A recent New Yorker story suggested that, in the same way that cocaine was the jittery, keyed-up drug of choice for upwardly mobile types in the 80s, ayahuasca is the punishingly self-improving drug for today’s ‘Age of Kale’. For the less reverent, it’s a new way to get high.Įvery year, thousands visit Peru’s so-called healing centres and retreats for ayahuasca ceremonies, drawn by claims that one ayahuasca ceremony is equivalent to years of therapy.Īlthough it’s illegal in America, ayahuasca has been growing in popularity in Silicon Valley, New York and Los Angeles, with a generation that’s embraced wellness trends such as meditation, ‘clean eating’, CrossFit and yoga. It claimed ayahuasca consumption “constitutes the gateway to the spiritual world and its secrets”.Īyahuasca is becoming increasingly popular with Western tourists seeking healing, spiritual awakening and guidance. In 2008, the Peruvian government recognised ayahuasca, made from the ayahuasca vine and chacruna leaves, as “one of the basic pillars of the identity of the Amazon peoples”. It has been used for centuries by the jungle tribes of South America for healing and enlightenment. The vision came to me during my second ayahuasca ceremony at a plant medicine retreat called El Jardin de La Paz – The Garden of Peace – near the city of Tarapoto in northern Peru.Īyahuasca (eye-ew-ask-ah) is a powerful hallucinogenic brew and one of many sacred plant medicines. But I still have my mind and with it, I think: This is how it feels to die.įor an unknown amount of time, while sprawled on a thin, foam mattress in a wooden hut in the Amazon Jungle, death was my reality. It’s as though every meaningful connection I’ve made with another person has suddenly been lost. I’m gripped by loneliness, but not only in the sense of being alone. They are my family and friends looking down on me and I feel profound love for them. There is a rectangle of light above me in which faces begin to appear. My skin tightens around my aching bones as I descend deeper into wide, open nothingness. The cold enfolds me and leaches into my core. I am weightless in space with my arms crossed over my chest. This is my story.Īs I sink through the floor into darkness, I lose myself. In 2016, I travelled to the jungle in Peru to take part in this ancient ceremony. They were tightly compressed into an amount of time that often seemed both too long and not long enough.How it Feels to Die: An ayahuasca journeyīy Jonathan Carson Ayahuasca is a sacred hallucinogenic plant that has been used by Amazon tribes for centuries. The videos had to communicate entire ideas while being filmed on phones, by nonprofessionals, in six seconds, which meant fast cuts, broad humor, bad sound, and lived-in settings. Unless you truly committed to using Vine, it was almost incomprehensible. In a few ways, Vine resembled 4chan, or Tumblr, or any of the impenetrable online communities that create web culture before it seeps out to bigger and more mainstream services. By setting a hard limit on length, Vine gave the video-making process just enough structure to sustain it. By making it easy to produce video, Vine also made it fun. Instagram didn’t have video yet, nor did Twitter YouTube was best for desktop applications Facebook was still largely text-focused and Snapchat was mostly a messaging service. When Vine debuted, in 2013, it was the first mobile service to make uploading video easy, with very little friction. To butcher a Velvet Underground myth, not a lot of people used Vine, but everyone who did went out and started a YouTube comedy channel. But if you’ve always imagined Vine as a flash-in-the-pan social network populated by nonthreateningly cute teenagers making dumb jokes, you missed out on one of the internet’s weirdest and funniest spaces. To some extent, that’s true - Vine’s biggest stars have mostly moved on to Facebook or YouTube, and many of its functions are now built into the services of its parent company, Twitter. To people who’ve never fallen into a productivity hole on Vine, today’s announcement that the video-sharing app would be “discontinued” doesn’t mean much: just another once-popular social network quietly petering out.
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