Written By: Fabrizio Beverina
To die is to return to the forest that dreamt us. -Shipibo saying
1 — The Ceremony of the Old Woman
It was one of those nights. The rainy season. The jungle air was thick enough to drink, and inside the maloka, the smoke from palo santo and tobacco swirled in slow, blue spirals, hanging in the air like a prayer.
She was seventy-six years old. Her hands shook slightly as she placed a small, plain urn on the altar before the shaman. Inside were the ashes of her nephew, dead just two months. A small woman, short white hair, but with a presence that made you go quiet. I had deep respect for her. At her age, coming here to drink ayahuasca… It’s not the usual choice. It takes a certain kind of courage.
And of course, she came for a reason. In the Quechua language, ayahuasca means “the vine of the dead.” She had heard that in the jungle, people drink this brew not just to heal the living, but to speak to those who have already crossed the river.
When the shaman, Don Gardel, began to sing, the air itself seemed to shift. His Icaros rose and fell like leaves caught in a current, pulling you into the slipstream between worlds. At one point, he stopped. His eyes were half-closed, seeing something else entirely. “Aquí está,” he said softly, but the words landed in the silence like a stone. He’s here.
The old woman began to tremble. A soft, broken sobbing vibrated under the weight of Don Gardel’s powerful songs. You could feel it, a current moving through the room, touching everyone. Something was passing through.
In the morning, her voice was quiet but steady. She had seen her nephew. And he had given her a number. The PIN to his phone. Since his death, the family had been locked out, carrying the heavy, unspoken question of how he died. That morning, her daughter tried the code. It worked. Inside, they found photos, messages, fragments of his last days. Pieces of a puzzle that, when assembled, showed a simple, tragic accident: a lethal mix of medications. Not a suicide.
The relief that washed over her was a physical thing. A weight lifted, not just from her shoulders, but from the whole family story.
During the next ceremony, the presence returned. The woman told us the spirit said he had already been reborn, or was about to be, in a city not far from here, near the ocean. There was no more sadness in her voice. Just a quiet, luminous wonder, like someone who had been lost in a dark room and suddenly found the window.
Later, as the last Icaros faded into the sound of soft rain on the roof, I lay there thinking. This medicine, this so-called vine of the dead, isn’t just about showing us pictures. It’s a teacher of listening. It tunes you to a frequency where you can hear through the thin membrane of what we call reality. And what you hear, if you listen closely, isn’t an ending. It’s a conversation that keeps going.
2 — The Skeptic, the Jungle, and the Radio Signal
Weeks later, I picked up a book by a French journalist named Stéphane Allix. Death Does Not Exist. He was a war reporter, trained in skepticism, the kind of man who dealt in hard facts and visible evidence. Then his brother died.
Grief, as it so often does, didn’t just break him open, it made him a detective of the invisible. He began an investigation, but not a spiritual one. A journalistic one. He gathered testimonies: near-death experiences from nurses and doctors, children’s past-life memories from university archives, encounters with the inexplicable from ordinary people. What emerged from his notes wasn’t chaos. It was a pattern.
The very visions I had encountered in the jungle, the tunnel of light, the life review that unfolds like a tapestry, the overwhelming surge of unconditional love, were appearing in hospital rooms in Paris, in suburban homes in Ohio, in the accounts of people who had never heard of ayahuasca. It was too consistent to be a coincidence. It felt like a clue.
So Allix, the skeptic, followed the trail. He went to the Amazon. He sat in the maloka, drank the brew, and listened to the icaros. He didn’t find proof in a scientific paper; he met what he later called “the direct evidence of mystery.” After that, he stopped searching for life after death. He had, in his own words, touched its continuity.
Reading his journey, I felt a quiet click. I began to look at the science again, not to explain anything away, but to listen to it in a new language. A language of gamma waves and cardiac arrest that was, somehow, deeply familiar.
What I found was that over the last twenty years, a quiet revolution has been unfolding in hospital corridors. Cardiologists and neurologists have been listening to their patients who return from clinical death. People whose hearts had stopped, whose brain activity, as measured by our best machines, had flatlined. By every logic we hold, they should have experienced nothing. And yet, they returned with stories.
