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My name is Mawaan Rizwan. I'm an actor, comedian and a programme maker.

I've just made a documentary with BBC Three called Getting High For God? where I travel to the Americas to take part in religious ceremonies that involve drugs.

I wanted to get to the bottom of this spiritual drug taking thing - with lots of careful medical supervision obviously.

Can it help you find enlightenment? Or is it just a thing that backpackers do on their gap year?

As someone who grew up in a religious family but now feels detached from faith, I'm curious to explore my relationship with spirituality.

In the final episode I set out to Brazil to take part in an Ayahuasca ceremony.

Ayahuasca is a hallucination inducing drug that has been used for centuries by tribes in South America to connect with the divine.

(Image: BBC)

It contains the psychoactive ingredient dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which while illegal in the UK is permitted in religious ceremonies Brazil.

Interestingly I learnt DMT is a natural occurring compound in our brain too.

I'm on a journey to find out if taking it will help me connect with a higher spirit. The day before flying out from London, I felt sick to the core.

I've had endless medical checks and briefings from doctors, but I've been taught to see mind altering substances as something that's associated with addiction, partying or recreational escapism.

I started to question the idea behind my programme. What can I help explain by getting “high” on camera?

Perhaps I’d discover a route to enlightenment or I’d continue to feel sceptical about a higher power.

When I arrived in Rio I began to talk with people who had taken Ayahuasca to understand why people take it.

I met Guilherme, a Brazilian guy in his twenties who also grew up in a religious family, but unlike me he hasn't dismissed spirituality completely.

He has chosen to create his own pick 'n mix of various traditions.

Like many of his friends, Guilherme's connection with God is an ongoing experimental journey, one that he feels liberated by.

He told me that Ayahuasca ceremonies have helped him achieve that. I was recommended a church called Arca da Montanha Azul.

From what I heard, it sounded just like a Sunday service... with some psychotropic drugs thrown in.

On the day of the ceremony, I felt nervous but ready. I arrived at the church with my medical support team dressed in white (which is said to keep the bad spirits away) and joined a group of thirty people.

One by one, we went up and were given a cup of the hallucinogenic plant brew.

As I was nervously drinking the tea I realised it tasted like a rotten steak. Everyone around me looked like they were already in a trance – and they hadn't even taken anything yet.

After twenty minutes of feeling nauseous, I was suddenly hit by the Ayahuasca.

As the ceremony leaders played the tabla and sang ritualistic songs, I closed my eyes and became totally engrossed in a spiral of thoughts and visions.

I laughed, I wept and I saw things from my childhood that made me extremely uncomfortable.

This was the opposite of escapism. Some of the visions were very confronting and I started to panic.

They said the more I run away from the distressing images, the more they would linger like a heavy cloud over my head.

(Image: BBC)

So I started to go deeper into the darker tunnels of my mind. I realised the demons I was seeing were personifications of destructive patterns of behaviour in my brain.

This went on for five hours. By the end I was shattered. Repeatedly flicking between pain and euphoria was mentally exhausting and I'd had enough.

After a night of much needed rest, I woke up feeling like many of my questions and doubts about life had been answered.

Not by the wise words of some religious leader, but by something that I had happened within my own brain. So... did I talk to God or was this something else?

During the trip I did feel a sense of divinity.

Instead of seeing God as an external force that I'm not allowed to question, I started seeing it as an energy that can be found all around.

What helped me come to this realisation wasn't just the Ayahuasca, but also the context I took it in.

I don't think it would have had the same effect had it not been for the conversations I had shared beforehand and the ceremonial nature of the experience.

I can see why so many people take part in Ayahuasca ceremonies but I'm aware there are also serious downsides.

There has been a recent increase in mainstream popularity which has led to “Ayahuasca tourism” and it's now becoming a booming industry.

Many pop-up shamans are unqualified to create the brew safely and a handful of fatal incidents have been reported, particularly amongst tourists.

(Image: BBC)

However, Ayahuasca ceremonies are routed in ancient ancestral history and many people are using it as a source of making sense of their lives and the world around them.

I'm definitely not saying everyone should start taking part in mind-altering shamanic rituals to seek enlightenment.

I'm also not encouraging it as a tourism for Brits. It was an extremely intense thing to go through and I'm not sure I'd do it again.

But I think these experiences are part of some ancient cultures for genuine reasons and should be taken into account as one of the many ways some people have found to commune with a higher being and it isn't for western culture to judge.

Getting High for God? now available on BBC Three bbc.co.uk/bbcthree

Mawaan Rizwan: Gender Neutral Concubine Pirate is on every day until 28 August as part of the Edinburgh Free Fringe