If there is one phrase I have heard in almost every ceremony I have ever sat in it is:
Ayahuasca told me...

It often arrives at the end of a long ceremony, or three days later on the phone, or years later in a story… Ayahuasca told me I am a healer. Ayahuasca told me to move to Brazil, to stop speaking to my mother, to sell the house, or often to start serving the medicine. And because these words arrived in a state that felt more vivid, and even more real than ordinary waking life, they are received as beyond question. To doubt them would feel like doubting God.

I want to express something that may be unpopular in the world of plant-medicine work, and I say it with tremendous love for this path, to which I have given my life: not everything we receive in ceremony is true.

It is always profound; some of it is genuinely of the astral, and genuinely for us. Yet, some of it is our own subconscious wearing a costume of cosmic authority, speaking to us in the borrowed voice of the sacred because that is the only voice we will finally sit still and listen to.

Learning to tell the difference is not optional; it is the work itself.

The Medicine Does Not Speak in Sentences

Ayahuasca is an entheogen, which means it is intended to bring us to communion with the Divine. It is a sacrament which supports us in interacting with the astral and the realms of spirit. I often repurpose a quote by Thomas Aquinas: For those who have drunk the sacrament, no explanation is necessary; for those who did not, no explanation will suffice. It is hard to put into words the experience of drinking Ayahuasca; it is a profound wake-up call, and the realness of the experience is never in question. However, how we interpret these experiences is.

What actually happens in ceremony is much more layered than "Ayahuasca told me something." The sacrament opens perception. It loosens the grip of the ordinary self, quiets the commentating mind, and lets material rise that we normally keep submerged. Into that opened field comes a great deal at once: the influence of spirit, yes, but also our own unprocessed grief, our fantasies, our fears, our unspoken resentments, the argument we had last Tuesday, that thing our father told us when we were nine, and the story we most want to be true about ourselves.

It all arrives in the same way; it all feels equally true. And here lies the challenge. Ayahuasca does not explain its visions, or title its guidance. It does not put the spirit communications in one column and the psychological debris in another. It hands us the whole undifferentiated flood, in the language of image, feeling and knowing, leaving the sorting and interpretation to us.

When we say "Ayahuasca told me," we are usually describing a knowing that arrived without argument, a certainty that felt so deeply real and authentic as it occurred. But the feeling of certainty is not evidence of the source. Certainty is a sensation. It can be produced by the divine, and it can be produced by a nervous system in an altered state that has finally been given permission and space to want what it wants, or what it has been hiding. Perhaps, finally, there is enough willingness to give a dormant pain a voice and a space to be heard. 

The Subconscious Is a Drama Queen

In Spiritism we speak of excited imagination — what Chico Xavier named as one of the medium’s greatest potential downfalls. It is not lying. The person is not being dishonest. It is the mind’s astonishing capacity to generate content that feels utterly external to itself. It does so often as a form of protection, layers of defense, reaction to certain wounding, or out of the need to feel special or seen.

The subconscious is not a passive archive. It is a live collection of interpretations and subjective understanding of personal experience. It is not objective in any way or form. Much of our unprocessed emotional states, unresolved trauma, fears, and wounding exist silently within our subconscious mind, often dormant for years. When finally expressed, these voices carry the immaturity of a child, of an abandoned self, or a wounded part needing care and attention.

When we come to ceremony, we often bring with us the expectation that something meaningful will be revealed. Something life-changing, something grand and earth-shattering. In order to avoid disappointment, or to push away layers of inner work, the mind, the ego, will often cast the character you have been longing to play. Notice how often these messages conveniently authorize exactly what the person already wanted. The man unhappy in his marriage receives that he must be free. The woman who has always felt overlooked receives that she carries an ancient lineage of high priestesses. The person with an inferiority complex and the need to be seen are called to serve the sacrament and act as a great healer. The one who cannot bear to look at their hurtful past actions receives that it was all karma, all agreed upon before birth, and therefore not theirs to grieve.

I am not saying these messages are always false. Sometimes a marriage genuinely must end, and Ayahuasca gives us the courage to face it. Occasionally it’s time to shift from our jobs and find a vocation. And yes, often, great revelations do come to be seen and experienced. 

But I invite you to notice a pattern: the subconscious rarely tells you to go apologize. It rarely tells you that you were the source of the challenge. It rarely assigns you a humbler role than the one you have. When a message flatters, elevates, or urgently authorizes a desire you already carried into the ceremony, it deserves more scrutiny than a message that humbles you - not less.

There is a second layer here that Spiritism mentions: not every message that reaches a medium is necessarily coming from an elevated source. There are spirits of low vibration who are drawn precisely to inflation and flattery, and who will happily supply a seeker with grand titles and cosmic missions. This is old knowledge in every tradition that takes the unseen seriously. But I want to place the emphasis where I think it actually belongs for most people, most of the time: long before we are dealing with mocking spirits, we are dealing with ourselves.

Insight vs. Instruction

Our interpretation of the entheogenic state is extraordinarily reliable in relation to seeing what is. A description of current inner-events. It is far less reliable when it relates to an action needed to be taken, or in other words – what we should do about what we saw.

