Return to the Jungle

I don’t really know where to begin.

I’m back in the jungle, finally, after nearly two very long, very aimless years in the States. My time there was not spent wisely. I worked a tedious, retail job for some time until I was fired. I drank progressively more and more, and I used various drugs. In the end, I had purposefully cultivated a mindset of general indifference. Feeling indifferent is easier than feeling hopeless.

I became scattered, abandoned things I had once felt passionately about. The days were monotonous, and I pursued nothing of value. I couldn’t focus, I watched too much television. I lost my enthusiasm and generally fell into a depressive state that, I know, has not yet fully dissipated.

Without getting into the details, circumstances seemed to conspire to force me back here. And that statement carries little positive connotation. I had nowhere else to go.

Of course, I’d wanted to come back ever since I left. But whereas upon my arrival in the US my goal felt clear and firm and unshakable, by the time I was in a position to purchase a return ticket, everything had gotten a bit hazy. And that’s the word that best describes what life had become for me: hazy. No clear destination, no clear path. A lot of stumbling.

So I boarded the plane, I flew to Florida. I boarded the second plane and flew to Lima. I spent the night in the airport and in the morning boarded the final flight to the jungle. All the while feeling as though I was in some sort of dream-state. Like I was watching myself going through the motions. But I didn’t experience the excitement like I always had before. I felt numb, disconnected, not present.

I should mention that throughout my sojourn in the States, I don’t think I ever succeeded in completely silencing that small voice within me that knew where I needed to be. But I sufficiently dampened the sound, and I was able to ignore it.

Alright, you get the picture. Things felt dark.

So I arrived in Pucallpa and was shown to my room, similar to the one I stayed in last time. Orange walls instead of hospital green, but more or less identical. I reached out to Papa Miky immediately, and he invited me to come visit with him at his house, very near the small hotel where he used to live. It was good to see him, and we spoke for a while about what had changed during my absence and what my plans were. Robert and Jurrien, two friends from past diets, stopped by and we all sat around chatting on the back porch for some time.

Miky informed me that I could open my diet on the 30th of May. Robert had been in diet since April, and Jurrien, as he told me later, felt like he’d been in diet since birth.

So, for simplicity’s sake, let’s jump to the 30th.

We met outside the Hotel Gavilanes, as always. During my time away, Miky had a maloka built on a friend’s property about 30 km outside of the city. We were driven there in a proper truck (luxury!) by another friend of Miky’s who, I think, is somehow associated with the hotel.

It’s a beautiful piece of property that Miky built on. The maloka itself is surrounded by a man-made lake that the owner stocked with 70,000 fish. At night the sky is often cloudless and clear and the Milky Way pours, glowing, from one end of the horizon to the other.

I approached the first ceremony with…well, “trepidation” is a good word. Fear, uncertainty, anxiety, and resignation are others. The only thing I felt fairly sure of was that Ayahuasca would not be gentle with me.

Noyarao Dieta – First Ceremony

There were four of us that first night. The maloka can hold 20, so we all had plenty of space. Miky set up his mat in the middle of the room, as usual. After we got situated, one of the dieteros extinguished the lanterns that ringed the hut, until all the light that was left emanated from a single candle in front of Miky.

Papa began by purifying the space with mapacho (rustic, jungle tobacco) smoke, and then he whistled an icaro to the medicine in the bottle. After that, he called each of us up to drink. I was last. He gave me a knowing look and a little laugh, and asked how much I wanted. I took a full cup.

I’ll say again, for the record: the taste of Ayahuasca is so utterly repulsive that when you drink it, even once, you tend to have a nauseatingly visceral reaction to the very thought of the medicine for some time afterwards. There were several times in California that I had to suppress a gag reflex while reading descriptions of various ceremonies. Getting it down, as I’ve said before, is an act of pure will. I always exhale, and throw the medicine back in one gulp. Doing otherwise would be impossible for me.

