A Living Rite of Passage into the Forgotten Kingdoms of the Amazon Rainforest
What if the most advanced civilization on Earth was not measured in steel or stone, but in consciousness?
Before borders, before kings and clocks, there were cultures older than time itself. Their sciences were oral. Their temples were trees, and their memories lived in the wind and the water.
The ancestors of the Amazon knew how to listen. And what they listened to, listened back.
Beyond Ayahuasca book took shape over two decades of immersion in Indigenous wisdom traditions. It is not a collection of ideas, but a lived story. The main teacher in the narrative, Don Sinchi, is a composite of the elders I learned from. His voice is drawn from many Amazonian lineages, shaped into one current of guidance. He may be fictional in name, but he embodies the universal qualities I have witnessed fragments of in many elders. That makes him very real to me.
The story begins in the dark night of the soul. The kind we all go through when life’s meaning breaks down. It follows the thread of a question that once guided the elders: How do we remember what the world has forgotten?
In the ancestral view, human beings are not separate from nature. We are expressions of the forest, just as jaguars and vines are. Illness and confusion arise when we forget that. Thus, healing is not a technique, but a return.
The book maps a parallel between our collective descent from a luminous ancient consciousness and the personal journey each of us undertakes through life. From innocence to loss, from fragmentation to wholeness.
The elders speak of a state of being that does not depend on fear or dominance. When living in presence the heart learns to see without grasping.
True happiness, they say, is not a goal and we are all meant to be happy just as birds fly in the sky. It is a memory that returns when the heart is clear.
When I later came across the writings of Graham Hancock, I recognized in his discoveries a circumstantial mirror to what I had been taught firsthand. His explorations affirmed that these myths and oral histories hold more than symbolic meaning. They point to real civilizations. Ones that reached immense depth, not through conquest, but through communion.
This book is dedicated to the Yahua Nation of the Peruvian Amazon who adopted me into their tribe over twenty years ago. The proceeds from the book help support our grassroots initiative through the Paititi Institute, where I serve as a co-founder. Together, we are building an ancestral school for Yahua children. A space for learning their native language, plant medicine, mythology, and the values of harmony with the Earth.
Beyond Ayahuasca is published by Hay House and has become a multiple bestseller in Canada and Australia already. Rather than a prescriptive guide or a dry doctrine it is written as a living rite of passage in the form of an adventure story, offered to those who feel the pull to remember what has been quietly waiting inside all along.
If this message resonates, I invite you to read the book, share it and leave a review. Support this grass root initiative as another baby step we are taking together, not only for the Yahua people, but for the Indigenous soul of humanity. In this time of great forgetting, may this work become a spark of remembrance. May it help us return to the sacred, and to one another.
- Roman Hanis
Co-founder
Paititi Institute for the Preservation of Ecology and Indigenous Culture
P.S. See our Yahua tribe Initiative here:
