Bring Me Fresh Meat

Near the end of my book, Ayahuasca in My Blood, I have an interchange with Ayahuasca where she makes the demand that I bring her fresh meat. People have often asked me if  I ever resolved what Ayahuasca meant by that. I responded to one of those people with this, this morning.
    I've never gotten a straight answer from ayahuasca about what she meant. Like so many things, she offered the opportunity to me to figure it out. And I think it meant both that she wanted me fresh when I visited --as in do not have a glass of wine or three during the day of an experience, and also that she wanted me to bring new people, spread the word about her.

   This is where we run into an issue: I believe that all things have spirit, and that all spirits have desires and fears, in other words, an ego. In the case of ayahuasca, she labored in the Amazon and a bit in the mountains for a long, long time. She was a medicine and tool for those people. But when she was brought out to the Western world suddenly she was being revered – something I don't believe the indigenous ever did. (Respect, yes, revere, no.) I think that got to her spirit a little and she started taking herself very seriously, thinking she was very important, rather than recognizing that she was a spirit equal with all other spirits. Which is where the demand for more "fresh meat" came from: for a little while she was not seeing us as equal spirits but as fodder for her ego.

   So she needed a little reminder that she is not more important than other spirits. All spirits have things they can do, and she opens the doors to other worlds, other levels of reality, very well. But that does not make her those other worlds: She's just the one seeing what you need to learn and then opening the door to a place where you can learn that.

  I hope that makes sense.