‘I saw my body sitting at the balcony. I could see through it and through the walls. Then everything, including people, started turning into code.'

‘I found myself in a chamber with pillars of faces: I only later recognized it exactly in an Alex Grey painting. It had many little galaxies everywhere. I went into one of them, and became a glowing ball of light with 360° vision, floating in deep outer space. Finally I was back to the place where souls are born. I came from there and will return there. Thinking was light-speed. No time to formulate words. Whatever question, the answer was instantly there, carrying the information of ten books.

‘An entity, also a sphere of light, came to me and said, "You are nothing. Everything around you happens without you." She touched my third eye. “But you are part of everything.” And I became completely one with God, and everything that exists.

‘That world seemed much more real than this. When I shared this with my friends, they said I’ve gone crazy and need help. My life became hard and isolated. I quit my job. I couldn't continue until I understood what happened.

‘Today I see my architect colleagues struggle to come up with ideas. But to me, right as a client starts saying, "I want a house like this," immediately in my mind there's a 3D form of the fully complete project, and I just copy it. It’s too easy and unfair.'

Brazilian architect Cristiano shares an experience with crystallized DMT that completely transfigured his life.

He describes leaving his body to spend years in just fifteen minutes. We trace his journey with strange alternative groups in Brazil, and his continued development of his psychic and paranormal abilities. Finally, we discuss how his profound DMT realizations have changed his perspective on religion, god, and fatherhood, and why he forgave his friends who abandoned him.

‘As a child, I had a book with a macabre 15th century painting: writhing naked bodies, blood, people being torn up. I was fascinated, and ashamed that I liked it. I used to go to the basement to watch an old show with nude actors doing very erotic things, and would go into ecstatic states as a child. I drew pictures of people being strung up, their breasts tied up, being boiled in oil. I thought I was possessed by the devil, that men in white coats would come get me.

‘I went to grad school and worked at the public defender's office, interviewing sex offenders in prison to say whether they could be released. I was finding humanity in them, seeing that they’d been horribly traumatized themselves. The school didn’t like this. I was called into the dean's office and threatened to be flunked.

‘In my thirties I was in a mental hospital, in a semi-locked unit. One day I said something about wanting to hurt myself. They dragged me to the locked unit. There, I saw what deep mental illness really looks like. A woman was talking to me, and she put out her cigarette in her arm. After all my years thinking I was so crazy, I realized, that's not me.

‘I work a lot with Indian couples, and I’ve learned how little sex education they get. An Indian sex therapist friend told me that her female clients from Gujarat only want to do therapy in English, because there is not one word about sex in their language that is not vulgar or disgusting.’

Dr. Anna Randall earned a Master of Social Work from Boston University, and a Master of Public Health and Doctor of Human Sexuality from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. She is currently a sex therapist in Silicon Valley, and co-founder and Executive Director of The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance.

Anna begins by sharing her childhood erotic fascinations, and the pervasive role of shame in her Catholic upbringing. We trace her unique history of navigating 27 different therapists, beginning with a psychoanalyst who fell asleep during sessions, and how those encounters have informed her current approach as a directive sex therapist. Finally, we discuss her clinical work treating desire discrepancies in multicultural couples, and how watching Indian Matchmaking has helped her decode their intricate dynamics.

‘A teacher helping me with homework was studying psychology, and asked me many intelligent questions. That’s when I became curious about psychology. I specialized in drug addiction, then psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, transactional analysis, then transpersonal psychology.

‘I once left my body, and saw myself from the outside. I started researching, and found that you can do such things in trance states. I learned hypnosis and holotropic breathwork. I was using hypnosis to explore my clients’ past lives, but sometimes they instead went into some other dimension or planet, and I realized then that there are such worlds.

‘I went into the Amazon to work with shamans. On ayahuasca, the jungle spoke to me telepathically, and asked me to help it. I was in awe. Each time I drank it, I saw a probable future, and focused on it.

‘Ayahuasca is trance. When you drink it, you communicate with a sentient entity. In my opinion, everything has a cause in the spiritual realm, that materializes in the body. I help people enter into a light trance to see the spiritual causes of their problems.’

Silvia Polivoy, PhD, is co-founder and facilitator at the Spirit Vine Ayahuasca retreat center in Brazil, where I went last year. She is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who has worked in psychoanalysis, transactional therapy, transpersonal approaches, spiritual methods, meditation, group therapy, hypnosis, past-life regression, Jungian archetypes, and holotropic breathwork. She studied psilocybin mushrooms with Mazatec shamans in Mexico, the San Pedro cactus, and ayahuasca in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon. Many leaders in consciousness studies have joined her retreats, including Rick Doblin, founder and president of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), and psychedelic artist Alex Grey. At her ayahuasca retreats, Silvia led us through group workshops such as regression to the inner child, going to the root cause of traumas, understanding the victim mindset, cancelling unconscious contracts, reconnecting with our power, breaking soul ties, and releasing negative attachments from our body.

We begin this conversation by talking about Silvia’s ADD, her strange intuitions as a child, how she became interested in psychology, and about being a conscious medium. I ask about my lack of visions on ayahuasca. Can someone get better from an ayahuasca experience even without vision and insight? What is the future of the relation between human and nature? We talk about past and future lives and their connection with ayahuasca. Are there cases where ayahuasca can amplify someone’s ego, or harm them?