Colonel Sanders earned his Kentucky Fried millions with a secret blend of eleven herbs and spices. Today, elite entrepreneurs, entertainment moguls, high level athletes, and eager spiritualists choose another “Original Recipe” to bring wealth, health, and inner peace. At least that’s what the narrative says.
Meet ayahuasca, the latest nectar of the rich, the famous, and the seekers.
Pronounced aa·yuh·waa·skuh, ayahuasca is a brewed drink containing DMT, a powerful hallucinogen. For centuries, indigenous tribes in the Amazon basin consumed ayahuasca in religious rituals after boiling leaves from the Psychotria viridis shrub and stalks of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine.
The brew took a few hundred years to bubble into the American mainstream. Psychedelics used to be a niche subculture of “psychonauts” and disciples of Eastern spiritualism. They still make up a large portion. The late adopters in the 2010s and 2020s, however, are anything but shy evangelists. They attribute ayahuasca with healing everything from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and depression to easing an enormous ego or existential crises.
Practitioners and tourists travel to nations like Peru or Costa Rica and participate in the ritual under the guidance of a shaman. Word on the Internet is if you get a guide from the Quechua lineage indigenous to Peru, you’re set up for an even more authentic experience.
In more recent years, retreat centers have sprouted up in the U.S. where guests can enter into altered states of consciousness. Get pampered in a spa-like atmosphere by day, then trip out on the hallucinogenic drink by night (with the help of a classically-trained guide, of course).
What gives? Have I gone trippy?
No, I’m not here to preach behind a pulpit of mind-altering substances. I’m here to show you how an idol rises up, brew by brew, shaman by shaman.
To get the pot boiling, let’s take a look at Romans 1:21-23.
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”
In 2022, the cast-iron atheism of a Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris doesn’t square with large portions of American culture. They understand it’s spiritually bankrupt. They crave the divine. Although it’s a divine apart from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Comedian, Mixed Martial Arts commentator, and podcaster Joe Rogan has championed ayahuasca and DMT since the early days of the The Joe Rogan Experience.
In an August 10th podcast, Rogan interviewed Rick Strassman, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
Rogan waxed poetic on the benefits of DMT.
“If there was a thing that you could do, like a door you could go through, and that door would take you to another dimension where you would communicate with some entity beyond your wildest imagination that’s constantly visually changing, and communicating with you telepathically and knows everything about you and sees all your bulls— and is trying to impart some ideas that will help you with your life.
‘Cause it’s a god-like experience. Like you’re experiencing like some sort of uberpowerful entity, some uberintelligent entity…
This is what I tell people. I go ‘If you would open a door and you would go there and have that experience, would you do it?’
And most people would be like, ‘Yes, I would do it.’
If I gave you a drug that gave you that experience, you still have the exact same experience. You’ve just decided it’s not real. And you’ve decided it’s not real because you’re putting it into this category of hallucination. Like what does that even mean? What does that even mean? You’re actually having that experience. I don’t know what it is.”
Entity.
That’s the idol, partner.
Look at the setup: a shamanistic ritual, the motive to enter into a quasi-religious experience, and the appearance of an entity.
Bind those together and you’re entering into witchcraft. Sure, proponents package ayahuasca under the guise of self-improvement. But when entering Ephesians 6:12 territory, knowing or clueless, you’re opening yourself up to demonic encounters.
What’s more, hundreds of entities exist in these ayahuasca ceremonies, so much so an entire genre of art dedicates itself to chronicling these beings. Psychedelic researcher Des Tramacchi wrote her PhD dissertation on them in Vapors and Visions: The Religious Dimensions of DMT Use.
In an article for Kahpi: The Ayahusca Hub, Tramacchi writes:
“During my research, I discovered that the entities or spirits encountered on a DMT trip ranged from faerie-like beings that look like they have just stepped out of an Enid Blyton children’s book through to others that look like they have just crawled out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror.
There is great variety among these entities, but there are also some creatures that recur with surprising frequency.
A basic inventory would include enormous amoebas and tentacled beings; felines; insects (especially mantids); reptiles; robots, ‘mechanoids’ and androids; aliens; and humanoids (including elves, clowns, goblins, divinities, ‘ancestors’, ‘elementals’, ‘little cartoon character like entities’, and daemons).
