I drank ayahuasca at Soltara and came home with a theory of consciousness.
Posting here because I hope someone else will share if they’ve heard similar things in their experiences (and because this is where others could process this without straight dismissal). I’m still integrating, and writing this out is part of that.
Quick context. I’m was a fairly grounded guy before this journey. Not someone who studied eastern religions or thinking (that has since changed). Wife, friends, job. Not someone who walks around quoting Alan Watts at parties. I went to Soltara after a best friend passed, and with childhood trauma I hoped to resolve. I was curious, a little nervous, and reasonably skeptical, but I stayed open minded during the week. Came home with something I can’t put down.
I sat three ceremonies. The second and third were beautiful in their own right (and the second directly help me remove a block around my childhood trauma) but this is about the first one, which rearranged the furniture in my head and is still rearranging it over a year later. It didn’t make me a believer. It made me a seeker. That distinction matters to me and I’ll come back to it.
The BIG parts of this night happened after the ceremony wrapped around midnight and they let anyone who wanted to return to their rooms go with a group. I was among them. Roughly five hours of BIG experience happens after I get back to my room and have one sip of water before lying down. Here’s how it went (Short version):
Phase 1. Reality showed me its source code. I started moving through what looked like temples built out of math. Geometry folding into geometry, all interlocking, all moving. I wasn’t in my body, just a perception moving through the space. Objects would sort of present themselves to me at times, like a museum where the exhibits know you’re there.
It was beautiful and intricate and the colors seemed to be from another spectrum, but the images were sharp.
Phase 2. The download. Information started arriving at a speed I cannot describe. Not sentences. Whole structures and frameworks, handed across. It’s hard to describe what I really mean. It’s like you know you‘re receiving a transmission but you’re not really built to receive it. When it overwhelmed me I thought “please slow down” and it would, it slowed down.
That’s the part that made me realize I wasn’t alone in there. Whatever was on the other end, or on my end, was paying attention. Imagine drinking from a fire hose, and the fire hose noticing and dialing itself back to a garden hose. That’s a relationship.
Phase 3. Higher beings. Eventually I get to the end of this temple and I enter a completely dark space. My wife is both all of a sudden present and also it felt like she was the one operating the download. This was my wife, but she was her higher self and I never actually saw her. I just knew she was there. She was both the woman I knew and loved back home, and something much more. Note: She was at home, not at the retreat. I heard her thoughts, and we spoke at the speed of thought.
I want to be clear about what I’m claiming here, which is nothing. I don’t know what any of this truly was — and that’s a constant for me now to wonder and seek to understand. But it felt exactly like her, just at a much higher frequency. Like meeting the version of someone you love that knows them at a depth they don’t even have access to themselves. We talk more and for the majority of the 5 hours.
Phase 4. Fractals. She started teaching me. I’d recently lost my best friend Chris. I received (the way you receive things in there, not in words) that Chris was a “fractal” of me, and that he returned to my higher self when he passed. I also learned I have many of them in this life (fractals), and others are fractals of their higher selves. People I love deeply. People who annoy me because they reflect things I won’t look at in myself. Many of them are fractals of me.
I‘m told, beyond fractals, there are countless versions of me in other realities. I then see glimpses of myself living other lives in other realities.
Phase 5. A sculpture made of suffering. My wife showed me her suffering from this experience as a sculpture. Geometry again, beautiful and moving and complicated. When I looked at it I could see the parts I’d contributed to. No story I could tell myself, no defense, just the shape. I cried in the way you cry when something is undeniably true and pierces you.
The “higher view” didn’t let me off the hook. It made the hook sharper. I felt both the sadness of realizing the pain I caused and the compassion and pure love my wife gave to me as she shared it.
Phase 6. Brotherhood, and meeting myself. Other beings showed up, all without bodies but all recognizable to me. One of them I knew immediately as my close friend, Jason. We were brothers in this place, and had been for a long time. There was a reverence around him from the others. I felt honored to know him and feel close to him, and I could feel how big his heart and spirit were in this place (In this life, he is also a big guy in size).