I saw how much defensiveness I carry around my heart. That is a statement of seeing what is. A reality: there is defensiveness within me; I am describing what I saw.

I was told to end my marriage. That is an action, an instruction. It has a subject, a verb, and an actionable object. It sounds authoritative. And it is precisely the kind of content the mind is most capable of manufacturing, as a reaction to subconscious pain, hurt, resentment, or disappointment.

If we study Spiritism and understand the phenomenon of mediumship deeply, we find that the core foundation of spiritual evolution relies on free will and the personal choices that result from soul-level impact. Therefore, any spiritual message that carries a command about the specifics of one’s life takes this direct choice away from you and doesn’t respond to your own free will.

Elevated influence tends to illuminate rather than direct. It shows you the map; it gives you direction, but it doesn't force you to walk down any specific path or through any specific door. A spirit that removes your choice by handing you orders is not serving your evolution; it is pushing you away from your own free center and sovereign path.
So when a message arrives in the shape of a directive, a command, especially one with urgency or a timeline, I would employ a healthy dose of doubt. I would question its source and motives. Not because it must be false, but because the burden of proof is much higher.

Practical Discernment

None of this is useful as philosophy alone.

Let it sit. Nothing true is ever affected by a healthy pause. This is the single most reliable test I know. A message that is genuinely for you will still be there in three weeks, quieter, without the buzz and urgency around it. It will have grown roots into your ordinary life. A message manufactured by desire tends to lose its charge once the ceremony’s atmosphere fades. It might linger, but it will thin out and require constant reinforcement to be kept alive. Never act on a ceremony instruction within a few days. If you only allow for the presence of patience to guide your choices, you would walk this path with more confidence and truth.

Question the urgency. Urgency is the most common signature of the devil. You must do this now. You must not tell anyone. If you hesitate, the window closes. Real guidance is patient because it has no anxiety about an outcome. Pressure indicates that something in you needs the decision made before your critical faculties come back online. In every tradition I have studied, the counsel is the same: when something insists you cannot wait -- you wait.

Ask who benefits. Follow the message to its consequence and ask honestly: does this make me larger, more exceptional, more exempt from ordinary obligations? Does it get me out of something I did not want to face? Or does it “cost” me something - an apology, humility, a slower and less glamorous road? This is not a rule that inconvenient messages are true and pleasant ones are false. It is a rule about where to point your suspicion first.

Bring it to someone who will not be impressed. Take the message to your teacher, your therapist, your elder, your spiritual mentor, someone with real experience of these states and no stake in your self-image. Not the friend who will say “wow”. Not the group chat. Isolation is where excited imagination grows unchecked, and one of the clearest markers of a message going wrong is the conviction that no one else could possibly understand it.

Ask whether it is for you or about you. The Medium’s Creed teaches us that: “any and all mediumistic instructions come first and foremost toward me, and only when integrated fully may be offered to others.” Most of what we receive is addressed to our own becoming. The impulse to immediately share it, teach it, build a practice around it, is usually the ego catching the scent of an opportunity. Question this instruction, sit with it, understand its root, give it time, and study its motives.

Distrust anything that requires no effort. A revelation that grants you a title, a lineage, or a mission without a single day of study or service behind it is telling you something about your longing, not your destiny. In the traditions that formed me, spiritual authority is conferred slowly, by teachers, through practice, over years. It is not downloaded in a night.

Ayahuasca Is Not an Oracle

I have written before that Ayahuasca is not medicine, but I will add - it is not an oracle either.

It is a mirror, and mirrors do not take sides. They show us the contents of ourselves with unbearable clarity and then leave the interpretation entirely in our hands. The work of the path is not about visions or blinding insight. The work is the long, unglamorous discipline of learning to read what we have seen without the ego holding the flashlight, directing the show.

This is why the traditions that have carried this sacrament for generations surround it with so much structure, with lineage, with teachers, with study, with practice. With elders who have taken every mistake possible themselves and can tell you gently, with love and care, that you might be following the chatter of your mind instead of listening to the whisper of your heart. 

The ceremonial structure is not a limitation imposed on a free experience. It is the accumulated discernment of everyone who came before us. We discard it at our peril, and the last twenty years have given us no shortage of examples of what happens when we do.

Sit with Ayahuasca, listen to her, receive everything with attention and care. Use these teachings as guidance, signs on the map, direction and inspiration, but not as your final destination.

Then wait. Live for a year as though you were the sort of person the message described, and see whether it holds. What is true will survive the daylight. What was only ever your own wanting, dressed in the language of the sacred, will quietly dissolve, and that dissolution is not a loss of faith. It is faith maturing into discernment.

The snake sheds its skin; so must we our certainties. When you drink Ayahuasca, you can go beyond the mind, underneath it… or through it. To go through it means to see and understand it. To accept it for all that it is - the lower self, the higher self, the profane and the profound. 

So next time, you sit with Ayahuasca, before you rush to share what she has told you… remember to ask yourself first: what was I able to hear, and how truly does this message relate to who I am today, as I am, right here, right now.