I have, not in Peru but at home. I've tried DMT roughly 300 times, pharmahuasca (N,N-DMT in an enteric capsule, inside a larger capsule of synthetic monoamine oxidase inhibitor) and ayahuasca, and the usual others (I've tried everything I could find from Pihkal and Tihkal). I eventually became too afraid of DMT (I had mistakenly bought 5-MeO-DMT and was using the same dosage and that wasn't pleasant, and now I'm too anxious to "blast-off" because of the pace) and wanted something slower, so I turned to Ayahuasca.
It's a difficult feeling to describe (three Ayahuasca sessions at home so far.) – it's similar to N,N-DMT but whilst DMT feels like chapter-skipping, Ayahuasca feels like things are being played at 1x – If you have specific questions I will try to answer them.
If you get the chance or you are guided to it, you should try Ayahuasca with someone who carries strong medicine. Here's what I mean by that.
The shamans who train out in the jungle are trained directly by the plant spirit. Each plant carries an energy, a consciousness, and a host of insights and realms connected with it. The icaros of the Mestizo tradition will call upon those plant spirits with whom the shaman has gained a relationship with. And by "gain a relationship with", usually means ingesting and working with the consciousness of that specific plant -- some requiring cycles of years to establish a powerful relationship.
So when such a shaman sings, that plant spirit is brought into the ceremony space while your consciousness is open. In a group setting, it will express itself in a form that somehow blends what you need with what the group needs. This means that the medicine coming through in an Ayahuasca ceremony facilitated by someone trained in a lot of plant medicines will not just be bringing Ayahuasca to the table -- but also specialist medicines that Ayahuasca enables as a "master plant".
It's also not just the material you are using. The relationship you have with the Ayahuasca spirit will inflect and influence your own experience. Ask her about this next time you decide to try it at home again.
I was lucky enough to breakthrough on my first dose, and the only times I haven't broken through have been down to choice (to feel what lower doses felt like) – I invested in better equipment (http://imgur.com/vjvKzQB – from one of my posts in the /r/DMT channel in reddit) after the first few breakthroughs, it was the most interesting, terrifying, and beautiful thing that has ever happened to me, and I wanted to keep doing it to try and work out just what it was, there have been moments where I have lay in awe completely convinced I am witnessing everything happening everywhere in the universe, there have been times where I've been convinced I am solely responsible for the destruction of the universe, that my consciousness was the last thing left, there have been so many other strange experiences, I could never control them, I had to just sit back and feel everything, so it was always trying, I doubt that it's possible to master the effects, and most I know from various communities on the subject tend to ease off at around the same number of times that I did, as a chemical, it's absolutely non-addictive, all psychedelics I tend to find as self-regulating.
Yep, as mentioned, I twice had DMT (HCl) in an enteric capsule within a capsule of synthetic MAOI (Moclobemide) – it was a similar experience to Ayahuasca but there was much more of a mechanical feel to the CEVs, similar to the visuals produced by the Ketamine hole, there was also more anxiety, the plants combined with DMT in Ayahuasca are synergistic, the mechanical feeling could be a subjective effect in the brain caused by knowing the source of the material before consumption.
It has been life changing through and through -- too much to type and so much to say. But a few suggestions for those who are curious:
1) Do your research; don't go in there not knowing what you've signed up for. It can be incredibly transcendent and healing, but also quite possibly the hardest experience of your life. Difficult experiences make you stronger; this is the point. 2) For first timers -- and really anyone -- I would highly, highly recommend starting at a minimum of TWO nights. When going into the experience for the first time there's a lifetime of tangled psychology that the medicine loosens up, and there have been many people who go in for a single session unaware that the experience changes over multiple nights, end up disappointed or scared, and then leave and never touch it again. Night one untangles, leading into the second night and beyond which tends to get much, much deeper. 3) Read this book by Ralph Metzner, who has studied the subject extensively; it will give you a better idea of the pharmacology as well as the experience: https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Spirits-Ralph-Metzner-Ph-D/dp/.... And lastly, 4) leave your expectations behind. I can only speak from personal experience, but the Aya seems to enjoy toying with those who expect certain things from her -- this ends up generally being a valuable lesson in humility, for better or for worse.
Psychedelic experiences, like any drug experience are highly dependent on dosage, which is not standardized for Ayahuasca, as well as setting, and many other factors. Hence expect to hear a variety of experiences. It's generally gonna be quite a high dose of DMT from what I've heard so quite mind blowing.