I learned that my wife “created” me and that she is an elder architect like Jason. That she is an architect of this experience, among others. I also learned that I’m an architect too (this is very self serving, I know). I met, what I can only call my true self, and I loved it. That’s the moment I keep coming back to. I met the kind being I actually am underneath all of this ego and I loved it.
Phase 7. I asked questions. Religions? Monuments to elder consciousnesses and each have truths and have something to offer us all. Like statues we build to mark that something big once stood here, except the something is still around.
Mass killings and children dying? In this place, which I was told was outside of space and time as I know it, they were just part of this experience and no one is lost. The acts themselves matter less than the lessons and what we gain.
There was a lot of time spent on suffering. in this space, I felt complete connection. I felt peace, contentment, I felt like my true self without ego. Thats when I realized just being in this experience is an act of suffering. Not to say that we are here to suffer, but that it comes with the experience and we gain more than we lose through it in some way. Embrace it.
I’m still sitting with this one. The architect view made it feel okay, but the suffering sculpture argued the opposite. I’m holding both.
Trump? Oh yeah, at some point I just straight up ask, ”So what is Trump all about and what’s the deal there?”. I’m not trying to get political, but I see him as a surreal character who makes no sense to me. “A product of the collective consciousness. A part the collective repressed. Just like when you repress a part of you, it finds a way into the experience as a fractal — the same is true with the collective consciousness”. This is the answer that became a theory I share later. More on that in a second.
Phase 8. Coming back. I begged for a sign in this life that any of it was real. The sign didn’t come. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay. The ceremony closed. I came back to my body. The sun was coming up.
—
Okay, the theory.
I’m calling it the Theory of Higher Selves. It’s basically this.
Consciousness is the substrate. Everything else is shapes inside it (that part is not new, but I’m in agreement). And it scales fractally in both directions.
Imagine a Russian doll, but it doesn’t stop, and each doll is its own conscious being.
Going down: you have parts of yourself (the Internal Family System or IFS idea, parts work, whatever you want to call it). Those parts have their own sub-parts. All the way down.
Going up: you are a part of something. Your relationships are tiny consciousnesses made of you and the other person. Your community is a consciousness. Your culture is a consciousness. Your generation is a consciousness. (Boomers and Millennials really do behave like two different personalities, right?) Humanity is a consciousness. And it keeps going.
The same patterns repeat at every scale. Feelings, moods, traits, personality. Real at the individual level, real at the cultural level. A culture has moods. A generation has traits. They get repressed, they have shadows, they project, they integrate. The Trump answer I got was just this idea at the cultural scale. A repressed shadow grew until it walked back into the room.
Here’s the metaphor I keep coming back to.
You know how a hologram works? You can break the holographic plate into pieces, and each piece contains the whole image, just at lower resolution. I think consciousness might be like that. You are the whole thing, at the resolution your aperture allows. So am I. So is your dog. So is a tree. So is humanity. So is, presumably, whatever the universe is up to overall.
A drop in the ocean. An ocean in a drop. And both true.
You’re not a small piece of God. You’re God at the size of a person or God experiencing a person. Which sounds “woo-woo” until you remember that the whole point of a fractal is that the small version isn’t a downgrade. It’s the full pattern at a different scale.
I think this is what every mystic has been trying to say (or the ones I selectively have sought out after this experience seem to say). And the IFS people are accidentally describing cosmology while doing therapy.
And I think the only reason it feels weird is because we live inside a materialistic world that decided matter was the substrate and consciousness was something matter does sometimes. Flip those, and a lot of stuff starts making more sense.
My patience for writing every detail of everything that was shared in this session or my own interpretation and theory around it is thin, and my insecurity that anyone will want to read it limits me too. Thanks for reading if you made it here!