Humanoids or beings with primarily human attributes are probably the most common.”
There you have it. Romans 1:21-23 in action. Let’s return to verses 22-23.
“Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”
Common threads weave their way through most ayahuasca participant experiences. They want to go beyond the “illusion” of selfhood, crush their egos, and heal from trauma.
In “The Brutal Mirror: What an ayahuasca retreat showed me about my life,” Vox writer Sean Illing describes his four-night sojourn to Rythmia, a Costa Rican retreat center for ayahuasca ceremonies. Rythmia looks like any other wellness retreat and includes massages, volcanic mud baths, organic food, yoga classes, and colonic cleanses. The main attraction, on the other hand, is the “medicine,” as the drink is called.
Illing and 78 others drank the Ayhuasca concoction multiple times during their stay, resting on padded mats in a large room. He recalled it tasted like “motor oil diluted with a splash of water.” Buckets and toilet paper were placed at each mat, and two bathrooms stood ready to receive the faithful. Why? After about 30-45 minutes, the brew starts to kick in, as does the purging. (Vomiting, diarreahea, crying, gyrating, and laughing can occur.)
Illing looks at a fellow participant, Andrea. She has a bundle of snakes coming from her mouth and into his. He crumples into the fetal position and soon experiences his entire life, “as though it were projected on a movie screen…every counterfeit pose, every missed opportunity to say or do something true, every false act and ingratiating gesture, every pathetic attempt to be seen in a certain light.”
Welcome to the Post-Modern High Place. Instead of idols carved in stone, the Spirit Molecule carries the worshiper away.
Here’s what drew Illing there:
“My interest in ayahuasca was specific: I wanted to cut through the illusion of selfhood. Psychedelics have a way of tearing down our emotional barriers. You feel plugged into something bigger than yourself, and — for a moment, at least — the sensation of separation melts away.
There are many ways to reach the truth of non-selfhood. Think of it as a mountain peak, with meditators and certain spiritual traditions ascending different sides.
Psychedelic drugs offer a kind of shortcut; you get a glimpse of this higher truth without all those years of serious, disciplined practice.”
What did he achieve, in his view?
“There was no ego. I wasn’t an isolated ‘I,’ a separate person with a separate consciousness. The feeling, I imagine, isn’t much different from what advanced meditators experience when their sense of self disappears. You simply have no awareness of anything but your body and the moment.”
The experience remains common across the board. In doing research for this story, articles and forum posts paint a picture of overwhelming dread, then a blessed release to “enlightenment.”
Illing ends the narrative by revealing he yearned to go back to Costa Rica, not for the ayahuasca mind you, but for the shared experience “that creates an emotional intensity that’s hard to find elsewhere. Every person looks right at you, and you look right back.”
Stay with me, because I’m going somewhere Biblical with all these stories. But before that, I must introduce you to one more disciple of ayahuasca.
Meet NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, voted league MVP for the last two years. On the Aubrey Marcus Podcast, Rodgers tells of meeting a “grandmother spirit” who walked him through past, present, and future lives.
“I had a magical experience with the sensation of feeling 100 different hands on my body imparting a blessing of love and forgiveness for myself and gratitude for this life from what seemed to be my ancestors.”
Fortunate for Rodgers, he didn’t need a Squatty Potty or chunder bucket to puke in. He credited ayahuasca for helping him to unconditionally love himself and others. He views self-love as one of the most important factors for mental health.
The podcast host, Aubrey Marcus, further explains:
It requires us to accept the thing that we’re afraid of or the thing that we’re resisting. And in the acceptance is the permission to transform. You really wouldn’t learn that other way of doing things, at least it’s hard, without something extraordinarily challenging in your life, where you can actually do that in real life…
So instead of having to play it out in real life, which is messy and takes a long time and has a lot of consequences, we get to work through these things in like this Dr. Strange bubble of medicine. Where we get to do it for practice but it’s for real for our whole life.
What I really believe is that our life won’t force us into those situations where we have to learn that lesson the hard way through a near death experience or a cataclysmic injury or something like that.
Noticing a pattern across all these stories?
Encounter with entities.
Total awareness of one’s shortcomings.
