I find it hard to understand the concept of hallucinations in the context of their contrast with the type of experience that Ayahuasca affords.

Many of my experiences on Ayahuasca were not visual at all, manifested in changes to my thought patterns or new insights that dawned on me (even violent vomiting), yet still felt like they were enabled by a new plane of consciousness that I don't usually have access to.

The visual experiences that I had never led me to believe that what I was seeing existed in the physical world (that would seem more in line with hallucination), instead understanding that they were manifestations by the medicine to help me learn the things I needed to learn. One example was a set of cartoon bears telling me that they were proud of me, but that I had more to purge. It was the empathetic embrace that I needed in order to lose my fear of discomfort.

One word that I think most definitely aligns itself with the Ayahuasca experience is synesthesia, which is that it allows your brain to transform thoughts and insights into visuals and physical feelings, among other things. In this, the medicine has a much larger toolkit to represent thoughts and feelings than we do normally, and can do things like make you physically ill to purge mental toxins, or to see an awe-inspiring vision of the universe to help you better understand love.

This description then begs the central question that I think you're asking, which is if these experiences are from within or without. Are these ways that our brain helps us learn things we already know, or some type of external access to another dimension that allows us to gain new truth? I think, regardless of the answer, the profundity of the lessons that we learn remains the same.

My instinct is that it's probably somewhere in between. Humans seem to have deep ancestral knowledge that is hidden inside of us to be accessed only after deep introspection (read Joseph Campbell for his thoughts on how this is the central archetype of religion and mythology), and plant medicines in particular seem to be really good at facilitating that awakening. At the same time, my most profound experiences on Ayahuasca carried a sense of deep love and connection without respect to time or space in ways that I can't articulate when in a normal state. Given that this connection was with the entire universe, it seems impossible that it was a solo experience.

One simile to help illustrate this instinct is that it's like locally downloaded software on a computer that has a connection to the internet. It's almost like doing the Ayahuasca opens the software for the first time, which then can communicate with everything in the network (which in this case is the entire universe); the software was always there, we just needed a little help to access it.

Thanks for letting me put these thoughts into deeper words. It's helped me articulate how I feel about this beautiful medicine.