They spoke of floating above their bodies, watching the resuscitation efforts with eerie calm. They described tunnels of light, reunions with loved ones who had passed, and a panoramic life review that felt less like judgment and more like understanding. Even more compelling, some recalled specific, verifiable details from the operating room, conversations, instruments, events, that occurred while their brains showed no activity whatsoever.
Neuroscience is slowly, humbly, beginning to voice a possibility that shamans and monks have whispered for millennia: perhaps consciousness is not produced by the brain, like steam from a kettle. Perhaps it is transmitted through it, like a signal through a radio. When the radio is damaged, the broadcast doesn’t cease. It simply finds another receiver.
Some researchers now point to a remarkable molecule: DMT. It is the primary visionary compound in ayahuasca, and intriguingly, our own bodies produce it. Some theorize it may be released in significant amounts at the extremes of existence, at birth, and at death.
If that is true, then the parallels make a heartbreaking, beautiful sense. The tunnel, the dissolution, the encounter with a boundless intelligence, it’s the same doorway. Ayahuasca, in this light, is not merely a hallucinogen. It is a teacher. A sacred technology. It lets us, in the safety of ceremony and song, rehearse what our bodies and souls will one day do on their own: to let go, to travel, and to recognize the journey home.
3 — Technologies of Dying
In the deep quiet of the forest, every ceremony is a lesson in letting go. It’s not an idea, it’s something you practice, something you feel in your bones.
To really get it, you need to know the word bardo. It’s Tibetan, and it doesn’t mean a place. It means a gap, a luminous, bewildering in-between. The famous one is the bardo of dying, the 49-day journey between this breath and the next life. But there’s also the bardo of dreaming, of meditation, even the bardo of this very life. They’re all sacred transitions where reality softens and the mind paints the whole world. The trick is recognition: “Ah, this is a bardo. These visions are mine. I need not fear them. I can move through them.”
This is what I went to learn, years ago, in a monastery tucked high in the Indian Himalayas. Death had always been a close companion. On my arm is tattooed memento mori “remember you must die.” Back then, I was living on the edge, quite literally. Rock climbing was my world, and death was a quiet, familiar shadow beside us. We all had friends who didn’t come back. That risk was part of it, the deep shadow that gave everything else its shape, its sharp, three-dimensional color. The shadows are like tattoos.
So, I decided to turn toward the shadow, to learn its name. I became a monk for eight days. Woke before dawn, chanted on cold floors, ate two simple meals, and studied the Tibetan maps of death. I’ve always admired these monks. They are explorers of the inner world, scientists of the mind, and they bring back maps for the rest of us. Real explorers.
Our teacher was a nun, her face etched with a serenity that felt ancient. She told us we were learning to become guides, for the dying, and in the end, for ourselves. We had to become familiar with death. The word she used was gom. It’s the Tibetan word for meditation, and it literally means “to become familiar with.” So that’s what we did. We meditated on death. We practiced becoming familiar with it.
The real practice came on the fifth day. We lay on the cold wooden floor, wrapped in our thin sitting blankets. “Close your eyes,” her voice began, a soft, steady stream in the dark. “You are not well. You have felt a deep tiredness for months. A pain has taken root in your side.” She painted the picture slowly, deliberately. The sterile doctor’s office, the cold stethoscope, the way the doctor’s eyes fall to the chart to avoid yours as he names the thing that has no cure. “You call your family,” she continued. “You hear the crack in your mother’s voice.”
Around me, the first sharp breath. Then a muffled sob.
She walked us through selling a beloved car, watching a last sunset from a window, the awkward visits from friends who have run out of words. She guided us to the hospital bed, the beep of the monitor, the thin blanket, the body becoming a heavy, foreign object. “Your breath is shallow now,” she murmured. “The sounds of the room grow distant. You see their faces, but their voices are far away. There is a pressure, and then… release.”