Annihilation of the ego.
Enrapturing bliss of self-love.
Top it all off with the belief that psychedelics are both the shortcut and safe space to cultivate enlightenment, and you have the recipe for a steady stream of converts.
Any spiritual experience where the end result is self-love won’t save you, in the end. I know, it’s rough to hear. I’m not suggesting you walk around screaming internally, “I’m a scumbag, I’m a scumbag, I’m a scumbag.” But Paul warns in 1 Timothy 3:2 that people will be lovers of self, a warped love that puts them at odds with God and others, ironically.
If you take a peek at the comments section of the podcast featuring Rodgers, you’ll find people sharing their stories or showing their support, their inspiration, and their hopes.
One comment put it best: “Aaron is about to inspire a generation of psychedelics users. I’m here for it.”
I’m not.
Entities like Rodger’s “grandmother spirit” give me the not-so-sneaking suspicion there’s a Father of Lies skulking behind all this. No matter what the marketing, drugs-as-a-gateway to the divine is witchcraft. And no, the witch isn’t flying on a broom. It’s a shaman who’s growling like a jaguar (yes, that happens) and singing sacred songs as you blow chunks and blast out of your bottom.
No doubt Aaron Rodgers seems at peace, poised, and affectionate for all around him. The only thing worse than kicking a man while he’s down is kneecapping him while he’s skipping through a field of sunflowers. Rodgers is a fascinating character, an excellent quarterback, and seems like a genuine seeker of emotional wholeness. I just think he’s allowing himself to be led down a primrose path that ends in torment.
Here’s one of his takeaways from the “grandmother spirit.”
“And that’s the modeling that we need. The redefining of the masculine qualities, calling in the Divine Feminine to balance our lives out and to raise up the women in your life and to give them a platform to speak and to lead and to set the trajectory for the next generations.”
“Grandma” can get lost in the name of Jesus. The logic of “to become a better man, you must become more like a woman” never works out. Men become better men when they reflect the character of Christ. God took the rib from Adam to make Eve. We don’t need to ask for it back so things are on the level.
Now, if you’re a female reading this story, please don’t feel like you have to duck ricochet shots. Should you be a godly woman, you get that the Divine Feminine doesn’t exist and is a direct affront to Jesus’ laying it down that “no one comes to the father except through me’ anyway.
Big Pharma gets a lot of scorn, much of it justifiable. Yet I can’t help but wonder if all those activists are swapping one drug culture for another. Out with the painkillers, in with the micro dosing and edibles. And for the hardcore, enough hallucinogens to travel the seven psychedelic seas.
At the end of it all, there’s still more dependence.
Underneath a YouTube clip for The Joe Rogan Experience #1854, the one where he talks about the entity, someone left a comment that stuck in my chest for the rest of the day:
“I’ve tried DMT once and I can assure you it was THE most incredible, life changing experience. The trip itself may not be for everyone, but the “come down” really is for everyone. The overall feeling of the warmth of happiness, love, and gratitude is nothing short of a religious experience. I imagine its the closest you’ll come to meeting ‘God.’ “
That’s the best we can hope for in 2022: some mashed up shrubs and a sliding spectrum of entities.
Unless…
You trade the sacred brew for the Cup of the New Covenant.
Because what the shamans won’t tell you in their ancient utterances is that there’s no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood. No amount of self-love or psychedelic shortcut excuses you.
Thankfully, an obedient Son was slain before the foundations of the world and greater still, descended to earth to for a crucifixion and resurrection. If you believe in Christ already, that’s standard fare. But what about those who don’t give Him a second thought?
It’s the male co-worker who’s just gotten divorced, feels no sense of purpose, and books a trip to an ayahuasca retreat. It’s the successful tech CEO who’s craving something bigger and willing plunk down the money and hand himself over to whatever entity he’ll be inviting in. It’s the freelance photographer and mom of three who wants to reconnect to something bigger than herself and starts researching the health benefits of DMT.
There’s your mission field.
Just find the gods of this age and the brew they offer you.
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Kevin Cochrane is the creator of Replenish, the site to resupply your faith with overlooked insights from Scripture-based stories. Share your thoughts by commenting below or dropping a line to kevin@replenishstories.com.
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