valence hacking

I thought I was a psychedelic connoisseur, that I’ve seen it all, have experimented with almost every available compound, but what I subjected myself to that night in Mexico was incomparable to anything I’ve experienced before. I booked a flight to Mexico only a week in advance, to partake in ayahuasca ceremonies in the jungles of Riviera Maya, without the whole period of “spiritual preparation” or “the diet”, on my own, with an intention to fly back home just a few days after. But hey, they say, when Mother Ayahuasca calls you, you’ll know it (I knew it), my call was just a bit out of a sudden.

I arrived at the shaman’s house a bit late—her jungle home had no address, so my moto-taxi driver and I navigated purely by landmarks vaguely identified through WhatsApp pictures. The place was serene, nestled deep within the lush wilderness. There were only four of us—strangers soon to be bound by the shared experience of Ayahuasca. As the sun dipped behind the trees, we climbed a wooden tower that opened up to the stars. It was breathtaking, the perfect setting for what was to come.

The Purge

The ceremony began not with the Ayahuasca, but with Rape, a pungent, spicy tobacco-cocoa mixture. The shaman didn’t ask us to inhale it ourselves; instead, she blew it straight into our noses, sending a sharp, stinging warmth flooding through my head. It felt like fire spreading, hot and overpowering, as if the ground had suddenly started spinning beneath me. The woman next to me fainted, unable to continue the ceremony. I, too, felt as though the ground beneath me had vanished, but I remained, hovering in that liminal space, trembling, where everything felt on the verge of slipping away.

Then came the Ayahuasca. The brew, dark and foul, clung to my throat like a poison. The shaman warned us not to vomit too soon; the medicine needed time to settle into our blood. But soon, the body rebels. We each had our own bucket, and the room filled with the sounds of purging, a cacophony of retching that seemed to vibrate with the energy of release. Even with a day of fasting behind me, my body heaved with force, expelling more than just the contents of my stomach—this was the cleansing, she said, when it’s over, you are an empty vessel, hollowed out, ready to receive whatever the medicine had in store.

Rebirth into infinite love

The first wave of visions felt familiar—geometric patterns and swirling colors, reminiscent of a more intense mushroom trip, nothing too surprising. I felt a twinge of disappointment. I had come here with a specific issue, naively hoping that “Mother Ayahuasca,” whatever that was, would reveal some solution or offer enlightenment. But it seemed like I was still fully in control of the experience—nothing was going to be handed to me easily, there wouldn’t be any sudden revelation, I will still have to do all the introspective heavy lifting. So I asked the shaman for another cup fully aware that, being the smallest participant, I was about to receive the strongest dose. This time, I didn’t even vomit, the Ayahuasca hit me with such force that it felt like reality itself was being torn apart. My face began to dissolve, as if my left side drifted away with the music while my right sank into the earth. My body ceased to exist, unraveling in the air, and then my sight faded into darkness.

I was not Joanna anymore. I was something older, something unformed. I was a fetus, floating in the warm amniotic waters of a womb. I realized I can’t see, because my eyeballs were still encased in my skull, and I existed as a formless entity—an amorphous, jelly-like being devoid of identity. II wasn’t a person anymore, just a feeling—suspended in time, pure potential. Love surrounded me, but it was not the love that dawns on you during an MDMA trip. It was not something I gave, it did not originate from me —it was something that existed outside me, embracing me without demand, like a cosmic hug from something much, much bigger. It was the kind of peace I have never experienced before. Something communicated with me, a presence I couldn’t define, suddenly making all my fears feel insignificant. It conveyed to me that this state—this peace, this boundless love—was the default state of the universe. No matter where I go, or what happens, this peace is what I will always return to.

The Death, the infinite gelatinous plane and the sudden freedom from the constant sequencing

Breathing became strange, a mechanical act I had to force, like my body was an engine I had to keep running, but I didn’t need it. I suddenly realized I hadn’t breathed in what felt like 20 seconds. As the experience deepened, I grappled with the notion that perhaps I had died, and this was the sensation of that transition. I tried to ascertain if I still had a body by gently moving my cheek towards – what I though could be – my arm. Instead of feeling my physical form, I sensed this gelatinous plane stretching out infinitely in space. I understood gravity, yet I was untethered, simply existing in that strange, weightless and free realm.

It was so quiet, and then a profound sense of déjà vu washed over me. A thought surfaced with clarity: how could I have forgotten this! Of course, this is what it was like before I was born—a timeless existence that could never form memories because there was no flow of time to contain them, there is no sequence to anything, so this could never have been laid out as a memory by the hippocampal sequence-making-machinery. But it’s really there. It was both static and ever-shifting, a field of consciousness so vast that it felt more real than anything I had ever experienced.

