Aubrey Marcus recounts a six-day ayahuasca retreat in Peru’s Madre de Dios River under Maestro Orlando Chuhandama, a 30-year veteran shaman, where he "died" and returned as Aubrey after visions of snakes, thorns, and a glowing "geometrical city." He describes healing lymphoma fears, uploading cosmic data via metallic motherships, and even remotely clearing a friend’s post-accident trauma with golden light—claiming his own swollen glands vanished permanently. Rogan’s skepticism clashes with Marcus’s conviction that ayahuasca’s medicine reveals deeper truths, reshaping reality through intent and shared visions, not just placebo. [Automatically generated summary]
It went from going to a comedy club and saying hi to somebody, like, oh, how was your week, to actually digging into this person for two to three hours.
Ayahuasca is the orally active version of the most potent psychedelic drug known to man, which is dimethyltryptamine.
Dimethyltryptamine is produced by the human body.
They don't understand why, but they believe that it's produced during heavy REM sleep and during periods of extreme stress.
They don't know what it is.
They don't know what its real true function is, but they do know that it is the most incredible hallucination-creating, visionary, psychedelic experience known to man.
No doubt.
It's a struggling, incredible experience.
But it's not orally active because it's in so many different plants that if you got it orally from eating it, man, people would go on DMT trips all the time because it's in all sorts of different grasses and plants and usually in a combinatory state with a bunch of other, whether they're active or non-psychoactive ingredients.
Like some plants actually contain 5-methoxy dimethyltryptamine, which is another form of DMT that's just as, actually more powerful but unique and different than the regular DMT experience.
But we're getting off track.
What ayahuasca is, is the shamans of South America figured out, and no one knows how long ago they figured this out, whether it's a thousand years, ten thousand years.
It's all guesswork, because there's no written history of it.
They figured out how to combine...
The reason why it's not orally active is your stomach produces something called monoamine oxidase, and that breaks down dimethyltryptamine in the oral form.
So once it gets to your stomach, where any...
Like marijuana, when you eat it, it would get into your bloodstream.
Well, it can't because the monoamine oxidase crushes it.
So what they figured out how to do is take the root of one plant, the leaves of one plant, and the vine of another plant.
The point is, it's amazing that these people figured out long before we were ever driving cars or sending emails, they figured out how to combine these two plants and make an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine that, in the words of the shaman, connects you to the spirit world.
And the idea is that there is a world that is all around us all the time, but we just cannot tune into it.
And it is a world of souls, and it is a world of the afterlife, and it is a world of non-embodied entities that are, to the experiencer, to the subjective person that's having this experience, they are As real, if not more real, than this life itself.
So it's kind of a school of shamans that have been studying and training.
And going to classes and things, led by a master shaman who's found out the best in South America, learned from them for 30 years, and is now trying to teach people here in the U.S. about it.
So in order to get into this, this is kind of like the master class here.
This is the finishing course, going down and taking the medicine down in the Amazon.
So in order to get admitted, I had to write a letter, and they reviewed it, and did whatever they do to kind of approve me to go along.
I've been watching a lot of that Jeremy Wade's River Monsters, so I'm just looking at this muddy brown water, thinking of these eels that burrow through people's flesh and sawfish and all those things that he's pulled out of there.
But yeah, three hours up is two and a half or so up the river to this place.
It was just this eco-lodge.
Running on generators and out in the middle of the jungle.
There's two different churches, I believe, in North America that have won through the Supreme Court the ability to take ayahuasca in a ceremonial Christian religion.
They were all super good-natured, but this is not the crew that I would bring on board like a seaworthy vessel if I was going to, you know, cross the ocean.
And in a sense, a lot of people, whatever you become anything, you've got to fake it before you make it.
You know, like, I've had this conversation with my friends about comics that are comics that are just starting out, and like, you know, that's not a fucking comic.
Look at this fucking terrible.
Like, goddamn, man, if you saw me a week into my act, you'd want to kill me, too.
If you're in fucking high school and you're wearing black nail polish and you're growing your hair long, you decide to fake like you're a rock star until you become a rock star.
But anyway, the point is we're at a gym and we're lifting weights and this girl has this cute little body and she's talking to him and Eddie is like, so what's up?
Where are you from?
Blah, blah, blah.
And she was like, oh, I'm from...
Out of state, and I'm really not that happy with California.
She was like, real uppity.
And he's like, what's up?
Like, what's the matter?
She goes, well, you know what?
There's just a lack of spirituality here.
And I don't think that the men are very godlike.
That's what she actually said.
She actually said they're not very godlike.
And we were like, and I was like, right there with him.
I was like, shit, is that godlike?
Like, I don't want to start making fun of her because he's trying to get laid.
So I'm being cool and I back off and I'm like, what the fuck?