The room dissolved. An old woman wept openly. Another rocked back and forth, whispering, “No, no, no.” The air grew thick with a shared, human sorrow. And I lay there, perfectly still. I had followed every instruction, visualized each scene like a careful director. I felt a deep sadness for the story, but it was still a story. I had studied the map with devotion, but I had never once stepped off its edge. I was puzzled by my own calm, i felt like I couldn’t feel like the others. Like my heart was shut.
That step off the edge came years later, in the Amazon. Under the shaman’s icaros, there was no script. There was a direct, biochemical unraveling. The bardo was no longer a concept in a book. It was the only reality. I died of a brain tumor. I felt all of it, the panic, the pain, the sheer, undignified suffering. I sobbed shamelessly, fought, begged until there was nothing left. Fuck it. Surrender. And when I did, the “clear light” the monks described wasn’t a metaphor. It blazed. The “peaceful and wrathful deities” weren’t paintings on a thangka; they were the very forces storming through my consciousness. This was the bardo of the living body, and the guide was not a voice describing the path, but a song, the icaros, holding me as I fell. It was too much. And I am glad for it.
That was the first time I died. After that, I died four more times: heart attack, AIDS, an accident, liver cancer. Each death taught me how to meet a different fear. The last one was so utterly real that the next morning, I wrote my will. I called everyone I loved and told them. I solved unfinished things. And once I did, I felt lighter. Now, I can die. And because I can die, I can finally live without that old, hidden fear.
Science now gives us a faint glimpse into this mystery, though its true depth can’t be touched by words. Researchers find that near death, the brain lights up with gamma waves, the highest frequency we produce. It’s the same vibrant activity found in deep meditation and sacred plant journeys. It seems that at the very edge, consciousness recognizes the same door. DMT’s game, isn’t it?
The Tibetan tradition gives us the map for the journey after the final breath. The shaman’s song gives us the map for the journey within the living body, and makes you more alive than ever. One prepares the mind through contemplation. The other prepares the entire being through a living, breathing dissolution. Both whisper the same human truth: these profound thresholds are not separate rooms. They are different doors into the same sacred space.
And in the maloka, this passage can be fierce. Some nights, the medicine brings no visions, only a gentle, terrifying obliteration. We have seen it. Heard the screams. Your body turns to furnace, then to ice. Your heart races against time, and one thought rises, clear and absolute: I am dying. It is so convincing the soul kneels. In that space, your whole life can flash by, not as judgment, but as a stunning clarity. You see the love you withheld, the forgiveness you postponed. A clean urgency arises: you don’t want to carry any of that with you when you go.
This ego death is not a metaphor. It is surgery of the spirit, and there is no anesthesia. None. Trust me. People weep. They call for their mothers. They curl and writhe on the earth, wrestling with a shadow that feels like fate. And then, all at once, the fight is gone. What remains is a vast, simple stillness, like the clear, open sky after a cathedral has burned. Sometimes, from that silence, a laugh bubbles up. Fragile at first, then bright, piercing the last walls of the storm.
The morning after, people move slowly. Their eyes are hollowed and radiant at once. The world feels too vivid, the air too intimate. It takes time to gather the pieces and weave a self back together, one that is lighter, kinder, less armored. And when the ground feels solid again, something fundamental has changed. The old fears loosen their grip. The person who returns is not the one who left.
This is why we hold the songs so close. Our work is not to stop the death, but to midwife it, just like the Tibetan monks who chant the prayers of passage. We sing for courage, for breath, for remembrance, until the traveler knows, in their bones: the one who dies is not the one who is truly alive.
If you don’t die, you cannot be reborn. That’s why our hearts are full when this happens to someone in our care, even though we know how hard it is. It’s the hardest work there is, the kind that gives the most incredible results.
Words can only point. Perhaps it’s better to remember the caterpillar, growing heavy and still, convinced it is sick. It wraps itself in a shroud, grieving an end it cannot understand. It has no word for wings. It does not know that what it calls the end, the forest calls a beginning. And then, a tear, a spill of color, a new form the wind can finally carry.
There was never a sickness. Only life, heartbreaking and precise, making its miraculous, relentless way.
But what comes after the storm? What remains when the self is reassembled?
