“There are rips in the fabric, big tears in the matrix,” she tells me. “This is what I saw. All I could do was say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…and weep and vomit…for seven hours.” This was how my friend described one aspect of her very complicated experience while doing ayahuasca in the Rain Forest of Ecuador with a 104 year-old shaman.
Ayahuasca is a psychedelic brew made out of various plants. Shamans use it for divinatory and healing purposes. My friend had gone to experience the revelatory powers of this particular shaman. She had to walk to a hut in the middle of the jungle and be surrounded by only natural things – no cell phones, no metal, nothing fabricated, only wood and plants. This supposedly intensifies the depth of the ayahuasca. My friend said she could literally see the interconnectedness of all things and all space, a matrix of interconnected life force so to speak. But then as she continued through her experience, she could see huge tears and rips caused by many of the things humans “create” as if a machete had violently cut gaping holes into this fragile web. She said her grief was unbearable.
Who knows how and why ayahuasca works. Clearly, it affects the brain’s ability to process and organize sense experience. On a very basic level, everything is energy and our waking brains take this energy and organize it into things and objects and particular events. But then our past, present, and future impressions of experience contribute to this overall energetic organization. This paring down of the energy presented allows us to function in the world. (I suspect that someone with autism is unable to successfully pare down the full spectrum of incoming energy.) So I believe that what my friend “saw” while on ayahuasca is a version of reality that appears when her brain is unable to ‘properly’ organize the energy of experience, including when it is combined with the impressions of her past, present, and future. Something became revealed to her and I have no doubt that is somehow maps to a more uninterrupted, uninterpreted level of reality. (One also has to take seriously that many takers of ayahuasca report a similar experience of a matrix.)
So what does this have to do with the Matisse Dimension? In my previous blog, I wrote that Matisse was seeking to express an aspect of our consciousness that exists somewhere between the flat, two-dimensional world of thinking and three-dimensional world of vases and chairs. In his paintings, this world appears both real and surreal – everything is floating and everything is settled simultaneously.
For descriptive purposes, let’s say that ayahausca changed my friend’s brain function and her inner and outer landscape merged. As her brain’s preconscious ability to organize and interpret sense experience became impaired, the world presented differently to her, more as pure energy, less as distinct things and events. Quite frankly, it makes me hopeful that she experienced a level of unspeakable unity, a fragile web of interconnectedness. I am not surprised at her grief about our destructive ways. I feel it too.
I believe that a world of unity literally presents itself in the ‘space’ between mind and body, a world where there is “no distinction between what is inside and what is outside.” (See my previous blog.) For Matisse, as an artist, this world appeared as color, shapes, and patterns. (See image above.) For my friend, who is an activist, a world of unity appears that needs honoring and protecting, a world we have to save.
I do not choose to take ayahausca, nor am I a visual artist. But I do practice yoga. I practice yoga with my whole body, especially asana (poses) and pranayama (yogic art of breathing), even though I am paralyzed from the chest down, even though I do not ‘experience’ sensation below my point of injury, at least according to the current version of western medicine. According to it, any sensation I might experience is “only in my mind.” Yep…and my friend’s experience is only in her drug-twisted head, leave aside that modern physics hints at a similar conception of interconnected randomness at the quantum level.
I feel the ‘inside’ of my paralysis, despite a severed spinal cord. This level of sensation does not map to the world of physical objects and particular events that we generally consider ‘objective’ reality. In theory and practice, yoga calms the mind down enough for another level of experience to appear, one where there is a fundamental unity between what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside.’ This level is not a thought; it is not a hope. It is an energetic, experienced fact. When I inhale through my spines and into the sensation within my paralysis, I feel an underlying unity with a ‘space’ around me. When I exhale, I am filled with relief and gratitude. This does not happen with every breath, but it happens enough such that I cannot doubt the reality of my experience.
In principle, your experience is the same. Don’t be distracted by my paralysis. Don’t be distracted by ayahausca. Find your own path to a fundamental unity within your experience. Find your own version of the Matisse Dimension