I was surprised by the smooth cartoony nature of the graphics on this trip - it was a candy land compared to the weirder transformational spaces I saw in the Amazon. The unconvincing Yellow Submarine-style graphics are probably emanations that are not as deep somehow, and this whole rather friendly interior dimension seemed like my own personal projection into the infinite, which was different from my trips with the Secoya. At that deeper level, the masks come off and the revelations are far more shocking.

What can one make of a "drug" that activates the imagination and the internal powers of visualization to this extent? What does it mean that an element of the spirit moves at a speed far faster than thought, and seems comfortable at those speeds?

For me, the visions produced by ayahuasca support the notion that we live in what some theorists have dubbed a "holographic universe." Physicists have defined a property of certain particles that they call "Action at a Distance." They found that these particles, even when they were separated by vast distances, remained linked, following the same trajectory in all circumstances. This could only be the case because the particles are not, actually, separate from each other. They are parts of an extra-dimensional object and their separation is only an illusion caused by the limitations of the physical dimensions we can perceive.

The British physicist David Bohm tried to apply the insights of quantum physics to the world we experience. He postulated an "implicate" and an "explicate" order of reality. Phenomona that seem entirely separate to our senses in the explicate order are actually connected in the implicate, which is a higher dimensional space. One principle of a hologram is that the whole exists in each fragment. In psychedelic terms, the entire cosmos would be accessible through each person's consciousness (the individual's consciousness is, in shamanic terms, the link to other dimensions accessible through the "Cosmic Tree"). If the universe is a kind of hologram projected from extra-dimensional space, then anyone could travel anywhere in space or time instantaneously if they could move their consciousness to a higher dimension.

The mind seems to function holographically. The memory researcher Karl Pribam, for instance, found that specific memories are not stored in any single place, but distributed nonlocally across the brain - but if our memories are like a holographic projection, then from where is that hologram projected? The writer Michael Talbot examines the workings of memory and a vast number of otherwise inexplicable phenomena in his book The Holographic Universe, from UFOs to schizophrenia to manifestations of the Virgin Mary. In a holographic universe, Talbot suggests, mind and matter are intertwined. The mind would have much more power to change the actual substance of reality than it does under the materialist framework. Talbot thinks that certain experiences might be neither subjective - created in the individual mind - or objective. He coins the term "omnijective" to describe things like UFO manifestations (which can show up on radar and leave imprints in the earth) and apparitions of the Virgin Mary above a church (sometimes seen by hundreds of people). The energy of conscious or unconscious beliefs and the willpower of human beings may create actual physical manifestations that take on a level of independence from any individual consciousness.

In ayahuasca visions, I have seen, in photographic detail, entities from different spiritual traditions. I have seen Hindu gods and goddesses, Egyptian deities, and masked figures that I later identified in pictures of African rituals. I was not forcing these images into existence - they simply rose up from that vast holographic storehouse that Jung named "the collective unconscious." Perhaps these archetypes, once enshrined in the pantheon of human belief, exist autonomously inside the "spiritual worlds" perceived through yagé. Or perhaps it was their autonomous existence on a higher order that allowed them to penetrate into the human world, through dreams, visions, and revelations.

Ayahuasca reveals that the gods have not gone away. We just need to seek for them again.