I walked back to my mat and I sat in the darkness waiting for the effects to set in. It took quite a long while. As I sat there in silence, I took note of how discombobulated my thoughts were, how chaotic and disordered. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t. I’d really done myself in. I took comfort in knowing, despite feeling unprepared for what was about to happen, that Aya would do what was necessary. There was a an implicit threat in that word “necessary,” of course, but for some reason it shored me up.

I don’t remember how it started. It crept up on me. There were some patterns behind the eyes, I think. But the real visions slipped in subtly, and all of the sudden I was lost.

The medicine was incredibly strong. Prior to this experience, I had never been absolutely certain that I was dealing with external entities and not aspects of my own subconscious. But the realm I was carried into that first night left me with no doubt about the reality of the spiritual world in which I was immersed. And it was not a pleasant reality.

What I remember most vividly was the spider. It was there, hanging around the periphery, large and black and fat. I didn’t pay much attention, but it slowly asserted itself more and more forcefully, and suddenly I very clearly recognized its presence, and that it was a negative entity, a bad spirit.

Now, there’s some confusion here for me. I was aware of Ayahuasca, and I was aware of another spirit that was very clearly angry, taunting, antagonistic, evil. Two voices, and two separate personas. But there were certain points at which the voices and the personas overlapped, and it was difficult for me to discern between the two.

I felt as though I stood in a kind of spiritual courtroom, condemned. I was reprimanded again and again for not taking the path seriously. For allowing the drugs in, the alcohol, the various and detrimental energetic influences. This, I think, was Ayahuasca. She was very upset with me. The voice was screaming. She seemed hurt, offended. Pissed off and frighteningly so. I had made a commitment, a promise, and I had not kept it. A terrifying and humbling experience, to be sure, but one that I felt was just and deserved.

But there was something else, as well. Something that went further than merely chastising me for my foolish choices, something that wanted to hurt me, to make me feel pain, to bring me low and beat me down. Crippling thoughts:

This is not your path.

Even the medicine can’t help you.

You don’t belong here.

You don’t belong anywhere.

You’re not up to this.

Don’t kid yourself.

You can’t make up the time you lost.

It was the absence of love. Something like love withheld. Hatred, yes. But more like a disparaging tolerance, like ridicule, like mockery. It felt torturous, and I felt incapable of getting past it.

Meanwhile, my body was being racked by occasional spasms and uncontrollable shaking. I was coughing and hacking things up into my bucket. And there was no catharsis. I couldn’t even convince myself that any good was being done. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of hopelessness and inferiority.

Miky sat in front of me for a long time, singing and cleaning me up. He began to call out the bad spirit, and eventually sucked it out of me through the top of my head. I remember feeling grateful that he was there and working, but embarrassed, too. This was work he had to do because I’d acted irresponsibly.

Once he’d dealt with the spirit and cleaned me up a bit, he opened my diet. I was more or less incapacitated, and completely unaware of what he was doing. Suddenly he stopped singing and told me that my diet was officially open. I remember barely managing a half-hearted thumbs-up and muttering something like “great.” Somewhere along the line I had vomited, and I remember dry-heaving for quite a while.

The shaking and the spasms continued, and I more or less lay quaking on the mat for the duration. I was profusely apologizing to Ayahuasca throughout the latter half of the ceremony, mentally begging her to make it stop. Finally, of course, the effects of the medicine subsided and the last of the shakes petered out.

When I had enough energy, I stood up with a cigarette in hand and walked outside to be alone. I needed air. I needed silence. I breathed in deeply, and looked out over the jungle that surrounded us. The early morning fog was resting along the tops of the trees. It was a beautiful sight, and part of me knew that, but I wasn’t in any kind of mood to appreciate it.

I remember standing there smoking, kicking myself, reeling from the night, confused and generally wondering what the fuck I was doing.

The next morning, Miky asked me if I’d had a rough ceremony.

I still felt exhausted. “Yeah,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it gets worse.”

I’ll leave it there for now.