Beneath the Milky Way: An Ayahuasca Vision
An ayahuasca ceremony under the stars, and the vision of the river that connects all things.
The ceremony was held in a clearing in the forest, under a sky so dense with stars it looked like foam. I drank the brew — bitter, earthy, alive — and lay back on my mat. The shaman began to sing, and the songs were not just sounds but architecture, building a space inside me that I had not known existed.
The vision came gradually. First, the trees around the clearing began to glow, as if lit from within. Then the sky began to move — not the stars themselves, but the darkness between them, which began to flow like a river. I understood, with a certainty that did not require evidence, that the Milky Way was the same river I was seeing inside — that the galaxy and the nervous system were the same pattern at different scales, and that I was a point where the pattern had become conscious of itself.
The shaman's song carried me through the night. I purged twice — violently, and with a sense of releasing something very old. By morning, I was empty and clear. I sat by the river as the sun came up and felt, for the first time in my life, that I belonged to something that was not going to end. I have not been the same since. I do not talk about it much, because the words make it small. But I carry it.