Dosages are not standardized. They are customized. The point isn't to try to get you to fit into a mold; a big part of this is to come into a wholeness of being.
The day we try to standardize Ayahuasca dosages in order to create a map of causal effects ... that's the day we missed the point of this.
I drank on at least 35 nights, most of them with Mestizo shamans brought into the US. This happened within the span of three intense years.
Every single time was difficult and challenging. Each one of them brought a theme that picked off where the last left off. What I worked on was a range of things: from physical ailments, to letting go of attachments and facing fears, to purging out BS in the mind, to spiritual ailments spanning across multiple lifetimes. I had to work through a lot of internal resistance. There were training in a variety of things at a variety of levels of being. It did not help that there was something within me that drove me to keep coming back, like I'm hurrying to make it. There was period where, by the next ceremony rolls around, I forgotten the initial suffering and I have fond memories of the peak. By the time I got to the most recent one I participated in, I could intuitively tell when I was going to work a lot.
My experiences are atypical and intense. I am sensitive to it, and it took a while to figure out where the right dosage was for me. Every person's experience and work is going to be unique to them, even if it might fall into broad, general patterns.
I'm currently on hiatus, and will probably be getting back into it... well, when the time is right again. In the meantime, I've been keeping up with my daily practices of meditation and sometimes chanting, getting into the darker spaces of my being, when necessary. If anything, my experiences in the ceremonies taught me to have courage to look. And although the hiatus was due to external circumstances, I'm training to access these visionary states without taking the medicine directly.
IIRC, gwern tends to focus on cognitive enhancers, or psychoactive drugs that could theoretically be used for that purpose (like the LSD microdosing experiment). I don't think he takes hallucinogens recreationally (or if he does, he doesn't write about it)
Throwaway account; this stuff is of dubious legality and I like being employable.
I participated in a Yagé ceremony -- locally, though led by a Columbian shaman and apprentice -- about a month ago on recommendation of my individual therapist. This was my first experience with psychedelics (or anything stronger than marajuana), and I went in with a set of expectations: powerful wakeful hallucinations, ego death, and a total emotional asskicking. (This latter expectation in particular is almost a manifestation of my own personal issues; ymmv.)
The description of the plant as having her own agenda and laughing at your plans is quite accurate; much as I tried to find a way to use the experience to reveal all of my own deep emotional flaws, I felt a presence just laughing and saying-without-saying to choose to love myself as an action, not just a concept and a feeling -- and to take the active step of choosing not to beat myself up so damn much, and all would be okay.
Also as written, this experience was deeply personal; for me to go into much greater description of my own interactions and experience would require you, dear reader, to both know and care about all of the issues that I carry. Suffice to say that if you were to try this, you would likely find your experience also to be both profound and incredibly difficult to communicate satisfactorily.
To follow on the description as personal: it was also incredibly isolating while _in situ_. You may be sitting with a dozen or with fifty people, but (aside from the sounds of retching and of guidance from the shaman, apprentice, and/or assistants) you are very much alone with whatever is going on inside of you.
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For contrast, my wife had a less typical and more powerful experience with ayahuasca about ten years back while traveling in Peru. She and a friend participated in a ceremony in a much more intimate environment (just the two of them, a shaman, and a female bystander for safety) without as much of the physical preparation; they did it practically on a whim, so while my wife was fairly prepared emotionally and spiritually from her own work, she hadn't, say, avoided pork or alcohol for the week before. She downed two or three cups of the vile stuff over the course of their ceremony, to little obvious effect that evening. It was on the travel back out of the jungle that everything hit: the most intense projectile vomiting of her life to date, followed by extremely intense daytime hallucinations, and a strong sense of spiritual connectedness and openness that she carries to this day.
Having asked around, this significantly delayed and highly intense experience is very uncommon.
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Finally, as a quick followup on the original article discussing the anthropomorphization of the leaf as grandmother/_abuela_ -- it's worth noting, for context, that frequent medicinal users, devotes, psychonauts, etc. refer also to peyote as grandfather/_abuelo_. I have no personal experience, but have been given to understand that peyote gives a very different but complimentary experience: communal and reassuring rather than individual and truth-revealing.
It's a difficult feeling to describe (three Ayahuasca sessions at home so far.) – it's similar to N,N-DMT but whilst DMT feels like chapter-skipping, Ayahuasca feels like things are being played at 1x – If you have specific questions I will try to answer them.