AYAHUASCA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF SELF-OBSERVATION
Our habitually blunted perception only allows us to apprehend and access a distorted fraction of reality: a reality full of personal projections and presuppositions. The central property of “psycho-integrators” is certainly to lift the veil, broadening our experience.
Ayahuasca amplifies our psychosomatic ability to respond to subtler degrees of stimulus, as well as often integrating our various sensory faculties in “synesthetic” processes. This effect of increasing our capacity to experience, to evaluate and to appreciate things by ourselves, is central to the understanding of its significance.
This amplification, like a magnifying glass, allows us to revisit intensively our mental archive – memories, ideas, fantasies, thoughts, emotions, fears, hopes, sensations in general. Depending on the current ethical and moral values of the individual, as well as influencing the intensity and focus of his perceptions, the experience may lead to a re-understanding of the meaning of the things being observed. Moral values and attitudes are re-evaluated.
Here we have a technology which, by altering the biochemical composition of the instruments and means of processing information, allows us temporarily to de-activate the cultural and psychodynamic filters which act in the shadows of our mind, formatting and ordering our daily experiences.
One can in fact learn a great deal, grow and liberate psychic energy by reviewing, transforming, eliminating, accepting and reconciling oneself with the uncomfortable aspects of the self.