Yeah, I got to know my roommate and kind of wait for it, and then they talk about it a little bit, and then you have a few minutes to kind of gather yourself and get ready for the lunch.
Actually, there's a video I posted on my blog kind of midway down on warriorpoet.us that has actually the maestro that I work with and it shows some pictures of them boiling it with the big sticks.
I have by far the fewest people with our group because people were scared of the dragon.
So I had like 10 people.
So we're going to a small hut in the secluded part of the jungle.
So a long walk.
My fearless compatriots were kind of laughing and joking around.
And I felt confident, but I was very calm.
I knew I was going into some pretty intense work.
So we get in there, and then they do some of the opening ceremony type of stuff.
So all of us are faced like spokes of a wheel towards the center of the room and we all have a puke bucket kind of near us because you know most people purge during this process it's part of the healing process and then he calls us up one by one kind of looks you know looks at you assesses and then pours a coconut pours the ayahuasca in like a polished coconut husk and you drink And it is thick and bitter and just tastes like earth and fire.
So he only has, his tools are, he has his breath, which he uses more than anything, and then he has a kind of a branch with a bunch of leaves that he uses as sort of like a rattle, and those are his tools in his voice, in his whistling.
And he also has some cinnamon sticks, which he chews at the end, but I'll get to that.
So it starts going and you start to get that energetic activation, same as you do on mushrooms or something, where you know Something's about to happen.
Your closed-eyed visuals start to splash with color and light and things like that.
Your stomach starts to gurgle a little bit.
So that was happening, and he started his Icarus.
Starts slowly, kind of like it is now, whistling and building, building.
And then, in about an hour, you hear the first person just retch, like...
And it's not like just a gentle bulimic-style vomit.
This is like years of rot just pouring out of every organ that they have.
And they're half yelling, half puking when they do it.
Like all my companions, like one of the ladies just turned into a blithering child.
Like, help me, help me, help me.
Another person started pretending that he could sing the Ikros, but it was like a kid that thinks he knows the words to a song.
She was like two beats off and it was awful.
And then another lady completely lost her internal monologue.
And this culminated throughout the night and her finally saying, I can't tell if I shit my pants or if I didn't shit my pants, like over and over again.
And I was like, oh my God.
You know, I mean, this is, so people, I mean, people who weren't ready cracked, you know, bad.
I mean, that wasn't, that's not the experience you're supposed to get.
You're supposed to keep it to yourself, follow through.
So that part, that part was rough in this first, in this first session.
And then, you know, right as I'm starting to get, you know, get some serious visions, lady next to me, and I like shuddered and she puked all over my socks.
So they pitch black and I'm peeling off the wet chunky wool from my feet and put them on the side and just curl back up on my mat.
No way to clean it.
Fucking pitch black in the middle of ceremony starting to trip balls.
So that was that was the start of it.
And it's kind of signatory for the way the rest of the night went because it was intense and dark.
And, you know, what started happening is Snakes started coming in through the jungle.
I had visions of snakes and they would look at me and then immediately start savagely going inside my body and eating my organs, eating my throat, going down my throat and eating their way out and exploding through my body.
And I know enough from psychedelic experiences to just witness and allow and just let it happen.
And then from there, insects would burrow into my body and explode and spiders and things would go.
And really, that was not so bad, actually.
That was kind of the good part.
But what ayahuasca will do is it will find your own weaknesses and then use them to fuck with you.
It's like when you're at the final level of a video game and it's like, no, you must fight yourself.
That's what it felt like.
So it started preying on my own fears.
And I heard a voice telling me exactly what I was scared of, which is some illness.
My family's had some lymphoma issues or something like that.
So it basically said, you're going to die of cancer.
Say your goodbyes.
You're fucking done.
You got it now.
It's bad.
And it was telling me that.
And that actually started to shake me a little bit.
Because I've never had it myself work against me in that kind of magnitude.
I've had visions of things before that were dark and I always worked through and I ended up feeling good.
That was a more challenging experience.
And then at a certain point, you know, I had to just apply the same philosophy and say, you know what, if this is the end, I'm going to have a fucking hell of a six months, you know, and I'm going to do everything I can and enjoy my life.
And then boom, that ended.
And then finally at that point I was able to get a sense of peace and I felt myself getting sucked back down into the earth.
Kind of like in the, the only thing I can describe is that movie Avatar.
You know when the little fibers grow up around the body and it like connects it back down to the earth.
I felt this deep relaxation just like right back down into the earth.
And then you know that was kind of the end.
That was the climax of this first experience for me.
Did you get a sense that it was a purposeful trip?
That the reason why it takes you on this destruction of your body and the snakes and everything like that, is it supposed to scare the fuck out of you to break you down?
It's a death-rebirth motif, really, is what it is.