And yet, it was so beautiful. The beauty of death, not in the morbid sense, but in the way it stripped away the noise of life and left only this: a stillness, a peace, a connection to everything that ever was or will be. I understood then why people no longer fear death after this experience.

When I opened my eyes, I could vaguely remember where the shaman stood, but she had transformed. Her face, once middle-aged, now appeared ancient, riddled with tumors, as if she were Death itself, standing at the edge of my vision. I quickly closed my eyes again, thinking, ok, HERE the death is really scary, it’s much less scary THERE, so I better retreat back into being that disembodied plane…

The Merge

In the earlier parts of the trip, even though I had lost connection with my body, I could still distinguish vision from the other senses. I could open my eyes and, through the haze, make out rough shapes, like distant anchors to the physical world. But that was about to change, and change drastically. Suddenly, I couldn’t open my eyes anymore—or maybe I could, but it no longer made any difference. The boundaries between my senses dissolved entirely.

Sound began to ripple through my vision, transforming light into waves, merging with the vibrations around me. Every sound seemed to color the air, weaving through what I could see and feel until they were one and the same. There was no longer any separation between what I heard, saw, touched or thought —everything folded into this strange, all-encompassing field of sensation. Thought itself dissolved, as if the mind had no place here. I wasn’t hearing or seeing or thinking—I was simply existing within this field of consciousness, where everything blended together into a surreal, inseparable thing. It was the most bizarre fusion of senses, as though I had stepped beyond them entirely, catapulted into an absolute peak of synesthesia.

Something still directs eye movements

I have no idea how long I remained in that bizarre space, but as soon as the experience began to loosen its grip and I could think again, I felt an overwhelming urge to make sense of it—to understand what the hell had just happened. The sound was still fused with vision, and I decided to run a little test on myself: Can I still control my eye movements, and what would happen to this strange world if I did? I could still command my eyes, but the results were chaotic. Moving my eyes to the right didn’t just shift the visual field as I expected; instead, it triggered a cacophony of prediction errors. Depths folded in on themselves, shapes contracted and expanded, and the whole field scrambled into unrecognizable forms, as if my attention could no longer parse this insane geometry. Even stranger, my eye movements affected the sound itself. Since sound and vision were still blended, when I moved my eyes in a slow circle, the frequency of the sound lowered, shifting the tone of the space. It was as if every movement I made twisted reality further, scrambling it absolutely beyond my ability to parse.

The Entities and the hint

In the depths of the trip, I encountered entities, something supposedly quite common with DMT—I encountered them not in the usual sense, but through an unspoken language, a direct transmission of meaning. I didn’t see them, but I could feel their presence, and it was as if they possessed an incredible intelligence. At that moment, I remembered why I came here—my intention, my issue, the problem I wanted to resolve. But in their presence, it suddenly seemed so trivial, so silly. I felt embarrassed to even bring it up. Maybe that’s the therapeutic part of DMT – not any big revelation or explicit solution, but simply experiencing your problems as bullshit.

The entities were benevolent, and they reminded me of what I had experienced earlier in the trip—that love is the default state of the universe, that the fear of death is misplaced, and that all pain is just a temporary deviation from that default, but everything, in the end, returns to peace. The snapshots of conscious experience that we move through in daily life are just a tiny fraction of what’s available, and while death marks the end of personal identity, it isn’t the end of experience. And before they left, intriguingly, they also told me that if I really want to understand valence, I should always pay attention to eye movements, as I intuitively did, that there’s more hidden in there, that they are a gateway into the mechanisms.

The softest-landing

As I began to slowly return to my body, I could feel the soreness in my jaw, realizing I had been smiling the entire time (for hours) under the blanket. I had no idea where the blanket came from, but I suddenly felt so nice, feeling its warmth, hearing the jungle again and looking at the stars above. Given my highest dose, I was the last one to finish my trip. Everyone else was already “back”, sitting by the fire and talking to the shaman. I was Joanna again, but something had shifted—I felt different, glowing, and full of hope. I started walking towards other people, but I could not utter a world, the external environment still felt extremely wavy and distorted as if it hadn’t quite settled back into its usual form, and it stayed like that for another few hours.

This was an incredible gift, from myself to myself. No, I didn’t get any grand revelation, and I didn’t “receive” a solution to my original question, but I still felt like I got exactly what I needed. I knew I had touched something far beyond words, dissolving into an unconstrained existence, only to come back and appreciate my constrained, finite existence so much more, making me more mindful of my time. And I will hold this experience deep in my memory – the experience that everything we fret over is just a ripple on the surface, and even though I don’t believe in God, there is still something vast and unshakable beneath.