4 — Living After Dying
After a night like that, the old software glitches. The program called “urgency” just… crashes. People stop saving their lives for later. They start spending it, right now.
Guests come to me a few mornings after, eyes a bit wider, awkwardly smiling, and they say things like: “I can’t believe I used to make choices based on that.” Fear doesn’t vanish, but its CV gets shredded. They start picking paths that feel like aliveness, not just safety. It’s a quiet, personal insurrection. Not so small.
The medicine isn’t a delete button for death. It’s more like a trainer. It gets you familiar with the machinery of dissolution. It shows you, in high definition with all six senses, that everything you cling to is already in motion. And that motion isn’t tragedy, it’s physics. Resistance is friction; it burns. Surrender is flow; it carries you. And you can surf it, if you can.
Then comes the real expedition: bringing that data back to basecamp. To the kitchen sink. To the awkward family call. To the moment you choose patience over irritation. This is integration, the long, unglamorous work of rewiring your normal. If death isn’t a full stop, then every act of attention, every moment of care, becomes a kind of continuity. A gentle rebellion against forgetting. You start building a legacy not of monuments, but of moments that mattered.
And you know what’s funny? Once you see it, it’s almost ridiculous how serious we thought it all was. The whole show is so much wilder, and so much lighter, than we were ever told.
5 — The Question of the French Journalist
One afternoon, a French journalist showed up at the camp. She arrived with philosophy in her bag and microphones in her hands.
“Do you believe in life after death?” she asked la Maestra, the old Mestizo healer, her recorder ready for a revelation.
La Maestra just frowned, her brow knitting like she’d been asked something obvious and odd at the same time. “Life… after death?” she repeated, tasting the phrase.
The journalist leaned in, trying to bridge the gap with words. “Yes. When the physical body dies, does the soul continue on? Is there another place?”
The old woman’s face softened into a smile, the kind that holds the patience of raising many children and listening to the jungle for a lifetime. “Sometimes,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact, “in ceremony, I see people who are dead. They come. They look. They leave. Sometimes they want to talk. Sometimes they just watch.”
She paused, as if checking her own memory. She found nothing else to add. With a small shrug she concluded. Full stop. It was enough.
For the Western mind, wrapped in books and logic, truth is a structure you build, a theory to be proven. You need a blueprint, an argument, a conclusion. For the people of the forest, truth is simply what you witness. A fact. Not an abstraction. It’s not a belief. It’s an event. The jungle doesn’t need to believe in the afterlife. It just sees its visitors passing through, like birds across a clearing.
6 — The Vine of the Dead
We call it ayahuasca, the vine of the dead, but maybe that’s only half the story. Maybe it’s the vine that teaches us how to *live*. It’s the same with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. People think it’s a manual for dying, but for me, it was a manual for waking up. It taught me that the monsters in my life were just projections, shadows I cast myself. And in that light, even the shadows become teachers. A slap in the face. Wake up. What’s outside isn’t what you think it should be. Another slap. Wake up. Yes, they’re slaps, but full of compassion, like a mother’s, like the vine’s.
An old woman came looking for her nephew and found continuity.
A journalist came looking for proof and found silence.
Allix went searching for the dead and found a love that doesn’t end.
And then there were others.
A man came to mourn his mother. For months he’d carried her like an open wound. During ceremony, he saw her standing beside him, radiant, calm. She told him gently, Stop. Your tears are keeping me here. I want to go further.
When he shared this the next night, his face was still wet, but something inside had unclenched. His grief had turned into a blessing.
Another time, a woman was with us when her best friend died suddenly overseas. The news arrived just before ceremony. That night, we watched her walk around the maloka, speaking softly into the air, her hands moving like she was brushing someone’s hair. Afterward she told us her friend had visited, they talked for hours. She received stories and details only her friend could have known. She said she finally felt peace.
Most of the time, when people come to the medicine in mourning, the message is the same: Stop grieving. Let me go further. It’s as though the spirits say that too much grief holds them close to the earth, like birds tangled in nets. It doesn’t serve the living, and it doesn’t free the dead. Love has to move, not freeze, if it wants to stay alive.
All these stories start in grief and end in wonder.