And, you know, that was the idea of the medicine in the night.
Each night the medicine had a theme.
And the first night it was anaconda medicine, snake medicine, which is shedding your skin in one piece.
So like a snake does.
A snake sheds his skin all in one piece.
This was about shedding everything that you don't need.
Your fears, your weaknesses, all of that.
And that's why you explore it.
And I think part of the intent of what the shaman was doing, which meanwhile, by the way, is Icaros were growing in intensity and it was like the room was swirling with a voice.
So that first experience, so after he comes by, the shaman comes by, he asks me, you know, I say, you know, I managed to muster something like, I told him I was dead, good and dead, and he just laughed and kind of, that was, I think, when we He started to give me a little bit of respect because the rest of the room was just crushed.
I was crushed too, but at least I was able to sit up and deal with it a little bit.
He brings me over to where he's at.
He starts chewing up some cinnamon, and it's the final closing ceremony, the cleansing ritual.
And he has me open the back of my shirt, and he goes, shoo, with the cinnamon.
And the instant he did that, it was like I was on a bungee cord.
And this is six hours after I'd taken it.
You know, the peak of my trip was completely done.
And I just went, whew.
Straight up and right into this world of just pure energetic vibration that I had no idea how to decode.
It was something completely foreign to anything I've ever seen.
It seems to me that just jumping right into an ayahuasca trip without any previous psychedelic experience is like taking no martial arts classes and fighting in the UFC. It just seems ridiculous.
Wouldn't you want to build your way up slowly, smoke some salvia, eat a brownie, slowly dip your legs into the river that is the psychedelic experience?
Because the ayahuasca experience and the DMT experience is supposed to be the two most powerful that you can ever have back to back.
One being a bit more on the spiritual side, the ayahuasca.
Supposedly because it's longer and not as intense, it sort of connects you in a way that you can interpret better than the DMT flash.
The DMT flash a lot of times is so mind-bogglingly alien that There's no words for it.
You come back with a lot of confusion.
There's some message in it somewhere, but it takes a while to decode.
Second day, I just rested, wrote in my journal, made sure to kind of digest what I'd gone through.
It's very energetically taxing, but I felt fucking great.
I felt reborn, energetic.
I slept five hours and I was just pumped.
I got a good workout in and I felt more alive than I have been in a long time.
It was rad.
My body felt great.
My mind felt great.
My spirit felt great.
I felt like I learned some valuable lessons about You know the importance of the physical realm and I feel like I conquered some deep fears about cancer and shit that was going on like it was it like I'm not worried about that anymore like it took me there to overcome it and you know really that first night for me was you know I call it my death it was like the old parts of me that night died you know anything weak was killed off by the ayahuasca But it's funny, you said that, you know, the UFC analogy.
I wrote in my blog, it was like I was kind of with a bunch of karate black belts.
And, you know, they took ayahuasca and just got punched in the face.
They were like, what the hell is going on here?
You know, they didn't really, you know, they had the training.
But it's different when you're in a street fight, you know, and that's...
That's kind of what it was.
I didn't have the training, but I've been in a few brawls in my day.
So I think that that ends up being a bit more important as far as being able to handle the experience.
But then, you know, at another point, the second night, I wish I did have some of their training because I got an opportunity To do some cool shit, but I just didn't know what to do.
What happened?
That's the second session.
This is the third day.
Slightly more comfortable room.
The people from the first session, a lot of them ducked out, but there was new people who wanted a strong experience, so his legend started to spread in the camp.
So we had a few more people, probably 15. And I went up to him beforehand and I said, you know, Maestro, I said, Medicina Fuerte, like I wanted a strong dose.
And he looks at me and he smiled and he remembered that I handled the last one pretty well.
So when it was my turn to go up, he fills the cup to the brim, like to the brim.
And, you know, I look at it and set my intent.
And my intent was to See how far I could go.
Like, I wanted to go back to that place he showed me at the end of the session, and I wanted to experience joy and happiness in that side of life, the opposite side, and just see where it could take me.
And that was really my goal in doing that.
And I picked up some tips from some of the other shamans about how to set kind of your own spiritual armor and kind of prevent things from interfering and taking you off your intent.
So I was like, I felt well equipped.
Drank the full cup, three gulps, pretty brutal again.
And then it starts.
And it starts, you know, kind of similarly, as usual.
You know, an hour in, visions, things that I remember.
You know, kind of like most psychedelic trips are like, ah, I got to remember that.
That's a good lesson.
You know, take little gems from the visions you see, things like that.
At some point, some eels came out of the water, and they started coming after me, and it was much like the snakes.
And I looked at the eels, and I was able to kind of mentally stop them with the armor, which is a trick, you know, opening your witter kocha, it's called.
And I was like, ah, sweet, they stopped.
I was like, what's up, eels?
This is not the day for killing me.
And I just told them that.
And they looked at me, and they're like, yeah, okay, I'll believe you.
Right after that happened, you know, I started to feel really fucking good, like really good.
And I was looking around the room and people were vomiting and lots of, you know, chaos had started around the room.
But I felt it all as like a...
Kind of like just a cleanse you know like I had a different perspective on it so each one would bring me more like happiness until finally it reached this ecstatic state which was about 10 minutes of just pure straight ecstasy like every cell of my body felt better than it ever had Before.
It was like the exact reason why we were given physical forms was to experience some kind of pleasure like this.
The only thing I compare it to, and every time I make this analogy, people ask if I nutted my pants, which I didn't, but it felt like that moment of orgasm stretched for like five minutes, ten minutes.
Like I didn't know whether to yell.
It was like so crazy, intensely, bodily good to feel that.
And then, you know, so I experienced that and that was rad.
I was like, That would have been enough right there.
But then it just continued to build.
And so what happened next is this giant organic flotilla of snakes and feathers comes, kind of like an organic mothership comes.
He didn't have a great voice either, but it was powerful.
You know what I mean?
It's not like he was a singer.
It was just coming out.
And he was shaking his leaves.
But he's jutted up on this precipice.
And that was at 3 o'clock in my line of vision.
9 o'clock there's some kind of terraforma and kind of universal stars and but it was like boom like everything everything else was completely gone everything else I could see kind of vague outlines in white light you just got a software update yeah for sure but this is the fucking this is another crazy factor I would turn my head to the left you know turn my head 90 degrees and still the shaman's at three o'clock the terraform is at nine o'clock It did not matter which way I turned my head.
I could lie down.
I could go left.
I could go right.
Didn't matter.
My vision was stuck in the same spot.
It's like any movements I made in the third dimension had absolutely no impact of what I was seeing in the eighth dimension.
I guess if I wanted to look around in that dimension.
They call where I was at that point the eighth dimension.
And the reason why is that's the penultimate dimension.
That's the last one before the ninth, which is oneness with all creation, which is just unification with all life, all creation that ever was, that ever will be.
Pure solidarity with God, with the universe, whatever you want.
When you hear stuff like this, when you hear yourself say it, whose phone is that?
Someone's got their phone right next to the thing.
Anyway, you hear that shit, that feedback?
That's a phone next to something.
Anyway, when you hear yourself saying this, you hear yourself describing it, surely part of you must think how preposterous and ridiculous this must sound to a skeptical person.
But if you can control your mind, if you are what your mind believes it is, then if he thinks he's cleaning out his body, his brain will think he's cleaning out his body and it might actually have something to it, you know?
And I feel like it's one of the reasons why it happened to me so I could talk about it and talk to you guys and get it out there.
But the next thing I did was I looked at my business.
Very lucidly looked at all my marketing channels and different things, thought about AlphaBrain, thought about the different things, thought about, you know, very, very conservative Republican-type thinking about my life and my business.
And I saw some channels that I was working hard to produce, and I was like, there's no resources there.
And I could physically visualize, you know, where there was pools and these tubes that were feeding like a giant machine.
I was like, well, I'm trying to build this tube to this Pool of resources, but there's nothing there.
Like, I gotta cut that one off.
I was like, this one is good, but it's blocked.
You know, they gotta change that.
Change the marketing.
You know, change something on that.
So, or, you know, think about this formula or that.
And I can visualize it perfectly.
And, you know, right now, you know, business is going great.
When they first discovered it, when they started bringing it back to the Western world, they tried to call it telepathine.
Because of shared experiences, but because of the scientific rules of nomenclature, because they isolated the compound as harmine already, one of the compounds, they went with that because it was the first description of it.
But they were going to call it telepathine because of the shared experiences.
There were some husband and wife couples in different huts that did, that were witnessing.
witnessing one would just witness the other's entire experience and be like, they would try and talk to each other about it and be like, Yeah, I know, I saw the whole thing.
So that happened.
But as far as like the group in my setting, it seemed to be more closely linked to family, you know, family ties or relationship romantic ties, things like that, not necessarily what So the shared experiences are with people that already have a relationship?
Well, you know, there's that feeling always when you're in a relationship that you become a part of that person.
I mean, I think every deep, intense relationship that I've ever had, you feel like it's more than just two people hanging out together.
Somehow or another, you connect on some...
I don't want to say spiritual energy, some sort of intangible level, which is why breaking up is so painful because a part of you is literally missing.
You cannot feel whole.
You can't sleep.
You can't eat.
You don't feel right because some of you is missing.
So that would kind of make sense that those are the type of people that would have a shared experience because they literally have their souls are somehow or another connected.